Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  Perhaps she would have felt differently if she’d been the most vulnerable person in the bedroom. She had sought out Bjørn when she was at her weakest, her most fragile, when she needed someone who would love her unconditionally. And the slightly plump but kind and charming forensic specialist had hardly been able to believe his luck, and responded by proclaiming her his queen, almost to the point of self-negation. She had told herself that she wouldn’t exploit that, that she had seen too many people—women and men alike—turn into monsters simply because their partner invited it. And she had tried. She really had.

  She had been tested before, but when the real test came along—the third person, the baby—the survival instinct that got you through the day took over and consideration for your partner had to give way.

  The third person. The one you loved more than your partner.

  But in Katrine’s case, the third person had been there all along.

  Once. Just once she had lain like this, in this very bed with him, the third person. Listened to him breathing while an autumn storm made the windows rattle, the walls creak, and her world collapse. He belonged to someone else, she was only borrowing him, but if that was all she could get, she’d take it. Did she regret that attack of madness? Yes. Yes, of course she did. Was it the happiest moment of her life? No. It was despair and a peculiar numbness. Could the whole thing have been avoided? Definitely not.

  “What are you thinking about?” Bjørn whispered.

  What if she said it? What if she told him everything?

  “The case,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “How can you lot have absolutely nothing?”

  “Like we’ve said, the perpetrator cleaned up after himself. Are you really thinking about the case, or…something else?”

  Katrine couldn’t see the expression in his eyes in the darkness, but she could hear it in his voice. He had always known about the third person. Bjørn Holm was the person she had confided in back when he was just a friend and she had only just moved to Police Headquarters, when she had a hopeless, silly infatuation with Harry. It was so long ago. But she had never told him about that night.

  “A married couple who live in Holmenkollen were driving home on the night of the murder,” Katrine said. “They saw an adult male walking down Holmenkollveien at quarter to midnight.”

  “Which fits the presumed time of the murder, between 22:00 and 02:00,” Bjørn said.

  “Sober adults in Holmenkollen drive cars. The last bus had gone, and we’ve checked the security cameras at Holmenkollen metro station. A tram arrived at twenty-five minutes to midnight, but the only person who got off was a woman. What’s a pedestrian doing out that late at night? If he was walking all the way home from a bar in the city, he’d have been walking uphill, and if he was heading back into the city, he’d have gone to the metro station, don’t you think? Unless he wanted to avoid any security cameras.”

  “A man, out walking. It’s a bit thin, isn’t it? Did they give a description?”

  “Just the usual. Average height, between twenty-five and sixty, unknown ethnicity, but rather dark-skinned.”

  “So the reason you’ve got hung up on this is…”

  “…that it’s the only lead of any value at all.”

  “So you didn’t get anything useful from the neighbour?”

  “Mrs. Syvertsen? Her bedroom is at the back of the house, and the window was open. But she says she slept like a baby all night.”

  Like an ironic response, a tentative whimpering sound came from the crib. They looked at each other and almost started to laugh.

  Katrine turned away from them and pressed her ear down into the pillow, but couldn’t shut out two further whines, then the usual pause before the siren started. She felt the mattress move as Bjørn rolled out of bed.

  She wasn’t thinking about the baby. She wasn’t thinking about Harry. And she wasn’t thinking about the case. She was thinking about sleep. A mammal’s deep sleep, the sort with both sides of the brain switched off.

  * * *

  —

  Kaja ran her hand over the rough, hard grip of the pistol. She had switched off all sources of noise in the living room and was listening to the silence. He was out there, she had heard him. She had got hold of the pistol after what happened to Hala in Kabul.

  Hala and Kaja had been two of the nine women in the group of twenty-three people who shared the same living quarters, most of them employed by the Red Crescent or Red Cross, but a few held civilian positions in the peacekeeping forces. Hala was an unusual person with an unusual background, but what really set her apart from the others in the building was that she wasn’t foreign but Afghan. The building wasn’t far from the Kabul Serena Hotel and Afghan Presidential Palace. The Taliban attack on the Serena had demonstrated that nowhere in Kabul was completely safe, but everything was relative, and they had felt protected by the security guard behind the tall railings. In the afternoons, Hala and Kaja would go up onto the flat roof and fly the kite they had bought at the Strand Bazaar for a dollar or two. Kaja had assumed it was just a romantic cliché from a best-selling book—the idea that the kites in the skies above Kabul were a symbol that the city was free from the Taliban regime, which had banned kite-flying in the nineties because it took people’s time and attention away from prayer. But at the weekends now there were hundreds, thousands of kites in the air. And according to Hala, the colours of the kites were even brighter than they were before the Taliban, because of the new ink that had come onto the market. Hala had known just how they had to work together when they flew the kite—one steering it, the other watching the line—otherwise they wouldn’t stay clear of other kites that were looking for a fight, trying to cut their line or kite with their own lines, which had slivers of glass attached to them. It wasn’t hard to see the parallels with the West’s self-imposed mission in Afghanistan, but it was still a game. If they lost a kite, they just sent up another one. And even more beautiful than the kites in the sky was the glow in Hala’s beautiful eyes when she looked up at them.

  It was past midnight, and Kaja had heard sirens and seen blue police lights from the living-room window. She was already worried because Hala hadn’t come home, so she got dressed and went outside. The police cars were parked by an alley. There was no cordon, and a crowd of onlookers had already gathered. Young Afghan men in leather jackets, copies of Gucci and Armani, were pretty much the only people on the streets at that time of night. How many crime scenes had Kaja attended as a detective in the Crime Squad Unit? Even so, she still woke up from nightmares about that night. The knife had cut large flaps in Hala’s shalwar kameez, baring the skin beneath, and her head was bent back at an impossible angle, as if her neck was broken, making the wound in her neck gape open, and Kaja could see right into the pink, already-dry innards. When she crouched over the body, a swarm of sandflies had emerged from the wound, like an evil spirit emerging from a lamp, and Kaja had flailed her arms about her.

  The post-mortem revealed that Hala had had intercourse right before the murder, and even if the physical evidence couldn’t rule out the possibility that it had been voluntary, they all assumed—given the circumstances and the fact that she was a single young woman who followed the strict rules of the Hazaras—that it was rape. The police never found the perpetrator or perpetrators. People said that the risk of being raped in the street in Kabul was a fraction of the risk of being blown up by an IED. And even if the number of rapes had risen since the fall of the Taliban, the police had a theory that the Taliban were behind the attack, to show what would happen to Afghan women who worked for ISAF, Resolute Force and other Western organisations. Despite that, the rape and murder in Kabul had frightened the other women in the group. Kaja had taught them how to handle a gun. And in a strange way, this pistol—which was passed around like a baton whenever one of them had to go out after dark—brought them together
as a team. A kite team.

  Kaja felt the weight of the pistol. When she was in the police, holding a loaded pistol had always filled her with a mixture of fear and security. In Afghanistan she had started to think of it as a necessary tool, something you valued having. Like the knife. It was Anton who had taught her to use it. Who had taught her that even in the Red Cross—at least, in his Red Cross—you defended your own life if necessary by killing. She remembered that the first time she met Anton she had thought that the refined, almost jovial, tall blond Swiss man—who was far too handsome—wasn’t for her. She had been wrong. And right. But when it came to Hala’s murder, she wasn’t wrong, only right.

  It wasn’t the Taliban who had been behind it.

  She knew who it was, but had no evidence.

  Kaja squeezed her hand tightly round the handle. Listened. Breathed. Waited. Numb. That was what was so strange: her heart was pounding as if she were on the brink of panic, but at the same time she felt completely indifferent. Scared of dying, but not particularly interested in living. Even so, she had got through the debriefing with the psychologist when they stopped in Tallinn on the way home. And sailed under the radar.

  20

  Harry woke up, and everything was the same. A few seconds passed before he remembered, realised it wasn’t a nightmare, and the clenched fist hit him in the guts. He rolled onto his side and stared at the picture on the table. Rakel, Oleg and himself, smiling, sitting on a boulder surrounded by autumn leaves, on one of those hikes Rakel was so keen on, and which Harry suspected that he had rather started to enjoy. And for the first time he thought the thought: if this was the start of a day that was only going to get worse, how many more days could he handle? He was in the process of giving himself an answer when he realised he hadn’t been woken by the alarm clock. His phone, lying next to the picture, was vibrating almost silently, like the buzz of a hummingbird. He grabbed it.

  It was a text message containing a picture.

  Harry’s heart began to beat faster.

  He tapped the screen twice with his finger, and it felt as if his heart had stopped.

  Svein Finne, “the Fiancé,” was standing with his head bowed, facing the camera, his eyes focused a little way above it. The sky above his head had a reddish glow.

  Harry leapt out of bed, picked up his trousers from the floor and pulled them on. Yanked on a T-shirt on his way to the door, pulled on his coat and boots and rushed out into the stairwell. He stuck his hands in his pockets to check that everything he had put in them the previous evening was still there: car keys, handcuffs and the Heckler & Koch pistol.

  He burst out of the door, breathed in the cold morning air and jumped in the Escort that was parked on the edge of the pavement. Three and a half minutes if he ran. But he needed the car for part two. Harry quietly cursed the starter motor when it failed to work the first time. It would be game over at the next MOT. He turned the key again and pressed the accelerator. There! Harry skidded up the wet cobbles of Stensberggata, almost deserted so early in the morning. How long did people stand at graves? He cut across the beginnings of the morning rush on Ullevålsveien and parked on the pavement on Akersbakken right in front of the north gate to Vår Frelsers Cemetery. He left the car unlocked with its police badge clearly visible on the dashboard.

  He ran, but stopped when he reached the gate. From where he was standing, at the top of the sloping cemetery, he immediately caught sight of the lonely figure standing in front of the grave. His head was bowed, and a long, thick Native American plait was hanging down his back.

  Harry clasped the butt of the pistol in his coat pocket and started walking. Not fast, not slow. He stopped when he was three metres from the man’s back.

  “What do you want?”

  The sound of the man’s voice made Harry shiver. The last time he had heard Svein Finne’s gravelly, resounding priest’s voice they had been sitting in a cell in Ila Prison, when Harry was trying to get help to catch the man who was now lying in the grave in front of them. Back then Harry had had no idea that Valentin Gjertsen was Svein Finne’s son. In hindsight, he couldn’t help thinking he should have suspected something. Should have realised that such sick, violent fantasies must have come from the same source, one way or another.

  “Svein Finne,” Harry said, and heard his voice shake. “You’re under arrest.”

  He didn’t hear Finne laugh, just saw his shoulders move. “That seems to be your standard line whenever you see me, Hole.”

  “Put your hands behind your back.”

  Finne let out a deep sigh. He put his hands behind his back with a nonchalant gesture, as if it made his posture more comfortable.

  “I’m going to put handcuffs on you. And before you think of doing anything stupid, you should know that I’ve got a pistol aimed at the base of your spine.”

  “You’d shoot me in the base of the spine, Hole?” Finne turned his head and grinned. Those brown eyes. The thick, wet lips. Harry breathed through his nose. Cold. He needed to stay cold now, not think about her. Think about what he was going to do, nothing else. Simple, practical things.

  “Because you think I’m more frightened of being paralysed than of dying?”

  Harry took a deep breath in an attempt to stop himself trembling. “Because I want a confession before you die.”

  “Like you got from my boy? And then you shot him?”

  “I had to shoot him because he was resisting arrest.”

  “Yes, I daresay that’s how you choose to remember it. That’s probably how you remember shooting me too.”

  Harry saw the hole in Svein Finne’s palm, like Torghatten, the mountain with a hole you can see daylight through. From a bullet fired during an arrest early in Harry’s police career. But it was the other hand that caught his attention. The grey watchstrap around his wrist. Without lowering the pistol, he grabbed Finne’s wrist with his free hand and turned it over. Pressed the face of the watch. Red numbers indicating the time and date lit up.

  The click of the handcuffs sounded like a damp kiss in the empty cemetery.

  * * *

  —

  Harry turned the ignition key counterclockwise, and the engine died.

  “A beautiful morning,” Finne said, looking through the Escort’s windshield down at the fjord below them. “But why aren’t we at Police Headquarters?”

  “I was thinking of giving you a choice,” Harry said. “You can give me a confession here and now, and we can drive back down for breakfast and a warm cell in Police Headquarters. Or you can deny it, and you and I can take a little walk into that wartime bunker.”

  “Ha! I like you, Hole. I really do. I hate you as a person, but I like your personality.” Finne moistened his lips. “And I confess, obviously. She—”

  “Wait until I start recording,” Harry said, fishing his phone out of his coat pocket.

  “…was a willing participant.” Finne shrugged his shoulders. “I think she might even have enjoyed it more than me.”

  Harry swallowed. Closed his eyes for a moment. “Enjoyed having a knife stuck in her stomach?”

  “A knife?” Finne turned in his seat and looked at Harry. “I took her by the railings, right behind where you arrested me. Of course I know it’s against the law to fuck in a cemetery, but given the way she insisted on getting more, I think it’s only reasonable for her to pay most of the fine. Has she really filed a complaint? I suppose she regretted her ungodly behaviour. Yes, that wouldn’t surprise me. Unless perhaps she actually believes what she’s saying. Shame can make us distort anything. Do you know, there was a psychologist in prison who tried to tell me about Nathanson’s Compass of Shame. That I was so ashamed at having killed the girl, like you claimed I had, that I had to flee the shame altogether by denying it had ever happened. That’s what’s going on here. Dagny feels so ashamed of how much she enjoyed what happened in the ceme
tery that her memory has turned it into rape. Does that sound familiar, Hole?”

  Harry was about to answer when a wave of nausea rose up inside him. Shame. Repression.

  The handcuffs rattled as Finne leaned forward in his seat. “Either way, you know what it’s like with rape cases, where it’s one person’s word against another’s, with no witnesses or forensic evidence. I’ll get off, Hole. Is that what this is about? You know the only way you can get me locked up for rape is by forcing a confession out of me? Sorry, Hole. But, like I said, I confess to fucking in a public place, so at least you’ve got something you can pin on me. Are you still offering breakfast?”