Read Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police for Free Online Page A

natural buoyancy in his private life and career. As a rule Truls was an easy man to lead and to predict – when Mikael said jump, he jumped. But he could also get that blackness in his eyes, and then he seemed to become someone Mikael didn’t know. Like the time with the young guy they arrested, whom Truls blinded with his truncheon. Or the guy at Kripos who tried it on with Mikael. Colleagues had seen, so Mikael had to do something to avoid the impression he would let such matters go. He had tricked the guy into meeting in the Kripos boiler room, and there Truls had attacked the man with his baton. First of all, in a controlled way, then more and more savagely as the blackness in his eyes seemed to spread, until he appeared to be possessed, his eyes wide and dark, and Mikael had to stop him so that he didn’t kill the guy. Yes, Truls was loyal, but he was also a loose cannon, and that in particular worried Mikael Bellman. When Mikael had told him the Appointments Board had decided he was suspended until they were satisfied they knew where the money in Truls’s account came from, Truls had just shrugged as though it was of no significance and left. As if Truls ‘Beavis’ Berntsen had anything to go to, a life outside work. And Mikael had seen the blackness in his eyes. It had been like lighting a fuse, watching it burn in a mine gallery and then nothing happens. But you don’t know if the fuse is just long or if it has gone out, so you wait, on tenterhooks, because something tells you the longer it takes, the worse the explosion is going to be.
    The car parked behind City Hall. Mikael got out and walked up the steps to the entrance. Some claimed this was the real main entrance, the way the architects Arneberg and Poulsson had designed it in the 1920s, and that the drawing had been turned round by mistake. And when the error was discovered in the late 1940s the building was so far along that they hushed the matter up and went on as if nothing was wrong, hoping that people sailing up Oslo Fjord to Norway’s capital city wouldn’t realise the sight that met them was the kitchen entrance.
    Mikael Bellman’s Italian leather soles gently caressed the stone floor as he marched over to reception, where the woman behind the counter flashed him a dazzling smile.
    ‘Good morning, sir. You are expected. Ninth floor, end of the corridor on the left.’ Bellman studied himself in the lift mirror on his way up. And reflected that was exactly what he was: on his way up. Despite this murder case. He straightened the silk tie Ulla had bought him in Barcelona. Double Windsor knot. He had taught Truls how to tie a knot at school. But only the thin, easy one. The door at the end of the corridor was ajar. Mikael pushed it open.
    The office was bare. The desk cleared, the shelves empty and the wallpaper had light patches where pictures had hung. She was sitting on a windowsill. Her face had the conventional good looks that women often call ‘nice’, but it had no sweetness or charm despite the blonde doll’s hair arranged in comic ringlets. She was tall and athletic with broad shoulders and broad hips which had been negotiated into a tight leather skirt for the occasion. Her thighs were crossed. The masculinity in her face – emphasised by an aquiline nose and a pair of cold, blue lupine eyes – combined with a self-confident, provocative, playful gaze had caused Bellman to make a couple of quick assumptions the first time he saw her. Isabelle Skøyen was an initiative-taker and a risk-loving cougar.
    ‘Lock,’ she said.
    He hadn’t been mistaken.
    Mikael closed the door behind him and turned the key. Walked over to one of the other windows. City Hall towered above Oslo’s modest development of four- and five-storey buildings. Overlooking Rådhusplassen, the City Hall square, was the 700-year-old Akershus Fortress, on high ramparts with ancient, war-damaged cannons pointing at the fjord, which seemed to have goose pimples as it