Jo Nesbo - The Redeemer

'And the boys knew that Thea wanted to be an officer? Even though she's a girl.'

Martine smiled and shook her head. 'I can see you don't know much about the Salvation Army. Two-thirds of the officers are women.'

'But the commander is a man? And the chief administrator?'

Martine nodded. 'Our founder William Booth said his best men were women. Nevertheless, we are like the rest of society. Stupid, self-assured men ruling over smart women with a fear of heights.'

'So the boys fought every summer to be the one who ruled over Thea?'

'For a while. But Thea stopped going to Ostgard all of a sudden, so the problem was solved.'

'Why did she stop?'

Martine shrugged. 'Perhaps she didn't want to go. Or her parents didn't want her to go. So many boys around day and night at that age. .. you know.'

Harry nodded. But he didn't know. He had never even been to a confirmation camp. They walked up Stensberggata.

'I was born here,' Martine said, pointing to the wall that used to run around Rikshospitalet before it was pulled down. Before long the new residential project Pilestredet Park would be there.

'They've kept the building with the maternity ward and converted it into flats,' Harry said.

'Do people really live there? Think of all the things that have happened there. Abortions and…'

Harry nodded. 'Sometimes when you walk around here at midnight you can still hear the screams of children coming from there.'

Martine ogled Harry. 'You're joking! Are there ghosts?'

'Well,' Harry said, turning into Sofies gate, 'it might be because families with children have moved in.'

Martine slapped him on the shoulder with a laugh. 'No jokes about ghosts. I believe in them.'

'Me too,' said Harry. 'Me too.'

Martine stopped laughing.

'I live here,' Harry said, pointing to a light blue front door.

'Didn't you have any more questions?'

'Yes, but they can wait until the morning.'

She cocked her head to the side. 'I'm not tired. Have you got any tea?'

A car crawled forward on creaking snow, but pulled into the pavement fifty metres lower down and blinded them with bluish-white light. Harry gave her a thoughtful look as he groped for his keys. 'Just Nescafe. Listen, I'll ring-'

'Nescafe's fine,' Martine said. Harry went to put the key in the lock but Martine was a step ahead. She pushed open the light blue front door. Harry watched it spring back and close against the frame, but it didn't snap shut.

'It's the cold,' he mumbled. 'The building's shrinking.'

Harry slammed the door after them, then they went up the stairs.

'Tidy here,' Martine said, taking off her boots in the hall.

'I don't have a lot of things,' Harry said from the kitchen.

'What do you like best?'

Harry gave that some thought. 'Records.'

'Not the photo album?'

'I don't believe in photo albums,' Harry said.

Martine went into the kitchen and slunk onto one of the chairs. From the corner of his eye Harry watched her tuck her legs under her with the agility of a cat.

'You don't believe?' she asked. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'They destroy the ability to forget. Milk?'

She shook her head. 'But you believe in records?'

'Yes. They lie in a more truthful way.'

'But don't they destroy the ability to forget?'

Harry paused mid-pour. Martine was chuckling. 'I don't believe in this surly, disillusioned inspector. I think you're a romantic, Hole.'

'Let's go into the sitting room,' Harry said. 'I've just bought a great new record. For the moment it comes without any memories attached.'

Martine slipped onto the sofa while Harry put on Jim Stark's debut record. Then he sat in the green wing chair and caressed the coarse woollen material to the accompaniment of the first guitar notes. He remembered the chair had been bought from Elevator, the Salvation Army's second-hand shop. He cleared his throat. 'Robert may have been having a relationship with a girl who was much younger than him. What do you think about that?'

'What do I think about relationships between younger women and older men?' She chuckled but flushed deep red in the silence that followed. 'Or whether I think Robert liked underage girls?'

'I didn't say that, but a teenager maybe. Croatian.'

'Izgubila sam se.'

'Pardon?'

'That's Croat. Or Serbo-Croat. We used to spend the summer in Dalmatia when I was small, before the Salvation Army bought Ostgard. When Daddy was eighteen he went to Yugoslavia to help with recon-struction after the Second World War. He got to know the families of a lot of the builders. That was why he committed us to taking refugees from Vukovar.'

'With regard to Ostgard, do you remember a Mads Gilstrup, the grandson of the people you bought it off?'

'Oh, yes. He was there for some days the summer we took it over. I didn't speak to him. No one spoke to him, I remember. He seemed so angry and introverted. But I think he liked Thea, too.'

'What makes you think that? If he didn't speak to anyone, I mean.'

'I saw him watching her. And when we were with Thea all of a sudden there he was. But he didn't say a word. He seemed weird, I thought. Almost a bit scary.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. He slept at the neighbours' house on the days he was there, but one night I woke up in the room where a few of the girls slept. And I saw a face pressed against the window. Then it went. I'm almost positive it was him. When I told the other girls they said I was seeing things. They were convinced there had to be something wrong with my eyesight.'

'Why's that?'

'Haven't you noticed?'

'What?'

'Come and sit here, and I'll show you,' Martine said, patting the sofa beside her. 'Can you see my pupils?'

Harry leaned forward and felt her breath on his face. And then he saw it. The pupils inside the brown irises looked as though they had spilt into the iris, forming a keyhole shape.

'It's congenital,' she said. 'It's called iris coloboma. But you can still have normal eyesight.'

'Interesting.' Their faces were so close he could smell her skin and her hair. He breathed in and had the tremulous sensation of slipping into a hot bath. A short, firm buzz sounded.

It took Harry a moment to realise it came from the door. Not the intercom. Someone was standing outside his door on the landing.

'Must be Ali,' Harry said, getting up from the sofa. 'The neighbour.'

In the six seconds it took Harry to get off the sofa, go into the hall and open the door, it went through his mind that it was too late to be Ali. And he usually knocked, anyway. And if anyone had come in to the block or gone out after Martine and him the main door was bound to have been left open.

It wasn't until the seventh second that he realised he shouldn't have opened up. He looked at the person standing there and had an intimation of what was in the offing.

'Now you're happy, I suppose,' Astrid said with a slight slur.

Harry didn't answer.

'I've just come from a Christmas dinner. Are you going to invite me in, Harry boy?' Her red lips tautened against her teeth as she smiled and her stiletto heels clattered on the floor as she stepped sideways to regain balance.

'It's not convenient,' Harry said.

She scrunched up her eyes and studied his face. Then she peered over his shoulder. 'Got a lady there, have you? Is that why you skipped the meeting today?'

'We can talk another time, Astrid. You're drunk.'

'We discussed Step Three at the meeting today. We took the decision to put our lives in God's care. But I can't see any God, I can't, Harry.' She took a half-hearted swipe at him with her bag.

'There is no third step, Astrid. Everyone has to look after themselves.'

She stiffened and looked at him as the tears welled in her eyes. 'Let me in, Harry,' she whispered.