Read Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police for Free Online

his return to the lectern. For the certain showstopper, telling them the unit would be cut to thirty-five. Bellman’s orders, but which they had agreed he would not have to pass on. Hagen stepped forward, put down his folder, coughed, pretended to flick through it. Looked up. Coughed again and said with a wry smile: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.’
    Silence, no laughter.
    ‘Well, we have a few matters to deal with. Some of you are going to be transferred to other duties.’
    Stone dead. Fire extinguished.
    As Mikael Bellman left the lift in the atrium at Police HQ he caught a glimpse of a figure disappearing into the adjacent lift. Was it Truls? Hardly likely, he was still suspended after the Asayev business. Bellman walked out of the building and struggled through the snow to the waiting car. When he took over the Chief of Police post he had been told that in theory he had the services of a chauffeur, but his three predecessors had all refrained from using them because they thought it would send the wrong signals, as they were the ones who had to deliver all the cuts in other areas. Bellman had reversed this practice and said in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t let that kind of social-democratic pettiness threaten his productivity, and it was more important to signal to those further down the food chain that hard work and promotion brought certain benefits. The head of PR had subsequently taken him aside and suggested that if the press were to ask him he should limit his answer to productivity and lose the bit about benefits.
    ‘City Hall,’ Bellman said as he settled in the back seat.
    The car glided away from the kerb, rounded Grønland Church and headed towards the Plaza Hotel and the Post Office building, which despite the excavations around the Opera House still dominated Oslo’s small skyline. But today there was no skyline, only snow, and Bellman thought three mutually independent thoughts. Bloody December. Bloody Vennesla case. And bloody Truls Berntsen.
    Mikael had neither seen nor spoken to Truls since he had been forced to suspend his childhood friend and subordinate last October. Although he thought he’d glimpsed him outside the Grand Hotel last week in a parked car. It was the large injections of cash into Truls’s account that had led to his suspension. As he couldn’t – or didn’t want to – explain them, Mikael, as his boss, had had no choice. Of course Mikael knew where the money had come from: burner jobs – sabotaging evidence – which Truls had done for Rudolf Asayev’s drug cartel. Money the idiot had put straight into his account. The sole consolation was that neither the money nor Truls could point a finger at Mikael. There were only two people in the world who could expose Mikael’s cooperation with Asayev. One was the Councillor for Social Affairs and she was an accomplice, and the other lay in a coma in a closed wing of the Rikshospital.
    They drove through Kvadraturen. Bellman stared with fascination at the contrast between the prostitutes’ black skin and the white snow in their hair and on their shoulders. He also saw that new layers of dope dealers had moved into the vacuum left by Asayev.
    Truls Berntsen. He had followed Mikael through his childhood in Manglerud the way sucker fish follow sharks. Mikael with the brain, the leadership qualities, the eloquence, the appearance. Truls ‘Beavis’ Berntsen with the fearlessness, the fists and the almost childlike loyalty. Mikael, who made friends wherever he turned. Truls, who was so difficult to like that everyone actively avoided him. Yet it was precisely these two who hung out together, Bellman and Berntsen. Their names were called out one after the other in class and later at Police College, Bellman first, Berntsen tagging along afterwards. Mikael had got together with Ulla, but Truls was still there, two steps behind. As the years passed Truls had lagged further behind; he had none of Mikael’s