Текст книги "Phantom"

Автор книги: Jo Nesbo

Соавторы: Jo Nesbo,Jo Nesbo
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

41

It was like standing between two oncoming trains. The wall of water in front hit him first. Threw him backwards, and he felt his head strike the ground. Then he was picked up and whirled onwards. He flailed desperately, his fingers and knees scraping against the wall, trying to catch hold of something, but he had no chance against the forces around him. Then, as quickly as it had started it stopped. He could feel the currents as the two cascades of water neutralised each other. And saw something by his back. Two white arms with a shimmer of green embraced Harry from behind, pale fingers reached up to his face. Harry kicked, twisted round and saw the body with the bandage round its stomach revolving in the dark water like a weightless, naked astronaut. Open mouth, slowly flapping hair and beard. Harry put his feet on the floor and stretched up to the ceiling. There was water to the very top. He crouched down, glimpsed the MP5 and the white line on the floor beneath him as he took his first swimming strokes. He had lost his bearings until the body told him which way he had to go to get back to where he had come from. Harry swam with his body at a diagonal to the walls, so that he had maximum arm span, shoved off, forcing himself not to think the other thought. Buoyancy wasn’t a problem, quite the contrary, the bullet-proof vest was dragging him down too far. Harry considered whether to spend time removing his coat; it kept drifting up above him and creating greater resistance. He tried to concentrate on what he had to do, swim back to the shaft, not count seconds, not count metres. But he could already feel the pressure in his head, as though it was going to explode. And then the thought came after all. Summer, fifty-metre outdoor pool. Early morning, almost no one around, sunshine, Rakel in a yellow bikini. Oleg and Harry were to settle who could swim furthest underwater. Oleg was on form after the ice-skating season, but Harry had a better swimming technique. Rakel cheered and laughed her wonderful laugh as they warmed up. They both strutted about for her – she was the queen of Frogner Lido and Oleg and Harry her subjects seeking the favour of her gaze. Then they started. And it was a dead heat. After forty metres they both broke the surface, panting and certain they had won. Forty metres. Ten metres to the end. With the pool wall to kick off from and unrestricted arm movement. Bit more than half the distance to the end of the shaft. He didn’t have a hope. He would die here. He would die now, soon. His eyeballs felt as if they were being squeezed out of his head. The plane left at midnight. Yellow bikini. Ten metres to the end. He took another stroke. Would manage one more. But then, then he would die.

It was half past three in the morning. Truls Berntsen was driving round the streets of Oslo in drizzle that whispered and murmured against the windscreen. He had been doing it for two hours. Not because he was searching for something, but because it brought him calm. Calm to think and calm not to think.

Someone had deleted an address from the list Harry Hole had been given. And it had not been him.

Perhaps not everything was as cut and dried as he had believed after all.

He replayed the night of the murder one more time.

Gusto had stopped by, so desperate for a fix that he was shaking, and threatened to grass him up unless Truls gave him some money for violin. For some reason there had been no violin for weeks, there had been panic in Needle Park, and a quarter cost three thousand, at least. Truls had said they would drive to an ATM, he’d just have to fetch his car keys. He had taken his Steyr pistol along; there was no doubt what would have to be done. Gusto would use the same threat again and again. Dopeheads are pretty predictable like that. But when he went back to the front door the boy had hopped it. Presumably because he had smelt blood. Fair enough, Truls had thought. Gusto wouldn’t do any snitching as long as he had nothing to gain by it, and after all he’d been in on the burglary as well. It was Saturday, and Truls was on what was known as reserve duty, which meant he was on call, so he had gone to the Watchtower, read a bit, watched Martine Eckhoff and drunk coffee. Then he had heard the sirens and a few seconds later his mobile had rung. It was the Ops Room. Someone had called in to say there was shooting at Hausmanns gate 92, and they had no one from Crime Squad on duty. Truls had run there, it was only a few hundred metres from the Watchtower. All his police instincts were on alert, he had observed the people he passed on the way, in the full knowledge that his observations could be important. One person he saw was a young man with a woollen hat, leaning against a house. The youngster’s attention was caught by the police car parked by the gate of the crime scene address. Truls had noticed the boy because he didn’t like the way his hands were buried in the pockets of his North Face jacket. It was too big and too thick for the time of year, and the pockets could have concealed all manner of things. The boy’d had a serious expression on his face, but didn’t look like a dope seller. When the police had accompanied Oleg Fauke from the river and into the patrol car the boy had turned his back and gone down Hausmanns gate.

Now Truls could probably have come up with another ten people he had observed around the crime scene and tied theories to them. The reason he remembered this one was that he had seen him again. In the family photo Harry Hole had shown him at Hotel Leon.

Hole had asked if he recognised Irene Hanssen, and he had answered – truthfully – no. But he hadn’t told Hole whom he had recognised in the photo. Gusto of course. But there had been someone else. The other boy. Gusto’s foster-brother. It was the same serious expression. He was the boy he had seen by the crime scene.

Truls stopped the car in Prinsens gate, just down from Hotel Leon.

He had the police radio on, and at last came the message to the Ops Room he had been waiting for.

‘Zero One. We checked the report about the noise in Blindernveien. Looks like there’s been a battle here. Tear gas and signs of one helluva lot of shooting. Automatic weapon, no question about that. One man shot dead. We went down to the cellar, but it’s full of water. Think we’d better call Delta to check the first floor.’

‘Can you clarify whether there is still anyone alive?’

‘Come and clarify it yourself! Didn’t you hear what I said? Gas and an automatic weapon!’

‘OK, OK. What do you want?’

‘Four patrol cars to secure the area. Delta, SOC group and… a plumber perhaps.’

Truls Berntsen turned down the volume. Heard a car screech to a halt, saw a tall man cross the street in front of the car. The driver, furious, sounded his horn, but the man didn’t notice, just strode in the direction of Hotel Leon.

Truls Berntsen squinted.

Could that really be him? Harry Hole?

The man had his head hunched down between the shoulders of a shabby coat. It was only when he twisted his head and the face was illuminated by the street lamp that Truls saw he had been wrong. There was something familiar about him, but it wasn’t Hole.

Truls leaned back in the seat. He knew now. Who had won. He looked out over his town. For this was his now. The rain mumbled on the car roof that Harry Hole was dead, and cried in torrents down the windscreen.

Most people had generally shagged themselves out by two and gone home, and afterwards Hotel Leon was quieter. The boy in reception barely lifted his head as the pastor came in. The rain ran off his coat and hair. He used to ask Cato what he had been doing to arrive in such a state, in the middle of the night, after an absence of several days. But the answers he received were always so exhaustingly long, intense and detailed about the misery of others that he had stopped. But tonight Cato seemed more tired than normal.

‘Hard night?’ he asked, hoping for a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.

‘Oh, you know,’ the old man said with a pale smile. ‘Humanity. Humanity. I was almost killed just now.’

‘Oh?’ said the boy and regretted asking. A long explanation was sure to be on its way.

‘A car almost ran me over,’ Cato said, continuing up the stairs.

The boy breathed out with relief and concentrated on The Phantom again.

The old man put the key in his door and turned. But to his surprise discovered it was already open.

He went in. Switched on the light, but the ceiling lamp didn’t come on. Saw the bedside lamp was lit. The man sitting on the bed was tall, stooped and wearing a long coat, like himself. Water dripped from the coat-tails onto the floor. They were so different, yet it struck the old man now for the first time: it was like staring at your reflection.

‘What are you doing?’ he whispered.

‘I broke in of course,’ the other man said. ‘To see if you had anything of value.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Of value? No. But I found this.’

The old man caught what was thrown over. Held it between his fingers. Nodded slowly. It was made of stiffened cotton, formed into a U-shape. Not as white as it should be.

‘So you found this in my room?’ the old man asked.

‘Yes, in your bedroom. In the wardrobe. Put it on.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to confess my sins. And because you look naked without it.’

Cato looked at the man sitting on the bed, hunched over. Water was running from his hair, down the scar on his jaw to his chin. From there it dripped onto the floor. He had placed the sole chair in the middle of the room. The confessional chair. On the table lay an unopened pack of Camel and beside it a lighter and a sodden broken cigarette.

‘As you like, Harry.’

He sat unbuttoning his coat and pushed the U-shaped priest’s collar into the slits in the priest’s shirt. The other man flinched when he put his hand in his jacket pocket.

‘Cigarettes,’ the old man said. ‘For us. Yours look like they’ve drowned.’

The policeman nodded and the old man took out his hand and held up an opened pack.

‘You speak good Norwegian.’

‘Tiny bit better than I speak Swedish. But as a Norwegian you can’t hear the accent when I speak Swedish.’

Harry took one of the black cigarettes. Studied it.

‘The Russian accent, you mean?’

‘Sobranie Black Russian,’ the old man said. ‘The only decent cigarettes to be found in Russia. Produced in Ukraine now. I usually steal them from Andrey. Speaking of Andrey, how is he?’

‘Bad,’ the policeman said, allowing the old man to light his cigarette for him.

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Speaking of bad, you should be dead, Harry. I know you were in the tunnel when I opened the sluices.’

‘I was.’

‘The sluices opened at the same time and the water towers were full. You should have been washed into the middle.’

‘I was.’

‘Then I don’t understand. Most suffer from shock and drown in the middle.’

The policeman exhaled the smoke from a corner of his mouth. ‘Like the Resistance fighters who went after the Gestapo boss?’

‘I don’t know if they ever tested his trap in a real retreat.’

‘But you did. With the undercover officer.’

‘He was just like you, Harry. Men who think they have a calling are dangerous. Both to themselves and their environment. You should have drowned like him.’

‘But as you see, I’m still here.’

‘I still don’t understand how that’s possible. Are you claiming that having been battered by the water you still had enough air in your lungs to swim eighty metres in ice-cold water through a narrow tunnel, fully clothed?’

‘No.’

‘No?’ The old man smiled. He seemed genuinely curious.

‘No, I had too little air in my lungs. But I had enough for forty metres.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I was saved.’

‘Saved? By whom?’

‘By the man you said was good, deep down.’ Harry held up the empty whiskey bottle. ‘Jim Beam.’

‘You were saved by whiskey?’

‘A bottle of whiskey.’

‘An empty bottle of whiskey?’

‘On the contrary, a full bottle.’

Harry put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, unscrewed the cap, held the bottle over his head.

‘Full of air.’

The old man gave a look of disbelief. ‘You…?’

‘The biggest problem after emptying my lungs of air in the water was to put my mouth to the bottle, tilt it so the neck was pointing upwards, and I could inhale. It’s like diving for the first time. Your body protests. Because your body has a limited knowledge of physics and thinks it will suck in water and drown. Did you know that the lungs can take four litres of air? Well, a whole bottle of air and a bit of determination were enough to swim another forty metres.’ The policeman put down the bottle, removed his cigarette and looked at it sceptically. ‘The Germans should have made a slightly longer tunnel.’

Harry watched the old man. Saw the furrowed old face split. Heard him laugh. It sounded like the chug-chug of a boat.

‘I knew you were different, Harry. They told me you would come back to Oslo when you heard about Oleg. So I made enquiries. And I know now the rumours did not exaggerate.’

‘Well,’ Harry said, keeping an eye on the priest’s folded hands. Sat on the edge of the bed with both feet on the floor, ready as it were, with so much weight on his toes that he could feel the thin nylon cord beneath his shoe. ‘What about you, Rudolf? Do the rumours exaggerate in your case?’

‘Which ones?’

‘Well, for example, the ones saying you ran a heroin network in Gothenburg and killed a policeman there.’

‘Sounds like it’s me who has to confess and not you, eh?’

‘Thought it would be good to unburden your sins onto Jesus before you die.’

More chug-chug laughter. ‘Good one, Harry! Good one! Yes, we had to eliminate him. He was our burner, and I had a feeling he was not reliable. And I couldn’t go back to prison. There’s a stale dampness that eats away at your soul, the way mould eats walls. Every day takes another chunk. Your human side is consumed, Harry. It’s something I would only wish on my worst enemy.’ He looked at Harry. ‘An enemy I hate above all else.’

‘You know why I came back to Oslo. What was your reason? I thought Sweden was as good a market as Norway.’

‘Same as you, Harry.’

‘Same?’

Rudolf Asayev took a drag of the black cigarette before answering. ‘Forget it. The police were on my heels after the murder. And it’s strange how far away you are from Sweden in Norway, despite the proximity.’

‘And when you came back you became the mysterious Dubai. The man no one had seen. But who was thought to haunt the town at night. The ghost of Kvadraturen.’

‘I had to stay under cover. Not only because of the businesses, but because the name Rudolf Asayev would bring back bad memories for the police.’

‘In the seventies and eighties,’ Harry said, ‘heroin addicts died like flies. But perhaps you included them in your prayers, Pastor?’

The old man shrugged. ‘One doesn’t judge people who make sports cars, base-jumping parachutes, handguns or other goods people buy for fun and yet send them to their deaths. I deliver something people want, of quality and at a price that makes me competitive. What customers do with the goods is up to them. You are aware, are you, that there are fully functioning citizens who take opiates?’

‘Yes, I was one of them. The difference between you and a sports car manufacturer is that what you do is forbidden by law.’

‘One should be careful mixing law and morality, Harry.’

‘So you think your god will exonerate you, do you?’

The old man rested his chin on his hand. Harry could sense his exhaustion, but he knew it could be faked, and watched his movements carefully.

‘I heard you were a zealous policeman and a moralist, Harry. Oleg spoke about you to Gusto. Did you know that? Oleg loved you like a father would wish a son to love him. Zealous moralists and love-hungry fathers like us have enormous dynamism. Our weakness is that we are predictable. It was just a question of time before you came. We have a connection at Gardermoen who sees the passenger lists. We knew you were on your way even before you sat down on the plane in Hong Kong.’

‘Mm. Was that the burner, Truls Berntsen?’

The old man smiled by way of answer.

‘And what about Isabelle Skoyen on the City Council? Did you work with her too?’

The old man heaved a heavy sigh. ‘You know I’ll take the answers with me to the grave. I’m happy to die like a dog, but not like an informer.’

‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘what happened next?’

‘Andrey followed you from the airport to Hotel Leon. I stay at a variety of similar hotels when I’m in circulation as Cato, and Leon is a place I’ve stayed at a lot. So I checked in the day after you.’

‘Why?’

‘To follow what you were doing. I wanted to see if you were getting close to us.’

‘As you did when Beret Man stayed here?’

The old man nodded. ‘I knew you could be dangerous, Harry. But I liked you. So I tried to give you some friendly warnings.’ He sighed. ‘But you didn’t listen. Of course you didn’t. People like you and me don’t, Harry. That’s why we succeed. And that’s also in the end why we always fail.’

‘Mm. What were you afraid I would do? Persuade Oleg to grass?’

‘That too. Oleg had never seen me, but I couldn’t know what Gusto had told him. Gusto was, sad to say, untrustworthy, especially after he began to take violin himself.’ There was something in the old man’s eyes that Harry realised with a jolt was not the result of tiredness. It was pain. Sheer unadulterated pain.

‘So when you thought Oleg would talk to me you tried to have him killed. And when that didn’t work you offered to help me. So that I would lead you to Oleg.’

The old man nodded slowly. ‘It’s not personal, Harry. Those are the rules in this industry. Grasses are eliminated. But you knew that, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I knew. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to kill you for following your rules.’

‘So why haven’t you done it already? Don’t you dare? Afraid you’ll burn in hell, Harry?’

Harry stubbed out his cigarette on the table. ‘Because I want to know a couple of things first. Why did you kill Gusto? Were you afraid he would inform on you?’

The old man stroked back his white hair, round his Dumbo ears. ‘Gusto had bad blood flowing through his veins, just like me. He was an informer by nature. He would have informed on me earlier, all that was missing was something to gain. But then he became desperate. It was the craving for violin. It’s pure chemistry. The flesh is stronger than the spirit. We all weaken when the craving’s there.’

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘We all weaken then.’

‘I…’ The old man coughed. ‘I had to let him go.’

‘Go?’

‘Yes. Go. Sink. Disappear. I couldn’t let him take over the businesses, I realised that. He was smart enough, he had inherited that from his father. It was spine he lacked. He inherited that deficiency from his mother. I tried to give him responsibility, but he failed the test.’ The old man kept stroking his hair back, harder and harder, as if it were steeped in something he was trying to clean. ‘Didn’t pass the test. Bad blood. So I decided it would have to be someone else. At first I thought of Andrey and Peter. Siberian Cossacks from Omsk. Cossack means “free man”. Did you know that? Andrey and Peter were my regiment, my stanitsa. They’re loyal to their ataman, faithful to the death. But Andrey and Peter were not businessmen, you know.’ Harry noticed the old man’s gesticulations, as if immersed in his own brooding thoughts. ‘I couldn’t leave the shop to them. So I decided it would have to be Sergey. He was young, had his future in front of him, could be moulded…’

‘You told me you might have had a son yourself once.’

‘Sergey may not have had Gusto’s head for figures, but he was disciplined. Ambitious. Willing to do what was required to be an ataman. So I gave him the knife. There was only one remaining test. For a Cossack to become an ataman in the old days you had to go into the Taiga and come back with a living wolf, tied and bound. Sergey was willing, but I had to see that he could also accomplish chto nuzhno.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The necessary.’

‘Was that son Gusto?’

The old man stroked his hair back so hard his eyes narrowed to two slits.

‘Gusto was six months old when I was sent to prison. His mother sought solace where she could. At least for a short while. She was in no position to take care of him.’

‘Heroin?’

‘The social services took Gusto from her and provided foster-parents. They were in agreement that I, the prisoner, did not exist. She OD’d the following winter. She should have done it before.’

‘You said you came back to Oslo for the same reason as me. Your son.’

‘I’d been told he had moved away from his foster-family, he had strayed off the straight and narrow. I had been thinking of leaving Sweden anyway, and the competition in Oslo wasn’t up to much. I found where Gusto hung out. Studied him from a distance at first. He was so good-looking. So damned good-looking. Like his mother, of course. I could just sit looking at him. Looking and looking, and thinking he’s my son, my own…’ The old man’s voice choked.

Harry stared at his feet, at the nylon cord he had been given instead of a new curtain pole, pressed it into the floor with the sole of his shoe.

‘And then you took him into your business. And tested him to see if he could take over.’

The old man nodded. Whispered: ‘But I never said anything. When he died he didn’t know I was his father.’

‘Why the sudden haste?’

‘Haste?’

‘Why did you need to have someone take over so quickly? First Gusto, then Sergey.’

The old man mustered a weary smile. Leaned forward in his chair, into the light from the reading lamp above the bed.

‘I’m ill.’

‘Mm. Thought it was something like that. Cancer?’

‘The doctors gave me a year. Six months ago. The sacred knife Sergey used had been lying under my mattress. Do you feel any pain in your wound? That’s my suffering the knife has transmitted to you, Harry.’

Harry nodded slowly. It fitted. And it didn’t fit.

‘If you have only months left to live why are you so afraid of being grassed up that you want to kill your own son? His long life for your short one?’

The old man gave a muffled cough. ‘Urkas and Cossacks are the regiment’s simple men, Harry. We swear allegiance to a code, and we stick to it. Not blindly, but with open eyes. We’re trained to discipline our feelings. That makes us masters of our own lives. Abraham said yes to sacrificing his son because-’

‘-it was God’s command. I have no idea what kind of code you’re talking about, but does it say it’s alright to let an eighteen-year-old go to prison for your crimes?’

‘Harry, Harry, have you not understood? I didn’t kill Gusto.’

Harry stared at the old man. ‘Didn’t you just say it was your code? To kill your own son if you had to?’

‘Yes, I did, but I also said I was born of bad people. I love my son. I could never have taken Gusto’s life. Quite the opposite. I say screw Abraham and his god.’ The old man’s laughter morphed into coughing. He laid his hands on his chest, bent over his knees and coughed and coughed.

Harry blinked. ‘Who killed him then?’

The old man straightened up. In his right hand he was holding a revolver. It was a large, ugly object and looked even older than its owner.

‘You should know better than to come to me without a weapon, Harry.’

Harry didn’t answer. The MP5 was at the bottom of a water-filled cellar, the rifle was at Truls Berntsen’s flat.

‘Who killed Gusto?’ Harry repeated.

‘It could have been anyone.’

Harry seemed to hear a creak as the old man’s finger curled around the trigger.

‘It’s not very difficult to kill, Harry. Don’t you agree?’

‘I do,’ Harry said, lifting his foot. There was a whistle under the sole of his foot as the thin nylon cord shot up towards the curtain pole holder.

Harry saw the question marks in the old man’s eyes, saw his brain working lightning-fast with the half-digested bits of information.

The light that didn’t work.

The chair that was in the middle of the room.

Harry who hadn’t searched him.

Harry who hadn’t moved a centimetre from where he was sitting.

And perhaps now he could see the nylon cord in the semi-gloom as it ran from under Harry’s shoe via the curtain pole holder to the ceiling lamp fitting right above his head. Where there was no longer a lamp but the only thing Harry had taken from Blindernveien apart from the priest’s collar. Which was all he had in his mind as he lay on Rudolf Asayev’s four-poster bed, soaking wet, gasping for breath as black dots jumped in and out of his vision and he was sure he was going to pass out any second, but fought to stay conscious, to stay on this side of the darkness. Then he had got up, and taken the zjuk, which was beside the Bible.

Rudolf Asayev hurled himself to the left, thus the steel nails embedded in the brick did not pierce his head but the skin between the collarbone and the shoulder muscle, which continued down to a juncture of nerve fibres, the cervico-brachial plexus, with the result that when, two hundredths of a second later, he pulled the trigger, the muscle in his upper arm was paralysed, causing his revolver to drop seven centimetres. The powder hissed and burned for the thousandth of a second the bullet needed to leave the barrel of the old Nagant. Three thousandths of a second later the bullet bored into the bed frame between Harry’s calves.

Harry got up. Flicked the security catch to the side and pressed the release button. The shaft quivered as the blade sprang out. Harry swung his hand, low, past the hip, with a straight arm, and the long, thin knife blade entered midway between the coat lapels, down the priest’s shirt. He felt the material and skin give, then the blade slid in up to the hilt without any resistance. Harry let go of the knife knowing that Rudolf Asayev was a dying man as the chair tipped back and the Russian hit the floor with a groan. He kicked the chair away, but stayed where he was, curled up like an injured but still dangerous wasp. Harry stood astride him, bent down and pulled the knife out of his body. Looked at the abnormally deep red colour of the blood. From the liver, maybe. The old man’s left hand scrabbled across the floor, round the paralysed right arm, searching for the pistol. And for one wild moment Harry wished the hand would find it, give him the pretext he needed to…

Harry kicked the pistol away, heard it thud against the wall.

‘The iron,’ whispered the old man. ‘Bless me with my iron, my boy. It’s burning. For both of our sakes, bring this to an end.’

Harry closed his eyes for a brief instant. Could feel he had lost it. It was gone. The hatred. The wonderful, white hatred which had been the fuel that had kept him going. He had run out of it.

‘No, thank you,’ Harry said. Stepped over and away from the old man. Buttoned up the wet coat. ‘I’m going now, Rudolf Asayev. I’ll ask the boy in reception to ring for an ambulance. Then I’ll call my ex-boss and tell him where they can find you.’

The old man chuckled and red bubbles formed at the corner of his mouth. ‘The knife, Harry. It’s not murder, I’m already dead. You won’t end up in hell, I promise you. I’ll tell them at the gate not to drag you in.’

‘It’s not hell that frightens me.’ Harry put the wet Camel pack in his coat pocket. ‘I’m a policeman. Our job is to bring alleged lawbreakers to justice.’

The bubbles burst when the old man coughed. ‘Come on, Harry, your sheriff’s badge is made of plastic. I’m ill. The only thing a judge can do is give me custody, kisses, hugs and morphine. And I committed so many murders. Rivals I hanged from bridges. Employees, like that pilot we used the brick on. The police, too. Beret Man. I sent Andrey and Peter to your room to shoot you. You and Truls Berntsen. And do you know why? To make it look like you two had shot each other. We had left the weapon as proof. Come on now, Harry.’

Harry wiped the knife blade on the bed sheet. ‘Why did you want to kill Berntsen? After all, he worked for you.’

Asayev turned onto his side and he seemed to be able to breathe better. He lay like that for a couple of seconds before answering. ‘He stole a stockpile of heroin from Alnabru behind my back. It wasn’t my heroin, but when you discover your burner is so greedy you can’t trust him and at the same time he knows enough about you to bring you down, you know the sum of the risks has become too great. And then businessmen like me eliminate the risk, Harry. We saw a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. You and Berntsen.’ He chuckled. ‘Like I tried to murder your boy in Botsen. Feel the hatred now, Harry? I almost murdered your boy.’

Harry stopped by the door. ‘Who killed Gusto?’

‘Humanity lives by the gospel of hatred. Follow the hatred, Harry.’

‘Who are your contacts in the police and on the City Council?’

‘If I tell you, will you help me to bring this to an end?’

Harry looked at him. Nodded quickly. Hoped the lie wasn’t transparent.

‘Come closer,’ whispered the old man.

Harry bent down. And suddenly the old man’s hand, like a stiff claw, had grabbed his lapels and pulled him close. The whetstone voice wheezed softly in his ear.

‘You know I paid a man to confess to the murder of Gusto, Harry. But you thought it was because I couldn’t kill Oleg as long as he was being held in a secret location. Wrong. My man in the police force has access to the witness protection programme. I could have had Oleg stabbed to death just as easily where he was. But I had changed my mind. I didn’t want him to get away so…’

Harry tried to tear himself away, but the old man held him tight.

‘I wanted him hung upside down with a plastic bag over his head,’ the voice rumbled. ‘His head in a clear plastic bag. Water running down his feet. Water following the body all the way down into the bag. I wanted to film it. With sound so that you could hear the screams. And afterwards I would have sent you the film. And if you let me go this is still my plan. You’ll be surprised how quickly they release me for lack of evidence, Harry. And then I’ll find him, Harry, I swear I will, you just keep an eye on your post for when the DVD comes.’

Harry acted instinctively, swung his hand. Felt the blade gain purchase. Go deep. He twisted it. Heard the old man gasp. Continued to twist. Closed his eyes and felt intestines and organs curling round, bursting, turning inside out. And when at last he heard the old man scream, it was Harry’s own scream.