Jo Nesbo - The Redeemer

Then came the bang. The bullet. The door slamming into the frame and locking. Jon hitting the cupboard and the kitchen unit. Harry swivelled onto his side and looked up. The door handle was being pressed down.

'Fuck,' Harry whispered, getting to his knees.

The door was shaken hard, twice.

Harry grabbed Jon's belt and dragged him, lifeless, over the parquet floor to the bedroom.

There was a scratching sound outside the door. Then another bang. Splinters flew from the middle of the door, one of the cushions on the sofa jerked, a column of greyish-black down rose to the ceiling and the carton of semi-skimmed milk began to gurgle. A jet of milk described a weak, white arc onto the table.

The damage a nine-millimetre projectile can do is underrated, thought Harry, turning Jon onto his back. One drop of blood ran from a hole in his forehead.

Another bang. The tinkle of glass.

Harry flipped his mobile out of his pocket and punched in Beate's number.

'OK, OK, don't hassle me, I'm coming,' Beate answered after the first ring. 'I'm outsi-'

'Listen,' Harry interrupted. 'Radio all patrol cars to get here now. With their sirens blaring. Someone is outside the flat peppering us with lead. And you keep away. Received?'

'Received. Stay on the line.'

Harry put the mobile on the floor in front of him. Scraping sound against the wall. Could he hear them? Harry sat motionless. The scraping came nearer. What kind of walls were they? A bullet that could go through an insulated front door would have no problems with a stud wall of plasterboard and fibreglass. Even nearer. It stopped. Harry held his breath. And that was when he heard. Jon was breathing.

Then a sound rose from the general rumble of city noise and it was music to Harry's ears. A police siren. Two police sirens.

Harry listened for scraping. Nothing. Make a run for it, he prayed. Beat it. And was heard. The sound of footsteps down the corridor and the stairs.

Harry lay back on the cold parquet floor and stared at the ceiling. There was a draught coming from under the door. He closed his eyes. Nineteen years. Christ. Nineteen years until he could go into retirement.

Wednesday, 17 December. Hospital and Ashes.

In the shop window he saw the reflection of a police car pulling up in the street behind him. He kept walking, forcing himself not to run. As he had done a few minutes ago when he raced down the stairs from Jon Karlsen's flat, came out onto the pavement and almost knocked over a young woman with a mobile phone in her hand, sprinted across the park, westwards, to the busy streets where he was now.

The police car was moving at the same speed as he was. He saw a door, opened it and had the impression he had stepped into a film. An American film with Cadillacs, bootlace ties and young Elvises. The music on the speakers sounded like an old hillbilly record at three times the speed and the bartender's suit looked like it had been lifted from the LP cover.

He was looking around the surprisingly full but tiny bar area when he noticed the bartender had been talking to him.

'Sorry?'

'A drink, sir?'

'Why not? What have you got?'

'Well, a Slow Comfortable Screw, maybe. Though, you look as if you could do with a whisky from the Orkneys.'

'Thank you.'

A police siren rose and fell. The heat in the bar was causing the sweat to stream out of his pores now. He tore off his neckerchief and stuffed it in his coat pocket. He was glad of the tobacco smoke, which camouflaged the smell of the gun in his coat pocket.

He was given a drink and found a seat by the wall facing the window.

Who had the other person in the room been? A friend of Jon Karlsen? A relative? Or someone Karlsen shared the flat with? He took a sip of the whisky. It tasted of hospital and ashes. And why did he ask himself such stupid questions? Only a policeman could have reacted in the way he did. Only a policeman could have called for help with such speed. And now they knew who his target was. That would make his job much harder. He would have to consider retreat. He took another sip.

The policeman had seen his camel-hair coat.

He went to the toilet, moved the gun, neckerchief and passport into his jacket pockets and shoved the coat into the rubbish bin beneath the sink. On the pavement outside, rubbing his hands and shivering, he surveyed the street in both directions.

The final job. The most important. Everything depended on it.

Easy does it, he said to himself. They don't know who you are. Go back to the beginning. Think constructively.

Nevertheless, he couldn't repress the thought running through his mind: who was the man in the flat?

'We don't know,' Harry said. 'All we know is that he might have been the same man who killed Robert.'

He tucked in his legs so that the nurse could roll the empty bed past them down the narrow corridor.

'M-might have been?' Thea Nilsen stuttered. 'Are there several of them?' She sat slightly forward, holding the wooden seat of the chair tight as though afraid of falling off.

Beate Lonn leaned over and placed a comforting hand on Thea's knee. 'We don't know. The most important thing is that it went well. The doctor says he has concussion, that's all.'

'Which I gave him,' Harry said. 'Along with the edge of the kitchen unit, which made a small hole in his forehead. The bullet missed. We found it in the wall. The second bullet came to rest in the milk carton. Just imagine. Inside the milk carton. And the third in the kitchen cupboard between the currants and-'

Beate sent Harry a glance which he guessed was supposed to say that right now Thea would hardly be interested in ballistic idiosyncrasies.

'Anyway. Jon is fine, but he was out cold for a bit, so the doctors are keeping him under observation for the time being.'

'Alright. Can I go in and see him now?'

'Of course,' Beate said. 'We would like you to have a look at these pictures first though. And tell us if you have seen any of these men before.'

She took three photos out of a folder and gave them to Thea. The photos of Egertorget had been blown up so much that the faces seemed like mosaics of black-and-white dots.

Thea shook her head. 'That was difficult. I couldn't even see any differences between them.'

'Nor me,' Harry said. 'But Beate is a specialist in facial recognition, and she says they're two different people.'

'I think they are,' Beate corrected. 'In addition, I was almost knocked flying by him as he came running out of the block in Goteborggata. And to me he didn't look like either of these people in the pictures.'

Harry was taken aback. He had never heard Beate express doubt in this field before.

'Good God,' Thea whispered. 'How many do you think there really are?'

'Don't worry,' Harry said. 'We have a guard outside Jon's room.'

'What?' Thea stared at him wide-eyed, and Harry realised it had not even occurred to her that Jon could be in danger at Ulleval Hospital. Until now. Fantastic.

'Come on. Let's go and see how he is,' Beate suggested in a friendly tone.

Yes, thought Harry. And leave this idiot to sit and ponder the concept of 'people managment'.

He turned at the sound of running footsteps from the other end of the corridor.

It was Halvorsen slaloming between patients, visitors and nurses in clattering clogs. Breathless, he pulled up in front of Harry and handed him a sheet of paper with pale black writing on it and that shiny quality that told Harry it was from Crime Squad's fax machine.

'A page from the passenger lists. I tried to ring you-'

'Mobiles have to be switched off here,' Harry said. 'Anything interesting?'

'I got the passenger lists, no problem. And mailed them to Alex, who got on to them right away. A couple of the passengers have small blemishes on their records, but nothing that would raise suspicion. But there was one thing that was a bit odd…'