Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  Then he stepped across the threshold and automatically walked outside the white flags the forensics team had set up.

  Investigation, he thought. This is an investigation. I’m dreaming, but I can do an investigation in my sleep. It’s just a matter of doing it properly, getting it going, and I won’t wake up. As long as I’m not awake, it isn’t true. So Harry did it properly, he didn’t look directly at the sun, at the body he knew was lying on the floor between the kitchen and living-room areas. The sun—that, even if it hadn’t been Rakel—would blind him if he stared straight at it. The sight of a body does something to your senses even if you’re an experienced murder detective; it overwhelms them to a greater or lesser extent, numbs them and makes them less sensitive to other, less violent impressions, all the small details of a crime scene that can tell you something. That can help piece together a coherent, logical narrative. Or the reverse, something that jars, that doesn’t belong in the picture. He let his eyes roam across the walls. A single red coat hung from the hooks under the hat rack. Where she used to hang the coat she had used last, unless she knew she wasn’t going to wear it next time, in which case she hung it in the wardrobe with her other jackets. He had to pull himself together to stop himself clutching the coat and pressing it to his face to breathe in the smell of her. Of forest. Because no matter what perfume she used, the symphony of smells always had an underlying note of sun-warmed Norwegian forest. He couldn’t see the red silk scarf she usually wore with that coat, but her black boots were standing on the shoe rack directly beneath it. Harry looked on towards the living room, but there was nothing different there. It looked just like the room he had walked out of two months, fifteen days and twenty hours ago. None of the pictures were hanging crookedly, none of the rugs were out of place. He looked across to the kitchen. There. There was a knife missing from the pyramid-shaped wooden block on the kitchen worktop. His eyes began to circle towards the body.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Hello, Bjørn,” Harry said without turning around, unable to stop his eyes systematically photographing the crime scene.

  “Harry,” Bjørn said. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You ought to be telling me I shouldn’t be here,” Harry said. “You ought to be saying I’m disqualified, that this isn’t my case, that I’ll just have to wait to see her like any other civilian until I’m called in to formally identify her.”

  “You know I can’t say any of that.”

  “If you don’t, someone else will,” Harry said, noting the blood sprayed across the bottom of the bookcase, across the spines of Hamsun’s collected works and an old encyclopaedia that Oleg used to like looking at while Harry explained the things that had changed since the encyclopaedia was printed and why. “And I’d rather hear it from you.” Only now did Harry look at Bjørn Holm. His eyes were shiny and bulging even more than usual in his pale face, framed by bright red sideburns à la 1970s-era Elvis, a beard and the new cap that had replaced his Rasta hat.

  “I’ll say it if you want me to, Harry.”

  Harry’s eyes ventured closer to the sun, hit the edge of the pool of blood on the floor. The outline revealed that it was large. He had said “reported dead” to Oleg. As if he didn’t quite believe it until he had seen it for himself. Harry cleared his throat. “Tell me what you’ve got first.”

  “Knife,” Bjørn said. “The forensic medical officer’s on the way, but it looks to me like three blows, no more. And one was at the back of the neck, directly below the skull. Which means that she died—”

  “Quickly and painlessly,” Harry said. “Thanks for that, Bjørn.”

  Bjørn nodded curtly, and Harry realised that the forensics officer had said it as much for his own sake as Harry’s.

  He looked back at the wooden block on the kitchen worktop again. The ultra-sharp Tojiro knives that he had bought in Hong Kong, traditional Santoku-style, with oak handles, but these had a water-buffalo-horn collar. Rakel had loved them. It looked like the smallest one was missing, an all-purpose knife with a blade between ten and fifteen centimetres long.

  “And there’s no sign of sexual assault,” Bjørn said. “All her clothes are still in place, and intact.”

  Harry’s eyes had reached the sun.

  Mustn’t wake up.

  Rakel was lying curled up with her back to him, facing the kitchen. More tightly curled than when she was asleep. She had no obvious injuries or knife wounds to her back, and her long dark hair was covering her neck. The roaring voices in his head were trying to drown each other out. One was screaming that she was wearing the traditional cardigan he had bought her during a trip to Reykjavik. Another that it wasn’t her, that it couldn’t be her. A third was saying that if it was the way it looked at first glance, that she had been stabbed from the front at first, and that the perpetrator hadn’t been standing between her and the door, so she hadn’t made any attempt to escape. The fourth was saying that she was going to get up any moment, walk towards him with a smile and point at the hidden camera.

  The hidden camera.

  Harry heard someone clear their throat quietly and turned around.

  The man standing in the doorway was large and rectangular, with a head that looked like it had been cut from granite and drawn with a ruler. A hairless cranium with a straight chin, straight mouth, straight nose and straight narrow eyes under a pair of straight eyebrows. Blue jeans, a smart jacket and a shirt with no tie. There was no expression in his grey eyes, but his voice and the way he dragged the words out—as if he were enjoying them, had been waiting for the chance to say them—expressed everything his eyes were hiding.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave the scene, Hole.”

  Harry met Ole Winter’s gaze, noting that Kripos’s senior inspector had used an expression directly translated from English, as if Norwegian didn’t have a perfectly adequate way of expressing sympathy. And that he hadn’t even allowed himself a full stop after his expression of sympathy before throwing Harry out, just a quick comma. Harry didn’t answer, merely turned and looked at Rakel again.

  “That means now, Hole.”

  “Mm. As far as I’m aware, the task of Kripos is to assist Oslo Police District, not to issue—”

  “And now Kripos is helping to keep the partner of the victim away from the crime scene. You can act like a professional and do as I say, or I can get a couple of uniforms to help you out.”

  Harry knew Ole Winter wouldn’t have any objection to that, letting two officers lead Harry out to a police car in full view of his colleagues, neighbours, and the media vultures who were standing down at the road photographing everything they could. Ole Winter was a couple of years older than Harry and they had worked on either side of the fence as homicide detectives for twenty-five years, Harry with the Oslo Police District and Winter in the specialist national unit, Kripos, which assisted local police departments in serious criminal cases such as murder. And which occasionally, because of its superior resources and competence, took over the investigations altogether. Harry assumed that his own Chief of Police, Gunnar Hagen, had taken the decision to bring Kripos in. A perfectly valid decision, given that the victim’s partner was employed in the Crime Squad Unit at Police Headquarters in Oslo. But also a somewhat sensitive decision given that there was always an unspoken rivalry between the two largest murder investigation units in the country. What wasn’t unspoken, however, was Ole Winter’s opinion that Harry Hole was seriously overrated, that his legendary status owed more to the sensational nature of the cases he had solved than the factual quality of his detective work. And that Ole Winter—even though he was the undisputed star of Kripos—was undervalued, at least outside the inner circle. And that his triumphs never got the same headlines as Hole’s, because serious police work rarely did, while an alcoholic loose cannon with one single lucid moment of inspiration alwa
ys did.

  Harry pulled out his packet of Camels, stuck a cigarette between his lips and took out his lighter.

  “I’m going, Winter.”

  He walked past the other man, went down the steps and out onto the drive before needing to steady himself. He stopped, and went to light the cigarette, but was so blinded by tears that he couldn’t see either lighter or cigarette.

  “Here.”

  Harry heard Bjørn’s voice, blinked quickly several times and sucked in the flame from the lighter Bjørn was holding up to the cigarette. Harry inhaled hard. Coughed, then inhaled again.

  “Thanks. Have you been thrown out too?”

  “No, my work’s as good for Kripos as it is for the Oslo Police District.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on paternity leave?”

  “Katrine called. The lad’s probably sitting on her lap behind her desk running Crime Squad right now.” Bjørn Holm’s crooked smile vanished as soon as it appeared. “Sorry, Harry, I’m babbling.”

  “Mm.” The wind tugged at the smoke as Harry exhaled. “So, you’re finished with the garden?”

  Stay in investigation mode, stay sedated.

  “Yes,” Bjørn Holm said. “There was a frost on Saturday night, so the gravel was harder. If there was anyone here, or any vehicles, they haven’t left much evidence.”

  “Saturday night? You’re saying that’s when it happened?”

  “She’s cold, and when I bent her arm it felt as if the rigor mortis was already starting to ease.”

  “At least twenty-four hours, then.”

  “Yes. But the medical officer should be here anytime. Are you OK, Harry?”

  Harry had started to retch, but nodded and swallowed the stinging bile. He would manage. He would manage. Stay asleep.

  “The knife wounds, do you have any idea of what sort of knife was used?”

  “I’d say a small- to medium-sized blade. No bruising on the side of the wound, so either he didn’t stab very deep or the knife doesn’t have much of a shaft.”

  “The blood. He went deep.”

  “Yes.”

  Harry sucked desperately at the cigarette, which was already close to the filter. A tall young man in a Burberry jacket and suit was walking up the drive towards them.

  “Katrine said it was someone from Rakel’s work who called it in,” Harry said. “Do you know any more than that?”

  “Just that it was her boss,” Bjørn said. “Rakel didn’t show up for an important meeting, and they couldn’t get hold of her. He thought something might be wrong.”

  “Mm. Is it normal to call the police when one of your staff doesn’t show up for a meeting?”

  “I don’t know, Harry. He said it wasn’t like Rakel not to turn up, or at least not to call beforehand. And obviously they knew that she lived alone.”

  Harry nodded slowly. They knew more than that. They knew she had recently thrown her husband out. A man with a reputation for being unstable. He dropped the cigarette and heard it hiss on the grit as he ground his heel on it.

  The young man had reached them. He was in his thirties, thin, upright, with Asian features. The suit looked tailor-made, the shirt chalk-white and freshly ironed, the tie neatly knotted. His thick black hair was cut short, in a style that could have been discreet if it hadn’t been so calculatedly classic. Kripos detective Sung-min Larsen smelled vaguely of something Harry assumed was expensive. At Kripos he was apparently known as the Nikkei Index, despite the fact that his first name—Sung-min, which Harry had come across several times when he was in Hong Kong—was Korean rather than Japanese. He had graduated from Police College the first year Harry had been lecturing there, but Harry could still remember him from his lectures on criminal investigation, mostly because of those white shirts and his quiet demeanour, the wry smiles when Harry—still an inexperienced lecturer—felt he was on shaky ground, and also his exam results, which had evidently been the highest grades ever achieved at Police College.

  “I’m sorry, Hole,” Sung-min Larsen said. “My deepest condolences.” He was almost as tall as Harry.

  “Thanks, Larsen.” Harry nodded to the notepad the Kripos detective was holding. “Been talking to the neighbours?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Anything of interest?” Harry looked round. There was plenty of space between the houses up here in fashionable Holmenkollen. Tall hedges and ranks of fir trees.

  For a moment, Sung-min Larsen seemed to ponder whether this was information he could share with the Oslo Police District. Unless the problem was that Harry was the victim’s husband.

  “Your neighbour, Wenche Angondora Syvertsen, says she didn’t hear or see anything unusual on Saturday night. I asked if she sleeps with the window open, and she said she did. But she also said she was able to do that because familiar sounds don’t wake her up. Like her husband’s car, the neighbours’ cars, the dustcart. And she pointed out that Rakel Fauke’s house has thick timber walls.”

  He said this without having to look down at his notes, and Harry got the feeling that Larsen was presenting these minor details as a test, to see if they prompted any sort of reaction.

  “Mm,” Harry said, a rumbling sound that merely indicated he’d heard what the other person had said.

  “So it’s her house?” Larsen asked. “Not yours?”

  “Separate property,” Harry said. “I insisted. Didn’t want anyone to think I was marrying her for her money.”

  “Was she rich?”

  “No, that was just a joke.” Harry nodded towards the house. “You’ll have to pass any information you’ve managed to get to your boss, Larsen.”

  “Winter’s here?”

  “It was certainly cold enough in there.”

  Sung-min Larsen smiled politely. “In formal terms Winter is leading the tactical investigation, but it looks like I’m going to be in charge of the case. I’m not in the same class as you, Hole, but I promise to do my utmost to catch whoever murdered your wife.”

  “Thanks,” Harry said. He had a feeling the young detective meant every word he said. Apart from the bit about not being in the same class. He watched as Larsen made his way past the police cars towards the house.

  “Hidden camera,” Harry said.

  “Huh?” Bjørn said.

  “I set up a wildlife camera on that middle fir tree there.” Harry nodded towards the thicket of bushes and trees, a little cluster of raw Norwegian forest in front of the fence to the neighbouring property. “I suppose I’ll have to tell Winter about it.”

  “No,” Bjørn said emphatically.

  Harry looked at him. It wasn’t often he heard him sound so decisive. Bjørn Holm shrugged his shoulders. “If it’s recorded anything that can help solve the case, I don’t think Winter should get the glory.”

  “OK?”

  “On the other hand, you shouldn’t touch anything here either.”

  “Because I’m a suspect,” Harry said.

  Bjørn didn’t answer.

  “That’s fine,” Harry said. “The ex-husband is always the first suspect.”

  “Until you’ve been ruled out,” Bjørn said. “I’ll get hold of whatever the camera recorded. The middle tree, you said?”

  “It’s not easy to spot,” Harry said. “It’s hidden in a sock the same colour as the trunk. Two and a half metres up.”

  Bjørn looked amiably at Harry. Then the stocky forensics officer began to pad towards the trees with his surprisingly soft and extremely slow gait. Harry’s phone rang. The first four digits told him it was from a landline in the offices of VG. The vultures scented carrion. And the fact that they were calling him meant that they probably knew the victim’s name and had made the connection. He rejected the call and put his phone back in his pocket.

  Bjørn was crouching down over by the trees.
He looked up and beckoned Harry over to him. “Don’t come any closer,” Bjørn said, pulling on a fresh pair of white latex gloves. “Someone got here before us.”

  “What the fuck…?” Harry whispered. The sock had been pulled from the tree and was lying in tatters on the ground. Beside it lay the wreckage of the camera. Someone had stamped it to pieces. Bjørn picked it up. “The memory card is gone,” he said.

  Harry was breathing hard through his nose.

  “Pretty good going to spot the camera with its camouflage sock on,” Bjørn said. “You’d pretty much have to be standing here among the trees to see it.”

  Harry nodded slowly. “Unless…” he said, and felt that his brain needed more oxygen than he could give it. “Unless the perpetrator knew the camera was there.”

  “Sure. So who have you told?”

  “No one.” Harry’s voice was hoarse, and at first he didn’t recognise what it was, the pain growing in his chest, trying to get out. Was he waking up? “No one at all,” Harry said. “And I set it up in complete darkness in the middle of the night, so no one saw me do it. No one human, anyway.” Then Harry realised what it was that was trying to get out. The shrieking of crows. The wailing of a madman. Laughter.

  9

  It was half past two in the afternoon, and most of the clientele looked up disinterestedly at the door when it swung open.

  Schrøder’s Restaurant.

  “Restaurant” was perhaps something of a misnomer, although the brown café did indeed serve a selection of Norwegian specialities, such as pork chops and dripping, but the main courses were beer and wine. The bar had existed on Waldemar Thranes gate since the mid-fifties, and it had been Harry’s regular haunt since the nineties. There had been an interval of a few years after he moved in with Rakel in Holmenkollen. But now he was back.

  He sank down onto the bench by the wall at one of the window tables.

  The bench was new. But apart from that, the interior had stayed the same for the past twenty years, the same tables and chairs, the same stained-glass ceiling, the same Sigurd Fosnes paintings of Oslo, even the red tablecloths with a white cloth set diagonally on top were the same. The biggest change Harry could remember was when the smoking ban came into force in 2004 and they repainted the bar to get rid of the smell of smoke. The same colour as before. And the smell of smoke never went completely.