Jo Nesbo - The Son

They found the stairwell, the basement corridor and the lift door. In contrast to the floors above this was a simple metal door with a mottled glass pane. Across the door was a sign. LIFT CONTROL. KEEP OUT. Simon shook the door handle. Locked.

‘Run back upstairs to the rehearsal rooms and see if you can find a cable,’ Simon said.

‘What kind of-’

‘Anything,’ he said and leaned against the wall.

She swallowed a protest and headed back to the stairs.

Two minutes later she was back with a jack-jack cable and watched while Simon unscrewed the plugs and stripped off the plastic around the wires. Then he bent the cable into a U-shape and slipped it in between the lift door and the frame at the height of the door handle. They heard a loud click, and a couple of sparks flew. He opened the door.

‘Christ,’ Kari said. ‘Where did you learn that?’

‘I was trouble when I was little,’ Simon said, levering himself down to the bottom of the lift shaft which was half a metre lower than the basement floor. He looked up the lift shaft. ‘If I hadn’t become a police officer. .’

‘Isn’t this a bit risky? Kari said, feeling a prickling on her scalp. ‘What if the lift comes down?’

But Simon was already kneeling on all fours and sweeping the concrete floor with his hands.

‘Do you need a little light down there?’ she asked, hoping that he couldn’t hear the tension in her voice.

‘Always,’ he laughed.

A tiny scream escaped Kari when she heard a small bang and saw the thick, oiled wires starting to move. But Simon quickly got to his feet, pressed his palms against the basement floor and pulled himself up into the corridor. ‘Come,’ he said.

She half ran after him up the stairs, through the exit door and across the gravelled area.

‘Wait!’ she said before he got into the car which they had parked between the two derelict trucks. Simon stopped and looked at her across the roof of the car.

‘I know,’ he said.

‘What do you know?’

‘That it’s bloody irritating when your partner goes solo and doesn’t tell you what’s going on.’

‘Exactly! So when will you-’

‘But I’m not your partner, Kari Adel,’ Simon said. ‘I’m your boss and your mentor. It’ll happen when it happens. Do you understand?’

She looked at him. Saw the breeze toss his comically thin hair to and fro across the shiny scalp. Saw the flint in his otherwise friendly gaze.

‘Understood,’ she said.

‘Take these.’ He opened one hand and threw something across the roof of the car. She cupped hands and caught both items. She looked at them. One was the yellow marble. The other was an empty shell.

‘You can discover new things by changing your perspective and your location,’ he said. ‘You can compensate for any blind spots. Let’s go.’

She got into the passenger seat, he started the car and drove across the gravel to the gate. She kept her mouth shut. Waited. He stopped and looked for a long time and very carefully to the right and the left before he pulled out onto the road, like cautious, elderly male drivers are wont to do. Kari had always imagined it was because of lower testosterone levels. But it struck her now — almost as a new insight — that all rationality was built on experience.

‘At least one shot was fired inside the lift,’ he said and positioned himself behind a Volvo.

She still didn’t say anything.

‘And your objection is?’

‘That it doesn’t match the evidence,’ Kari said. ‘The only bullets were those that killed the victims and they were found right under them. The victims must have been lying on the floor when they were shot and that doesn’t match the angle if they were shot from the lift.’

‘No, and besides, there was a powder burn to the skin of the guy who was shot in the head, and burned cotton fibres in the shirt around the bullet wound on the other victim. Which suggests?’

‘That they were shot at close range while they were lying down. It matches the empty shell cases that were found next to them and the bullets in the floor.’

‘Right. But don’t you find it weird that the two men collapse on the floor and then they’re shot?’

‘Perhaps they got so scared when they saw the gun that they panicked and tripped. Or they were ordered to lie down before they were executed.’

‘Good thinking. But did you notice something about the blood around the body nearest the lift?’

‘That there was a lot of it?’

‘Yes.’ He spoke with a drawl that told her this wasn’t the end of it.

‘The blood had flowed from the victim’s head and formed a pool,’ she said. ‘It means that he wasn’t moved after he was shot.’

‘Yes, but at the edge of the pool, the blood was sprayed. As if it had splattered. In other words, the flowing blood covered parts of the area where it had first spattered from his head. And given the length and the range of the blood spurt, the victim must have been standing straight up when he was shot. That was why Nils was going over it with his magnifying glass — he couldn’t get the blood evidence to match.’

‘But you can?’

‘Yes,’ Simon said simply. ‘The killer fired the first shot from inside the lift. It went through the victim’s head and left the hole you saw in the wall. While the shell landed on the lift floor-’

‘-rolled along the sloping floor, fell through the crack and down the lift shaft?’

‘Yep.’

‘But. . the bullet in the floorboard. .’

‘The killer shot him again at close range.’

‘The entry wound. .’

‘Our friend from Kripos thought the killer had used a bigger calibre bullet, but if he’d known more about ballistics, he would have noticed that the empty shells are from small calibre bullets. So the big entry wound is really two small, overlapping entry wounds which the killer tried to make look like one. That’s why he took away the first bullet which made the hole in the wall.’

‘So it wasn’t an old bullet hole as the CSO thought,’ Kari said. ‘That’s why there was fresh plaster dust on the floor right below.’

Simon smiled. She could see that he was pleased with her. And she realised to her surprise that it cheered her up.

‘Look at the type description and the serial number on the shell case. It’s a different kind of ammunition from what we found on the first floor. It means the shot the killer fired from the lift came from a different gun to the one he subsequently used on the victims. I think ballistics will be able to prove that they came from the victims’ own guns.’

‘Their own?’

‘This is more your area of expertise, Adel, but I find it hard to believe there would be three unarmed guys in a drug den. The killer took their guns with him so that we wouldn’t discover he’d used them.’

‘You’re right.’

‘The question,’ Simon said, pulling in behind a tram, ‘is of course why it matters so much to him that we don’t find the first bullet and the empty shell.’

‘Isn’t it obvious? The imprint from the firing pin would give us the gun’s serial number and the Gun Register would soon lead us to-’

‘Wrong. Look at the back of the shell. No mark. He was using an older gun.’

‘OK,’ Kari said, reminding herself never to use the word ‘obvious’ again. ‘Then I don’t know what it is. But I have a strong feeling that you’re about to tell me. .’

‘I am, Adel. The empty shell you’re holding is the same type of ammo used to shoot Agnete Iversen.’

‘I see. But are you saying. .?’

‘I believe the killer tried to cover up that he also killed Agnete Iversen,’ Simon said and stopped so abruptly for a yellow light that the car behind him sounded its horn. ‘The reason he picked up the empty shell at Iversen’s isn’t as I thought at first because it had a mark from the firing pin. It was because he was already planning a second killing and doing as much as he could to minimise the risk that we would make the connection. I bet that the empty shell the killer took with him from the Iversen house was of the same series as the one you have here.’