‘Look at yourself,’ Harry said, opening one eye.
‘Eh?’
‘Look at yourself and feel. You’re furious, you hate, you want to see the miscreant dangle by the neck, die, suffer, don’t you? Because you, like us, loved the woman who sat there. So the mother of your hatred is love, Bjørn. And it’s love, not hatred, that makes you willing to do whatever it takes, go to any lengths to get your hands on the guilty party. Sit down.’
Bjørn sat down. And Harry got up.
‘That’s what strikes me about these murders too. The lengths he goes to to reconstruct the original crimes. The risks the murderer is willing to take. I’m not sure, bearing in mind all the work involved, that behind everything is sheer bloodlust or hatred. The bloodthirsty murderer kills prostitutes, children or other easy targets. Someone who hates without love is never so extreme in his efforts. I think we should look for someone who loves more than he hates. And so the question is, from what we know about Valentin Gjertsen, has he really got the capacity to love so much?’
‘Maybe,’ Gunnar Hagen said. ‘We don’t know everything about Valentin Gjertsen.’
‘Mm. When’s the date for the next unsolved murder?’
‘There’s a bit of a gap now,’ Katrine said. ‘May. There was a case nineteen years ago.’
‘That’s more than a month away,’ Harry said.
‘Yes, and there was no sexual element. It was more like a family feud. So I took the liberty of examining a missing persons case that looks like murder. A girl disappeared in Oslo. She was reported missing after no one had seen her for more than two weeks. The reason no one reacted earlier was that she had texted several friends that she was off on a cheap flight to the sun and needed some time and space. A few friends answered her text but didn’t get a reply, so they concluded that getting away from it all included her phone. When she was reported missing the police checked all the airlines, but she hadn’t been on any of them. In short, she vanished without a trace.’
‘The phone?’ Bjørn Holm asked.
‘Last signal to the base station was in Oslo city centre, then it stopped. The battery may have died.’
‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘The text. Leaving a message that she’s ill. .’
Bjørn and Katrine nodded slowly.
Ståle Aune sighed. ‘Possible to have this spelt out?’
‘He means the same thing happened to Beate,’ Katrine said. ‘I got a text saying she was ill.’
‘Of course,’ Hagen said.
Harry nodded slowly. ‘He might for example check the recent calls and then send a short message to those contacts to delay the chase.’
‘Which means it’s harder to find clues at the crime scene,’ Bjørn added. ‘He’s in the loop.’
‘What date was the message sent?’
‘The twenty-fifth of March,’ Katrine said.
‘That’s today,’ Bjørn said.
‘Mm.’ Harry rubbed his chin. ‘We have a possible sexually motivated murder and a date, but no location. Which detectives were involved?’
‘No investigation was set up as it remained a missing persons case and was never upgraded to murder.’ Katrine looked at her notes. ‘But in the end it was sent to Crime Squad and put on the list of one of the inspectors. You, in fact.’
‘Me?’ Harry frowned. ‘I usually remember my cases.’
‘This was straight after the Snowman. You’d buggered off to Hong Kong and never reappeared. You ended up on the missing persons list yourself.’
Harry shrugged. ‘Fine. Bjørn, you check with the Missing Persons Unit afterwards to see what they have on this case. And alert them to the danger of someone ringing their doorbell or receiving mysterious call-outs during the day, OK? I think we should follow this one up, despite the fact that we don’t have a body or a crime scene.’ Harry clapped his hands. ‘So, who makes the coffee round here?’
‘Mm,’ Katrine said in a deeper, hoarse voice, slumped in her chair, legs stretched out, eyes closed and rubbing her chin. ‘I reckon that has to be the new consultant.’
Harry pursed his lips, nodded, jumped up, and for the first time since they found Beate there was the sound of laughter in the Boiler Room.
The gravity of the occasion hung heavy in the chamber at City Hall.
Mikael Bellman sat at the far end of the table, the chairman at the top. Mikael knew the names of most of the councillors; it was one of the first things he did as the Chief of Police, learn names. And faces. ‘You can’t play chess without knowing the pieces,’ the outgoing Police Chief had told him. ‘You have to know what they can and can’t do.’
It had been a well-meant piece of advice from an experienced Chief. But why was this retired officer sitting here now, in this room? Had he been brought in as a kind of consultant? Whatever his experience with chess, he doubted he’d played with pieces like the tall blonde sitting two places from the chairman. The person who was speaking at this moment. The queen. The Councillor for Social Affairs. Isabelle Skøyen. The leavee. Her voice had that cold administrative timbre of someone who knows that minutes are being taken.
‘With increasing unease we have seen how Oslo Police appear to be unable to stop these murders on their own. For some time the media have naturally been applying considerable pressure for us to do something drastic, but it is of greater significance that the city’s inhabitants have also lost their patience. We simply cannot have this growing lack of trust in our institutions, in this case the police and the City Council. And since this is my area of responsibility I have initiated this informal hearing so that the council can react to the Chief of Police’s solution, which we have to assume exists, and thereafter evaluate the alternatives.’
Mikael Bellman was sweating. He hated sweating in his uniform. In vain he had tried to catch the eye of his predecessor. What the hell was he doing here?
‘And I think we should be as open and innovative as possible with regard to alternatives,’ Isabelle Skøyen’s voice intoned. ‘We, of course, understand that this may be an excessively demanding issue for a young, newly appointed Police Chief. It is indeed unfortunate that a situation requiring experience and knowledge of procedure should come so early in his period of office. It would have been better if this had landed on the desk of the previous Police Chief, given his long years of experience and his many achievements. I’m sure that’s what everyone in this room would have wished for, including the two Police Chiefs.’
Mikael Bellman wondered if he had heard what he thought he had heard. Did she mean. . was she about to. .?
‘Isn’t that right, Bellman?’
Mikael Bellman cleared his throat.
‘Excuse me for interrupting, Bellman,’ Isabelle Skøyen said, placing a pair of Prada reading glasses on the tip of her nose and peering down at the sheet of paper in front of her. ‘I’m reading from the minutes of the previous meeting we had on this matter and in which you said, quote: “I can assure the council that we have this case under control and we have every confidence that there will be a speedy resolution.”’ She removed her glasses. ‘To save ourselves and you the time, which apparently we are short of, perhaps you could skip the repetition and tell us what you’re intending to do now that differs from and is more fruitful than what you were doing before?’
Bellman rolled his shoulders in the hope his shirt would come loose from his back. Bloody sweat. Bloody bitch.
It was eight o’clock in the evening, and Harry felt tired as he unlocked the door to PHS. He was obviously out of practice at concentrating for longer periods. And they hadn’t got much further. They had skimmed through reports, thinking thoughts they had thought a dozen times before, gone in circles, banged their heads against the wall hoping that the wall would give sooner or later.
The ex-inspector nodded to the cleaner and ran up the stairs.