Nemesis

5

Nemesis

The rain was making speed lines against the prematurely darkened October sky in the light from the outside lamp. From the ceramic sign beneath, Harry read that Espen, Stine and Trond Grette lived here, 'here' being a yellow terraced house in Disengrenda. He pressed the bell and surveyed the locality. Disengrenda was four long rows of terraced houses at the centre of a large flat field encircled by blocks of flats, which reminded Harry of pioneers on the prairie taking up a defensive position against Indian attacks. Perhaps that was how it was. The terraced houses were built in the sixties for the burgeoning middle classes and perhaps the dwindling local population of workers in the blocks in Disenveien and Traverveien already knew that these were the new conquerors; that they would have hegemony over the new country.

'Doesn't seem to be at home,' Harry said, pressing the button once more. 'Are you sure he understood we were coming this afternoon?'

'No.'

'No?' Harry turned and looked down at Beate Lшnn shivering under the umbrella. She was wearing a skirt and high-heeled shoes, and when she picked him up outside Schrшder's it had crossed his mind that she seemed to be dressed for a coffee morning.

'Grette confirmed the meeting twice when I rang,' she said. 'But he seemed completely…out of it.'

Harry leaned across the step and flattened his nose against the kitchen window. It was dark inside and all he could see was a white Nordea Bank calendar on the wall.

'Let's go back,' he said.

At that moment the neighbour's kitchen window opened with a bang. 'Are you looking for Trond?'

The words were articulated in bokmеl, standard Norwegian, but in a Bergen accent with such strong trilled 'r's that it sounded like a medium-sized train being derailed. Harry turned round and gazed into a woman's brown, wrinkled face caught in an attempt to smile and appear grave at the same time.

'We are,' Harry confirmed.

'Family?'

'Police.'

'Right,' the woman said and dropped the funereal expression. 'I thought you had come to express your sympathy. He's on the tennis court, poor thing.'

'Tennis court?'

She pointed. 'On the other side of the field. He's been there since four o'clock.'

'But it's dark,' Beate said. 'And it's raining.'

The woman rolled her shoulders. 'Must be the grief, I suppose.' She trilled her 'r's so much that Harry began to think about when he was growing up in Oppsal and about the bits of cardboard they used to insert in cycle wheels so they flapped against the spokes.

'You grew up in East Oslo, too, I can hear,' Harry said as he and Beate walked towards where the woman had indicated. 'Or am I mistaken?'

'No,' Beate said, unwilling to expatiate.

The tennis court was positioned halfway between the blocks and the terraced houses. They could hear the dull thud of racquet strings on wet tennis ball. Inside the high wire-mesh fence they could make out a figure standing and serving in the quickly gathering autumn gloom.

'Hello!' Harry shouted when they reached the fence, but the man didn't answer. It was only now that they saw he was wearing a jacket, shirt and tie.

'Trond Grette?'

A ball hit a black puddle of water, bounced up, hit the fence and sprayed them with a fine shower of rainwater, which Beate fended off with her umbrella.

Beate pulled at the gate. 'He's locked himself in,' she whispered.

'Police! Officers Hole and Lшnn!' Harry yelled. 'We were due to meet. Can we…Christ!' Harry hadn't seen the ball until it lodged itself in the wire fence with a smack a few centimetres from his face. He wiped the water from his eyes and looked down: he had been spray-painted with dirty, reddish-brown water. Harry automatically turned his back when he saw the man toss up the next ball.

'Trond Grette!' Harry's shout echoed between the blocks. They watched a tennis ball curve in an arc towards the lights in the blocks before being swallowed by the dark and landing somewhere in the field. Harry faced the tennis court again, only to hear a wild roar and see a figure rushing towards him out of the dark. The metal fence squealed as it checked the charging tennis player. He fell onto the shale on all fours, picked himself up, took a run-up and charged the fence again. Fell, got up and charged.

'My God, he's gone nuts,' Harry mumbled. He instinctively took a step back as a white face with staring eyes loomed up in front of him. Beate had managed to switch on a torch and shone it at Grette, who was hanging on the fence. With wet, black hair stuck to his white forehead, he seemed to be searching for something to focus on as he slid down the fence like sleet on a car windscreen, until he lay lifeless on the ground.

'What do we do now?' Beate breathed.

Harry felt his teeth crunching and spat into his hand. From the light of the torch he saw red grit.

'You ring for an ambulance while I get the wirecutters from the car,' he said.

'Then he was given sedatives, was he?' Anna asked.

Harry nodded and sipped his Coke.

The young West End clientele perched on bar stools around them drinking wine, shiny drinks and Diet Coke. M was like most cafйs in Oslo-urban in a provincial and naive but, as far as it went, pleasant way, which made Harry think about Kebab, the bright, well-behaved boy in his class at school who, they discovered, kept a book of all the slang expressions the 'in' kids used.

'They took the poor guy to hospital. Then we chatted to the neighbour again and she told us he had been out there hitting tennis balls every evening since his wife had been killed.'

'Goodness. Why?'

Harry hunched his shoulders. 'It's not so unusual for people to become psychotic when they lose someone in those circumstances. Some repress it and act as if the deceased were still alive. The neighbour said Stine and Trond Grette were a fantastic mixed-doubles pair, that they practised on the court almost every afternoon in the summer.'

'So he was kind of expecting his wife to return the serve?'

'Maybe.'

'Jeesus! Will you get me a beer while I go to the loo?'

Anna swung her legs off the stool and wiggled her way across the room. Harry tried not to follow her movements. He didn't need to, he had seen as much as he wanted. She had a few wrinkles around the eyes, a couple of grey strands in her raven-black hair; otherwise she was exactly the same. The same black eyes with the slightly hunted expression under the fused eyebrows, the same high, narrow nose above the indecently full lips and the hollow cheeks which tended to give her a hungry look. She might not have qualified for the epithet 'beautiful'-for that her features were too hard and stark-but her slim body was curvaceous enough for Harry to spot at least two men at tables in the dining area lose their thread as she passed.

Harry lit another cigarette. After Grette, they had paid a visit to Helge Klementsen, the branch manager, but that hadn't given them much to work on, either. He was still in a state of shock, sitting in a chair in his duplex in Kjelsеsveien and staring alternately at the poodle scurrying between his legs and his wife scurrying between kitchen and sitting room with coffee and the driest cream horn Harry had ever tasted. Beate's choice of clothes had suited the Klementsen family's bourgeois home better than Harry's faded Levi's and Doc Martens. Nevertheless, it was mostly Harry who maintained conversation with the nervously tripping fru Klementsen about the unusually high precipitation this autumn and the art of making cream horns, to the interruptions above of stamping feet and loud sobbing. Fru Klementsen explained that her daughter Ina, the poor thing, was seven months pregnant to a man who had just given her the heave-ho. Well, in fact, he was a sailor and had set sail for the Mediterranean. Harry had almost spattered the cream horn across the table. It was then that Beate took charge and asked Helge, who had given up pursuing the dog with his eyes as it had padded out through the living-room door, 'How tall would you say the robber was?'

Helge had observed her, then picked up the coffee cup and lifted it to his mouth where, of necessity, it had to wait because he couldn't drink and talk at the same time: 'Tall? Two metres perhaps. She was always so accurate, Stine was.'

'He wasn't that tall, herr Klementsen.'

'Alright, one ninety. And always so well turned out.'

'What was he wearing?'

'Something black, like rubber. This summer she took a proper holiday for the first time. In Greece.'

Fru Klementsen sniffled.

'Like rubber?' Beate asked.

'Yes. And a balaclava.'

'What colour, herr Klementsen?'

'Red.'

At this point Beate had stopped taking notes and soon after they were in the car on their way back to town.

'If judges and juries only knew how little of what witnesses said about bank robberies was reliable, they would refuse to let us use it as evidence,' Beate had said. 'What people's brains recreate is almost fascinatingly wrong. As if fear gives them glasses which make all robbers grow in stature and blackness, makes guns proliferate and seconds become longer. The robber took a little over one minute, but fru Brжnne, the cashier nearest the entrance, said he had been there for close on five minutes. And he isn't two metres tall, but 1.79. Unless he wore insoles, which is not so unusual for professionals.'

'How can you be so precise about his height?'

'The video. You measure the height against the door frame where the robber enters. I was in the bank this morning chalking up, taking new photos and measuring.'

'Mm. In Crime Squad we leave that kind of measuring job to the Crime Scene Unit.'

'Measuring height from a video is a bit more complicated than it sounds. The Crime Scene Unit's measurements were out by three centimetres, for example, in the case of the Den norske Bank robber in Kaldbakken in 1989. So I prefer to use my own.'

Harry had squinted at her and wondered whether he should ask her why she had joined the police. Instead, he had asked her if she could drop him off outside the locksmith's in Vibes gate. Before getting out, he had also asked her if she had noticed that Helge hadn't spilt a drop of coffee from the brimming cup he had been holding during their questioning. She hadn't.

'Do you like this place?' Anna asked, sinking back on her stool.

'Well.' Harry cast his eyes around. 'It's not my taste.'

'Not mine, either,' Anna said, grabbing her bag and standing up. 'Let's go to my flat.'

'I've just bought you a beer.' Harry nodded towards the frothy glass.

'It's so boring drinking alone,' she said and pulled a face. 'Relax, Harry. Come on.'

It had stopped raining outside and the cold, freshly washed air tasted good.

'Do you remember the day, one autumn, we drove to Maridalen?' Anna asked, slipping her hand inside his arm and starting to walk.

'No,' Harry said.

'Of course you do! In that dreadful Ford Escort of yours, with the seats that don't fold down.'

Harry smiled wryly.

'You're blushing,' she exclaimed with glee. 'Well, I'm sure you also remember that we parked and went for a walk in the forest. With all the yellow leaves it was like…' She squeezed his arm. 'Like a bed, an enormous bed of gold.' She laughed and nudged him. 'And afterwards I had to help you push-start that wreck of a car. I hope you've got rid of it by now?'

'Well,' Harry said, 'it's at the garage. We'll have to see.'

'Dear, oh dear. Now you make it sound like an old friend who's been taken to hospital with a tumour or something.' And she added-softly: 'You shouldn't have been so quick to let go, Harry.'

He didn't answer.

'Here it is,' she said. 'You can't have forgotten that, anyway, can you?' They had stopped outside a blue door in Sorgenfrigata.

Harry gently detached himself. 'Listen, Anna,' he began and tried to ignore her warning stare. 'I've got a meeting with Crime Squad investigators at the crack of dawn tomorrow.'

'I didn't say a word,' she said, opening the door.

Harry suddenly remembered something. He put his hand inside his coat and passed her a yellow envelope. 'From the locksmith.'

'Ah, the key. Was everything alright?'

'The person behind the counter scrutinised my ID very closely. And I had to sign. Odd person.' Harry glanced at his watch and yawned.

'They're strict about handing out system keys,' Anna said hastily. 'It fits the whole block, the main entrance, the cellar, flat, everything.' She gave a nervous, perfunctory laugh. 'They have to have a written application from our housing co-op just to make this one spare key.'

'I understand,' Harry said, rocking on his heels. He drew breath to say goodnight.

She beat him to it. Her voice was almost imploring: 'Just a cup of coffee, Harry.'

There was the same chandelier hanging from the ceiling high above the same table and chairs in the large sitting room. Harry thought the walls had been light-white or maybe yellow-but he wasn't sure. Now they were blue and the room seemed smaller. Perhaps Anna had wanted to reduce the space. It is not easy for one person living alone to fill a flat with three reception rooms, two big bedrooms and a ceiling height of three and a half metres. Harry remembered that Anna had told him her grandmother had also lived in the flat on her own, but she hadn't spent so much time here, as she had been a famous soprano and had travelled the world for as long as she was able to sing.

Anna disappeared into the kitchen and Harry looked around the sitting room. It was bare, empty, apart from a vaulting horse the size of an Icelandic pony, which stood in the middle on four splayed wooden legs with two rings protruding from its back. Harry went over and stroked the smooth, brown leather.

'Have you taken up gymnastics?' Harry called out.

'You mean the horse?' Anna shouted back from the kitchen.

'It's for men, isn't it?'

'Yes. Sure you won't have a beer, Harry?'

'Quite sure,' he shouted. 'Seriously, though, why have you got it here?'

Harry jumped when he heard her voice behind his back: 'Because I like to do things that men do.'

Harry turned. She had taken off her sweater and was standing in the doorway. One hand resting on her hip, the other up against the door frame. At the very last minute Harry resisted the temptation to let his eyes wander from top to toe.

'I bought it from Oslo Gym Club. It's going to be a work of art. An installation. Much like "Contact", which I am sure you haven't forgotten.'

'You mean the box on the table with the curtain you could stick your hand in? And inside there were loads of false hands you could shake?'

'Or stroke. Or flirt with. Or reject. They had heating elements in so they could maintain body temperature and were such a great hit, weren't they. People thought there was someone hiding under the table. Come with me and I'll show you something else.'

He followed her to the furthest room, where she opened sliding doors. Then she took his hand and pulled him into the dark with her. When the light was switched on, at first Harry stood staring at the lamp. It was a gilt standard lamp formed into the shape of a woman holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other. Three bulbs were located on the outside edge of the sword, the scales and the woman's head, and when Harry turned, he could see each illuminated its own oil painting. Two of them were hanging on the wall while the third, which clearly wasn't finished yet, was on an easel with a yellow-and-brown-stained palette fastened to the left-hand corner.

'What sort of pictures are they?' Harry asked.

'They're portraits. Can't you see that?'

'Right. Those are eyes?' He pointed. 'And that's a mouth?'

Anna tilted her head. 'If you like. There are three men.'

'Anyone I know?'

Anna gazed at Harry pensively for a long time before answering. 'No. I don't think you know any of them, Harry, but you could get to know them if you really wanted.'

Harry studied the pictures more closely.

'Tell me what you can see.'

'I can see my neighbour with a kicksled. I can see a man coming out of the backroom at the locksmith's as I'm leaving. And I can see the waiter in M. And that TV celeb, Per Stеle Lшnning.'

She laughed. 'Did you know that the retina reverses everything so your brain receives a mirror image first? If you want to see things as they really are, you have to see them in a mirror. Then you would have seen some quite different people in the pictures.' Her eyes were radiant and Harry couldn't bring himself to object that the retina didn't reverse images, it turned them upside down. 'This will be my final masterpiece, Harry. This is what I will be remembered for.'

'These portraits?'

'No, they're merely a part of the whole work of art. It's not finished yet. Just wait.'

'Mm, has it got a name?'

' "Nemesis",' she said in a low voice.

He gazed enquiringly at her and their eyes locked.

'After the goddess, you know.'

The shadow fell over one side of her face. Harry looked away. He had seen enough. The curve of her back begging for a dancing partner, one foot in front of the other as if unsure whether to move forwards or backwards, her heaving bosom and the slim neck with the veins he imagined he could see throbbing. He felt hot and a tiny bit faint. What was it she said? 'You shouldn't have been so quick to let go.' Had he been?

'Harry…'

'I have to go,' he said.

He pulled her dress over her head, and she fell back laughing against the white sheet. She loosened his belt as the turquoise light, which shone through the swaying palm trees of the laptop's screensaver, flickered over the imps and open-mouthed demons snarling from the carvings on the bedhead. Anna had told him it was her grandmother's bed and it had been there for almost eighty years. She nibbled at his ear and whispered sweet nothings in an unfamiliar language. Then she stopped whispering and rode him as she yelled, laughed, entreated and invoked external forces and he just wished it would go on and on. He was about to come when she suddenly held back, took his face between her hands and whispered: 'Mine for ever?'

'Not bloody likely,' he laughed and turned her so that he was on top. The wooden demons grinned at him.

'Mine for ever?'

'Yes,' he groaned and came.

When the laughter had died down and they lay there sweating, but still tightly entwined on the bedcovers, Anna told him that the bed had been given to her grandmother by a Spanish nobleman.

'After a concert she gave in Seville in 1911,' she said, raising her head slightly so that Harry could place the lit cigarette between her lips.

The bed arrived in Oslo three months later on SS Elenora. Chance, among other things, would have it that the Danish captain, Jesper something-or-other, would be her grandmother's first lover-though not her first ever-in this bed. Jesper had obviously been a passionate man, and according to the grandmother, that was why the horse adorning the bed had lost its head. Captain Jesper, in his ecstasy, bit it off.

Anna laughed and Harry smiled. Then the cigarette was finished and they made love to the creaking and groaning of the Spanish Manila wood, which made Harry think he was in a boat with no one at the helm, but that it didn't matter.

That was a long time ago and it was the first and last night he had slept sober in Anna's grandmother's bed.

Harry twisted in the narrow iron bed. The display of the radio alarm clock on the bedside table glowed 3.21. He cursed. He closed his eyes and his thoughts slowly glided back to Anna and the summer on the white sheets of her grandmother's bed. More often than not he had been drunk, but he could recall the nights, pink and wonderful like erotic picture postcards. Even the final line he had delivered when the summer was over had been a hackneyed, but a passionately felt clichй: 'You deserve someone better than me.'

At this stage he was drinking so hard that everything pointed in only one direction. In one of his clearer moments he had made up his mind he would not drag her down with him. She had cursed him in her foreign tongue and sworn that one day she would do the same to him: take the thing he loved most from him.

That was seven years ago, and the relationship had only lasted six weeks. After that he had only met her twice. Once in a bar when she had gone over to him with tears in her eyes and asked him to go somewhere else, which he had done. And once at an exhibition where Harry had taken his younger sister. He had promised to call her, but he never did.

Harry rolled over to look at the clock again. 3.22. He had kissed her. At the end of the evening. Once he was safely outside the door of her flat with the wavy glass, he had leaned over to give her a goodnight hug and it had become a kiss. Easy and great. Easy, at any rate. 3.33. Christ, when had he become so sensitive that he felt pangs of guilt for giving an old flame a goodnight kiss? Harry tried to take deep, regular breaths to concentrate his mind on possible escape routes from Bogstadveien via Industrigata. In. Out. In again. He could still smell her fragrance. Feel the sweet pressure of her body. The rough insistence of her tongue.