Simon managed to roll over and aim his pistol at the man, but the man had already slumped to his knees and folded his hands behind his head in total surrender. The engine started, the revs so high that it squealed. Simon rolled over onto his other side and could now see heads in the front of the van; the girls had clearly been hiding in the back.
‘Stop! Police!’ Simon tried to get to his feet, but it hurt like hell, the guy must have broken one of his ribs. And before Simon could point his pistol, the van was in motion and out of his firing range. Dammit!
There was a bang followed by glass shattering.
The squeal of an engine falling silent.
‘Stay where you are,’ Simon said and groaned as he scrambled to his feet and staggered out of the door.
The van had come to a standstill. Loud screaming and frantic barking could be heard coming from the inside.
But it was the scene in front of the van which Simon took a mental photograph of for his scrapbook. Kari Adel in a long, black leather coat standing in the beam from the headlights of the van which was now relieved of its windscreen. The stock of the shotgun in her shoulder and an underhand grip on the still smoking barrel.
Simon walked up to the side of the van and slid open the door on the driver’s side. ‘Police!’
The man inside didn’t respond, he just continued to stare straight ahead as if in shock, with blood dripping from his hairline. His lap was filled with broken glass. Simon ignored the pain in his side, dragged the man out and down on the ground. ‘Nose to the tarmac and hands behind your head! Now!’
Then he walked round the van and subjected the equally apathetic passenger to the same treatment.
Simon and Kari walked up to the side door in the body of the van. They could hear the dog yelp and bark from the inside. Simon grabbed the door handle and Kari positioned herself right in front of it with the shotgun at the ready.
‘It sounds big,’ Simon said. ‘Perhaps you should take another step back?’
She nodded and did as he had suggested. Then he slid the door open.
A white monster shot out of the van and flew right at Kari with its jaws snarling and open. It happened so quickly that she didn’t have time to fire her weapon. The animal slammed into the ground in front of her and stayed there.
Simon stared at his own smoking pistol in astonishment.
‘Thank you,’ Kari said.
They turned back to the van. Terrified, wide-eyed faces stared out at them from inside it.
‘Police,’ Simon said. And added when he saw from the expressions that this might not be considered universally good news: ‘Good police. We’re on your side.’
Then he took out his mobile and rang a number. Put the mobile to his ear and looked up at Kari.
‘Do you think you could call the station and ask them to dispatch a couple of patrol cars?’
‘So who are you ringing then?’
‘The press.’
30
DAWN WAS STARTING
to break over Enerhaugen, but the press hadn’t finished taking pictures and interviewing the girls who had been given woollen blankets and tea which Kari had made in the kitchen. Three of the reporters were crowding around Simon in an attempt to milk him for even more details.
‘No, we don’t know if there are more people behind this than those we arrested here tonight,’ Simon repeated. ‘And, yes, it’s correct that we raided this address following an anonymous tip-off.’
‘Did you really have to kill an innocent animal?’ asked a female journalist, nodding towards the dead dog which Kari had covered with a blanket from the house.
‘It attacked us,’ Simon said.
‘Attacked you?’ She snorted. ‘Two adults against one small dog? Surely you could have found a way to restrain it.’
‘The loss of life is always sad,’ Simon said and knew that he shouldn’t, but couldn’t help himself and continued, ‘but given that the life expectancy of a dog is in inverse proportion to its size, you will – if you take a look under the blanket – realise that this dog didn’t have long to live, anyway.’
Stalsberg, a senior crime reporter who was the first person Simon had called, grinned.
A police SUV had appeared over the hill and parked behind the patrol car, which – to Simon’s irritation – still had its blue light flashing on its roof.
‘But rather than ask me any more questions, I suggest that you speak to the boss himself.’
Simon nodded towards the SUV and the journalists turned round. The man who emerged from the car was tall and slender with thin hair swept back and rectangular, frameless glasses. He straightened up and looked astonished as the journalists raced towards him.
‘Congratulations on the arrests, Commissioner Parr,’ Stalsberg said. ‘Would you like to comment on how it looks as if you’re finally making progress with the trafficking problem? Would you call this a breakthrough?’
Simon folded his arms across his chest and met Pontius Parr’s icy stare. The Commissioner nodded almost imperceptibly, then he looked at the reporter who had asked the question. ‘It’s certainly an important step in the police’s fight against trafficking. Before this current incident we’ve stressed that this issue must be given priority, and this prioritising has – as you can see – borne fruit. So we would like to congratulate Chief Inspector Kefas and his colleagues.’
Parr grabbed Simon as he headed back to his car.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Simon?’
It was one of the things Simon had never understood about his old friend; how his voice never changed character or pitch. He could be exhilarated or furious, but his voice stayed exactly the same.
‘My job. Catching villains.’ Simon stopped, stuffed a piece of
snus
under his upper lip and offered the tin to Parr, who rolled his eyes. It was an old joke of which Simon never tired; Parr had never used
snus
or smoked a cigarette in his life.
‘I mean this performance,’ Parr said. ‘You defy a direct order not to enter and then you invite every member of the media to come here. Why?’
Simon shrugged. ‘I thought we could do with some favourable press coverage for once. Incidentally, it’s not everyone, only those who were working the night shift. And I’m delighted that we agree that the assessment of the officer at the scene should be the decisive factor. If we hadn’t, I don’t think we would have found these girls – they were about to be moved on.’
‘What I’m wondering is how you knew about this place.’
‘As I told you before, a text message.’
‘From?’
‘Anonymous. It’s a pay-as-you-go phone.’
‘Get the phone companies to trace it. Find whoever it is as soon as possible so we can interview them for more information. Because unless I’m very much mistaken, we won’t get a word out of the people we arrested here.’
‘Oh?’
‘They’re just small fry, Simon. They know that the big fish will eat them up unless they keep their mouths shut. And it’s the big ones we want, isn’t it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good. Listen, Simon, you know me, and you know that I can be too certain of my own brilliance at times, and . . .’
‘And?’
Parr cleared his throat. Rocked back and forth on his heels as if to take off. ‘And your assessment of the situation here tonight was better than mine. Plain and simple. It won’t be forgotten at your next review.’
‘Thank you, Pontius, but I’ll be retired long before my next review.’
‘That’s true,’ Parr smiled. ‘But you’re a fine policeman, Simon, you always were.’
‘That’s also true,’ Simon said.
‘How’s Else?’
‘Good, thank you. Or . . .’
‘Yes?’
Simon took a breath. ‘Good enough. We’ll talk about it some other time. Bed?’
Parr nodded. ‘Bed.’ He patted Simon on the shoulder, turned round and walked towards the SUV. Simon looked after him. Hooked his index finger and pulled out the
snus
. It didn’t taste right.
31
IT WAS SEVEN
in the morning when Simon got to work. He had managed two and a half hours’ sleep, one and a half cups of coffee, and half a headache pill. Some people could survive on very little sleep. Simon wasn’t one of them.
Kari, however, might be. She certainly looked surprisingly alert as she strode towards him.
‘So?’ Simon said, slumping down in his office chair and tearing open the brown envelope which had been waiting for him in his pigeonhole.
‘Not one of the three people we arrested last night is saying anything,’ Kari said. ‘Not a single word, in fact. They even refused to state their names.’
‘What nice boys. Do we know them?’
‘Oh yes. Plain clothes recognised them. They have previous convictions, all three of them. Their lawyer turned up unannounced in the middle of night and interrupted our attempts to get anything out of them. A man called Einar Harnes. I managed to trace the mobile with the text message from this Son. The mobile belongs to a Fidel Lae. Owns a kennel. He’s not answering his phone, but the signals to the base stations indicate it’s at his farm. We’ve dispatched two patrol cars there.’
Simon realised why she – unlike him – didn’t look as if she had just got straight out of bed. It was because she had never made it that far, she had worked right through the night.
‘Then there’s this Hugo Nestor you asked me to find . . .?’ she continued.
‘Yes?’
‘He’s not at his home address, doesn’t answer his phone, nor is he at his office address, but they could all be fake. All I have so far is a plain-clothes cop who says she saw Nestor at Vermont last night.’
‘Hm. Do you think I have bad breath, Officer Adel?’
‘Not that I’ve noticed, but then again we haven’t—’
‘So you wouldn’t regard this as a hint?’
Simon held up three toothbrushes.
‘They look used,’ Kari said. ‘How did you get them?’
‘Good question,’ Simon said, peering into the envelope. He pulled out a sheet of paper with the logo of the Plaza Hotel at the top. But there was no sender. Just a short handwritten message:
Check for DNA. S.
He handed the sheet to Kari and looked at the toothbrushes.
‘Probably some weirdo,’ Kari said. ‘Forensics have more than enough to do with the killings to—’
‘Take them straight up there,’ Simon said.
‘What?’
‘It’s him.’
‘Who?’
‘“S”. It’s Sonny.’
‘How do you know—’
‘Tell them it’s urgent.’
Kari looked at him. Simon’s phone started to ring.
‘OK,’ she said, and turned to leave.
She was standing outside the lift when Simon came over and stood next to her. He had put on his coat.
‘You’re coming with me first,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘That was Åsmund Bjørnstad. They’ve found another body.’
A woodland bird hooted hollowly from somewhere in the spruce forest.
Åsmund Bjørnstad had been stripped of all traces of arrogance. He was pale. He had come straight out with it on the phone: ‘We need help, Kefas.’
Simon was standing beside the Kripos inspector and Kari, staring through the mesh of a cage, at the remains of a body which they had temporarily identified on the basis of various credit cards as Hugo Nestor’s. Confirmation would have to wait until they had checked his dental records. Simon could deduce from where he was standing and looking at the fillings in the exposed teeth that the deceased had actually seen a dentist. The two police officers from the dog patrol who had taken away the Argentine mastiffs had provided a simple explanation for the state of the body: ‘The dogs were hungry. Somebody forgot to feed them.’
‘Nestor was Kalle Farrisen’s boss,’ Simon said.
‘I know,’ Bjørnstad groaned. ‘All hell will break loose once the press finds out.’
‘How did you find Lae?’
‘Two patrol cars down at the farm were following a phone signal,’ Bjørnstad said.
‘I sent them,’ Kari said. ‘We got an anonymous text message.’
‘First they discovered Lae’s phone,’ Bjørnstad said. ‘It was on top of the gate as if someone had left it there to be traced and found. But they didn’t find Lae when they searched the house. They were about to leave when one of the police dogs reacted and wanted to go inside the forest. And that’s when they found . . . this.’ He flung out his hands.
‘And Lae?’ Simon asked, nodding towards the shivering man huddling under a woollen blanket, sitting on a tree stump behind them.
‘The killer threatened him with a gun, he says. Locked him in the adjacent cage, took his mobile and his wallet. Lae was locked up for thirty-six hours. He saw everything.’
‘And what’s he saying?’
‘He’s broken, poor man, he can’t stop talking. Lae sold dogs illegally and Nestor was his client. But he’s unable to give a proper description of the killer. Still, it’s common for witnesses not to remember the faces of people who threatened their lives.’
‘Oh, they remember them,’ Simon said. ‘They remember those faces for the rest of their lives. They just don’t recall them the way we see them, that’s why their descriptions are wrong. Wait here.’
Simon went over to the man. Sat down on another tree stump next to him.
‘How did he look?’ Simon asked.
‘I’ve already given a description—’
‘Like this?’ Simon said, producing a photograph from his inside pocket and showing it to him. ‘Try to imagine him without the beard and the long hair.’
The man stared at the picture for a long time. Then he nodded slowly. ‘That look. He had that look in his eyes. As if he was innocent.’
‘Sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Thank you.’
‘He kept saying that the whole time. Thank you. And he cried when the dogs killed Nestor.’
Simon put the picture back in his pocket. ‘One last thing. You told the police that he threatened you with a gun. In which hand did he hold the gun?’
The man blinked a couple of times as if he hadn’t thought about it until now. ‘Left. He was left-handed.’
Simon got up and walked back to Bjørnstad and Kari. ‘It’s Sonny Lofthus.’
‘Who?’ Åsmund Bjørnstad asked.
Simon looked at the inspector for a long time. ‘I thought it was you who turned up with Delta, trying to catch him at the Ila Centre?’