‘Oh.’ The young man’s face crumpled like a punctured beach ball.
‘Thanks for your help, though, Kim Erik.’
He would go a long way all right. But in a few years of course.
Bjørn systematically went through the Mittet box.
There was another thing that set his mind whirring.
He put the lid back on and walked to the office at the end of the corridor. Knocked at the open door. Blinked first, a little confused, at the polished head, before realising who it was sitting there: Roar Midtstuen, the oldest and most experienced forensics officer of them all. Once upon a time Midtstuen had struggled with the idea of working for a boss who was not only younger but also a woman. But the situation had eased as he’d seen that Beate Lønn was one of the best things that had ever happened to their department.
He had just returned to work after being off sick for some months, ever since his daughter had been killed in a collision. She was returning from top-rope climbing a mountain face to the east of Oslo. Her bike had been found in a ditch. The driver still hadn’t been found.
‘How do, Midtstuen.’
‘How do, Holm.’ Midtstuen spun round in the swivel chair, shrugged, smiled and tried to exude energy, but it wasn’t there. Bjørn had barely recognised the bloated face when he’d reappeared for work. Apparently it was a normal side effect of antidepressants.
‘Have police batons always been black?’
As forensics officers, they were used to somewhat bizarre questions about detail, so Midtstuen didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
‘They’ve definitely been dark.’ Midtstuen had grown up in Østre Toten, like Holm, but it was only when the two of them spoke that their childhood dialect resurfaced. ‘But there was a period in the nineties when they were blue, I seem to remember. Bloody irritating that is.’
‘What is?’
‘That we’re always changing the colour, that we can’t stick to one. First of all, patrol cars are black and white, then they’re white with red-and-blue stripes, and now they’re going to be white with black-and-yellow stripes. This fiddling about just weakens the brand. Like the Drammen cordon tape.’
‘What cordon tape?’
‘Kim Erik was at the Mittet crime scene and found bits of police tape and thought it had to be from the old murder. He. . we were both on the case of course, but I always forget the name of that homo. .’
‘René Kalsnes.’
‘But young folk like Kim Erik don’t remember that police tape at that time was light blue and white,’ Midtstuen hastened to add as though afraid he’d put his foot in it: ‘But Kim Erik is going to be good.’
‘I reckon so, too.’
‘Good.’ Midtstuen’s jaw muscles churned as he chewed. ‘Then we agree.’
Bjørn rang Katrine as soon as he was back in his office, asked her to drop by the police station, on the first floor, scrape a bit of paint off one of their batons and send it to Bryn with a message.
Afterwards he sat thinking that he had automatically gone to the office at the end of the corridor, where he had always gone for advice. He had been so absorbed in his work that he had simply forgotten she wasn’t there any longer. That the office had been taken over by Roar Midtstuen. And for a brief instant he thought he could understand Midtstuen, how the loss of another person could suck the marrow out of you and make it impossible to get anything done, make it meaningless even to get out of bed. He dismissed the thought. Dismissed the sight of Midtstuen’s round, bloated face. Because they had something here, he could feel it.
Harry, Katrine and Bjørn sat on the roof of the Opera House looking across to the islands of Hovedøya and Gresholmen.
It had been Harry’s suggestion. He thought they needed fresh air. It was a warm, cloudy evening, the tourists had decamped ages ago, and they had the whole of the marble roof to themselves, even where it sloped down into Oslo Fjord, which glittered with lights from Ekeberg Ridge, Havnelageret and the Denmark ferry docked at Vippetangen.
‘I’ve gone through all the police murders again,’ Bjørn said. ‘And tiny bits of paint were found on Vennesla and Nilsen as well as on Mittet. It’s standard paint used everywhere, also on police batons.’
‘Well done, Bjørn,’ Harry said.
‘And then there were the remains of the cordon tape they found at the Mittet crime scene. It couldn’t have been from the investigation of the Kalsnes murder. They didn’t use that kind of tape then.’
‘It was tape from the day before,’ Harry said. ‘The murderer rang Mittet, told him to come to what Mittet thinks is a police murder committed at the old crime scene. So when Mittet gets there and sees the police tape he doesn’t smell a rat. Perhaps the murderer is even wearing his uniform.’
‘Shit,’ Katrine said. ‘I’ve spent the whole day cross-checking Kalsnes with police employees and didn’t find a thing. But I can see we’re on to something here.’
Excited, she looked at Harry, who was lighting a cigarette.
‘So what do we do now?’ Bjørn asked.
‘Now,’ Harry said, ‘we call in service pistols to see if they match our bullet.’
‘Which ones?’
‘All of them.’
They eyed Harry in silence.
‘What do you mean by “all”?’ Katrine asked.
‘All the service pistols in the police force. First in Oslo, then in Østland and, if necessary, in the whole country.’
Another silence as a gull screamed shrilly in the darkness above them.
‘You’re kidding?’ Bjørn tested.
The cigarette bobbed up and down between Harry’s lips as he answered. ‘Nope.’
‘It ain’t feasible. Forget it,’ Bjørn said. ‘People think it takes five minutes to run a ballistics test because it looks like that on CSI. Even officers think that. The fact is that to check one gun is almost a day’s work. All of them? In Oslo alone that’s. . how many officers are there?’
‘One thousand eight hundred and seventy-two,’ Katrine said.
They gawped at her.
She shrugged. ‘Read it in the annual report for Oslo Police District.’
They were still gawping at her.
‘The TV doesn’t work, and I couldn’t sleep, OK?’
‘Anyway,’ Bjørn said, ‘we haven’t got the resources. It can’t be done.’
‘The crucial thing is what you said just now about even officers thinking it takes five minutes,’ Harry said, blowing cigarette smoke into the night sky.
‘Oh?’
‘It’s important they think an operation like this can be done. What happens when the murderer finds out his gun has to be checked?’
‘You crafty devil,’ Katrine said.
‘Eh?’ Bjørn said.
‘He’ll report his gun missing or stolen as quick as a flash,’ Katrine said.
‘And that’s where we start looking,’ Harry said. ‘But maybe he’s one step ahead, so we’ll start by making a list of all the service pistols that have been reported missing since the murder of Kalsnes.’
‘One problem,’ Katrine said.
‘Yup,’ Harry answered. ‘Will the Chief of Police agree to put out an order which in practice points a finger of suspicion at all his officers? He’ll imagine the papers having a field day.’ Harry drew a rectangle in the air with his thumb and forefinger: “POLICE CHIEF SUSPECTS OWN OFFICERS”. “POLICE TOP BRASS LOSING IT”.’
‘Doesn’t sound very likely,’ Katrine said.
‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘say what you like about Bellman, but he’s not stupid and he knows which side his bread is buttered. If we can make a case for the murderer being a policeman and sooner or later we catch him, whether Bellman’s with us or not, he knows it will look really bad if the Chief of Police is seen to have delayed the whole investigation out of sheer cowardice. So what we have to explain to him is that investigating his own officers shows the world that the police will leave no stone unturned in their efforts, whatever corruption it reveals. It shows courage, leadership, mental agility, all good things.’