‘Tom Ketchum,’ said Harry, draining the rest of his coffee in one swig and getting up.

‘Ketchup?’

‘Ketchum. Hole-in-the-Wall gang. Hanged in New Mexico Territory in 1901. Standard gallows, they just used too much rope.’

‘Oh. How much?’

‘Just over two metres.’

‘Not more? He must have been a fat lump.’

‘Nope. Tells you how easy it is to lose your head, doesn’t it.’

Gjendem shouted something after him, but Harry didn’t catch it. He crossed the car park north of the lido, continued across the grass and took a left over the bridge to the main gate. The fence was more than two and a half metres high all the way round. Over a hundred kilos. Marit Olsen might have tried, but she did not get over the lido fence unaided.

On the other side of the bridge, Harry turned left so that he could approach the lido from the opposite angle. He stepped over the orange police cordon and stopped at the top of the slope by a shrub. Harry had forgotten an alarming amount over recent years. But the cases stuck. He could still remember the names of the four boys on the diving tower. The older brother’s distant eyes as he answered Harry’s questions in a monotone. And the hand pointing to the place where they had got in.

Harry chose his steps carefully, not wishing to destroy possible clues, and bent the shrub to one side. Oslo Parks’ maintenance planned well in advance. If they planned at all. The tear in the fence was still there.

Harry crouched down and studied the jagged edges of the tear. He could see dark threads. Someone who had not sneaked in, but had forced her way through here. Or was pushed. He looked for other evidence. From the top of the tear hung a long black piece of wool. The tear was so high that the person must have been standing upright to touch the fence at that point. The head. Wool made sense, a woollen hat. Had Marit Olsen been wearing a woollen hat? According to Roger Gjendem, Marit Olsen had left home at a quarter to ten to jog in the park. As usual, he had surmised.

Harry tried to visualise it. He imagined an abnormally mild evening in the park. He saw a large, sweaty woman jogging. He didn’t see a woollen hat. He couldn’t see anyone else wearing a woollen hat, either. Not because it was cold at any rate. But perhaps so as not to be seen or recognised. Black wool. A balaclava maybe.

He stepped out of the bushes with care.

He hadn’t heard them coming.

One man held a pistol – probably a Steyr, Austrian, semi-automatic. It was pointed at Harry. The man behind it had blond hair, an open mouth with a powerful underbite, and when he emitted a grunt of a laugh, Harry remembered the nickname belonging to Truls Berntsen from Kripos. Beavis. As in Beavis and Butt-Head.

The second man was short, unusually bow-legged and had his hands in the pockets of a coat that Harry knew concealed a gun and an ID card bearing a Finnish-sounding name. But it was the third man, the one in an elegant grey trench coat, who attracted Harry’s attention. He stood to the side of the other two, but there was something about the gunman and the Finn’s body language, the way they partly addressed Harry, partly this man. As though they were an extension of him, as though this man was actually holding the gun. What struck Harry about the man was not his almost feminine good looks. Nor that his eyelashes were so clearly visible above and below his eyes, incurring suspicions he used make-up. Nor the nose, the chin, the fine shape of his cheeks. Nor that his hair was thick, dark, grey, elegantly cut and a great deal longer than was standard for the force. Nor the many tiny colourless blemishes in the suntanned skin that made him look as if he had been exposed to acid rain. No, what struck Harry was the hatred. The hatred in the eyes that bored into him, a hatred so fierce that Harry seemed to sense it physically, as something white and hard.

The man was cleaning his teeth with a toothpick. His voice was higher and softer than Harry would have imagined. ‘You’ve trespassed into territory that has been cordoned off for an investigation, Hole.’

‘An incontrovertible fact,’ Harry said, looking around him.

‘Why?’

Harry eyed the man, quietly rejecting one potential answer after the other until he realised he simply didn’t have one.

‘Since you appear to know me,’ Harry said, ‘who do I have the pleasure of meeting?’

‘I doubt it will be much of a pleasure for either of us, Hole. So I suggest you leave the area now and never show your face near a Kripos crime scene again. Is that understood?’

‘Well, received but not completely understood. What about if I can help the police in the form of a tip about how Marit Olsen-’

‘The only help you’ve given the police’, the gentle voice interrupted, ‘has been to besmirch its reputation. In my book, you’re a drunk, a lawbreaker and vermin, Hole. So my advice to you is this: crawl back under the stone you came from before someone crushes you with their heel.’

Harry looked at the man, and his gut instinct and his brain concurred: Take it. Withdraw. You have no ammunition to counter with. Be smart.

And he really wished he was smart; he would really have appreciated that quality. Harry took out his pack of cigarettes.

‘And that someone would be you, would it, Bellman? You are Bellman, aren’t you? The genius who sent the sauna-ape after me?’ Harry nodded towards the Finn. ‘Judging from that attempt, I doubt you would be able to crush… er… er…’ Harry struggled feverishly to remember the analogy, but it wouldn’t come. Bloody jet lag.

Bellman interceded. ‘Piss off now, Hole.’ The POB jerked his thumb behind him. ‘Come on. Hop it.’

‘I-’ Harry began.

‘That’s it,’ Bellman said with a broad smile. ‘You’re under arrest, Hole.’

‘What?!’

‘You’ve been told three times to vacate the crime scene and you haven’t complied. Hands behind your back.’

‘Now listen here!’ Harry snarled with a niggling feeling that he was a very predictable rat caught in the laboratory maze. ‘I just want-’

Berntsen, alias Beavis, jogged his arm, knocking the cigarette out of his mouth and onto the wet ground. Harry bent down to pick it up, but got Jussi’s boot in his backside and toppled forwards. He banged his head on the ground and tasted earth and bile. And heard Bellman’s soft voice in his ear.

‘Resisting arrest, Hole? I told you to put your hands behind your back, didn’t I? Told you to put them here…’

Bellman placed his hand lightly on Harry’s bottom. Harry breathed hard through his nose without moving. He knew exactly what Bellman was after. Assault on a police officer. Two witnesses. Paragraph 127. Sentence: five years. Game over. And even though this was already as clear as day to Harry, he knew that Bellman would get what he wanted before long. So he concentrated on something else, excluded Beavis’s grunted laugh and Bellman’s eau de cologne from his mind. He thought about her. About Rakel. He put his hands behind his back, on top of Bellman’s hand and turned his head. Now the wind had blown away the fog hanging over them and he could see the slim, white diving tower outlined against the grey sky. Something was dangling aloft, from the platform, a rope perhaps.

The handcuffs clicked gently into place.

Bellman stood in the car park by Middelthunsgate watching them as they drove away. The wind was tugging gently at his coat.

The custody officer was reading the newspaper when he noticed the three men in front of the counter.

‘Hi, Tore,’ Harry said. ‘Got a non-smoker with a view?’

‘Hi, Harry. Long time no see.’ The officer picked up a key from the cupboard behind him and passed it to Harry. ‘Honeymoon suite.’

Harry saw the confusion on Tore’s face when Beavis leaned forward, grabbed the key and snarled, ‘He’s the prisoner, you old git.’

Harry grimaced an apology to Tore as Jussi frisked him and turned up some keys and a wallet.