Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  “Have you seen VG’s headline about the arrest?” Harry asked, picking up a cup in front of him. Coffee, Bjørn noted.

  “Yes. They’ve used a picture of you.”

  “I don’t give a damn about that. Look at what they’ve just published.” Harry held his phone up for Bjørn to read.

  “They’re saying we’ve done a deal,” Bjørn said. “Murder in exchange for rape. OK, it’s not common, but it does happen.”

  “But it doesn’t usually appear in the press,” Harry said. “And, if it does, not until after the bear has been shot.”

  “You don’t think it’s been shot?”

  “If you do a deal with the devil, you need to ask yourself why the devil thinks it’s a good deal.”

  “Aren’t you being a bit paranoid now?”

  “I’m just hoping we get a confession in a proper police interview. The things I recorded in the bunker would be torn apart by a defense lawyer like Krohn.”

  “Now that the press have published this, he’ll have to confess. If not, we’ll charge him for the rape. Katrine’s interviewing him right now.”

  “Mm.” Harry tapped at his phone and raised it to his ear. “I need to update Oleg. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “I…er…promised Katrine that I’d check to make sure everything was OK with you. You weren’t at home and you weren’t at Schrøder’s. To be honest, I thought you were barred from here for life after last time…”

  “Yes, but that idiot’s not working until this evening.” Harry nodded towards the pram. “Can I take a look?”

  “He tends to notice people and wake up.”

  “OK.” Harry lowered his phone. “Engaged. Any suggestions for next Thursday’s playlist?”

  “Theme?”

  “Cover versions that are better than the original.”

  “Joe Cocker and ‘A Little—’ ”

  “Already on it. What about Francis and the Lights’ version of ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing?’ ”

  “Kanye West? Are you ill, Harry?”

  “OK. A Hank Williams song, then?”

  “Are you mad? No one does Hank better than Hank.”

  “What about Beck’s version of ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’?”

  “Do you want me to punch you?”

  Harry and Øystein laughed, and Bjørn realised they were teasing him.

  Harry put his arm round Bjørn’s shoulders. “I miss you. Can’t the two of us solve a really gruesome murder together soon?”

  Bjørn nodded as he looked at Harry’s smiling face in astonishment. The unnaturally intense glow in his eyes. Maybe he really had snapped? Maybe grief had finally tipped him over the edge. Then it was as if Harry’s smile suddenly shattered, like the morning ice in October, and Bjørn found himself looking into the black depths of desperate pain again. As if Harry had merely wanted to taste happiness. And had spat it out again.

  “Yes,” Bjørn said quietly. “I’m sure we can manage that.”

  * * *

  —

  Katrine stared at the red light above the microphone that indicated that recording was under way. She knew that if she raised her eyes she would see those of Svein Finne, “the Fiancé.” And she didn’t want to do that—not because it might influence her, but because it might influence him. They had discussed whether to use a male interviewer, given Finne’s warped attitude to women. But when they read through the transcripts of previous interviews with Finne, he seemed to open up more for female interviewers. She didn’t know if that had been with or without eye contact.

  She had put on a blouse that shouldn’t seem provocative, or give the impression that she was afraid of him looking at her. She glanced over at the control room, where an officer was taking care of the recording equipment. In there with him were Magnus Skarre from the investigative team, and Johan Krohn, who somewhat reluctantly had left the interview room after Finne himself had asked to talk to Katrine alone.

  Katrine gave a brief nod to the officer, who nodded back. She read out the case number, her own and Finne’s names, the location, date and time. It was a hangover from the time when audio tapes could go astray, but it also served as a reminder that the formal part of the interview had begun.

  “Yes,” Finne replied with a slight smile and exaggeratedly clear diction when Katrine asked if he had been made aware of his rights, and the fact that the interview was being recorded.

  “Let’s begin with the evening of the tenth of March and early morning of the eleventh of March,” Katrine said. “Hereafter referred to as the night of the murder. What happened?”

  “I’d taken some pills,” Finne said.

  Katrine looked down as she took notes.

  “Valium. Stesolid. Or Rohypnol. Maybe a bit of everything.”

  His voice made her think of the sound of the wheels of her grandfather’s tractor driving along a gravel track out in Sotra.

  “So things might be a little unclear for me,” Finne said.

  Katrine stopped writing. Unclear? She detected something metallic at the back of her throat, the taste of panic. Was he planning to withdraw his confession?

  “Unless perhaps it’s just because I always get a bit confused when I get horny.”

  Katrine looked up. Svein Finne caught her gaze. It felt like something was drilling into her head.

  He moistened his lips. Smiled. Lowered his voice. “But I always remember the most important things. That’s why we do it, isn’t it? For the memories we can take away and use in lonely moments?”

  Katrine caught sight of his right hand painting the picture for her as it moved up and down before she looked back at her notes again.

  Skarre had argued that they should cuff Finne, but Katrine had objected. She said it would give him a mental advantage if he thought they were that frightened of him. That it might tempt him to toy with them. And now, one minute into the interview, that was precisely what he was doing.

  Katrine leafed through the files in front of her. “If your memory isn’t great, perhaps we could talk about the three rape files I’ve got here instead. With witness statements that might help prompt your memory.”

  “Touché,” Finne said, and without looking up she knew he was still smiling. “Like I said, I remember the most important details.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  “I arrived at about nine o’clock in the evening. She had a stomach ache and was rather pale.”

  “Hang on. How did you get in?”

  “The door was open, so I went straight in. She screamed and screamed. She was so frightened. So I h-held her.”

  “A stranglehold? Or by locking her arms to her sides?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  She knew they were proceeding too quickly, that she needed more details, but this was first and foremost about getting a confession out of him before he changed his mind. “Then what?”

  “She was in so much pain. Blood was pouring out of her. I used a kn-knife…”

  “Your own?”

  “No, a sharper one, from a knife block.”

  “Where on her body did you use it?”

  “H-here.”

  “The interviewee is pointing at his stomach,” Katrine said.

  “Her belly button,” Finne said in an affected, childlike voice. “Her belly button.”

  “Her belly button,” Katrine repeated, swallowing a surge of nausea. Swallowing the feeling of triumph. They had the confession. The rest was all icing on the cake.

  “Can you describe Rakel Fauke? And the kitchen?”

  “Rakel? Beautiful. Like you, K-Katrine. You’re very similar.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “I don’t remember. Has anyone ever told you how similar you are? Like s-sisters.”

  “Describe the kitche
n.”

  “A prison. Bars over the windows. You’d almost think they were frightened of something.” Finne laughed. “Shall we call it a day, Katrine?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got th-things to do.”

  Katrine felt a slight sense of panic. “But we’ve only just begun.”

  “Headache. It’s tough, going through such traumatic things as this, I’m sure you can understand that.”

  “Just tell me—”

  “That wasn’t actually a question, my dear. I’m done here. If you want more, you’ll have to come down to my cell and visit me this evening. I’m fr-free then.”

  “The video recording that Dagny Jensen received. Did you send it, and is it of the victim?”

  “Yes.” Finne stood up.

  From the corner of her eye Katrine saw that Skarre was already on his way. She held one hand up towards the window. She looked down at her folder of questions. Tried to think. She could press on. And risk the possibility that Krohn could invalidate the confession by citing unnecessarily harsh interview methods as the reason. Or she could make do with what she’d got, which was more than enough to get the prosecutor to press charges. They could get the details later, before the trial. She looked at the watch Bjørn had given her on their first anniversary.

  “Interview concluded at 17:31,” she said.

  When she looked up she discovered that a red-faced Gunnar Hagen had walked into the control room and was talking to Johan Krohn. Skarre came into the interview room and put cuffs on Finne to lead him back to the detention cells in the custody unit. Katrine saw Krohn shrug his shoulders as he said something, and Hagen turned even redder.

  “See you, Mrs. Bratt.”

  The words were spoken so close to her ear that she could feel the thin spray of saliva that accompanied them. Then Finne and Skarre were gone. She saw Krohn set off after them.

  Katrine wiped her face with a tissue before going in to Hagen.

  “Krohn has told VG about our horse-trading. It’s already up on their website.”

  “And what did he have to say in his defense?”

  “That neither party had given any sort of promise to keep it secret. Then he asked if I thought we’d entered into an agreement that didn’t hold up in daylight. Because he prefers to avoid that sort of agreement, apparently.”

  “Hypocritical bastard. He just wants to show what he can do.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Krohn is a smart, devious defense lawyer. But there’s someone even more devious than him.”

  Katrine looked at Hagen. Bit her bottom lip. “His client, you mean?”

  Hagen nodded, and they both turned and looked through the open door into the corridor. They saw Finne, Skarre and Krohn waiting for the lift.

  * * *

  —

  “You never call at a bad time, Krohn,” Mona Daa said, adjusting her earphone as she studied herself in the mirrored wall of the gym. “You’ll have seen that I’ve been trying to get hold of you too. Along with every other journalist in Norway, I daresay.”

  “It’s a bit like that, yes. I’ll get straight to the point. We’re about to issue a press statement about the confession in which we’re considering attaching a picture of Finne that was taken just a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Good, the pictures we’ve got of him must be ten years old.”

  “Twenty, in fact. Finne’s condition for sending this private picture is that you make it your lead story.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Don’t ask me why, that’s just how he wants it.”

  “I’m not in a position to be able to make that sort of promise, as you’re no doubt aware.”

  “Of course I’m aware of journalistic integrity, just as I’m sure you’re aware of the value of such a picture.”

  Mona tilted her head and studied her body. The wide belt she used when she was lifting weights made her penguin-shaped body (the association was possibly more the fault of her rolling gait, itself the result of a hip injury from birth) look briefly as if it was shaped like an hourglass. Occasionally, Mona suspected that the belt, which would never be used for anything except pointless weight training, was the real reason she spent so many hours on pointless weight training. Just like personal acknowledgment was a more important driving force in her work than being the watchdog of society, defending free speech, journalistic curiosity and all the other crap they trotted out each year when the Press Awards were handed out. Not that she didn’t believe in those things, but they came in second place, after standing in the spotlight, seeing your byline and measuring up against yourself. When you looked at it like that, Finne was being no more or less perverse in wanting a large picture of himself in the paper, even if it was as a serial rapist and murderer. That was what Finne had spent his life doing, after all, so perhaps it was understandable that he wanted to be a famous killer, at the very least. If people can’t be loved, it’s well known that a popular alternative is to be feared.

  “That’s a hypothetical dilemma, anyway,” Mona said. “If the picture is good quality, then obviously we’d want to blow it up to a decent size. Especially if you let us have it an hour before you send it to the other papers, OK?”

  * * *

  —

  Roar Bohr held his rifle, a Blaser R8 Professional, up to the window frame and peered through the Swarovski X5i sight. Their house lay on a hillside on the west side of Ring 3, just below the Smestad junction, and from the open cellar window he had a view of the residential area on the other side of the motorway as well as Smestaddammen, a small, artificial lake of shallow water that was built in the 1800s to provide the more bourgeois inhabitants of the city with ice.

  The red dot in the viewfinder found and stopped on a large white swan that was gliding effortlessly across the surface of the water, as if being blown by the wind. It was between four and five hundred metres away, almost half a kilometre, well above what their American allies in the coalition forces called “maximum point-blank range.” He had the red dot on the swan’s head now. Bohr lowered the sight until the red dot lay on the water just above the swan. He focused on his breathing. Increased the pressure on the trigger. Even the greenest recruits at Rena understood that bullets flew in an arc because even the fastest bullet is affected by gravity, so obviously you have to aim higher the farther away the target is. They also knew that if the target is higher in the terrain, you have to aim even higher, because the bullet has to travel “uphill.” But they usually protested when they were told that even when the target is lower than you, you still have to aim higher—not lower—than on flat terrain.

  Roar Bohr could see from the trees outside that there was no wind. The temperature was about ten degrees. The swan was moving at about one metre per second. He imagined the bullet blasting through its little head. The neck losing its tension and crumpling like a snake on top of that chalk-white swan body. It would be a demanding shot even for a sniper in the Special Forces. But no more than he and his colleagues would expect of Roar Bohr. He let the air out of his lungs and moved the sight to the small island by the bridge. That was where the female swan and her cygnets were. He scanned the island, then the rest of the lake, but saw nothing. He sighed, leaned the rifle against the wall and walked over to the chattering, hardworking printer where the end of a sheet of A4 was emerging. He had taken a screengrab of the picture that had just been published on VG’s website, and now he studied the almost-complete face that lay before him. A wide, flat nose. Thick lips with a trace of a sneer. Hair pulled back tightly, presumably gathered in a plait at the back of his neck; that was probably what gave Svein Finne those narrow eyes and an impression of hostility.

  The printer squeezed out the last of the sheet with a final drawn-out groan, as if it wanted to push this terrible man away from it. A man who had just,
with what seemed to be arrogant pride, confessed to the murder of Rakel Fauke. Just like the Taliban when they accepted responsibility for every bomb that went off in Afghanistan, or at least if the attack had been successful. Claimed responsibility, the way some of the troops in Afghanistan could do if the opportunity arose to steal a kill. Sometimes it was little short of grave-robbing. After chaotic engagements, Roar had witnessed soldiers claiming kills that their superior officer—after checking the footage on the helmet-cams of their own dead—then revealed to have been made by fallen soldiers.

  Roar Bohr snatched the sheet of paper and went over to the other end of the large, open cellar room. He fastened it to one of the targets hanging in front of the metal box that caught the bullets. Walked back. The distance was ten and a half metres. He closed the window, which he’d had fitted with three layers of soundproof glass, and put his ear defenders on. Then he picked up the pistol, a High Standard HD 22, from next to the computer, didn’t give himself more time to aim than he could expect in a pressured situation, pointed the gun at the target and fired. Once. Twice. Three times.

  Bohr removed the ear defenders, picked up the silencer and began to screw it onto the barrel of the High Standard. A silencer changed the balance, it was like training with two different weapons.

  He heard the clatter of steps on the cellar stairs.

  “Damn,” he muttered, closing his eyes.

  He opened them again and saw Pia’s pale, tense, furious face.

  “You frightened the life out of me! I thought I was alone in the house!”

  “I’m sorry, Pia, I thought the same.”

  “That doesn’t help, Roar! You promised there wouldn’t be any more shooting inside the house! I get back from the shops and am quietly going about my business and then…Anyway, why aren’t you at work? And why are you naked? And what’s that you’ve got on your face?”