‘Even though he was killed?’
‘Even though he was killed. Especially if the person asking the question is a reporter.’
‘Even though it was you who tipped off Tore Pulli that I was back at work?’
Olsvik looks at Henning as a cup of steaming hot coffee is placed in front of him.
‘Thank you,’ he says, looking up at the waiter. ‘Put it on the company account, would you?’
‘Sure.’
Olsvik waits until the waiter is out of hearing range. Then he pins his eyes on Henning. ‘What are you talking about, Juul?’
‘The only people to visit Tore while he was inside were you, Geir Gronningen and Veronica Nansen. And I know that neither of them told Tore that I had returned to 123news. ’
Olsvik smiles wearily. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Juul. There are many ways to get information in a prison even if you don’t have visitors every day or access to the Internet. The inmates speak to the prison guards and with other inmates, and they’re entitled to make twenty minutes’ worth of telephone calls every week.’
‘I thought all telephone conversations were monitored?’
‘In theory, yes. But no one listens in to every word that is said. They do spot checks, primarily to determine if any communication relating to drug smuggling or similar is taking place. And I regret to have to tell you, Juul, but no alarm bells would start ringing if someone, in an aside, happens to mention that you’re back at work. People have more important things to worry about.’
Feeling a tad humbled, Henning has to admit that the lawyer is probably right.
‘Do you know if the prison keeps a record of which numbers an inmate has called?’ he says, trying to shake off his embarrassment.
‘I imagine that they log outgoing calls. And Tore might have tried to get someone on the outside to help him by calling or writing a letter. He is not the first inmate to believe he was unfairly convicted. Some write to the press, others to private detectives.’
‘So you and Tore never discussed if a third party might be able to help him?’
‘I really can’t tell you what I did or did not discuss with my client-’
‘Please, Olsvik,’ Henning interrupts him. ‘I know you have attorney-client privileges and rules to observe, but we’re not talking about information that is sensitive to your client’s case. And I’m asking you because I’m still trying to help him — even though he is dead.’
‘And you can do that by finding out how Tore knew that you were working again?’
Henning hesitates for a second. ‘Among other things.’
‘You have to explain the logic in this to me.’
Henning takes a deep breath. ‘In parallel with working on Tore’s case, I’m also trying to find out what happened on the day my son died. Tore claimed that he…’
A thought occurs to Henning that almost takes his breath away. Pulli contacted him in the hope that Henning could help exonerate him. The bait was the truth of what happened the day that Jonas died.
What if that was the reason Pulli had to die?
‘Pulli claimed what?’ Olsvik asks him.
‘That he knew something about the fire in my flat,’ Henning says, distracted.
‘And you think that your son’s death relates to Pulli’s?’
‘Yes. Or… I… I don’t know,’ Henning admits without looking up.
He remembers what Elisabeth Haaland told him about their burglar alarm packing up on a Sunday. That must have been the day after Pulli called me, Henning concludes, since he met the fire investigator Erling Ophus on a Saturday. In which case, someone must have acted with extreme speed. First they would have to identify someone who could get close to Tore Pulli, a job that would surely require time and research, then they would need to get hold of the surveillance equipment for Brenden’s flat — on a Saturday — and install it when the Brenden family left the house the next day.
Henning shakes his head. There wouldn’t be enough time.
‘I know nothing about this,’ Olsvik says. ‘I haven’t heard anything.’
Henning nods slowly. But the thought refuses to go away. And there is another option, he thinks, which Olsvik also touched on. That Pulli had been in contact with someone else regarding the same subject before he called Henning.
I need to get hold of those call logs, Henning says to himself.
Chapter 96
Normally it takes the police five to six weeks to get an answer when they send off a fingerprint to Kripos. But after locating Thorleif Brenden’s car in Kirkegaten and successfully lifting a fingerprint from the armrest on the passenger side, Brogeland persuaded forensic scientist Ann-Mari Sara to convince her bosses to give the sample top priority and run it through AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. It took only ten or twelve seconds before she got a hit. And after the result had been checked manually, there was no doubt that the fingerprint belonged to a man called Orjan Mjones.
Brogeland remembers Mjones from his plain-clothes days. His name also appeared on the long list Nokleby gave them after Elisabeth Haaland had described ‘Furio’ — the man who pretended to interview her.
It really is ridiculous, Brogeland thinks, that so few staff within the police force have access to the Indicia database where all information about everyone — obtained both officially and unofficially — is collected and stored. If you have a description of a person and if information about someone with similar features has previously been entered, everything relating to them — including any criminal record — appears in a matter of seconds. In some cases the level of information stored about the person includes the smallest details. All mapping of East Europeans, for example, in connection with Project Borderless is being entered into Indicia.
Brogeland studies the fact sheet on Mjones which Nokleby printed out and gave to them after Elisabeth Haaland had described ‘Furio’. His criminal career began in his teens, and he has two previous convictions. The first is for a robbery in the Majorstua area of Oslo where a car was used to ram-raid a jeweller’s, while the other conviction relates to possession of an illegal weapon in a bar in Oslo. When police searched his remarkably tidy home, they discovered several other weapons as well as explosives and burglary equipment. While he was suspected of being the brains behind a string of minor and major robberies in his early twenties, things quietened down around him at the end of the nineties and the start of the new millennium. For that reason, Mjones was suspected of having made the transition from petty to organised crime and of moving into an even more lucrative and discreet career as a fixer. This could mean anything from providing persuasive heavies to carrying out actual hits. But even though the rumours flourished, the police never found anything concrete they could arrest him for.
Yesterday, Brogeland had called one of his former colleagues at Organised Crime, Njal Vidar Hammerstad, to ask if they had come across Mjones in recent years. Hammerstad said that they didn’t have him under surveillance, but that his face popped up from time to time. They knew, for example, that Mjones had befriended several people in the criminal Albanian community. But Hammerstad didn’t know if there was a link between Mjones and Tore Pulli.
In an ideal world, Brogeland thinks, plain-clothes officers would have followed Mjones and his like every day all year round. But it’s too expensive. Every year Oslo Police spends billions of kroner fighting organised crime and yet it’s still not enough. It doesn’t even scratch the surface. Norway is an attractive country for criminal gangs because we’re an affluent nation, he thinks. With a chronically understaffed police force.
Sometimes his wife asks him if he misses his old life as a plain-clothes police officer. His reply is always no, but that’s a lie. Of course he does. He misses the buzz of the chase even though there might be long boring intervals in between. He remembers the endless hours sitting in cars or trying to blend in in the street. And then the high when everything kicked off at last, when he would explode into action, give his all without hesitating. Not for one second. But he couldn’t live that life once he had a family. The level of risk and the generally anti-social working hours were intolerable in the long run.