The Redbreast

83

Harry's Flat. 11 May 2000.

Harry didn't feel like a loser when, shortly before midnight, he unlocked the door to his flat and saw the red eye on the answerphone blinking. He had carried Oleg to bed and drunk tea, and Rakel had said that one day she would tell him a long story. When she wasn't so exhausted. Harry had answered that she needed a holiday, and she agreed.

'We could go together, all three of us,' he had said, 'when this business is over.'

She had stroked his hair.

'This is not the sort of thing to be flippant about, Harry Hole.’

‘Who's being flippant?'

'I can't talk about this now. Go on home, Harry Hole.'

They had kissed a little more in the hallway, and Harry still had the taste of her on his lips.

Without turning on the light, he crept into the sitting room in stockinged feet and pressed the play button of the answerphone. Sindre Fauke's voice filled the darkness:

'Fauke here. I've been thinking. If Daniel Gudeson is more than a ghost, there's only one person on this earth who can solve this riddle. And that's the man who was on watch that New Year's Eve when Daniel Gudeson was apparently shot dead: Gudbrand Johansen. You have to find Gudbrand Johansen, Inspector Hole.'

Then there was the sound of the receiver being replaced, a bleep, and where Harry expected the click, a new message instead.

'Halvorsen here. It's 11.30. I've just received a call from one of the officers outside Mosken's flat. They've been waiting and waiting, but he hasn't returned home. So they tried to ring the number in Drammen, just to see if he would answer the phone. But he didn't answer. One of the men drove to Bjerken, but everything was locked up and the lights were off. I asked them to stick it out for a while yet and put out a call for Mosken's car on police radio. Just so you know. See you tomorrow.'

New bleep. New message. New record on Harry's answerphone.

'Halvorsen again. I'm going senile. I completely forgot to mention the other thing. Looks as if we've finally had a bit of luck. The SS archive in Cologne didn't have any personal details about Gudeson or Johansen. They told me to ring the central Wehrmacht archive in Berlin. There I talked to a nice old grump who said that very few Norwegians had been in the regular German army. But when I explained the matter to him, he said he would check anyway. After a while he rang back and said that, as expected, he hadn't found anything about Daniel Gudeson. However, he had found copies of some papers concerning one Gudbrand Johansen, also a Norwegian. It appeared from the papers that he had been transferred from the Waffen SS to the Wehrmacht in 1944. A note was made on the copies that the original papers were sent to Oslo in the summer of 1944, which, according to our man in Berlin, could only mean that Johansen had been sent there. He also found some correspondence with a doctor who had signed Johansen's medical certificates. In Vienna.'

Harry sat down on the only chair in the room.

'The doctor's name was Christopher Brockhard, at the Rudolf II Hospital. I checked with the Viennese police and it turns out the hospital is still fully functional. They even gave me the name and telephone number of twenty-odd people who worked there during the war and are still alive.'

The Teutons know how to archive, Harry thought.

'So I began ringing round. I'm really crap at speaking German!'

Halvorsen's laughter crackled in the loudspeaker.

I rang eight of them before I found a nurse who could remember Gudbrand Johansen. She was an old lady of seventy-five. Remembered him very well, she said. You'll have the number and her address tomorrow morning. By the way, her name is Mayer. Helena Mayer.'

A crackly silence was followed by a bleep and the click of the tape recorder stopping.

Harry dreamed about Rakel, about her face burrowing into his neck, about her strong hands, and Tetris blocks falling and falling. But it was Sindre Fauke's voice that woke him in the middle of the night and made him stare at the contours of a figure in the dark.

'You have to find Gudbrand Johansen.'