Death in Oslo by Anne Holt

objections, as far as we were led to believe.’
    ‘I think then we’ll leave it at that,’ the Minister of Justice said. ‘Let’s stick to the actual situation and not get distracted by what might, could or should have been done differently. I suggest that we . . .’
    He went over to the door and opened it.
    ‘Where are the drawings?’ Peter Salhus asked and looked at the Chief of Police.
    ‘Of the hotel?’
    Salhus nodded.
    ‘We’ve got them down at HQ. I’ll get you copies straight away.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    Salhus held out his hand in a conciliatory gesture. Bastesen hesitated and then finally shook it.
    It was already past two o’clock. Still no one had heard from Helen Bentley. Still no one knew exactly when she had disappeared. And the Director General of the PST and the Chief of Oslo Police still did not know that the architectural drawings of the Hotel Opera that they had back in that bleak, curved building at Grønlandsleiret 44 were incomplete and inaccurate.

VI
    T he man woke up with his ear full of vomit.
    The stench seared his nose and he tried to get up. His arms wouldn’t do as he wanted. He lay back down, resigned. He was too far gone now. He had started to puke. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had to get rid of all the shit he poured into himself. Several decades of practice had made his stomach immune to most things. The only thing he didn’t drink was meths. Two years ago, after a real glut of contraband, he’d ended up in hospital with a couple of brethren spirits. All of them with methanol poisoning. One of them had died. The other one went blind. Whereas he got up after five days and walked straight home, more alert than he had been for a long time. The doctor had said he was lucky.
    Practice, he had said to himself. It’s having enough practice that counts.
    But he avoided meths.
    The flat was a tip. He knew that. He should do something about it. The neighbours had started to complain. About the smell, primarily. He had to do something, or they’d throw him out.
    He tried to get up again.
    Shit. The whole world was spinning.
    He had an intense pain in his groin and sick in his hair. If he rolled his lower body off the sofa, he might be able to get up from there. If it weren’t for the bloody cancer, he’d bedoing all right. He wouldn’t have thrown up. He would have had the energy to get up.
    Slowly, to save what little muscle he had left in his scrawny body, he wedged his leg against the coffee table. He then managed to get up into a kind of sitting position, with his knees on the matted carpet and his body in a resting position against the sofa, as if in prayer.
    The TV was on, with the volume too loud.
    He remembered now. He had turned it on when he came home at the crack of dawn. As in a distant dream, he remembered that someone had knocked on the door. Heavily and loudly, the way his bloody neighbours always did, to pester him both night and day. Fortunately nothing more had happened. No doubt the pigs had other things to do on a day like today, instead of coming to pick up a poor old soak.
    ‘Hurrah for the seventeenth of May,’ he wheezed with great effort, and finally managed to creep up on to the sofa.
    ‘It is still uncertain when President Bentley disappeared from the hotel. . .’
    The sound penetrated the man’s tired brain. He tried to find the remote control in the chaos on the table. A packet of crisps that had spilled out over old newspapers was now drenched in beer from an upturned can. Someone had eaten nearly all the pizza that a mate in the backyard had given him the day before, and that he had been saving for today. He had no idea who.
    ‘
As far as Dagsrevyen is aware, the American president is. . .’
    In many ways it had been a damn good night.
    Real alcohol, not the usual rubbish and shit. He had had half a bottle of Upper Ten whisky to himself. And more, if he was honest. He had helped himself to some of the stuff the others had with