Assassin

52

Ole Ravnsborg looked down at the damp, huddled figure wrapped in a rough woollen blanket, sitting on a metal chair in his office and shivering unhappily. The young man's hands were wrapped around a mug of hot coffee. It did not appear to have done much to raise his spirits. So Ravnsborg began by giving him the good news.

'We found your moped, Mr Olsen,' he said. 'It was abandoned in Aker Brygge, at the end of Stranden, just as he promised. He even left your helmet.'

Per Olsen looked up, feeling better than he had done for some time. He almost managed a grin. 'That's great,' he said. 'Can I take it away now?'

'Afraid not,' Ravnsborg told him. 'We need to do forensic tests and then we may have to hold it as evidence, in the event of a trial.'

Olsen looked downcast again. 'But that could be months!'

'It could, yes, I am sorry about that. But you will get it back eventually…' He thought for a moment. '… Assuming there are no appeals.'

'Thanks a lot.' Olsen was now plunged into the pits of that melodramatic, self-pitying despair that is reserved for those in their teens and early twenties.

Ravnsborg pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him. 'Now, tell me exactly, in detail, what happened to you.'

'Why should I?' Olsen sulked.

'Grow up,' said Ravnsborg. 'I am not your father, having some stupid argument. I am a police officer attempting to understand two violent, criminal incidents in which at least ten people died, and I am not interested in playing childish games. Either you talk to me, or I throw you in a cell overnight for obstructing my investigation. And, no, you will not be given dry clothes.'

'All right, all right… I get it.'

It took Ravnsborg a while, and there were points where even he, who prided himself on his non-violent nature, was tempted to grab Olsen by the neck and shake some sense into him, but in the end he had a clear picture of events.

'There is just one point I want to be completely certain of,' he concluded. 'The man who stole your moped was armed. He placed his gun against the back of your neck…'

'The barrel was hot,' Olsen said, 'I just remembered.'

'So he had already used the gun. In fact, you may be interested to hear, he had just shot two men dead and killed a third with his bare hands.'

'My God…' Olsen wrapped the blanket even tighter around his body, as if it could protect him.

'And yet he did not shoot you. In fact, he did nothing to you, except throw you in the water.'

'That wasn't nothing!'

'Oh yes, I think it was. And he even told you where you would be able to find your moped afterwards.'

'I shouldn't have told your men that. I should have waited and just gone to get it myself.'

'But then you would have been committing a crime, so it is as well that you did not. As it is, you have been a great help to me, Mr Olsen. Thank you. And I will have one of my men drive you home, so you won't even miss your moped.'

When Olsen had been led away, Ravnsborg sat for a while in silence, letting the many apparently contradictory elements of the evening's events sort themselves out in his mind. Olsen's survival was just one of these. If Carver were really a heartless killer, why had he not killed the young man when stealing his ridiculous little moped? It would have removed a witness. Ravnsborg wished there were some way of seeing precisely what had happened around the hotel and up on the roof of the opera house. Oslo was not littered with CCTV cameras every few metres: the Norwegian government, unlike so many of its counterparts, still trusted its people to go about their business unobserved.

Ravnsborg was musing on this fact when a thought suddenly struck him. The government might take that view, but the people, particularly the young, were just like their counterparts everywhere else. They photographed or videoed every single moment of their lives. And then they put it online.

The massive policeman lumbered off to the incident room. He looked around, mentally sorting through his officers until he found two detectives who looked particularly juvenile and, to his eyes, badly dressed. He thought they would understand the task best.

'You, you… come here!' he snapped. 'Go on the internet – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all those places. Find everything you can relating to the bomb at the Haakon, and the shoot-out at the Operaen. Oh, and anything that anyone took between those two points. In fact, find every damn frame of material taken in Oslo tonight. Stick it all together. Then come and get me.' It was amazing, Ravnsborg mused, this total change in the way the world perceived itself, and it had happened almost overnight. There had been no massive advertising campaigns, no government policies: just a spontaneous global decision to make everyone visible everywhere, all the time.

Already there were six different YouTube entries that showed the actual moment of the explosion, and more than twice as many dealing with the aftermath. The first group all began with something extraneous in the foreground: a girl posing awkwardly for her boyfriend, trying not to look embarrassed; two teenage lads pulling silly faces at the rich folk gathered inside the hotel cafe; an elderly couple arm in arm, smiling at the grandchild recording them on his phone. But the next scene was always the same: a blast of light and flame; a tremor as the force hit the person holding the camera or phone; the boom of the blast, followed by screams and shouts of alarm. The YouTube films all kept rolling. In the post 9/11 world, everyone understood the value of live disaster footage. But there was another film, retrieved by detectives at the site itself. Immediately after the blast, this one switched to a single, unchanging shot: the night sky seen through the blood-smeared filter of the glass that had killed the young woman behind the lens.

It was now possible for Ravnsborg to assemble a sort of montage that showed the run-up to the explosion, the blast itself and the aftermath from a series of different angles. He knew now that Madeleine Cross had not been lying when she described the events at her cafe table. He could see her behind the face-pulling boys. Larsson, too, was there. And, yes, there was a third figure, just rising from the table as the film began. That must be Carver.

It was only when he had spent more than two hours watching the same few minutes of footage again and again that Ravnsborg spotted a fourth individual, a red-haired man, standing outside the cafe, tapping out a message on a phone. That same figure was on another film, walking into the hotel, barely a second before the blast. He could be seen emerging fifteen seconds later. So, too, was a man who appeared to be wearing a T-shirt similar to the one worn by the man in the cafe that Ravnsborg had identified as Carver. He stood for a moment outside the hotel, a single point of stillness among the confusion all around him. Then the red-haired man came up behind him.

That took him by surprise, thought Ravnsborg, zooming in as close as he could on Carver's face.

The other man was very close to him, whispering in his ear. Were these instructions, perhaps? Or was he making threats? For Carver's face twice winced as though he had been hurt. Ravnsborg wished he had a shot that could give him a view from beside or behind the redhead, just so he could see what he was sticking in Carver's back. The obvious assumption was a knife, for Carver then jerked forward, arching his back and pulling his hands round to protect his kidneys.

Ravnsborg could then see what Carver had not, the red-haired man sidling back into the crowd and disappearing down the street. Carver, meanwhile, looked around. He saw someone – Ravnsborg knew from his witness statement that this must have been Larsson – then ran.

But why? Was this the natural reaction of a fugitive, fleeing the scene of a crime? Or was Carver fleeing something else?

The answers to his question, Ravnsborg felt sure, lay up on the roof of the opera house. He went and poured himself yet another black coffee, then settled down again. He was using a workstation equipped with a widescreen the size of a large domestic TV. It enabled him to get several different shots in front of him at the same time.

His young officers had collected all the material they had found into folders covering specific times, places and incidents. Sipping on his coffee as he worked, he clicked on the one marked 'Operaen'. There were nine different video files, and 114 photos.

Ravnsborg rubbed his aching eyes. He slapped his hand against his cheek to sting himself back awake. And then he got down to work.