Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  “But if he used a knife he took from the scene and wiped his prints off it, the only way it could be traced back to him is if it’s found in his home. Home is the last place I’d have chosen.”

  Harry nodded. “You’re right. Like I said, I don’t know, I’m just guessing. It’s just…” He tried to find the right word.

  “Gut feeling?”

  “Yes. No.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “I don’t know. Do you remember the warnings we were given when we were young before we took LSD, that we could have flashbacks and start tripping again without any warning later in life?”

  Kaja looked up from the camera. “I never took or was offered LSD.”

  “Smart girl. I was a rather less clever boy. Some people say those flashbacks can be triggered. Stress. Heavy drinking. Trauma. And that sometimes those flashbacks are actually a new trip, that the remnants of old drugs get activated because LSD is synthetic and doesn’t get broken down in the same way as cocaine, for instance.”

  “So now you’re wondering if you’re having an LSD trip?”

  Harry shrugged his shoulders. “LSD is consciousness-raising. It makes the brain work in top gear, interpret information on such a detailed level that it gives you a feeling of cosmic insight. That’s the only way I can describe why I felt we had to check those green rubbish bins. I mean, you don’t just find such a tiny piece of plastic in the first rather odd place you look in, one kilometre from the crime scene by chance, do you?”

  “Maybe not,” Kaja said, still staring at the camera screen.

  “OK. Well, the same cosmic insight is telling me that Roar Bohr isn’t the man we’re looking for, Kaja.”

  “And what if I tell you that my cosmic insight is saying you’re wrong?”

  Harry shrugged. “I’m the one who took LSD, not you.”

  “But I’m the one who’s looked at the recordings from before the tenth of March, not you.”

  Kaja turned the camera around and held the screen up in front of Harry.

  “This is a week before the murder,” she said. “The person obviously approaches from behind the camera, so when the recording starts we only see his back. He stops right in front of the camera, but unfortunately he doesn’t turn around and show his face. Nor when he leaves two hours later.”

  Harry saw a large moon hanging directly above the roof of the house. And silhouetted against the moon Harry saw all the details of the barrel of a rifle and parts of the butt sticking up over the shoulder of someone standing between the camera and the house.

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” Kaja said, and Harry already knew that she wasn’t mistaken, “that’s a Colt Canada C8. Not exactly your standard rifle, to put it mildly.”

  “Bohr?”

  “It’s the sort of rifle Special Forces used in Afghanistan, anyway.”

  * * *

  —

  “Are you aware of the situation you’ve put me in?” Dagny Jensen asked. She had kept her coat on and was sitting bolt upright on the chair in front of Katrine Bratt’s desk as she hugged her handbag in her arms. “Svein Finne has walked free of all charges, he doesn’t even have to hide. And now he knows that I reported him for rape.”

  Outside the door, Katrine saw the muscular frame of Kari Beal. She was one of three officers who were working shifts to protect Dagny Jensen.

  “Dagny—” Katrine began.

  “Jensen,” the woman interrupted. “Miss Jensen.” Then she covered her face with her hands and started to cry. “He’s free forever, and you can’t protect me for that long. But he…he’ll watch me like…like a farmer watching a pregnant cow!”

  Her crying turned to hiccoughing sobs, and Katrine wondered what she ought to do. Should she go around her desk and try to comfort the woman, or leave her be? Do nothing. See if it blew over. If it went away.

  Katrine cleared her throat. “We’re looking at the possibility of charging Finne for the rapes anyway. To get him behind bars.”

  “You’ll never manage that, he’s got that lawyer. And he’s smarter than all of you, anyone can see that!”

  “He may be smarter, but he’s on the wrong side.”

  “And you’re on the right side? Harry Hole’s side?”

  Katrine didn’t answer.

  “You persuaded me not to press charges,” Dagny said.

  Katrine opened her desk drawer and handed Dagny a tissue. “Obviously it’s up to you if you want to change your mind, Miss Jensen. If you want to file a formal complaint against Hole for claiming to be a police officer on active duty and for the way he put you in danger, I’m sure he would be dismissed and charged to your full satisfaction.”

  Katrine saw from Dagny Jensen’s expression that that had come out rather sharper than she intended.

  “You don’t know, Bratt.” Dagny wiped the makeup running from her eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like, bearing a child that you don’t want…”

  “We can help arrange an appointment to see a doctor who—”

  “Let me finish!”

  Katrine closed her mouth.

  “Sorry,” Dagny whispered. “I’m just so exhausted. I was going to say that you don’t know how it feels…” She took a deep, trembling breath. “…to still want the baby anyway.”

  In the silence that followed, Katrine could hear footsteps hurrying up and down the corridor outside her office. But they had been moving faster yesterday. Tired feet.

  “Don’t I?” Katrine said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Of course I can’t know how you feel. Look, I want to get Finne as much as you. And we will. The fact that he tricked us with that deal won’t stop us. That’s a promise.”

  “The last time I got a promise like that from a police officer, it came from Harry Hole.”

  “This is a promise from me. From this office. This building. This city.”

  Dagny Jensen put the tissue down on the desk and stood up.

  “Thanks.”

  When she had gone, it struck Katrine that she had never heard a single syllable express so much and yet so little. So much resignation. So little hope.

  * * *

  —

  Harry stared at the memory card he had put down on the bar counter in front of him.

  “What can you see?” Øystein Eikeland asked. He was playing Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. According to Øystein, that was where the bar was at its lowest for old men who wanted to overcome their prejudices against hip-hop.

  “Night recordings,” Harry said.

  “Now you sound like St. Thomas when he puts a cassette to his ear and says he can hear it. You’ve seen the documentary?”

  “No. Good?”

  “Good music. And a few interesting clips and interviews. Way too long, though. Looks like they had too much footage and couldn’t manage to focus.”

  “Same here,” Harry said, turning the memory card over.

  “Direction is everything.”

  Harry nodded slowly.

  “I’ve got a dishwasher to empty,” Øystein said, and disappeared into the back room.

  Harry closed his eyes. The music. The references. The memories. Prince. Marvin Gaye. Chick Corea. Vinyl records, the scratch of a needle, Rakel lying on the sofa at Holmenkollveien, sleepy, smiling as he whispers: “Listen now, this bit…”

  Perhaps she had been lying on the sofa when he arrived.

  Who was he?

  Maybe it wasn’t a he; not even that much was possible to determine from the recordings.

  But the first person, who had arrived on foot at eight o’clock and left again half an hour later, that had been a man, Harry was fairly certain of that. And he hadn’t been expected. She had opened the door and stood there for two or three seconds instead of letting him in at once. Perhaps he had asked if he could come in,
and she had let him in without hesitation. So she had known him well. How well? So well that he had let himself out just under half an hour later. Perhaps that visit had nothing to do with the murder, but Harry couldn’t help the questions from popping up: What can a man and a woman do in just under half an hour? Why had the lights in the kitchen and living room been dimmed when he left? Bloody hell, he didn’t have time to let his thoughts wander off in that direction now. So he hurried on instead.

  The car that had arrived three hours later.

  It had parked right in front of the steps. Why? A shorter walk to the house, less chance of being seen. Yes, that fitted with the fact that the automatic light inside the car was switched off.

  But there was slightly too much of a gap between the car arriving and the front door of the house opening.

  Perhaps the driver had been looking for something inside the car.

  Gloves. A cloth to wipe fingerprints off with. Perhaps he checked that the safety was on on the pistol he was going to threaten her with. Because obviously he wasn’t going to kill her with that; ballistics analysis can identify the pistol, which identifies the owner. He would use a knife he found at the scene. The perfect knife, the one the murderer already knew he would find in the knife block on the kitchen counter.

  Or had he improvised in there, had the knife at the scene been a matter of chance?

  The thought had struck Harry because it seemed careless to spend so long in the car in front of the steps. Rakel could have woken up and become alarmed, the neighbours could have chanced to look out of their windows. And when the man finally opened the front door and enough light filtered out for them to see the silhouette of an oddly hunched figure disappear inside, what was that? Someone who was intoxicated? That might fit with the clumsy parking, and the fact that he had taken so long getting to the door, but not the light inside the car and the clean crime scene.

  A mixture of planning, intoxication and chance?

  The person in question had been in there for almost three hours, from just before midnight until around half past two in the morning. Given the Forensic Department’s estimate of the time of death, he had been in there for a long time after committing the murder, and had taken plenty of time to clean up.

  Could it be the same person who was there earlier that evening, and he had come back later in his car?

  No.

  The images had been too poor to see anything clearly, but there was something about the shape—the person who had been hunched over when he went in had looked broader. But, on the other hand, that could be thanks to a change of clothes, or even a shadow.

  The person who had come out at 02:23 had stood for a couple of seconds in the doorway, and had looked as if he were swaying. Injured? Intoxicated? Momentary dizziness?

  He had got in the car, the lights had come on, then gone off again. He had walked around behind the wildlife camera. End of recording.

  Harry rubbed the memory card, hoping that a genie might appear.

  He was thinking about this wrong. All wrong! Damn, damn.

  And he needed a break. He needed a…coffee. Strong, Turkish coffee. Harry reached behind the bar for the cezve, the Turkish coffeepot Mehmet had left, and realised that Øystein had changed the music. Still hip-hop, but the jazz and intricate bassline were gone.

  “What’s this, Øystein?”

  “Kanye West, ‘So Appalled,’ ” Øystein called from the back room.

  “And just when you almost had me. Please, turn it off.”

  “This is good stuff, Harry! Give it time. We mustn’t let our ears get stale.”

  “Why not? There are thousands of albums from the last millennium I haven’t heard, and that’s enough to last the rest of my life.” Harry swallowed. What a relief it was to take a break from the heavy stuff, with these feather-light, meaningless exchanges with someone you knew inside out, like table tennis with a three-gram ball.

  “You need to make more of an effort.” Øystein came back into the bar with a broad, toothless grin. He had lost his last front tooth in a bar in Prague, it had just fallen out. And even if he had discovered the gap in the airport toilet, called the bar and had the brownish-yellow tooth returned to him by post, there was nothing that could be done. Not that Øystein seemed particularly bothered.

  “These are the classics hip-hop fans will be listening to when they’re old, Harry. This isn’t just form, it’s content.”

  Harry held the memory card up to the light. He nodded slowly. “You’re right, Øystein.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I’m thinking wrong because I’m focusing on form, on how the murder was carried out. I’m ignoring what I always used to go on about to my students. Why. The motive. The content.”

  The door opened behind them.

  “Oh, shit,” Øystein said in a low voice.

  Harry glanced up at the mirror in front of him. A man was approaching. Short, with a light step, shaking his head, with a grin under his black, greasy fringe. It was the sort of grin you see on golfers or footballers when they’ve just shot the ball high into the stands, a grin that’s probably supposed to suggest that it was such a fuck-up that all they can do is smile.

  “Hole.” A high, disconcertingly friendly voice.

  “Ringdal.” Not high. Not disconcertingly friendly.

  Harry saw Øystein shiver, as if the temperature in the bar had just plunged below zero.

  “So, what are you doing in my bar, Hole?” There was a jangle of keys and coins in Ringdal’s pockets as he took off his blue Catalina jacket and hung it on the hook behind the door to the back room.

  “Well,” Harry said. “Would ‘seeing how the inheritance is being managed’ be a satisfactory answer?”

  “The only satisfactory answer is ‘getting out of here.’ ”

  Harry put the memory card in his pocket and pushed himself off the bar stool. “You don’t look as badly hurt as I’d hoped, Ringdal.”

  Ringdal was rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Hurt?”

  “To deserve a lifetime ban I should have broken your nose at the very least. But perhaps you haven’t got any bones in your nose?”

  Ringdal laughed as if he genuinely thought Harry was funny. “You landed your first punch because I wasn’t expecting it, Hole. A bit of a nosebleed, but not enough to break anything, I’m afraid. And after that you hit nothing but air. And that wall over there.” Ringdal filled a glass with water from the tap behind the bar. Perhaps it was a paradox that a teetotaller was running a bar. Perhaps not. “But all credit to you for trying, Hole. Maybe you should try to be a bit less drunk next time you attempt to take on a Norwegian judo champion.”

  “And there we have it,” Harry said.

  “What?”

  “Have you ever heard of anyone involved in judo who has good taste in music?”

  Ringdal sighed, Øystein raised his eyebrows and Harry realised that the ball had ended up in the stand.

  “Getting out of here,” Harry said, and stood up.

  “Hole.”

  Harry stopped and turned around.

  “I’m sorry about Rakel.” Ringdal raised his glass of water in his left hand as if in a toast. “She was a wonderful person. A shame she didn’t have time to carry on.”

  “Carry on?”

  “Oh, didn’t she tell you? I asked her to stay on as chair after you were gone. Well, let’s draw a line under all that, Harry. You’re welcome here, and I promise to listen to Øystein here when it comes to the choice of music. I can see that takings have dropped a bit, although of course that could be due to something other than a slightly less…”—he searched for the right words—“strict music policy.”

  Harry nodded and opened the door.

  He stopped in the doorway and looked around.

  Grünerløkka. The
scraping sound of a skateboard, ridden by a guy closer to forty than thirty, wearing Converse and flannels. Harry guessed design studio, clothing boutique or one of the hipster burger joints that Helga, Oleg’s girlfriend, had said “sold the same shit, same wrapping as everywhere else, but they put truffles on the fries so they can charge three times the price and still be on-trend.”

  Oslo. A young man with an impressive, unkempt beard—like an Old Testament prophet—hanging like a bib over his tie and impeccable suit, his Burberry coat open. Finance? Irony? Or just confusion?

  Norway. A couple in Lycra suits, jogging with skis and sticks in their hands, ski wax worth a thousand kroner, energy drinks and protein bars in their bumbags, on their way to the last patches of snow in the highest shadows of Nordmarka.

  Harry pulled out his phone and called Bjørn’s number.

  “Harry?”

  “I’ve found the memory card from the wildlife camera.”

  Silence.

  “Bjørn?”

  “I just needed to get away from everyone. That’s crazy! What can you see?”

  “Not much, sadly. I was wondering if you could help me get it analysed. It’s dark, but you’ve got methods of getting more out of the images than I can manage. There are a few silhouettes and reference points, the height of the door frame, that sort of thing. A 3-D specialist might be able to come up with a decent description.” Harry rubbed his chin. He was itching somewhere, he just didn’t know where.

  “I can try,” Bjørn said. “I can use an external expert. Because I’m assuming you’d like this done discreetly?”

  “If I’m to have any chance of following this line of inquiry undisturbed, yes.”

  “Have you made copies of the recordings?”

  “No, it’s all on the memory card.”

  “OK. Leave it in an envelope at Schrøder’s and I’ll call in and pick it up later today.”