Cockroaches: The Second Inspector Harry Hole Novel by Jo Nesbø Read Free Book Online

a motel room. That’s why they built this. They could rent American cars from the parking lot. They even had American beer in the minibars.”
    “Wow, how do you know all this?”
    “My mother told me.”
    Harry turned to her, but even though the functioning letters in Olympussy cast a bluish neon light over her skull it was too dark to discern her expression. She pulled a cap over her head before going into the reception area.
    The motel room was furnished simply, but the filthy gray carpet hinted at better days. Harry shivered. Not because of the yellow suit that made any further identification of the corpse superfluous—only members of the Christian Democratic Party and the Progress Party would voluntarily wear such suits. Nor because of the knife with the oriental ornamentation that had pinned the suit to the ambassador’s back and caused the unflattering bulge to the shoulders of the jacket. The reason was quite simply that the room was freezing cold. Crumley had explained that as the shelf life for bodies in this climate was very short and they had been told they would have to wait at least forty-eight hours for the Norwegian detective, they had put the air-conditioning on full, to ten degrees, and set the fan on max.
    Nevertheless, the flies were persistent, and a swarm of them rose as Nho and Sunthorn carefully rolled the body onto its back. Atle Molnes’s glazed eyes stared down his nose as though trying to see the tips of his Ecco shoes. The boyish fringe made the ambassador appear younger than hisfifty-two years. It flopped down, sun-bleached, as though there were still life in it.
    “Wife and teenage daughter,” Harry said. “Has either of them been here to see him?”
    “No. We informed the Norwegian Embassy, and they said they would pass on the message to the family. So far we’ve only been told not to let anyone in.”
    “Anyone from the embassy?”
    “The chargé d’affaires. Can’t remember her name.”
    “Tonje Wiig?”
    “That’s it. She was hard-faced right up to the moment we turned over the body to have him identified.”
    Harry studied the ambassador. Had he been a good-looking man? A man who, apart from the dreadful suit and a couple of rolls of fat around his stomach, could make the heart of a young, female chargé d’affaires beat faster? The sun-tanned skin had taken on a sallow hue and the blue tongue seemed to be trying to force its way between the teeth.
    Harry sat down on a chair and had a look around. When a person dies their appearance changes quickly, and he had seen more than enough corpses to know that he didn’t get much from staring at them. Atle Molnes had taken with him any secrets his personality might have revealed and all that remained was an empty, abandoned husk.
    Harry pushed the chair closer to the bed. The two young officers leaned over him.
    “What can you see?” Crumley asked.
    “I see a Norwegian lech who happened to be the ambassador and therefore has to have his reputation protected for king and country.”
    She glanced up in surprise, and examined Harry more closely.
    “No matter how good the a/c you can’t cover the stench,” he said. “But that’s my problem. As for this guy here …” Harry grasped the ambassador’s jaw. “Rigor mortis. He’srigid, but the rigidity has begun to give, which is normal after three days. His tongue’s blue, but the knife would suggest not from suffocation. Has to be checked.”
    “
Has
been,” Crumley said. “The ambassador had been drinking red wine.”
    Harry mumbled something.
    “Molnes left his office at lunchtime,” she continued, “and when the woman found him it was nearly eleven p.m. Our doctor says he died somewhere between four and ten p.m., so that narrows it down a bit.”
    “Between four and ten? That’s six hours.”
    “Correct, Detective.” Crumley crossed her arms.
    “Well.” Harry looked up at her. “In Oslo we usually determine the time of death with a margin of twenty minutes