Police

It was asleep in there, behind the door.

The inside of the corner cupboard smelt of old wood, powder residue and gun oil. When the sun shone through the window into the room, a strip of light shaped like an hourglass travelled from the keyhole into the cupboard and, if the sun was at precisely the right angle, there would be a matt gleam to the gun lying on the middle of the shelf.

It was a Russian Odessa, a copy of the better-known Stechkin.

The ugly automatic pistol had had a peripatetic existence, travelling with the Cossacks in Lithuania to Siberia, moving between the various Urka headquarters in southern Siberia, becoming the property of an ataman, a Cossack leader, who had been killed, Odessa in hand, by the police, before ending up in the Nizhny Tagil home of an arms-collecting prison director. Finally, the weapon was brought to Norway by Rudolf Asayev, alias Dubai, who, before he disappeared, had monopolised the narcotics market in Oslo with the heroin-like opioid violin. Oslo, the very town where the gun now found itself, in Holmenkollveien, to be precise, in Rakel Fauke’s house. The Odessa had a magazine that could hold twenty rounds of Makarov, 9x18mm calibre, and could fire single shots and salvos. There were twelve bullets left in the magazine.

Three of them had been fired at Kosovo Albanians, rival dope pushers. Only one of the bullets had bitten into flesh.

The next two had killed Gusto Hanssen, a young thief and drug dealer who had pocketed Asayev’s money and dope.

The gun still smelt of the last three shots, which had hit the head and chest of the ex-police officer Harry Hole during his investigation into the above-mentioned murder of Gusto Hanssen. And the crime scene had been the same: Hausmanns gate 92.

The police still hadn’t solved the Hanssen case, and the eighteen-year-old boy who had initially been arrested had been released. Mostly because they hadn’t been able to find, or link him to, any murder weapon. The boy’s name was Oleg Fauke and he woke every night staring into the darkness and hearing the shots. Not those that had killed Gusto, but the others. The ones he had fired at the policeman who had been a father to him when he was growing up. Who he had once dreamt would marry his mother, Rakel. Harry Hole. Oleg’s eyes burned into the night, and he thought of the gun in the distant corner cupboard, hoping that he would never see it again. That no one would see it again. That it would sleep until eternity.

He was asleep in there, behind the door.

The guarded hospital room smelt of medicine and paint. The monitor beside him registered his heartbeats.

Isabelle Skøyen, the Councillor for Social Affairs at Oslo City Hall, and Mikael Bellman, the newly appointed Chief of Police, hoped they would never see him again.

That no one would see him again.

That he would sleep until eternity.