‘And you reckon you can persuade him with that?’ Katrine snorted. ‘If my memory serves me correctly, Harry Hole is pretty high up his hate list.’
Harry shook his head. ‘I’ve put Gunnar Hagen on the case.’
‘And when will it happen?’ Bjørn asked.
‘It’s happening as we speak,’ Harry said, looking at the cigarette. It was almost down to the filter already. He felt an urge to throw it away, watch the sparks arcing into the darkness as it bounced down the shimmering marble slope. Until it landed in the black water and was immediately extinguished. What was stopping him? The thought that he was polluting the town or witnesses’ disapproval of his polluting the town? The act itself or the punishment? The Russian he had killed in Come As You Are was a simple matter; it had been self-defence: the Russian or him. But the so-called unsolved murder of Gusto Hanssen, that had been a choice. And yet, among all the ghosts that regularly haunted him, he had never seen the young man with the girlish good looks and the vampire teeth. An unsolved case, bollocks.
Harry flicked the cigarette. Glowing tobacco swept into the darkness and was gone.
37
The morning light filtered through the blinds over the surprisingly small windows in Oslo City Hall where the chairman coughed the cough that meant the meeting had started.
Around the table sat the nine councillors each with their own responsibility, as well as the ex-Chief of Police, who had been summoned to give a brief account of how he would tackle the case of the murdered police officers or ‘the cop killer’ case as the press was consistently referring to it. The formalities were dealt with in seconds, with brief minutes and nods of agreement, which the secretary acknowledged and noted.
The chairman then moved on to the business of the day.
The former Chief of Police looked up, caught an enthusiastic, encouraging nod from Isabelle Skøyen and began.
‘Thank you, Mr Chairman. I won’t take up much of the council’s time today.’
He glanced over at Skøyen, who appeared to be less enthusiastic about this unpromising opening.
‘I’ve gone through the case as requested. I have examined the police’s ongoing work and their progress, the leadership, the strategies that have been applied and their execution. Or to use Councillor Skøyen’s words, the strategies that may have been applied, but have definitely not been executed.’
Isabelle Skøyen’s laughter was rich and self-indulgent, but somewhat curtailed, perhaps because she discovered she was the only person laughing.
‘I have employed all my skills accumulated over many years as a police officer and reached an unambiguous conclusion about what has to be done.’
He saw Skøyen nod — the glint in her eye reminded him of an animal, though which, he couldn’t say.
‘Now the solving of a single crime doesn’t necessarily mean that the police are well managed. Just as an unsolved crime is not necessarily down to poor management. And having seen what the present incumbents, and Mikael Bellman in particular, have done I can’t see what I would have done differently. Or to make the point even clearer, I don’t think I could have done it as well.’
He noted that Skøyen’s jaw had dropped, and, feeling to his surprise a certain sadistic pleasure, he continued.
‘The craft of criminal investigation is evolving, as is everything else in society, and from what I can see, Bellman and his staff are cognisant with and adept at utilising new methods and technological advances in a way which I and my peers would probably not have managed. He enjoys the full confidence of his officers, he is an excellent motivator and he has organised his work in a manner which colleagues in other Scandinavian countries say is exemplary. I don’t know if Councillor Skøyen is aware, but Mikael Bellman has just been asked to give a lecture at the Interpol conference in Lyons about criminal investigation and management with reference to this particular case. Skøyen suggested that Bellman was not up to the job, and it does have to be said that he is young to be a Chief of Police. But he is not only a man for the future. He is a man for the present. He is, in sum, exactly the man you need in this situation, Mr Chairman. Which makes me surplus to requirements. This is my unequivocal conclusion.’
The former Chief of Police straightened his back, shuffled the two sheets of notes he had been holding and did up the top button of his jacket, a carefully selected capacious tweed jacket favoured by pensioners. Pushed back his chair with a scrape, as though he needed space to be able to stand up. Saw that Skøyen’s jaw had reached the nadir of its descent and that she was staring at him in disbelief.
He waited until he heard the chairman draw breath to say something so that he could proceed to the final act. The finale. The coup de grâce.
‘And if I may add, since this is also about the council’s competence and management of serious cases such as the police murders, Mr Chairman. .’
The chair’s bushy eyebrows, which usually arched high above smiling eyes, were now low and protruded like greyish-white awnings over an angry glare. The ex-Chief waited for the chairman to nod.
‘. . I appreciate that on this matter the council has been subject to immense personal pressure — after all it is their area of responsibility, and the case has attracted huge media coverage. But when a city council cedes to pressure and acts in panic by attempting to cut off the head of its Chief of Police, the question is perhaps more: is the council up to its job? We, of course, understand that this may be an excessively demanding issue for a newly elected city council. It’s unfortunate that a situation requiring experience and routine procedure should come so early in the council’s period of office.’
He saw the chairman recoil as he recognised the phrasing.
‘It would have been better if this had landed on the desk of the previous City Council, given its long years of experience and its many achievements.’
He could see from Skøyen’s suddenly pale face that she too recognised her own words about Bellman at the previous meeting. And he had to confess that it was indeed a long time since he’d had such fun.
‘I’m sure,’ he concluded, ‘that is what everyone in this room would have wished for, including the current council.’
‘Thank you for being so clear and candid,’ the chairman said. ‘I assume this means you do not have any alternative plan of action.’
The old man nodded. ‘I don’t. But there’s a man outside whom I have taken the liberty of summoning in my place. He’ll give you what you’ve asked for.’
He stood up, gave a brief nod and walked towards the door. He thought he could feel Isabelle Skøyen’s glare burning holes in his tweed jacket somewhere between his shoulder blades. But it didn’t matter; he had no plans she could thwart. And he knew that tonight what he would revel in most, over a glass of wine, would be the two small words he had woven into the text. They contained all the subtext the council needed. One was ‘attempting’, as in ‘attempting to cut off the head of its Chief of Police’. The other was ‘current’, as in ‘the current council’.
Mikael Bellman got up from his chair as the door opened.
‘Your turn,’ said the man in the tweed jacket, proceeding past him to the lift without gracing him with a glance.
Bellman assumed he must have been mistaken when he thought he detected a tiny smile on the man’s lips.
Then he swallowed, took a deep breath and entered the same room where not so long ago he had been butchered into little pieces.
The long table was encircled by nine faces. Eight of them oddly expectant, a bit like an audience at the start of the second act after a successful first. One was oddly pale. So pale that for a moment he hardly recognised her. The butcher.