Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  “You’re aware that those categories of yours don’t exactly narrow it down much?” Kaja said. She had turned and was looking down at the city. “At some point in our lives we all fit into one or other of those descriptions.”

  “Mm. But actually going through with a premeditated, cold-blooded murder?”

  “Why are you asking, if you already know the answer?”

  “Maybe I just want to hear someone else say it.”

  Kaja shrugged. “Killing is just a question of context. There’s no problem taking a life if you see yourself as the city’s respected butcher, the fatherland’s heroic soldier or the long arm of the law. Or, potentially, the righteous avenger of justice.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it, that came from your own lecture at Police College. So who killed Rakel? Someone with personality traits from one of those categories killing without any context, or a normal person killing for a reason they’ve come up with themselves?”

  “Well, I think that even a crazy person needs some sort of context. Even in outbursts of rage there’s a moment when we manage to convince ourselves that we’re acting in a justifiable way. Madness is a lonely dialogue where we give ourselves the answers we want. And we’ve all had that conversation.”

  “Have we?”

  “I know I have,” Harry said, looking down the drive where the dark, heavy fir trees stood on watch on either side. “But to answer your question: I think the process of narrowing down potential suspects starts here. That’s why I wanted you to see the scene. It’s been cleaned up. But murder is messy, emotional. It’s as if we’re facing a murderer who is both trained and untrained at the same time. Or perhaps trained, but emotionally unbalanced, typical for a murder motivated by sexual frustration or personal hatred.”

  “And because there are no signs of sexual assault, you’ve concluded that we’re dealing with hatred?”

  “Yes. That’s why Svein Finne looked like the perfect suspect. A man accustomed to using violence who wants to avenge the death of his son.”

  “In which case surely he should have killed you?”

  “I reasoned that Svein Finne knows that living after losing the person you love is worse than dying. But it looks like I was wrong.”

  “The fact that you got the wrong person doesn’t necessarily mean that you got the wrong motive.”

  “Mm. You mean it’s hard to find anyone who hated Rakel, but easy to find people who hate me?”

  “Just a thought,” Kaja said.

  “Good. That could be a starting point.”

  “Perhaps the investigative team have got something that we don’t know about.”

  Harry shook his head. “I went through their files last night, and all they’ve got are separate details. No definite line of inquiry or actual evidence.”

  “I didn’t think you had access to the investigation?”

  “I know the access code of someone who has. Because he was pissed off that IT had given him his bust measurement: BH100. I guessed the password.”

  “His date of birth?”

  “Almost. HW1953.”

  “Which is?”

  “The year Hank Williams was found dead in a car on New Year’s Day.”

  “So, nothing but random thoughts, then. Shall we go and think them somewhere warmer than this?”

  “Yes,” Harry said, about to take a last drag on the cigarette.

  “Hold on,” Kaja said, holding out her hand. “Can I…?”

  Harry looked at her before passing her the cigarette. It wasn’t true that he was able to see. He was more blind than any of them, blinded by tears, but now it was as if he had managed to blink them away for a moment and, for the first time since they’d met again, actually saw Kaja Solness. It was the cigarette. And the memories flooded back, suddenly and unexpectedly. The young police officer who had travelled to Hong Kong to fetch Harry home so he could hunt a serial killer the Oslo Police hadn’t managed to catch. She had found him on a mattress in Chungking Mansions, in a kind of limbo between intoxication and indifference. And it wasn’t exactly clear who had needed rescuing most: the Oslo Police or Harry. But here she was again. Kaja Solness, who denied her own beauty by showing her sharp, irregular teeth as often as she could, thereby spoiling her otherwise perfect face. He remembered the morning hours they had spent in a large, empty house, the cigarettes they had shared. Rakel used to want the first drag of a cigarette, Kaja always wanted the last.

  He had abandoned them both and fled to Hong Kong again. But he had come back for one of them. Rakel.

  Harry saw Kaja’s raspberry lips close around the yellow-brown filter and tense ever so slightly as she inhaled. Then she dropped the butt onto the damp brown earth between the puddle and the gravel, trod on it and set off towards the car. Harry was about to follow her, but stopped.

  His eyes had been caught by the squashed cigarette butt.

  He thought about pattern recognition. They say that the human brain’s ability to recognise patterns is what distinguishes us from animals, that our automatic, never-ending search for patterns repeating is what allowed our intelligence to develop and made civilisation possible. And he recognised the pattern in the shoeprint. From the pictures in the file titled “Crime-scene photographs” in the investigative team’s material. A short comment attached to the photograph said they hadn’t found a match in Interpol’s database of shoe-sole patterns.

  Harry cleared his throat.

  “Kaja?”

  He saw her thin back stiffen as she made her way to the car. God knows why, perhaps she detected something in his voice that he himself hadn’t heard. She turned towards him. Her lips were drawn back, and he could see those sharp teeth.

  26

  “All infantry soldiers have dark hair,” the stocky, fit-looking man sitting in the low armchair at the end of the coffee table said. Erland Madsen’s chair was positioned at a ninety-degree angle to Roar Bohr’s, instead of directly opposite him. That was so Madsen’s patients could decide for themselves if they wanted to look at him or not. Not having to see the person you were talking to had the same effect as talking in a confessional: it gave the patient a feeling of talking to themselves. When you don’t see a listener’s reactions in the form of body language and facial expressions, the threshold for what you tell them is lowered. He had toyed with the idea of getting hold of a couch, even if that would have a been a cliché, something of a showpiece.

  Madsen glanced down at his notepad. At least they had been allowed to keep those. “Can you elaborate?”

  “Elaborate on dark hair?” Roar Bohr smiled. And when the smile reached those slate-grey eyes, it was as if the tears in them—the silent, dry tears that just lay there—emphasised the smile, the way the sun shines extra strongly when it’s at the edge of a cloud. “They have dark hair, and they’re good at putting a bullet in your skull from a couple of hundred metres. But the way to recognise them when you approach a checkpoint is that they have dark hair and are friendly. Terrified and friendly. That’s their job. Not to shoot the enemy as they’ve been trained, but the last thing they ever thought they’d have to do when they applied to join the corps and went through hell to be accepted into Special Forces. Smiling and being friendly to civilians passing through a checkpoint that has been blown to pieces by suicide bombers twice in the previous year. It’s called winning hearts and minds.”

  “Did it ever win any?”

  “No,” Bohr said.

  As a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, Madsen had become a sort of Doctor Afghanistan, the psychologist whom people who were struggling after their experiences in war-torn areas heard about and sought out. But even if Madsen had learned a lot about the life and feelings they talked about, he also knew from experience that it was better to be a blank page. To let the patients talk as long as they liked about concrete, sim
ple things. Nothing could be taken for granted, he needed to get them to realise that they had to paint the whole picture for him. His patients weren’t always aware of where their pressure points were; occasionally they lay in things the patients themselves regarded as trivial and unimportant, in things they may otherwise have skipped over, in things their unconscious was working through in secret, out of sight. But right now, it was a sort of limbering up.

  “So no hearts?” Madsen said.

  “No one in Afghanistan really understood why ISAF were there. Not even everyone in ISAF. But no one believes that ISAF were there solely to bring democracy and happiness to a country that has no concept of democracy, nor any interest in the values it represents. The Afghans say what they think we want to hear as long as we help them with drinking water, supplies and mine clearance. But apart from that, we can go to hell. And I’m not just talking about people sympathetic to the Taliban.”

  “So why did you go?”

  “If you want to get on in the Army, you need to have been part of ISAF.”

  “And you wanted to get on?”

  “There’s no other way. If you stop, you die. The Army has a slow, painful and humiliating death in store for anyone who thinks they can stop striving to get ahead.”

  “Tell me about Kabul.”

  “Kabul.” Bohr shifted position in his chair. “Strays.”

  “Strays?”

  “They’re everywhere. Stray dogs.”

  “You mean literally, not…”

  Bohr shook his head with a smile. No sunlight in his eyes this time. “The Afghans have far too many masters. The dogs live off rubbish. There’s a lot of rubbish. The city smells of exhaust fumes. And burning. They burn everything to keep warm. Rubbish, oil, wood. It snows in Kabul. It always seemed to make the city look greyer. There are a few decent buildings, of course. The Presidential Palace. The Serene Hotel is five-star, apparently. The Babur Gardens are nice. But what you see most of when you drive around the city are simple, shabby buildings, one or two storeys, and shops where they sell all manner of things. Or Russian architecture at its most depressing.” Bohr shook his head. “I’ve seen pictures of Kabul before the Soviet invasion. And what they say is true, Kabul really was beautiful once.”

  “But not when you were living there?”

  “We didn’t really live in Kabul, but in tents just outside. Very nice tents, almost like houses. But our offices were in ordinary buildings. We didn’t have air con in the tents, just fans. They weren’t often on, anyway, because it gets cold at night. But the days could get so hot that it was impossible to move outside. Not as bad as fifty humid degrees in Basra in Iraq, but all the same, Kabul in summer could be hell.”

  “But you still went back…” Madsen looked down at his notes. “Three times? On twelve-month tours?”

  “One twelve, two six.”

  “You and your family were obviously aware of the risks of going into a war zone. With regard to both mental health and close relationships.”

  “I was told about that, yes. That the only things you get from Afghanistan are shredded nerves, divorce, and a promotion to colonel just before you retire if you manage to avoid alcoholism.”

  “But…”

  “My course was staked out. I had been invested in. Officer training at the Military Academy. There are no limits to what people are willing to do if you give them a feeling that they’ve been chosen. Getting sent to the moon in a tin can in the sixties was pretty much a suicide mission, and everyone knew it. NASA asked only the best pilots to volunteer for their astronaut programme, the ones who had brilliant prospects in an age when pilots—civilian as well as military—had the same sort of status as film stars and footballers. They didn’t ask the fearless, thrill-seeking younger pilots, but the more experienced, steady ones. The ones who knew what risk was, and had no desire to seek it out. Married pilots, who had maybe just had a child or two. In short: the ones with everything to lose. How many of them do you think turned down their country’s offer to commit suicide in public?”

  “Was that why you went?”

  Bohr shrugged. “It was probably a mixture of personal ambition and idealism. But I don’t really remember the proportions anymore.”

  “What do you remember most about coming home again?”

  Bohr gave a wry smile. “That my wife always had to retrain me. Remind me that I didn’t have to say ‘understood’ when she asked me to buy milk. That I should dress properly. When you haven’t worn anything but a field uniform for years because of the heat, a suit feels…constricting. And that in social situations you’re expected to shake hands with women, even if they’re wearing hijabs.”

  “Shall we talk about killing?”

  Bohr tugged at his tie and looked at the time. He took a slow, deep breath. “Shall we?”

  “We’ve still got time.”

  Bohr closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them again. “Killing is complicated. And extremely simple. When we select soldiers for an elite unit like Special Forces, they don’t just have to fulfil a set of physical and mental criteria. They also have to be able to kill. So we’re looking for people who are capable of maintaining enough distance to kill. You’ve probably seen films and television programmes about recruitment to specialist units, like the Rangers, where it’s mostly about stress management, solving tasks without food or sleep, behaving like a soldier under emotional and physical stress. When I was a rank-and-file soldier, there wasn’t much focus on killing, on the individual’s ability to take a life and deal with that. We know more about that now. We know that people who are going to kill have to know themselves. They mustn’t be surprised by their own feelings. It isn’t true that it’s unnatural to kill a member of the same species, it’s actually perfectly natural. It happens in nature all the time. Most people obviously feel a certain reluctance, which is also logical from an evolutionary perspective. But that reluctance can be overcome when the circumstances demand it. In fact, being able to kill is actually a sign of good health, because it demonstrates a capacity for self-control. If there’s one thing my soldiers in Special Forces had in common, it was the fact that they were extremely relaxed about killing. But I’d happily slap anyone who accused a single one of them of being a psychopath.”

  “Just slap them?” Madsen asked with a wry smile.

  Bohr didn’t answer.

  “I’d like you to talk a little more directly about your own problem,” Madsen said. “Your own killing. I see from my notes that you called yourself a freak last time. But you didn’t want to go into that in any more depth.”

  Bohr nodded.

  “I can see that you’re concerned, and I can only repeat what I’ve said before about being under an oath of complete confidentiality.”

  Bohr rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I know, but I’m starting to run short of time if I’m going to make it to a meeting at work.”

  Madsen nodded. Apart from purely professional curiosity, the business of working out where the problem was, it was rare that he ever felt curious about his patients’ stories per se. But this was different, and he hoped his face wasn’t showing the disappointment he felt. “Well, let’s call it a day, then. And if you’d rather not talk about it at all…”

  “I want to talk about it, I…” Bohr stopped. Buttoned his jacket. “I need to talk about it to someone. If I don’t…”

  Madsen waited, but he didn’t go on.

  “See you on Monday, same time?” Madsen asked.

  Yes, he was definitely going to get hold of a couch. Maybe even a confessional.

  * * *

  —

  “I hope you like your coffee strong,” Harry called towards the living room as he poured water from the kettle into their cups.

  “How many records have you actually got?” Kaja called back.

  “About fifteen hundr
ed.” The heat scorched Harry’s knuckles as he stuck his fingers through the handles of the cups. With three quick, long strides he was in the living room. Kaja was kneeling on the sofa looking through the records. “About?”

  Harry pulled one corner of his mouth up into a sort of smile. “One thousand, five hundred and thirty-six.”

  “And like most neurotic guys, obviously you’ve got them arranged alphabetically by artist, but I see that at least you haven’t got each artists’ albums arranged by release date.”

  “No,” Harry said, putting the cups down beside the computer on the table and blowing on his fingers. “Just in order of when I bought them. The most recent acquisition by that artist on the far left.”

  Kaja laughed. “You’re all mad.”

  “Probably. Bjørn says I’m the only mad one, because everyone else arranges theirs by release date.” He sat down on the sofa and she slid down beside him and took a sip of the coffee.

  “Mmm.”

  “Freeze-dried coffee from a freshly opened jar,” Harry said.

  “I’d forgotten how good it is.” She laughed.

  “What? Hasn’t anyone else served you coffee like this since I last did?”

  “Clearly you’re the only one who knows how to treat a woman, Harry.”

  “And don’t you forget it,” Harry said, then pointed at the screen. “Here’s the picture of the shoeprint in the snow outside Rakel’s house. Do you see it’s the same?”

  “Yes,” Kaja said, holding up her own boot. “But the print in the picture is from a bigger size, isn’t it?”

  “Probably size 43 or 44,” Harry said.

  “Mine are 38. I bought them in a second-hand market in Kabul. They were the smallest they had.”

  “And they’re Soviet military boots from the occupation?”