Nemesis

'I say!' he exclaimed with enthusiasm. 'A genuine Grimmer lamp.'

'Grimmer?'

'Bertol Grimmer. World-famous German designer. Among other things, he designed the victory monument which Hitler had erected in Paris in 1941. He could have been one of the greatest artists of our time, but at the zenith of his career it came out that he was three-quarters Romany. He was sent to a concentration camp and his name was erased from several buildings and works of art he had worked on. Grimmer survived, but both his hands had been shattered in the quarry where the gypsies worked. He continued to work after the War although he never attained the same magnificent heights because of his injuries. This must be from the post-War years, though, I would wager.' Aune took off the lampshade.

Harry coughed: 'I was actually thinking more about these portraits.'

'Amateur,' Aune snorted. 'You would do better to concentrate on this elegant statue of a woman. The goddess Nemesis, Bertol Grimmer's favourite motif after the War. The goddess of revenge. Incidentally, revenge is a frequent motive in suicides, you know. They feel it is someone's fault their lives have been unsuccessful, and they want to inflict this guilt on others by committing suicide. Bertol Grimmer also took his own life, after his wife's, because she had a lover. Revenge, revenge, revenge. Did you know that humans are the only living creatures to practise revenge? The interesting thing about revenge-'

'Aune?'

'Oh yes, these pictures, you wanted me to interpret them, didn't you? Hm, they look not too dissimilar to the Rorschach blot.'

'The pictures you give to patients to prompt associations?'

'Correct. The problem here is that if I interpret these pictures, it will probably say more about my inner life than hers. Except that no one believes in the Rorschach blot any more, so why not? Let me see…These pictures are very dark, possibly more angry than depressed. One of them clearly isn't finished, though.'

'Perhaps it's supposed to be like that, perhaps it forms a whole?'

'What makes you say that?'

'I don't know, perhaps because the light from the three individual lamps falls perfectly on its own picture?'

'Hm.' Aune placed an arm over his chest and rested a forefinger on his lips. 'You're right. Of course you're right. And do you know what, Harry?'

'No. What?'

'They mean nothing to me at all-please excuse the expression-absolutely bugger all. Have we finished?'

'Yes. Oh, by the way, there is just one minor detail, since you paint. As you can see, the palette is on the left of the easel. Isn't that extremely impractical?'

'Yes, unless you're left-handed.'

'I see. I'll have to help Halvorsen. I don't know how I can thank you.'

'I know. I'll add an hour to my next invoice.'

Halvorsen had finished in the bedroom.

'She didn't have many possessions,' he said. 'It's a bit like searching a hotel room. Just clothes, toiletries, an iron, towels, bed linen and so on. No picture of the family, no letters or personal papers.'

An hour later, Harry knew exactly what Halvorsen meant. They had gone through the whole flat and were back in the bedroom without having turned up so much as a telephone bill or a bank statement.

'That's the strangest thing I've ever experienced,' Halvorsen said, sitting down opposite Harry at the writing desk. 'She must have cleaned up. Perhaps she wanted to take everything with her, her whole person, when she went, if you know what I mean.'

'I do. You didn't see any signs of a laptop?'

'Laptop?'

'Portable PC.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Can't you see the faded square on the wood here?' Harry pointed to the desk between them. 'Looks like there's been a laptop here and it's been moved.'

'Does it?'

Harry could feel Halvorsen's probing eyes.

***

In the street, they stood staring up at her windows in the pale yellow facade while Harry smoked a stray concertinaed cigarette he had found lying in the inside pocket of his coat.

'That family business was strange, wasn't it,' Halvorsen said.

'The what?'

'Didn't Mшller tell you? They couldn't find the addresses of her parents, brothers, sisters or anyone, just an uncle in prison. Mшller had to ring the undertaker's himself to have the poor girl taken away. As if dying wasn't lonely enough.'

'Mm. Which undertaker?'

'Sandemann,' Halvorsen said. 'The uncle wanted her to be cremated.'

Harry pulled at his cigarette and watched the smoke rise and disperse. The end of a process which had started when a peasant sowed tobacco seeds in a field in Mexico. The seed became a tobacco plant as tall as a man within four months, and two months later it was harvested, shaken, dried, graded, packed and sent to RJ Reynolds factories in Florida or Texas where it became a filter cigarette in a vacuum-packed, yellow Camel packet in a carton and was shipped to Europe. Eight months after being a leaf on a green sprouting plant under the sun in Mexico, it falls out of a drunken man's coat pocket as he falls down steps or out of a taxi or spreads his coat over himself as a blanket because he cannot or dare not open the door to his bedroom with all the monsters under the bed. And then, when he finally finds the cigarette, crumpled and covered in pocket fluff, he puts one end in his malodorous mouth and lights the other. After the dried, sliced tobacco leaf has been inside this body for a brief moment of enjoyment, it is blown out and is at long last free. Free to dissolve, to turn to nothing. To be forgotten.

Halvorsen cleared his throat twice: 'How did you know she had ordered the keys from the locksmith in Vibes gate?'

Harry threw the end of the cigarette onto the ground and pulled his coat tighter around him. 'Looks like Aune was right,' he said. 'It's going to rain. If you're heading straight to Police HQ, I could use a lift.'

'There must be hundreds of locksmiths in Oslo, Harry.'

'Mm. I rang the deputy chairman of the housing committee, Knut Arne Ringnes. Nice man. They've used the same locksmith for twenty years. Shall we go?'

***

'Good you've come,' Beate Lшnn said as Harry walked in the House of Pain. 'I discovered something last night. Look at this.' She rewound the video and pressed the PAUSE button. A quivering still of Stine Grette's face turned towards the robber's balaclava filled the screen. 'I've magnified one portion of the video frame. I wanted to have Stine's face as large as possible.'

'Why was that?' Harry asked, flinging himself onto a chair.

'If you look at the counter, you'll see that this is eight seconds before the Expeditor shoots…'

'The Expeditor?'

She smiled bashfully. 'It's just something I've started calling him in private. My grandfather had a farm, so I…yes.'

'Where was that?'

'Valle in the Sete valley.'

'And you saw animals being slaughtered there?'

'Yes.' The intonation didn't invite further questions. Beate pressed the SLOW button and Stine Grette's face became animated. Harry saw her blinking and her lips moving in slow motion. He had begun to dread seeing the shot when Beate suddenly stopped the video.

'Did you see that?' she asked excitedly.

A few seconds passed before Harry clicked.

'She was speaking!' he said. 'She says something seconds before she is shot, but you can't hear anything on the sound recording.'

'That's because she's whispering.'

'How did I miss that? But why? And what does she say?'

'I hope we'll soon find out. I've got hold of a lip-reading specialist from the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. He's on his way now.'