Jo Nesbo - Police

Katrine shivered and snuggled up under Bjørn’s arm. It was cold in the large church. Cold inside, cold outside, and she should have put on more clothes.

They were waiting. Everyone in Oppsal Church was waiting. Coughing. Why was it that people started coughing as soon as they entered a church? Was it the room itself that provoked tight throats and pharynxes? Even in a modern church made of glass and concrete like this? Was it their anxiety not to make a sound which they knew would be amplified by the acoustics that created this compulsive action? Or was it just a human way of releasing pent-up emotion, coughing it out instead of bursting into tears or laughter?

Katrine craned her head. There was a small turnout, only those closest. Few enough people to have only an initial in Harry’s contacts list. She saw Ståle Aune. Wearing a tie for once. His wife. Gunnar Hagen, also with wife.

She sighed. She should have worn more. Even if Bjørn didn’t seem to be cold. Dark suit. She hadn’t known he would look so good in a dark suit. She brushed his lapel. Not that there was anything on it, it was just what you did. An intimate act of love. Monkeys picking lice from the coat of another monkey.

The case was solved.

For a while they had been afraid they’d lost him, that Arnold Folkestad — now also known as the Cop Killer — had managed to escape abroad or find a hidey-hole in Norway. It would have had to be a deep, dark hole, for during the twenty-four hours after the initial alert, his description and personal information had been broadcast on every media outlet in such detail that every person of sound mind in the country had grasped who Arnold Folkestad was and what he looked like. And Katrine had at that point come to her own conclusions about how close they had been earlier in the case when Harry had asked her to check the connections between René Kalsnes and other police officers. If she had only widened her search to include former officers they would have found Arnold Folkestad’s ties to the young man.

She stopped brushing Bjørn’s lapel and he flashed her a smile of gratitude. A quick, forced smile. A little tremble around the chin. He was going to cry. She saw it now, for the first time she was going to see Bjørn Holm cry today. She coughed.

Mikael Bellman slipped into the end of the row. Glanced at his watch.

He had another interview in three-quarters of an hour. Stern . A million readers. Another foreign journalist wanting the story of how the young Chief of Police had worked indefatigably week after week, month after month, to catch this murderer, and how in the end he had himself almost become the Cop Killer’s victim. And Mikael would once again pause briefly before saying that the eye he had sacrificed was a cheap price for what he had achieved: preventing an insane murderer from taking even more of his officers’ lives.

Mikael Bellman pulled the sleeve over his watch. They should have started by now. What were they waiting for? He had given some thought to his choice of dress today. Black, to match the moment and the eyepatch? The patch was a real hit; it told his story in such a dramatic and effective way that according to Aftenposten he was the most photographed Norwegian in the international press this year. Or should he choose something dark but more neutral, which would be acceptable and not so conspicuous for the interview afterwards? He would have to go straight from the interview to a meeting with the City Council chairman, so Ulla had opted for dark, neutral colours.

If they didn’t start soon he would be late.

He mused. Did he feel anything? No. What should he feel? After all, it was only Harry Hole, not exactly a close friend, nor one of his officers in Oslo Police District. But there was a certain possibility that the press were waiting outside, and of course it was good PR to show your face in church. It was indeed impossible to get around the fact that Harry Hole had been the first to point the finger of guilt at Arnold Folkestad, and with the dimensions this case had taken on that linked Mikael and Harry. And PR was going to be even more important than ever. He already knew what the meeting with the City Council chairman was going to be about. The party had lost a strong personality with Isabelle Skøyen and was on the lookout for someone new. A popular, respected person they would like to have on the team, to lead Oslo forward. When the chairman had rung he had opened by singing the praises of the warm, contemplative impression Bellman had made in the Magasinet interview. And then wondered if their party political programme chimed with Mikael Bellman’s own political standpoints.

Chimed.

Lead Oslo forward.

Mikael Bellman’s town.

So get that organ cranked up!

Bjørn Holm could feel Katrine trembling under his arm, felt the cold sweat under his suit trousers and reflected that it was going to be a long day. A long day before he and Katrine could take off their clothes and crawl into bed. Together. Let life carry on. The way life carried on for those of them who were left, whether they wanted it to or not. And as his gaze swept across the rows of pews he thought of all those who were not here. Of Beate Lønn. Of Erlend Vennesla. Anton Mittet. Roar Midtstuen’s daughter, Fia. And of Rakel Fauke and Oleg Fauke, who weren’t here either. Who had paid the price for attaching themselves to the man who was being positioned in front of them by the altar. Harry Hole.

And in a strange way it was as though the man at the front was continuing to be what he had always been: a black pit sucking in everything that was good around him, consuming all the love he was offered and also the love he wasn’t.

Katrine had said yesterday after they had gone to bed that she had also been in love with Harry Hole. Not because he deserved it, but because he had been impossible not to love. As impossible as he was to catch, keep or live with. Yes, of course she had loved him. But it had passed, the desire had cooled, or at least she had tried to cool it. But the delicate little scar after the short heartbreak she shared with several women would always be there. He had been someone they’d had on loan for a while. And now it was over. Bjørn had asked her to drop the subject there.

The organ piped up. Bjørn had always had a weakness for organs. His mother’s organ in the sitting room in Skreia, Gregg Allman’s B3 organ, creaking pump organs squeezing out an old hymn, to Bjørn it was all the same, like sitting in a bathtub of warm notes and hoping the tears didn’t get you.

They had never caught Arnold Folkestad; he had caught himself.

Folkestad had probably come to the conclusion that his mission had ended. And with it, his life. So he had done the only logical thing. It took them three days to find him. Three days of desperate searching. BjØrn had had the feeling the whole country had been on the march. And perhaps that was why it felt like a bit of an anticlimax when the news came that he’d been found in the forest in Maridalen, only a few hundred metres from where Erlend Vennesla had been spotted. With a small, almost discreet, hole in his head and a gun in his hand. It was his car that had put them on the track; it had been seen in a car park close to where the trail paths started: an old Fiat that had also featured in the nationwide alert.

Bjørn himself had led the forensics team. Arnold Folkestad had looked so innocent lying on his back in the heath, like a leprechaun with his red beard. He lay beneath a patch of open sky unprotected by the trees clumped together around him. In his pockets they had found the keys for the Fiat and the door that was blown up in Hausmanns gate 92, a standard Heckler amp; Koch gun as well as the one he held in his hand, together with a wallet containing a dog-eared photo of a man Bjørn immediately recognised as René Kalsnes.