“Are you talking about me or my husband?” she asked, brushing her thighs. “Or yourself?”
“Sorry?”
“You’d hardly be allowed to investigate the murder of your own wife, Hole. You’re here as a private detective. Or should we saypiratedetective?”
Harry tore off the bent tip of the cigarette and lit what was left. He looked down at his own filthy clothes. His coat was torn where one of the buttons had been pulled off. “Will you tell me if your husband comes back?”
Pia nodded towards the water. “Watch out for that one, it doesn’t like men.”
Harry turned and saw that one of the swans had set off towards them.
When he turned back, Pia Bohr was already heading up the slope.
—
“Apiratedetective?”
“Yep,” Harry said, holding the door to Bjølsenhallen open for Kaja.
The hall lay nestled among the more ordinary buildings around it. Kaja had said that Kjelsås Table Tennis Club was based above the large supermarket on the ground floor.
“Still not keen on the whole lift concept?” Kaja asked as she struggled to keep up with Harry on the stairs.
“It’s not the concept, it’s the size,” Harry said. “How did you find out about this military police officer?”
“There weren’t that many Norwegians in Kabul, and I’ve talked to most of the people I know there now. Glenne is the only person who sounds like he might have something to tell us.”
The girl in reception told them where to go. The sound of shoes on hard floors and the clatter of ping-pong balls reached them before they turned the corner and found themselves in a large, open room where a few people, most of them men, were dancing and crouching and swinging at either end of green table-tennis tables.
Kaja set off towards one of them.
Two men were hitting a ball diagonally across the net at each other, the same trajectory every time, forehand with topspin. They were barely moving, just repeating the same movement, striking the ball with their arms bent and a flick of the wrist, accompanied by a hard step with one foot. The ball was moving so fast that it looked like a white line between the men, who seemed locked into this duel, like a computer game that had got stuck.
Then one of them hit the ball too far and it bounced away across the floor between the tables.
“Damn,” the player said. He was a fit-looking man in his forties or fifties, with a black headband over cropped, silver-grey hair.
“You’re not reading the spin,” the other man said as he went to fetch the ball.
“Jørn,” Kaja said.
“Kaja!” The man with the headband grinned. “Here’s a sweaty soldier for you.” They hugged each other.
Kaja introduced him to Harry.
“Thanks for agreeing to see us,” Harry said.
“No one turns down a meeting with this young lady,” Jørn Glenne said with his smile still in his eyes, squeezing Harry’s hand just hard enough for it to be taken as a challenge. “But if I’d known she was going to be bringing backup…”
Kaja and Glenne laughed.
“Let’s grab a coffee,” Glenne said, putting his paddle on the table.
“What about your partner?” Kaja asked.
“My trainer, bought and paid for,” he said, showing them the way. “Connolly and I are going to be meeting up in Juba this autumn. I need to get in practice.”
“An American colleague,” Kaja explained to Harry. “They had a never-ending table-tennis tournament while we were in Kabul.”
