Jo Nesbo - The Redbreast

Harry stared into his coffee cup. It struck him how quiet it could be in some of Oslo's better residential areas.

'It's not your past I'm after, fru Juul. Do you remember a Norwegian soldier at the front called Gudbrand Johansen?'

Signe Juul flinched, and Harry knew he had stumbled on to something.

'What is it you actually want to know?' she asked, her face taut. 'Hasn't your husband told you?’

‘Even never tells me anything.'

'Right. I'm trying to identify the Norwegian soldiers who went through Sennheim on the way to the front.'

'Sennheim,' she repeated softly. 'Daniel was there.'

'Yes, I know you were engaged to Daniel Gudeson. Sindre Fauke told me that.'

'Who's he?'

A veteran of the front and the Resistance whom your husband knows. It was Fauke who suggested I talk to you about Gudbrand Johansen. Fauke deserted, so he doesn't know what happened to Gudbrand afterwards. But another soldier from the front, Edvard Mosken, told me about a hand-grenade exploding in the trenches. Mosken wasn't able to account for all the events following the explosion, but if Johansen survived it would be natural to assume that he ended up in the field hospital.'

Signe Juul made a smacking noise with her lips. Burre ambled over and she buried her fingers in the dog's thick, wiry coat.

'Yes, I can remember Gudbrand Johansen,' she said. 'Daniel occasionally wrote about him, in the letters from Sennheim and in the notes I got from him at the field hospital. They were very different. I think Gudbrand Johansen became like a younger brother to him.' She smiled. 'Most men in Daniel's presence tended to behave like younger brothers.'

'Do you know what happened to Gudbrand?'

'He ended up in the hospital with us, as you said. This was at the time when our section of the front was falling into Russian hands and there was a full-scale retreat. We couldn't get any medicine to the front because all the roads were blocked by traffic coming from the other direction. Johansen was badly injured with, among other things, a shell splinter in his thigh, just above the knee. Gangrene was spreading in his foot and there was a risk we might have to amputate. So, instead of waiting for medicine which wasn't coming, he was sent with the stream of traffic to the west. The last I saw of him was a bearded face sticking up from under a blanket at the back of a lorry. The spring mud was up to the middle of the wheels and it took them an hour to move round the first bend and out of sight.'

The dog had rested its head in her lap and looked up at her with sad eyes.

'And that was the last you saw or heard of him?'

She slowly raised the delicate porcelain cup to her lips, took a tiny sip and put it down. Her hand didn't shake much, but it was trembling.

I received a card from him a few months later,' she said. 'He wrote that he had some of Daniel's personal effects, a Russian cap that I understood to be some kind of trophy of war. The writing was rather confused, but that is not at all unusual among recent war casualties.'

'The card, do you…?'

She shook her head.

'Do you remember where it was sent from?’

‘No. I can only remember that the name made me think it was somewhere green and rural and that he was well.'

Harry stood up.

'How did this Fauke know about me?' she asked.

'Well -' Harry didn't quite know how to put it, but she broke in.

'All the soldiers at the front have heard of me,' she said and her mouth smiled. 'The woman who sold her soul to the Devil for a shorter sentence. Is that what they think?'

'I don't know,' Harry said. He knew he had to get out. They were only two blocks away from the circular road round Oslo, but it was so quiet they could have been by a lake in the mountains.

'You know I never saw him again,' she said. 'Daniel. After they told me he was dead.'

She had focused on an imaginary point in front of her.

'I received a New Year's greeting from him via an orderly and three days later I saw Daniel's name on a list of the fallen. I didn't believe it was true. I told them I would refuse to believe it until they showed me his body. So they took me to the mass grave in the Northern Sector where they were burning the dead. I went down into the grave, trod over dead bodies as I searched, going from one burned corpse to the next, staring into the blackened, empty eye sockets. But none of them was Daniel. They said it would be impossible for me to recognise him, but I told them they were wrong. Then they said that he might have been put in one of the graves that had been covered over. I don't know, but I never saw him again.'

She started when Harry cleared his throat.

'Thank you for the coffee, fru Juul.'

She followed him out to the hall. As he stood by the wardrobe, buttoning up his coat, he couldn't help looking for her features in the faces peering out of the framed photographs hanging on the wall, but in vain.

'Do we have to tell Even any of this?' she asked, opening the door for him.

Harry looked at her in surprise.

'I mean, does he have to know that we talked about this?' she added hurriedly. About the war and… Daniel?'

'Well, not if you don't want him to, of course.'

'He'll see that you've been here. But can't we just say that you waited for him and you had to go to another appointment?'

Her eyes were imploring, but there was something else there too.

Harry couldn't put his finger on what it was until he was in Ringveien and had opened the window to let in the liberating, deafening roar of cars, which blew the silence out of his head. It was horror. Signe Juul was terrified of something.

Brandhaug's House, Nordberg.

8 May 2000.

Bernt Brandhaug tapped the edge of the crystal glass with his knife, pushed his chair back and dabbed his mouth with his napkin while gently clearing his throat. A tiny smile flitted across his lips, as if he were already amused by the points he was going to make in this speech to his guests: Chief Constable Storksen with husband and Kurt Meirik with wife. 'Dear friends and colleagues.'

Out of the corner of his eye he could see his wife smiling stiffly to the others as if to say: Sorry we have to go through this, but it is beyond my control.

This evening Brandhaug talked about friendship and collegiality. About the importance of loyalty and summoning positive energy as a defence against the scope democracy will always allow for mediocrity, the abrogation of responsibility and incompetence at leadership level. Of course you couldn't expect politically elected housewives and farmers to understand the complexity of the areas of responsibility they were designated to manage.

'Democracy is its own reward,' Brandhaug said, a formulation he had plagiarised and made his own. 'But that doesn't mean that democracy doesn't come at a price. When we make a sheet-metal worker a minister of finance…'

At regular intervals he checked that the Chief Constable was listening and interjected a witticism about the democratization process in various ex-colonies in Africa where he had once been an ambassador himself. But the speech, which he had given several times before in other forums, did not inspire him this evening. His mind was somewhere else, where it had been for the last few weeks: with Rakel Fauke.

She had become an obsession with him and he had on occasion considered forgetting her. He had been trying too hard to have her.

He thought about his recent manipulations. If it hadn't been for the fact that Kurt Meirik was the head of POT, it would never have worked. The first thing he'd had to do was get this Harry Hole off the scene, out of the way, out of the city, to some place where he couldn't be contacted by Rakel or anyone else.

Brandhaug had rung Kurt and said that his contact at Dagbladet had told him that there were rumours doing the rounds in press circles about 'something' having happened during the presidential visit in the autumn. They had to act before it was too late, hide Harry somewhere the press couldn't get hold of him. Didn't Kurt think so too?