Police

13

‘All right?’ Ulla said, leaning back against the kitchen worktop.

‘Oh, yes,’ Truls said, shifting uneasily on the chair and lifting the coffee cup from the narrow worktop. He took a swig. Looked at her with the eyes she knew so well. Frightened and hungry. Embarrassed and searching. Rejecting and imploring. No and yes.

She had immediately regretted allowing him to visit her. But she hadn’t been prepared when he had suddenly rung and asked how things were going with the house, was there anything that needed fixing? As he was suspended now, the days were long, and he had nothing to do. No, there was nothing that needed fixing, she had lied. Oh, right. What about a cup of coffee then? A little chat about old times? Ulla had said she didn’t know if. . but Truls acted as if he hadn’t heard, said he was passing by, a coffee would be nice. And she had answered, OK, why not, drop in, Truls.

‘I’m still alone, as you know,’ he said. ‘Nothing new there.’

‘You’ll find someone. Of course you will.’ She made a show of looking at the clock, had considered saying the children had to be picked up. But even a bachelor like Truls would realise it was too early.

‘Maybe,’ he said. Looking into his cup. And instead of putting it down he took another swig. Like taking courage, he thought with dread.

‘As you probably know, I’ve always liked you, Ulla.’

Ulla clutched the worktop.

‘So you know if you have a problem and you need. . er, someone to talk to, you can always count on me.’

Ulla blinked. Had she heard him correctly? Talk?

‘Thank you, Truls,’ she said. ‘But I’ve got Mikael, haven’t I?’

He put his cup down slowly. ‘Yes, of course. You’ve got Mikael.’

‘By the way, I have to start cooking dinner for him and the children.’

‘Yes, of course you have to. You’re in the kitchen cooking for him while he. .’ He stopped.

‘He what, Truls?’

‘Has dinner elsewhere.’

‘Now I don’t understand what you mean, Truls.’

‘I think you do. Listen, I’m only here to help you. I have your best interests at heart, Ulla. And the children’s, of course. The children are important.’

‘I’m going to make them something nice. And these family meals take time, Truls, so. .’

‘Ulla, there’s one thing I want to say.’

‘No, Truls. No, don’t say it, please.’

‘You’re good to Mikael. Do you know how many other women he-?’

‘No, Truls!’

‘But-’

‘I want you to go now, Truls. And I don’t want to see you here again for a while.’

Ulla stood by the worktop watching Truls go out of the gate to the car parked beside the gravel drive winding between the newly built houses in Høyenhall. Mikael had said he would pull a few strings, make a few calls to the right people on the council, get the tarmac laid, but so far nothing had happened. She heard the brief chirp as Truls pressed the key and the car alarm switched itself off. Watched him get into the car. Watched him sit motionless, staring into the distance. Then his body seemed to twitch and he started pummelling the steering wheel so hard she saw it give. Even from a distance it was so violent she shuddered. Mikael had told her about his anger, but she had never witnessed it. If Truls hadn’t become a policeman, according to Mikael he would have been a criminal. He said the same about himself when he was acting tough. She didn’t believe him. Mikael was too straight, too. . adaptable. But Truls. . Truls was made of something else, something darker.

Truls Berntsen. Simple, naive, loyal Truls. She’d had a suspicion, no doubt about that, but she couldn’t believe Truls could be so sly. So. . imaginative.

The Grand Hotel.

They had been the most painful seconds of her life. Not that she hadn’t considered the idea that he could have been unfaithful. Especially after he had stopped having sex with her. But there could be several explanations for that, the stress of the police murders. . but Isabelle Skøyen? Sober, in a hotel in the middle of the day? And it had also struck her that the whole scenario had been a set-up. The fact that someone could know the two of them would be there suggested it was a regular occurrence. She wanted to throw up whenever she thought about it.

Mikael’s suddenly pale face in front of her. The frightened, guilty eyes, like a boy caught apple scrumping. How did he manage it? How did he, the faithless swine, how did he make it seem as if it was a minor issue requiring his protective hand? The man who had trodden all over everything they had that was good, the father of three children. Why did he look as if he was the one carrying the cross?

‘I’ll be home early,’ he had whispered. ‘We can deal with it then. Before the children. . I have to be in the council chairman’s office in four minutes.’ Had he had a tear in the corner of his eye? Had the bastard had the temerity to shed a tear?

After he had gone she had pulled herself together surprisingly quickly. Perhaps that is what people do when there is no alternative, when a nervous breakdown is not an option. With numb composure she rang the number the man claiming to be Runar had used. No answer. She had waited for another five minutes, then she had left. When she got home she checked out the number with one of the women she knew at Kripos. And she told Ulla it was a pay-as-you-go mobile. The question was: who would go to such lengths to send her to the Grand so that she could witness it with her own eyes? A journalist from the celebrity gossip press? A more or less well-meaning woman friend? Someone on Isabelle’s side, a vengeful rival of Mikael’s? Or someone who didn’t want to separate him and Isabelle but him and her, Ulla? Someone who hated Mikael or her? Or someone who loved her? Who thought it would give him a chance if he could drive a wedge between her and Mikael. She knew only one person who loved her more than was good for anyone.

She didn’t mention her suspicions to Mikael when they spoke later in the day. He clearly thought her presence in reception had been a coincidence, one of those lightning strikes that happen in everyone’s lives, that improbable concurrence of events that some call fate.

Mikael hadn’t tried to lie and say he hadn’t been there with Isabelle. She had to give him that. He wasn’t so stupid. He had explained she didn’t need to ask him to finish the affair; he had terminated it on his own initiative before Isabelle had left the hotel. That was the word he had used: affair. Probably advisedly, it made it sound so small, unimportant and sordid, something that could be swept under the carpet, as it were. A ‘relationship’, on the other hand, that would have been a different matter. She didn’t believe for a second that he had ‘terminated it’ at the hotel. Isabelle had seemed too elated for that. But what he said next was true. If this came out, the scandal would not only hurt him, but also their children and her. It would, furthermore, come at the worst possible moment. The council chairman had wanted to talk to him about politics. And he wanted him to join the party. Mikael was someone they had been considering as an interesting candidate for a political post in the not too distant future. He was exactly what they were after: young, ambitious, popular and successful. Until these police murders, of course. But after he had solved them, they should sit down and discuss his future, where it lay, in the police or in politics, where Mikael thought he could have the most impact. Not that Mikael had decided what he wanted, but it was obvious that any kind of scandal would close that door.

And then of course there was her, and the children. What happened to his career was a minor issue compared to what this loss would mean. She interrupted him before his self-pity had gone too far and said she had thought the matter through and that her calculations matched his. His career. Their children. The life they had together. She said quite simply that she forgave him, but he would have to promise never, ever to have any more contact with Isabelle Skøyen. Except as the Chief of Police at meetings where others were present. Mikael had almost seemed disappointed, as though he had been armed for a battle and not a tame skirmish, which had fizzled out in an ultimatum that wouldn’t cost him much. Ulla watched Truls start the car and drive off. She hadn’t told Mikael about her suspicions and had no intention of doing so either. What purpose would it serve? If she was right, Truls could continue to be the spy who sounded the alarm if the pact regarding Isabelle Skøyen was not kept.

The car disappeared and the residential silence mingled with the clouds of dust. And a thought went through her mind. A wild, totally unacceptable thought, of course, but the mind isn’t so strict on censorship. Her and Truls. In the bedroom, here. Just as revenge, of course. She rejected the idea as soon as it had appeared.

The sleet that had oozed across the windscreen like grey spit had been superseded by rain. Vertical, heavy rain. The windscreen wipers fought a desperate battle against a wall of water. Anton Mittet drove slowly. It was pitch black, and the water was making everything blur and distort as though he were drunk. He glanced at the clock in his VW Sharan. When they had decided to buy a new car three years ago, Laura had insisted on this seven-seater, and he had jokingly enquired if she was planning a big family, even though he knew it was because she didn’t want to be in a tiny car if they crashed. Well, Anton didn’t want a crash either. He knew these roads well and also knew the chances of meeting oncoming traffic at this time of night were slim, but he didn’t take any risks.

The pulse in his temple was pounding. Mostly because of the telephone call he had received twenty minutes ago. But also because he hadn’t had his coffee today. He had lost his taste for it after reading the result of the test. Stupid, that went without saying. And now the caffeine-accustomed blood vessels had narrowed so much that his headache lay there like unpleasant, throbbing background music. He had read that coffee addicts’ withdrawal symptoms took two weeks to disappear. But Anton didn’t want to renounce his addiction. He wanted coffee. He wanted it to taste good. Good like the mint taste of Mona’s tongue. But all he could taste now when he drank coffee was the bitter aftertaste of sleeping tablets.

He had plucked up the courage to ring Gunnar Hagen to tell him that he had been doped when the patient died. That he had been asleep while someone had been in the room. That even if the doctors said it had been a natural death, that could not have been the case. That they would have to do another, more thorough autopsy. Twice he had rung. Without getting an answer. He had tried. He had. And he would try again. Because it always catches up with you. Like now. It had happened again. Someone had been killed. He braked, turned off and took the gravel road up to Eikersaga, accelerated again and heard the small stones hitting the wheel arches.

It was even darker here, and there was already water lying in the hollows in the road. Midnight soon. It had been around midnight when it had happened the first time as well. As the location was close to the border of the neighbouring district, Nedre Eiker, an officer from that police force had been first on the crime scene after receiving a call from someone who had heard a crash and thought a car must have landed in the river. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the officer had entered the district without permission, he had also made a mess, gouging up the site with his car and obliterating potential clues.

Anton passed the bend where he had found it. The baton. It had been the fourth day after the murder of René Kalsnes and Anton had finally had a day off, but he had got restless and had gone for a walk in the forest on his own to continue the search. After all, murder wasn’t the kind of crime they had every day — or every year — in Søndre Buskerud Police District. He had left the area the search party had gone over with a fine-tooth comb. And that was where it had been, under the spruce trees behind the bend. That was where Anton had taken the decision, the stupid decision that had ruined everything. He decided not to report it. Why? First of all, it was such a long way up to the crime scene in Eikersaga that the baton could hardly have had anything to do with the murder. Later they had asked him why he had been searching there if he had really thought it was too far away to be of any relevance. But at the time he had just thought that a standard police baton would only lead to unnecessary and negative attention for the force. The injuries inflicted on René Kalsnes could have been caused by any heavy instrument or by being tossed around in the car when it had fallen off the precipice into the river forty metres below. And it wasn’t the murder weapon anyway. René Kalsnes had been shot in the face with a 9mm calibre handgun, and that had been the end of the story.

But Anton had told Laura about the baton a couple of weeks later. And it was her who ultimately persuaded him it should be reported and that it wasn’t up to him to assess how important the find was. So he had done it. He had gone to his boss and told him what he had found. ‘A serious miscalculation,’ the Chief of Police had called it. And the thanks he had received for spending his day off trying to help a murder investigation had been that they dropped him from active service and put him in an office answering a phone. In one fell swoop he had lost everything. For what? No one said it aloud, but René was generally known as a cold, unscrupulous bastard who had cheated friends and strangers alike, a person most considered the world was better off without. But the most mortifying part of the whole business had been that Krimteknisk hadn’t found any traces on the baton to link it with the murder. After three months of being incarcerated in the office Anton had the choice of going insane, resigning or getting himself moved. So he rang his old friend and colleague Gunnar Hagen, and he got him a job with Oslo Police. Professionally, what Gunnar offered him was a step backwards, but at least Anton was among people, and villains, in Oslo, and anything was better than the stale air of Drammen, where they tried to copy Oslo, calling their little station ‘Police HQ’, and even the address sounded plagiarised: Grønland 36 as compared with Oslo’s Grønlandsleiret.

Anton came over the brow of the hill, and his right foot automatically jumped on the brake when he saw the light. The tyres chewed gravel. Then the car came to a standstill. Rain was hammering down on the car, almost drowning the sound of the engine. A torch twenty metres ahead was lowered. The headlights picked up the reflectors on the orange-and-white tape and the yellow police vest of the person who had just lowered the torch. He waved him closer, and Anton drove on. This was where, behind the barrier, René’s car had driven off. They had used a breakdown truck with a crane and steel cables to drag the wreck up the river to the disused sawmill, where they’d managed to haul it onto land. They’d had to wriggle the body of René Kalsnes free as the engine had been knocked through into the car at hip height.

Anton pressed the button to open the window. Damp, chilly night air. Great, heavy raindrops hit the edge of the window, sending a fine spray over his neck.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Where. .?’

Anton blinked. He wasn’t sure if he had completed the sentence. It was like a tiny jump in time, a bad edit in a film, he didn’t know what had happened, just that he was absent. He looked down at his lap, at the fragments of glass there. He looked up again and discovered that the top part of the window was smashed. Opened his mouth, was about to ask what was going on. Heard something whistle through the air, sensed what it was, wanted to raise his arm, but was too slow. Heard a crunch. Realised it came from his own head, something breaking into pieces. Raised his arm, screamed. Got his hand on the gearstick, tried to put it in reverse. But it wouldn’t go. Everything was moving in slow motion. Wanted to slip the clutch, accelerate, but that would only send them forwards. Towards the edge. To the precipice. Straight down into the river. Forty metres. This was. . This was. . He shook the gear lever and pulled at it. Heard the rain more clearly and felt the chilly night air down the whole of the left side of his body now. Someone had opened the door. The clutch. Where was his foot? This was a carbon copy. Reverse gear. There we are.

Mikael Bellman stared up at the ceiling. Listened to the reassuring patter of rain on the roof. Dutch tiles. Guaranteed to last forty years. Mikael wondered how many tiles they sold just as a result of this guarantee. More than enough to pay for the ones that didn’t last that long. If there was one thing people wanted it was a guarantee that things would last.

Ulla lay with her head on his chest.

They had spoken. Spoken at length. For the first time he could remember. She had cried. Not the painful tears he hated but the others, the gentle tears that denoted less pain, more loss, the loss of something that had been and could never return. The tears that told him something in their relationship had been so precious it was worth the loss. He didn’t feel the loss until she cried. It was as though he needed her tears to show him. They removed the curtain that was normally there; the curtain between what Mikael Bellman thought and what Mikael Bellman felt. She was crying for them both, she always had done. She had laughed for them both as well.

He had wanted to comfort her. Had stroked her hair. Allowed her tears to wet the light blue shirt she had ironed for him the day before. Then he had, almost inadvertently, kissed her. Or had it been consciously? Had it been out of curiosity? The curiosity to know how she would react, the same kind of curiosity he had felt when he, as a young detective, had questioned suspects according to the Inbau, Reid and Buckley nine-step model, the step where they press the emotional button just to see what reaction they get.

At first Ulla had not reacted to the kiss, she had just stiffened. Then she had responded gently. He knew her kisses but not this one. The tentative, hesitant one. Then he had kissed her with more hunger. And she had taken off. Dragged him into bed. Torn off his clothes. And in the darkness he’d had the thought again. That she wasn’t him. Gusto. And his erection had subsided even before they were under the duvet.

He had explained that he was too tired. He’d had too much to think about. The situation was too confusing, the shame of what he had done too great. Hastening to add that she, the other woman, had nothing to do with it. And he was able to tell himself that this was actually true.

He closed his eyes again. But it was impossible to sleep. There was the unrest, the same unrest he had woken to over recent months, a vague feeling that something terrible had happened or was about to happen, and for some time he hoped it was just the lingering effect of a dream until he remembered it.

Something made him open his eyes again. A light. A white light on the ceiling. From the floor beside his bed. He turned and looked down at the display on his phone. On silent, but always on. He had agreed with Isabelle that they should never send messages at night. What her reason was, he had never asked. And she had appeared to take it well when he explained that they wouldn’t be able to see each other for a while. Even though he thought she had understood what he meant. That the bit about ‘a while’ should be deleted.

Mikael was relieved when he saw the text was from Truls. Then taken aback. Drunk probably. Or maybe the wrong number, maybe it was meant for a woman he hadn’t mentioned. The text consisted of two words:

Sleep well.

Anton Mittet woke up.

The first thing he registered was the sound of rain, which was now no more than a light mumble on the windscreen. Then that the engine was switched off, his head ached and he couldn’t move his hands.

He opened his eyes.

The headlamps were still on. They shone down along the ground, through the rain and into the darkness where the land suddenly vanished. The wet windscreen prevented him from seeing the spruce forest on the other side of the gorge, but he knew it was there. Uninhabited. Silent. Blind. They hadn’t been able to find witnesses that time. Not that time either.

He looked at his hands. The reason he couldn’t move them was that they were bound to the wheel with plastic ties. The ties had almost completely taken over from handcuffs in the police force now. You just put the narrow bands around the wrists of the arrestee and tightened them, they restrained even the strongest suspects; the most anyone who struggled could achieve was deep cuts into the skin and the flesh. To the bone, if they didn’t give up.

Anton gripped the wheel, with no feeling in his fingers.

‘Awake?’ The voice sounded strangely familiar. Anton turned to the passenger seat. Stared into the eyes peering through the holes of a balaclava. Same type Delta, the special forces, used.

‘Let’s release this, shall we?’

The gloved left hand gripped the handbrake between them and lifted it. Anton had always liked the rasp of the old handbrakes, it gave him a sense of the mechanics, of cogs and chains, of what was actually happening. This time it was lifted and released with barely a murmur. Just a slight crunch. The cogs. They rolled forward. But only a metre or two. Anton had instinctively stamped his foot on the brake pedal. He’d had to stamp hard as the engine was not switched on.

‘Good reactions, Mittet.’

Anton stared through the windscreen. The voice. That voice. He took his foot off the brake. It creaked like an unlubricated door hinge, the car moved and he stamped his foot back down. And held it there this time.

The interior light came on.

‘Do you think René knew he was going to die?’

Anton Mittet didn’t answer. He had just caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. At least he thought it was him. His face was covered with glistening blood. His nose was swollen on one side, probably broken.

‘How does it feel, Mittet? Knowing? Can you tell me that?’

‘Wh. . why?’ Anton’s question was almost an automatic response. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to know why. Just knew he was freezing cold. And that he wanted to get away. He wanted to go to Laura. To hold her. To be held by her. Smell her fragrance. Feel her warmth.

‘Haven’t you worked it out, Mittet? It’s because you didn’t solve the case, of course. I’m giving you all another chance. An opportunity to learn from earlier mistakes.’

‘L. . learn?’

‘Did you know that psychological research has shown that slightly negative feedback enhances your performance? Not very negative and not positive, but just a bit negative. Punishing all of you, killing just one detective from the group at a time, is like a series of slightly negative reports, don’t you think?’

The wheels creaked, and Anton stamped on the pedal again. Staring at the edge. It felt as though he would have to press even harder.

‘It’s the brake fluid,’ the voice said. ‘I punctured the pipe. It’s running out. Soon it won’t help however hard you press. Do you think you’ll be able to think while you’re falling? Or regret what you’ve done?’

‘Regret wha. .?’ Anton wanted to go on, but no more words came, his mouth seemed to be filled with flour. Fall. He didn’t want to fall.

‘Regret taking the baton,’ the voice said. ‘Regret not helping to find the murderer. It could have saved you from this, you know.’

Anton had a feeling he was squeezing the fluid out via the pedal, that the harder he pressed, the quicker the fluid was being drained from the system. He eased the pressure with his foot. The gravel under the tyres crunched, and in his panic he pushed his back against the seat and straightened his legs against the floor and the brake pedal. The car had two separate hydraulic brake systems; maybe just one of them had been punctured.

‘If you repent perhaps your sins will be forgiven, Mittet. Jesus is magnanimous.’

‘I. . I repent. Get me out.’

Low laughter. ‘But, Mittet, I’m talking about heaven. I’m not Jesus. You won’t get any forgiveness from me.’ Little pause. ‘And the answer is yes, I punctured both systems.’

For a moment Anton thought he could hear the brake fluid dripping from under the car until he noticed that it was his own blood dripping from the tip of his chin into his lap. He was going to die. It was suddenly such an inalienable fact that a chill washed through his body and it became more difficult to move, as though rigor mortis had already set in. But why was the murderer still sitting beside him?

‘You’re frightened of dying,’ the voice said. ‘It’s your body; it’s secreting a scent. Can you smell it? Adrenalin. It smells of medicine and urine. It’s the same odour you smell in old people’s homes and slaughterhouses. The smell of mortal fear.’

Anton gasped for air; there didn’t seem to be enough for both of them.

‘As for me, I’m not at all afraid of dying,’ the voice said. ‘Isn’t it strange? That you can lose something so fundamentally human as the fear of dying. Of course, it’s partly to do with the desire to live, but only partly. Many people spend their whole lives somewhere they don’t want to be out of fear that the alternative is worse. Isn’t that sad?’

Anton had a sense he was being suffocated. He had never had asthma himself, but he had seen Laura when she had an attack, seen the desperate, imploring expression on her face, felt the despair at not being able to help, at being no more than a spectator of her panic-stricken struggle to breathe. But a part of him had also been curious, wanting to know, to feel what it was like to be there, to feel you were on the verge of dying, to feel there was nothing you could do, it was something that was being done to you.

Now he knew.

‘I believe death is a better place,’ the voice intoned. ‘But I can’t join you now, Anton. You see, I have a job to do.’

Anton could hear the crunching of gravel again, like a hoarse voice slowly introducing a sentence with this sound that would soon go faster. And it was no longer possible to press the pedal any further, it was on the floor.

‘Goodbye.’

He felt the cold air from the passenger’s side as the door was opened.

‘The patient,’ Anton groaned.

He stared ahead at the edge, where everything disappeared, but felt the person in the passenger seat turn towards him.

‘Which patient?’

Anton stuck out his tongue, ran it along his top lip, sensing something moist that tasted sweet and metallic. Licked the inside of his mouth. Found his voice. ‘The patient at the Rikshospital. I was drugged before he was killed. Was that you?’

There was a couple of seconds’ silence as he listened to the rain. The rain out there in the darkness, was there a more beautiful sound? If he could have chosen he would have sat there listening to the sound day after day. Year after year. Listening and listening, enjoying every second he was given.

Then the body beside him moved, he felt the car rise as it was relieved of the man’s weight. The door closed softly. He was alone. The car was moving. The sound of tyres rolling slowly on gravel was like a husky whisper. The handbrake. It was fifty centimetres away from his right hand. Anton tried to pull his hands away. Didn’t even feel the pain as the skin burst. The husky whisper was louder and quicker now. He knew he was too tall and too stiff to get a foot under the handbrake, so he leaned down. Opened his mouth. Held the tip of the handbrake, felt it pressing against the inside of his upper teeth, pulled, but it slipped out. Tried again, knowing it was too late, but he preferred to die like this, fighting, desperate, alive. He twisted, held the brake lever in his mouth again.

Now it was totally still. The voice had gone quiet and the rain had come to a sudden stop. No, it hadn’t stopped. It was him. He was falling. Weightless, as he swirled round in a slow waltz, like the one he had danced that time with Laura while everyone they knew stood around watching. Rotated on his own axis, slowly, swaying, step-two-three, only now he was all alone. Falling in this strange silence. Falling with the rain.