Jo Nesbo - Nemesis

'I don't know, perhaps because the light from the three individual lamps falls perfectly on its own picture?'

'Hm.' Aune placed an arm over his chest and rested a forefinger on his lips. 'You're right. Of course you're right. And do you know what, Harry?'

'No. What?'

'They mean nothing to me at all-please excuse the expression-absolutely bugger all. Have we finished?'

'Yes. Oh, by the way, there is just one minor detail, since you paint. As you can see, the palette is on the left of the easel. Isn't that extremely impractical?'

'Yes, unless you're left-handed.'

'I see. I'll have to help Halvorsen. I don't know how I can thank you.'

'I know. I'll add an hour to my next invoice.'

Halvorsen had finished in the bedroom.

'She didn't have many possessions,' he said. 'It's a bit like searching a hotel room. Just clothes, toiletries, an iron, towels, bed linen and so on. No picture of the family, no letters or personal papers.'

An hour later, Harry knew exactly what Halvorsen meant. They had gone through the whole flat and were back in the bedroom without having turned up so much as a telephone bill or a bank statement.

'That's the strangest thing I've ever experienced,' Halvorsen said, sitting down opposite Harry at the writing desk. 'She must have cleaned up. Perhaps she wanted to take everything with her, her whole person, when she went, if you know what I mean.'

'I do. You didn't see any signs of a laptop?'

'Laptop?'

'Portable PC.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Can't you see the faded square on the wood here?' Harry pointed to the desk between them. 'Looks like there's been a laptop here and it's been moved.'

'Does it?'

Harry could feel Halvorsen's probing eyes.

In the street, they stood staring up at her windows in the pale yellow facade while Harry smoked a stray concertinaed cigarette he had found lying in the inside pocket of his coat.

'That family business was strange, wasn't it,' Halvorsen said.

'The what?'

'Didn't Mшller tell you? They couldn't find the addresses of her parents, brothers, sisters or anyone, just an uncle in prison. Mшller had to ring the undertaker's himself to have the poor girl taken away. As if dying wasn't lonely enough.'

'Mm. Which undertaker?'

'Sandemann,' Halvorsen said. 'The uncle wanted her to be cremated.'

Harry pulled at his cigarette and watched the smoke rise and disperse. The end of a process which had started when a peasant sowed tobacco seeds in a field in Mexico. The seed became a tobacco plant as tall as a man within four months, and two months later it was harvested, shaken, dried, graded, packed and sent to RJ Reynolds factories in Florida or Texas where it became a filter cigarette in a vacuum-packed, yellow Camel packet in a carton and was shipped to Europe. Eight months after being a leaf on a green sprouting plant under the sun in Mexico, it falls out of a drunken man's coat pocket as he falls down steps or out of a taxi or spreads his coat over himself as a blanket because he cannot or dare not open the door to his bedroom with all the monsters under the bed. And then, when he finally finds the cigarette, crumpled and covered in pocket fluff, he puts one end in his malodorous mouth and lights the other. After the dried, sliced tobacco leaf has been inside this body for a brief moment of enjoyment, it is blown out and is at long last free. Free to dissolve, to turn to nothing. To be forgotten.

Halvorsen cleared his throat twice: 'How did you know she had ordered the keys from the locksmith in Vibes gate?'

Harry threw the end of the cigarette onto the ground and pulled his coat tighter around him. 'Looks like Aune was right,' he said. 'It's going to rain. If you're heading straight to Police HQ, I could use a lift.'

'There must be hundreds of locksmiths in Oslo, Harry.'

'Mm. I rang the deputy chairman of the housing committee, Knut Arne Ringnes. Nice man. They've used the same locksmith for twenty years. Shall we go?'

'Good you've come,' Beate Lшnn said as Harry walked in the House of Pain. 'I discovered something last night. Look at this.' She rewound the video and pressed the PAUSE button. A quivering still of Stine Grette's face turned towards the robber's balaclava filled the screen. 'I've magnified one portion of the video frame. I wanted to have Stine's face as large as possible.'

'Why was that?' Harry asked, flinging himself onto a chair.

'If you look at the counter, you'll see that this is eight seconds before the Expeditor shoots…'

'The Expeditor?'

She smiled bashfully. 'It's just something I've started calling him in private. My grandfather had a farm, so I…yes.'

'Where was that?'

'Valle in the Sete valley.'

'And you saw animals being slaughtered there?'

'Yes.' The intonation didn't invite further questions. Beate pressed the SLOW button and Stine Grette's face became animated. Harry saw her blinking and her lips moving in slow motion. He had begun to dread seeing the shot when Beate suddenly stopped the video.

'Did you see that?' she asked excitedly.

A few seconds passed before Harry clicked.

'She was speaking!' he said. 'She says something seconds before she is shot, but you can't hear anything on the sound recording.'

'That's because she's whispering.'

'How did I miss that? But why? And what does she say?'

'I hope we'll soon find out. I've got hold of a lip-reading specialist from the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. He's on his way now.'

'Great.'

Beate glanced at her watch. Harry bit his bottom lip, breathed in and said quietly: 'Beate, I once…'

He saw her stiffen when he used her first name. 'I had a colleague called Ellen Gjelten.'

'I know,' she said in a rush. 'She was killed next to the river.'

'Yes. When she and I ground to a halt in a case we had several techniques for activating information trapped in the subconscious. Association games. We wrote down words on scraps of paper, that kind of thing.' Harry, ill at ease, smiled. 'It may sound a bit vague, but occasionally it produced results. I wondered if we could have a go.'

'If you like.' Again it struck Harry how much more confident Beate seemed when they focused on a video or a computer screen. Now she was eyeing him as if he had just suggested playing strip poker.

'I want to know what you feel about this particular case,' he said.

She laughed nervously. 'Feelings, hm.'

'Forget cold facts for a while.' Harry leaned forward in his chair. 'Don't be the clever girl. You don't need to back up what you say. Just say what your gut instinct tells you.'

She stared at the table. Harry waited. Then she raised her gaze and looked him straight in the eyes: 'My money's on a two.'

'Two?'

'Football pools. Away team wins. It's one of the fifty per cent we never solve.'

'Right. And why's that?'

'Simple arithmetic. When you think of all the idiots we don't catch, a man like the Expeditor, who has thought things through and knows a bit about how we work, has pretty good odds.'

'Mm.' Harry rubbed his face. 'So your gut instincts do mental arithmetic?'

'Not exclusively. There's something about the way he functions. So determined. He seems to be driven…'

'What's driving him, Beate? Money?'

'I don't know. According to statistics, the prime motive for robberies is money and the second excitement and-'

'Forget statistics, Beate. You're a detective now. You're analysing not only video images now, but your own subconscious interpretations of what you've seen. Trust me, that's the most important lead a detective has.'

Beate looked at him. Harry was aware he was trying to coax her out of herself. 'Come on!' he urged. 'What drives the Expeditor?'