Jo Nesbo - Police

‘Katrine here.’

‘Katrine! It’s been a long time. What are you doing?’

‘Watching TV. And you?’

‘Being beaten at Monopoly by this young man. Comfort eating. Pizza.’

Katrine racked her brain. How old was her son now? Old enough to beat his mum at Monopoly anyway. Another reminder how terrifyingly fast time went. Katrine was about to add she was comfort eating as well. Cod heads. But remembered it had become a cliché among women, a kind of ironic, quasi-depressed phrase single girls were expected to use rather than telling it like it was: that she didn’t think she could live without total freedom. Over the years she had sometimes thought she should contact Beate just for a chat. Chat the way she used to do with Harry. She and Beate were both unattached police officers in their thirties, they had grown up with policemen as fathers, they were of above-average intelligence, realists without illusions or even the desire for a prince on a white charger. Well, maybe the horse, if it would take them where they wanted to go.

They could have had so much to talk about.

But she had never got round to ringing. Unless it was about work, of course.

They were similar in that respect as well.

‘I’m ringing about one Valentin Gjertsen,’ Katrine said. ‘Deceased sex offender. Do you know anything about him?’

‘Hang on,’ Beate said.

Katrine could hear a flurry of fingers on a keyboard and noted another thing they had in common. They were always online.

‘Ah, him,’ Beate said. ‘I’ve seen him a few times.’

Katrine realised that Beate had his picture on the screen. They said that Beate Lønn’s fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that recognises faces, contained all the people she had ever met. In her case, the line ‘I never forget a face’ was quite literally true. It was said she had been examined by brain researchers as she was one of the thirty-odd people in the world who were known to have this ability.

‘He was questioned about the Tryvann and Maridalen cases,’ Katrine said.

‘Yes, I can recall that vaguely,’ Beate said. ‘But I seem to remember he had alibis for both.’

‘One of the people in the house where he lived swore he’d been at home on the nights in question. What I’m wondering is if you took his DNA?’

‘I can’t imagine we would do that if he had an alibi. In those days, analysing DNA was a complicated and expensive process. At most it would have been done for prime suspects, and only then if we had nothing else.’

‘I know, but once you got your own DNA-testing department at the Institute you started checking the DNA on cold cases, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, we did, but in fact there were no biological traces at Maridalen or Tryvann. And if I’m not mistaken, Valentin Gjertsen received his punishment, with interest.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, he was killed.’

‘I knew he was dead, but not. .’

‘Yes, indeed. While serving his sentence at Ila. He was found in his cell. Beaten to a pulp. Inmates don’t like people who’ve molested small girls. The guilty party was never caught. Not certain anyone tried hard to find out who it was anyway.’

Silence.

‘Sorry I couldn’t help,’ Beate said. ‘And he’s got me playing Try Your Luck now, so. .’

‘Let’s hope it turns,’ Katrine said.

‘What?’

‘Your luck.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Just one last thing,’ Katrine said. ‘I’d like to have a chat with Irja Jacobsen, the woman who gave Valentin his alibi. She’s down as a missing person. But I’ve been doing some research.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘No changes of address, tax payments, social security payments or credit card purchases. No trips or mobile phone calls. If there’s so little activity, a person generally falls into one of two categories. The most common is they’re dead. But then I found something. Lotto. She’d registered for a flutter. Twenty kroner.’

‘She played lotto?’

‘Maybe she was hoping her luck would turn. Anyway, it means she belongs to the second category.’

‘Which is?’

‘Those actively trying not to be found.’

‘And now you want me to help you find her?’

‘I’ve got her last known address in Oslo and the address of the kiosk where she filled in the numbers. And I know she was on drugs.’

‘OK,’ Beate said. ‘I’ll check with our undercover guys.’

‘Thanks.’

‘OK.’

Pause.

‘Anything else?’

‘No. Yes. What do you think of Singin’ in the Rain ?’

‘I don’t like musicals. Why?’

‘Soulmates are hard to find, don’t you think?’

Beate chuckled. ‘True. Let’s talk about that sometime.’

They hung up.

Anton was sitting with his arms crossed. Listening to the silence. He looked down the corridor.

Mona was in with the patient now, and soon she would be coming out. And giving him that mischievous smile. Perhaps laying a hand on his shoulder. Caressing his hair. Maybe a fleeting kiss, letting him feel her tongue, which always tasted of mint, and then she would be off down the corridor. Wiggling her voluptuous bottom in that teasing way. Perhaps she didn’t mean to do it, but he liked to think she did. That she tightened her muscles, rolled her hips, strutted her stuff for him, for Anton Mittet. Yes, he had a lot to be grateful for, as they said.

He looked at his watch. Soon be change of shift. Was about to yawn when he heard a cry.

That was enough for him to jump to his feet. He tore open the door. Scanned the room from left to right, confirmed that Mona and the patient were the only two there.

Mona was standing beside the bed with her mouth open. She hadn’t looked up from the patient.

‘Is he. .?’ Anton started to say, but he didn’t complete the sentence when he heard it was still there. The sound of the heart monitor was so piercing — and the silence was otherwise so total — he could hear the short, regular beeps from the corridor.

Mona’s fingertips rested on the point where the collarbone meets the sternum, what Laura called the ‘jewel pit’ because that was where it lay, the gold heart he had given Laura on one of the wedding anniversaries they had marked in their own way. Perhaps that was also where women’s real hearts rose when they were scared, worked up or out of breath, for Laura put her fingers in exactly the same place. And it was as though this spot, so like Laura’s, held his full attention. Even when Mona beamed at him and whispered, as if frightened to wake the patient, the words seemed to come from somewhere else.

‘He spoke. He spoke .’

It took Katrine no more than three minutes to slip through the familiar back alleys into the Oslo Police District system, but it was harder to find the interview tapes of the rape case at the Otta Hotel. The imposed digitalisation of all sound and film recordings was already well under way but it was a different matter with the indexing. Katrine had tried all the search words she could think of — Valentin Gjertsen, Otta Hotel, rape and so on — with no luck, and had almost given up when a man’s high-pitched voice filled the room.

‘She was asking for it, wasn’t she?’

Katrine felt an electric shock go through her body, like when she and her father had been sitting in the boat and he calmly announced he had a bite. She didn’t know why, she only knew this was the voice. This was him.

‘Interesting,’ said another voice. Low, almost ingratiating. The voice of a policeman pushing for a result. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘They do ask for it, don’t they? In some way or another. And afterwards they’re ashamed and report you to the police. But you know all that.’

‘So this girl at the Otta Hotel, she was asking for it, is that what you’re saying?’