The Redbreast

26

POT, Police HQ. 21 February 2000.

Harry cast his eyes around. At the tidy, well-organised shelves of ring-binders neatly displayed in chronological order. At the walls where diplomas and distinctions from a career in smooth ascent hung. A black and white photograph of a younger, uniformed Kurt Meirik, with the rank of major, greeting King Olav hung behind the desk and caught the eye of everyone who came in. This was the picture Harry sat studying when the door opened behind him.

'I apologise for keeping you waiting, Hole. Stay seated.'

It was Meirik. Harry hadn't made a move to stand up.

'Well,' said Meirik, taking a seat behind his desk. 'How has your first week with us been?'

Meirik sat upright in his chair and revealed a row of large yellow teeth, in a way which made you suspect he had overdone the smile training in his life.

'Fairly dull,' Harry said.

'Heh, heh. It hasn't been that bad, has it?' Meirik seemed surprised. 'Well, you've got better coffee than we have downstairs.’

‘Crime Squad have, you mean?'

'Sorry,' Harry said. 'It takes time to get used to it. To "we" being POT now.'

'Yes, we'll just have to be a bit patient. That's true for a number of things. Isn't it, Hole, eh?'

Harry nodded assent. No point running at windmills. Not in the first month, anyway. As expected, he had been given an office at the end of a long corridor, which meant that he didn't see more of the others working there than was absolutely necessary. His job consisted of reading reports from regional POT offices and quite simply evaluating whether they were case files which should be passed up higher into the system. Meirik's instructions had been absolutely clear: unless it was rubbish, everything should be passed on. In other words, Harry's job was to filter out the dross. Last week, three reports had come in. He had tried to read them slowly, but there were limits to how long he could drag it out. One of the reports was from Trondheim and dealt with the new electronic monitoring equipment no one knew how to operate, as their monitoring expert had left. Harry passed it on. The second one concerned a German businessman in Bergen whom they now declared 'not suspicious' because he had delivered the consignment of curtain rails he said he was there to deliver. Harry passed that one on. The third was from the Ostland region, from the police station in Skien. They had received some complaints from chalet owners in Siljan who had heard shooting the previous weekend. Since they weren't in the hunting season, an officer had gone up to investigate and had found empty cartridges of an unknown make in the woods. They had sent the cartridges to the forensics department within Kripos, the Norwegian CID, who had reported back that the ammunition was probably for a Marklin rifle, a very unusual weapon.

Harry had passed the report on, but not before taking a copy for himself.

'Right, what I wanted to talk to you about was a poster that has come into our possession. Neo-Nazis are planning to kick up a fuss outside mosques in Oslo on 17 May. There is some movable Muslim feast which falls on the seventeenth this year, and a great many foreign parents are refusing to allow their children to take part in the children's Independence Day parade because they want them to go to the mosque.’

‘Eid.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Eid. Their holy day. It's the Muslims' Christmas Eve.’

‘So you're into this stuff?'

'No, but I was invited to a dinner by my neighbour last year. They're Pakistani. They thought it was so sad for me to sit alone on Eid.'

'Really? Hm.' Meirik put on his Oberinspektor Derrick glasses.

'I've got the poster here. They write that it is an insult to your host country to celebrate anything other than Norwegian Independence Day on 17 May. And they say that blacks are happy to claim benefits, but shirk every single Norwegian citizen's obligation.'

'To be obedient and shout "Hurrah" for Norway as the parade goes by,' Harry said, pulling out his pack of cigarettes. He had noticed the ashtray on top of the bookcase and Meirik nodded in response to Harry's enquiring glance. Harry lit up, drew the smoke deep into his lungs and tried to imagine the blood vessels in the lung wall greedily absorbing the nicotine. Life was becoming shorter and the thought that he would never stop smoking filled him with a strange satisfaction. Ignoring the warning on the cigarette packet might not be the most flamboyant act of rebellion a man could allow himself, but at least it was one he could afford.

'See what you can find out,' Meirik said.

'Fine, but I warn you I have a short fuse where skinheads are concerned.'

'Heh, heh.' Meirik showed his large yellow teeth again and Harry realised what he reminded him of: a dressage horse. 'Heh, heh.'

'There was another thing,' Harry said. 'It's about the report on the ammunition found in Siljan. It's for a Marklin rifle.'

'I have a vague recollection of hearing something about that, yes.'

'I've been doing a bit of checking of my own.'

'Oh?'

Harry picked up on the chill tone.

'I checked the National Firearms Registry for last year. No Marklin rifles have been registered in Norway.'

'That doesn't surprise me. The list must already have been checked by people here after you passed on the report, Hole. Not your job, you know.'

'Perhaps not. But I wanted to be sure that whoever was dealing with it followed up Interpol's reports on arms smuggling.’

‘Interpol? Why should we do that?'

'No one is importing these rifles into Norway, so this one has been smuggled in.'

Harry took a print-out from his breast pocket.

'This is a copy of a list of consignments Interpol found during a raid on an illegal arms dealer in Johannesburg in November. Look here. A Marklin rifle. And there's the destination, Oslo.'

'Hm. Where did you get hold of this?'

'The Interpol file on the Net. Available to anyone in POT. Anyone who can be bothered.'

'Really?' Meirik's gaze settled on Harry for a moment before scrutinising the print-out more closely.

'This is all very well, but arms smuggling is not our business, Hole. If you knew how many illegal weapons the police confiscate in the course of one year -'

'Six hundred and eleven,' Harry said.

'Is that so?'

'Last year. And that's just the police authority in Oslo. Two out of three are taken off criminals, mainly small arms, pump guns and sawn-off shotguns. On average one gun is confiscated every day. In the nineties the number almost doubled.'

'Fine, so you understand that we in POT cannot prioritise an unregistered rifle in Buskerud.'

Meirik was struggling to maintain his composure. Harry exhaled smoke through his mouth and studied it as it rose to the ceiling.

'Siljan isn't in Buskerud,' he said.

Meirik's jaw muscles were working hard.

'Have you rung Customs amp; Excise, Hole?’

‘No.'

Meirik looked at his watch, a lumpen, inelegant steel job Harry guessed he had been given for long and faithful service.

'Then I suggest you do. This is a case for them. Right now I have more pressing -'

'Do you know what a Marklin rifle is, Meirik?'

Harry watched the POT boss's eyebrows jump up and down and wondered if it was already too late. He could feel the swish of the windmills.

'Not my business, either, by the way, Hole. You'd better take this up with…'

Kurt Meirik suddenly seemed to realise that he was Hole's only line manager.

'A Marklin rifle,' Harry said, 'is a German semi-automatic hunting rifle which uses 16 mm bullets, bigger than those of any other rifle. It is intended for use on big game hunts, such as for water buffalo or elephants. The first rifle was made in 1970, but only three hundred were made before the German authorities banned the sale of the weapon in! 973- The reason was that the rifle is, with a couple of simple adjustments and Marklin telescopic sights, the ultimate professional murder weapon, and it had already become the world's most sought after assassination weapon by 1973. Of the three hundred rifles at least one hundred fell into the hands of contract killers and terrorist organisations like Baader Meinhof and the Red Brigade.'

'Hm. Did you say one hundred?' Meirik passed the print-out back to Harry. 'That means that two out of three use the gun for what it was intended. Hunting.'

'This is not a weapon for hunting elk or any other kind of hunting common in Norway'

'Really? Why not?'

Harry wondered what it was that held Meirik back. Why didn't he ask him to finish his cigarette and go? And why was he himself so keen to provoke such a reaction? Perhaps it was nothing, perhaps he was just getting old and grumpy. Whatever it was, Meirik was behaving like a well-paid childminder who didn't dare touch the brat. Harry observed the long column of ash bending towards the floor.

'First of all, hunting is not a millionaire's sport in Norway. A Marklin rifle with telescopic sights costs around 150,000 Deutschmarks-in other words, the same as a new Mercedes. And every cartridge costs 90 Deutschmarks. Secondly, an elk hit by a 16 mm bullet looks as if it has been in a collision with a train. A pretty messy business.'

'Heh, heh.' Meirik had obviously decided to change tactics. Now he was leaning back with his hands behind his shiny pate, as a sign that he wouldn't mind Hole entertaining him for a while yet. Harry stood up, took the ashtray down from the top shelf and returned to his seat.

'Of course the cartridges may belong to some fanatical arms collector who has tested out his new rifle and now keeps it hanging in a glass showcase in a big house somewhere in Norway, never to be used again. But dare we assume that?' Harry shook his head. 'I suggest I take a trip up to Skien and have a peep at this place. Besides, I doubt that it was a pro up there.'

'Really?'

'Pros clean up after themselves. Leaving empty cartridges is like leaving a business card. But if it's an amateur with a Marklin rifle, that doesn't make me feel any more reassured.'

Meirik uttered a few hmm-sounds. Then he nodded.

'Fine. And keep me posted if you find out anything about the Independence Day plans of our neo-Nazis.'

Harry stubbed out his cigarette. Venice, Italy, it said on the side of the gondola-shaped ashtray.