Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Read Online Free PDF Page B

Persons Unit of three refused to delve into old cases; they had more than enough to do with the new ones.
    In the deserted corridor on his way back to his office Magnus noticed that the door was ajar. He knew he had closed it, and it was past nine, so the cleaners had finished long before. Two years ago they had had problems with thieving from the offices. Magnus Skarre pulled the door open with a vengeance.
    Katrine Bratt was standing in the middle of the room and glanced at him with a furrowed brow, as if it was he who had burst into her office. She turned her back on him.
    ‘I just wanted to see,’ she said, casting her eye over the walls.
    ‘See what?’ Skarre looked around. His office was like all the others except that it didn’t have a window.
    ‘This was his office? Wasn’t it?’
    Skarre frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Hole’s. This was his office for all those years. Even while he was investigating the serial killings in Australia?’
    Skarre shrugged. ‘I think so. Why?’
    Katrine Bratt ran a hand over the desk top. ‘Why did he change offices?’
    Magnus walked around her and plopped down on the swivel chair. ‘It hasn’t got any windows.’
    ‘And he shared the office, first with Ellen Gjelten and then Jack Halvorsen,’ Katrine Bratt said. ‘And both were killed.’
    Magnus Skarre put his hands behind his head. This new officer had class. A league or two above him. He bet her husband was the boss of something or other and had money. Her suit seemed expensive. But when he looked at her a bit closer, there was a little flaw somewhere. A slight blemish he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
    ‘Do you think he heard their voices? Was that why he moved?’ Bratt asked, scrutinising a wall map of Norway on which Skarre had circled the home towns of all the missing persons in Østland, eastern Norway, since 1980.
    Skarre laughed but didn’t answer. Her waist was slim and her back willowy. He knew she knew he was ogling her.
    ‘What’s he like actually?’ she asked.
    ‘Why do you ask?’
    ‘I suppose everyone with a new boss does, don’t they?’
    She was right. It was just that he had never thought of Harry Hole as a boss, not in that way. OK, he gave them jobs to do and led investi gations, but beyond that all he asked was that they kept out of his way.
    ‘He is, as you probably know, somewhat infamous,’ Skarre said.
    She shrugged. ‘I’ve heard about his alcoholism, yes. And that he has reported colleagues. And that all the heads wanted him booted out, but the previous POB held a protective wing over him.’
    ‘His name was Bjarne Møller,’ Skarre said, looking at the map, at the ring around Bergen. That was where Møller had been seen last, before he disappeared.
    ‘And that people at HQ don’t like the media turning him into a kind of pop idol.’
    Skarre chewed his lower lip. ‘He’s a bloody good detective. That’s enough for me.’
    ‘You like him?’ Bratt asked.
    Skarre grinned. He turned and looked straight into her eyes.
    ‘Like, dislike,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could say one or the other.’
    He pushed back his chair, put his feet on the desk, stretched and gave a sort-of-yawn. ‘What are you working on so late at night?’
    It was an attempt to gain the upper hand. After all, she was only a low-ranking detective. And new.
    But Katrine Bratt just smiled as if he had said something funny, walked out of the door and was gone.
    Disappeared. Speaking of which. Skarre cursed, sat up in the chair and went back to his computer.
    Harry woke up and lay on his back staring at the ceiling. How long had he been asleep? He turned and looked at the clock on his bedside table. A quarter to four. The dinner had been an ordeal. He had watched Rakel’s mouth speaking, drinking wine, chewing meat and devouring him as she told him about how she and Mathias were going to Botswana for a couple of years where the government had a good set-up in place to fight HIV but were short