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Phantom
  • Текст добавлен: 6 октября 2016, 22:43

Текст книги "Phantom"


Автор книги: Jo Nesbo


Соавторы: Jo Nesbo,Jo Nesbo

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Permanent address.

Well, the flat in Sofies gate was sold right after he left three years ago, the same applied to his parents’ house in Oppsal. In his present occupation an official address would have carried a certain inherent risk. So he wrote what he usually wrote when he checked in at other hotels: Chungking Mansion, Hong Kong. Which was no further from the truth than anything else.

Occupation.

Murder. He didn’t write that. This section hadn’t been marked.

Telephone number.

He put a fictitious one. Mobile phones can be traced, the conversations and where you make them.

Next of kin’s telephone number.

Next of kin? What husband would voluntarily give his wife’s number when he checked in at Hotel Leon? The place was the closest Oslo had to a public brothel, after all.

The receptionist could evidently read his mind. ‘In case you should feel indisposed and we have to call someone.’

Harry nodded. In case of a heart attack during the act.

‘You don’t need to write anything if you don’t…’

‘No,’ the man said, looking at the words. Next of kin. He had Sis. A sister with what she herself called ‘a touch of Down’s syndrome’, but who had always tackled life a great deal better than her elder brother. Apart from Sis there was no one else. Absolutely no one. All the same, next of kin.

He ticked ‘Cash’ for mode of payment, signed and passed the form to the receptionist. Who skimmed through it. And then at last Harry saw it shine through. The mistrust.

‘Are you… are you Harry Hole?’

Harry Hole nodded. ‘Is that a problem?’

The boy shook his head. Gulped.

‘Fine,’ said Harry. ‘Have you got a key for me?’

‘Oh, sorry! Here. 301.’

Harry took it and noticed that the boy’s pupils had widened and his voice constricted.

‘It… it’s my uncle,’ the boy said. ‘He runs the hotel. Used to sit here before me. He’s told me about you.’

‘Only nice things, I trust,’ Harry said, grabbing his canvas suitcase and heading for the stairs.

‘The lift…’

‘Don’t like lifts,’ Harry said without turning.

The room was the same as before. Tatty, small and more or less clean. No, in fact, the curtains were new. Green. Stiff. Probably drip-dry. Which reminded him. He hung his suit in the bathroom and turned on the shower so the steam would remove the creases. The suit had cost him eight hundred Hong Kong dollars at Punjab House on Nathan Road, but in his job it was an essential investment; no one respected a man dressed in rags. He stood under the shower. The hot water made his skin tingle. Afterwards he walked naked through the room to the window and opened it. Second floor. Backyard. Through an open window came the groans of simulated enthusiasm. He grasped the curtain pole and leaned out. Looked straight down onto an open skip and recognised the sweet smell of rubbish rising forth. He spat and heard it hit the paper in the bin. But the rustling that followed was not of paper. There was a crack, and the stiff green curtains landed on the floor on either side of him. Shit! He pulled the thin pole out of the curtain hem. It was the old kind with two bulbous pointed ends; it had broken before and someone had tried to stick it together with brown tape. Harry sat down on the bed and opened the drawer in the bedside table. A Bible with a light blue synthetic leather cover and a sewing kit comprising black thread wound round card with a needle stuck through. On mature reflection, Harry realised they might not be such a bad idea after all. Afterwards guests could sew back torn fly buttons and read about forgiveness of sins. He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Everything was new. Everything… He closed his eyes. On the flight he hadn’t slept a wink, and with or without jet lag, with or without curtains, he was going to have to sleep. And he began to dream the same dream he had had every night for the last three years: he was running down a corridor, fleeing from a roaring avalanche that sucked out all the air, leaving him unable to breathe.

It was just a question of keeping going and keeping his eyes closed for a bit longer.

He lost a grip on his thoughts; they were drifting away from him.

Next of kin.

Kin. Kith.

Next of kin.

That’s what he was. That’s why he was back.

Sergey was driving on the E6 towards Oslo. Longing for the bed in his Furuset flat. Keeping under 120, even though the motorway was virtually empty so late at night. His mobile phone rang. The mobile. The conversation with Andrey was concise. He had spoken to his uncle, or ataman – the leader – as Andrey called Uncle. After they had rung off Sergey could not restrain himself any longer. He put his foot down. Shrieked with delight. The man had arrived. Now, this evening. He was here! Sergey was not to do anything for the moment, the situation might resolve itself, Andrey had said. But he had to be even more prepared now, mentally and physically. Had to practise with the knife, sleep, be on his toes. If the necessary should become necessary.

4

Tord Schultz barely heard the plane thundering overhead as he sat on the sofa breathing heavily. Perspiration lay in a thin layer on his naked upper body, and the echoes of iron on iron still hung between the bare sitting-room walls. Behind him were his weights and the mock-leather upholstered bench glistening with his sweat. From the TV screen Donald Draper peered through his own cigarette smoke, sipping whiskey from a glass. Another plane roared over the rooftops. Mad Men. The sixties. USA. Women wearing decent clothes. Decent drinks in decent glasses. Decent cigarettes without menthol and filters. The days when what didn’t kill you made you stronger. He had bought only the first season. Watched it again and again. He wasn’t sure he would like the next series.

Tord Schultz looked at the white line on the glass coffee table and dried the edge of his ID card. He had used his card to chop it up, as usual. The card that he attached to the pocket of his captain’s uniform, the card that gave him access to airside, the cockpit, the sky, the salary. The card that made him what he was. The card that – with everything else – would be taken from him if he was found out. That was why it felt right to use the ID card. There was – in all the dishonesty – something honest about it.

They were going back to Bangkok early tomorrow morning. Two rest days at Sukhumvit Residence. Good. It would be good now. Better than before. He hadn’t liked the arrangement when he flew from Amsterdam. Too much risk. After it had been discovered how deeply involved the South American crews were in cocaine smuggling to Schiphol, all crews, regardless of airline, risked having their hand luggage checked and being subjected to a body search. Furthermore, the arrangement had been that, on landing, he would carry the packages and keep them in his bag until later in the day when he flew an internal flight to Bergen, Trondheim or Stavanger. Internal flights that he had to make, even if it meant he was forced to absorb delays from Amsterdam by burning up extra fuel. At Gardermoen he was airside all the time of course, so there was no customs check, but occasionally he had to store the drugs in his bag for sixteen hours before he could deliver them. And deliveries had not always been without risk, either. Public car parks. Restaurants with far too few customers. Hotels with observant receptionists.

He rolled up a thousand-krone note he’d taken from an envelope he’d been given the last time he was here. There were especially designed plastic tubes for the purpose, but he was not that kind: he was not the heavy user she had told her divorce lawyer he was. The sly bitch maintained she wanted a divorce because she did not wish to see her children growing up with a drug-addict father and she had no interest in watching him sniff away their house and home. And it had nothing to do with air stewardesses, she couldn’t give a damn, she had stopped worrying about that years ago, his age would take care of that. She and the lawyer had given him an ultimatum. She would take over the house, the children and the remnants of the inheritance he hadn’t squandered. Or they would report him for possession and use of cocaine. She had gathered together enough evidence for even his own lawyer to say that he would be sentenced and dumped by his airline.

It had been a simple choice. All she had allowed him to retain were the debts.

He got to his feet and went to the window and stared out. Surely they would be here soon, wouldn’t they?

This was quite a new arrangement. He was to take a package on an outward flight, to Bangkok. God knows why. Fish to Lofoten, as they said in Norwegian, and so on. Anyway, this was the sixth trip, and so far everything had gone without a hitch.

There was light in the neighbouring houses, but they were so far apart. Lonely habitations, he thought. They had been officers’ quarters when Gardermoen had been a military base. Identical single-storey boxes with large, bare lawns between the houses. Least possible height so that a low-flying machine wouldn’t collide. Greatest possible distance between the houses so that a fire following a crash wouldn’t spread.

They had lived here during his compulsory national service when he had been flying Hercules transport planes. The kids had run between houses, visiting other children. Saturday, summer. Men round the barbecues wearing aprons and holding aperitifs. Chatter coming from the open windows where the women were preparing salads and drinking Campari. Like a scene from The Right Stuff, his favourite film, the one with the first astronauts and the test pilot, Chuck Yeager. Damned attractive, these pilots’ wives. Even though they were only Hercules pilots. They had been happy then, hadn’t they? Was that why he had returned? An unconscious urge to go back in time? Or to find out where it all went wrong, and make amends?

He saw the car coming and automatically checked his watch. Logged that they were eighteen minutes late.

He went to the coffee table. Breathed in twice. Then placed the rolled-up note against the lowest end of the line, bent down and sniffed the powder up his nose. It stung the mucous membrane. He licked his fingertip, ran it over the remaining powder and rubbed it into his gums. It had a bitter taste. The doorbell rang.

It was the same two Mormon guys as always. One small, one tall, both wearing their Sunday best. But tattoos protruded from under their sleeves. It was almost comic.

They handed him the package. Half a kilo in one long sausage that would just fit inside the metal plate around the telescopic handle of the cabin bag. He was to remove the package after they had landed in Suvarnabhumi and put it under the loose rug at the back of the pilots’ locker in the cockpit. And that was the last he would see of it; the rest would probably be sorted out by the ground crew.

When Mr Big and Mr Small had presented the opportunity to take packages to Bangkok, it had sounded like lunacy. After all, there was not a country in the world where the street price of dope was higher than in Oslo, so why export? He hadn’t probed, he knew he wouldn’t get an answer, and that was fine. But he had pointed out that smuggling heroin to Thailand carried a sentence of death if caught, so he wanted better payment.

They had laughed. First the little one. Then the big one. And Tord had wondered if maybe shorter nerve channels produced quicker reactions. Maybe that was why they made fighter-jet cockpits so low, to exclude tall, slow pilots.

The little one explained to Tord in his harsh, Russian-sounding English that it was not heroin, it was something quite new, so new that there wasn’t even a law banning it yet. But when Tord asked why they had to smuggle a legal substance they had laughed even louder and told him to shut up and answer yes or no.

Tord Schultz had answered yes as another thought announced its presence. What would the consequences be if he said no?

That was six trips ago.

Tord Schultz studied the package. A couple of times he had considered smearing washing-up liquid over the condoms and freezer bags they used, but he had been told that sniffer dogs could distinguish smells and were not fooled so easily. The trick was to make sure the plastic bag was fully sealed.

He waited. Nothing happened. He cleared his throat.

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ said Mr Small. ‘Yesterday’s delivery…’

He slipped his hand inside his jacket with an evil grin. Or perhaps it wasn’t evil, perhaps it was Eastern bloc humour. Tord felt like punching him, blowing unfiltered cigarette smoke into his face, spitting twelve-year-old whiskey in his eye. Western bloc humour. Instead he mumbled a thank-you and took the envelope. It felt thin between his fingertips. They had to be big notes.

Afterwards he stood by the window again and watched the car disappear into the darkness, heard the sound being drowned by a Boeing 737. Maybe a 600. Next generation anyway. Throatier and higher pitched than the old classics. He saw his reflection in the window.

Yes, he had taken their coin. And he would continue to take it. Take everything life threw in his face. For he was not Donald Draper. He was not Chuck Yeager and not Neil Armstrong. He was Tord Schultz. A long-spined pilot with debts. And a cocaine problem. He ought to…

His thoughts were drowned by the next plane.

Bloody church bells! Can you see them, Dad, the so-called next of kin all standing over my coffin? Crying crocodile tears, their sombre mugs saying: ‘Gusto, why couldn’t you have just learned to be like us?’ Well, you sodding self-righteous hypocrites, I couldn’t! I couldn’t be like my foster-mother, a daft, spoilt airhead, going on about how wonderful everything is, provided you read the right book, listen to the right guru, eat the right fricking herbs. And whenever anyone punctured that woolly wisdom she had bought into, she always played the same card: ‘But look at the world we have created: war, injustice, people who don’t live in harmony with themselves any longer.’ Three things, baby. One: war, injustice and disharmony are natural. Two: you are the least harmonious of all in our disgusting little family. You wanted only the love you were denied, and you didn’t give a shit about the love you were given. Sorry, Rolf, Stein and Irene, but she had room only for me. Which makes point three all the more amusing: I never loved you, baby, however much you considered you deserved it. I called you Mum because it made you happy, and life simpler for me. When I did what I did it was because you let me, because I couldn’t stop myself. Because that’s the way I am.

Rolf. At least you told me not to call you Dad. You really tried to love me. But you could not fool nature; you realised you loved your own flesh and blood more: Stein and Irene. When I told other people you were ‘my foster-parents’ I could see the wounded expression in Mum’s eyes. And the hatred in yours. Not because ‘foster-parents’ shrank you to the only function you had in my life, but because I wounded the woman you, incomprehensibly, loved. I think you were honest enough to see yourself as I saw you: a person who at some point in your life, intoxicated on your own idealism, undertook to raise a changeling but soon understood that your account was in deficit. The monthly sum they paid you for care did not cover the real expense. Then you discovered that I was a cuckoo in the nest. That I ate everything. Everything you loved. Everyone you loved. You should have realised earlier and thrown me out, Rolf! You were the first to see that I stole. Initially it was only a hundred kroner. I denied it. Said I’d been given it by Mum. ‘Isn’t that right, Mum? You gave it to me.’ And Mum nodded after some hesitation, with tears in her eyes, said she must have forgotten. The next time it was a thousand. From your desk drawer. Money that was meant for our holiday, you said. ‘The only holiday I want is from you,’ I answered. And then you slapped me for the first time. And it was as if it triggered something in you, because you went on hitting. I was already taller and broader than you, but I have never been able to fight. Not like that, not with fists and muscles. I fought in another way, one where you win. But you kept hitting me, with a clenched fist now. And I knew why. You wanted to destroy my face. Take my power away from me. But the woman I called Mum intervened. So you said it. The word. The Thief. True enough. But it also meant I would have to crush you, little man.

Stein. The silent elder brother. The first to recognise the cuckoo by the plumage, but smart enough to keep his distance. The clever, bright, smart lone wolf who upped and left for a student town as far away as possible and as soon as he could. Who tried to persuade Irene, his dear little sister, to join him. He thought that she could finish school in fricking Trondheim, that it would do her good to get away from Oslo. But Mum put a stop to Irene’s evacuation. She knew nothing of course. Didn’t want to know.

Irene. Attractive, lovely, freckled, fragile Irene. You were too good for this world. You were all I was not. And yet you loved me. Would you have loved me if you had known? Would you have loved me if you had known that I was shagging your mother from the age of fifteen? Shagging your red-wine-soaked, whimpering mother, taking her from behind against the toilet door or the cellar door or the kitchen door while whispering ‘Mum’ in her ear because it made both her and me hot. She gave me money, she covered my back if anything happened, she said she only wanted to borrow me until she was old and ugly and I met a nice, sweet girl. And when I answered, ‘But, Mum, you are old and ugly,’ she laughed it off and begged for more.

I still had the bruises after my foster-father’s punches and kicks the day I rang him at work and told him to come home at three, there was something important I had to tell him. I left the front door ajar so that she wouldn’t hear him come in. And I spoke into her ear to drown his footsteps, said the sweet nothings she liked to hear.

I saw the reflection in the kitchen window, of him standing in the kitchen doorway.

He moved out the next day. Irene and Stein were told that Mum and Dad had not been getting on well for a while and had decided to separate for a bit. Irene was broken-hearted. Stein was in his student town, and he answered with a text: ‘Sad. Where would u like me to go 4 Xmas?’

Irene cried and cried. She loved me. Of course she searched for me. For the Thief.

The church bells rang for the fifth time. Crying and sniffling from the pews. Cocaine, incredible earnings. Rent a city-centre flat in the West End, register it in some junkie’s name who you pay off with a shot, and start selling in small quantities by stairways or gates, ratchet up the price as they begin to feel secure; coke folk pay anything for security. Get on your feet, get out, cut down on dope, become somebody. Don’t die in a squat like a bloody loser. The priest coughs. ‘We are here to commemorate Gusto Hanssen.’

A voice from far back: ‘Th-th-thief.’

Tutu’s tribe sitting there in biker jackets and bandanas. And even further back: the whimpering of a dog. Rufus. Good, loyal Rufus. Have you come back here? Or is it me who has already gone there?

Tord Schultz placed his Samsonite bag on the conveyor belt winding its way into the X-ray machine beside the smiling security official.

‘I don’t understand why you let them give you such a schedule,’ the flight attendant said. ‘Bangkok twice a week.’

‘I asked them to,’ Tord said, passing through the metal detector. Someone in the trade union had proposed that the crews should go on strike against having to be exposed to radiation several times a day. American research had shown that proportionally more pilots and cabin crew died of cancer than the rest of the population. But the strike agitators had said nothing about the average life expectancy also being higher. Air crew died of cancer because there was very little else to die of. They lived the safest lives in the world. The most boring lives in the world.

‘You want to fly that much?’

‘I’m a pilot. I like flying,’ Tord lied, taking down his bag, extending the handle and walking away.

She was alongside him in seconds, the clack of her heels on Gardermoen’s grey antique fonce marble floor almost drowning the buzz of voices under the vaulted wooden beams and steel. However, unfortunately it did not drown her whispered question.

‘Is that because she left you, Tord? Is it because you have too much time on your hands and nothing to fill it with? Is it because you don’t want to sit at home-’

‘It’s because I need the overtime,’ he interrupted. At least that was not an outright lie.

‘Because I know exactly what it’s like. I got divorced last winter, as you know.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Tord, who didn’t even know she had been married. He shot her a swift glance. Fifty? Wondered what she looked like in the morning without make-up and the fake tan. A faded flight attendant with a faded flight attendant dream. He was pretty sure he had never rogered her. Not face on, anyway. Whose stock joke had that been? One of the old pilots. One of the whiskey-on-the-rocks, blue-eyed fighter pilots. One of those who managed to retire before their status crashed. He accelerated as they turned into the corridor towards the flight crew centre. She was out of breath, but still kept up with him. But if he maintained this speed she might not have enough air to speak.

‘Erm, Tord, since we’ve got a stay-over in Bangkok perhaps we could…’

He yawned aloud. And felt no more than that she had been offended. He was still a bit groggy after the night before – there had been some more vodka and powder after the Mormons had gone. Not that he had ingested so much he would have failed a breathalyser test, of course, but enough for him to dread the fight against sleep for the eleven hours in the air.

‘Look!’ she exclaimed in the idiotic glissando tone that women use when they want to say something is absolutely, inconceivably, heart-rendingly sweet.

And he did look. It was coming towards them. A small, light-haired, long-eared dog with sad eyes and an enthusiastically wagging tail. A springer spaniel. It was being led by a woman with matching blonde hair, big drop earrings, a universally apologetic half-smile and gentle, brown eyes.

‘Isn’t he a dear?’ she purred beside him.

‘Mm,’ Tord said in a gravelly voice.

The dog stuck its snout into the groin of the pilot in front of them, and passed on. He turned round with a raised eyebrow and a crooked smile, as if to suggest a boyish, cheeky expression. But Tord was unable to continue that line of thought. He was unable to continue any line of thought except his own.

The dog was wearing a yellow vest. The same type of vest the woman with the drop earrings was wearing. On which was written CUSTOMS.

It came closer, and was only five metres from them now.

It shouldn’t be a problem. Couldn’t be a problem. The drugs were packed in condoms with a double layer of freezer bags on the outside. Not so much as a molecule of odour could escape. So just smile. Relax and smile. Not too much, not too little. Tord turned to the chattering voice beside him, as though the words that were issuing forth demanded deep concentration.

‘Excuse me.’

They had passed the dog, and Tord kept walking.

‘Excuse me!’ The voice was sharper.

Tord looked ahead. The door to the flight crew centre was less than ten metres away. Safety. Ten paces. Home and dry.

‘Excuse me, sir!’

Seven paces.

‘I think she means you, Tord.’

‘What?’ Tord stopped. Had to stop. Looked back with what he hoped did not appear to be feigned surprise. The woman in the yellow vest was coming towards them.

‘The dog picked you out.’

‘Did it?’ Tord looked down at the dog. How? he was thinking.

The dog looked back, wagging its tail wildly, as though Tord was its new play pal.

How? Double layer of freezer bags and condom. How?

‘That means we have to check you. Could you come with us please.’

The gentleness was still there in her brown eyes, but there was no question mark behind her words. And at that moment he realised how. He almost fingered the ID card on his chest.

The cocaine.

He had forgotten to wipe down the card after chopping up the last line. That had to be it.

But it was only a few grains, which he could easily explain away by saying he had lent his ID card to someone at a party. That wasn’t his biggest problem now. The bag. It would be searched. As a pilot he had trained and practised emergency procedures so often it was almost automatic. That was the intention, of course, even when panic seized you this was what you would do, this brain kicked in for lack of other orders: the emergency procedures. How many times had he visualised this situation: the customs officials asking him to go with them? Thinking what he would do? Practising it in his mind? He turned to the flight attendant with a resigned smile, caught sight of her name tag. ‘I’ve been picked out, it seems, Kristin. Could you take my bag?’

‘The bag comes with us,’ the official said.

Tord Schultz turned back. ‘I thought you said the dog picked me out, not the bag.’

‘That’s true, but-’

‘There are flight documents inside which the crew needs to check. Unless you want to take responsibility for delaying a full Airbus 340 to Bangkok.’ He noticed that he – quite literally – had puffed himself up, filled his lungs and expanded his chest muscles in his captain’s jacket. ‘If we miss our slot that could mean a delay of several hours and a loss of hundreds of thousands of kroner for the airline.’

‘I’m afraid rules-’

‘Three hundred and forty-two passengers,’ Schultz interrupted. ‘Many of them children.’ He hoped she heard a captain’s grave concern, not the incipient panic of a dope smuggler.

The official patted the dog on the head and looked at him.

She looks like a housewife, he thought. A woman with children and responsibility. A woman who should understand his predicament.

‘The bag comes with us,’ she said.

Another official appeared in the background. Stood there, legs apart, arms crossed.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ Tord sighed.

The head of Oslo’s Crime Squad, Gunnar Hagen, leaned back in his swivel chair and studied the man in the linen suit. It was three years since the sewn-up gash in his face had been blood red and he had looked like a man on his last legs. But now his ex-subordinate looked healthy, had put on a few sorely needed kilos, and his shoulders filled out the suit. Suit. Hagen remembered the murder investigator in jeans

and boots, never anything else. The other difference was the sticker on his lapel saying he was not staff but a visitor: HARRY HOLE.

But the posture in the chair was the same, more horizontal than sitting.

‘You look better,’ Hagen said.

‘Your town does too,’ Harry said with an unlit cigarette bobbing between his teeth.

‘You think so?’

‘Wonderful opera house. Fewer junkies in the streets.’

Hagen got up and went to the window. From the sixth floor of Police HQ he could see Oslo’s new district, Bjorvika, bathed in sunshine. The clean-up was in full flow. The demolition work over.

‘There’s been a marked fall in the number of fatal ODs in the last year.’

‘Prices have gone up, consumption down. And the City Council got what it craved. Oslo no longer tops OD stats in Europe.’

‘Happy days are here again.’ Harry put his hands behind his head and looked as if he was going to slide out of the chair.

Hagen sighed. ‘You didn’t say what brings you to Oslo, Harry.’

‘Didn’t I?’

‘No. Or, more specifically, to Crime Squad.’

‘Isn’t it normal to visit former colleagues?’

‘Yes, for other, normal, sociable people, it is.’

‘Well.’ Harry bit into the filter of the Camel cigarette. ‘My occupation is murder.’

‘ Was murder, don’t you mean?’

‘Let me reformulate that: my profession, my area of expertise, is murder. And it’s still the only field I know something about.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘To practise my occupation. To investigate murders.’

Hagen arched an eyebrow. ‘You’d like to work for me again?’

‘Why not? Unless I’m very much mistaken I was one of the best.’

‘Correction,’ Hagen said, turning back to the window. ‘You were the best.’ And repeated in a lower tone: ‘The best and the worst.’

‘I fancy one of the narco murders.’

Hagen gave a dry smile. ‘Which one? We’ve had four in the last six months. We haven’t made an ounce of headway with any of them.’

‘Gusto Hanssen.’

Hagen didn’t answer, continued to study the people sprawled over the grass. And the thoughts came unforced. Benefit cheats. Thieves. Terrorists. Why did he see that instead of hard-working employees enjoying a few well-earned hours in the September sunshine? The police look. The police blindness. He half listened to Harry’s voice behind him.

‘Gusto Hanssen, nineteen years old. Known to police, pushers and users. Found dead in a flat in Hausmanns gate on 12 July. Bled to death after a shot to the chest.’

Hagen burst out laughing. ‘Why do you want the only one that’s cleared up?’

‘I think you know.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Hagen sighed. ‘But if I were to employ you again I would put you on one of the others. On the undercover cop case.’

‘I want this one.’

‘There are, in round figures, about a hundred reasons why you will never be put on that case, Harry.’

‘Which are?’

Hagen turned to Harry. ‘Perhaps it’s enough to mention the first. The case has already been solved.’

‘And beyond that?’

‘We don’t have the case. Kripos does. I don’t have any vacancies. Quite the opposite, I’m trying to make cuts. You’re not eligible. Should I go on?’

‘Mm. Where is he?’

Hagen pointed out of the window. Across the lawn to the grey-stone building behind the yellow leaves of the linden trees.

‘Botsen,’ Harry said. ‘On remand.’

‘For the moment.’

‘Visits out of bounds?’

‘Who traced you in Hong Kong and told you about the case? Was it-?’

‘No,’ Harry interrupted.

‘So?’

‘So.’

‘Who?’

‘I might have read about it on the Net.’

‘Hardly,’ Hagen said with a thin smile and lifeless eyes. ‘The case was in the papers for one day before it was forgotten. And there were no names. Only an article about a drugged-up junkie who had shot another junkie over dope. Nothing of any interest for anyone. Nothing to make the case stand out.’


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