Free The Son by Jo Nesbø

that he would take anything he was offered, no matter what it was.
    ‘Come on,’ Goldsrud said.
    ‘Lift your legs, will you, Simon?’
    Simon looked up. The old cleaner was so small and bent double that she barely reached over the cleaning cart. She had worked at Police HQ since before Simon had started there himself sometime in the previous millennium. She was a woman with strong opinions, and always referred to herself – and to her colleagues regardless of gender – as a cleaning ‘lady’.
    ‘Hi, Sissel, is it that time again?’ Simon looked at his watch. Past four o’clock. The official end of the working day in Norway. Indeed, employment law practically prescribed that you had to leave on the dot for king and country. In the past he couldn’t have cared less about leaving on time, but that was then. He knew that Else was waiting for him, that she had started cooking dinner several hours ago and that when he came home she would pretend the meal was something she had just thrown together in a hurry and hope that he wouldn’t see the mess, the spills and the other signs that revealed her sight had deteriorated a little more.
    ‘Long time since you and I last had a fag together, Simon.’
    ‘I use snus now.’
    ‘I bet it’s that young wife of yours who made you quit. Still no kids?’
    ‘Still not retired, Sissel?’
    ‘I think you already have a kid somewhere, that’s why you don’t want another one.’
    Simon smiled, looked at her as she ran the mop under his legs and wondered, not for the first time, how it had been possible for Sissel Thou’s tiny body to squeeze out such a huge offspring. Rosemary’s Baby. He cleared away his papers. The Vollan case had been shelved. None of the residents in the Sannerbrua flats had seen anything and no other witnesses had come forward. Until they found evidence to suggest that a crime had been committed, the case would be downgraded, said his boss, and told Simon to spend the next couple of days fattening up reports on two solved murder cases where they had been given a bollocking by the public prosecutor who had described them as ‘on the thin side’. She hadn’t found any actual errors; she only wanted to see ‘a certain raising of the level of detail’.
    Simon switched off his computer, put on his jacket and headed for the door. It was still summer which meant that many of the staff who were not on holiday had left at three o’clock and in the open-plan office that smelled of glue from the old partition walls warmed by the sun he heard only scattered keystrokes. He spotted Kari behind one of the partitions. She had put her feet on the desk and was reading a book. He popped his head round.
    ‘So no dinner with friends tonight?’
    She automatically slammed the book shut and looked up at him with a mixture of irritation and guilt. He glanced at the title of the book: Company Law . He knew that she knew that she had no reason to feel bad for studying during work hours since no one had given her anything to do. It was par for the course in Homicide; no murders equalled no work. So Simon concluded from her blushes that she knew her law degree would eventually take her away from the department and it felt like a kind of treachery. And irritation, because though she had convinced herself that it must be acceptable to use her time like this, her instinctive reaction when he appeared had been to shut the book.
    ‘Sam is surfing in Vestlandet this weekend. I thought I would read here rather than at home.’
    Simon nodded. ‘Police work can be dull. Even in Homicide.’
    She looked at him.
    He shrugged. ‘Especially in Homicide.’
    ‘So why did you become a homicide investigator?’
    She had kicked off her shoes and pulled up her bare feet on the edge of the chair. As if she was hoping for a longer reply, Simon concluded. She was probably one of those people who prefer any company to solitude, who would rather sit in a near-deserted open-plan office with the