Nemesis

'What do we do now?' Beate breathed.

Harry felt his teeth crunching and spat into his hand. From the light of the torch he saw red grit.

'You ring for an ambulance while I get the wirecutters from the car,' he said.

***

'Then he was given sedatives, was he?' Anna asked.

Harry nodded and sipped his Coke.

The young West End clientele perched on bar stools around them drinking wine, shiny drinks and Diet Coke. M was like most cafйs in Oslo-urban in a provincial and naive but, as far as it went, pleasant way, which made Harry think about Kebab, the bright, well-behaved boy in his class at school who, they discovered, kept a book of all the slang expressions the 'in' kids used.

'They took the poor guy to hospital. Then we chatted to the neighbour again and she told us he had been out there hitting tennis balls every evening since his wife had been killed.'

'Goodness. Why?'

Harry hunched his shoulders. 'It's not so unusual for people to become psychotic when they lose someone in those circumstances. Some repress it and act as if the deceased were still alive. The neighbour said Stine and Trond Grette were a fantastic mixed-doubles pair, that they practised on the court almost every afternoon in the summer.'

'So he was kind of expecting his wife to return the serve?'

'Maybe.'

'Jeesus! Will you get me a beer while I go to the loo?'

Anna swung her legs off the stool and wiggled her way across the room. Harry tried not to follow her movements. He didn't need to, he had seen as much as he wanted. She had a few wrinkles around the eyes, a couple of grey strands in her raven-black hair; otherwise she was exactly the same. The same black eyes with the slightly hunted expression under the fused eyebrows, the same high, narrow nose above the indecently full lips and the hollow cheeks which tended to give her a hungry look. She might not have qualified for the epithet 'beautiful'-for that her features were too hard and stark-but her slim body was curvaceous enough for Harry to spot at least two men at tables in the dining area lose their thread as she passed.

Harry lit another cigarette. After Grette, they had paid a visit to Helge Klementsen, the branch manager, but that hadn't given them much to work on, either. He was still in a state of shock, sitting in a chair in his duplex in Kjelsеsveien and staring alternately at the poodle scurrying between his legs and his wife scurrying between kitchen and sitting room with coffee and the driest cream horn Harry had ever tasted. Beate's choice of clothes had suited the Klementsen family's bourgeois home better than Harry's faded Levi's and Doc Martens. Nevertheless, it was mostly Harry who maintained conversation with the nervously tripping fru Klementsen about the unusually high precipitation this autumn and the art of making cream horns, to the interruptions above of stamping feet and loud sobbing. Fru Klementsen explained that her daughter Ina, the poor thing, was seven months pregnant to a man who had just given her the heave-ho. Well, in fact, he was a sailor and had set sail for the Mediterranean. Harry had almost spattered the cream horn across the table. It was then that Beate took charge and asked Helge, who had given up pursuing the dog with his eyes as it had padded out through the living-room door, 'How tall would you say the robber was?'

Helge had observed her, then picked up the coffee cup and lifted it to his mouth where, of necessity, it had to wait because he couldn't drink and talk at the same time: 'Tall? Two metres perhaps. She was always so accurate, Stine was.'

'He wasn't that tall, herr Klementsen.'

'Alright, one ninety. And always so well turned out.'

'What was he wearing?'

'Something black, like rubber. This summer she took a proper holiday for the first time. In Greece.'

Fru Klementsen sniffled.

'Like rubber?' Beate asked.

'Yes. And a balaclava.'

'What colour, herr Klementsen?'

'Red.'

At this point Beate had stopped taking notes and soon after they were in the car on their way back to town.

'If judges and juries only knew how little of what witnesses said about bank robberies was reliable, they would refuse to let us use it as evidence,' Beate had said. 'What people's brains recreate is almost fascinatingly wrong. As if fear gives them glasses which make all robbers grow in stature and blackness, makes guns proliferate and seconds become longer. The robber took a little over one minute, but fru Brжnne, the cashier nearest the entrance, said he had been there for close on five minutes. And he isn't two metres tall, but 1.79. Unless he wore insoles, which is not so unusual for professionals.'

'How can you be so precise about his height?'

'The video. You measure the height against the door frame where the robber enters. I was in the bank this morning chalking up, taking new photos and measuring.'

'Mm. In Crime Squad we leave that kind of measuring job to the Crime Scene Unit.'

'Measuring height from a video is a bit more complicated than it sounds. The Crime Scene Unit's measurements were out by three centimetres, for example, in the case of the Den norske Bank robber in Kaldbakken in 1989. So I prefer to use my own.'

Harry had squinted at her and wondered whether he should ask her why she had joined the police. Instead, he had asked her if she could drop him off outside the locksmith's in Vibes gate. Before getting out, he had also asked her if she had noticed that Helge hadn't spilt a drop of coffee from the brimming cup he had been holding during their questioning. She hadn't.

'Do you like this place?' Anna asked, sinking back on her stool.

'Well.' Harry cast his eyes around. 'It's not my taste.'

'Not mine, either,' Anna said, grabbing her bag and standing up. 'Let's go to my flat.'

'I've just bought you a beer.' Harry nodded towards the frothy glass.

'It's so boring drinking alone,' she said and pulled a face. 'Relax, Harry. Come on.'

It had stopped raining outside and the cold, freshly washed air tasted good.

'Do you remember the day, one autumn, we drove to Maridalen?' Anna asked, slipping her hand inside his arm and starting to walk.

'No,' Harry said.

'Of course you do! In that dreadful Ford Escort of yours, with the seats that don't fold down.'

Harry smiled wryly.

'You're blushing,' she exclaimed with glee. 'Well, I'm sure you also remember that we parked and went for a walk in the forest. With all the yellow leaves it was like…' She squeezed his arm. 'Like a bed, an enormous bed of gold.' She laughed and nudged him. 'And afterwards I had to help you push-start that wreck of a car. I hope you've got rid of it by now?'

'Well,' Harry said, 'it's at the garage. We'll have to see.'

'Dear, oh dear. Now you make it sound like an old friend who's been taken to hospital with a tumour or something.' And she added-softly: 'You shouldn't have been so quick to let go, Harry.'

He didn't answer.

'Here it is,' she said. 'You can't have forgotten that, anyway, can you?' They had stopped outside a blue door in Sorgenfrigata.

Harry gently detached himself. 'Listen, Anna,' he began and tried to ignore her warning stare. 'I've got a meeting with Crime Squad investigators at the crack of dawn tomorrow.'

'I didn't say a word,' she said, opening the door.

Harry suddenly remembered something. He put his hand inside his coat and passed her a yellow envelope. 'From the locksmith.'

'Ah, the key. Was everything alright?'

'The person behind the counter scrutinised my ID very closely. And I had to sign. Odd person.' Harry glanced at his watch and yawned.