Jo Nesbo - Phantom

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?’