Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  Her eye stared at him through the hole.

  “Are you ready, darling?”

  “Don’t call me that,” she whimpered. More pleading than commanding. “And stop talking about knives…”

  Svein Finne sighed. Why were people so frightened of the knife? It was humanity’s first tool, they’d had two and a half million years to get used to it, yet some people still didn’t appreciate the beauty of what had made it possible for them to descend from the trees. Hunting, shelter, agriculture, food, defense. Just as much as the knife took life, it created it. You couldn’t have one without the other. Only those who appreciated that, and accepted the consequences of their humanity, their origins, could love the knife. Fear and love. Again, two sides of the same thing.

  Svein Finne looked up. At the knives on the bench beside them, ready for use. Ready to be chosen. The choice of the right knife for the right job was important. These ones were good, purpose-made, top quality. Sure, they lacked what Svein Finne looked for in a knife. Personality. Spirit. Magic. Before that tall young policeman with the short, messy hair had ruined everything, Svein Finne had had a fine collection of twenty-six knives.

  The finest of them had been Javanese. Long, thin, asymmetrical, like a curved snake with a handle. Sheer beauty, feminine. Possibly not the most effective to use, but it had the hypnotic qualities of both a snake and a beautiful woman, it made people do exactly what you told them. The most efficient knife in the collection, on the other hand, was a Rampuri, the favourite of the Indian mafia. It emanated a sort of chill, as if it were made of ice; it was so ugly that it was mesmerising. The karambit, which was shaped like a tiger’s claw, combined beauty and efficiency. But it was perhaps a little too calculated, like a whore wearing too much makeup and a dress that was too tight, too low-cut. Svein Finne had never liked it. He preferred them innocent. Virginal. And, ideally, simple. Like his favourite knife in the collection. A Finnish puukko knife. It had a worn, brown wooden handle, without any real relation to the blade, which was short with a groove, and the sharp edge curved up to form a point. He had bought the puukko in Turku, and two days later he had used it to clarify the situation to a plump eighteen-year-old girl who had been working all alone in a Neste petrol station on the outskirts of Helsinki. Even back then he had—as always when he felt a rush of sexual anticipation—started to stammer slightly. It wasn’t a sign that he wasn’t in control, but rather the opposite, it was just the dopamine. And confirmation that at the age of almost eighty his urges were undiminished. It had taken him precisely two and a half minutes from the moment he walked through the door—when he pinned her down on the counter, cut her trousers off, inseminated her, took out her ID card, noted Maalin’s name and address—until he was out again. Two and a half minutes. How many seconds had the actual insemination taken? Chimpanzees spent an average of eight seconds having intercourse, eight seconds in which both monkeys were defenseless in a world full of predators. A gorilla—who had fewer natural enemies—could stretch out the pleasure to a minute. But a disciplined man in enemy territory often had to sacrifice pleasure for the greater goal: reproduction. So, just as a bank robbery should never take more than four minutes, an act of insemination in a public place should never take more than two and a half minutes. Evolution would prove him right, it was just a matter of time.

  But now, here, they were in a safe environment. Besides, there wasn’t going to be any insemination. Not that he didn’t want to—he did. But this time she was going to be penetrated by a knife instead; there was no point trying to impregnate a woman when there was no chance of it resulting in offspring. So the disciplined man saved his seed.

  “I have to be allowed to call you darling, seeing as we’re engaged,” Svein Finne whispered.

  She stared at him with eyes that were black with shock. Black, as if they had already gone out. As if there were no longer any light to shut out.

  “Yes, we are engaged.” He laughed quietly, and pressed his thick lips to hers. He automatically wiped her lips with the sleeve of his flannel shirt so there wouldn’t be any traces of saliva. “And this is what I’ve been promising you…” he said, running his hand down between her breasts towards her stomach.

  3

  Harry woke up. Something was wrong. He knew it wouldn’t take long for him to remember what, that these few blessed moments of uncertainty were all he was going to get before reality punched him in the face. He opened his eyes and regretted it at once. It was as if the daylight forcing its way through the filthy, grimy window and lighting up the empty little room carried straight on to a painful spot just behind his eyes. He sought shelter in the darkness behind his eyelids again and realised that he had been dreaming. About Rakel, obviously. And it had started with the same dream he had had so many times before, about that morning many years ago, not long after they had first met. She had been lying with her head on his chest, and he had asked if she was checking to see if what they said was true, that he didn’t have a heart. And Rakel had laughed the laugh he loved; he could do the most idiotic things to coax it out of her. Then she had raised her head, looked at him with the warm brown eyes she had inherited from her Austrian mother, and replied that they were right, but that she would give him hers. And she had. And Rakel’s heart was so big, it had pumped blood around his body, thawing him out, making him a real human being again. And her husband. And a father to Oleg, the introverted, serious boy that Harry had grown to love as his own son. Harry had been happy. And terrified. Happily unaware of what was going to happen, but unhappily aware that something was bound to, that he wasn’t made to be this happy. And terrified of losing Rakel. Because one half of a heart couldn’t beat without the other, he was well aware of that, as was Rakel. So if he couldn’t live without her, why had he been running away from her in his dream last night?

  He didn’t know, couldn’t remember, but Rakel had come to claim her half-heart back, had listened out for his already weak heartbeat, found out where he was and rung the doorbell.

  Then, at last, the blow that had been coming. Reality.

  That he had already lost her.

  And not because he had fled from her, but because she had thrown him out.

  Harry gasped for air. A sound was boring through his ears, and he realised that the pain wasn’t only behind his eyes, but that his whole brain was a source of immense hurt. And that it was that noise that had triggered the dream before he woke up. There really was someone ringing the doorbell. Stupid, painful, irrepressible hope poked its head up.

  Without opening his eyes, Harry reached one hand down towards the floor next to the sofa bed, feeling for the whisky bottle. He knocked it over, and realised it was empty from the sound it made as it rolled across the worn parquet floor. He forced his eyes open. Stared at the hand that was dangling above the floor like a greedy claw, at the grey, titanium prosthetic middle finger. The hand was bloody. Shit. He sniffed his fingers and tried to remember what had happened late last night, and if it had involved women. He threw back the covers and glanced down at all 1.92 metres of his lean, naked body. Too little time had passed since he had fallen off the wagon for it to have left any physical trace, but if things followed their usual course, his muscles would start to weaken, week by week, and his already greyish-white skin would turn as white as a sheet, he would turn into a ghost and eventually vanish altogether. Which, of course, was the whole point of drinking—wasn’t it?

  He pushed himself up into a sitting position. Looked around. He was back where he had been before he became a human being again. Only, one rung further down now. In what could have been an ironic twist of fate, the two-room apartment, all forty square metres of it, that he had borrowed and then gone on to rent from a younger police colleague, lay just one floor below the flat he had lived in before he moved in with Rakel, to her wooden house in Holmenkollen. When he moved into the flat, Harry had bought a sofa bed at IKEA. That, together with the bookcase
full of vinyl records behind the sofa, a coffee table, a mirror that was still leaning against the wall, and a wardrobe out in the hall, was the total extent of the furniture. Harry wasn’t sure if it was due to a lack of initiative on his part, or if he was trying to convince himself that this was only temporary, that she was going to take him back when she had finished thinking things through.

  He wondered if he was going to be sick. Well, that was probably up to him. It was as if his body had got used to the poison after a couple of weeks, had built up a tolerance to the dosage. And demanded that it increase. He stared down at the empty whisky bottle that had come to rest between his feet. Peter Dawson Special. Not that it was particularly good. Jim Beam was good. And it came in square bottles that didn’t roll across the floor. But Dawson was cheap, and a thirsty alcoholic with a fixed salary and an empty bank account couldn’t afford to be fussy. He looked at the time. Ten to four. He had two hours and ten minutes until the liquor store closed.

  He took a deep breath and stood up. His head felt like it was about to burst. He swayed but managed to stay upright. Looked at himself in the mirror. He was a bottom feeder that had been reeled in so quickly that his eyes and innards were trying to get out; so hard that the hook had torn his cheek and left a pink, sickle-shaped scar running from the left side of his mouth up towards his ear. He felt under the covers but couldn’t find any underwear, so pulled on the jeans that were lying on the floor and went out into the hall. A dark shape was silhouetted against the patterned glass in the door. It was her, she had come back. But he had thought that the last time the doorbell rang too. And that time it had been a man who said he was from Hafslund Electricity and needed to change the meter and replace it with a modern one that meant they could monitor usage from hour to hour, down to the nearest watt, so all their customers could see exactly what time of day they turned the stove on, or when they switched their reading light off. Harry had explained that he didn’t have a stove, and that if he did have one, he wouldn’t want anyone to know when he switched it on or off. And with that he had shut the door.

  But the silhouette he could see through the glass this time was a woman’s. Her height, her outline. How had she got into the stairwell?

  He opened the door.

  There were two of them. A woman he had never seen before, and a girl who was so short she didn’t reach the glass in the door. And when he saw the collection box the girl was holding up in front of him he realised that they must have rung on the door down in the street and one of the neighbours had let them in.

  “We’re collecting for charity,” the woman said. They were both wearing orange vests with the emblem of the Red Cross on top of their coats.

  “I thought that was in the autumn,” Harry said.

  The woman and girl stared at him silently. At first he interpreted this as hostility, as if he had accused them of fraud. Then he realised it was derision, probably because he was half naked and stank of drink at four o’clock in the afternoon. And was evidently entirely unaware of the nationwide, door-to-door charity collection that had been getting loads of TV coverage.

  Harry checked to see if he felt any shame. Actually, he did. A little bit. He stuck his hand into the trouser pocket where he usually kept his cash when he was drinking, because he had learned from experience that it wasn’t wise to take bank cards with him.

  He smiled at the girl, who was staring wide-eyed at his bloody hand as he pushed a folded note into the slot on the sealed collection box. He caught a glimpse of a moustache just before the money disappeared. Edvard Munch’s moustache.

  “Damn,” Harry said, and put his hand back in his pocket. Empty. Like his bank account.

  “Sorry?” the woman said.

  “I thought it was a two hundred, but I gave you a Munch. A thousand kroner.”

  “Oh…”

  “Can I…er, have it back?”

  The girl and woman looked at him in silence. The girl cautiously lifted the box a little higher so that he could see the plastic seal across the charity logo more clearly.

  “I see,” Harry whispered. “What about change?”

  The woman smiled as though he were trying to be funny, and he smiled back to assure her that she was right, while his brain searched desperately for a solution to the problem. 299 kroner and 90 øre before six o’clock. Or 169.90 for a half-bottle.

  “You’ll have to console yourself with the fact that the money will go to people who really need it,” the woman said, guiding the girl back towards the stairs.

  Harry closed the door, went into the kitchen and rinsed the blood off his hand, feeling a sting of pain as he did so. Back in the living room, he looked around and saw that there was a bloody handprint on the duvet cover. He got down on all fours and found his mobile under the sofa. No texts, just three missed calls from last night, one from Bjørn Holm, the forensics officer from Toten, and two from Alexandra from the Forensic Medical Institute lab. She and Harry had become intimately acquainted fairly recently, after he got thrown out, and going by what he knew—and remembered—about her, Alexandra wasn’t the sort to use menstruation as grounds to cancel on him. The first night, when she had helped him home and they had both searched his pockets in vain for his keys, she had picked the lock with disconcerting ease and laid him—and herself—down on the sofa bed. And when he had woken up again she was gone, leaving just a note thanking him for services rendered. It could have been her blood.

  Harry closed his eyes and tried to focus. The events and chronology of the past few weeks were pretty hazy, but when it came to last night his memory was blank. Completely blank, in fact. He opened his eyes and looked down at his stinging right hand. Three bleeding knuckles, with the skin scraped off and congealed blood around the edges of the wounds. He must have punched someone. And three knuckles meant more than one punch. Then he noticed the blood on his trousers. Too much of it to have come from his knuckles alone. And it was hardly menstrual blood.

  Harry pulled the cover off the duvet as he returned the missed call from Bjørn Holm. As it started to ring, he knew that somewhere out there a ringtone in the form of a particular song by Hank Williams had gone off, a song Bjørn was convinced was about a forensics officer like him.

  “How’s things?” Bjørn asked in his cheery Toten dialect.

  “That depends,” Harry said, going into the bathroom. “Can you lend me three hundred kroner?”

  “It’s Sunday, Harry. The liquor store’s closed today.”

  “Sunday?” Harry pulled his trousers off and stuffed both them and the duvet cover into the overflowing washing basket. “Bloody hell.”

  “Did you want anything else?”

  “You were the one who called me, around nine o’clock.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t answer.”

  “No, looks like my phone’s been under the sofa for the past day or so. I was at the Jealousy.”

  “I thought as much, so I called Øystein and he told me you were there.”

  “And?”

  “So I went over there. You really don’t remember any of this?”

  “Shit. What happened?”

  Harry heard his colleague sigh, and imagined him rolling his slightly protruding eyes, his pale moon of a face framed by a flat cap and the bushiest, reddest beard in Police Headquarters.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Only as much as you think I need to know,” Harry said as he discovered something in the basket of dirty washing. The neck of a bottle, sticking up from the dirty underpants and T-shirts. He snatched it up. Jim Beam. Empty. Or was it? He unscrewed the top, put it to his lips and tipped his head back.

  “OK, the short version,” Bjørn said. “When I arrived at the Jealousy Bar at 21:15 you were drunk, and by the time I drove you home at 22:30, you had only spoken coherently about one thing. One single person. Guess who?”

 
Harry didn’t answer, he was squinting cross-eyed at the bottle, following the drop that was trickling down inside it.

  “Rakel,” Bjørn said. “You passed out in the car and I got you up into your flat, and that was that.”

  Harry could tell by the speed of the drop that he had plenty of time, and he moved the bottle away from his mouth. “Hm. That was that?”

  “That’s the short version.”

  “Did we fight?”

  “You and me?”

  “From the way you stress ‘me,’ it sounds like I had a fight with someone. Who?”

  “The Jealousy’s new owner may have taken a bit of a knock.”

  “A knock? I woke up with three bloody knuckles and blood on my trousers.”

  “Your first punch hit him on the nose, so there was a lot of blood. But then he ducked and you punched the wall instead. More than once. The wall’s probably still got your blood on it.”

  “But Ringdal didn’t fight back?”

  “To be honest, you were so fucked that there was no way you were going to hurt anyone, Harry. Øystein and I managed to stop you before you did yourself any more damage.”

  “Shit. So I’m barred?”

  “Oh, Ringdal deserved at least one punch. He’d played the whole of that White Ladder album and had just put it on again. Then you started yelling at him for ruining the bar’s reputation, which you claimed you, Øystein and Rakel had built up.”

  “But we had! That bar was a gold mine, Bjørn. He got the whole thing for next to nothing, and I only made one demand. That he should take a stand against all the crap, and only play decent music.”