23
DAY 19.
Mosaic.
THE THICK, FLUFFY CLOUDS CONCEALED THE DAWN AS Harry entered the corridor on the sixth floor of the high-rise in Frogner. Tresko had left his bedsit door ajar, and when Harry entered, Tresko had his feet up on the coffee table, his arse on the sofa and the remote control in his left hand. The images that flicked backwards across the screen dissolved into digital mosaic.
‘Don’t want a beer then?’ Tresko repeated, lifting his half-empty bottle. ‘It’s Saturday.’
Harry thought he could discern bacterial gases in the air. Both ashtrays were full of cigarette ends.
‘No thanks,’ Harry said, taking a seat. ‘Well?’
‘Well, I’ve just had one night on it,’ Tresko said, stopping the DVD player. ‘It usually takes me a couple of days.’
‘This person’s not a pro poker player,’ Harry said.
‘Don’t be too sure,’ Tresko said and took a swig from the bottle. ‘He bluffs a lot better than most card players. This is the place where you ask him the question you reckoned he would answer with a lie, isn’t it.’
Tresko pressed play and Harry saw himself in the TV studio. He was wearing a pinstriped suit jacket, a Swedish brand, slightly too tight. A black T-shirt that was a present from Rakel. Diesel jeans and Dr Martens boots. He was sitting in a strangely uncomfortable position, as if the chair had nails at the back. The question sounded hollow through the TV speakers. ‘Do you invite her for a bit of extra-curricular in your hotel room?’
‘No, I don’t think I would do that,’ Støp answered, but froze as Tresko pressed the pause button.
‘And there you know he’s lying?’ Tresko asked.
‘Yup,’ Harry answered. ‘He fucked a friend of Rakel’s. Women don’t usually like to boast. What can you see?’
‘If I ran this on the computer I could enlarge the eyes, but I don’t need to. You can see the pupils have dilated.’ Tresko pointed an index finger with a chewed nail at the screen. ‘That’s the classic sign of stress. And look at the nostrils. Can you see they’ve flared a tiny bit? We do that when we’re stressed and the brain needs more oxygen. But that doesn’t mean he’s lying; many people get stressed even when they’re telling the truth. Or don’t get stressed when lying. You can see, for example, that his hands are still.’
Harry noticed that Tresko’s voice had undergone a transformation; the jarring sounds were gone and it had become soft, almost pleasant. Harry looked at the screen, at Støp’s hands which lay still in his lap, the left hand over the right.
‘I’m afraid there are no immutable signs,’ Tresko continued. ‘All poker players are different, so what you have to do is spot the differences. Find out what’s different in a person from when he’s lying and when he’s telling the truth. It’s like triangulation, you need two fixed points.’
‘A lie and an honest answer. Sounds easy.’
‘Sounds is right. If we assume he’s telling the truth when he’s talking about the founding of his magazine and why he hates politicians we have the second point.’ Tresko rewound the clip and played it. ‘Look.’
Harry looked. But obviously not where he was supposed to. He shook his head.
‘The hands,’ Tresko said. ‘Look at his hands.’
Harry looked at Støp’s tanned hands resting on the chair arms.
‘They’re not moving,’ Harry said.
‘Yes, but he isn’t hiding them,’ Tresko said. ‘A classic sign of bad poker players with poor cards is all the effort they make to hide them behind their hands. And when they bluff they like to place an apparently pensive hand over their mouth to hide their expression. We call them hiders. Others exaggerate the bluff by sitting upright in the chair or leaning back to appear bigger than they are. They’re the bluffers. Støp is a hider.’
Harry leaned forward. ‘Did you . . . ?’
‘Yes, I did,’ Tresko said. ‘And it runs all the way through. He takes his hands off the arms of the chair and hides the right one – I would guess he’s right-handed – when he’s lying.’
‘What does he do when I ask him if he makes snowmen?’ Harry made no attempt to conceal his eagerness.
‘He’s lying,’ Tresko said.
‘Which bit? The bit about making snowmen or making them on his roof terrace?’
Tresko uttered a short grunt which Harry realised was meant to be laughter.
‘This is not an exact science,’ Tresko said. ‘As I said, he’s not a bad card player. In the first seconds after you asked the question he has his hands on the arms as if he’s considering telling the truth. At the same time his nostrils flare as though he’s becoming stressed. But then he changes his mind, hides his right hand and comes up with a lie.’
‘Exactly,’ Harry said. ‘And that means he has something to hide, doesn’t it?’
Tresko pressed his lips together to show this was a tricky one. ‘It may also mean he’s choosing to tell a lie he knows will be sussed. To hide the fact that he could easily have told the truth.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When pro card players have good hands, sometimes, instead of trying to bump up the pot, they bid high first time and give tiny signals that they’re bluffing. Just enough to hook inexperienced players into believing they’ve spotted a bluff and to get them to join the bidding. That’s basically what this looks like. A bluffed bluff.’
Harry nodded slowly. ‘You mean he wants me to believe that he has something to hide?’
Tresko looked at the empty beer bottle, looked at the fridge, made a half-hearted attempt to lever his huge body off the sofa and sighed.
‘As I said, this is not an exact science,’ he said. ‘Would you mind . . . ?’
Harry got up and went over to the fridge. Cursing inside. When he had rung Oda at Bosse he had known they would accept his offer to appear. And he had also known that he would be able to ask Støp direct questions unhindered, that was the format of the programme. And that the camera would film the person answering, with close-ups or so-called medium shots, that is, the upper half of the body. All of this had been perfect for Tresko’s analysis. And yet they had failed. This had been the last ray of hope, the last place to look where there was some light. The rest was darkness. And perhaps ten years of fumbling and praying for luck, serendipity, a slip-up.
Harry stared at the neatly stacked rows of Ringnes beer bottles in the fridge, a comical contrast to the chaos reigning in the bedsit. He hesitated. Then he took two bottles. They were so cold that they burned his palms. The fridge door was swinging shut.
‘The only place where I can say with certainty that Støp is lying’, Tresko said from the sofa, ‘is when he answers that there isn’t any madness or hereditary illness in his family.’
Harry managed to catch the fridge door with his foot. The light from the crack was reflected in the black, curtainless window.
‘Repeat,’ he said.
Tresko repeated.
Twenty-five seconds later Harry was halfway down the stairs and Tresko halfway down the beer Harry had chucked him.
‘Yes, there was one more thing, Harry,’ Tresko mumbled to himself. ‘Bosse asked you if there was someone special you were kicking your heels waiting for, and you answered no.’ He belched. ‘Don’t take up poker, Harry.’
Harry rang from his car.
There was an answer before he could introduce himself. ‘Hi, Harry.’
The thought that Mathias Lund-Helgesen either recognised his number or had his number listed made Harry shudder. He could hear Rakel and Oleg’s voices in the background. Weekend. Family.
‘I have a question about Marienlyst Clinic. Are there still any patient records from there?’
‘I doubt it,’ Mathias said. ‘I think the rules say that sort of thing has to be destroyed if no one takes over the practice. But if it’s important I’ll check of course.’
‘Thank you.’
Harry drove past the Vinderen tram stop. A glimpse of a ghost fluttered by. A car chase, a collision, a dead colleague, a rumour that it had been Harry driving and he should have been breathalysed. That was a long time ago. Water under the bridge. Scars under the skin. Versicolor on the soul.
Mathias called back after a quarter of an hour.
‘I spoke to Gregersen – he was the boss of Marienlyst. Everything was deleted or destroyed, I’m afraid. But I think some people, including Idar, took their patient data with them.’
‘And you?’
‘I knew I wouldn’t go into private practice, so I didn’t take anything.’
‘Can you remember any of the names of Idar’s patients, do you think?’
‘Some maybe. Not many. It’s a while ago, Harry.’
‘I know. Thank you anyway.’
Harry rang off and followed the sign to Rikshospitalet. The collection of buildings ahead of him covered the low ridge.
Gerda Nelvik was a gentle, buxom lady in her mid-forties and the only person in the paternity department at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Rikshospitalet this Saturday. She met Harry in reception and took him through. There was not much to suggest that this was where society’s worst criminals were hunted. The bright rooms, decorated in homely fashion, were rather testimony to the fact that the staff consisted almost entirely of women.
Harry had been here before and knew the routines for DNA testing. On a weekday, behind the laboratory windows, he would have seen women dressed in white lab coats, caps and disposable gloves, bent over solutions and machines, busy with mysterious processes they called hair-prep, blood-prep and amplification, which would ultimately become a short report with a conclusion in the form of numerical values for fifteen different markers.
They passed a room fitted with shelves, on which lay brown padded envelopes marked with names of police stations around the country. Harry knew they contained articles of clothing, strands of hair, furniture covers, blood and other organic material that had been submitted for analysis. All to extract the numeric code that represented selected points on the mysterious garland that is DNA and identified its owner with a certainty of ninety-nine point many nines per cent.
Gerda Nelvik’s office was no larger than it needed to be to accommodate shelves of ring files and a desk with a computer, piles of paper and a large photograph of two smiling boys, each with a snowboard. ‘Your sons?’ Harry asked, sitting down.
‘I think so,’ she smiled.
‘What?’
‘Insiders’ joke. You said something about someone submitting tests?’
‘Yes. I’m keen to know about all the DNA tests submitted by a particular institution. Starting from twelve years back. And who they were for.’
‘I see. Which institution?’
‘Marienlyst Clinic.’
‘Marienlyst Clinic? Are you sure?’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘In paternity cases it’s usually a court or a solicitor who submits the request. Or individuals directly.’
‘These aren’t paternity suits but tests to establish possible family links because of the danger of hereditary medical conditions.’
‘Aha,’ Gerda said. ‘Then we’ve got them on the database.’
‘Is that something you can check on the spot?’
‘Depends on whether you’ve got the time to wait . . .’ Gerda looked at her watch, ‘for thirty seconds.’
Harry nodded.
Gerda tapped away on the keyboard as she dictated to herself. ‘M-a-r-i-e-n-l-y-s-t C-l-i-n-i-c.’
She leaned back in her chair and let the machine work.
‘Terrible autumn weather we’re having, isn’t it.’ she said.
‘Yes, it is,’ Harry answered, miles away, listening to the whirring of the hard disk as if that could reveal whether the answer was the one he was hoping for.
‘The darkness can get to you,’ she said. ‘Hope snow is on its way soon. Then it’ll brighten up at least.’
‘Mm,’ Harry said.
The whirring stopped.
‘There you go,’ she said, looking at the screen.
Harry took a deep breath.
‘Yes, Marienlyst Clinic has been a client here. But not for quite some time.’
Harry tried to think back. When was it Idar Vetlesen had finished there?
Gerda furrowed her brow. ‘But before that there were a lot, I can see.’
She hesitated. Harry waited for her to say it. And then she said: ‘An unusually high number for a medical centre, I would say.’
Harry had a feeling. This was the path they should take, this one led out of the labyrinth. Or to be more precise: into the labyrinth. Into the heart of darkness.
‘Have you got any names or personal details of those tested?’
Gerda shook her head. ‘Usually we do, but in this case the centre wanted them to be anonymous, evidently.’
Fuck! Harry closed his eyes and deliberated.
‘But you still have the test results? About whether individuals are fathers or not, I mean.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Gerda said.
‘And what do they tell you?’
‘I can’t give you an answer off the cuff. I’ll have to go into each one and that’ll take more time.’
‘OK. But have you saved the DNA profiles of those you have tested?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the test is as comprehensive as in criminal cases?’
‘More comprehensive. To establish paternity beyond doubt we require more markers since half of the genes are from the mother.’
‘So what you’re saying is that I can collect a swab from a specific person, send it here and have you check it for any similarities with those you’ve checked from Marienlyst Clinic?’
‘The answer is yes,’ Gerda said with an intonation that suggested she would appreciate an explanation.
‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘My colleagues will send you some swabs from a number of people who are husbands and children of women who have gone missing in recent years. To check whether they’ve been submitted before. I’ll make sure this is authorised to receive top priority.’
A light seemed to be switched on in Gerda’s eyes. ‘Now I know where I’ve seen you! On Bosse. Is this about . . . ?’
Even though there were only two of them there, she lowered her voice as if the name they had given the monster was a curse, an obscenity, an incantation that was not to be uttered aloud.
Harry called Katrine and asked her to meet him at Java café in St Hanshaugen. He parked in front of an old block of flats with a sign on the entrance threatening that parked cars would be towed away, although the entrance was barely the width of a lawnmower. Ullevålsveien was full of people hurrying up and down doing their essential Saturday shopping. An ice-cold northerly wind swept down from St Hanshaugen on its way to Vår Frelsers cemetery to blow black hats off a bowed funeral procession.
Harry paid for a double espresso and a cortado, both in takeaway paper cups, and sat on one of the chairs on the pavement. On the pond on the other side of the road a lone white swan drifted round quietly with a neck formed like a question mark. Harry watched it and was reminded of the name of the fox trap. The wind blew goose pimples onto the surface of the water.
‘Is the cortado still hot?’
Katrine was standing in front of him with outstretched hand.
Harry passed her the paper cup, and they walked to his car.
‘Great that you could work on a Saturday morning,’ he said.
‘Great that you could work on a Saturday morning,’ she said.
‘I’m single,’ he said. ‘Saturday morning has no value for people like us. You, on the other hand, should have a life.’
An elderly man stood glaring at their car as they arrived.
‘I’ve ordered a breakdown truck,’ he said.
‘Yes, I hear they’re popular,’ Harry said, unlocking the door. ‘The only problem is finding somewhere to park them.’
They got in and a wrinkled knuckle rapped on the glass. Harry rolled down the window.
‘Truck’s on its way,’ the old man said. ‘You’ve got to stay here and wait.’
‘Have I?’ Harry said, holding up his ID.
The man ignored the card and glowered at his watch.
‘Your space’s too narrow to qualify as an entrance,’ Harry said. ‘I’m sending over a man from the traffic department to unscrew your illegal sign. I’m afraid there’ll be a big fat fine, too.’
‘What?’
‘We’re police.’
The old man snatched the ID card, looked suspiciously at Harry, at the card and back at Harry.
‘That’s fine this time. You can go,’ the man mumbled with a sour expression and gave back the card.
‘It’s not fine,’ Harry said. ‘I’m calling the traffic department now.’
The old man stared with fury in his eyes.
Harry twisted the key in the ignition, let the engine roar, then turned to the old man again. ‘And you are to stay here.’
They could see his open-mouthed expression in the rear-view mirror as they drove off.
Katrine laughed. ‘You are bad! That was an old man.’
Harry shot her a sidelong glance. Her facial expression was strange, as if it hurt her to laugh. Paradoxically, the episode at Fenris Bar had made her more relaxed with him. Perhaps that was a thing attractive women had, a rejection demanded their respect, made them trust you more.
Harry smiled. He wondered how she would have reacted if she had known that this morning he had woken with an erection and fragments of a dream in which he had fucked her while she was sitting on the sink with her legs wide apart in the Fenris Bar toilet. Screwed her so hard the pipes creaked, water slopped in the toilet bowls and the neon tubes buzzed and flickered as he felt the freezing porcelain on his bollocks every time he thrust. The mirror behind her had vibrated so much his features had blurred as they banged hips, backs and thighs against taps, hand dryers and soap holders. Only when they had stopped did he see that it wasn’t his but someone else’s face in the mirror.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Reproduction,’ Harry said.
‘Oh?’
Harry passed her a packet which she opened. At the top was a piece of paper with the heading Instructions for DNA Swabbing Kit.
‘Somehow this is all tied up with paternity,’ Harry said. ‘I just don’t know how or why yet.’
‘And we’re off to . . . ?’ Katrine asked, lifting a small pack of cotton buds.
‘Sollihøgda,’ Harry said. ‘To get a swab from the twins.’
In the fields surrounding the farm the snow was in retreat. Wet and grey, it squatted on the countryside it still occupied.
Rolf Ottersen received them on the doorstep and offered them coffee. As they removed their outer clothing Harry told them what he wanted. Rolf Ottersen didn’t ask why, just nodded.
The twins were in the living room knitting.
‘What’s it going to be?’ Katrine asked.
‘Scarf,’ the twins said in unison. ‘Auntie’s teaching us.’
They motioned to Ane Pedersen, who was sitting in the rocking chair knitting and smiling a ‘nice to see you again’ to Katrine.
‘I just want a bit of spit and mucus from them,’ Katrine said brightly, raising a cotton bud. ‘Open wide.’
The twins giggled and put down their knitting.
Harry followed Rolf Ottersen to the kitchen where a large kettle had boiled and there was a smell of hot coffee.
‘So you were wrong,’ Rolf said. ‘About the doctor.’
‘Maybe,’ Harry said. ‘Or maybe he has something to do with the case after all. Is it OK if I take a look at the barn again?’
Rolf Ottersen made a gesture inviting Harry to help himself.
‘But Ane has tidied up in there,’ he said. ‘There’s not a lot to see.’
It was indeed tidy. Harry recalled the chicken blood lying on the floor, thick and dark, as Holm took samples, but now it had been scrubbed. The floorboards were pink where the blood had seeped into the wood. Harry stood by the chopping block and looked at the door. Tried to imagine Sylvia standing there and slaughtering chickens as the Snowman came in. Had she been surprised? She had killed two chickens. No, three. Why did he think it was two? Two plus one. Why plus one? He closed his eyes.
Two of the chickens had been lying on the chopping block, their blood pouring out onto the sawdust. That was how chickens should be slaughtered. But the third had been lying some distance away and had soiled the floorboards. Amateur. And the blood had clotted where the third chicken’s throat had been cut. Just like on Sylvia’s throat. He recalled how Holm had explained this. And knew the thought wasn’t new, it had been lying there with all the other half-thought, half-chewed, half-dreamed ideas. The third chicken had been killed in the same way, with an electric cutting loop.
He went to the place where the floorboards had absorbed the blood and crouched down.
If the Snowman had killed the last chicken why had he used the loop and not the hatchet? Simple. Because the hatchet had disappeared in the depths of the forest somewhere. So this must have happened after the murder. He had come all the way back here and slaughtered a chicken. But why? A kind of voodoo ritual? A sudden inspiration? Rubbish, this killing machine stuck to the plan, followed the pattern.
There was a reason.
Why?
‘Why?’ Katrine asked.
Harry hadn’t heard her come in. She stood in the doorway of the barn, the light from the solitary bulb falling on her face, and she was holding up two plastic bags containing cotton buds. Harry shuddered to see her standing like that again, in a doorway with her hands pointing in his direction. Just like at Becker’s. But there was something else, another realisation, too.
‘As I said,’ Harry mumbled, studying the pink residue, ‘I think this is about family relationships. About covering things up.’
‘Who?’ she asked and moved towards him. The heels of her boots clicked on the wooden floor. ‘Who have you got in mind?’
She crouched down beside him. Her masculine perfume wafted past him, rising from her warm skin into the cold air.
‘I haven’t a clue.’
‘This is not systematic processing; this is an idea you’ve had. You’ve got a theory,’ she stated simply and ran her right index finger through the sawdust.
Harry held back. ‘It’s not even a theory.’
‘Come on, out with it.’
Harry took a deep breath. ‘Arve Støp.’
‘What about him?’
‘According to Arve Støp, he went to Idar Vetlesen for medical help with his tennis elbow. But, according to Borghild, Vetlesen didn’t hold any records for Støp. I’ve been asking myself why that might be.’
Katrine shrugged. ‘Perhaps it was more than an elbow. Perhaps Støp was afraid it might be documented that he was having beauty treatment.’
‘If Idar Vetlesen had agreed not to keep records for all the patients who were afraid of that, he wouldn’t have had a single name in his files. So I thought it had to be something else, something that really couldn’t bear close scrutiny.’
‘Like what?’
‘Støp was lying on Bosse. He said there was no madness or hereditary illness in his family.’
‘And there is?’
‘Let’s assume there is, as a theory.’
‘The theory that’s not even a theory?’
Harry nodded. ‘Idar Vetlesen was Norway’s most secret expert on Fahr’s syndrome. Not even Borghild, his own assistant, knew about it. So how on earth did Sylvia Ottersen and Birte Becker find their way to him?’
‘How?’
‘Let’s assume Vetlesen’s specialty was not hereditary illness but discretion. After all, he said himself that’s what his business was founded on. And that was why a patient and friend went to him and said he had Fahr’s syndrome, a diagnosis which he had been given somewhere else, by a real specialist. But this specialist did not have Vetlesen’s expertise in discretion, and this was something which had to be kept secret. The patient insisted, perhaps paid extra for it. Because this person could really pay.’
‘Arve Støp?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he’s already been diagnosed by someone and that might leak out.’
‘This is not what Støp is primarily afraid of. He’s afraid that it could come to light that he goes there with his offspring. Whom he wants checked to see if they have the inherited illness. And this has to be treated with the utmost confidentiality because no one knows they’re his children. In fact there are some people who believe them to be their own. As indeed Filip Becker thought he was Jonas’s father. And . . .’ Harry nodded towards the farmhouse.
‘Rolf Ottersen?’ Katrine whispered, breathless. ‘The twins? Do you think . . . ?’ She lifted the plastic bags. ‘That they have Arve Støp’s genes?’
‘Possibly.’
Katrine looked at him. ‘The missing women . . . the other children . . .’
‘If the DNA test shows that Støp is the father of Jonas and the twins, we’ll do tests on the children of the other missing women on Monday.’
‘You mean . . . that Arve Støp has been bonking his way round Norway? Impregnating a variety of women and then killing them years after they’ve given birth?’
Harry rolled his shoulders.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘If I’m right we’re talking about madness, of course, and this is pure speculation. There’s often a pretty clear logic behind madness. Have you heard about Berhaus seals?’
Katrine shook her head.
‘The father of the species is cold and rational,’ Harry said. ‘After the female has given birth to their young and it has survived the first critical phase, the father tries to kill the mother. Because he knows she won’t want to breed with him again. And he doesn’t want other young seals to compete with his own offspring.’
Katrine seemed to be having trouble absorbing this.
‘It’s madness, yes,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know what’s more insane: thinking like a seal or thinking that someone’s thinking like a seal.’
‘As I said . . .’ Harry stood up with an audible creak of his knees, ‘it’s not even a theory.’
‘You’re lying,’ she said, peering up at him. ‘You’re already certain that Arve Støp’s the father.’
Harry responded with a crooked smile.
‘You’re as crazy as I am,’ she said.
Harry subjected her to a searching gaze. ‘Let’s get going. The Forensic Institute is waiting for your cotton buds.’
‘On a Saturday?’ Katrine ran her hand over the sawdust, smoothing over her doodles and stood up. ‘Haven’t they got a life?’
After delivering the plastic bags to the institute and receiving a promise that they would get back to him that evening or early the following morning, Harry drove Katrine home to Seilduksgata.
‘No lights on in the windows,’ Harry said. ‘On your ownsome?’
‘Good-looking girl like me?’ she smiled, grasping the door handle. ‘Never on my own.’
‘Mm. Why didn’t you want me to tell your colleagues at the Bergen Police Station that you were there?’
‘What?’
‘Thought they would be amused to hear you were working on a big murder case in the capital.’
She shrugged and opened the door. ‘Bergensians don’t think of Oslo as a capital. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
Harry drove to Sannergata.
He wasn’t certain, but he thought he had seen Katrine stiffen. But what could you be certain of? Not even a click, which you took to be a gun being cocked but turned out to be a girl cracking a dry twig out of sheer fright. He couldn’t pretend any longer though, couldn’t pretend he didn’t know. Katrine had pointed her service revolver at Filip Becker’s back that evening. And when Harry had stepped into her firing line he had heard the sound, the sound he had thought he heard when Salma cracked a twig in the yard. It was the lubricated click of a revolver hammer being released. Which meant that it had been raised, that Katrine had squeezed the trigger more than two-thirds of the way and that the gun could have gone off at any time. She had meant to shoot Becker.
No, he couldn’t pretend. Because the light had fallen on her face in the doorway to the barn. And he had recognised her. And, as he had said to her, this was all about family relationships.
POB Knut Müller-Nilsen loved Julie Christie. So much that he had never dared to tell his wife the whole truth. However, as he suspected her of having an extra-marital affair with Omar Sharif, he didn’t feel too guilty as he sat beside her devouring Julie Christie with his eyes. The only fly in the ointment was that his Julie at this moment was in a passionate embrace with said Sharif. And when the telephone on the living-room table rang and he answered, his wife pressed the pause button causing the picture of this wonderful yet unbearable moment of their favourite DVD, Doctor Zhivago, to freeze in front of them.
‘Well, good evening, Hole,’ said Müller-Nilsen after the inspector had introduced himself. ‘Yes, I imagine you’ve got enough to keep you busy for the time being.’
‘Have you got a minute?’ asked the hoarse but soft voice at the other end.
Müller-Nilsen gazed at Julie’s quivering red lips and raised misty eyes. ‘We’ll take the time we need, Hole.’
‘You showed me a photo of Gert Rafto when I was in your office. There was something about it I recognised.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘And then you said something about his daughter. She had turned out very well, of course, you said. It was this understood “of course”. As if this was information I already knew.’
‘Yes, but she did turn out well, didn’t she.’ said Müller-Nilsen.
‘Depends on how you look at it,’ Harry said.