The white stains had taken on a bluish sheen. They had hammered on the door and shouted in the howling wind for a while before smashing a window to an empty bedroom. A bedroom with an unmade bed and a smell that caused Harry to wonder whether someone had slept there very recently. He almost place...
Pygmalion The head waiter scrutinised him from top to toe. Thirty years in the job had given him a bit of a nose for trouble and this man stank from a long way off. Not that all trouble was bad. A good scandal from time to time was, in fact, what customers at the Viennese Theatre Café had come to...
It was a quarter past one, five hours since I had got up, and I had already managed to survive my wife’s attempt on my life unscathed, dump the body of my partner in a lake, rescue said body, then alive and kicking, just to see my alive and kicking partner try to shoot me. Whereupon, with a fluke...
He wondered how much she took in, if she could see that Palace Gardens were especially green after yesterday’s violent downpour. If she could even see that they were driving past Palace Gardens.It was Else herself who had suggested that they visit the Chagall exhibition at Høvikodden and Simon ha...
The Container.FOUR PEOPLE WERE IN THE CAR DRIVING THROUGH THE darkness and the snow between the high drifts.'Østgård is up here to the left,' Jon said from the back seat where he had his arm around Thea's cowed figure.Halvorsen turned off the main road. Harry observed the scattered farmhouses, li...
Nothing was making a sound – not the twelve sets of brown wooden climbing bars along the walls, not the old pommel horse covered in cracked leather or the eight grey well-worn ropes hanging motionless from the ceiling or the sixteen boys and girls who made up the Dølgen School Marching Band and w...
Doctor Proctor said, exhausted, rubbing a hand over his face. “The light switch is here, on the wall behind all the lasers.” He pointed. “You can’t get to it without triggering the alarm. They’ve thought of everything!” “Hmm,” Nilly said, scratching his left sideburn with ...
A crocodile of nursery children paraded past the car in chafing rain gear. Some of them glanced with curiosity at the strange old car with rally stripes along the bonnet, and at the two men behind the windscreen wipers swishing away the morning rain. The man in the passenger seat, Politioverbetje...
Plus one for Lisa to take back to the hotel for Nilly. But Nilly would have to wait a bit, because first Lisa had to hear Juliette Margarine’s story. “I don’t know exactly where Victor is,” Juliette said. “But I was there when he left, and I know what he was thinking. This is a long story, I thin...
It was only a couple of hundred metres between the gently rounded island and the mainland, which tumbled abruptly and darkly into the sea from the heather-covered plateau. Knut took his shoes off, waded ashore and tied the boat to a rock. I offered to carry Lea, but she just smiled and made me th...
Nho stayed in the car because Maisan thought he stank of cop from miles off. Besides, he was worried they might be suspicious at Miss Duyen’s if three people turned up at once.‘Smoking opium is not really a social thing,’ Maisan explained in an approximation of an American accent. Harry wondered ...
He had come here every morning for a week, read the paper and eaten his breakfast. Some days he had looked tired, true enough, but the waiter had never seen him in such a state as today. Furthermore, it had been almost half past two when he arrived. “Hard night, sir?” &nbs...
Eva gazed at Lisa with her narrow, kind-of-evil eyes, which glowed just as angrily as the two new zits she had on her face, and said in a taunting, squeaky voice, “Nilly’s not here, Flatu-Lisa.” “I know,” Lisa said. “He’s in jail.” Eva’s eyes got big. “In jail?” “Yup. In the Dungeon of the Dead.”...
The plan was to watch what the wife did for a couple of days, see if she went anywhere while her husband was at work, or if she had any visitors. Not that I was interested in finding out who her lover was. My aim was simply to work out the best, least risky time to strike, when she was on her own...