by Jo Nesbo
“Mm. On the other hand, even the largest bear can be brought down by a single, well-aimed shot.”
“How, though?”
The policeman put one hand around his coffee cup. “There are several ways. One is to use you as bait. Fitted with a hidden microphone. Get him to talk about the rape.”
He looked down at the table.
“Go on,” she said.
He raised his head. The blue of his irises looked washed-out. “You’d have to ask him about the consequences if you don’t do as he says. That way we’d have the threats. If we have those and a conversation in which he indirectly confirms the rape, we’d have enough on tape to get him convicted.”
“You still use tape?”
The policeman raised his coffee to his lips.
“Sorry,” Dagny said. “I’m just so…”
“Of course,” the policeman said. “And I’d understand completely if you said no.”
“You said there were several ways?”
“Yes.” He said no more, just sipped from the cup.
“But?”
The policeman shrugged. “In many ways, a church is perfect. There’s no noise, nothing to stop us getting a good-quality recording. And you’d be in a public place where he couldn’t attack you…”
“We were in a public place last time.”
“…and we could be there to monitor the situation.”
Dagny looked at him. There was something in his eyes she recognised. And now she realised what it was. It was the same thing she’d seen in her own eyes, and at first had thought was a flaw in the mirror. A defect. Something broken. And something about his voice put her in mind of pupils with unsteady voices serving up fake explanations of why they hadn’t done their homework. She went over to the stove, put the coffee pot down and looked out of the window. Down below she could see people out for Sunday walks, but she couldn’t see him. Life, going on around her, had become an unnatural, strained idyll. Dagny had never thought about it like that before, she had just thought that was the way it was supposed to be.
She walked back and sat down on the kitchen chair.
“If I do this, I need to be certain he won’t turn up again. Do you understand that, Hole?”
“Yes, I understand. And you have my word that you’ll never see Svein Finne again. Ever. OK?”
Never. She knew that wasn’t true. Just as she had known that what the female priest said wasn’t true when she spoke of salvation. That it was meant as a comfort. But it worked. Even if we saw through “never” and “salvation,” they were passwords that opened the door to the heart, and the heart believed what it wanted to believe. Dagny could feel herself breathing easier already. She half closed her eyes. And when she looked at him like that, with the daylight coming through the window forming a halo around his head, she could no longer see the hurt in the policeman’s eyes, could no longer hear the false note in his voice.
“OK,” she said. “Tell me how we do this.”
* * *
—
Harry stopped in the street outside Kaja Solness’s house and called her number for the third time. Same result again. “The person you are calling has their phone switched off, or is…”
He opened the creaking wrought-iron gate and walked towards the house.
It was crazy. Of course it was crazy. But what else could he do?
He rang the doorbell. Waited. Rang again.
Put his eye to the large peephole in the door and saw her coat, the one she had been wearing at the funeral, hanging on a hook. And her tall black boots were standing on the shoe rack below.
He walked around the house. There were still patches of snow on the withered, flattened grass in the shade of the north side.
He looked up at the window of what had been her bedroom, although obviously she could have moved her bed into one of the other rooms. When he bent down to gather enough snow to make a snowball, he saw it. A footprint in the snow. From a boot. His brain began to search its databases. Found what it was looking for. A boot print in the snow outside the house in Holmenkollen.
His hand reached inside his jacket. Obviously, it could be a completely different print. Obviously, she could have left the house. He clasped the butt of his pistol, a Heckler & Koch P30L, hunched up and walked with long, silent strides back to the front steps. He shifted his grip on the pistol, holding it by the barrel so that he could break the glass in the peephole, but tried the door first.
It was open.
He stepped inside. Listened. Silence. He sniffed. Could only detect a faint smell of perfume—Kaja’s—probably from the scarf hanging from a hook next to her coat.
He walked along the hallway with his pistol in front of him.
The door to the kitchen was open, and the button on the coffee machine was glowing red. Harry tightened his grip on the butt, put his finger on the trigger. He moved farther into the house. The living-room door was ajar. A buzzing sound. Like flies. Harry nudged the door open cautiously with his foot, still holding the pistol in front of him.
She was lying on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and her arms were folded across her chest in that wool cardigan that was too big for her. Her body and pale face were bathed in the daylight streaming through the window.
Harry let the air out of his lungs with a groan. He lowered the pistol and crouched down. He held his thumb and forefinger around her worn slipper and pinched her big toe.
Kaja started, screamed and pulled her headphones off. “Bloody hell, Harry!”
“Sorry, I did try to get hold of you.” He sat down on the rug beside her. “I need help.”
Kaja closed her eyes, put one hand to her chest, still breathless. “So you said.”
What had previously been just a buzzing sound from the headphones was now clearly audible as familiar hard rock, played at loud volume.
“And you called me because you wanted me to persuade you to say yes,” he said, pulling out his cigarettes.
“I’m not the type who lets themselves be persuaded, Harry.”
He nodded towards the headphones. “You let yourself be persuaded to listen to Deep Purple.”
Did he see a hint of a blush on her cheeks? “Only because you said they were the best group in the ‘unintentionally ridiculous but still good’ category.”
“Mm.” Harry put an unlit cigarette to his lips. “Seeing as this plan belongs to the same category, I’m counting on it being of interest and—”
“Harry…”
“And bear in mind that by helping me put a notorious rapist behind bars, you’d be helping all the women of this city. You’d be helping Oleg by getting the man who murdered his mother punished. And you’d be helping me—”
“Stop, Harry.”
“…to get out of a situation I’ve only got myself to blame for.”
She raised one of her dark eyebrows. “Oh?”
“I’ve recruited one of Svein Finne’s rape victims to act as bait, in order to catch him red-handed. I’ve persuaded an innocent woman to wear a microphone and record him in the belief that it’s part of a police operation, whereas it’s actually a solo performance directed by a suspended police officer. Plus his accomplice, a former colleague. You.”
Kaja stared at him. “You’re kidding.”
“No,” Harry said. “It turns out that I have no moral boundaries when it comes to how far I’m willing to go to catch Svein Finne.”
“Those are precisely the words I was going to use.”
“I need you, Kaja. Are you with me?”
“Why on earth would I do that? This is utter madness.”
“How many times did we know who the culprit was, but couldn’t do anything about it because we had to follow the rules? Well, you’re not in the police, you don’t have to follow any rules.”
“But
you do, even if you are suspended. You’re not just risking your job, but your liberty. You’re the one they’ll end up putting away.”
“I won’t be losing anything, Kaja. I’ve got nothing left to lose.”
“What about your sleep? You know what you’re exposing this woman to?”
“Not my sleep either. Dagny Jensen knows this isn’t by the book, she’s seen through me.”
“Did she say that?”
“No. And we’re keeping it that way. So afterwards she can claim she thought it was a legitimate police operation, so she won’t be risking anything. She’s just as keen as I am to see that Svein Finne is eliminated.”
Kaja rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up on her elbows. The sleeves of her cardigan slid down her long, thin lower arms. “Eliminated. What exactly do you mean by that?”
Harry shrugged. “Taken out of the game. Removed.”
“Removed from…?”
“The streets. Public life.”
“Put in prison, then?”
Harry looked at her as he sucked on the unlit cigarette. Nodded. “For instance.”
Kaja shook her head. “I don’t know if I dare, Harry. You’re…different. You always pushed the boundaries, but this isn’t you. This isn’t us. This is…” She shook her head.
“Just say it,” Harry said.
“This is hatred. This is a horrible mixture of hatred and grief.”
“You’re right,” Harry said. He took the cigarette from his mouth and put it back in the packet. “And I was wrong. I haven’t lost everything. I’ve still got the hatred.”
He stood up and walked out of the living room, hearing the buzzing sound as Ian Gillan shrieked in a shrill vibrato that he was going to make it hard for you, that you’d…The sentence remained unfinished, Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar took over before Gillan launched into the conclusion: into the fire…Harry walked out of the house, onto the steps, out into the blinding daylight.
* * *
—
Pia Bohr knocked on the door of her daughter’s bedroom.
Waited. There was no answer.
She pushed the door open.
He was sitting on the bed with his back to her. He was still wearing his camouflage uniform. On the bedspread lay the pistol, the sheathed dagger and his NVGs—night-vision goggles.
“You need to stop,” she said. “Do you hear me, Roar? This can’t go on.”
He turned towards her.
His bloodshot eyes and streaked face showed he’d been crying. And that he probably hadn’t slept.
“Where were you last night? Roar? You can tell me.”
Her husband, or the man who had once been her husband, turned back to the window again. Pia Bohr sighed. He never said where he’d been, but the mud on the floor suggested he could have been out in the forest. Or a field. Or a rubbish dump.
She sat down on the opposite side of the bed. She needed the distance. The distance you’d want to maintain towards a stranger.
“What have you done?” she asked. “What have you done, Roar?”
She waited fearfully for what he was going to say in reply. And when he hadn’t answered after five seconds, she got up and quickly walked out. Almost relieved. Regardless of whatever he might have done, she was innocent. She had asked three times. What more could anyone demand?
18
Dagny looked at her watch under the light above the entrance to the Catholic church. Nine. What if Finne didn’t come? The traffic was rumbling on Drammensveien and Munkedamsveien, but when she stared along the narrow street leading to Slottsparken she couldn’t see any cars or people. Nor in the direction of Aker Brygge and the fjord either. The eye of the storm, the city’s blind spot. The church was squeezed between two office blocks, and there was little to show that it was a house of God. The building got thinner towards the top, and there was a spire, but there was no cross on the facade, no Jesus or Mary, no Latin quotes. The carvings on the solid wooden door—which was wide, tall and unlocked—may perhaps have led your thoughts in a religious direction, but apart from that, for all Dagny knew, it could have been the entrance to a synagogue, mosque or temple for some other small congregation. But if you went closer, you could read on a poster in a glass-fronted cabinet beside the door that there had been masses since early morning that Sunday. In Norwegian, English, Polish and Vietnamese. The last one—in Polish—had ended just half an hour ago. The noise never stopped, but this street remained quiet. How alone was she? Dagny hadn’t asked Harry Hole how many colleagues he had positioned to keep an eye on her, if any of them were out here, or if they were all inside the church. Possibly because she didn’t want to know, because she might then give herself away. She looked along the windows and doorways on the other side of the street, hopefully. But also hopelessly. Because deep down she had a feeling it was just Hole. Him and her. That was what Hole had tried to tell her with that look. And after he had left, she had checked on the Internet and found confirmation of what she thought she’d read in the papers. That Harry Hole was a famous police officer and the husband of the poor woman who had recently been murdered. With a knife. That explained the look in his eyes, of something broken, the cracked mirror. But it was too late now. She had set this in motion herself, and she could have stopped it. But she hadn’t been able to. No, she probably wasn’t lying to herself any less than Hole had done. She had seen his pistol.
She was freezing, she should have worn warmer clothes. Dagny looked at the time again.
“Is it me you’re waiting for?”
Her heart stopped.
How in all the world had he managed to sneak right up on her without her seeing him coming?
She nodded.
“Are we alone?”
Dagny nodded again.
“Really? No one else has come to celebrate our marital covenant?”
Dagny opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out.
Svein Finne smiled. His thick, wet lips curled against his yellow teeth. “You need to breathe, darling. We don’t want our child to suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen, do we?”
Dagny did as he said. Breathed. “We need to talk,” she said in a shaky voice. “I think I’m pregnant.”
“Of course you are.”
Dagny only just managed to stop herself from pulling back when he raised his arm—and for a moment she saw the light from the lamp above the church door shine through the hole in his hand before he held it, warm and dry, against her cheek. She remembered to breathe, and swallowed. “We need to talk about practical matters. Can we go in?”
“In?”
“Inside the church. It’s cold out here.”
“Of course. We’re getting married, after all. No time to lose.” He ran his hand down the side of her neck. She had taped the tiny microphone onto her bra, between the cups, inside her thin sweater and coat. Hole had said they couldn’t be sure of getting a decent recording until she got him into the church, where they would be free of the background noise of the city, and where she would also have a reason to take off the sound-muffling coat. He wouldn’t be able to escape in there, and they would grab Finne as soon as they had enough evidence to get him charged.
“Shall we go in, then?” Dagny said, pulling away from his hand. She put her hands in her coat pockets and managed to summon up a visible shiver.
Finne didn’t move. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back and sniffed. “I smell something,” he said.
“Smell?”
He opened his eyes and looked at her again.
“I smell sorrow, Dagny. Desperation. Pain.”
This time Dagny didn’t have to pretend to shiver.
“You didn’t smell like that last time,” he said. “Have you had a visit?”
“A visit?” She tried to laugh, but all that emerged was a coughing sound. “
Who from?”
“I don’t know. But there’s something familiar about that smell. Let me search my memory…” He put his finger under his chin. Frowned. Studied her. “Dagny, don’t tell me you’ve…You haven’t…have you, Dagny?”
“Have I what?” She tried to fend off the panic that was creeping up on her.
He shook his head sadly. “Do you read the Bible, Dagny? You know the parable of the sower? His seed is the word. The promise. And if the seed doesn’t take root, Satan will come and devour it. Satan will take away faith. Will take our child, Dagny. Because I am the sower. The question is, have you met Satan?”
Dagny swallowed, moved her head, wasn’t sure if she was nodding or shaking it.
Svein Finne sighed. “You and I, we conceived a child together in a precious moment of love. But perhaps you regret that now, perhaps you just don’t want a child. But you can’t go through with the cold-blooded murder of it as long as you know that it’s a real love-child, so you’re trying to find something that would make it possible for you to get rid of it.” He was talking loudly, and his soft lips were forming the words very clearly. Like an actor on stage, she thought. Using volume and diction so that every word was audible, even in the back row. “So you’re lying to your own conscience, Dagny. You tell yourself that that wasn’t what happened, that I didn’t want it, he forced himself on me. And you tell yourself that you can get the police to believe that. Because that man, that Satan, has told you that I have served time for other supposed rapes.”
“You’re wrong,” Dagny said, giving up any attempt to control the tremor in her voice. “Aren’t we going inside?” She could hear herself pleading.
Finne tilted his head to one side. Like a bird looking at its prey before it strikes. Almost contemplatively, as if it hasn’t quite decided whether or not to let its prey live. “A marital vow is a serious thing, Dagny. I don’t want you to enter into it lightly or act too hastily. And you seem…uncertain. Perhaps we should wait a little?”
