Free Cockroaches: The Second Inspector Harry Hole Novel by Jo Nesbø Page A

fru Molnes.”
    She informed the servant and sent him off.
    “Have you been told that you can go and see your husband now?”
    “Yes. Thank you,” she said. Harry noticed a curt undertone. “Now they let me see him. A man I’ve been married to for twenty years.”
    The brown eyes had turned black, and Harry reflected that it was probably true that lots of shipwrecked Portuguese and Spanish sailors had drifted ashore on the Sunnmøre coast.
    “I’m obliged to ask you some questions,” he said.
    “Then you’d better do it now while the gin’s still working.”
    She swung a slim, sun-tanned leg over her knee.
    Harry took out a notepad. Not that he needed any notes, but it meant he wouldn’t have to look at her while she answered. As a rule it made talking to next of kin easier.
    She told him that her husband had left home in the morning and had not mentioned anything about coming home late, but it was not unusual for something to crop up. When it was ten in the evening and she still hadn’t heard from him she had tried calling, but she didn’t get an answer from either the office or his mobile phone. Nevertheless, she hadn’t been worried. Just after midnight Tonje Wiig had called and said her husband had been found dead in a motel room.
    Harry studied Hilde Molnes’s face. She spoke with a firm voice and without any dramatic gestures.
    Tonje Wiig had given Hilde Molnes the impression theydidn’t know what the cause of death was yet. The next day the embassy had informed her that he had been murdered, but as regards the cause of death instructions from Oslo imposed absolute silence on all of them. That included Hilde Molnes, even though she was not employed by the embassy, because all Norwegian citizens can be forced to maintain silence if state security considerations demand it. She said the latter with deep sarcasm and raised her glass to a
skål
.
    Harry just nodded and took notes. He asked if she was sure he hadn’t left his mobile phone at home, to which she answered she was. On an impulse he asked what kind of mobile phone he had and she replied that she wasn’t sure, but thought it was Finnish.
    She couldn’t help him with the name of anyone who might have had a motive for wishing the ambassador dead.
    He drummed his pencil on the pad.
    “Did your husband like children?”
    “Oh yes, a lot!” Hilde Molnes burst out, and for the first time he could hear a quiver in her voice. “You know, Atle was the world’s kindest father.”
    Harry had to look down at the pad again. There had been something in her eyes that revealed she had sussed the double-edged nature of his question. He was nearly sure she didn’t know anything, but he also knew it was his unfortunate task to have to take the next step and ask her straight out if she knew the ambassador had child pornography in his possession.
    He ran a hand across his face. He felt like a surgeon with a scalpel in his hand, unable to perform the first incision. He could never get over his sensitivity when it came to matters unpleasant, when innocent people had to put up with having their nearest and dearest thrust into the limelight, having details they hadn’t wanted to know hurled in their faces.
    Hilde Molnes spoke first.
    “He loved children so much we considered adopting alittle girl.” She had tears in her eyes now. “A poor little refugee from Burma. Yes, at the embassy they are so careful to say Myanmar not to offend anyone, but I’m so old I say Burma.”
    She forced a dry chuckle through the tears and composed herself. Harry looked away. A red hummingbird hovered quietly in front of the orchids, like a little model helicopter.
    That was it, he decided. She knows nothing. If it had any relevance to the case he would take it up later. And if it didn’t he would spare her.
    Harry asked how long they had known each other, and she told him how they had met when Atle Molnes was a newly qualified political science graduate, a bachelor home for