by Jo Nesbo
Harry saw no reaction in her eyes. Just an even, intense, black hatred. And realised that his conscience felt just fine. The authorities gave guns to nineteen-year-olds and ordered them to kill. And this one had killed her mother and was prepared to let her innocent father throw himself under the bus for her. Sara wasn’t going to be one of the figures who visited Harry in his nightmares.
“Andreas loves me,” she whispered. It sounded like her mouth was full of sand. “But Mum lured him away from me. She seduced him just so I couldn’t have him. I hate her. I…” She was close to tears. Harry held his breath. They were almost there, the race was on, he just needed a few more words on tape, but crying would cause a delay, and in the delay the avalanche might grind to a halt. Sara raised her voice. “I hate that fucking bitch! I should have stabbed her even more, I should have cut off that smug face she was so fucking proud of!”
“Mm.” Harry leaned back in his chair. “You wish you’d killed her more slowly, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes!”
Confession to murder. Touchdown. Harry cast a quick glance through the doll’s house window and saw that Truls Berntsen had woken up and was giving him the thumbs up. But Harry felt no joy. On the contrary, the excitement he had felt just a few seconds before had been replaced by a weary sadness, almost disappointment. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, it often arose after a long chase where anticipation of solving the case had built up, anticipation of the arrest as a cathartic climax, a hope that it might change something, make the world a slightly better place. Instead, what followed was often a sort of post-case depression with associated alcoholic elements and days or weeks on the bottle. Harry imagined that it resembled a serial killer’s frustration when the murder didn’t provide any prolonged sense of satisfaction, just a feeling of anti-climax that drove him back out into the chase again. Maybe that’s why Harry—for a fleeting moment—felt bitter disappointment, as if he had briefly swapped places with her and was sitting on the other side of the table.
* * *
—
“We sorted that out very nicely,” Truls Berntsen said in the lift on the way up to the Crime Squad Unit on the sixth floor.
“We?” Harry said drily.
“I pressed the Record button, didn’t I?”
“I certainly hope so. Did you check the recording?”
“Did I check it?” Truls Berntsen raised one eyebrow questioningly. Then he grinned. “Relax.”
Harry took his eyes off the glowing floor numbers and looked down at Berntsen. And felt that he envied his colleague with the weak chin, protruding brow and the grunting laughter that had earned him the nickname Beavis, which no one dared say out loud, probably because there was something about Truls Berntsen’s passive-aggressive demeanour that meant you didn’t want to be in his line of fire during a critical situation. Truls was even less popular than Harry Hole in Crime Squad, but that wasn’t why Harry envied him. He envied Truls’s ability to not give a damn. Mind you, Harry didn’t give a damn what his colleagues thought of him either. No, it was Berntsen’s ability to shrug off any sense of responsibility, practical as well as moral, for the job he was supposed to do as a police officer. You could say a lot of things about Harry, and he was well aware that plenty of people did, but no one could take away the fact that he was a real police officer. That was one of his few blessings, and probably his greatest curse. Even when Harry was on the skids in his private life, like he had been since Rakel kicked him out, the policeman in him couldn’t just give up and tumble headlong into anarchy and nihilism the way Truls Berntsen had. No one would thank Harry for not giving up, but that was fine, he wasn’t after gratitude, and he wasn’t seeking salvation through good deeds. His tireless, almost compulsive search for the worst offenders in society had been his only reason for getting up each morning until he met Rakel. So he was grateful for that herd instinct or whatever it was, for providing him with an anchor. But part of him longed for total, destructive freedom, cutting the anchor chain and getting crushed by the breakers, or simply disappearing into the deep, dark ocean.
They got out of the lift and walked along the corridor with its red-painted walls that confirmed they had got off at the right floor, past the separate offices towards the open-plan space.
“Hey, Hole!” Skarre called from an open door. He had recently been appointed an inspector and had been given Harry’s old office. “The dragon’s looking for you.”
“Your wife?” Harry asked, not bothering to slow down to wait for Skarre’s presumably furious and failed attempt at a retort.
“Nice,” Berntsen said with a grin. “Skarre’s an idiot.”
Harry didn’t know if that was meant as an outstretched hand, but he didn’t answer. He had no intention of acquiring any more ill-advised friendships.
He turned off left without any word of goodbye and stepped in through the open door to the head-of-department’s office. A man was standing with his back to him, leaning over Katrine Bratt’s desk, but it wasn’t hard to recognise the shiny bald head with its oddly profuse wreath of black hair.
“Hope I’m not disturbing, but I heard I was wanted?”
Katrine Bratt looked up, and the Chief of Police Gunnar Hagen spun around as if he had been caught doing something. They looked at Harry in silence.
He raised an eyebrow. “What? You’ve already heard?”
Katrine and Hagen exchanged a look. Hagen grinned. “Have you?”
“What do you mean?” Harry said. “I was the one who questioned her.”
Harry’s brain searched and came up with a suggestion that the police lawyer Harry had called after the interview to discuss the father’s release must have called Katrine Bratt in turn. But what was the Chief of Police doing here?
“I advised the daughter to bring a lawyer, but she declined,” Harry said. “And I repeated the offer before the start of the interview, but she declined again. We’ve got that on tape. Well, not tape, but on the hard drive.”
Neither of them smiled, and Harry could tell that something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Is it the father?” Harry asked. “Has he…done something?”
“No,” Katrine said. “It’s not the father, Harry.”
Harry’s brain unconsciously noted the details: the fact that Hagen had let Katrine, the one of them who was closer to him, take over. And that she had used his first name when she didn’t have to. To soften the blow. In the silence that followed, he felt the clawing at his chest again. And even if Harry didn’t have any great belief in telepathy and foresight, it felt as if what was coming was what the claw, the little glimpses, had been trying to tell him all along.
“It’s Rakel,” Katrine said.
6
Harry held his breath. He had read that it was possible to hold your breath for so long that you died. And that you don’t die from too little oxygen, but from too much carbon dioxide. That people can’t usually hold their breath for more than a minute or a minute and a half, but that one Danish free diver had held his for over twenty minutes.
Harry had been happy. But happiness is like heroin; once you’ve tasted it, once you’ve found out that happiness exists, you will never be entirely happy with an ordinary life without happiness again. Because happiness is something more than mere satisfaction. Happiness isn’t natural. Happiness is a trembling, exceptional state; seconds, minutes, days that you know simply can’t last. And sorrow at its absence doesn’t come afterwards, but at the same time. Because with happiness comes the terrible insight that nothing can be the same again, that you are already missing what you have, you’re worrying about the withdrawal pangs, grief at the loss, cursing the awareness of what you are capable of feeling.
Rakel always used to read in bed. Sometimes she read out loud to him, if it was something he liked. Like Kjell Askildsen’s short stories. That made him happy. One evening she rea
d a sentence that stuck in his mind. About a young girl who had lived her whole life alone with her parents in a lighthouse, until a married man, Krafft, arrived and she fell in love. And she thought to herself: Why did you have to come and make me so lonely?
Katrine cleared her throat, but her voice still sounded muffled. “They’ve found Rakel, Harry.”
He felt like asking how they could have found someone who wasn’t missing. But to do that he would have to breathe. He breathed. “And…that means what?”
Katrine was struggling to keep control of her face, but gave up and clapped her hand to her mouth, which was contorted into a grimace.
Gunnar Hagen took over. “The worst, Harry.”
“No,” Harry heard himself say. Angry. Pleading. “No.”
“She—”
“Stop!” Harry held his hands up defensively in front of him. “Don’t say it, Gunnar. Not yet. Just let me…just wait a bit.”
Gunnar Hagen waited. Katrine had covered her face with her hands. She was sobbing silently, but her shaking shoulders gave her away. His eyes found the window. There were still greyish-white islands and small continents of snow on the brown sea of Botsparken. But in the past few days buds had begun to appear on the lime trees that led up to the prison. A month or so from now, those buds would suddenly burst into life, and Harry would wake up and see that Oslo had once again been invaded by the blitzkrieg of spring overnight. And it would be utterly meaningless. He had been alone most of his life. It had been fine. Now it wasn’t fine. He wasn’t breathing. He was full of carbon dioxide. And he hoped it would take less than twenty minutes.
“OK,” he said. “Say it.”
“She’s dead, Harry.”
7
Harry weighed his mobile phone in his hand.
Eight digits away.
Four less than the time he had lived in Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, those four grey tower blocks that were a small community in themselves, with hostels for guest workers from Africa and the Philippines, restaurants, prayer rooms, tailors, money-changers, maternity rooms and funeral parlours. Harry’s room had been on the second floor of C-block. Four square metres of bare concrete with space for a shabby mattress and an ashtray, where a dripping air-conditioning unit had counted the seconds, while he himself lost count of the days and weeks as he slid in and out of an opium haze that decided when he came and went. In the end, Kaja Solness from the Crime Squad Unit had turned up to take him home. But before then he had fallen into a rhythm. And every day, after eating glass noodles at Li Yuan or walking down Nathan Road and Melden Row to buy a lump of opium in a baby’s bottle, he had walked back, waited by the lift doors of the Chungking Mansions and looked at the payphone hanging on the wall.
He had been on the run from everything. From his work as a murder detective, because it was eating away at his soul. From himself, because he had become a destructive force that killed everyone near him. But first and foremost from Rakel and Oleg, because he didn’t want to hurt them as well. No more than he already had done.
And every day, as he waited for the lift, he had stood there staring at the payphone. Touching the coins in his trouser pocket.
Twelve numbers, and he would be able to hear her voice. Reassure himself that she and Oleg were OK.
But he couldn’t know that until he called.
Their lives had been in chaos, and anything could have happened since he’d left. It was possible that Rakel and Oleg had been dragged down into the maelstrom left in the Snowman’s wake. Rakel was strong, but Harry had seen it happen in other murder cases, where the survivors also ended up as victims.
But as long as he didn’t call, they were there. In his head, in the payphone, somewhere in the world. As long as he didn’t know better—or worse—he could carry on seeing them in front of him, hiking in Nordmarka in October. Where he, Rakel and Oleg had gone walking. The young boy running ahead of them, excitedly trying to catch falling leaves. Rakel’s warm, dry hand in Harry’s. Her voice, laughing as she asked what he was smiling for, him shaking his head when he realised that he had actually been smiling. So he never touched the payphone. Because as long as Harry resisted pressing those twelve numbers, he could always imagine that it could be like that again.
Harry tapped in the last of the eight digits.
The phone rang three times before he answered.
“Harry?” The first syllable expressed surprise and joy, the second surprise, but mixed with a degree of anxiety. On the rare occasions that Harry and Oleg called each other, it happened in the evening, not in the middle of the working day. And even then, it was to discuss things of a practical nature. Obviously the practical pretext was sometimes rather contrived, but neither Oleg nor Harry were that fond of talking on the phone, so even if they were really only calling to see how the other was, they usually kept things brief. None of that had changed since Oleg and his girlfriend Helga moved up north to Lakselv in Finnmark, where Oleg was doing a year’s practical training before his final year at Police College.
“Oleg,” Harry said, and heard that his voice sounded choked. Because he was about to pour boiling water over Oleg, and Oleg would bear the scars of the burns he was about to receive for the rest of his life. Harry knew that because he had so many similar scars himself.
“Is something wrong?” Oleg asked.
“It’s about your mother,” Harry said, then stopped abruptly because he couldn’t go on.
“Are you getting back together again?” Oleg’s voice sounded hopeful.
Harry closed his eyes.
Oleg had been angry when he found out that his mother had broken up with Harry. And because Oleg had been spared any explanation of the causes, his anger had been directed at Rakel rather than Harry. Not that Harry could see how he had been a good enough dad to warrant anyone taking his side. When Harry had come into their lives he had taken a very low profile, as both a parent and a shoulder to cry on, because it was obvious the boy didn’t need a replacement dad. And Harry definitely didn’t need a son. But the problem—if that’s what it was—was that Harry had taken a liking to the serious, sullen young man. And vice versa. Rakel used to accuse them of being like each other, and perhaps there was something in that. And after a while—when the boy was particularly tired or wasn’t concentrating—the word “Dad” would slip out instead of the “Harry” they had agreed on.
“No,” Harry said. “We’re not getting back together. Oleg, it’s bad news.”
Silence. Harry could tell Oleg was holding his breath. Harry poured the water.
“She’s been reported dead, Oleg.”
Two seconds passed.
“Can you say that again?” Oleg said.
Harry didn’t know if he could manage that, but he did.
“How do you mean, ‘dead’?” Oleg said, and Harry heard all the metallic desperation in his voice.
“She was found in the house this morning. It looks like murder.”
“Looks like?”
“I’ve only just found out myself. The crime team are already there, I’m about to head over.”
“How…?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But…”
Oleg didn’t get any further, and Harry knew there was no continuation to that all-encompassing “but.” It was just an instinctive objection, a self-sustaining protest, a rejection of the possibility that things could be the way they actually were. An echo of his own “but…” in Katrine Bratt’s office twenty-five minutes ago.
Harry waited while Oleg struggled to hold back tears. He replied to Oleg’s next five questions with the same “I don’t know, Oleg.”
He heard the hiccough in the boy’s voice, and thought that, as long as he’s crying, I won’t.
Oleg ran out of questions and the line went quiet.
“I’ll keep my phone on, and I’l
l call as soon as I know more,” Harry said. “Are there any flights…?”
“There’s one that leaves Tromsø at one o’clock.” Oleg’s heavy, laboured breathing echoed through the phone.
“Good.”
“Call as soon as you can, OK?”
“I will.”
“And, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let them…”
“No, I won’t,” Harry said. He didn’t know how he knew what Oleg was thinking. It wasn’t a rational thought, it just…appeared. He cleared his throat. “I promise that no one at the scene will see more than they need to in order to do their job. OK?”
“OK.”
“OK.”
Silence.
Harry tried to think of some words of comfort, but found nothing that didn’t sound meaningless.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“OK.”
They ended the call.
8
Harry walked slowly up the hill to the black timber house, in the glare of the rotating blue lights of the police cars parked in the drive. The orange and white cordon tape had started down by the gate. Colleagues who didn’t know what to say or do stared at him as he passed. It felt like he was walking underwater. Like a dream he hoped he was about to wake up from. Maybe not wake up, actually, because it offered a numbness, a peculiar absence of sensation and sound, just hazy light and the muffled sound of his own steps. As if he had been injected with something.
Harry walked up the three steps to the open door leading into the house he, Rakel and Oleg had shared. Inside, he could hear the chatter of police radios and Bjørn Holm’s clipped commands to the other crime-scene investigators. Harry took several trembling breaths.
