Nemesis

It is exactly 15.22.22 when he pulls the trigger. The report is sharp and hollow. Stine's chair is forced backwards as her head dances on her neck like a mangled rag doll. Then the chair topples backwards. There is a thud as her head hits the edge of a desk and Harry can no longer see her. Nor can he see the poster advertising Nordea's new pension scheme glued to the outside of the glass partition above the counter, which now has a red background. All he can hear is the angry, insistent ringing of the telephone. The masked robber picks up the holdall. Harry has to make up his mind. The robber vaults the counter. Harry makes up his mind. In one quick movement he is out of the chair. Six strides. He is there. And picks up the phone:

'Speak!'

In the pause which follows he can hear the sound of the police siren on the TV in the sitting room, a Pakistani pop song from the neighbours and heavy steps up the stairwell sounding like fru Madsen's. Then there is a gentle laugh at the other end of the line. It is laughter from a long-distant encounter. Not in time, but just as distant. Like seventy per cent of Harry's past, which returns to him now and again in the form of vague rumours or total fabrications. But this was a story he could confirm.

'Do you really still use that macho line, Harry?'

'Anna?'

'Gosh, well done, Harry.'

Harry could feel the sweet warmth surging through his stomach, almost like whisky. Almost. In the mirror he saw a picture he had pinned up on the opposite wall. Of himself and Sis one summer holiday a long time ago in Hvitsten when they were small. They were smiling in the way that children do when they still believe nothing nasty can happen to them.

'And what do you do of a Sunday evening then, Harry?'

'Well.' Harry could hear his voice automatically mimicking hers. Slightly too deep, slightly too lingering. He didn't mean to do that. Not now. He coughed and found a more neutral pitch: 'What people usually do.'

'And that is?'

'Watch videos.'

3

The House of Pain

'Seen the video?'

The battered office chair screamed in protest as Police Officer Halvorsen leaned back and looked at his nine-years-senior colleague, Inspector Harry Hole, with an expression of disbelief on his innocent young face.

'Absolutely,' Harry said, running thumb and first finger down the bridge of his nose to show the bags under his bloodshot eyes.

'The whole weekend?'

'From Saturday morning to Sunday evening.'

'Well, at least you had a good time on Friday night,' Halvorsen said.

'Yes.' Harry took a blue folder out of his coat pocket and placed it on the desk facing Halvorsen's. 'I read the transcripts of the interviews.'

From the other pocket Harry took a grey packet of French Colonial coffee. He and Halvorsen shared an office at almost the furthest end of the corridor in the red zone on the sixth floor of Police Headquarters in Grшnland. Two months ago they had gone to buy a Rancilio Silvia espresso coffee machine, which had taken pride of place on the filing cabinet beneath a framed photograph of a girl sitting with her legs up on a desk. Her freckled face seemed to be grimacing, but in fact she was helpless with laughter. The background was the same office wall on which the picture was hanging.

'Did you know that three out of four policemen can't spell "uninteresting" properly?' Harry said, hanging his coat on the stand. 'They either leave out the "e" between the "t" and the "r", or-'

'Interesting.'

'What did you do at the weekend?'

'On Friday, thanks to some anonymous nutter's phone call warning us about a car bomb, I sat in a car outside the American ambassador's residence. False alarm, of course, but things are so sensitive right now that we had to sit there all evening. On Saturday, I made another attempt to find the woman of my life. On Sunday, I concluded that she doesn't exist. What did you get on the robber from the interviews?' Halvorsen measured the coffee into a double-cup filter.

'Nada,' Harry said, taking off his sweater. Underneath, he was wearing a charcoal-grey T-shirt-it had once been black and now bore the faded letters Violent Femmes. He collapsed into the office chair with a groan. 'No one has reported seeing the wanted man near the bank before the robbery. Someone came out of a 7-Eleven on the other side of Bogstadveien and saw the man running up Industrigata. It was the balaclava that caught his attention. The surveillance camera outside the bank shows both of them as the robber passes the witness in front of a skip outside the 7-Eleven. The only interesting thing he could tell us which wasn't on the video was that the robber crossed the road twice further up Industrigata.'

'Someone who can't make up his mind which pavement to walk on. That sounds pretty uninteresting to me.' Halvorsen put the double-cup filter in the portafilter handle. 'With two "e"s, one "r" and one "s".'

'You don't know much about bank robberies, do you, Halvorsen.'

'Why should I? We're supposed to catch murderers. The guys from Hedmark can take care of the robbers.'

'Hedmark?'

'Haven't you noticed as you walk around the Robberies Unit? The rural dialect, the knitted cardigans. But what's the point you're making?'

'The point is Victor.'

'The dog handler?'

'As a rule, the dogs are the first on the scene, and an experienced bank robber knows that. A good dog can follow a robber on foot, but if he crosses the street and cars pass, the dog loses the scent.'

'So?' Halvorsen compressed the coffee with the tamper and finished off by smoothing the surface with a twist, which he maintained was what distinguished the professionals from the amateurs.

'It corroborates the suspicion that we are dealing with an experienced bank robber. And that fact alone means we can concentrate on a dramatically smaller number of people than we might otherwise have done. The Head of Robberies told me-'

'Ivarsson? Thought you weren't exactly on speaking terms?'

'We aren't. He was talking to the whole of the investigation team. He said there are under a hundred bank robbers in Oslo. Fifty of them are so stupid, doped up or mental that we nail them almost every time. Half of them are in prison, so we can ignore them. Forty are skilled craftsmen who manage to slip through so long as someone helps them with the planning. And then there are ten pros, the ones who attack security vans and cash-processing centres. To get them we need a lucky break, and we try to keep tabs on them at all times. They're being asked to give alibis right now.' Harry cast a glance at Silvia, who was gurgling away on the filing cabinet. 'And I had a word with Weber from Forensics on Saturday.'

'Thought Weber was retiring this month.'

'Someone slipped up. He won't be stopping until the summer.'

Halvorsen chuckled. 'He must be even grumpier than usual then.'

'He is, but that's not the reason,' Harry said. 'His lot found sod all.'

'Nothing?'

'Not one fingerprint. Not one strand of hair. Not even clothing fibres. And, of course, you could see from the footprint that he was wearing brand new shoes.'

'So they can't check the patterns of wear against other shoes?'

'Cor-rect,' Harry said, with a long 'o'.

'And the bank robber's weapon?' said Halvorsen, taking one of the cups of coffee over to Harry's desk. On looking up, he noticed that Harry's left eyebrow was almost into his cropped blond hair. 'Sorry. The murder weapon.'

'Thank you. It wasn't found.'

Halvorsen sat on his side of the two desks sipping at his coffee. 'So, in a nutshell, a man walked into a crowded bank in broad daylight, took two million kroner, murdered a woman, strolled out, up a relatively unpopulated but heavily trafficked street in the centre of the capital of Norway, a few hundred metres from a police station and we, the salaried police professionals, do not have a thing to go on?'