Jo Nesbo - Police

He looked down at the empty coffee cup beside the chair. He would have to go and make himself a double espresso. Oh no, shit, it had run out of capsules. He would have to ring Mona and ask her to bring a cup for him; it wasn’t long before her next visit. He picked up the phone. Her name was under GAMLEM CONTACT RIKSHOSPITAL. Which was no more than a safety precaution in case Laura checked the call log on his mobile phone and saw the frequent calls to this number. Of course he deleted the texts as he went. Anton Mittet was going to call when his brain identified it.

The wrong sound. The creak of the bedroom door.

It was the silence.

It was the sound that wasn’t there that was wrong.

The sonar beep. The heart monitor.

Anton struggled to his feet. Staggered to the door, burst in. Tried to blink away the fuzziness. Stared at the machine’s green shimmering screen. At the dead, flat line extending across it.

He ran to the bed. Looked down at the pallid face lying there.

He heard the sound of running footsteps approaching in the corridor. An alarm must have gone off in the duty office when the machine stopped registering heartbeats. Anton instinctively placed a hand on the man’s forehead. Still warm. However, Anton had seen enough bodies to leave no room for doubt. The patient was dead.

The funeral of the patient was a brief, efficient affair with an extremely meagre turnout. The priest didn’t even try to suggest the man in the coffin was much-loved, had lived an exemplary life or was eligible to enter paradise. He therefore just went straight to Jesus, who, he maintained, had let all sinners off the hook.

There weren’t even enough volunteers to carry the coffin, so it had to be left standing in front of the altar while the congregation walked out into the snow outside Vestre Aker Church. The majority of the assembled mourners were police officers — four to be precise — who got into the same car and drove to Kafé Justisen, which had just opened and where a psychologist was waiting for them. They stamped the snow off their boots, ordered a beer and four bottles of water, which was no cleaner or tastier than the water that came out of Oslo’s taps. They skål ed, cursed the dead man, as was the custom, and drank.

‘His death was premature,’ said the head of Crime Squad, Gunnar Hagen.

‘Only a little premature,’ said the head of Krimteknisk, Beate Lønn.

‘May he burn long and hot,’ said the red-haired forensics officer in the suede jacket with a fringe, Bjørn Holm.

‘As a psychologist I hereby diagnose you all as out of touch with your emotions,’ said Ståle Aune, raising his glass of beer.

‘Thank you, Doctor, but the diagnosis is police ,’ Hagen said.

‘The autopsy,’ Katrine said. ‘I’m not sure that I quite understood it.’

‘He died of a cerebral infarction,’ Beate said. ‘A stroke. It can happen.’

‘But he came out of the coma,’ Bjørn Holm said.

‘It can affect any of us, at any time,’ Beate said in flat voice.

‘Thank you for that,’ Hagen grinned. ‘And now that we’re done with the dead man, I suggest we move on.’

‘An ability to deal quickly with trauma is a sign of a person with low intelligence.’ Aune took a swig from his glass. ‘Just thought I would throw that in.’

Hagen gazed at the psychologist for a second before continuing. ‘I think it would be good if we assembled here and not at HQ.’

‘Fine. Why are we here actually?’ Bjørn Holm asked.

‘To talk about the police murders.’ He turned. ‘Katrine?’

Katrine Bratt nodded. Cleared her throat.

‘A brief summary so that Aune is also up to speed,’ she said. ‘Two police officers have been killed. Both at scenes of unsolved murders. Both were involved in those investigations afterwards. With respect to the police murders, as yet we do not have any clues, suspects or leads regarding the motive. With respect to the original murders, we assume they were sexually motivated. There were some clues, but none pointed towards particular suspects. That is, we had several in for questioning, but they were eliminated, either because they had an alibi or they didn’t fit the profile. Now, however, one has had his eligibility revalidated. .’

She took something from her bag and placed it on the table so that they could all see. It was a photograph of a man with his chest bared. The date and number showed it was a police mugshot.

‘This is Valentin Gjertsen. Vice cases. Men, women and children. The first charge came when he was sixteen, interfering with a nine-year-old girl he had lured into a rowing boat. The following year his neighbour reported him for trying to rape her in the laundry room.’

‘And what ties him to Maridalen and Tryvann?’ Bjørn Holm asked.

‘For the moment, only that the profile fits and the woman who gave him an alibi for the times of the murders has just told us she was lying. She was doing what he ordered her to do.’

‘Valentin told her the police were trying to pin a false charge on him,’ Beate Lønn said.

‘Aha,’ Hagen said. ‘That could be a basis for hating the police. What do you say, Doctor? Is it conceivable?’

Aune smacked his lips. ‘Absolutely. However, the rule of thumb I adhere to in matters concerning the human psyche is that absolutely everything conceivable is possible. Plus a goodly amount that is not conceivable.’

‘While Valentin Gjertsen was doing time for molesting a minor, he raped and disfigured a female dentist at Ila. He was sure revenge would follow and decided he would have to escape. Escaping from Ila is not exactly difficult, but Valentin wanted it to look as if he’d died so that no one would go after him. He killed a fellow inmate, one Judas Johansen, beat him to a pulp and hid the body so that when Judas didn’t turn up for roll call he was listed as missing. Afterwards he forced the prison tattooist to do a copy of Valentin’s demon face on the only place where Judas hadn’t been beaten, his chest. He made it clear that he and his family would suffer a painful, premature death if he ever breathed a word to anyone, and then on the night Valentin escaped, he dressed Judas Johansen’s dead body in his own clothes, placed him on the floor of his cell and left the door ajar. The next morning, when they found the body of the man they thought was Valentin, no one was especially surprised. The murder of the unit’s most hated prisoner was more or less expected. It was so obvious they didn’t even consider checking the fingerprints, even less running a DNA test.’

There was silence around the table. Another customer came in, was about to sit at the neighbouring table, but one glance from Hagen was enough to make him move further away.

‘So what you’re saying is that Valentin escaped and is alive and well,’ Beate Lønn said. ‘He was behind the original murders and the police murders. The motive for the latter is revenge on the police in general. And he uses the earlier crime scenes to do it. But what precisely is he exacting revenge for? The police doing their job? In which case not many of us would be left alive.’

‘I’m not sure he’s after the police in general,’ Katrine said. ‘The prison warder told me they’d been visited by a policeman at Ila, who spoke to some of the inmates about the murders of the girls at Maridalen and Tryvann. He said he spoke to prisoners in for murder, and rather than ask for information he leaked it. He fingered Valentin as a. .’ Katrine braced herself. ‘. . child-fucker.’

She saw them all, even Beate Lønn, recoil. It was strange how one word could seem stronger than even the worst crime-scene photographs.