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– The technicians have found tracks, Nina Jebsen told him.

Her voice was so studiedly calm that he turned to look at her.

– Tracks?

She pointed in the direction of one of the white coats squatting by the stream a few metres away. The next moment Viken was at his side. The track in the mud was about the length of a child’s foot, but much broader, and with clear signs of claw marks. He was no wildlife expert, but he was in no doubt that this track was like the one they had found up in the Nordmarka. He opened his mouth, but what he was about to say stuck in his throat.

The technician shone his torch along the edge of the stream.

– There are more tracks here. They seem to disappear into the water.

Viken’s stomach had turned into a burning acid bubble bath. He peered up towards the top of the slope. Heard voices up there, a car starting, someone calling. Maybe they’d picked up what was being said down here with those directional mikes. The helicopter had dropped lower and was circling like a giant bird in the dark sky. He tried to imagine the reaction when news of what he now believed to be the case became known. There would be a storm. A tidal wave. He swallowed down the jet of heartburn that pulsed all the way up into his mouth.

26

BY THE TIME Nina Jebsen had finished making out her crime-scene report, the canteen was open. She would have time to pop up there and get a sandwich and a Bonaqua before the meeting began. She took her breakfast back down to the office she shared with Sigmundur Helgarsson. As usual, something or other had delayed him, and she was pleased enough to have the room to herself for a while. She removed the sandwich wrapping, picked up one of the pieces of bread and as best she could scraped off the mayonnaise. There was some left on the lettuce, but she didn’t have time to take it to the toilet to wash it off.

As she munched away, she reread what she had typed. It was as though she only now realised what she had seen in Frogner Park the night before. She pushed the half-eaten sandwich to one side, took a few swigs of the mineral water with its sickly raspberry taste, opened Aftenposten’s net edition. Main headline: Found murdered. She knew this was just the beginning and opened VG Nett to get a better idea of what was in store. Killer bear tracks in Oslo centre. She gaped. The photograph had been taken from the helicopter and showed the crime scene by the water, the dead woman, the technicians in white, a figure that might have been herself. The press conference was going to be a lot of fun. It was due to start at ten o’clock. Agnes Finckenhagen and Viken would be there, and someone from the eighth floor, maybe the chief of police himself. Viken had made it clear that there would be no mercy for anyone found leaking information in the case. She had to smile at his phrase, like the title of some fifty-year-old Western, but there was no reason to suppose he didn’t mean what he said. Viken wasn’t as hard to get on with as some people claimed. He was like a reasonably complex machine; it was a question of finding out how it worked. She’d said something along these lines to Sigge Helgarsson one morning after he’d been hauled over the coals, but he didn’t seem to share her view. A while back Sigge had started referring to Chief Inspector H. M. Viken as His Master’s Voice, abbreviated in due course to just the Voice. Nina Jebsen thought it was a pretty appropriate nickname, but she didn’t use it herself.

– We’ve got one hour before the section leader and I have to leave, Viken announced.

Nina fidgeted with the corner of the report lying in front of her. She thought it was comical, the formal way he always referred to Agnes Finckenhagen as ‘section leader’. It was just six months ago that she’d been appointed to the post. There was not much doubt that Viken had been bypassed. A man with thirty years’ experience in the job, with a recognised talent as an investigator. When he led a team, there were not many who would cross him, and certainly not those who wished to carry on working in the section. And if you were loyal, he would take you under his wing. It was a safe place to be for a newcomer; she wasn’t the only one to have discovered that. He spoke out for them against the higher-ups; loud and clear, as he would say himself. And then they had gone and appointed an outsider as section leader. A woman ten years his junior, with little experience of crimes of violence. Viken had contented himself with the observation that it was amazing how far you could get with a few evening classes in Better Leadership at the Business Institute. Especially if you were a woman. And then he kept his mouth shut.

– Do you need to expand the group? asked Jarle Frøen, the police prosecutor who had been put in formal charge of the investigation. A joke, as long as it was Viken who was leading it. Frøen was regarded as one of the weakest of the lawyers. Maybe that was why Viken seemed so pleased to have him along, thought Nina. The lawyer was a tubby man with a pear-shaped head, along the sides of which a few reddish tufts still clung. He wasn’t much older than her but looked more like someone in his mid-forties.

Viken seemed to be weighing the pros and cons before answering.

– Let’s wait until we know what kinds of skills we’re going to need.

– The woman last night, this Davidsen, do we have a cause of death for her? asked Arve Norbakk.

Viken looked over at Nina.

– Know anything about that, Nina?

– I spoke to the woman who’s handling the case at the Pathological Institute, a Dr Finnerud…

– I think you mean Plåterud, Viken grinned.

Nina Jebsen felt herself going red.

– Correct. She’s found a number of hypodermic needle marks on the arms and legs. They also have a provisional result from the blood tests.

– And you didn’t tell us until now, Viken interrupted. – Did they find any trace of a narcotic called thiopental?

– Yes, they did.

Viken scratched his thick lower jaw. As usual he was wearing a freshly ironed white shirt. – We haven’t told anyone that was what Hilde Paulsen was given an overdose of.

He looked around the table.

– Two women killed in exactly the same way. Let us make this assertion: the perpetrator is the same. Or perpetrators.

He gave them time to digest this. Then he asked:

– What about time of death?

– According to Plåterud, Davidsen had been dead for more than ten hours but less than twenty-four before she was found.

– Less than twenty-four hours, Viken repeated thoughtfully. – I will presume the animal tracks by the water were left at the same time as the body.

He swallowed the rest of his coffee.

– Outside these walls we’re going to be as careful as fuck, pardon my French, Nina, you who are so young and unsullied.

She responded with a weary little shake of the head.

– But in here we can be as creative as we like. We damn well need to be. We know that Hilde Sofie Paulsen’s body had marks on it indicating an attack by a bear. If we leave out Spitsbergen, then it’s extremely rare for anyone to be threatened by a bear in Norway. But now we find a second victim, Cecilie Davidsen, with wounds remarkably similar to those we found on Paulsen, and animal tracks in Frogner Park that are practically identical to those we found up in the Nordmarka. Which of you supposes that a large brown bear is prowling the streets of central Oslo?

He bared his teeth. To Nina it was unclear whether he was smiling or imitating the imagined animal.

– We have to look at other possibilities here. Come on, Sigge, you grew up with polar bears as your next-door neighbours.

The Icelander gave a little laugh, though he obviously didn’t think it was particularly funny.

– It might have escaped from somewhere.

– A bear sanctuary? The nearest one is in Hallingdal; that’s over a hundred miles away. Think it took the bus?