Harry Hole 02 - Cockroaches (32 page)

Harry couldn’t see if Løken was smiling in the darkness, but guessed he was.

Harry ran towards the house that loomed out of the night. Because he was running, it looked as if the silhouette of the fierce dragonhead on the roof ridge was moving. Yet the house looked very dead. The shaft of the sledgehammer in his rucksack banged against his back. He had stopped thinking about snakes.

He arrived at the second window, signalled to Løken and crouched down. It was a while since he had run so far; that was probably why his heart was pounding so hard. He heard light breathing next to him. It was Løken.

Harry had suggested tear gas, but Løken had rejected the idea point-blank. The gas would prevent them from seeing anything, and they had no reason to believe that Klipra was waiting for them with a knife to Runa’s throat.

Løken raised a fist to Harry as a signal.

Harry nodded and could feel his mouth was dry, a sure sign that adrenalin was pumping through his veins in the right quantities. The butt of the gun was clammy in his hands. He checked that the door opened inwards before Løken swung the sledgehammer.

The moonshine was reflected on the iron, and for a brief second he resembled a tennis player serving before the hammer came down with immense power and smashed the lock with a bang.

The next moment Harry was inside, and his torchlight was circling the room. He saw her immediately, but the light moved on, as if acting off its own instructions. Kitchen shelves, a fridge, a bench, a crucifix. He couldn’t hear the animal noises any more. He was transported back to Sydney, and heard only the sound of chains, waves smacking against the side of a boat in a marina, and the gulls screaming, perhaps because Birgitta was lying on the deck and forever dead.

A table with four chairs, a cupboard, two beer bottles, a man on the floor, not moving, blood under his head, his hand hidden by her hair, a gun under the chair, a painting of a dish of fruit and an empty vase.
Stilleben
.
Nature morte
. Still life. The torchlight swept over her and he saw it again: the hand, pointing upwards against the table leg. He heard Runa’s voice: ‘Can you feel it? You can have eternal life!’ As though she was trying to summon energy for a final protest against death. A door, a freezer, a mirror. Before he was blinded he saw himself for a brief instant – a figure in black clothes with a hood over his head. He looked like an executioner. Harry dropped the torch.

‘Are you OK?’ Liz asked, laying a hand on his shoulder. He intended to answer, opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

‘This is Ove Klipra, yes,’ Løken said. He crouched down by the dead man, the scene lit by a bare bulb in the ceiling. ‘How odd. I’ve been watching this guy for months.’ He placed his hand on the man’s forehead.

‘Don’t touch!’

Harry grabbed Løken’s collar and pulled him up. ‘Don’t . . . !’ He let go as fast. ‘Sorry, I . . . Just don’t touch anything. Not yet.’

Løken said nothing, and stared at him. Liz had her deep wrinkle between her non-existent eyebrows again.

‘Harry?’

He slumped down on a chair.

‘It’s over now, Harry. I’m sorry, we’re all sorry, but it’s over.’

Harry shook his head.

She leaned over him and laid a big, warm hand on his neck. The way his mother used to do. Shit, shit, shit.

He got up, pushed her away and went outside. He could hear Liz and Løken’s whispers from inside the house. He looked up at the sky, searched for a star, but couldn’t find one.

It was almost midnight when Harry went to the door. Hilde Molnes opened it. He looked down; he hadn’t phoned in advance and could hear from her breathing that soon she would be in tears.

They sat opposite each other in the living room. He couldn’t see anything left in the gin bottle, and she seemed clear-headed enough. She wiped away the tears. ‘She was going to be a diver, you know?’

He nodded.

‘But they wouldn’t let her take part in normal competitions. They said the judges wouldn’t know how to assess her. Some people said it was unfair. Diving with only one arm gave you an advantage.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. It was the first thing he had said since he arrived.

‘She didn’t know,’ she said. ‘Had she known she wouldn’t have spoken to me in that way.’ Her face contorted, she sobbed and the tears ran down the wrinkles by her mouth like small streams.

‘Didn’t know what, fru Molnes?’

‘That I’m ill!’ she shouted, and buried her face in her hands.

‘Ill?’

‘Why else would I anaesthetise myself like this? My body will have been eaten up soon. It’s just rotten, just dead cells.’

Harry said nothing.

‘I meant to tell her,’ she whispered between her fingers. ‘The doctors told me six months. But I wanted to tell her on a good day.’

Her voice was barely audible. ‘But there weren’t any good days.’

Harry, unable to sit, got to his feet. He walked over to the large window overlooking the garden, avoided the family photographs on the wall because he knew who his eyes would meet there. The moon was reflected in the swimming pool.

‘Have they rung back, the men your husband owed money?’

She lowered her hands. Her eyes were red from crying and ugly.

‘They rang, but Jens was here and he spoke to them. Since then I’ve heard nothing.’

‘So he takes care of you, does he?’

Harry wondered why he had asked her that of all questions. Perhaps it had been a clumsy attempt to console her, to remind her she still had someone.

She nodded mutely.

‘And now you’re going to get married?’

‘Do you object?’

Harry turned to her. ‘No, why should I?’

‘Runa . . .’ She didn’t get any further, and the tears began to roll down her cheeks again. ‘I haven’t experienced much love in my life, Hole. Is it asking too much to want a few months’ happiness before the end? Couldn’t she allow me that?’

Harry watched a little petal floating into the pool. He was reminded of the freighters from Malaysia.

‘Do you love him, fru Molnes?’

In the ensuing silence he listened for a fanfare.

‘Love him? What does that matter? I’m capable of imagining I love him. I think I could love anyone who loves me. Do you understand?’

Harry glanced towards the bar. It was three steps away. Three steps, two ice cubes and a glass. He closed his eyes and could hear the ice cubes clink in the glass, the gurgle of the bottle as he poured the brown liquid over and finally the hiss as the soda mixed with the alcohol.

44

Thursday 23 January

IT WAS SEVEN
o’clock in the morning when Harry returned to the crime scene. At five he had given up trying to sleep, dressed and got into the hire car in the car park. There was no one else around, the forensics team had finished for the night and wouldn’t appear for another hour at least. He pushed the orange police tape aside and went in.

It looked quite different in the daylight: peaceful and well kept. Only the blood and the chalk outlines of two bodies on the rough wooden floor were testimony to the fact that it was the same room he had been in the night before.

They hadn’t found a letter, yet no one had been in any doubt as to what had happened. The question was more why Ove Klipra had shot her and then himself. Had he known the game was up? In which case, why not just let her go? Perhaps it hadn’t been planned, perhaps he had shot her while she was trying to escape or because she had said something that had sent him over the edge? And then he had shot himself? Harry scratched his scalp.

He studied the chalk outline of her body and the blood that hadn’t been washed clean. Klipra had shot her in the neck with the gun they had found, a Dan Wesson. The bullet had passed straight through her, tearing the main artery, which had managed to pump out so much blood it ran over to the kitchen sink before the heart stopped beating. The doctor said she had lost consciousness at once because her brain didn’t get enough oxygen and she died after three or four pumps of the heart. A hole in the window showed where Klipra had been standing when he shot her. Harry stood inside the chalk silhouette of Klipra’s body. The angle was right.

He looked at the floor.

The blood formed a coagulated black halo where his head had been. That was all. He had shot himself through the mouth. Harry saw that the crime scene people had chalked the spot where the bullet had entered the double bamboo wall. He imagined how Klipra would have lain down, twisted his head and looked at her, perhaps wondering where she was before pulling the trigger.

He went outside and found where the bullet exited. He peered through the aperture and looked straight at the painting on the opposite wall. Still life. Strange, he had thought he would be looking down at the silhouette of Klipra. He continued towards the place where they had been lying in the grass the day before, stamping hard so as not to bump into reptiles, and stopped by the house of spirits. A small, smiling Buddha figure with a globular stomach took up most of the space, along with some withered flowers in a vase, four filter cigarettes and a couple of used candles. A little white cavity at the back of the ceramic figure showed where the bullet had struck. Harry took out his Swiss army knife and prised out a deformed lump of lead. He looked back at the house. The bullet had travelled in a straight horizontal line. Klipra had of course been standing when he shot himself. Why had he thought he had been lying down?

He walked back to the house. Something wasn’t right. Everything seemed so nice and tidy. He opened the fridge. Empty, nothing to keep two people alive. A vacuum cleaner fell out and hit his big toe when he opened the kitchen cupboard. He swore and heaved it back in, but it rolled out again before he could close the door. Looking closer, he saw a hook for storing the vacuum.

A system, he thought. There is a system here. But someone has been meddling with it.

He removed the beer bottles from the top of the freezer and opened it. Pale, red meat shone up towards him. It wasn’t wrapped, just stowed in large pieces, and in some places the blood had frozen into a black membrane. He lifted a piece out, examined it before cursing his own morbid imagination and putting it back. It looked like standard, straightforward pork.

Harry heard a sound and whirled round. A figure froze in the doorway. It was Løken.

‘Jesus, you startled me, Harry. I was sure the place was empty. What are you doing here?’

‘Nothing. Sniffing around. And you?’

‘Just wanted to see if there were any papers we could use on the paedophile case here.’

‘Why’s that? That case must be done and dusted now he’s dead, isn’t it?’

Løken shrugged. ‘We need solid evidence that we did the right thing as there’s no doubt our surveillance will come under the spotlight now.’

Harry looked at Løken. Did he seem a touch tense?

‘For Christ’s sake, you’ve got the photos. What better evidence could you find?’

Løken smiled, but not enough for Harry to see his gold tooth. ‘You may be right, Harry. I’m probably just a nervous old man who wants to be absolutely sure. Have you found anything?’

‘This,’ Harry said, holding up the lead bullet.

‘Hm.’ Løken, inspected it. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘In the spirit house over there. And I can’t work out why.’

‘Why not?’

‘It means Klipra must have been standing when he shot himself.’

‘So?’

‘Then blood would have been spurting all over the kitchen floor. But there’s no blood coming from him except for where he was lying. And even there there’s not a lot.’

Løken held the bullet between his fingertips. ‘Haven’t you heard of the vacuum effect in suicide cases?’

‘Explain.’

‘When a victim lets the air out of his lungs and closes his mouth around a gun barrel there will be a vacuum, which means the blood will run into the mouth instead of out of the exit wound. From there it runs into the stomach and leaves behind these small mysteries.’

Harry looked at Løken. ‘That’s news to me.’

‘It would be boring if you knew everything at the age of thirty-something,’ Løken said.

Tonje Wiig had rung to say that all the big Norwegian newspapers had phoned and the more bloodthirsty of them had announced their imminent arrival in Bangkok. In Norway, the headlines were focusing for the moment on the daughter of the recently deceased ambassador. Ove Klipra was, despite his status in Bangkok, an unknown name at home. It was true that
Kapital
had interviewed him a couple of years ago, but as neither Per Ståle Lønning nor Anne Grosvold had had him as a guest on their shows, he had escaped public attention.

‘The Ambassador’s Daughter’ and the ‘Unknown Norwegian Magnate’ had both been reported shot dead, most probably by intruders or prowlers.

In Thailand, however, photos of Klipra were plastered across the newspapers. The
Bangkok Post
journalist questioned the police’s theory about a prowler. He wrote that you couldn’t rule out the possibility that Klipra had murdered Runa Molnes and afterwards committed suicide. The newspaper also speculated freely on what consequences this might have for the BERTS transport project. Harry was impressed.

However, both countries emphasised that information released by the Thai police had been very sparing.

Harry drove up to the gate of Klipra’s residence and sounded his horn. He had to admit that he had begun to like the big Toyota Jeep. The guard came out and Harry rolled down the window.

‘Police. I rang you,’ he said.

The guard gave him the obligatory guard’s look before opening the gate.

‘Could you unlock the front door for me?’ Harry asked.

The guard jumped onto the running board and Harry felt his eyes examining him. Harry parked in the garage. The guard rattled his bunch of keys.

‘The main door’s on the other side,’ he said, and Harry almost let slip that he already knew. As the guard inserted the key into the lock and was about to twist it, he turned to Harry. ‘Haven’t I seen you before, sir?’

Harry smiled. What could it have been? The aftershave? The soap he used? Smell is said to be the sense the brain remembers best.