Phantom

33

Through the narrow opening of the window in room 301 Harry heard a church bell strike eleven somewhere in the darkness. His aching chin and throat had one advantage: they kept him awake. He got out of bed and sat in the chair, tilted it back against the wall beside the window so that he was facing the door with the rifle in his lap.

He had stopped at reception and asked for a strong light bulb to replace the one that had gone in his room and a hammer to knock in a couple of nails sticking up from the door sill. Said he would fix them himself. Afterwards he had changed the weak bulb in the corridor outside and used the hammer to loosen and remove the door sill.

From where he was sitting he would be able to see the shadow in the gap beneath the door when they came.

Harry lit another cigarette. Checked the rifle. Finished the rest of the pack. Outside in the darkness the church bell chimed twelve times.

The phone rang. It was Beate. She said she had been given copies of four of the five lists from patrol cars trawling the Blindern district.

‘The last patrol car had already delivered its list to Orgkrim,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ Harry said. ‘Did you get the bags from Rita at Schroder’s?’

‘Yes, I did. I’ve told Pathology to make it a priority. They’re analysing the blood now.’

Pause.

‘And?’ Harry asked.

‘And what?’

‘I know that intonation, Beate. There’s something else.’

‘DNA tests take more than a few hours, Harry. It-’

‘-can take days before we have a final result.’

‘Yes, so for the time being it’s incomplete.’

‘How incomplete?’ Harry heard footsteps in the corridor.

‘Well, there’s at least a five per cent chance there’s no match.’

‘You’ve been given an interim DNA profile and have a match on the DNA register, haven’t you?’

‘We use incomplete tests only to say who we can eliminate.’

‘Who’s the match for?’

‘I don’t want to say anything until-’

‘Come on.’

‘No. But I can say it’s not Gusto’s own blood.’

‘And?’

‘And it’s not Oleg’s. Alright?’

‘Very alright,’ Harry said, suddenly aware that he had been holding his breath.

A shadow under the door.

‘Harry?’

Harry rang off. Pointed the rifle at the door. Waited. Three short knocks. Waited. Listened. The shadow didn’t move. He tiptoed along the wall towards the door, out of any possible firing line. Put his eye to the peephole in the middle of the door.

He saw a man’s back.

The jacket hung straight and was so short he could see the trouser waistband. A black piece of cloth hung from his back pocket, a cap perhaps. But he wasn’t wearing a belt. His arms hung close to his sides. If the man was carrying a weapon it had to be in a holster, either on his chest or on the inside of his calf. Neither very common.

The man turned to the door and knocked twice, harder this time. Harry held his breath while studying the distorted image of a face. Distorted, and yet there was something unmistakable about it. A pronounced underbite. And he was scratching himself under the chin with a card he had hanging from his neck. The way police officers sometimes carried ID cards when they were going to make an arrest. Shit! The police had been quicker than Dubai.

Harry hesitated. If the guy had orders to arrest him he would also have a blue chit with a search warrant he had already shown the receptionist and he would have been given a master key. Harry’s brain calculated. He tiptoed back, pushed the rifle in behind the wardrobe. Went back and opened the door. Said: ‘What do you want and who are you?’ while glancing up and down the corridor.

The man stared at him. ‘What a state you’re in, Hole. Can I come in?’ He held up his ID card.

‘Truls Berntsen. You used to work for Bellman, didn’t you?’

‘Still do. He sends his regards.’

Harry stepped aside and let Berntsen go first.

‘Cosy,’ Berntsen said, looking around.

‘Take a seat,’ Harry said, indicating the bed and sitting on the chair by the window.

‘Chewing gum?’ Berntsen said, offering a packet.

‘Gives me cavities. What do you want?’

‘As friendly as ever?’ Berntsen grinned, rolled up the chewing gum, placed it in his drawer-like prognathous jaw and sat down.

Harry’s brain was registering intonation, body language, eye movement, smell. The man was relaxed, yet threatening. Open palms, no sudden movements, but his eyes were collecting data, reading the situation, preparing for something. Harry already regretted stowing his rifle. Failure to hold a licence was the least of his problems.

‘Thing is, we found blood on Gusto’s shirt in connection with a grave desecration at Vestre Cemetery last night. And the DNA test shows it to be your blood.’

Harry watched as Berntsen neatly folded the silver paper that had been wrapped round the chewing gum. Harry remembered him better now. They had called him Beavis. Bellman’s errand boy. Stupid and smart. And dangerous. Forrest Gump gone bad.

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ Harry said.

‘No, I can imagine,’ Berntsen said with a sigh. ‘Mistake on the register perhaps? I’ll have to drive you down to Police HQ to take another blood sample.’

‘I’m searching for a girl,’ Harry said. ‘Irene Hanssen.’

‘She’s in Vestre Cemetery?’

‘She’s been missing since this summer at any rate. She’s the foster-sister of Gusto Hanssen.’

‘News to me. Nevertheless you’ll have to come with me down to-’

‘It’s the girl in the middle,’ Harry said. He had taken the Hanssen family photograph from his jacket pocket and passed it to Berntsen. ‘I need a bit of time. Not much. Afterwards you’ll understand why I’ve had to do things like this. I promise to report within forty-eight hours.’

‘ 48 Hours,’ Berntsen said, studying the picture. ‘Good film. Nolte and that negro. McMurphy?’

‘Murphy.’

‘Right. Stopped being funny, he did. Isn’t that strange? You have something, and then suddenly you’ve lost it. How do you think that feels, Hole?’

Harry looked at Truls Berntsen. He wasn’t so sure about this Forrest Gump thing any more. Berntsen held the photograph up to the light. Squinted with concentration.

‘Do you recognise her?’

‘No,’ said Berntsen, passing the picture back as he twisted round. Obviously it wasn’t comfortable sitting on the item of clothing he had in his back pocket because he quickly moved it to his jacket pocket. ‘We’re going for a ride to Police HQ, where we will review your forty-eight hours.’

His tone was light. Too light. And Harry had already done his thinking. Beate had prioritised her DNA tests at the Pathology Unit and still did not have a final result. So how come Berntsen had a blood test result off Gusto’s shroud? And there was another thing. Berntsen hadn’t moved the item quickly enough. It wasn’t a cap, it was a balaclava. The type used when Gusto was executed.

And the next thought followed hard on its heels. The burner.

Were the police perhaps not the first on the scene? Was it not Dubai’s lackey?

Harry considered the rifle behind the wardrobe. But it was too late to escape now. In the corridor he heard footsteps approaching. Two people. One of them so big the floorboards creaked. The footsteps stopped outside the door. The shadows of two pairs of legs, standing akimbo, fell across the floor under the crack. He could of course have hoped they were police colleagues of Berntsen, that this was a real arrest. But he had heard the floor’s lament. A big man, he guessed the size of the figure running after him through Frogner Park.

‘Come on,’ Berntsen said, getting up and standing in front of Harry. Scratched his chest inside his lapel in an apparently casual way. ‘A little ride, just you and me.’

‘We’re not alone, it seems,’ Harry said. ‘I see you have backup.’

He nodded to the shadow under the door. Another shadow appeared. A straight, oblong shadow. Truls followed his gaze. And Harry saw it. The genuine astonishment on his face. The kind of astonishment types like Truls Berntsen cannot simulate. They weren’t Berntsen’s people.

‘Move away from the door,’ Harry whispered.

Truls stopped masticating the chewing gum and looked down at him.

Truls Berntsen liked to have his Steyr pistol in a shoulder holster, positioned in such a way that the gun lay flat against his chest. It made it harder to see when you stood face to face with someone. And as he knew that Harry Hole was an experienced detective, trained by the FBI in Chicago and so on, he also knew that Hole would automatically notice anything bulky in the usual places. Not that Truls reckoned he would need to use the pistol, but he had taken precautions. If Harry resisted he would escort him outside with the Steyr discreetly pointing at his back, having put on the balaclava so that any potential witnesses couldn’t say whom they had seen with Hole before he disappeared off the face of the earth. The Saab was parked in a backstreet; he had even smashed the only street lamp so that no one would see the number plate. Fifty thousand euros. He had to be patient, build stone by stone. Get a house a bit higher up in Hoyenhall with a view, looking down on them. Down on her.

Harry Hole had seemed smaller than the giant he remembered. And uglier. Pale, ugly, dirty and exhausted. Resigned, unfocused. This was going to be an easier job than he had anticipated. So when Hole whispered he should move away from the door Truls Berntsen’s first reaction was irritation. Was the guy attempting to play games now everything looked to be going so well? But his second reaction was that this was the voice they used. Police officers in critical situations. No colouring, no drama, just a neutral, cold clarity with the least possible chance of a misunderstanding. And the greatest possible chance of survival.

So Truls Berntsen — almost without thinking — took a step to the side.

At that moment the top part of the door panel was blown into the room.

As Berntsen whirled round his instinctive conclusion was that the barrel must have been sawn off to have such wide coverage at such short range. He already had a hand inside his jacket. With the shoulder holster in its conventional position and without a jacket he would have drawn faster as the handle would have been sticking out.

Truls Berntsen fell backwards onto the bed with the gun freed and at the end of an outstretched arm as the remains of the door opened with a bang. He heard the glass shatter behind him before everything was drowned by a new explosion.

The noise filled his ears, and there was a snowstorm in the room.

In the doorway the silhouettes of two men stood in the snowdrift. The taller one raised his gun. His head almost touched the door frame, he must have been well over two metres. Truls fired. And fired again. Felt the wonderful recoil and even more wonderful certainty that this was for real, to hell with the consequences. The tall one jerked, seemed to flick his fringe before stepping back and disappearing from view. Truls shifted his pistol and his gaze. The second man stood there without moving. White feathers fluttered around him. Truls had him in his sights. But he didn’t fire. He saw him more clearly now. Face like a wolf. The kind of face Truls had always associated with the Sami, Finns and Russians.

Now the guy calmly raised his gun. Finger wrapped around the trigger.

‘Easy, Berntsen,’ he said in English.

Truls Berntsen gave a long, drawn-out roar.

Harry fell.

He had lowered his head, crouched up and moved back as the first blast of the shotgun sprayed over his head. Back to where he knew the window was. Felt the pane almost bend before it remembered it was glass and gave way.

Then he was in free fall.

Time had jammed on the brakes, as though he was falling through water. Hands and arms working like slow paddles in a reflex attempt to stop the body rotating into the beginnings of a backward somersault. Semi-transmitted thoughts bounced between the brain’s synapses:

He was going to land on his head and break his neck.

It was lucky he didn’t have curtains.

The naked woman in the window opposite was upside down.

Then he was received by softness everywhere. Empty cardboard boxes, old newspapers, used nappies, milk cartons and day-old bread from the hotel’s kitchen, wet coffee filters.

He lay on his back in the open skip amid a shower of glass. Flashes of light appeared from the window above him, like camera flashbulbs. Muzzles of flames. But it was eerily quiet, as though the flashes came from a TV with the volume turned down. He could feel the gaffer tape around his neck had torn. Blood was streaming out. And for one wild moment he considered staying where he was. Closing his eyes, going to sleep, drifting off. He seemed to be watching himself sit up, jump over the edge of the skip and race towards the gate at the end of the yard. Open it as he heard a protracted, furious roar from the window reach the street. Slip on a drain cover but manage to stay on his feet. See a black woman in tight jeans, on the game, who smiled instinctively and pouted at him, then reviewed the situation and averted her gaze.

Harry set off.

And decided that this time he would just run.

Until there was nowhere left to run.

Until it was over, until they had him.

He hoped it wouldn’t be too long.

In the meantime he would do what hunted prey are programmed to do: flee, try to escape, try to survive for a few more hours, a few more minutes, a few more seconds.

His heart pounded in protest, and he began to laugh as he crossed the street in front of a night bus and continued down towards Oslo Central.