Nemesis Read Online Free

suppose.’
    ‘I have an inkling she’s good-looking.’
    ‘Hope not,’ Harry said, ducking, out of ingrained habit, to allow his 192 centimetres to pass under the door frame.
    ‘Oh?’
    The answer was shouted from the corridor: ‘Good police officers are ugly.’
    At first sight, Beate Lønn’s appearance didn’t give any firm indicators either way. She wasn’t ugly; some would even call her doll-like. But that might have been mostly because she was small: her face, nose, ears – and her body. Her most prominent feature was her pallor. Her skin and hair were so colourless that she reminded Harry of a corpse Ellen and he had once fished out of Bunnefjord. Unlike with the woman’s body, however, Harry had a feeling that if he just turned away for a second he would forget what Beate Lønn looked like. Which, it seemed, she wouldn’t have minded as she mumbled her name and allowed Harry to shake her small, moist hand before she quickly retrieved it.
    ‘Inspector Hole is a kind of legend here in the building, you know,’ PAS Rune Ivarsson said, standing with his back to them and fiddling with a bunch of keys. At the top of the grey iron door in front of them a sign said, in Gothic letters: THE HOUSE OF PAIN . And underneath: CONFERENCE ROOM 508. ‘Isn’t that right, Hole?’
    Harry didn’t answer. He had absolutely no doubt about the kind of legendary status Ivarsson had in mind; he had never made the slightest attempt to hide his view that Harry was a blot on the force and should have been removed years ago.
    Ivarsson finally unlocked the door and they went in. The House of Pain was the Robberies Unit’s dedicated room for studying, editing and copying video recordings. There was a large table in the middle with three workplaces; no windows. The walls were covered with shelving packed with video tapes, a dozen posters of wanted robbers, a large screen on one wall, a map of Oslo and various trophies from successful arrests: for example beside the door, where two cut-off woollen sleeves with holes for eyes and mouth hung from the wall. Otherwise the room contained grey PCs, black TV monitors, videoand DVD players as well as a number of other machines which Harry could not have identified.
    ‘What has Criiime Squad got out of the video?’ Ivarsson asked, flopping down onto one of the chairs. He drawled the diphthong in an exaggerated fashion.
    ‘Something,’ Harry said, walking over to a shelf of video cassettes.
    ‘Something?’
    ‘Not very much.’
    ‘Shame you lot didn’t come to the lecture I gave in the canteen last September. All the units were represented except yours, if I’m not very much mistaken.’
    Ivarsson was tall, long-limbed, with a fringe of undulating blond hair above two blue eyes. His face had those masculine characteristics which models for German brands like Boss tend to have, and was still tanned after many summer afternoons on the tennis court and perhaps the odd solarium session in a fitness centre. In short, Rune Ivarsson was what most would regard as a good-looking man, and as such he underpinned Harry’s theory about the link between looks and competence in police work. However, what Rune Ivarsson lacked in investigative talent, he made up for with a nose for politics and the ability to form alliances within the Police HQ hierarchy. Furthermore, Ivarsson had the natural self-confidence that many misinterpret as a leadership quality. In his case, this confidence was based solely on being blessed with a total blindness to his own shortcomings, a quality which would inevitably take him to the top and one day make him – in one way or another – Harry’s superior. Initially, Harry saw no reason to complain about mediocrity being kicked upwards, out of the way of investigations, but the danger with people like Ivarsson was that they could easily get it into their heads that they should intervene and dictate to those who really understood detection work.
    ‘Did we miss