‘Oh dear.’
Katrine took out her notebook and wrote her name and number. ‘You can tell her it’s about the police murders.’
‘Yes, she seems to be obsessed by them.’
Katrine stopped writing. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She uses them like wallpaper. Newspaper cuttings about dead policemen, I mean. Not that it’s any of my business. Students can put up what they like, but that’s a bit. . creepy, isn’t it?’
Katrine looked at him. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Leif Rødbekk.’
‘Listen, Leif. Do you think I could have a peek at her room? I’d like to see the cuttings.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Can I?’
‘No problem. Just show me the search warrant.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t-’
‘I was kidding,’ he grinned. ‘Come with me.’
A minute later they were in the lift on their way to the third floor.
‘The rental agreement says I can go into the rooms as long as I’ve given advance warning. Right now we’re checking all the electric radiators for accumulated dust. One of them caught fire last week. And we tried to give her advance warning before we entered, but Silje didn’t answer the intercom. Sound all right to you, Detective Bratt?’ Another grin. Wolfish grin, Katrine thought. Not without charm. If he’d taken the liberty of using her Christian name at the end of the sentence, it would of course have been over, but he did have a certain lilt. Her gaze sought his ring finger. The smooth gold was matt. The lift doors opened and she followed him down the narrow corridor until he stopped in front of one of the blue doors.
He knocked and waited. Knocked again. Waited.
‘Let’s go in,’ he said, turning the key in the lock.
‘You’ve been very helpful, Rødbekk.’
‘Leif. And it’s a pleasure to be able to help. It’s not every day I run into such a. .’ He opened the door for her but stood in such a way that if she wanted to go in she would have to squeeze past him. She sent him an admonitory glance. ‘. . serious case,’ he said with laughter dancing in his eyes and stepped to the side.
Katrine went in. The rooms hadn’t changed a lot. There was still a kitchenette and the bathroom door at one end and a curtain at the other, behind which Katrine remembered there was a bed. But the first thing that struck her was that she had entered a girl’s room and it couldn’t be a very mature girl living here. Silje Gravseng must long for something in the past. The sofa in the corner was covered with a motley collection of teddy bears, dolls and various cuddly toys. Her clothes, strewn across the table and chairs, were brightly coloured, predominantly pink. On the walls there were pictures, a human menagerie of fashion victims; Katrine guessed they were from boy bands or the Disney Channel.
The second thing to strike her was the black-and-white newspaper cuttings between the lurid glamour shots. She walked round the room, but was drawn to the wall above the iMac on the desk.
Katrine went closer although she had already recognised most of the cuttings. They had the same ones on the wall of the Boiler Room.
The cuttings were fastened with drawing pins and bore no other notes than the date written in biro.
She rejected her first thought and instead tested a second: that it was not so strange for a PHS student to be fascinated by such a high-profile ongoing murder case.
Beside the keyboard lay the newspapers the cuttings had been taken from. And between the papers a postcard with a picture of a north Norwegian mountain peak she recognised: Svolværgeita in Lofoten. She picked up the card and turned it over, but there wasn’t a stamp, or an address or signature. She had already put the card down when her brain told her what her eyes had registered where they had automatically searched for a signature. A word in block capitals where the writing had finished. POLITI. She picked up the card again, holding it by the edges this time and read it from the start.
They think the officers have been killed because someone hates them. They still haven’t understood that it’s the other way round, that they were killed by someone who loves the police and the police’s sacred duty: catching and punishing anarchists, nihilists, atheists, the faithless and the creedless, all the destructive forces. They don’t know that what they’re hunting is an apostle of righteousness, someone who has to punish not only vandals but also those who betray their responsibilities, those who out of laziness and indifference do not live up to the standard, those who do not deserve to be called POLITI.
‘Do you know what, Leif?’ Katrine said, without moving her eyes from the microscopic, neat, almost childish letters written in blue ink. ‘I really wish I had a search warrant.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’ll get one, but you know how it is with these things. They can take time. And by then what I’m curious about may have disappeared.’
Katrine looked up at him. Leif Rødbekk returned her gaze. Not flir-tatiously, but as if to find confirmation. That this was important.
‘And do you know what, Bratt?’ he said. ‘I’ve just remembered that I have to nip down to the basement. The electricians are changing cupboards there. Can you manage on your own for a while?’
She smiled at him. And when he returned her smile too, she wasn’t sure what kind of smile it was.
‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.
Katrine pressed the space bar on the iMac the second she heard the door close behind Rødbekk. The screen lit up. She put the cursor on Finder and typed in Mittet. No hits. She tried a couple of other names from the investigation, crime scenes and ‘police murders’, but no hits.
So Silje Gravseng hadn’t used the computer. Smart girl.
Katrine pulled at the desk drawers. Locked. Strange. What girl of twenty-something would lock the drawers in her own room?
She got up, went over to the curtain and drew it aside.
It was as she remembered, an alcove.
With two large photographs on the wall above the narrow bed.
She had seen Silje Gravseng only twice, the first time at PHS when Katrine had visited Harry. But the family likeness between the blonde Silje and the person in the photo was so striking she was sure.
There was no doubt about the man in the other photo.
Silje must have found a high-res photo online and enlarged it. Every scar, every line, every pore in the skin of the ravaged face stood out. But it was as though they were invisible, as though they faded in the gleam of the blue eyes and the furious expression as he spotted the photographer and told him there would be no cameras on his crime scene. Harry Hole. This was the photo the girls in the row in front of her in the auditorium had been talking about.
Katrine divided the room into squares and started with the top left, then scanned the floor, looked up again to start the next row, the way she had been taught by Harry. And recalled his thesis: ‘Don’t search for something, just search. If you search for something the other things won’t speak to you. Make sure everything speaks to you.’
After going through the room, she sat down at the iMac again, his voice still buzzing in her head: ‘And when you’ve finished and think you haven’t found anything, think inversely, a mirror image, and let the other things speak to you. The things that weren’t there, but should have been. The bread knife. The car keys. The jacket from a suit.’
It was the last item that had helped her to conclude what Silje Gravseng was doing now. She had flicked through all the clothes in the wardrobe, in the linen basket in the little bathroom and on the hooks beside the door, but she hadn’t found the tracksuit Silje had been wearing the last time Katrine had seen her, with Harry in the basement flat where Valentin had lived. Dressed in black from top to toe. Katrine remembered she had reminded her of a marine on night manoeuvres.