Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (31 page)

‘I’ll come back to that. But I’m sure you understand that if you don’t cooperate I can’t continue to sit on the news.’

‘Aha, you’re the good cop. And the one who questioned me yesterday is the bad cop, right?’

‘That’s right, Becker, I’m the good cop. And I’d like to ask you a few questions off the record. Whatever you tell me will not and can not be used against you. Are you with me on this?’

Becker shrugged.

‘Espen Lepsvik, who interviewed you yesterday, thinks you’re lying,’ Harry said, blowing blue cigarette smoke at the smoke alarm on the ceiling.

‘About what?’

‘When you said you only spoke to Camilla Lossius in the garage and then you left.’

‘It’s the truth. What does he think?’

‘What he told you last night. That you kidnapped, killed and hid her.’

‘That’s just crazy!’ Becker erupted. ‘We were talking, that was all, and that’s the truth!’

‘Why are you refusing to tell us what you talked about?’

‘It’s a private matter. I’ve told you.’

‘And you admit that you called Idar Vetlesen the day he was found dead, but you regard that conversation as a private matter too, I take it?’

Becker cast around as if thinking there ought to be an ashtray somewhere. ‘Listen, I haven’t done anything illegal, but I didn’t want to answer any more questions without my solicitor being present. And he’s not coming until later today.’

‘Last night we offered you a solicitor who would have been able to come at once.’

‘I want to have a decent solicitor, not one of those … local government employees. Isn’t it time you lot told me why you think I’ve done something to this wife of Lossius’s?’

Harry was taken aback by the phraseology. Or, to be precise, the reference to Camilla. This wife of Lossius’s.

‘If she’s gone missing, you should arrest Erik Lossius,’ Becker went on. ‘Isn’t it always the husband who does it?’

‘Yes, it is,’ Harry said. ‘But he has an alibi; he was working at the time she disappeared. The reason you’re sitting here is that we think you’re the Snowman.’

Becker’s jaw half dropped and he blinked as he had done in the living room in Hoffsveien the night before. Harry pointed to the spiralling cigarette smoke from between his fingers. ‘You’ll have to inhale a bit so we don’t set off the alarm.’

‘The Snowman?’ Becker blurted. ‘That was Vetlesen, wasn’t it?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘We know it wasn’t.’

Becker blinked twice before bursting into laughter so dry and bitter that it sounded like coughing. ‘So that’s why you haven’t leaked anything to the press. They mustn’t find out that you’ve cocked up. And in the meantime you’re desperate to find the right man. Or a potential right man.’

‘Correct,’ Harry said, sucking on his own cigarette. ‘And at the moment that’s you.’

‘At the moment? I thought your role was to persuade me that you knew everything, so I might as well confess right away.’

‘But I don’t know everything,’ Harry said.

Becker scrunched up one eye. ‘Is this a trick?’

Harry shrugged. ‘It’s just a gut instinct. I need you to convince me that you’re innocent. The short interview reinforced the impression that you’re a man with a lot to hide.’

‘I had nothing to hide. I mean, I
have
nothing to hide. And I just don’t see why I should tell you anything if I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Listen to me carefully, Becker. I don’t think you’re the Snowman or that you killed Camilla Lossius. And I think you’re a rational, thinking person. The kind who can appreciate that it will damage you less if you reveal private matters to me here and now rather than read in tomorrow’s papers that Professor Filip Becker has been arrested on suspicion of being Norway’s most notorious killer. Because you know that even if you were cleared and released the day after tomorrow,
your name would be forever connected with these headlines. And your son’s.’

Harry watched Becker’s Adam’s apple rise and fall in his unshaven neck. Watched his brain drawing the logical conclusions. The simple conclusions. And then it came, in an anguished tone that Harry initially thought was due to the unaccustomed cigarette.

‘Birte, my wife, was a whore.’

‘Eh?’ Harry tried to conceal his astonishment.

Becker dropped his cigarette on the floor, leaned forward and pulled a black notebook from his back pocket. ‘I found this the day after she went missing. It was in her desk drawer, wasn’t even hidden. At first sight it looked quite innocent. Commonplace memoranda to herself and telephone numbers. It was just that when I checked the numbers with directory enquiries, they didn’t exist. They were codes. But my wife wasn’t much good at writing in code, I’m afraid. It took me less than a day to crack them all.’

Erik Lossius owned and ran Rydd & Flytt, a removal company that had found a niche in an otherwise less than lucrative market by dint of standardised prices, aggressive marketing, cheap foreign labour and contracts that demanded cash payment as soon as the vehicles were loaded up but before they left for their destination. He had never lost any money on a customer, because among other things the small print stated that any complaints regarding damage or theft had to be made within two days, which in practice meant that 90 per cent of the fairly numerous complaints came too late and could therefore be dismissed. As far as the final 10 per cent was concerned, Erik Lossius had devised routines to make himself inaccessible or to slow the usual procedures, which became so draining that even those who had lost plasma TVs or had had pianos wrecked during the removal gave up in the end.

Erik Lossius had started in the industry at a young age with the
former owner of Rydd & Flytt. The owner was a friend of Erik’s father, and his father had got him a job there.

‘The boy’s too restless to go to school and too smart to be a crook,’ the father had said. ‘Can you take him?’

As a salesman working on commission Erik soon distinguished himself with his charm, efficiency and brutality. He had inherited his mother’s brown eyes and his father’s thick curly hair and had an athletic build; women in particular decided not to collect quotes from other removal firms and signed on the spot. And he was intelligent and nifty with figures and ploys on the rare occasions the company was asked to bid for bigger jobs. The price was set low and the loss or damage excess set high. After five years the firm enjoyed a substantial profit and Erik had become the owner’s right hand in most areas of the business. However, during a relatively easy removal job just before Christmas – moving a table up to Erik’s new office next to the boss’s on the first floor – the owner had suffered a heart attack and dropped dead. In the days that followed Erik comforted the owner’s wife as well as he was able – and he was well able – and a week after the funeral they agreed on an almost symbolic transfer sum that reflected what Erik had emphasised was ‘a little business in a less than lucrative market with high risks and non-existent profit margins’. But, he asserted, the most important thing for him was that someone would carry on her husband’s life’s work. A tear glistened in his brown eyes as he said that, and she laid a trembling hand on his and said that he personally should visit her to keep her informed. With that Lossius became the owner of Rydd & Flytt and the first thing he did was to throw all the letters of complaint into the bin, rewrite the contracts, send circulars to all the households in Oslo’s wealthy West End where residents moved most frequently and were most price-sensitive.

By the time Erik Lossius was thirty, he had enough money to buy two BMWs, a summer residence to the north of Cannes and a five-hundred-square-metre detached house somewhere in Tveita where the high-rise flats he had grown up in didn’t block the sun. In short, he could afford Camilla Sandén.

Camilla came from bankrupt clothing nobility in the West End, from Blommenholm, an area which was as alien to the working man’s son as the French wine he now had stacked metre-high in his cellar in Tveita. But when he entered the great house and saw all the things that had to be moved, he discovered what he still didn’t have and therefore had to have: class, style, former splendour and a natural superiority that politeness and smiles only served to reinforce. And all this was personified in the daughter, Camilla, who sat on the balcony looking across Oslo fjord through a pair of large sunglasses which, for all Erik knew, could have been bought at the local petrol station, but which on her became Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana or whatever the other brands were called.

Now he knew what all the other brands were called.

He moved all their things, minus a couple of paintings that had to be sold, to a smaller house with a less fashionable address and never received a loss report on the one thing he had pinched off the load. Not even when Camilla Lossius was standing outside Tveita church as a bride, with the high-rises as silent witnesses, did her parents show with so much as a moue that they disapproved of their daughter’s choice. Perhaps because they saw that Erik and Camilla complemented each other in a way; he lacked refinement and she lacked money.

Erik treated Camilla as a princess, and she let him. He gave her what she wanted, left her in peace in the bedroom department whenever she wished and demanded no more than that she should pretty herself up when they went out or invited ‘couples they were friendly with’ – that is, friends from his childhood – to supper. She wondered from time to time whether he really loved her, and she slowly began to develop a deep affection for the ambitious, energetic Oslo East boy.

For his part, Erik was extremely happy. He had known from the start that Camilla was not the hot-blooded type; in fact, that was one of the things which, in his eyes, placed her in a higher sphere than the girls he was used to. He had his physical needs covered by close customer contact anyway. Erik had come to the conclusion that there had to be
something in the nature of moving that made people sentimental, distressed and open to new experiences. At any rate, he porked single women, separated women, cohabiting and married women on dining tables, on staircase landings, on plastic-wrapped mattresses and freshly washed parquet floors amid taped-up cardboard boxes and echoing bare walls while wondering what he would buy Camilla next.

The genius of the arrangement was that naturally he would never see these women again. They would move out and disappear. And they did. Apart from one.

Birte Olsen was dark-haired, sweet and had a
Penthouse
body. She was younger than he was, and her high-pitched voice and the language it produced made her seem even younger. She was two months into a pregnancy, moving into town from his part of Tveita to Hoffsveien with the child’s father-to-be, a West End man she was going to marry. This was a move Erik Lossius could identify with. And – he realised after taking her on a plain spindle-back chair in the middle of the stripped room – sex he could not do without.

In a nutshell, Erik Lossius had met his match.

Yes, indeed, because he thought of her as a man, one that did not pretend she wanted anything different from him: to fuck the other person’s brains out. And in a way they did just that. At any rate they began to meet in bare apartments, being moved out of or into, at least once a month and always there was a distinct risk of being found out. They were quick, efficient and their rituals were fixed and without variation. Nevertheless, Erik Lossius looked forward to these assignations like a child to Christmas – that is, with unfeigned, uncomplicated joy which was only increased by the certainty that everything would be the same, that their expectations would be fulfilled. They lived parallel lives, had parallel realities and that seemed to suit him as much as it suited her. And so they continued to meet, interrupted only by the birth – which fortunately was accomplished with a Caesarean section – some fairly long holidays and an innocent STD whose source he was neither able to nor attempted to trace. And now ten years had passed, and in front of Erik Lossius, sitting on a cardboard box in a half-emptied flat
in Torshov, a tall, shaven-headed man with a lawnmower voice was asking if he had known Birte Becker.

Erik Lossius gulped.

The man had introduced himself as Harry Hole, an inspector in Crime Squad, but looked more like one of his removal men than an inspector of anything. The police officers Erik had spoken to after he had reported Camilla’s disappearance were from the Missing Persons Unit. However, when this one had shown his ID, Erik’s first thought had been that he had news of Camilla. And – since the officer in front of him hadn’t rung but tracked him down to here – he feared it was bad news. Accordingly, he had sent his removal crew out and asked the inspector to take a seat while he found a cigarette and tried to prepare himself for what was to come.

‘Well?’ said the inspector.

‘Birte Becker?’ Erik Lossius repeated, trying to light his cigarette and think fast. He didn’t manage either. Christ, he couldn’t even think slowly.

‘I appreciate that you have to compose yourself,’ the inspector said, taking out his own packet of cigarettes. ‘Take your time.’

Erik watched the inspector light up a Camel and leaned over when he held the lighter out to Erik.

‘Thanks,’ Erik mumbled, sucking so hard that the tobacco crackled. The smoke filled his lungs, and it was as if the nicotine were being injected into his bloodstream, clearing all the obstructions. He had always thought this would happen sooner or later; that the police would somehow discover a link between him and Birte and come asking questions. But at that time he had only worried about how he would keep it hidden from Camilla. Now everything was different. From right now, in fact. Because up until this moment he hadn’t realised that the police might think there was a connection between the two disappearances.

‘Birte’s husband, Filip Becker, found a notebook in which Birte had entered a kind of easy decipherable code,’ the policeman said. ‘There were telephone numbers, dates and tiny messages. Leaving little doubt that Birte had regular contact with other men.’

‘Men?’ Erik let slip.

‘If it’s any consolation, Becker thought you were the one she met most often. At a huge variety of addresses, I’m led to believe,’ Harry added.