Nemesis

3

The House of Pain

'Seen the video?'

The battered office chair screamed in protest as Police Officer Halvorsen leaned back and looked at his nine-years-senior colleague, Inspector Harry Hole, with an expression of disbelief on his innocent young face.

'Absolutely,' Harry said, running thumb and first finger down the bridge of his nose to show the bags under his bloodshot eyes.

'The whole weekend?'

'From Saturday morning to Sunday evening.'

'Well, at least you had a good time on Friday night,' Halvorsen said.

'Yes.' Harry took a blue folder out of his coat pocket and placed it on the desk facing Halvorsen's. 'I read the transcripts of the interviews.'

From the other pocket Harry took a grey packet of French Colonial coffee. He and Halvorsen shared an office at almost the furthest end of the corridor in the red zone on the sixth floor of Police Headquarters in Grшnland. Two months ago they had gone to buy a Rancilio Silvia espresso coffee machine, which had taken pride of place on the filing cabinet beneath a framed photograph of a girl sitting with her legs up on a desk. Her freckled face seemed to be grimacing, but in fact she was helpless with laughter. The background was the same office wall on which the picture was hanging.

'Did you know that three out of four policemen can't spell "uninteresting" properly?' Harry said, hanging his coat on the stand. 'They either leave out the "e" between the "t" and the "r", or-'

'Interesting.'

'What did you do at the weekend?'

'On Friday, thanks to some anonymous nutter's phone call warning us about a car bomb, I sat in a car outside the American ambassador's residence. False alarm, of course, but things are so sensitive right now that we had to sit there all evening. On Saturday, I made another attempt to find the woman of my life. On Sunday, I concluded that she doesn't exist. What did you get on the robber from the interviews?' Halvorsen measured the coffee into a double-cup filter.

'Nada,' Harry said, taking off his sweater. Underneath, he was wearing a charcoal-grey T-shirt-it had once been black and now bore the faded letters Violent Femmes. He collapsed into the office chair with a groan. 'No one has reported seeing the wanted man near the bank before the robbery. Someone came out of a 7-Eleven on the other side of Bogstadveien and saw the man running up Industrigata. It was the balaclava that caught his attention. The surveillance camera outside the bank shows both of them as the robber passes the witness in front of a skip outside the 7-Eleven. The only interesting thing he could tell us which wasn't on the video was that the robber crossed the road twice further up Industrigata.'

'Someone who can't make up his mind which pavement to walk on. That sounds pretty uninteresting to me.' Halvorsen put the double-cup filter in the portafilter handle. 'With two "e"s, one "r" and one "s".'

'You don't know much about bank robberies, do you, Halvorsen.'

'Why should I? We're supposed to catch murderers. The guys from Hedmark can take care of the robbers.'

'Hedmark?'

'Haven't you noticed as you walk around the Robberies Unit? The rural dialect, the knitted cardigans. But what's the point you're making?'

'The point is Victor.'

'The dog handler?'

'As a rule, the dogs are the first on the scene, and an experienced bank robber knows that. A good dog can follow a robber on foot, but if he crosses the street and cars pass, the dog loses the scent.'

'So?' Halvorsen compressed the coffee with the tamper and finished off by smoothing the surface with a twist, which he maintained was what distinguished the professionals from the amateurs.

'It corroborates the suspicion that we are dealing with an experienced bank robber. And that fact alone means we can concentrate on a dramatically smaller number of people than we might otherwise have done. The Head of Robberies told me-'

'Ivarsson? Thought you weren't exactly on speaking terms?'

'We aren't. He was talking to the whole of the investigation team. He said there are under a hundred bank robbers in Oslo. Fifty of them are so stupid, doped up or mental that we nail them almost every time. Half of them are in prison, so we can ignore them. Forty are skilled craftsmen who manage to slip through so long as someone helps them with the planning. And then there are ten pros, the ones who attack security vans and cash-processing centres. To get them we need a lucky break, and we try to keep tabs on them at all times. They're being asked to give alibis right now.' Harry cast a glance at Silvia, who was gurgling away on the filing cabinet. 'And I had a word with Weber from Forensics on Saturday.'

'Thought Weber was retiring this month.'

'Someone slipped up. He won't be stopping until the summer.'

Halvorsen chuckled. 'He must be even grumpier than usual then.'

'He is, but that's not the reason,' Harry said. 'His lot found sod all.'

'Nothing?'

'Not one fingerprint. Not one strand of hair. Not even clothing fibres. And, of course, you could see from the footprint that he was wearing brand new shoes.'

'So they can't check the patterns of wear against other shoes?'

'Cor-rect,' Harry said, with a long 'o'.

'And the bank robber's weapon?' said Halvorsen, taking one of the cups of coffee over to Harry's desk. On looking up, he noticed that Harry's left eyebrow was almost into his cropped blond hair. 'Sorry. The murder weapon.'

'Thank you. It wasn't found.'

Halvorsen sat on his side of the two desks sipping at his coffee. 'So, in a nutshell, a man walked into a crowded bank in broad daylight, took two million kroner, murdered a woman, strolled out, up a relatively unpopulated but heavily trafficked street in the centre of the capital of Norway, a few hundred metres from a police station and we, the salaried police professionals, do not have a thing to go on?'

Harry nodded slowly. 'Almost nothing. We have the video.'

'Which you can visualise every second of, if I know you.'

'No, every tenth of a second, I would say.'

'And you can quote the witnesses' statements verbatim?'

'Only August Schulz's. He told me a lot of interesting things about the War. Reeled off the names of competitors in the clothing industry; so-called good Norwegians who had supported the confiscation of his family's property during the War. He knew precisely what these people are doing nowadays. Yet he didn't realise that a bank robbery had been committed.'

They drank their coffee in silence. The rain beat against the window.

'You like this life, don't you,' Halvorsen said suddenly. 'Sitting alone all weekend chasing ghosts.'

Harry smiled, but didn't answer.

'I thought that now you had family obligations you'd given up the solitary lifestyle.'

Harry sent his younger colleague an admonitory grimace. 'Don't know if I see it like that,' he said slowly. 'We don't even live together, you know.'

'No, but Rakel has a little boy and that makes things different, doesn't it?'

'Oleg,' Harry said, edging his way towards the filing cabinet. 'They flew to Moscow on Friday.'

'Oh?'

'Court case. Father wants custody.'

'Ah, that's right. What's he like?'

'Hm.' Harry straightened the crooked picture above the coffee machine. 'He's a professor Rakel met and married while she was working there. He comes from a wealthy, traditional family with loads of political influence, Rakel says.'

'So they know a few judges, eh?'

'Bound to, but we think it'll be alright. The father's a wacko, and everyone knows that. Bright alcoholic with poor self-control, you know the type.'

'I think I do.'

Harry looked up smartly, just in time to see Halvorsen wipe away a smile.

At Police HQ it was fairly well known that Harry had alcohol problems. Nowadays, alcoholism is not in itself grounds for dismissing a civil servant, but to be drunk during working hours is. The last time Harry had had a relapse, there were people higher up in the building who had advocated having him removed from the force, but Politiavdelingssjef, PAS for short, Bjarne Mшller, head of Crime Squad, had spread a protective wing over Harry pleading extenuating circumstances. The circumstances had been the woman in the picture above the espresso machine-Ellen Gjelten, Harry's partner and close friend-who had been beaten to death with a baseball bat on a path down by the river Akerselva. Harry had struggled to his feet again, but the wound still stung. Particularly because, in Harry's opinion, the case had never been cleared up satisfactorily. When Harry and Halvorsen had found forensic evidence incriminating the neo-Nazi Sverre Olsen, Inspector Tom Waaler had wasted no time in going to Olsen's home to arrest him. Olsen had apparently fired a shot at Waaler, who had returned fire in self-defence and killed him. According to Waaler's report, that is. Neither the investigations at the scene of the shooting, nor the inquiry by SEFO, the independent police authority, suggested otherwise. On the other hand, Olsen's motive for killing Ellen had never been explained, beyond indications that he had been involved in the illegal arms trafficking which had caused Oslo to be flooded with handguns over recent years, and Ellen had stumbled onto his trail. Olsen was just an errand boy, though; the police still didn't have any leads on those behind the liquidation.

After a brief guest appearance with Politiets Overvеkningstjeneste, or POT, the Security Service, on the top floor, Harry had applied to rejoin Crime Squad to work on the Ellen Gjelten case. They had been all too happy to get rid of him. Mшller was pleased to have him back on the sixth floor.

'I'll just nip upstairs to give Ivarsson this,' Harry muttered, waving the VHS cassette. 'He wanted to take a look with a new wunderkind they have up there.'

'Oh? Who's that?'

'Someone who left Police College this summer and has apparently solved three robberies simply by studying the videos.'

'Wow. Good-looking?'

Harry sighed. 'You young ones are so boringly predictable. I hope she's competent. I don't care about the rest.'

'Sure it's a woman?'

'Herr and fru Lшnn might have called their son Beate for a joke, I suppose.'

'I have an inkling she's good-looking.'

'Hope not,' Harry said, ducking, out of ingrained habit, to allow his 192 centimetres to pass under the door frame.

'Oh?'

The answer was shouted from the corridor: 'Good police officers are ugly.'

At first sight, Beate Lшnn's appearance didn't give any firm indicators either way. She wasn't ugly; some would even call her doll-like. But that might have been mostly because she was small: her face, nose, ears-and her body. Her most prominent feature was her pallor. Her skin and hair were so colourless that she reminded Harry of a corpse Ellen and he had once fished out of Bunnefjord. Unlike with the woman's body, however, Harry had a feeling that if he just turned away for a second he would forget what Beate Lшnn looked like. Which, it seemed, she wouldn't have minded as she mumbled her name and allowed Harry to shake her small, moist hand before she quickly retrieved it.

'Inspector Hole is a kind of legend here in the building, you know,' PAS Rune Ivarsson said, standing with his back to them and fiddling with a bunch of keys. At the top of the grey iron door in front of them a sign said, in Gothic letters: THE HOUSE OF PAIN. And underneath: CONFERENCE ROOM 508. 'Isn't that right, Hole?'

Harry didn't answer. He had absolutely no doubt about the kind of legendary status Ivarsson had in mind; he had never made the slightest attempt to hide his view that Harry was a blot on the force and should have been removed years ago.

Ivarsson finally unlocked the door and they went in. The House of Pain was the Robberies Unit's dedicated room for studying, editing and copying video recordings. There was a large table in the middle with three workplaces; no windows. The walls were covered with shelving packed with video tapes, a dozen posters of wanted robbers, a large screen on one wall, a map of Oslo and various trophies from successful arrests: for example beside the door, where two cut-off woollen sleeves with holes for eyes and mouth hung from the wall. Otherwise the room contained grey PCs, black TV monitors, video and DVD players as well as a number of other machines which Harry could not have identified.

'What has Criiime Squad got out of the video?' Ivarsson asked, flopping down onto one of the chairs. He drawled the diphthong in an exaggerated fashion.

'Something,' Harry said, walking over to a shelf of video cassettes.

'Something?'

'Not very much.'

'Shame you lot didn't come to the lecture I gave in the canteen last September. All the units were represented except yours, if I'm not very much mistaken.'

Ivarsson was tall, long-limbed, with a fringe of undulating blond hair above two blue eyes. His face had those masculine characteristics which models for German brands like Boss tend to have, and was still tanned after many summer afternoons on the tennis court and perhaps the odd solarium session in a fitness centre. In short, Rune Ivarsson was what most would regard as a good-looking man, and as such he underpinned Harry's theory about the link between looks and competence in police work. However, what Rune Ivarsson lacked in investigative talent, he made up for with a nose for politics and the ability to form alliances within the Police HQ hierarchy. Furthermore, Ivarsson had the natural self-confidence that many misinterpret as a leadership quality. In his case, this confidence was based solely on being blessed with a total blindness to his own shortcomings, a quality which would inevitably take him to the top and one day make him-in one way or another-Harry's superior. Initially, Harry saw no reason to complain about mediocrity being kicked upwards, out of the way of investigations, but the danger with people like Ivarsson was that they could easily get it into their heads that they should intervene and dictate to those who really understood detection work.

'Did we miss anything?' Harry asked, running a finger along the small handwritten labels on the videos.

'Maybe not,' Ivarsson said. 'Unless you're interested in those minute details which solve crime cases.'

Harry successfully resisted the temptation to say he hadn't gone to the lecture because he had been told by others, who had attended earlier talks, that the sole purpose of his grandstanding was to announce to all and sundry that after he had taken over as Head of the Robberies Unit the clear-up rate for bank robberies rose from thirty-five per cent to fifty per cent. Not a word about the fact that his appointment coincided with a doubling of manpower in his unit, a general extension of their investigative powers and the simultaneous departure of their worst investigator-Rune Ivarsson.

'I regard myself as reasonably interested,' Harry said. 'So, tell me how you solved this one.' He took out one of the cassettes and read aloud what was written on the label: '20.11.94, NOR Savings Bank, Manglerud.'

Ivarsson laughed. 'Gladly. We caught them the old-fashioned way. They switched getaway cars at a waste site in Alnabru and set fire to the one they dumped. But it didn't burn out. We found the gloves of one of the robbers and traces of DNA. We matched them with those of known robbers our investigators had highlighted as potential suspects after having seen the video, and one of them fitted the bill. The idiot had fired a shot into a ceiling and got four years. Anything else you were wondering about, Hole?'

'Mm.' Harry fidgeted with the cassette. 'What sort of DNA was it?'

'I told you, DNA that matched.' The corner of Ivarsson's left eye began to twitch.

'Right, but what was it? Dead skin? A nail? Blood?'

'Is that important?' Ivarsson's voice had become sharp and impatient.

Harry told himself he should keep his mouth shut. He should give up these Don Quixote-like offensives. People like Ivarsson would never learn, anyway.

'Maybe not,' Harry heard himself say. 'Unless you're interested in those minute details which solve crime cases.'

Ivarsson looked daggers at Harry. In the specially insulated room the silence felt like physical pressure on everyone's ears. Ivarsson opened his mouth to speak.

'Knuckle hair.'

Both men in the room turned to Beate Lшnn. Harry had almost forgotten she was there. She looked from one to the other and repeated in a near-whisper: 'Knuckle hair. The hair on your fingers…isn't that what it's called…?'

Ivarsson cleared his throat. 'You're right, it was a hair. But I think it was-although we don't need to go into this any deeper-a hair from the back of the hand. Isn't that right, Beate?' Without waiting for an answer he tapped on the glass of his large wristwatch. 'Have to be off. Enjoy the video.'

As the door slammed behind Ivarsson, Beate took the video cassette out of Harry's hand and the next moment the video player sucked it in with a hum.

'Two hairs,' she said. 'In the left-hand glove. From the knuckle. And the rubbish tip was in Karihaugen, not Alnabru. But the bit about four years is right.'

Harry gave her an astonished look. 'Wasn't that a little before your time?'

She shrugged as she pressed PLAY on the remote control. 'It's only a matter of reading reports.'

'Mm,' Harry said and studied her profile. Then he made himself comfortable in the chair. 'Let's see if this one left behind a few knuckle hairs.'

The video player groaned and Beate switched off the light. In the moments that followed, while the blue lead-in picture illuminated them, another film unravelled in Harry's head. It was short, lasting barely a couple of seconds, a scene bathed in the blue strobe light from Waterfront, a long-defunct club in Aker Brygge. He didn't know her name, the woman with the smiling brown eyes who was trying to shout something to him above the music. They were playing cow-punk. Green on Red. Jason and the Scorchers. He poured Jim Beam into his Coke and didn't give a stuff what her name was. The next night, though, he knew. When they were in the bed adorned with a ship's figurehead, a headless horse, had cast off all the moorings and set out on their maiden voyage. Harry felt the warmth in his belly from the evening before when he had heard her voice on the telephone.

Then the other film took over.

The old man had begun his trek across the floor towards the counter, filmed from a different camera every five seconds.

'Thorkildsen at TV2,' Beate Lшnn said.

'No, it's August Schulz,' Harry said.

'I mean the editing,' she said. 'It looks like Thorkildsen's handiwork at TV2. There are a few tenths missing here and there…'

'Missing? How can you see…?'

'Number of things. Follow the background. The red Mazda you can make out in the street outside was in the centre of the picture on two cameras when the picture shifted. An object can't be in two places at the same time.'

'Do you mean someone has bodged the recording?'

'Not at all. Everything on the six cameras inside and the one outside is recorded on the same tape. On the original tape the picture jumps quickly from one camera to another and all you see is a flicker. So the film has to be edited to get longer coherent sequences. Occasionally we call in people from the TV stations when we don't have the capacity. TV editors like Thorkildsen fiddle with the time code to improve the quality of the recording, not as jagged. Professional neurosis, I guess.'

'Professional neurosis,' Harry repeated. It struck him that was a strangely middle-aged thing for a young girl to say. Or perhaps she wasn't as young as he had first thought? Something had happened to her as soon as the lights were off. The silhouetted body language was more relaxed, her voice firmer.

The robber entered the bank and shouted in English. His voice sounded distant and muffled, it seemed to be wrapped in a duvet.

'What do you think about this?' Harry asked.

'Norwegian. He speaks English so that we won't recognise his dialect, accent or any characteristic words we might be able to link to earlier robberies. He's wearing smooth clothes which don't leave fibres we might be able to trace in getaway cars, bolt-holes or his house.'

'Mm. Any more?'

'All the openings in his clothes are taped over so he won't leave any traces of DNA. Like hair or sweat. You can see his trouser legs are taped round his boots, and the sleeves round his gloves. I would guess he has tape round his head and wax on his eyebrows.'

'A pro then?'

She shrugged. 'Eighty per cent of bank raids are planned less than a week in advance and are carried out by people under the influence of alcohol or drugs. This one was thought through and the robber doesn't appear to be on anything.'

'How can you make that out?'

'If we'd had better light and cameras, we'd have been able to magnify the pictures and see his pupils. But we don't, so I go by his body language. Calm, considered movements, can you see that? If he was on anything, it wasn't speed or any kind of amphetamine. Rohypnol, perhaps. That's the popular one.'

'Why's that?'

'Robbing a bank is an extreme experience. You don't need speed, just the opposite. Last year someone went into Den norske Bank in Solli plass with an automatic weapon, peppered the ceiling and walls and ran out again without any money. He told the judge that he'd popped so much amphetamine that he just had to get it out of his system. I prefer criminals who take Rohypnol, if I may put it like that.'

Harry motioned with his head to the screen. 'Look at Stine Grette's shoulder at position number 1; she's pressing the alarm. And the sound on the recording is suddenly much better. Why?'

'The alarm is connected to the recording device, and when it is activated the film begins to run much faster. That gives us better pictures and better sound. Good enough for us to analyse the robber's voice. And, then, speaking English doesn't help him.'

'Is it really as reliable as they say?'

'The sound of our vocal cords is like a fingerprint. If we can give our voice analyst, at the university in Trondheim, ten words on tape, he can match two voices with ninety-five per cent reliability.'

'Mm. But not with the sound quality we had before the alarm went, I take it?'

'It's less reliable.'

'So that's why he shouts in English first, and then when he reckons the alarm has been activated, he uses Stine Grette as his mouthpiece.'

'Exactly.'

In silence they observed the black-clad man manoeuvring himself over the counter, putting the gun barrel to Stine Grette's neck and whispering into her ear.

'What do you think about her reaction?' Harry asked.

'What do you mean?'

'Her facial expression. She seems relatively calm, don't you think?'

'I don't think anything. Generally, you can't get much information from a facial expression. I would think her pulse is close on 180.'

They watched Helge Klementsen floundering on the floor in front of the cash dispenser.

'Hope he gets proper post-trauma treatment,' Beate said sotto voce and shook her head. 'I've seen people become psychological wrecks after being exposed to robberies like this one.'

Harry said nothing, but thought that statement had to be something she had picked up from older colleagues.

The robber turned and displayed six fingers.

'Interesting,' Beate mumbled and, without looking down, made a note on the pad in front of her. Harry followed the young policewoman out of the corner of his eye and watched her jump when the shot was fired. While the robber on the screen swept up the holdall, sprang over the counter, and ran out of the door, Beate's little chin rose and her pen fell out of her hand.

'We haven't put the last part on the Net, or passed it on to any of the TV stations,' Harry said. 'Look, now he's on the camera outside the bank.'

They watched the robber walk across the pedestrian crossing-on green-in Bogstadveien before making his way up Industrigata. Then he was outside the frame.

'And the police?' Beate asked.

'The closest police station is in Sшrkedalsveien just after the toll station, only eight hundred metres from the bank. Nevertheless, it took just over three minutes from the time the alarm went off until they arrived. So the robber had less than two minutes to make his escape.'

Beate looked at the screen thoughtfully, at the people and cars passing by as though nothing had happened.

'The escape was as meticulously planned as the hold-up. The getaway car was probably parked around the corner so that it wouldn't be caught by the cameras outside the bank. He's been lucky.'

'Perhaps,' Harry said. 'On the other hand, he doesn't strike you as someone who relies on good fortune, does he?'

Beate shrugged. 'Most bank robberies seem well planned if they're successful.'

'OK, but here it was odds on that the police would be delayed. On Friday at this time all the patrol cars in the area were busy somewhere else, at-'

'-the American ambassador's residence!' Beate exclaimed, slapping her forehead. 'The anonymous phone call about the car bomb. I had Friday off, but I saw it on the TV news. And if you think how hysterical people are nowadays, it's obvious everyone there would have been.'

'There was no bomb.'

'Of course not. It's the classic ruse to keep the police busy somewhere else before a hold-up.'

They sat watching the last part of the recording in thoughtful silence. August Schulz standing waiting at the pedestrian crossing. Green changes to red and back again without him moving. What's he waiting for? Harry wondered. An irregularity? An extra-long sequence on green? A kind of hundred-year green wave? Alright. Should come soon. In the distance he heard the police sirens.

'There's something not quite right.'

Beate Lшnn answered with the weary sigh of an old man: 'There's always something not quite right.'

Then the film was over and the snowstorm swept across the screen.