Oslo was pale grey, like the face of a tired old man, but today in the sun the few colours still remaining shone. Like a final smile before saying goodbye, Harry mused.
' "A Wonderful Day",' he said. 'It's not a thought, a comment or an assertion. It's a title. Of the kind of essay you write at primary school.'
A hedge sparrow flew past the window.
'Trond Grette wasn't thinking, he was just scribbling on automatic pilot. As he had done from his school days when he sat practising the new handwriting style. Jean Hue, the handwriting expert at Kripos, has already confirmed the same person wrote the suicide letter and the school essays.'
The film seemed to be stuck, the image frozen, not a movement, not a word, only the repeated actions of a photocopier outside in the corridor.
Finally, Harry turned around and broke the silence: 'Seems like the mood is for Lшnn and me to bring Trond Grette in for a little bit of questioning.'
Fuck, fuck, fuck! Harry tried to hold the gun steady, but the pain was making him giddy and the blasts of wind were pulling and pushing at his body. Trond had reacted to the blood as Harry had hoped, and for a moment Harry had a clear line of fire. But Harry had hesitated and now Trond had Beate in front of him so that Harry could only see part of his head and his shoulder. She was similar, he could see that now, my God she was so similar. Harry blinked hard to get them in focus. The next blast of wind was so strong it caught hold of the grey coat on the bench and for a moment it seemed as if an invisible man clad only in a coat was running across the tennis court. Harry knew a downpour was on its way; this was the air mass the wall of rain was pushing forward as the final warning. Then it went as dark as night, the two bodies in front of him merged and then the rain was overhead; large, heavy drops hammered down.
'Twenty-five.' Beate's voice was suddenly loud and clear.
In the flash of light Harry could see their bodies casting shadows on the red shale. The crack which followed was so loud it attached itself to their ears like a lining. One body slipped away from the other and fell to the ground.
Harry sank to his knees and heard his voice roar: 'Ellen!'
He saw the figure still standing turn and begin to walk towards him, gun in hand. Harry took aim, but the rain was streaming down his face and blinding him. He blinked and aimed. He no longer felt anything, neither pain nor cold, sorrow nor triumph, only a huge void. Things were not meant to make sense; they just repeated themselves in an eternal, self-explanatory mantra-living, dying, being reborn, living, dying. He squeezed the trigger halfway. Took aim.
'Beate?' he whispered.
She kicked open the door and passed the AG3 to Harry, who grabbed it.
'What…happened?'
'The Setesdal Twitch,' she said.
'The Setesdal Twitch?'
'He went down like a pile of bricks, poor thing.' She showed him her right hand. The rain washed and rinsed away the blood from the two wounds on her knuckles. 'I was just waiting for something to distract him. And the clap of thunder scared the living daylights out of him. You too, it seems.'
They looked at the motionless body in the left-hand service box.
'Will you help me with the handcuffs, Harry?' Her blonde hair was stuck to her face, but she didn't seem to notice. She smiled.
Harry raised his face into the rain and closed his eyes. 'God in heaven above,' he mumbled. 'This poor soul will not be set free until 12 July 2022. Have mercy.'
'Harry?'
He opened his eyes. 'Yes?'
'If he's not to be set free before 2022 we'd better get him to Police HQ right now.'
'Not him,' Harry said, getting up. 'Me. That's when I retire.'
He put his arm around her shoulders and smiled. 'You Setesdal Twitch, you…'
50
Ekeberg Ridge
It began to snow again in December. And this time it was for real. The snow drifted against the walls of the houses and more snow was forecast. The confession came on Wednesday afternoon. Trond Grette, in consultation with his solicitor, told how he had planned and later carried out the murder of his wife.
It snowed right through the night, and the next day he also confessed to being behind the murder of his brother. The man he had paid for the job was called El Ojo, The Eye, of no fixed abode. He changed his professional name and mobile telephone number every week. Trond had only met him once, in a car park in Sгo Paulo, where they had agreed on the details. El Ojo had received 1,500 dollars in advance; Trond had placed the rest in a paper bag in a left-luggage locker at Tietк airport terminal. The agreement was that he would send the suicide letter to a post office in Campos Belos, a suburb in the south of the city, and the key when he had received Lev's little finger.
The only thing remotely approaching amusement during the long hours of questioning was when Trond was asked how, as a tourist, he had managed to contact a professional contract killer. He replied that it had been a great deal easier than trying to get hold of a Norwegian builder. The analogy was not entirely by chance.
'Lev told me about it once,' Trond said. 'They advertise themselves as plomeros next to chat-line ads in the newspaper Folha de Sгo Paulo.'
'Plum-whats?'
'Plomeros. Plumbers.'
Halvorsen faxed the scanty information to the Brazilian embassy, who refrained from making a sarcastic comment and promised to pursue the case.
The AG3 Trond had used in the raid was Lev's and had been in the loft in Disengrenda for several years. The gun was impossible to trace as the manufacturer's serial number had been filed off.
Christmas came early for Nordea's consortium of insurance companies since the money from the Bogstadveien robbery was found in the boot of Trond's car and not a krone had been touched.
The days passed, the snow came and the questioning continued. One Friday afternoon, when everyone was exhausted, Harry asked Trond why he hadn't thrown up when he shot his wife through the head-after all he couldn't stand the sight of blood. The room went quiet. Trond stared at the video camera in the corner. Then he merely shook his head.
But when they had finished and they were walking through the Culvert back to the detention cells, he had suddenly turned to Harry: 'It depends on whose blood it is.'
At the weekend Harry sat in a chair by the window watching Oleg and local boys building snow forts in the garden outside the timber house. Rakel asked him what he was thinking about and it almost slipped out. Instead he suggested going for a little walk. She fetched hats and gloves. They walked past the Holmenkollen ski jump and Rakel asked whether they should invite Harry's father and sister over to hers on Christmas Eve.
'We're the only family left,' she said and squeezed his hand.
On Monday Harry and Halvorsen started work on the Ellen case. Right from scratch. Questioned witnesses who had been in before, read old reports and checked tip-offs that had not been followed up and old leads. Cold leads, it turned out.
'Have you got the address of the guy who said he'd seen Sverre Olsen with a man in a red car in Grьnerlшkka?' Harry asked.
'Kvinsvik. His address is given as his parents' place, but I doubt we'll find him there.'
Harry didn't expect much cooperation when he walked into Herbert's Pizza asking for Roy Kvinsvik. But after buying a beer for a young guy with the Nasjonalallianse logo on his T-shirt, he learned that Roy no longer had to maintain an oath of silence since he had recently cut ties with his former friends. Apparently Roy had met a Christian girl and lost his faith in Nazism. No one knew who she was or where Roy lived now, but someone had seen him singing outside the Philadelphian church.