‘Too much information?’ Bjørn Holm asked.
‘A trifle superfluous perhaps,’ Beate said. ‘And I also wish he was here.’
‘Do you think he’ll ever come back?’ Bjørn Holm asked.
Beate shook her head. Bjørn Holm didn’t know if it was in response to his question or the whole situation. He turned and his eye caught a spruce branch swaying on the edge of the forest. A chilling bird cry filled the silence.
PART TWO
6
The bell over the door rang furiously as Truls Berntsen stepped in from the freezing cold street and into the damp warmth. There was a smell of rotten hair and hair lotion.
‘Trim?’ said the young man with the glistening black hairstyle Truls was fairly confident he had acquired in a different salon.
‘Two hundred?’ Truls asked, brushing snow off his shoulders. March, the month of broken promises. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to make sure the board outside was still accurate. Gentlemen 200. Children 85. Pensioners 75. Truls had seen people bring their dogs in here.
‘Same as always, pal,’ the hairdresser said in a Pakistani accent, ushering him into one of the salon’s two free chairs. In the third sat a man Truls immediately categorised as an Arab. Dark terrorist eyes beneath a fringe plastered to his forehead. Eyes that darted away in fear after meeting Truls’s in the mirror. Perhaps the man could smell bacon, or recognised the police look. In which case perhaps he was one of those selling drugs down by Brugata. Just hash. The Arabs were cautious with harder drugs. Maybe the Koran equated speed and heroin with a pork chop? Pimp maybe — the gold chain suggested as much. Small-time one, if so. Truls knew the faces of all the big-timers.
On with the babies’ bib.
‘Hair’s got long, pal.’
Truls didn’t like being called ‘pal’ by Pakis, especially not Paki poofs and extra-especially not Paki poofs who would soon be touching you. But the advantage of these powder-puffs was that at least they didn’t rest their hips against your shoulder, tilt their heads, run a hand through your hair, look into your eyes in the mirror and ask whether you want it like this or like that. They just got down to it. They didn’t ask if you wanted your greasy hair washed, they just sprayed it with water, ignored any instructions you might have and went for it with scissors and comb as if it were the Australian sheep-shearing championships.
Truls looked at the front page of the newspaper lying on the shelf below the mirror. It was the same refrain: what was the so-called cop killer’s motive? Most of the speculation centred on a crazy police-hater or an extreme anarchist. Some mentioned foreign terrorism, but terrorists usually claimed the honour of a successful action, and no one had come forward. No one doubted that the two murders were connected — the dates and the crime scenes saw to that — and for a while the police had searched for a criminal both Vennesla and Nilsen had arrested, questioned or offended in some way. But no such connection could be found. So in the interim they had worked on a theory that Vennesla’s murder was one individual’s revenge after an arrest, a bout of jealousy, an inheritance or any of the standard motives. And Nilsen’s murder was another individual with a different motive, but he had been clever enough to copy Vennesla’s murder to fool the police into thinking a serial killer was at work and stop them looking in the obvious places. But then the police had done exactly that, searched in the obvious places as though these were two separate murders. And they didn’t find anything there either.
So the police had gone back to square one. A police murderer. And the press had done the same and kept nagging: why can’t the police catch the person who has killed two of their own?
Truls felt both satisfaction and anger when he saw these headlines. Mikael had probably been hoping that by Christmas and New Year the press would have forgotten the murders and started focusing on other things, allowing them to work in peace. Letting him continue to be the sexy new sheriff in town, the whizz-kid, the town’s guardian. And not someone who failed, who messed up, who sat in front of the flashing cameras with a loser’s face radiating dejected Norwegian Rail-style incompetence.
Truls didn’t need to look at the papers, he had read them at home. He had laughed out loud at Mikael’s feeble statement about where the investigation stood. ‘At this moment in time it’s not possible to say. .’ and ‘There is no information regarding. .’ They were sentences taken directly from the chapter about handling the press in Bjerknes and Hoff Johansen’s Investigative Methods, which had been a set text at Police College and in which it said police officers should use these generic quasi-sentences because journalists got so frustrated with ‘no comment’. And also that they should avoid adjectives.
Truls had checked the photos for traces of desperation on Mikael’s face, the expression he used to wear when the big boys in Manglerud reckoned it was time to shut the poncy upstart’s gob, and Mikael needed help. Truls’s help. And of course Truls stepped up. And he was the one who went home with black eyes and thick lips, not Mikael. No, his good looks were spared. For Ulla.
‘Don’t cut off too much,’ Truls said. He watched his hair falling from his pale, slightly protruding forehead in the mirror. The forehead and the sturdy underbite often led people to assume he was stupid. Which on occasion was an advantage. On occasion. He closed his eyes. Trying to decide whether Mikael’s desperate expression was there in the press conference photos or if he saw it only because he wanted to see it.
Suspension. Expulsion. Rejection.
He was still getting his salary. Mikael had been apologetic. Placed a hand on his shoulder and said it was in everyone’s best interest, Truls’s too. Until it was decided what the consequences would be for a policeman who had received money he couldn’t or wouldn’t account for. Mikael had even made sure that Truls was entitled to keep some allowances. So it wasn’t as if he had to go to cheap hairdressers. He had always come here. But he liked it even better now. He liked having exactly the same haircut as the Arab in the next chair. The terrorist cut.
‘What are you laughing at, pal?’
Truls stopped abruptly when he heard his own grunted guffaws. Those which had given him the sobriquet Beavis. No, Mikael had given it to him. During the school party, to the amusement of everyone else, as they discovered, holy shit, that Truls Berntsen did indeed look and sound like the MTV cartoon character! Had Ulla been there? Or was Mikael sitting with his arm round another girl? Ulla with the gentle eyes, with the white sweater, with the slender hand she had once placed on his neck and drawn his head closer, shouted in his ear to drown the roars of the Kawasakis one Sunday in Bryn. She only wanted to ask where Mikael was. But he could still remember the warmth of her hand, it had felt as if it would melt him, make his knees buckle under him on the bridge over the motorway, then and there in the morning sun. And with her breath in his ear and on his cheek, his senses had been working overtime. Even surrounded by the stench of petrol, exhaust and burnt rubber from motorbikes below he could identify her toothpaste, tell her lip gloss was strawberry flavour and that her sweater had been washed in Milo. That Mikael had kissed her. Had had her. Or had he been imagining it? He definitely remembered he had answered he didn’t know. Even though he did. Even though part of him had wanted to tell her. Had wanted to crush the gentleness, the purity, the innocence and the naivety in her eyes. To crush him, Mikael.
But of course he hadn’t.
Why would he? Mikael was his best friend. His only friend. And what would he have achieved by telling her Mikael was up at Angelica’s house. Ulla could get anyone she wanted, and she didn’t want him, Truls. As long as she was with Mikael he would at least have a chance to be in her presence. He’d had the opportunity, but not the motive.