They sat down in the living room.
‘You’re alone,’ Mikael said.
‘Wife’s with the eldest. They needed a hand from Grandma and she’s a soft touch.’ He beamed. ‘Actually, I thought I should get in contact with you. Now, the council hasn’t reached a final decision, but we both know what they want, so it’s probably wise to talk about how we do this. The division of labour and so on, I mean.’
‘Yes,’ Mikael said. ‘Perhaps you could brew up some coffee?’
‘Sorry?’ The bushy eyebrows were raised high up on the old man’s forehead.
‘If we’re going to be sitting here for a while, a cup would be nice?’
The man studied Mikael. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Come on, we can sit in the kitchen.’
Mikael followed him. Passed a forest of family photographs on the table and cabinet. They reminded him of the barricades on the D-Day beaches, a futile bulwark against external attacks.
The kitchen was a half-hearted nod to modernity, resembling a compromise between a daughter-in-law’s insistence on the minimum you can demand of a kitchen and the owners’ basic desire to change nothing more than a broken fridge.
While the old man took a packet of coffee from a high-up cabinet with a frosted-glass door, pulled off the elastic and measured it with a yellow spoon, Mikael Bellman sat down, put his recording device on the table and pressed play. Truls’s voice sounded metallic and thin: ‘Even though we have reason to suspect that the woman is a prostitute, your son may have lent his car to someone else. We don’t have a photo of the driver.’
The ex-Chief of Police’s voice sounded more distant, but there was no background noise, so the words were easy to hear: ‘So you don’t even have any proof. No, you’d better just forget this one.’
Mikael saw the coffee spill from the spoon as the old man recoiled and froze, as though someone had thrust a gun barrel in his back.
Truls’s voice: ‘Thank you. We’ll do as you say.’
‘Berentzen at Orgkrim, did you say?’
‘Correct.’
‘Thank you, Berentzen. You officers are doing a good job.’
Mikael pressed stop.
The ex-Chief turned slowly. His face was pale. Ashen, Mikael Bellman thought. An appropriate colour for someone declared dead. The man’s mouth twitched a few times.
‘What you’re trying to say,’ Mikael Bellman said, ‘is “What’s this?” And the answer is this is the ex-Chief of Police putting pressure on a public servant to prevent his son being subjected to the same investigation and legal action as any other citizen of this country.’
The old man’s voice sounded like a desert wind. ‘He wasn’t even there. I spoke to Sondre. His car has been in the garage since January because of a fire in the engine. He can’t have been there.’
‘Does that sting a little?’ Mikael said. ‘You didn’t even need to save your son, and now the press and the council are going to hear how you tried to corrupt a policeman.’
‘There is no photo of the car and this prostitute, is there?’
‘Not now, anyway. You ordered it to be shredded. And who knows, perhaps it was taken before January?’ Mikael smiled. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help himself.
The colour returned to the man’s cheeks along with the bass tone in his voice. ‘You don’t surely imagine you’re going to get away with this, do you, Bellman?’
‘I don’t know. I only know that the council won’t want to have a demonstrably corrupt man as their Chief of Police.’
‘What do you want, Bellman?’
‘You’d be better off asking yourself what you want. To live a life of peace and quiet with a reputation as a good, honest policeman? Yes? Then you’ll see we’re not very different, because that’s exactly what I want. I want to perform my job as Chief of Police in peace and quiet, I want to solve the police murders without the bloody Councillor for Social Affairs interfering, and afterwards I want to enjoy a reputation as a good policeman. So how do we both achieve this?’
Bellman waited until he was sure the old man had collected himself sufficiently to be able to follow all the details.
‘I want you to tell the council that you’ve immersed yourself in the case and you’re so impressed by the professional manner in which it’s being handled that you can’t see any point in stepping in and taking over. Quite the contrary, you think it would reduce the chances of a swift resolution. Also you have to question the Social Affairs Councillor’s assessment of this case. She should know that police work has to be methodical and avoid the pitfalls of short-term thinking, and it appears she has reacted in a knee-jerk fashion. We have all been under pressure as a result of this case, but it is a requirement of all political and professional leaders that they don’t lose their heads in situations where they most need them. You therefore insist that the incumbent Chief of Police continue his work without any interference, as that strategy, from your perspective, has the greatest chance of success and accordingly you withdraw your candidacy.’
Bellman took an envelope from his inside pocket and pushed it across the table.
‘That in brief is what is written in this personal letter to the chair of the City Council. All you have to do is sign it and send it. As you can see, it even has a stamp. By the way, you can have this recording for keeps when I’ve received a satisfactory response from the council regarding their decision.’ Bellman nodded to the kettle. ‘How’s it doing? Any chance of that coffee?’
Harry took a swig of coffee and surveyed his town.
The Police HQ canteen was on the top floor and had a view of Ekeberg, the fjord and the new part of town that was emerging in Bjørvika. First, though, he looked for the old landmarks. How often had he sat here in his lunch break trying to see cases from other angles, with other eyes, with new and different perspectives, while the urge for a cigarette and alcohol tore at him and he told himself he wasn’t allowed to go onto the terrace for a cigarette until he had at least one new testable hypothesis?
He had yearned for that, he thought.
A hypothesis. One which wasn’t just a figment of the imagination but anchored in something that could be tested, responded to.
He raised his coffee cup. Put it down again. No more swigs until his brain had found something. A motive. They had been banging their heads against the wall for so long that perhaps it was time to start somewhere else. Somewhere where there was light.
A chair scraped. Harry looked up. Bjørn Holm. He put his coffee down on the table without spilling it, removed his Rasta hat and rumpled his red hair. Harry watched him absent-mindedly. Did he do this to air his scalp? Or to avoid the familiar hair-plastered-to-scalp look his generation feared, but which Oleg appeared to like? Fringe stuck to a sweaty forehead above a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. The well-read nerd, the webwanker, the self-conscious urbanite who embraced the loser image, the fake outsider role. Was that what he looked like, the man they were after? Or was he a red-cheeked country boy in the big city with light blue jeans, practical shoes, a haircut from the most convenient hairdresser’s, the type who cleaned the stairs when it was his turn, was polite and helpful and no one had a bad word to say about him? Non-testable hypotheses. No swig of coffee.
‘Well?’ Bjørn said, treating himself to a huge swig.
‘Well. .’ Harry said. He had never asked Bjørn why a country boy would walk around wearing a reggae hat and not a Stetson. ‘I think we should take a closer look at René Kalsnes. And forget the motive, just look at the forensic facts. We have the bullet that he was killed with. Nine mil. The world’s most common calibre. Who would use it?’
‘Everyone. Absolutely everyone. Even we would.’
‘Mm. Did you know that in peacetime policemen are responsible for four per cent of all murders worldwide? In the Third World the figure is nine per cent. And that makes us the world’s most lethal occupational group.’