The Redeemer

5

Monday, 15 December. The Lighthouse.

Jone found Robert in the backyard of Fretex, the Salvation Army shop in Kirkeveien.

He was leaning against the door frame with his arms crossed watching the guys carrying the bin bags from the lorry into the storeroom in the shop. They were blowing white speech bubbles which they filled with swear words in a variety of dialects and languages.

'Good catch?' Jon asked.

Robert shrugged. 'People happily give away their whole summer wardrobe so that they can buy new clothes next year. But it's winter clothes we need now.'

'Your boys use colourful language. Paragraph twelve types – doing social work instead of prison?'

'I counted up yesterday. We've now got twice as many volunteers doing a stretch as we have people who have turned to Jesus.'

Jon smiled. 'Untilled fields for missionaries. Just a question of getting started.'

Robert called one of the boys, who threw him a pack of cigarettes. Robert put a coffin nail between his lips, no filter.

'Take it out,' Jon said. 'Soldier's vows. You could be dismissed.'

'I wasn't thinking of lighting it, bruv. What do you want?'

Jon shrugged. 'A chat.'

'What about?'

Jon chuckled. 'It's quite normal for brothers to have a chat now and then.'

Robert nodded and picked flakes of tobacco off his tongue. 'When you say chat, you usually mean you're going to tell me how to lead my life.'

'Come on.'

'What is it then?'

'Nothing! I was wondering how you were.'

Robert took out the cigarette and spat in the snow. Then he peered up into the high, white cloud cover.

'I'm bloody sick of this job. I'm bloody sick of the flat. I'm bloody sick of the shrivelled-up, hypocritical sergeant major running the show here. If she weren't so ugly I would…' Robert grinned, '… fuck the old prune face stupid.'

'I'm freezing,' Jon said. 'Can we go in?'

Robert walked ahead into the tiny office and sat on a chair squeezed between a cluttered desk, a narrow window with a view of the backyard and a red-and-yellow flag with the Salvation Army's motto and emblem 'Fire and Blood'. Jon lifted a heap of papers, some yellowing with age, off a wooden chair he knew Robert had pinched from the Majorstuen Corps' room next door.

'She says you're a malingerer,' Jon said.

'Who?'

'Sergeant Major Rue.' Jon grimaced. 'Prune face.'

'So she rang you. Is that how it is?' Robert poked around in the desk with his pocket knife, then burst out: 'Oh, yes, I forgot. You're the new admin boss, the boss of the whole shebang.'

'No decision has been made yet. It might well be Rikard.'

'Whatever.' Robert carved two semicircles in the desk to form a heart. 'You've said what you came to say. Before you bugger off, can I have the five hundred for your shift tomorrow?'

Jon took the money from his wallet and laid it on the desk in front of his brother. Robert stroked the blade of the knife against his chin. The black bristles rasped. 'And I'll remind you of one more thing.'

Jon knew what was coming and swallowed. 'And what's that?'

Over Robert's shoulder he could see it had begun to snow, but the rising heat from the houses around the backyard made the flimsy white flakes stand still in the air outside the window, as though listening.

Robert placed the point of the knife in the centre of the heart. 'If I find you even once in the vicinity of you know who…' He put his hand around the shaft of the knife and leaned forward. His body weight forced the blade into the dry wood with a crunch. 'I'll destroy you, Jon. I swear I will.'

'Am I disturbing?' came a voice from the door.

'Not at all, fru Rue,' Robert said, as sweet as pie. 'My brother was just about to leave.'

The Chief Superintendent and the new POB, Gunnar Hagen, stopped talking when Bjarne Moller came into his office. Which of course was no longer his.

'Well, do you like the view?' Moller asked in what he hoped was a cheery tone. And added: 'Gunnar.' The name felt strange on his tongue.

'Mm, Oslo is always a sad sight in December,' Gunnar Hagen said. 'But we'll have to see whether we can sort that out, too.'

Moller felt an urge to ask what he meant by 'too', but stopped when he saw the Chief Superintendent give a nod of approval.

'I was giving Gunnar the low-down on the people around here. In all confidence, you understand.'

'Ah, yes, you two know each other from before.'

'Yes indeed,' said the Chief Superintendent. 'Gunnar and I have known each other ever since we were cadets at what used to be called Police School.'

'It said in the memo that you do the Birkebeiner race every year,' Moller said, turning to Gunnar Hagen. 'Did you know that the Chief Superintendent does, too?'

'Oh, yes, indeed.' Hagen looked over at the Chief Superintendent with a smile. 'Sometimes Torleif and I go together. And try to outdo each other in the final spurt.'

'Well, I never,' Moller said, amused. 'So if the Chief had been on the appointment board, he could have been accused of cronyism.'

The Chief Superintendent gave a dry chuckle and Bjarne Moller an admonitory glance.

'I was telling Gunnar about the man you so generously presented with a watch.'

'Harry Hole?'

'Yes,' Gunnar Hagen said. 'I know he's the man who killed an inspector in connection with that tedious smuggling business. Tore the man's arm off in a lift, I heard. And now he's also under suspicion of leaking the case to the press. Not good.'

'First of all, the "tedious smuggling business" was a gang of pros, with offshoots in the police, who flooded Oslo with cheap handguns for years,' Bjarne Moller said, trying in vain to keep the irritation out of his voice. 'A case which Hole, despite the resistance here in HQ, solved unaided thanks to many years of painstaking police work. Secondly, he killed Waaler in self-defence and it was the lift that tore off his arm. And, thirdly, we have no evidence whatsoever regarding who leaked what.'

Gunnar Hagen and the Chief Superintendent exchanged glances.

'Be that as it may,' the Chief Superintendent said, 'he's someone you'll have to keep an eye on, Gunnar. From what I gather his girlfriend left him of late. And we know that men with Harry's bad habits are extra susceptible to relapses. Which, of course, we cannot accept, however many cases he's solved in this unit.'

'I'll keep him in line,' Hagen said.

'He's an inspector,' Moller said, closing his eyes. 'Not rank and file. Not very keen on being kept in line, either.'

Gunnar Hagen nodded slowly as his hand went up through his thick wreath of hair.

'When is it you begin in Bergen…' Hagen lowered his hand, 'Bjarne?'

Moller guessed his name sounded just as strange on the other man's tongue.

Harry wandered down Urtegata and could see by the footwear of the people he met that he was getting close to the Lighthouse. The guys in the Narco Unit used to say that no one did more for the identification of addicts than the Army amp; Navy surplus stores. Because sooner or later military footwear ended up on junkies' feet via the Salvation Army. In the summer it was blue trainers; in the winter, like now, the junkie's uniform was black military boots together with a green plastic bag containing a Salvation Army packed lunch.

Harry swung through the door with a nod to the guard wearing the Salvation Army hoody.

'Anything?' the guard asked.

Harry patted his pockets. 'Nothing.'

A sign on the wall said all alcohol had to be handed in at the door and taken away when leaving. Harry knew they had given up on drugs and the equipment. No junkie would hand that in.

Harry entered, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat on the bench by the wall. Fyrlyset, the Lighthouse, was the Army's cafe, the new millennium's version of the soup kitchen where the needy were given free snacks and coffee. A cosy, well-lit room where the only difference between this and the usual cappuccino bar was the clientele. Ninety per cent of drug users were male. They ate slices of white bread with Norwegian brown or white cheese, read the newspapers and had quiet conversations round the tables. It was a free zone, a chance to thaw out and have a breather from the search for the day's fix. Although undercover police dropped by now and again, there was a tacit agreement that no arrests would be made inside.

A man sitting next to Harry had frozen into a deep bow. His head hung down over the table and in front of him black fingers held a cigarette paper. There were a few emptied dog-ends scattered around.

Harry noticed the uniformed back of a mini-woman changing burnt-down candles on a table with four picture frames. Inside three of them were individual photographs; inside the fourth a cross and a name on a white background. Harry stood up and walked over.

'What are they?' he asked.

Perhaps it was the slim neck or the grace of the movement, or the smooth, raven-black, almost unnatural, shiny hair that made Harry think of a cat even before she had turned round. The impression was reinforced by the small face with the disproportionately broad mouth and the pertest of noses possible, like those the characters in Harry's Japanese comics had. But, more than anything else, it was the eyes. He couldn't put his finger on why, but something about them was not right.

'November,' she answered.

She had a calm, deep, gentle alto voice that made Harry wonder if it was natural or a way of speaking she had acquired. He had known women who did that, who changed their voices the way they changed clothes. One voice for home use; one for first impressions and social occasions; and one for night-time intimacies.

'What do you mean?' Harry asked.

'Our November crop of deaths.'

Harry looked at the photos and he realised what she meant.

'Four?' he said in a low voice. In front of the pictures was a letter written with an unsteady hand in pencilled capitals.

'On average one customer dies a week. Four is not out of the ordinary. Our remembrance day is on the first Wednesday of every month. Is there anyone you…?'

Harry shook his head. 'My dearest Geir,' the letter began. No flowers.

'Is there anything I can help you with?' she asked.

It struck Harry that she may not have had any other voices in her repertoire, just this deep, warm tone.

'Per Holmen…' Harry started, not knowing quite how to finish.

'Poor Per, yes. We'll have a remembrance day for him in January.

Harry nodded. 'First Wednesday.'

'That's it. And you're very welcome to come, brother.'

This 'brother' was enunciated with such unforced ease, like an underplayed and hence almost unarticulated appendix to the sentence. For a moment Harry almost believed her.

'I'm a detective,' Harry said.

The difference in height between them was so great that she had to crane her neck to see him clearly.

'I've seen you before, I think, but it must be years ago.'

Harry nodded. 'Maybe. I've been here once or twice, but I haven't seen you.'

'I'm part-time here. Otherwise I'm at the Salvation Army headquarters. And you work in the drugs division?'

Harry shook his head. 'Murder investigations.'

'Murder. But Per wasn't murdered…?'

'Can we sit down for a moment?'

She hesitated and looked round.

'Busy?' Harry asked.

'Not at all, it's unusually quiet. On a normal day we serve 1,800 slices of bread. But today's dole day.'

She called one of the boys behind the counter, who agreed to take over. Harry caught her name at the same time. Martine. The head of the man with the empty cigarette paper had been ratcheted down a few more notches.

'There are a couple of things that don't check out,' Harry said after sitting down. 'What sort of person was he?'

'Hard to say,' she said. Harry's quizzical expression produced a sigh. 'When you've been on drugs for so many years, like Per, the brain is so destroyed that it's hard to see a personality. The urge to get high is all-pervasive.'

'I know that, but I mean… to people who knew him well…'

'Can't help, I'm afraid. You can ask Per's father how much of his son's personality was left. He came down here a couple of times to collect him. In the end, he gave up. He said Per had started to threaten them at home, because they locked away all their valuables when he was around. He asked me to keep an eye on the boy. I said we would do our best, but we couldn't promise miracles. And we didn't of course…'

Harry observed her. Her face expressed nothing more than the usual social worker's resignation.

'It must be hell,' Harry said, scratching his leg.

'Yes, you have to be an addict yourself to understand it.'

'To be a parent, I was thinking.'

Martine didn't answer. A man in a torn quilted jacket had come to the neighbouring table. He opened a transparent plastic bag and emptied out a pile of dry tobacco that must have come from hundreds of fag ends. It covered the cigarette paper and the black fingers of the man sitting there.

'Happy Christmas,' the man mumbled and departed with the junkie's old-man gait.

'What doesn't check out?' Martine asked.

'The blood specimen shows almost no toxins,' Harry said.

'So?'

Harry looked at the man next to him. He was desperately trying to roll a cigarette, but his fingers would not obey. A tear ran down his brown cheek.

'I know a couple of things about getting high,' Harry said. 'Do you know if he owed money to anyone?'

'No.' Her answer was curt. So much so that Harry already knew the answer to his next question.

'But you could maybe-'

'No,' she interrupted, 'I cannot make enquiries. Listen, these are people no one cares about, and I am here to help them, not to persecute them.'

Harry gave her a searching look. 'You're right. I apologise for asking and it won't happen again.'

'Thank you.'

'Just one last question?'

'Come on.'

'Would you…' Harry hesitated, wondering if he was about to commit a blunder. 'Would you believe me if I said I did care?'

She angled her head and studied Harry. 'Should I?'

'Well, I'm investigating a case everyone thinks is the cut-and-dried suicide of a person no one cared about.'

She didn't answer.

'It's good coffee.' Harry got up.

'You're welcome,' she said. 'And may God bless you.'

'Thank you,' Harry said, feeling, to his surprise, the lobes of his ears flush.

On his way out he stopped in front of the guard and turned, but she had gone. The man in the hoody offered Harry the green plastic bag with the packed lunch, but he turned it down, pulled his coat tighter around him and went out into the streets where he could already see the sun making its blushing retreat into Oslo fjord. He walked towards the Akerselva. In the area known as Eika a man was standing erect in a snowdrift with the sleeve of a quilted jacket rolled up and a needle hanging from his forearm. He smiled as he looked straight through Harry and the frosty mist over Gronland.