Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (42 page)

‘What? She tried …?’

‘She had her revolver pointed at him with the hammer cocked. I heard her release the hammer as I positioned myself in the firing line.’

Gunnar Hagen closed his eyes and massaged his temples with the tips of his fingers. ‘I hear you. But for the moment all this is just speculation, Harry.’

‘And then there’s the letter,’ Harry said.

‘The letter?’

‘From the Snowman. I found the document on her computer at home, dated before any of us knew anything about the Snowman. And the paper in the printer.’

‘Christ!’ Hagen banged his elbows down hard on the desk and buried his face in his hands. ‘We employed the woman here! Do you know what that means, Harry?’

‘Well, an almighty scandal. Lack of confidence in the whole police force. Heads will roll in the upper echelons.’

A crack opened between Hagen’s fingers and he squinted at Harry. ‘Thank you for being so explicit.’

‘My pleasure.’

‘I’ll summon the Chief Superintendent and the Chief Constable. In the meantime I want you and Bjørn Holm to keep this under your hats. What about Arve Støp? Will he blab?’

‘Hardly, boss.’ Harry smirked. ‘He’s run out.’

‘Run out of what?’

‘Integrity.’

It was ten o’clock and from his office window Harry watched the pale, almost hesitant daylight settle on the rooftops and a Sunday-still Grønland. More than six hours had passed since Katrine Bratt had vanished from Støp’s apartment, and so far the search had borne no fruit. Of course she could still be in Oslo, but if she had been prepared for a strategic withdrawal she could well be over the hills and far away. Harry had no doubt that she had made preparations.

Just as he had no doubt now that she was the Snowman.

First of all, there was the evidence: the letter and the murder attempts. And all his instincts were confirmed: the feeling that he was being observed from close range, the feeling that someone had infiltrated his life. The newspaper cuttings on the wall, the reports. Katrine had got to know him so well that she could predict his next moves, could use him in her game. And now she was a virus in his bloodstream, a spy inside his head.

He heard someone come in, but didn’t turn round.

‘We’ve traced her mobile phone,’ Skarre’s voice said. ‘She’s in Sweden.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Telenor Operations Centre says that the signals are moving south. The location and speed match the Copenhagen train that departed from Oslo Central Station at five past seven. I’ve spoken to the police in Helsingborg; they need a formal application to make an arrest. The train’s due to arrive in half an hour. What shall we do?’

Harry nodded slowly, as though to himself. A seagull sailed past on stiff wings before suddenly changing direction and swooping down to the trees in the park. Perhaps it had spotted something. Or just changed its mind. The way humans do. Oslo Station at seven o’clock in the morning.

‘Harry? She might make it to Denmark unless we –’

‘Ask Hagen to talk to Helsingborg,’ Harry said, swivelling and grabbing his jacket from the coat stand in one quick movement.

Skarre watched in amazement as the inspector hurried down the corridor with long, purposeful strides.

Officer Orø in the Stores at Police HQ looked at the shaven-headed inspector with undisguised astonishment and repeated: ‘CS? Gas, that is?’

‘Two canisters,’ Harry said. ‘And a box of ammo for the revolver.’

The officer limped to the stores, mouthing imprecations. This Hole guy was a complete fruitcake, everyone knew that, but tear gas? If it had been anyone else at the station, he would have guessed that it was for a stag night with the pals. But from what he heard, Hole had no pals, at least not on the force.

The inspector coughed as Orø returned. ‘Has Katrine Bratt in Crime Squad requested any weapons here?’

‘The woman from Bergen Police Station? Only the one stipulated in the rule book.’

‘And what does the rule book say?’

‘Return all weapons and unused ammo to the old police station upon departure and request a new revolver and two boxes of bullets from the new station.’

‘So she has nothing heavier than a revolver?’

Orø shook his head, mystified.

‘Thank you,’ Hole said, putting the boxes of ammunition in a black bag beside the green cylindrical canisters containing the pepper-reeking tear gas that Corso and Stoughton had concocted in 1928.

The officer didn’t answer, not until he had received Hole’s signature for the delivery, then he mumbled, ‘Have a peaceful Sunday.’

* * *

Harry was sitting in the waiting room at Ullevål Hospital with the black bag beside him. There was a smell of alcohol, old people and slow death. A female patient had taken a seat opposite him and was staring at him as though trying to locate someone who was not there: a person she had known, a lover who had never materialised, a son she thought she recognised.

Harry sighed, glanced at his watch and visualised the police storming the train in Helsingborg. The train driver who was instructed by the stationmaster to stop the train a kilometre before the station. The armed police dispersed along both sides of the track, standing by with dogs. The efficient inspection of the carriages, the compartments, the toilets. The terrified passengers reacting to the sight of armed police, still an unusual sight here in Scandinavian dreamland. The trembling, groping hands of women requested to present ID. The hunched shoulders of the police, the nervousness, but also the anticipation. Their impatience, doubt, irritation and ultimately their disappointment and despair that they didn’t find what they were looking for. And, at the end, if they were lucky and competent, the loud curses when they found the source of the signals the base stations had picked up: Katrine Bratt’s mobile phone in a toilet bin.

A smiling face appeared before him. ‘You can see him now.’

Harry followed the clatter of clogs and broad, energetic hips in white trousers. She pushed open the door. ‘But don’t stay too long. He needs rest.’

Ståle Aune lay on the bed in a private room. His round, red-veined face was sunken and so pale it almost blended in with the pillowcase. Thin hair, like a child’s, lay on the chubby sixty-year-old’s forehead. Had it not been for the same sharp-eyed, jovial eyes, Harry would have believed he was looking at the corpse of the Crime Squad’s resident psychologist and Harry’s personal spiritual adviser.

‘Goodness me, Harry,’ Ståle Aune said. ‘You look like a skeleton. Aren’t you well?’

Harry had to smile. Aune sat up with a grimace.

‘Sorry not to have visited you before,’ Harry said, dragging and
scraping a chair along the floor to the bed. ‘It’s just that the hospital … it … I don’t know.’

‘The hospital reminds you of your mother when you were a boy. That’s fine.’

Harry nodded and dropped his gaze to his hands. ‘Are they treating you well?’

‘That’s what you ask when you’re visiting folk in prison, Harry, not in a hospital.’

Harry nodded again.

Ståle Aune sighed. ‘I know you’re concerned about me, Harry. But I know you too well, so I know this is not a courtesy visit. Come on, spit it out.’

‘It can wait. They said you weren’t well.’

‘Being well is a relative thing. And, relatively speaking, I’m tremendously well. You should have seen me yesterday. By which I mean, you should
not
have seen me yesterday.’

Harry smiled at his hands.

‘Is it the Snowman?’ Aune asked.

Harry nodded.

‘At long last,’ Aune said. ‘I’ve been bored to death in here. Out with it.’

Harry breathed in. Then he gave a résumé of all that had happened in the case. Trying to trim the tedious, irrelevant information without losing the essential details. Aune interrupted him only a few times with pithy questions, otherwise he listened in silence with a concentrated, quasi-entranced expression on his face. And when Harry had finished the sick man appeared to have perked up; there was colour in his cheeks and he was sitting up straighter in bed.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘But you already know who the guilty person is, so why come to me?’

‘This woman is insane, isn’t she?’

‘People who commit such crimes are without exception insane. Though not necessarily in a criminal sense.’

‘Nevertheless, there are one or two things I don’t understand about her,’ Harry said.

‘Goodness me – there are only one or two things I
do
understand about people, so in that case you’re a better psychologist than me.’

‘She was just nineteen years old when she killed the two women in Bergen and Gert Rafto. How can a person who is that crazy get through the psychological tests for Police College and function in a job for all these years with no one being any the wiser?’

‘Good question. Perhaps she’s a cocktail case.’

‘Cocktail case?’

‘Someone with a bit of everything. Schizophrenic enough to hear voices, but capable of concealing her illness from those around her. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder mixed with a dash of paranoia, which creates delusions about the situation she is in and what she has to do to escape, but which to the outside world is simply perceived as a certain reticence. The bestial fury that emerges during the murders you describe tallies with a borderline personality, though one which can control its fury.’

‘Mm. In other words, you haven’t a clue?’

Aune laughed. The laughter degenerated into a coughing fit.

‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ he growled. ‘Most cases are like this. In psychology we have set up a number of corrals that our cattle refuse to be herded into. They’re nothing less than impudent, ungrateful, muddle-headed creatures. Think of all the research we’ve done for them!’

‘There’s something else. When we stumbled on the body of Gert Rafto she was genuinely frightened. I mean, she wasn’t acting. I could see the shock; her pupils were still enlarged and black even though I was shining the torch straight into her face.’

‘Aha! This is interesting.’ Aune levered himself up higher. ‘Why did you shine the torch in her face? Did you suspect something even then?’

Harry didn’t answer.

‘You may be right,’ Aune said. ‘She may have repressed the murders; that is by no means untypical. You’ve told me that in fact she has been a great help in the investigation and hasn’t sabotaged it. That may suggest she has a suspicion about herself and a genuine desire to uncover
the truth. How much do you know about noctambulism, to wit, sleepwalking?’

‘I know that people can walk in their sleep. Talk in their sleep. Eat, get dressed and even go out and drive a car in their sleep.’

‘Correct. The conductor Harry Rosenthal conducted and sang the parts of instruments for entire symphonies in his sleep. And there have been at least five murder cases in which the murderer has been acquitted because the court determined that he or she was a parasomniac, that is, a sufferer of sleep disorders. There was a man in Canada who, some years ago, got up, drove more than twenty kilometres, parked, killed his mother-in-law with whom he generally had an excellent relationship, almost strangled his father-in-law, drove home and went back to bed. He was acquitted.’

‘You mean she might have killed in her sleep? That she’s one of these parasomniacs?’

‘It’s a controversial diagnosis. But imagine a person who regularly goes into a hibernation-like state and is subsequently unable to remember with any clarity what they have done. Someone who has a blurred, fragmented image of events, like a dream.’

‘Mm.’

‘And suppose that this woman in the course of the investigation has begun to realise what she has done.’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘And realises that to get away she needs a scapegoat.’

‘It’s conceivable.’ Ståle Aune pulled a face. ‘However, most things are conceivable as far as the human psyche is concerned. The problem is that we cannot see the disorders we’re talking about; we have to assume they exist based on the symptoms.’

‘Like mould.’

‘What?’

‘What makes a person like this woman so psychologically sick?’

Aune groaned. ‘Everything in existence! And nothing! Nature and nurture.’

‘A violent, alcoholic father?’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Ninety points for that. Add a mother with a psychiatric history, a traumatic experience or two in her childhood and you have the round hundred.’

‘Does it seem likely that if she had become stronger than her violent, alcoholic father she would try to hurt him? Kill him?’

‘By no means impossible. I remember a ca –’ Ståle Aune stopped mid-word. Stared at Harry. Then leaned forward and whispered with a gleam dancing wildly in his eyes. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

Harry Hole studied his fingernails. ‘I was given a photo of a man at Bergen Police Station. It struck me there was something strangely familiar about him, as if I had met him before. It’s only now that I understand why. It was the family likeness. Before Katrine Bratt got married her name was Rafto. Gert Rafto was her father.’

On his way to the airport express train Harry received a call from Skarre. He had been mistaken. They hadn’t found her mobile phone in the toilet; it had been on the luggage rack in one of the coaches.

Eighty minutes later he was enshrouded in grey. The captain announced low-lying clouds and rain in Bergen. Zero visibility, Harry thought. They were flying on instruments alone now.

The front door was torn open seconds after Thomas Helle, from the Missing Persons Unit, had pressed the doorbell over the sign reading
Andreas, Eli and Trygve Kvale
.

‘Thank the Lord you came so quickly.’ The man standing in front of Helle looked over his shoulder. ‘Where are the others?’

‘There’s just me. You still haven’t heard anything from your wife?’

The man, whom Helle presumed was the Andreas Kvale who had rung HQ, stared at him in amazement. ‘She’s gone, I told you.’

‘We know, but they usually come back.’

‘Who’s
they
?’

Thomas Helle sighed. ‘May I come in, herr Kvale? This rain …’

‘Oh, sorry! Please …’ The man in his fifties stepped aside, and in the gloom behind him Helle caught sight of a dark-haired lad in his twenties.