“You, yeah,” she sniffed derisively, and went on sobbing. Harry caught the guy’s eye as he passed them.
Saturday night. There was a bar on this side of the street one hundred metres ahead. Maybe he ought to cross the road to avoid it. There wasn’t much traffic, just a few taxis. Actually, there were a lot of taxis. And they formed a wall of black vehicles that made it impossible to cross the road. Bloody hell.
—
Truls Berntsen was watching the seventh and final season ofThe Shield. He wondered about taking a quick look at Pornhub, then decided against it: someone in IT probably kept a log of what staff had gone surfing for on the Internet. Did people still say “surfing”? Truls looked at the time again. The Internet was slower at home, and it was time he got to bed anyway. He pulled on his jacket, zipped it up. But something was bothering him. He didn’t know what it could be, because he had spent the day at taxpayers’ expense without having to do anything useful, a day when he could go to bed secure in the knowledge that the balance sheet was once again in his favour.
Truls Berntsen looked at the phone.
It was stupid, but if it stopped him thinking about it, great.
“Duty officer.”
“This is Truls Berntsen. That woman you sent up here, did she file a report against Svein Finne when she got back down to you?”
“She never came back.”
“She just left?”
“Must have done.”
Truls Berntsen hung up. Thought for a moment. He tapped at the phone again. Waited.
“Harry.”
Truls could only just make out his colleague’s voice over the music and shouting in the background. “Are you at a party?”
“Bar.”
“They’re playing Motörhead,” Truls said.
“And that’s the only positive thing worth saying about the place. What do you want?”
“Svein Finne. You’ve been trying to keep an eye on him.”
“And?”
Truls told him about his visitor earlier in the day.
“Mm. Have you got the woman’s name and phone number?”
“Dagny something. Jensen, maybe. You can ask the duty officer if they took any other details, but I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“I think she’s frightened Finne will find out she was here.”
“OK. I can’t call the duty officer, I’m suspended. Can you do it for me?”
“I was about to go home.”
Truls listened to the silence at the other end. Lemmy was singing “Killed by Death.”
“OK,” Truls grunted.
“One more thing. My ID card’s been deactivated, so I can’t get into the office anymore. Can you bring my service pistol from my bottom drawer and meet me outside Olympen in twenty minutes?”
“Your pistol? What do you want that for?”
