by Jo Nesbo
“Indicators of what?”
“That I’m a bad man.”
“If you’re already feeling guilty, you might as well get undressed.”
“So there’s no doubt that Valentin Gjertsen was Svein Finne’s son?” Harry folded his hands behind his head.
“No.”
“Christ, it really is an absurd chain of events. Think about it. Valentin Gjertsen was probably the product of a rape.”
“Who isn’t?” She rubbed her crotch against his thigh.
“Did you know that Valentin Gjertsen raped the prison dentist during an appointment? Afterwards he pulled her nylon tights over her head and set light to them.”
“Shut up, Harry, I want you. There are condoms in the drawer of the bedside table.”
“No thanks.”
“No? You don’t want another kid, do you?”
“I didn’t mean the condoms.” Harry put one hand on the two of hers that had started to undo his belt.
“What the hell?” she snapped. “What’s the point of you if you don’t want to fuck?”
“Good question.”
“Why don’t you want to?”
“Low testosterone levels, at a guess.”
With an angry sniff Alexandra rolled onto her back. “She isn’t just your ex-wife, Harry, she’s dead. When are you going to accept that?”
“You think five days of celibacy is excessive?”
She looked at him. “Funny. But you’re not dealing with it as well as you’re pretending to, are you?”
“Pretending is half the job,” Harry said, raising his hips and pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. “Research shows that you end up in a better mood if you exercise your smile muscles. If you want to cry, laugh. I sleep. What’s the smoking policy in your bedroom?”
“Everything’s allowed. But when people smoke in front of me, my policy is to read what it says on the packet. Tobacco kills, my friend.”
“Mm. That bit about ‘my friend’ is nice.”
“It’s to make you recognise that it isn’t just something you’re doing to yourself, but to everyone who cares for you.”
“I got that. So, at the risk of cancer and feeling even more guilty, I am hereby lighting a cigarette.” Harry inhaled and blew the smoke up at the ceiling lamp. “You like lights,” he said.
“I grew up in Timisoara.”
“Oh?”
“The first town in Europe to have electric streetlamps. Only New York beat us to it.”
“And that’s why you like lights?”
“No, but you like fun facts.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Such as the fact that Finne had a rapist for a son.”
“That’s a bit more than a fun fact.”
“Why?”
Harry took a drag on the cigarette, but it tasted of nothing. “Because the son gives Finne a strong enough motive for revenge. I hunted down his son in connection with several murder investigations. And it ended with me shooting him.”
“You…”
“Valentin Gjertsen was unarmed, but provoked me to shoot by pretending he was reaching for a gun. Unfortunately I was the only witness, and Internal Investigations found it problematic that I had fired three shots. But I was cleared. They couldn’t, as they put it, prove that I hadn’t acted in self-defense.”
“And Finne found out about this? And you think he killed your ex-wife as a result?”
Harry nodded slowly. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
“Logically, he ought to have killed Oleg.”
Harry raised an eyebrow. “So you know his name?”
“You talk a lot when you’re drunk, Harry. And far too much about your ex-wife and the boy.”
“Oleg isn’t mine, he’s from Rakel’s first marriage.”
“You told me that too, but isn’t that just biology?”
Harry shook his head. “Not for Svein Finne. He didn’t love Valentin Gjertsen as a person, he hardly even knew him. He loved Valentin simply because he was carrying his genes. Finne’s driving force is to spread his seed and father children. Biology is everything to him. It’s his way of gaining eternal life.”
“That’s sick.”
“Is it?” Harry looked at his cigarette. Wondered where lung cancer was in the list of things queuing up to kill him. “Maybe we’re more tightly bound by biology than we like to think. Maybe we’re all born bloodline chauvinists, racists and nationalists, with an instinctive desire for global domination for our own family. And then we learn to ignore it, to a greater or lesser extent. Most of us, anyway.”
“We still want to know where we come from, in purely biological terms. Did you know that over the past twenty years at the Forensic Medical Institute we’ve seen a 300 percent increase in the number of DNA tests from people who want to know who their father is, or if their child really is theirs?”
“Fun fact.”
“That tells us something about how our identity is bound up with our genetic inheritance.”
“You think?”
“Yes.” She picked up the glass of wine she’d left on the bedside table. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
“In bed with me?”
“In Norway. I came here to find my father. My mother never liked talking about him, all I knew was that he was from Norway. When she died, I bought a ticket and came to look for him. That first year I had three different jobs. All I knew about my father was that he was probably intelligent, because my mother was pretty average but I always got top grades in Romania, and it only took me six months to learn Norwegian fluently. But I couldn’t find my father. So I got a grant to study chemistry at NTNU, then got a job at the Forensic Medical Institute, working on DNA analysis.”
“Where you could carry on looking.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I found him.”
“Really? You must have had luck on your side, because as far as I know, you lot delete DNA profiles taken in paternity cases after one year.”
“In paternity cases, yes.”
Then the penny dropped for Harry. “You found your father in the police database. He had a criminal record?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. What had he—”
Harry’s trouser pocket vibrated. He looked at the number. Pressed Answer.
“Hi, Kaja. Did you get my message?”
“Yes.” Her voice was soft against his ear.
“And?”
“And I agree, I think you’ve found Finne’s motive.”
“Does that mean you’re going to help me?”
“I don’t know.” In the pause that followed he could hear Kaja’s breathing in one ear, Alexandra’s in the other. “It sounds like you’re lying down, Harry. Are you at home?”
“No, he’s at Alexandra’s.” Alexandra’s voice cut into Harry’s ear.
“Who’s that?” Kaja asked.
“That…” Harry said, “was Alexandra.”
“In that case I won’t disturb you. Goodnight.”
“You’re not disturbing…”
Kaja had already hung up.
Harry looked at his phone. Put it back in his pocket. He stubbed the cigarette out on the cube light on the bedside table and swung his legs off the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” Harry said, then bent over and kissed her on the forehead.
* * *
—
Harry was walking west quickly as his brain worked things through.
He took out his phone and called Bjørn Holm.
“Harry?”
“It was Finne.”
“We’ll wake the baby, Harry,” Bjørn said. “Can we do this tomorrow?”
“Sv
ein Finne is Valentin Gjertsen’s father.”
“Oh, shit.”
“The motive’s blood vengeance. I’m certain of it. You need to put out an alert for Finne, and once you’ve got his address, you need to get a search warrant. If you find the knife, it’s case closed…”
“I hear you, Harry. But Gert is finally asleep, and I need to get some rest as well. And I’m not so sure we’d get a search warrant on those grounds. They’ll probably want something more concrete.”
“But this is blood vengeance, Bjørn. It’s in our nature. Wouldn’t you happily do the same if someone had killed Gert?”
“That’s one hell of a question.”
“Think about it.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Harry.”
“You don’t know?”
“Tomorrow. OK?”
“Of course.” Harry closed his eyes tightly and swore silently to himself. “Sorry if I’m behaving like an idiot, Bjørn, I just can’t bear to—”
“It’s fine, Harry. Let’s talk about it tomorrow. And while you’re suspended, it would probably be best if you don’t tell anyone we’re talking about the case.”
“Of course. Get some sleep, mate.”
Harry opened his eyes and slipped his phone back into his pocket. Saturday night. Ahead of him on the pavement stood a drunk, sobbing girl with her head pressed against the wall. A guy was standing behind her with his head bowed; he had one hand consolingly on her back. “He’s fucking other women!” the girl cried. “He doesn’t care about me! No one cares about me!”
“I do,” the guy said quietly.
“You, yeah,” she sniffed derisively, and went on sobbing. Harry caught the guy’s eye as he passed them.
Saturday night. There was a bar on this side of the street one hundred metres ahead. Maybe he ought to cross the road to avoid it. There wasn’t much traffic, just a few taxis. Actually, there were a lot of taxis. And they formed a wall of black vehicles that made it impossible to cross the road. Bloody hell.
* * *
—
Truls Berntsen was watching the seventh and final season of The Shield. He wondered about taking a quick look at Pornhub, then decided against it: someone in IT probably kept a log of what staff had gone surfing for on the Internet. Did people still say “surfing”? Truls looked at the time again. The Internet was slower at home, and it was time he got to bed anyway. He pulled on his jacket, zipped it up. But something was bothering him. He didn’t know what it could be, because he had spent the day at taxpayers’ expense without having to do anything useful, a day when he could go to bed secure in the knowledge that the balance sheet was once again in his favour.
Truls Berntsen looked at the phone.
It was stupid, but if it stopped him thinking about it, great.
“Duty officer.”
“This is Truls Berntsen. That woman you sent up here, did she file a report against Svein Finne when she got back down to you?”
“She never came back.”
“She just left?”
“Must have done.”
Truls Berntsen hung up. Thought for a moment. He tapped at the phone again. Waited.
“Harry.”
Truls could only just make out his colleague’s voice over the music and shouting in the background. “Are you at a party?”
“Bar.”
“They’re playing Motörhead,” Truls said.
“And that’s the only positive thing worth saying about the place. What do you want?”
“Svein Finne. You’ve been trying to keep an eye on him.”
“And?”
Truls told him about his visitor earlier in the day.
“Mm. Have you got the woman’s name and phone number?”
“Dagny something. Jensen, maybe. You can ask the duty officer if they took any other details, but I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“I think she’s frightened Finne will find out she was here.”
“OK. I can’t call the duty officer, I’m suspended. Can you do it for me?”
“I was about to go home.”
Truls listened to the silence at the other end. Lemmy was singing “Killed by Death.”
“OK,” Truls grunted.
“One more thing. My ID card’s been deactivated, so I can’t get into the office anymore. Can you bring my service pistol from my bottom drawer and meet me outside Olympen in twenty minutes?”
“Your pistol? What do you want that for?”
“To protect myself against the evils of the world.”
“Your drawers are locked.”
“But you’ve got a copy of the key.”
“What? What makes you think that?”
“I’ve noticed you moving things about in there. And on one occasion you used it to store a lump of hash that Narcotics had seized, according to the bag it was in. So it wouldn’t be found in your drawers if they started looking for it.”
Truls didn’t answer.
“Well?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Truls grunted. “On the dot. I’m not going to stand there freezing.”
* * *
—
Kaja Solness was standing with her arms folded, staring out of the living-room window. She was freezing. She was always cold. In Kabul, where the temperature veered from minus five to well over thirty, her nocturnal shivers were just as likely to strike in July as they were in December, and there’d been little she could do but wait for morning, when the desert sun would warm her up again. Her brother had been the same, and once she had asked him if he thought they were born cold-blooded, that they were incapable of regulating their own body temperature and were reliant on external heat to stop them seizing up and freezing to death like reptiles. For a long time she had thought that was true. That she wasn’t in control. That she was helplessly dependent on her surroundings. Dependent on others.
She stared out into the darkness. Let her gaze slip along the garden fence.
Was he standing out there somewhere?
It was impossible to know. The blackness was impenetrable, and a man like him knew perfectly well how to keep himself hidden.
She was shivering, but she wasn’t afraid. Because now she knew she didn’t need other people. She could shape her own life.
She thought about the sound of the other woman’s voice.
No, he’s at Alexandra’s.
Her own life. And other people’s.
17
Dagny Jensen stopped abruptly. She had gone for her usual Sunday walk along the banks of the Akerselva. Feeding the ducks. Smiling at families with small children and dogs. Looking for the first snowdrops. Anything to stop herself thinking. Because she had been thinking all night, and all she wanted to do now was forget.
But he wouldn’t let her. She stared at the figure standing outside the door to her building. He was stamping his feet on the ground, as if he was trying to keep warm. As if he had been waiting a long time. She was about to turn and walk away when she realised it wasn’t him. This man was taller than Finne.
Dagny walked closer.
He didn’t have long hair either, but scruffy, fair hair. She walked a bit closer.
“Dagny Jensen?” the man said.
“Yes?”
“Harry Hole. Oslo Police.”
The words sounded like he was grinding them out.
“What’s this about?”
“You wanted to report a rape yesterday.”
“I changed my mind.”
“So I understand. You’re frightened.”
Dagny looked at him. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and he had a liver-coloured scar running across one side of his face like a no-entry sign. But even if his face had something of the same brutality as Svein Finne, there was something that softene
d it, something that made it almost handsome.
“Am I?” she asked.
“Yes. And I’m here to ask for your help to catch the man who raped you.”
Dagny flinched. “Me? You’ve misunderstood, Hole. I’m not the person who was raped. If it was actually a rape at all.”
Hole didn’t answer. Just held her gaze. Now he was the one looking hard at her.
“He was trying to get you pregnant,” the police officer said. “And now that he’s hoping you’re carrying his child, he’s keeping watch over you. Has he been?”
Dagny blinked twice. “How do you know…”
“That’s his thing. Has he threatened you with what will happen if you have an abortion?”
Dagny Jensen swallowed. She was about to ask him to leave, but found herself hesitating. She didn’t know if she could trust what he said about catching Finne, there wasn’t much to go on. But this policeman had something the others hadn’t had. Resoluteness. There was determination in him. Maybe it’s a bit like with priests, Dagny thought; we trust them because we’re so desperate to believe what they say is true.
* * *
—
Dagny poured coffee into the cups on her small, folded-out kitchen table.
The tall policeman had squeezed himself onto the chair between the worktop and the table. “So Finne wants you to meet him at the Catholic church in Vika this evening? At nine o’clock?” He hadn’t interrupted her while she was talking, hadn’t taken any notes, but his bloodshot eyes had stayed on her, giving her the feeling that he was taking in every word, that he was seeing it in his mind’s eye the way she did, frame by frame of the short horror film that kept replaying inside her head.
“Yes,” she said.
“OK. Well, obviously we could pick him up there. Question him.”
“But you haven’t got any evidence.”
“No. Without evidence we’d have to let him go, and because he’d realise it was you who told us…”
“…I’d be in even more danger than I am now.”
The policeman nodded.
“That was why I didn’t report him,” Dagny said. “It’s like shooting a bear, isn’t it? If you don’t bring it down with your first shot, you won’t have time to reload before it gets you. In which case it’s better not to have fired the first shot.”
