Jo Nesbo - The Redbreast

He took out his mobile phone. A Nokia, a tiny thing, only two weeks old. He had fought against it for a long time, but in the end Ellen had persuaded him to buy one. He tapped in her number.

'Hi, Ellen. Harry here. Are you alone? OK. I want you to concentrate. Yes, it's a little game. Are you ready?'

They had played often enough before. The 'game' started with him giving her verbal cues. No background information, no clues as to where he was stuck, just scraps of information-of five words maximum -in any order. It had taken them time to work out the method. The most important rule was that there had to be at least five scraps of information, but no more than ten. Harry had got the idea when he bet Ellen a shift that she couldn't remember the order of the cards in a pack after seeing them for two minutes, two seconds per card. He had lost three times before he gave in. Afterwards she had told him the method she used. She didn't think of the cards as cards, but associated a person or action with every card and made up a story as they were turned over. Afterwards he had tried to use her association skills on the job. Sometimes the results were amazing.

'Man, seventy,' Harry said slowly. 'Norwegian. Half a million kroner. Bitter. Blue eyes. Marklin rifle. Speaks German. Able-bodied. Arms smuggling at container port. Shooting practice in Skien. That's it.'

He got into the car.

'Nothing? Thought so. OK. Reckoned it was worth a try. Thanks, anyway. Take care.'

Harry was on the raised intersection-known locally as the traffic machine-in front of the Post House when he suddenly had a thought and called Ellen back.

'Ellen? It's me again. There was one thing I forgot. Still with me? Hasn't held a weapon for more than fifty years. Repeat. Hasn't held a… Yes, I know it's more than five words. Still nothing? Damn, now I've missed my turning! Catch you later, Ellen.'

He put his phone on the passenger seat and concentrated on driving. He had just turned off the roundabout when his mobile bleeped.

'Harry here. What? What on earth made you think of that? Right, right, now don't get angry, Ellen. Now and then I forget that you. don't know what goes on in your own noodle. Brain. In your great big beautiful, bouffant brain, Ellen. And yes, now you say it, it's obvious. Thanks very much.'

He put down the phone and at that moment remembered he owed her three night shifts. Now that he was no longer in Crime Squad, he would have to find something else. He considered what he could do, for approximately three seconds.

Irisveien. 1 March 2000

The door opened and Harry peered into a pair of piercing blue eyes in a lined face.

'Harry Hole, police,' he said. 'I rang this morning.'

'Right'

The old man's grey-white hair was brushed smoothly across his high forehead, and he was wearing a tie under a knitted cardigan. It had said even amp; signe juul on the postbox outside the entrance to this red duplex house in the quietly affluent suburb in north Oslo.

'Please, come in, Inspector Hole.'

His voice was calm and firm, and there was something about his bearing that made Professor Even Juul look younger than, by rights, he had to be. Harry had done his research and knew that the history professor had been in the Resistance movement. Although Even Juul was retired, he was still considered to be Norway's foremost expert on the history of the German Occupation and the Nasjonal Samling.

Harry bent down to take off his shoes. On the wall directly in front of him hung old, slightly faded black and white photographs in small frames. One of them showed a young lady in nurse's uniform. Another, a young man in a white coat.

They went into the sitting room where a greying Airedale stopped barking and instead dutifully sniffed Harry's crotch before walking over and lying down beside Juul's armchair.

'I've been reading some of your articles about Fascism and National Socialism in Dagsavisen,' Harry said after they had sat down.

'My goodness, so Dagsavisen readers do exist then?' Juul smiled.

'You seem keen to warn us against today's neo-Nazism?'

'Not to warn, I am merely pointing out some historical parallels. It's an historian's duty to uncover, not to judge.' He lit his pipe. 'Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils-the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time.'

A blue column of smoke rose into the air. 'But this isn't what you came here to ask, I imagine?'

'We're wondering if you can help us to find a man.'

'You mentioned that on the telephone. Who is this man?'

'We don't know. But we have deduced that he has blue eyes, he's Norwegian and is seventy years old. And he speaks German.'

And?'

'That's it.'

Juul laughed. 'Well, there are a few to choose from then.'

'Right. There are 158,000 men in this country over seventy, and I would guess around 100,000 of them have blue eyes and can speak German.'

Juul raised an eyebrow. Harry gave a sheepish smile. 'Office for National Statistics. I checked, for fun.’

‘So how do you think I can help?'

'I'm coming to that. This person reportedly said that he hasn't handled a weapon in over fifty years. I thought, that is, my colleague thought, that over fifty is more than fifty, but less than sixty.'

'Logical.'

Yes, she's very… er, logical. So, let's assume it was fifty-five years ago. Then we'd be smack in the middle of the Second World War. He's around twenty and uses a weapon. All Norwegians privately owning a gun had to hand them over to the Germans. So where is he?'

Harry counted on three fingers: 'Either he's in the Resistance, or he's fled to England, or he's at the Eastern Front fighting alongside the Germans. He speaks better German than English. Accordingly…'

'So this colleague of yours came to the conclusion that he must have been fighting at the front, did she?' Juul asked.

'She did.'

Juul sucked on his pipe.

'Many of the Resistance people had to learn German,' he said, 'in order to infiltrate, monitor and so on. And you're forgetting the Norwegians in the Swedish police force.'

'So the conclusion doesn't stand up?'

'Well, let me think aloud a bit,' Juul said. 'Roughly fifteen thousand Norwegians volunteered for service at the front, of whom seven thousand were called up and were thus allowed to use a weapon. That's a lot more than those who escaped to England and joined up there. And even though there were more men in the Resistance at the end of the war, very few of them ever held a weapon.'

Juul smiled.

'For the time being, let's assume you're right. Now obviously these men fighting at the front are not listed in the telephone directory as ex-Waffen SS, but I imagine you have found out where to search?'

Harry nodded.

'The Traitors' Archives. Filed according to name, along with all the data from the court cases. I've been through it in the course of the last few days. I was hoping that enough of them would be dead to make it a manageable total, but I was wrong.'

'Yes, they're tough old birds,' Juul laughed.

'And so I come to why we called you. You know the background of these soldiers better than anyone. I would like you to help me to understand how men like that think, to understand what makes them tick.'

'Thank you for your confidence, Inspector, but I'm a historian and know no more than anyone else about individual motivation. As you perhaps know, I was in the Resistance, in Milorg, and that doesn't exactly qualify me to get into the head of someone who volunteers for the Eastern Front.'