Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  “Let me think about it,” Kaja said, and Harry could see from the expression on her face that she wasn’t joking.

  They got coffee in the canteen-like cafeteria and sat down at a table next to a grimy window looking out onto Bjølsen Valsemølle and the Akerselva. Jørn Glenne started speaking before Harry and Kaja had a chance to ask any questions.

  “I agreed to talk to you because I fell out with Roar Bohr in Kabul. A woman was raped and murdered; she was Bohr’s personal interpreter. A Hazara woman. The Hazaras are mostly poor, simple peasants with no education. But this young woman, Hela—”

  “Hala,” Kaja corrected. “It means the circle around the full moon.”

  “…had taught herself English and French pretty much unaided. And she was in the process of learning Norwegian as well. Brilliant at languages. She was found right outside the house where she lived with other women who worked for the coalition and various aid agencies. Of course, you lived there too, Kaja.”

  Kaja nodded.

  “We suspected it was the Taliban or someone from her home district. Honour is obviously a huge thing for Sunni Muslims, and even more so for the Hazaras. The fact that she was working for us infidels, socialised with men and dressed like a Westerner may have been enough for someone to want to make an example of her.”

  “I’ve heard about honour killings,” Harry said. “But honour rape?”

  Glenne shrugged his shoulders. “One could have led to the other. But who knows? Bohr stopped us investigating it.”

  “Really?”

  “Her body was found a stone’s throw from the house where we’re responsible for security. It was basically an area that was under our control. Despite that, Bohr handed the investigation to the local Afghan police. When I objected, he pointed out that the military police, which in this case meant me and one other guy, were under his command and charged with the security of Norwegian troops in the country, and that was all. Even if he knew perfectly well that the Afghan police lacked the resources and forensic tools that we take for granted. Fingerprinting was a new-fangled concept, and DNA-testing the stuff of dreams.”

  “Bohr had to consider the political implications,” Kaja said. “There was already a lot of ill will about Western forces taking too much control, and Hala was Afghan.”

  “She was a Hazara,” Glenne snorted. “Bohr knew the case wouldn’t be given the same priority it would have got if she’d been a Pashtun. OK, there was a post-mortem, and they found traces of fluni-something-or-other. The stuff men put in women’s drinks if they want to rape—”

  “Flunitrazepam,” Kaja said. “Also known as Rohypnol.”

  “Right. And do you think any Afghan would spend money drugging a woman before he raped her?”

  “Mm.”

  “No, damn it, it was a foreigner!” Glenne hit the table with his hand. “And was the case ever solved? Of course not.”

  “Do you think…” Harry took a sip of coffee. Tried to find an alternative, more indirect way to phrase the question, but changed his mind when he looked up and met Jørn Glenne’s gaze. “…that Roar Bohr could have been behind the murder, and made sure that the people with the least chance of catching him were given responsibility for the investigation? Is that why you wanted to talk to us?”

  Glenne blinked and opened his mouth. But nothing came out.

  “Listen, Jørn,” Kaja said. “We know Bohr told his wife he killed someone in Afghanistan. And I’ve talked to Jan…”

  “Jan?”

  “The camp instructor for Special Forces. Tall, blond…”

  “Oh, him. He was crazy about you too!”

  “Anyway,” Kaja said, lowering her eyes, and Harry suspected she was acting embarrassed to give the laughing Glenne what he wanted. “Jan says they have no record of any confirmed or claimed kill for Roar. As the officer in command, obviously he wasn’t on the front line much, but the fact is that he has no kills from earlier in his career when he was actually on the front line.”

  “I know,” Glenne said. “Officially, Special Forces weren’t in Basra, but Bohr was there for training with an American unit. According to rumour he saw a lot of action, but still remained a virgin. And the closest he got to the action in Afghanistan was that time Sergeant Waage was taken by the Taliban.”

  “Yes, that,” Kaja said.

  “What was that?” Harry asked.

  Glenne shrugged. “Bohr and Waage were on a long drive and stopped in the desert so the sergeant could have a shit. The sergeant went behind some rocks, and when he didn’t come back after twenty minutes and didn’t answer when he was called, Bohr said in his report that he got out of the car to look for him. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t budge.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because there’s not that fucking much that can happen in a desert. Because one or two Taliban farmers with basic rifles and a knife were sitting behind the rocks waiting for Bohr to come looking. And Bohr obviously knew that. And he was safe in the bulletproof car with open ground between him and the rocks. He knew there wouldn’t be any witnesses to prove he was lying. So he locked all the doors and called the camp. They told him it was a five-hour drive from there. Two days later an Afghan unit found a trail of blood on the pavement, several kilometres long, a few hours farther north. Sometimes the Taliban torture prisoners by dragging them behind a cart. And outside a village even farther north, a head was found on a stake stuck in the ground by the side of the road. His face had been scraped off on the pavement, but DNA analysis in Paris confirmed that it was Sergeant Waage, of course.”

  “Mm.” Harry toyed with his coffee cup. “Do you think that about Bohr because you’d have done the same thing if it had been you, Glenne?”

  The military police officer shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not under any illusions. We’re human, we all take the path of least resistance. But it wasn’t me.”

  “So?”

  “So I judge other people just as hard as I would have judged myself. And maybe Bohr did that as well. It’s tough for a commanding officer to lose any of his troops. Bohr was never the same after that, anyway.”

  “So you think he raped and murdered his interpreter, but what broke him was the fact that the Taliban took his sergeant?”

  Glenne shrugged again. “Like I said, I wasn’t allowed to investigate, so all I’ve got are theories.”

  “And what’s your best one?”

  “That the business of the rape was just a cover-up to make it look like sexually motivated murder. To get the police to look among the usual suspects and perverts. Which is a fairly thin file in Kabul.”

  “A cover-up for what?”

  “For Bohr’s real project. To kill someone.”

  “Someone?”

  “Bohr had a problem with killing, as you already know by now. And when you’re in Special Forces, that’s a big problem.”

  “Really? I didn’t think they were that bloodthirsty.”

  “They’re not, but…how can I explain it?” Glenne shook his head. “The old school in Special Forces, the ones who came through paratrooper training, were picked because of their long-term intelligence-gathering behind enemy lines, where patience and stamina are the most important qualities. They were the Army’s long-distance runners, OK? That’s where Bohr fitted in. Now, the focus is on antiterrorism in urban settings. And you know what? The new Special Forces look like ice hockey players, if you see what I mean? And in this new environment, a rumour had gone around saying Bohr was…” Glenne pulled a face, as if he didn’t like the taste of the word on his tongue.

  “A coward?” Harry asked.

  “Impotent. Imagine the shame. You’re in command, but you’re still a virgin. And not a virgin because you’ve never had the opportunity, because there are still soldiers in Special Forces who have never found themselves in a situation where it
’s been necessary to kill. But because you couldn’t get it up when it mattered. See what I mean?”

  Harry nodded.

  “As an old hand, Bohr knew that the first kill is the hardest,” Glenne went on. “After that first blood it gets easier. Much easier. So he chose an easy first victim. A woman who wouldn’t put up a fight, who trusted him and wouldn’t suspect anything. One of the hated Hazaras, a Shia in a Sunni Muslim country, someone plenty of people might have a motive to kill. And then maybe he got a taste for it. Killing is a very special feeling. Better than sex.”

  “Is it?”

  “So they say. Ask people in Special Forces. And tell them to answer honestly.”

  Harry and Glenne looked at each other for a few moments before Glenne looked at Kaja. “All of this is just things I’ve thought to myself. But if Bohr has admitted to his wife that he killed Hela—”

  “Hala.”

  “…then you can count on my help.” Glenne drank the last of his coffee. “Connolly never rests. I need to get back to training.”

  * * *

  —

  “Well?” Kaja asked when she and Harry were standing outside in the street. “What do you think about Glenne?”

  “I think he hits too long because he doesn’t read the spin.”

  “Funny.”

  “Metaphorically. He’s drawing overblown conclusions from the trajectory of the ball, but without analysing what his opponent has just done with the paddle.”

  “Is the lingo supposed to tell me you know all about table tennis?”

  Harry shrugged. “Øystein’s basement from when we were ten. Him, me and Tresko. And King Crimson. To be honest, by the time we were sixteen we knew more about screwballs and prog rock than girls. We…” Harry stopped abruptly and grimaced.

  “What?” Kaja asked.

  “I’m babbling, I…” He closed his eyes. “I’m babbling so I don’t wake up.”

  “Wake up?”

  Harry took a deep breath. “I’m asleep. As long as I’m asleep, as long as I can manage to stay in the dream, I can carry on looking for him. But every so often it starts to slip away from me. I need to concentrate on sleeping, because if I wake up…”

  “What?”

  “Then I’ll know that it’s true. And then I’ll die.”

  Harry listened. The clatter of studded tires on pavement. The sound of a small waterfall in the Akerselva.

  “Sounds like what my psychologist called lucid dreaming,” he heard Kaja say. “A dream where you can control everything. And that’s why we do all we can not to let it go.”

  Harry shook his head. “I can’t control anything. I just want to find the man who killed Rakel. Then I’ll wake up. And die.”

  “Why not try to sleep properly?” Her voice was soft. “I think it would do you good to get some rest, Harry.”

  Harry opened his eyes again. Kaja had raised her hand, probably to put it on his shoulder, but instead she brushed a strand of hair from her face when she saw the look in his eyes.

  He cleared his throat. “You said you’d found something in the property register?”

  Kaja blinked a couple of times.

  “Yes,” she said. “A cabin listed under Roar Bohr’s name. In Eggedal. An hour and forty-five minutes away, according to Google Maps.”

  “Good. I’ll see if Bjørn can drive.”

  “Sure you don’t want to talk to Katrine and put an alert out for him?”

  “What for? The fact that his wife didn’t see with her own eyes that he was asleep in their daughter’s old room that night?”

  “If she wouldn’t think what we’ve got is enough, why do you?”

  Harry buttoned his coat and got his mobile out. “Because I’ve got a gut feeling that’s caught more murderers than any other gut in this country.”

  He felt Kaja looking at him in astonishment as he called Bjørn.

  “I can drive,” Bjørn said after a short pause for thought.

  “Thanks.”

  “One other thing. That memory card of yours…”

  “Yes?”

  “I forwarded the envelope in your name to Freund, our external 3-D expert. I haven’t spoken to him, but I’ve sent you an email with his contact details, so you can talk to him yourself.”

  “I get it. You’d rather not have your name mixed up in this.”

  “This is the only job I know how to do, Harry.”

  “Like I said, I get it.”

  “If I get fired now, with a kid and everything…”

  “Stop it, Bjørn, you’re not the one who should be apologising. I should, for dragging you into this mess.”

  A pause. In spite of what he’d just said, Harry could almost feel Bjørn’s guilty conscience down the phone.

  “I’ll pick you up,” Bjørn said.

  * * *

  —

  Detective Inspector Felah was sitting with the fan on his back, but his shirt was still sticking to his skin. He hated the heat, hated Kabul, hated his bombproof office. But most of all he hated the lies he had to listen to, day in, day out. Like the ones from the pathetic, illiterate, opium-addicted Hazara sitting in front of him now.

  “You’ve been brought to see me because you claimed under questioning that you can give us the name of a murderer,” Felah said. “A foreigner.”

  “Only if you protect me,” the man said.

  Felah looked at the man cowering in front of him. The battered cap the Hazara was rubbing between his hands wasn’t a pakol, but it had at least covered his filthy hair. The dribbling, ignorant Shia bandit evidently thought that escaping the death penalty and getting a long prison sentence instead would be a mercy. A slow, painful death, that was what that was, and he himself would have chosen a quick death by hanging without hesitation.

  Felah wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “That depends on what you’ve got to say to me. Spit it out.”

  “He killed…” the Hazara said in a shaky voice. “He didn’t think anyone saw him, but I did. With my own eyes, I swear, as Allah is my witness.”

  “A foreign soldier, you said.”

  “Yes, sir. But this wasn’t in battle, this was murder. Murder, plain and simple.”

  “I see. And who was this military foreigner?”

  “The leader of the Norwegians. I know that because I recognised him. He’d been in our village, talking about how they’re here to help us, that we’d get democracy and jobs…all the usual.”

  Felah felt a moment of longed-for excitement. “You mean Major Jonassen?”

  “No, that wasn’t his name. Lieutenant Colonel Bo.”

  “Do you mean Bohr?”

  “Yes—yes I do, sir.”

  “And you saw him murder an Afghan man?”

  “No, not that.”

  “What, then?”

  Felah listened as he felt his excitement and interest fade away. Firstly, Lieutenant Colonel Bohr had gone home, and the chances of getting him extradited were as good as nonexistent. Secondly, a commander who was out of the game was no longer a particularly valuable chess piece in Kabul’s political game, a game that Felah actually hated more than everything else put together. Thirdly, the victim wasn’t someone who qualified for the amount of resources it would require to investigate this opium addict’s claims. And then there was the fourth thing. It was a lie. Of course it was a lie. Everyone was out to save their own skin. And the more detail the man in front of him gave about the murder—and Felah was confident it matched what little they already knew—the more certain Felah was that the man was describing a murder he himself had committed. A crazy idea, and Felah wasn’t about to use the few resources he had at his disposal to investigate the hypothesis. Opium addiction or murder—either way, you still couldn’t hang a man more than once.

  27

 
; “Can it really not go any faster?” Harry asked, staring out into the darkness beyond the slush and the hard-working windshield wipers.

  “Yes, but I’d rather not go off the road with so much irreplaceable brain capacity in the car.” As usual, Bjørn had his seat so far back that he was more lying than sitting. “Especially in a car with old-fashioned seat belts and no airbags.”

  A truck coming around a bend in the opposite direction on Highway 287 passed them so close that Bjørn’s 1970 Volvo Amazon shook.

  “Even I’ve got airbags,” Harry said, looking past Bjørn at the low crash barriers and still-frozen river that had been running alongside the road for the past ten kilometres. The Haglebu River, according to the GPS on the phone in his lap. When he looked the other way he saw the steep, snow-covered side of the valley and dark fir forest. Ahead of them: the paved road that swallowed up the light of the headlamps and wound, narrow and predictable, towards mountains, more forest and wilderness. He had read that there were supposed to be brown bears in the area.

  And as the sides of the valley towered above them, the voice on the radio—which in between tracks announced that they were listening to nationwide P10 Country—lost all credibility when it was intermittently replaced by static or disappeared altogether.

  Harry turned the radio off.

  Bjørn turned it back on again. Adjusted the dial. Crackling and a sense of post-apocalyptic empty space.

  “DAB killed the radio star,” Harry said.

  “Not at all,” Bjørn said. “They’ve got a local station here.” A razor-sharp steel guitar suddenly cut through the static. “There!” He grinned. “Radio Hallingdal. Best country channel in Norway.”

  “You still can’t drive without country music, then?”

  “Come on, driving and country music are like gin and tonic,” Bjørn said. “And they have radio bingo every Saturday. Just listen!”

  The steel guitar faded away and, sure enough, a voice announced that it was time to have your bingo cards ready, especially in Flå, where, for the first time ever, all five winners two Saturdays before had lived. Then the steel guitar was back at full volume again.