Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police by Jo Nesbø Page B

long, black leather coat. He had a lunatic’s staring eyes and a vampire’s open mouth with blood dripping from both corners. And he seemed to be floating above the ground.
    ‘Yes? Hello? Stian? Are you there? Stian?’
    But Stian didn’t answer. He had stood up, knocked the chair over, edged backwards and clung to the wall, tearing Miss December off the nail and sending her to the floor.
    He had found the emergency stop pole. It was protruding from the mouth of the man attached to one of the T-bars.
    ‘Then he was sent round and round on the ski lift?’ Gunnar Hagen asked, angling his head and studying the body hanging in front of them. There was something wrong about the shape, like a wax figure melting and being stretched out towards the ground.
    ‘That’s what the young man told us,’ said Beate Lønn, stamping her feet on the snow and looking up the illuminated tramway where her white-clad colleague had almost merged with the snow.
    ‘Found anything?’ Hagen asked in a tone that suggested he already knew the answer.
    ‘Loads,’ Beate said. ‘The trail of blood carries on four hundred metres to the top of the lift and four hundred metres back again.’
    ‘I meant anything apart from the obvious.’
    ‘Footprints in the snow from the car park, down the short cut and straight here,’ Beate said. ‘The pattern matches the victim’s shoes.’
    ‘He came here in shoes ?’
    ‘Yes. And he came alone. There were no prints other than his. There’s a red Golf in the car park. We’re checking now to find the owner.’
    ‘No signs of the perpetrator?’
    ‘What do you reckon, Bjørn?’ Beate asked, turning to Holm, who at that moment was walking towards them with a roll of police tape in his hand.
    ‘Not so far,’ he panted. ‘No other footprints. But loads of ski tracks, of course. No visible fingerprints, hair or fabric so far. Perhaps we’ll find some on the toothpick.’ Bjørn Holm nodded towards the pole sticking out of the dead man’s mouth. ‘Otherwise all we can do is hope Pathology might find something.’
    Gunnar Hagen shivered in his coat. ‘You make it sound as if you already know you won’t find much.’
    ‘Well,’ Beate Lønn said, a ‘well’ Hagen recognised; it was the word Harry Hole used to introduce bad news. ‘There was no DNA. There weren’t any fingerprints to be found at the other crime scene either.’
    Hagen wondered whether it was the temperature, the fact that he had come straight from his bed or what his Krimteknisk leader had said that made him shiver.
    ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, steeling himself.
    ‘I mean I know who it is,’ Beate said.
    ‘I thought you said you didn’t find any ID on him.’
    ‘That’s correct. And it took me a while to recognise him.’
    ‘You? I thought you never forgot a face?’
    ‘The fusiform gyrus gets confused when both cheeks have been smashed in. But that’s Bertil Nilsen.’
    ‘Who’s that?’
    ‘That’s why I rang you. He’s . . .’ Beate Lønn took a deep breath. Don’t say it, Hagen thought.
    ‘A policeman,’ Bjørn Holm said.
    ‘Worked at the police station in Nedre Eiker,’ Beate said. ‘We had a murder just before you came to Crime Squad. Nilsen contacted Kripos thinking the case bore similarities to a rape case he’d worked on in Krokstadelva, and offered to come to Oslo to give a hand.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Dead duck. He came, but basically just delayed the proceedings. The man or men were never caught.’
    Hagen nodded. ‘Where . . .?’
    ‘Here,’ Beate said. ‘Raped in the ski-lift hut and carved up. Part of the body was found in the lake here, another a kilometre south and a third seven kilometres in the opposite direction, by Lake Aurtjern. That was the reason it was thought there was more than one person involved.’
    ‘And the date . . .?’
    ‘. . . is the same, to the day.’
    ‘How long . . .?’
    ‘Nine years ago.’
    A walkie-talkie crackled. Hagen watched Bjørn Holm lift it to