Free Scarred by Thomas Enger Page A

which are craning their necks towards the sky. An autumnal morning mist has wrapped the branches and leaves in candy floss.
    Her attention is drawn to a man standing close to the fence behind a fir tree. He is holding up a camera and isn’t moving. Emilie slows down and narrows her eyes to get a better look at him. She can’t see much in the drowsy morning light other than that he wears a khaki army jacket and that his face is obscured by the camera. When he lowers it, he seems to be staring right at her. At them.
    ‘Mummy,’ says a small, squeaky and impatient voice at her side. She looks down at Sebastian who is pulling at her.
    ‘I’m coming, darling, I was just—’
    She turns again and looks towards the fir tree. The man is no longer there. She tries to work out where he could have gone, but all she can see are branches swaying in the wind and clouds of dust whirling up from the ground.
    How strange , she thinks. Was he taking pictures of us?
    She looks around. Right now they are the only people outside. And she thought there was something familiar about him.
    She brushes the idea aside. He might just have been taking pictures of the beautiful light. Nothing to worry about.
    Emilie carries on walking to the entrance while she glances at her watch. And it comes back, this twitchy, nagging feeling. Surely Mattis has to ring soon?

Chapter 16
    The reporters gathered around the big staircase at Oslo Police Station instantly fall silent when Pia Nøkleby arrives. She is usually accompanied by Chief Inspector Arild Gjerstad, but this time she is alone.
    Henning has to be honest: he has grown to like Pia Nøkleby since he returned to work in the spring. He likes her dark hair, the fringe that she always brushes behind her right ear even though the hair instantly falls back over her eyes again. And her eyes – brown with a fleck of green, eyes that never look tired. The little beauty spot left of her nose, which gives him yet another reason to look at her heart-shaped face. Her lips always moist, not too red, as if she deliberately stops herself from being too beautiful. Her cheeks, soft and rosy with only a hint of pale, delicate hairs, are tempting to touch.
    She is always very serious when the microphone is switched on, behaving like she thinks she should and ought. But as soon as the cameras are turned off, her personality changes and she will come out with quick and insightful comments. She has always had this professional acuity that rarely or never leads her astray in interviews.
    Henning has seen something in her eyes, not often, but every now and then she drops her facade. True, it’s some time since he last felt a woman’s warmth, or even interest, but he hasn’t completely lost his touch. Pia’s voice tends to soften when she speaks to him, also when other journalists or police officers are present.
    But Henning also remembers how Pia’s replies became more and more evasive when he started asking questions about the police investigation into a murder of which ex-torpedo and property magnate Tore Pulli was found guilty. At first he had put her behaviour down to work-related stress, concluding that she might not be inclined to answer questions from someone who was clearly critical of an investigation she had headed. But ever since Henning discovered that Pia had redacted a report in the police investigation program, Indicia, a report that stated that Tore Pulli was outside Henning’s flat on the night of the fire that killed his son, it’s tempting to think that her less than forthcoming answers were prompted by other motives.
    All Henning knows about the Pulli report is that Pulli was sitting in a car outside Henning’s flat in Markveien 32, on 11 September 2007, and that he had been there several nights in a row. But why was he there? Was he waiting for a meeting? Was he planning to beat someone up – after all, he had previously made his living as one of Oslo’s best-known enforcers? Or was he simply