Jo Nesbo - Nemesis

'Twenty-five.' Beate's voice was suddenly loud and clear.

In the flash of light Harry could see their bodies casting shadows on the red shale. The crack which followed was so loud it attached itself to their ears like a lining. One body slipped away from the other and fell to the ground.

Harry sank to his knees and heard his voice roar: 'Ellen!'

He saw the figure still standing turn and begin to walk towards him, gun in hand. Harry took aim, but the rain was streaming down his face and blinding him. He blinked and aimed. He no longer felt anything, neither pain nor cold, sorrow nor triumph, only a huge void. Things were not meant to make sense; they just repeated themselves in an eternal, self-explanatory mantra-living, dying, being reborn, living, dying. He squeezed the trigger halfway. Took aim.

'Beate?' he whispered.

She kicked open the door and passed the AG3 to Harry, who grabbed it.

'What…happened?'

'The Setesdal Twitch,' she said.

'The Setesdal Twitch?'

'He went down like a pile of bricks, poor thing.' She showed him her right hand. The rain washed and rinsed away the blood from the two wounds on her knuckles. 'I was just waiting for something to distract him. And the clap of thunder scared the living daylights out of him. You too, it seems.'

They looked at the motionless body in the left-hand service box.

'Will you help me with the handcuffs, Harry?' Her blonde hair was stuck to her face, but she didn't seem to notice. She smiled.

Harry raised his face into the rain and closed his eyes. 'God in heaven above,' he mumbled. 'This poor soul will not be set free until 12 July 2022. Have mercy.'

'Harry?'

He opened his eyes. 'Yes?'

'If he's not to be set free before 2022 we'd better get him to Police HQ right now.'

'Not him,' Harry said, getting up. 'Me. That's when I retire.'

He put his arm around her shoulders and smiled. 'You Setesdal Twitch, you…'

Ekeberg Ridge

It began to snow again in December. And this time it was for real. The snow drifted against the walls of the houses and more snow was forecast. The confession came on Wednesday afternoon. Trond Grette, in consultation with his solicitor, told how he had planned and later carried out the murder of his wife.

It snowed right through the night, and the next day he also confessed to being behind the murder of his brother. The man he had paid for the job was called El Ojo, The Eye, of no fixed abode. He changed his professional name and mobile telephone number every week. Trond had only met him once, in a car park in Sгo Paulo, where they had agreed on the details. El Ojo had received 1,500 dollars in advance; Trond had placed the rest in a paper bag in a left-luggage locker at Tietк airport terminal. The agreement was that he would send the suicide letter to a post office in Campos Belos, a suburb in the south of the city, and the key when he had received Lev's little finger.

The only thing remotely approaching amusement during the long hours of questioning was when Trond was asked how, as a tourist, he had managed to contact a professional contract killer. He replied that it had been a great deal easier than trying to get hold of a Norwegian builder. The analogy was not entirely by chance.

'Lev told me about it once,' Trond said. 'They advertise themselves as plomeros next to chat-line ads in the newspaper Folha de Sгo Paulo.'

'Plum-whats?'

'Plomeros. Plumbers.'

Halvorsen faxed the scanty information to the Brazilian embassy, who refrained from making a sarcastic comment and promised to pursue the case.

The AG3 Trond had used in the raid was Lev's and had been in the loft in Disengrenda for several years. The gun was impossible to trace as the manufacturer's serial number had been filed off.

Christmas came early for Nordea's consortium of insurance companies since the money from the Bogstadveien robbery was found in the boot of Trond's car and not a krone had been touched.

The days passed, the snow came and the questioning continued. One Friday afternoon, when everyone was exhausted, Harry asked Trond why he hadn't thrown up when he shot his wife through the head-after all he couldn't stand the sight of blood. The room went quiet. Trond stared at the video camera in the corner. Then he merely shook his head.

But when they had finished and they were walking through the Culvert back to the detention cells, he had suddenly turned to Harry: 'It depends on whose blood it is.'

At the weekend Harry sat in a chair by the window watching Oleg and local boys building snow forts in the garden outside the timber house. Rakel asked him what he was thinking about and it almost slipped out. Instead he suggested going for a little walk. She fetched hats and gloves. They walked past the Holmenkollen ski jump and Rakel asked whether they should invite Harry's father and sister over to hers on Christmas Eve.

'We're the only family left,' she said and squeezed his hand.

On Monday Harry and Halvorsen started work on the Ellen case. Right from scratch. Questioned witnesses who had been in before, read old reports and checked tip-offs that had not been followed up and old leads. Cold leads, it turned out.

'Have you got the address of the guy who said he'd seen Sverre Olsen with a man in a red car in Grьnerlшkka?' Harry asked.

'Kvinsvik. His address is given as his parents' place, but I doubt we'll find him there.'

Harry didn't expect much cooperation when he walked into Herbert's Pizza asking for Roy Kvinsvik. But after buying a beer for a young guy with the Nasjonalallianse logo on his T-shirt, he learned that Roy no longer had to maintain an oath of silence since he had recently cut ties with his former friends. Apparently Roy had met a Christian girl and lost his faith in Nazism. No one knew who she was or where Roy lived now, but someone had seen him singing outside the Philadelphian church.

The snow lay in deep drifts as the snow ploughs shuttled to and fro down the streets of Oslo city centre.

The woman who had been shot in the Grensen branch of the Den norske Bank was discharged from hospital. In Dagbladet she showed where the bullet had entered with one finger and how close it had been to hitting her heart with two fingers. Now she was going home to take care of her husband and children over Christmas, the paper said.

On Wednesday morning at ten o'clock the same week Harry stamped the snow off his boots outside Room 3, Police HQ, before knocking.

'Come in, Hole,' came the roar of Judge Valderhaug's voice. He was leading the internal SEFO inquiry into the shooting incident in the container terminal. Harry was led to a chair in front of a five-person tribunal. Apart from Valderhaug, there was a Public Prosecutor, one female detective, one male and Defence Counsel Ola Lunde whom Harry knew as tough but competent and genuine.

'We would like to have our findings tied up before we break for Christmas,' Valderhaug opened. 'Can you tell us as concisely as possible about your role in this case?'

To the clatter of the male detective's computer keyboard, Harry talked about his brief meeting with Alf Gunnerud. When he had finished, Valderhaug thanked him and rustled his papers for a while before finding what he was looking for. He peered at Harry over his glasses.

'We would like to know if from your brief meeting with Gunnerud you were surprised when you heard he had pulled a gun on a policeman.'

Harry remembered what he had thought when he saw Gunnerud on the staircase. A young man who was afraid of further beatings. Not a hardened killer. Harry met the judge's gaze and said: 'No.'

Valderhaug took off his glasses. 'But when Gunnerud met you, he chose to run off. Why this change of tactics when he met Waaler, I wonder.'