Katrine nodded, and Sung-min cast a quick glance at Jan as if to let him know that no, he wasn’t invited as well.
Sung-min and Katrine got in the front seats of his BMW Gran Coupé. Even if he got a decent petrol allowance, he was still taking a loss by driving his own car instead of one of Kripos’s, but as his father used to say: life’s too short not to drive a good car.
“Hello,” Bratt said, reaching her hand back between the seats to pat the dog lying on the back seat with its head on its front paws, looking up at them sadly.
“Kasparov’s a retired police dog,” Sung-min said as he poured coffee from a flask into two paper cups. “But he outlived his owner so I’ve taken him in.”
“You like dogs?”
“Not especially, but he didn’t have anyone else.” Sung-min handed her one of the cups. “To get to the point. I was at the point of arresting Harry Hole.”
Katrine Bratt spilled some of the coffee as she was about to take her first sip. And Sung-min knew it wasn’t because the coffee was too hot.
“Arrest him?” she said, accepting the handkerchief he offered her. “Based on what?”
“We got a phone call. From a guy called Freund. Sigurd Freund, in fact. A specialist in 3-D analysis of film and photographs. We’ve used him before, as have you. He wanted to check the formalities regarding a job he’d done for Detective Inspector Harry Hole.”
“Why did he call you? Hole works for us.”
“Maybe that’s why. Freund said Hole had asked him to send the invoice to his private address, which is obviously highly irregular. Freund just wanted to make sure it was all above board. He had also found out rather late that Harry Hole is between one metre ninety and one ninety-five tall, the same as the man in the footage in question. Then Freund checked with Police Headquarters to see if Hole drives a Ford Escort, the same as in the recording. He sent us the files. They were taken using a so-called wildlife camera outside Rakel Fauke’s house. The time matches the presumed time of the murder. The camera has been removed, presumably by the only person who knew it was there.”
“The only person?”
“When people install cameras like that in built-up areas, they’re usually used to spy on people. Their partner, for instance. So we sent Hole’s photograph to the people who sell wildlife cameras in Oslo, and Harry Hole was recognised by an elderly man who used to own Simensen Hunting and Fishing.”
“Why would Har... Hole request analysis of the footage if he knew it would incriminate himself?”
“Why would he request analysis without anyone in the police knowing about it?”
“Hole is suspended. If he was going to investigate the murder of his wife, it would have to be in secret.”
“In which case the brilliant Harry Hole has just achieved his greatest triumph by uncovering the brilliant Harry Hole.”
Katrine Bratt didn’t answer. She hid her mouth behind the paper cup, turning it in her hand as she stared out through the windshield at the dwindling daylight.
“I actually think it was the other way around,” Sung-min said. “He wanted to check with an expert if it was technically possible to see that it was him being filmed on his way in and out of Rakel Fauke’s home right in the middle of the presumed time of the murder. If Sigurd Freund hadn’t been able to tell that it was Hole, Hole could have safely handed the footage over to us, because it proves that someone was in Rakel Fauke’s house at the time when Hole apparently had an alibi. His alibi would have been strengthened because the images confirm the medical officer’s conclusion that Rakel Fauke was murdered sometime between ten o’clock and two o’clock, more precisely after 23:21, which is when the person caught on film arrives.”
“But he does have an alibi!”
Sung-min was about to state the obvious, that the alibi was reliant on a single witness, and that experience shows that witness statements couldn’t always be relied upon. Not because witnesses are unreliable by nature, but because our memories play tricks and our senses are less reliable than we think. But he had heard the despair in her voice, seen the naked pain in her eyes.
“One of our detectives has gone to see Gule, Hole’s neighbour,” he said. “They’re reconstructing the circumstances in which he gave Hole his alibi.”
“Bjørn says Harry was dead drunk when he left him in his flat, that Harry couldn’t possibly have...”
“Appeared to be dead drunk,” Sung-min said. “I’m assuming an alcoholic is more than capable of acting intoxicated. But it’s possible he overplayed it.”
“Oh?”
“According to Peter Ringdal, the owner of—”
“I know who he is.”
“Ringdal says he’s seen Hole drunk before, but never in such a state that he had to be dragged out. Hole can handle his drink better than most, and Ringdal says he hadn’t drunk that much more than he had seen him drink before. It may be that Hole wanted to look more incapacitated than he was.”
“I haven’t heard any of this before.”
“Because it was assumed that Hole had an alibi, no one looked into it particularly thoroughly. But I paid a visit to Peter Ringdal this morning, after I’d spoken to Freund. It turns out that he’d just had a visit from Harry Hole, and from what Ringdal says, I get the impression Hole realised that the net was starting to close in around him, and was searching desperately for a scapegoat. But once he realised that Ringdal was no use, he’d run out of options, and...” Sung-min gestured towards the road in front of them, leaving Bratt to finish the sentence for herself if she wanted to.
Katrine Bratt raised her chin, the way men of a certain age do to pull the skin of their necks from shirt collars that are too tight, but here it made Sung-min think of an athlete trying to motivate herself mentally, shake off a lost point before launching into battle for the next. “What other lines of inquiry are Kripos looking into?”
Sung-min looked at her. Had he expressed himself imprecisely? Didn’t she realise that this wasn’t a line of inquiry, but a well-lit four-lane highway where even Ole Winter couldn’t get lost, where they — apart from the fact that they weren’t in possession of the culprit’s earthly remains — had already reached their goal?
“There aren’t any other lines of inquiry now,” he said.
Katrine Bratt nodded and nodded as she alternated between closing her eyes and staring ahead of her, as if this simple fact was something that took a lot of brain power to process.
“But if Harry Hole is dead,” she said, “there isn’t really any rush to go public with the fact that he’s Kripos’s prime suspect.”
Sung-min began to nod too. Not because he was promising anything, but because he realised why she was asking.
“The local police have issued a press statement saying something along the lines of ‘man missing after a car ended up in the river next to Highway 287,’ ” Sung-min said, pretending he didn’t know it was an exact quote, because experience had taught him that it made people nervous and less communicative if you let them see too much of your good memory, your ability to read people, your deductive brain. “I can’t see any pressing reason for Kripos to issue any more information to the public, but of course that’s a decision for my bosses.”
“Winter, you mean?”
Sung-min looked at Bratt, wondering why she had felt it necessary to mention his boss by name. Her face revealed no ulterior motive, and there was no reason to suspect she knew how uncomfortable it made Sung-min every time he was reminded of the fact that Ole Winter was still his superior. Sung-min had never told a soul that he considered Ole Winter a mediocre detective and a distinctly weak leader. Not weak in the sense that he was too soft, quite the reverse, he was old-fashioned, authoritarian and stubborn. Winter lacked the confidence to admit when he was wrong, and to accept that he ought to delegate more of the management to younger colleagues with younger ideas. And, truth be told, sharper detectives. But Sung-min had kept all of this to himself because he assumed he was alone in these opinions within Kripos.