Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  “…Rakel would still be alive.”

  “I know people who specialise in PTSD. You need help, Harry.”

  “Yes. Help to catch Finne.”

  “That’s not your biggest problem.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Kaja sighed. “How long did you have to look for his son before you found him?”

  “Who’s counting? I found him.”

  “No one catches Finne, he’s like a ghost.”

  Harry looked up.

  “I worked in Vice within the Crime Squad Unit,” Kaja said. “I’ve read the reports about Svein Finne, they were on the syllabus.”

  “A ghost,” Harry said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what we’re all looking for.” He got to his feet. “Thanks for the hot water. And the tip-off.”

  “Tip-off?”

  * * *

  —

  The old man was staring at the blue dress that was swaying and drifting in the current of the river. Life as a dance performed by mayflies. You stand in a room full of testosterone and perfume, moving your feet in time to the music and smiling at the prettiest one because you think she’s meant for you. Until you ask her to dance and she says no and looks over your shoulder at the other guy, the guy who isn’t you. Then, once you’ve patched up your broken heart, you adjust your expectations and ask the next prettiest to dance. Then the third. Until you get to the one who says yes. And if you’re lucky, and you dance well together, you ask her for the next dance as well. And the next. Until the evening is over and you ask if she wants to spend eternity with you.

  “Yes, darling, but we’re mayflies,” she says, and dies.

  And then comes night, real night, and the only thing you’ve got is a memory, a blue dress waving enticingly, and the promise that it won’t be more than a day until you can follow her. The blue dress is the only thing that makes it possible to dream that you will one day dance again.

  “I’d like a wildlife camera.”

  The deep, hoarse voice came from the other side of the counter.

  The old man turned round. It was a tall man. Broad-shouldered but thin.

  “We’ve got several different types…” Alf said.

  “I know, I bought one here a while back. I’d like the fancy sort this time. The one that sends messages to your phone when someone’s there. The sort that can be hidden.”

  “I get you. Let me just get one I think would do the job.”

  The old man’s son-in-law went off to the shelves of wildlife cameras and the tall man turned and met the old man’s gaze. The old man remembered the face, not only because he had seen it in the shop before, but because he hadn’t been able to figure out if it belonged to a herbivore or a carnivore. Odd, because there was no doubt now. The man was a carnivore. But there was something else familiar about that look. The old man strained his eyes. Alf came back, and the tall man turned back towards the counter.

  “When this camera detects movement in front of the lens, it takes an image and sends it directly to the phone number you install…”

  “Thanks, I’ll take it.”

  When the tall man had left the shop, the old man looked back at the television screen. One day all the blue dresses would be torn to pieces and drift away, the memories would let go and disappear. He saw the scars of loss and resignation in his own eyes in the mirror every day. That was what he had recognised in the tall man’s expression. Loss. But not resignation. Not yet.

  * * *

  —

  Harry heard the gravel crunch beneath his boots and thought that this was what happened when you got old, you spent more and more time in cemeteries. Got to know your future neighbours in the place you’d be spending eternity. He stopped in front of the small, black stone. Crouched down, dug a hole in the snow and put the vase of white lilies in it. He packed the snow around it and arranged the stems. He stepped back to make sure it looked right. He looked up and surveyed the ranks of headstones. If the rule was that you were buried in the cemetery closest to your home, Harry would end up here somewhere, not next to Rakel, who lay in Voksen Cemetery. It had taken him seven minutes to get here from his flat—three and a half if he hurried, but he had taken his time. Burial plots were only left alone for twenty years; after that new coffins could be buried in the same plot, alongside the ones that were already there. So if fate was so inclined, they could be reunited in death. Harry shivered in his coat as a cold shudder ran through his body. He looked at the time. Then hurried towards the exit.

  * * *

  —

  “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” Oleg said.

  “Fine?”

  “Up and down.”

  “Mm.” Harry pressed the phone closer to his ear, as if to reduce the distance between them, between a flat on Sofies gate where Bruce Springsteen was singing “Stray Bullet” in the evening darkness, and the house two thousand kilometres farther north where Oleg had a view of the Air Force base and Porsanger Fjord. “I’m calling to tell you to be careful.”

  “Careful?”

  Harry told him about Svein Finne. “If Finne is out for revenge for me killing his son, that means you could be in danger too.”

  “I’m coming to Oslo,” Oleg said firmly.

  “No!”

  “No? If he killed Mum, am I supposed to just sit here and—”

  “Firstly, Crime Squad wouldn’t let you anywhere near the investigation. Just think what a defense lawyer could do to a case in which you, the victim’s son, had taken part. And secondly, it’s likely that he picked your mother rather than you because you’re well outside his normal territory.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Listen! If he comes after you, I want you up there for two reasons. He won’t drive two thousand kilometres by car, so he’d have to fly. To a small airport where you’ll be able to give them pictures of him. Svein Finne isn’t the sort of person it’s easy to ignore in a small place. With you where you are, we’re increasing the chances of catching him. OK?”

  “But—”

  “Reason number two. Imagine that you’re not there when he arrives. And finds Helga at home on her own.”

  Silence. Just Springsteen and a piano.

  Oleg cleared his throat. “You’ll keep me orientated as things progress?”

  “Orientated. OK?”

  After they hung up, Harry sat and stared at the phone where he’d put it down on the coffee table. The Boss was in the middle of another track that hadn’t made it onto The River album, “The Man Who Got Away.”

  Like hell. Not this time.

  The phone lay cold and dead on the table.

  When it was half past eleven, he couldn’t sit still any longer.

  He put his boots on, grabbed his phone and went out into the hallway. His car keys weren’t on the dresser where he usually kept them, so he hunted through all his trouser and jacket pockets until he found them in the bloody jeans he’d tossed in the laundry basket. He went down to his Ford Escort, got in, adjusted the seat, turned the key in the ignition and reached automatically for the radio, but changed his mind. He had it tuned to Stone Hard FM because they didn’t talk and played nothing but brain-dead, pain-numbing hard rock twenty-four hours a day, but he didn’t need anything pain-numbing right now. He needed pain. So he drove in silence through the drowsy streets of Oslo city centre, and up into the hills that wound past Sjømannsskolen to Nordstrand. He pulled over to the side of the road, took his flashlight from the glove compartment, got out and looked down at the Oslo Fjord as it lay bathed in moonlight, black and copper-smooth towards the south, towards Denmark and the open sea. He opened the boot and took out the crowbar. He stood and looked at it for a moment. There was something that wasn’t right, something he hadn’t thought of, but it was so small, like a fragment floating across
his retina, and now he’d forgotten it. He tried biting his false finger, and shivered when his teeth came into contact with the titanium. But it didn’t help, it was gone, like a dream slipping helplessly out of mind.

  Harry waded through the snow to the edge of the hill, to the old bunkers where he, Øystein and Tresko used to come and drink themselves stupid while their contemporaries were celebrating graduation, National Day, Midsummer and whatever the fuck else they used to celebrate.

  The council had padlocked the doors after a series of articles in one of the city’s papers. It wasn’t that they hadn’t known that the bunkers were used by drug addicts and prostitutes, and there had been pictures published before. Pictures of young people injecting heroin into arms covered in scars, and foreign women in slutty outfits lying on filthy mattresses. What made them react this time was one single picture. It wasn’t even particularly brutal. A young man sitting on a mattress with a user’s accessories beside him. He was staring into the camera with puppy-dog eyes. The shock factor was that he looked like an ordinary Norwegian youth: blue-eyed, with a traditional sweater and short, neat hair. You could have imagined it was taken one Easter holiday at his family’s cabin. The next day the council had put locks on all the doors, and set up signs warning about trespassing and saying the bunkers were regularly patrolled. Harry knew that was an empty threat—the Chief of Police didn’t even have enough money and people to investigate break-ins where things were actually stolen.

  He inserted the crowbar into the crack in the door.

  He had to use the whole of his weight before the lock gave way.

  Harry stepped inside. The only sound breaking the silence was the echo of dripping from deep inside the darkness, which made Harry think of the sonar pulse from a submarine. Tresko had said he’d downloaded a soundtrack of sonar pulses from the net, put it on a loop and used it to get to sleep. Said the feeling of being underwater made him calm.

  Harry could only identify three ingredients in the stench: piss, petrol and wet concrete. He switched the flashlight on and walked farther in. The beam found a wooden bench that looked like it had been stolen from the surrounding parkland, and a mattress that was black with damp and mould. Planks had been nailed over the horizontal firing slits facing the fjord.

  It was—as he had thought—the perfect place.

  And he couldn’t help himself.

  He turned the flashlight off.

  Closed his eyes. He wanted to try out the feeling now, in advance.

  He tried to see it in front of him, but the images wouldn’t come.

  Why not? Maybe he needed to feed the hate.

  He thought about Rakel. Rakel on the stone floor. Svein Finne over her. Feed the hate.

  And then it came.

  Harry screamed out loud into the darkness and opened his eyes.

  What the hell was going on, why was his brain storing these images of himself covered in blood?

  * * *

  —

  Svein Finne woke up at the sound of a branch snapping.

  He was wide awake in an instant, staring up into the darkness and the roof of his two-man tent.

  Had they found him? Here, so far from the nearest buildings, in dense pine forest in such rough terrain that even dogs would have trouble getting through it?

  He listened. Tried to identify what it could be from the sounds. A snort. Not human. Heavy steps on the forest floor. So heavy that he could feel a slight vibration through the ground. A large animal. An elk, perhaps. When he was young, Svein Finne had often gone off into the forest, taking his tent with him, and would spend the night in Maridalen or Sørkedalen. The Oslo forests were vast, and provided freedom and refuge for a young lad who often got in trouble, didn’t fit in, who people tended either to avoid or wanted to bully. People often reacted like that when there was something they were afraid of. Svein Finne hadn’t been able to understand how they knew. He kept it hidden from them, after all. He only revealed who he was to a very few people. And he could understand that they got scared. He felt more at home out here in the forest with the animals than in the city that lay just a couple of hours’ walk away. And there were more animals here, right on their doorstep, than most of the people in Oslo knew. Deer, hares, pine martens. Foxes, of course; they thrived on human waste. The occasional red deer. One moonlit night he’d watched a lynx sneak past on the other side of a lake. And birds. Ospreys. Tawny owls and boreal owls. He hadn’t seen any of the goshawks and sparrowhawks that had been common here when he was growing up. But a buzzard had drifted past between the trees above him.

  The elk had come closer. It had stopped breaking branches now. Elk break branches. A snout pressed against the tent, sniffed up and down. A snout that was sniffing for food. In the middle of the night. It wasn’t an elk.

  Finne rolled over in his sleeping bag, grabbed his flashlight and hit the snout with it. It disappeared and he heard a deep sniff outside. Then the snout was back, and this time it pressed so hard against the tent that when Finne switched his flashlight quickly on and off again, he was able to see what it was. He had seen the outline of the big head and jaw. There was a scratching sound of claws tearing at the fabric of the tent. Finne was as quick as lightning, grabbing the handle of the knife he always kept by the side of the underlay, pulled the zip down and rolled out of the tent, making sure he didn’t have his back to the animal. He had set up camp on a few square metres of snow-free ground on a slope, in front of a large rock that divided the meltwater so that it ran down either side of the tent, and now he tumbled naked down the slope. He felt no pain as twigs and stones cut into his skin, just heard the cracking of the undergrowth as the bear came after him. It had noticed his flight, and its hunting instincts had kicked in, and Svein Finne knew that no one could outrun a bear, not on this terrain. But he had no intention of trying to do that. Nor of lying down and pretending to be dead, the way some people say is a good strategy if you run into a bear. A bear that had just emerged from hibernation is desperate from starvation and would be more than happy to eat even a corpse. Fucking idiots. Finne reached the bottom of the slope, found his feet, pressed his back against a thick tree trunk and straightened up. He switched the flashlight on and aimed it at the noises coming towards him.

  The animal stopped abruptly when the light shone in its eyes. Blinded, it stood up on its hind legs and flailed at the air with its paws. It was a brown bear. About two metres tall. Could have been bigger, Finne thought, as he gripped the sheath between his teeth and drew the puukko knife. Grandfather Finne had said the last bear to be caught in the forests around Oslo—in 1882, by forest ranger Kjelsås, next to a fallen tree in Grønnvollia below Opkuven—had been almost two and a half metres tall.

  The bear fell onto all fours. Its skin was hanging loose around it. It was panting hard, swinging its head from side to side, looking alternately into the forest and towards the light, as if it couldn’t decide.

  Finne held the knife up in front of him. “Don’t want to work for your food, Bruin? Feeling a bit weak tonight?”

  The bear roared, as if in frustration, and Finne laughed so loud that it echoed off the rock face above them. “My grandfather was one of the men who ate your grandfather back in 1882,” Finne called. “He said it tasted terrible, even with plenty of seasoning. But I could imagine taking a bite of you all the same, Bruin, so come on! Come on, you stupid bastard!”

  Finne took a step towards the bear, which backed away slightly, shifting its weight from side to side. It looked confused, almost cowed.

  “I know how it feels,” Finne said. “You’ve been shut up for ages, then suddenly you get out, and there’s too much light, too little food, and you’re all alone. Not because you’ve been cast out—because you’re not like them, you’re not a herding animal, you’re the one who’s cast them out.” Finne took another step closer. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel lonely, does
it? Spread your seed, Bruin, make others who are like you, who understand you. Who understand how to honour their father! Hah! Hah! Get lost, because there are no females in Sørkedalen. Get lost, this is my territory, you poor, starving bastard! All you’ll find here is loneliness.”

  The bear pressed down on its front paws, as if it was about to stand up again but couldn’t manage it.

  Finne saw it now. The bear was old. Maybe sick. And Finne detected an unmistakable smell. The smell of fear. It wasn’t the far smaller, two-legged creature in front of it that was making it frightened, but the fact that this creature wasn’t emitting the same smell. It was fearless. Crazy. Capable of anything.

  “Well, old Bruin?”

  The bear snarled, revealing a set of yellow teeth.

  Then it turned and padded away until it was swallowed up by the darkness.

  Svein Finne stood and listened to the sound of twigs snapping farther and farther away.

  The bear would be back. Either when it was even hungrier, or when it had eaten and felt strong enough to conquer the territory. Tomorrow he would have to start looking for somewhere that was even less accessible, possibly somewhere with walls that could keep a bear out. But first he had to go into the city and buy a trap. And visit the grave. The herd.

  * * *

  —

  Katrine couldn’t sleep. But her son was asleep in his crib over by the window, that was the important thing.

  She rolled over in bed and looked directly into Bjørn’s pale face. His eyes were closed but he wasn’t snoring. And that meant he wasn’t asleep either. She studied him. His thin, reddish eyelids with their visible veins, his pale eyebrows, white skin. It was as if he’d swallowed a lit lightbulb. Inflated and illuminated from within. Plenty of people had been surprised when they got together. No one had asked straight out, obviously, but she had seen the question on their faces: what makes a beautiful, self-sufficient woman choose a less than averagely attractive man with no money? A female MP on the Justice Committee had taken her aside at a networking cocktail party for “women in important positions” and told her she thought it was great that Katrine had married a male colleague whose status was lower than hers. Katrine had replied that Bjørn was bloody good in bed, and asked the politician if she felt ashamed of having a high-status husband who earned more than her, and what did she think the chances were that her next husband would be lower-status? Katrine had no idea who the woman’s husband was, but from the look on her face she could tell that she had got pretty close to the mark. She hated those “influential women” gatherings anyway. Not because she didn’t support the cause, not because she didn’t think that true equality was something worth fighting for, but because she couldn’t summon up the forced sisterly solidarity and emotional rhetoric. Occasionally she felt like telling them to shut up and stick to asking for equal opportunities and equal pay for equal work. Sure, a change was long overdue, and not only when it came to direct sexual harassment, but also the indirect and often intangible sexual-control tactics men used. But that mustn’t be allowed to rise to the top of the agenda and draw attention away from what equality was really about. Women would only harm themselves yet again if they prioritised hurt feelings over the size of their pay packets. Because only better wages, more economic power, would make them invulnerable.