Police

15

The black VW Sharan slowly rose in circles towards the blue sky. Like a rocket in super slow motion, Katrine thought, watching the trail, which was not fire and smoke but water running from the doors and boot of the crushed car, dissolving into drops and glistening in the sun on its way down to the river.

‘We hauled the car up here last time,’ the local police officer said.

They were standing by the disused sawmill with the peeling red paint and smashed panes in the small windows. The withered grass lay on the ground like a Hitler fringe, combed in the direction the rain had fallen the previous night. In the shadows lay grey flecks of slushy snow. Doomed, a prematurely returning migratory bird sang optimistically, and the river gurgled with contentment.

‘But this one was stuck between two rocks, so it was easier to raise it straight up.’

Katrine’s gaze followed the river downstream. Above the sawmill, there was a dam, where the water trickled between the enormous grey rocks that had embraced the vehicle. She saw the sun glinting on the scattered fragments of glass. Then her eyes were drawn up the vertical rock face. Drammen granite. It was a concept apparently. She glimpsed the tail of the truck and the yellow crane protruding over the edge of the precipice high up. Hoped someone had worked out the weight versus jib ratio correctly.

‘But if you’re detectives, why aren’t you up there with the others?’ said the policeman who let them through the cordon after carefully examining their ID cards.

Katrine shrugged. She couldn’t exactly say they were apple scrumping, four people with no real authorisation, on the kind of mission that meant they should keep their distance from the official investigation unit.

‘We can see what we need to see from here,’ Beate Lønn said. ‘Thanks for letting us look.’

‘No problem.’

Katrine Bratt switched off her iPad, which was still logged into the Norwegian Prisons site, then hurried after Beate Lønn and Ståle Aune, who had already crossed the cordon and were on their way back to Bjørn Holm’s forty-year-old-plus Volvo Amazon. Its owner came sauntering down the steep gravel road from the top and caught them up at the old-timer with no air conditioning, airbag or central locking, but with two chequered speed stripes over the bonnet, roof and tail. Katrine concluded from Holm’s heaving chest that he would hardly satisfy the current PHS entrance requirements.

‘Well?’ Beate said.

‘The face is partly smashed, but they reckon the body’s probably one Anton Mittet,’ Holm said, removing his Rasta hat and using it to wipe the sweat from his round face.

‘Mittet,’ Beate said. ‘Of course.’

The others turned to her.

‘A local officer. He took over from Simon in Maridalen. Do you remember, Bjørn?’

‘No,’ Holm said, without any visible shame. Katrine assumed he had got used to the idea that his boss was from Mars.

‘He used to be in the Drammen force. And he was tangentially involved in the investigation of the previous murder here.’

Katrine shook her head in astonishment. It was one thing for Beate to react as soon as the message about a car in the river had appeared on the police log and she had ordered them all to Drammen because she remembered that it was the exact spot where René Kalsnes had been murdered several years ago. And quite another for her to remember the name of a Drammen man who had been tangentially involved in the investigation.

‘He was easy to remember because he made such a blunder,’ said Beate, obviously having noticed Katrine shaking her head. ‘He kept quiet about a baton he found because he was frightened it could implicate the police. Did they say anything about the probable cause of death?’

‘No,’ Holm said. ‘It’s pretty clear he would have been killed by the fall. The handbrake went through his mouth and out the back of his head. But he must have been beaten while he was alive because his face was bruised.’

‘Could he have driven off the cliff himself?’ Katrine asked.

‘Maybe. But his hands were attached to the wheel with cable ties. There were no brake marks, and the car hit the rocks close to the cliff, so it can’t have been going very fast. Must have just rolled over.’

‘Handbrake in his mouth?’ Beate said with a frown. ‘How did that happen?’

‘His hands were tied and the car was rolling towards the edge,’ Katrine said. ‘He must have been trying to pull it with his mouth.’

‘Perhaps. Anyway, this is a policeman. He was killed at an old crime scene.’

‘On a murder that was never cleared up,’ Bjørn Holm added.

‘Yes, but there are some important differences between that murder and the murders of the girls in Maridalen and Tryvann,’ Beate said, waving the report they had printed at breakneck speed before leaving the basement office. ‘René Kalsnes was a man and there were no signs of sexual abuse.’

‘There’s an even more important difference,’ Katrine said.

‘Oh?’

She patted the iPad under her arm. ‘I was just checking criminal records and the lists of prisoners as we were coming here. Valentin Gjertsen was serving a short sentence in Ila when René Kalsnes was killed.’

‘Shit!’ That was Holm.

‘Now now,’ Beate said. ‘That doesn’t rule out Valentin killing Anton Mittet. He might have broken the pattern here, but it’s still the same madman behind it. Isn’t it, Ståle?’

The three of them turned to Ståle Aune, who had been unusually quiet. Katrine noticed that the plump man was also unusually pale. He was leaning on the door of the Amazon, and his chest was rising and falling.

‘Ståle?’ Beate repeated.

‘Sorry,’ he said, making an unsuccessful attempt to smile. ‘The handbrake. .’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Beate said with an equally unsuccessful attempt to hide her impatience. ‘Is this our cop killer or not?’

Ståle Aune straightened up. ‘Serial killers can break the pattern, if that’s what you’re asking me. But I don’t think this is a copycat continuing where the first. . er, cop killer left off. As Harry was wont to say, a serial killer is a white whale. So, a serial killer of police officers is a white whale with pink dots. There aren’t two of them.’

‘So we agree this is the same murderer,’ Beate stated. ‘But the prison sentence pulls the carpet from under the theory that Valentin is visiting his old haunts and repeating the murders.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Bjørn said, ‘this is the only murder where the murder itself is also a copy. The blows to the face, the car in the river. That may have some significance.’

‘Ståle?’

‘It might mean that he feels he’s becoming more skilled, that he’s perfecting the murders by making them polished replicas.’

‘Come on,’ Katrine bridled. ‘You’re making him sound like an artist.’

‘Really?’ Ståle said, sending her a quizzical look.

‘Lønn!’

They turned. From the top of the hill came a man with a flapping Hawaiian shirt, quivering belly and dancing curls. The relatively high speed appeared to be more a consequence of the steep gradient of the hill than any enthusiasm on the body’s part.

‘Let’s get going,’ Beate said.

They had piled into the Amazon, and Bjørn was making a third stab at starting the car when a bony index finger tapped on the window at the front where Beate was sitting.

She gave a low groan and wound down the window.

‘Roger Gjendem,’ she said. ‘Does Aftenposten have any questions I can answer with “no comment”?’

‘This is the third policeman to be murdered,’ the man in the Hawaiian shirt gasped, and Katrine was able to confirm that, fitness-wise, Bjørn Holm had met his inferior. ‘Have you got any leads?’

Beate Lønn smiled.

‘N-O C-O-M. .’ Roger Gjendem spelt out, while pretending to write in his notebook. ‘We’ve been keeping an ear open. Picking up little things. A garage owner says Mittet filled up at his place late last night. He thought Mittet was alone. Does that mean. .?’

‘No. .’

‘. . comment. I reckon your police chief will have to make you carry loaded guns from now on.’

Beate raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The gun in Mittet’s glove compartment.’ Gjendem bent down and cast a suspicious look at the others, to see if they really hadn’t got this basic information. ‘Empty, even though there was a box of ammo there. If he’d had his gun loaded it might have saved his life.’

‘Do you know what, Gjendem?’ Beate said. ‘You can just add ditto marks after the first answer you got. Actually, I’d prefer it if you didn’t mention this little meeting to anyone.’

‘Why’s that?’

The engine growled into life.

‘Have a nice day, Gjendem.’ Beate began to wind up the window. But not quickly enough to avoid the next question.

‘Are you missing you-know-who?’

Holm let go of the clutch.

Katrine watched Roger Gjendem shrinking in the mirror.

But waited until they had passed Liertoppen before she said what everyone was thinking.

‘Gjendem’s right.’

‘Yes,’ Beate sighed. ‘But he’s no longer available, Katrine.’

‘I know, but we have to try!’

‘Try what?’ Bjørn Holm asked. ‘Digging up a man declared dead and buried?’

Katrine stared out at the monotonous trees as they glided along the motorway. Thinking how once she had flown in a police helicopter above here, the most densely populated part of Norway, and how it had struck her that even here there was just so much forest and wilderness. Places people didn’t go. Places to hide. That even here houses were tiny dots in the night, the motorway a thin stripe through the impenetrable darkness. That it was impossible to see everything. That you had to be able to smell. To listen. To know.

They had almost arrived in Asker, but they had travelled in a silence so impenetrable that when Katrine did answer no one had forgotten the question.

‘Yes,’ she said.