Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  “Can we turn it down?” Harry said, looking at the glowing screen of his phone.

  “You can handle a bit of country, Harry. I gave you that Ramones album because it’s country in disguise. You really need to listen to ‘I Wanted Everything’ and ‘Don’t Come Close.’ ”

  “Kaja’s calling.”

  Bjørn turned the radio off and Harry put the phone to his ear. “Hi, Kaja.”

  “Hi! Where are you?”

  “Eggedal.”

  “Where in Eggedal?”

  Harry looked outside. “Somewhere near the bottom.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “OK. I haven’t found out anything specific on Roar Bohr. He hasn’t got a criminal record, and none of the people I’ve spoken to have said anything to suggest that he’s a potential murderer. Quite the reverse, in fact, they all describe him as a very considerate man. Almost overprotective when it comes to his own children and troops. I spoke to an employee at the NHRI who said the same.”

  “Hang on. How did you get them to talk?”

  “I told them I’m working on a flattering profile piece about Roar Bohr’s time in Afghanistan for the Red Cross magazine.”

  “So you’re lying to them?”

  “Not really. I might be working on that article. Maybe I just haven’t asked the Red Cross if they’re interested yet.”

  “Sneaky. Go on.”

  “When I asked the member of staff at the NHRI how Bohr had taken Rakel Fauke’s murder, she said he had seemed upset and exhausted, that he’d taken a lot of time off in the past few days and had reported sick today. I asked what sort of relationship Bohr and Rakel had, and she said Bohr had kept an extra eye on Rakel.”

  “An extra eye? Did she mean that he looked out for her?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s how she put it.”

  “You said you didn’t have anything specific on Bohr. Does that mean you’ve something non-specific?”

  “Yes. Like I said, Bohr hasn’t got a criminal record, but I did find one old case when I searched for his name in the archive. It turns out that a Margaret Bohr went to the police in 1988 because her seventeen-year-old daughter, Bianca, had been raped. The mother claimed her daughter was showing behaviour typical of a rape victim, and had cuts on her stomach and hands. The police interviewed Bianca, but she denied she’d been raped and said she had inflicted those cuts herself. According to the report there were suspicions of incest, and Bianca’s father and her older brother, Roar Bohr, who was then in his twenties, were among the suspects mentioned. Later on, both the father and Bianca were briefly admitted to hospital for psychiatric treatment. But it was never discovered what—if anything—had happened. When I searched for Bianca Bohr, a report from Sigdal Police Station popped up from five years later. Bianca Bohr had been found dead on the rocks at the bottom of the twenty-metre-high falls at Norafossen. The Bohr family’s cabin is four kilometres farther up the river.”

  “Sigdal. Is that the same cabin we’re on our way to?”

  “I assume so. The post-mortem showed that Bianca died from drowning. The police concluded that she could have fallen into the river by accident, but that it was more likely that she had taken her own life.”

  “Why?”

  “A witness had seen Bianca running barefoot through the snow along the path between the cabin and the river, wearing only a blue dress. It’s several hundred metres from the cabin to the river. And she was naked when she was found. Her psychiatrist also confirmed that she had previously shown suicidal tendencies. I managed to find his phone number, and left a message on his answer machine.”

  “OK.”

  “Still in Eggedal?”

  “Presumably.”

  Bjørn turned the radio back on, and a voice monotonously reading out numbers, repeating them digit by digit, merged with the sound of the studded tires on the pavement. The forest and darkness seemed to be getting denser, the sides of the valley steeper.

  * * *

  —

  Bohr rested the rifle on the thickest, lowest branch and looked through the telescopic sight. Saw the red dot dance across the wooden wall before it found the window. It was dark in there, but the man was on his way. The man who needed to be stopped before he ruined everything was going to come, Bohr just knew it. It was simply a matter of time. And time was the only thing Roar Bohr had left.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s right up this hill,” Harry said, looking at the phone screen, where a red teardrop-shaped symbol marked the coordinates Kaja had given him. They were parked by the side of the road and Bjørn had switched the engine and lights off. Harry leaned forward and peered out through the windshield, where light rain had started to fall. There were no lights anywhere on the black hillside. “Looks pretty sparsely populated.”

  “We’d better take some beads for the natives,” Bjørn said, taking a flashlight and his service pistol from the glove compartment.

  “I was thinking I’d go up there alone,” Harry said.

  “And leave me here on my own when I’m scared of the dark?”

  “You remember what I said about laser sights?” Harry put his index finger to his forehead. “I’m still marked after Smestaddammen. This is my project, and you’re on paternity leave.”

  “You’ve seen those discussions in films where the woman nags the hero to let her join in something dangerous?”

  “Yes…”

  “I usually fast-forward those bits, because I know who’s going to win. Shall we go?”

  28

  “Sure it’s this cabin?” Bjørn asked.

  “According to the GPS, yes,” said Harry, who was holding his coat over his phone. Partly to shield it from the rain that had replaced the snow showers, and partly to stop the glow from giving away their position if Bohr was looking out for them. Because if he was in the cabin, the darkness inside suggested that that was precisely what he was doing. Harry screwed his eyes up. They had found a trail that ran partially across bare ground, and the brown marks where there was snow indicated that it had been used recently. It hadn’t taken more than fifteen minutes to find. The snow on the ground reflected the light, but it was still too dark for them to be able to make out what colour the cabin was. Harry was putting his money on red. The rain had camouflaged the sound as they approached, but now it was also muffling any noises from inside the cabin.

  “I’ll go in, you wait here,” Harry said.

  “I need a bit more instruction, I’ve been in Forensics too long.”

  “Shoot if you see someone who isn’t me shooting,” Harry said, then got out from under the low, dripping branches and strode towards the cabin.

  There were regulations for how to enter a house if you thought you might encounter armed resistance. Harry knew some of them. Roar Bohr probably knew them all. So there was no point overthinking it. Harry walked up to the door and tried the handle. Locked. He moved to the side of the door and banged on it twice.

  “Police!”

  He leaned against the wall and listened. All he could hear was the persistent rain. And a twig snapping somewhere. He stared out into the darkness, but it was like a solid black wall. He counted to five, then hit the pane of glass beside the door with the butt of his pistol. The glass shattered. He reached inside and loosened the window catch. The frame had swollen, and he had to grab it hard and pull. He climbed inside. Inhaled the spice-like smell of fresh birch wood and ash. He turned on his flashlight, holding it away from his body in case anyone felt like using it as a target. He swept the beam around the room until it found a light switch by the door. Harry clicked it and the ceiling lamp came on, and he hurried to stand with his back against the wall between the windows. He looked around the room, from left to right, like he would at a crime scene. He was in the living room, from which two
doors led to bedrooms containing bunk beds. No bathroom. A kitchen worktop with a sink and a radio at one end of the room. An open fireplace. Typical Norwegian cabin furniture—pine—a painted wooden chest, and a submachine gun and automatic rifle leaning against the wall. A table with a crocheted tablecloth and candlesticks, a sports magazine, two glinting hunting knives and a game of Yahtzee. Printed sheets of A4 were pinned to the walls all around the room. Harry stopped breathing when he saw Rakel beside the fireplace. The picture showed her standing behind a barred window. The kitchen window at Holmenkollveien. It must have been taken from right in front of the wildlife camera.

  Harry forced himself to carry on looking round.

  Above the dining table were photographs of more women, some with newspaper cuttings beneath them. And when Harry turned to look at the wall behind him he saw more pictures. Of men. Around a dozen, pinned in three columns, numbered according to some sort of ranking system. He recognised three of them at once. Number 1 was Anton Blix, who had been convicted of several rapes and a double murder ten years ago. Number 2 was Svein Finne. And further down, at number 6, Valentin Gjertsen. Now Harry thought he recognised some of the others as well. Well-known violent criminals, at least one of them dead and a couple more still in prison, as far as he was aware. He peered over at the newspaper cuttings on the other side of the room, and managed to make out one bold headline: Raped in Park. The print of the others was too small.

  If he stepped closer, he would make himself a target from outside. But, of course, he could switch the lamp off and just use his flashlight. Harry’s eyes turned towards the switch, but found Rakel again.

  He couldn’t see her face, but there was something about the way she was standing inside the window. Like a deer that had raised its head, pricked up its ears. That scented danger. Perhaps that was why she looked so alone. While she’s waiting for me, Harry thought. The way I waited for her. Two of us, waiting.

  Harry realised he’d stepped out into the room, into the light, visible to anyone and everyone. What the hell was he doing? He closed his eyes.

  And waited.

  * * *

  —

  Roar Bohr had the crosshairs on the back of the person in the illuminated room. He had switched off the laser sight that had given him away when Pia and Hole were sitting on the bench beside Smestaddammen. The raindrops rustled in the trees above him, dripping from the brim of his cap. He waited.

  * * *

  —

  Nothing happened.

  Harry opened his eyes. Started breathing again.

  And read the newspaper clippings.

  Some of them had turned yellow, some were just a couple of years old. Reports of rapes. No names, just ages, locations, an outline of what happened. Oslo, Østlandet. One in Stavanger. God knows how Bohr had got hold of the photographs, but Harry had no doubt that they were the rape victims. So what about the pictures of the men? A sort of top-ten list of the worst—or possibly best—rapists in Norway? Something for Roar Bohr to aspire to, to measure himself against?

  Harry unlocked the front door and opened it. “Bjørn! The coast’s clear!”

  He looked at the picture that was pinned up beside the door. Sharp sunlight in squinting green eyes, a hand brushing aside a strand of honey-brown hair, a white vest with the Red Cross on it, desert landscape, Kaja smiling with those pointed teeth.

  Harry looked down. Saw the same military boots he had seen in Bohr’s hallway.

  The rocks in the desert. The Taliban waiting for number two to get out of the bulletproof car.

  “No, Bjørn! No!”

  * * *

  —

  “Kaja Solness,” the almost exaggeratedly deep voice from the black stone slab beside the stove.

  “Officer in the Oslo Police,” Kaja said loudly as she scanned the shelves of the fridge in vain for something to eat.

  “And how can I help you, Officer Solness?”

  “We’re looking for a serial attacker.” She poured herself a glass of apple juice in the hope of getting her blood sugar up a bit. She checked the time. A relaxed local restaurant had opened on Vibes gate since she was last home. “Obviously I’m aware that as a psychiatrist you’re under an oath of confidentiality when it comes to patients who are still alive, but this concerns a deceased patient…”

  “Same rules.”

  “…whom we suspect may have been raped by someone we want to prevent from raping others.”

  There was silence at the other end.

  “Let me know when you’ve finished thinking, London.” She didn’t know why the man’s surname, one of the biggest cities in the world, seemed to suggest loneliness. She switched off the speaker function on her phone, and took it and the glass of juice back into the living room.

  “Go ahead and ask, and we’ll see,” he said.

  “Thanks. Do you remember a patient called Bianca Bohr?”

  “Yes.” He said this in a tone that told Kaja that he also remembered what had happened to her.

  “When you were seeing her as a patient, did you think she had been raped?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “OK. Did she show any behaviour that might indicate—”

  “The behaviour of psychiatric patients can indicate a lot of things. I wouldn’t rule out rape. Or assault. Or other traumas. But that’s just speculation.”

  “Her father was also admitted for mental health problems. Did she ever talk about him?”

  “During conversations between psychiatrists and patients we almost always talk about their relationship to their parents, but I can’t recall anything that struck me in particular.”

  “OK.” Kaja tapped a key on her computer and the screen came back to life. The frozen image showed the silhouette of a person leaving Rakel’s house. “What about her older brother, Roar?”

  Another long pause. Kaja took a sip from the glass and looked out at the garden.

  “You’re talking about a serial attacker who’s still on the loose?”

  “Yes,” Kaja said.

  “During the period that Bianca was an inpatient with us, one of the nurses noted that she had repeatedly screamed a name in her sleep. The name you just mentioned.”

  “Do you think that Bianca could have been raped, not by her father, but by her older brother?”

  “Like I said, Solness, I can’t rule out—”

  “But the thought has occurred to you, hasn’t it?”

  Kaja listened to the sound of his breathing in an attempt to interpret it, but all she heard was the rain outside.

  “Bianca did tell me something, but I have to stress that she was psychotic, and when suffering from psychosis patients say all sorts of things.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That her brother had performed an abortion on her at the family’s cabin.”

  Kaja shuddered.

  “Naturally, that needn’t necessarily have happened,” London said. “But I remember a drawing she had pinned up above the bed in her room. It was a large eagle swooping down over a little boy. And out of the bird’s beak came the letters R-O-A-R.”

  “As in the English verb?”

  “That was how I chose to interpret it at the time, yes.”

  “But in hindsight?”

  Kaja heard him sigh loudly, out there in telephone-land. “It’s quite typical that when a patient takes their own life, you imagine that you misinterpreted everything, that everything you did and thought was wrong. When Bianca died, we thought she was actually getting better. So I looked through my old notes to see what I had misunderstood, where I’d gone wrong. And I discovered that on two occasions—which I had dismissed as psychotic babbling—she told me that they had killed her big brother.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “She herself, and her older brother.” />
  “What does that mean? That Roar took part in killing himself?”

  * * *

  —

  Roar Bohr lowered the butt of the rifle, but left the barrel resting on the branch.

  The person he’d had in his sights had moved away from the illuminated window.

  He took in the sounds of the darkness around him.

  Rain. The sound of tires on wet pavement not far away. He guessed a Volvo. They liked Volvos here on Lyder Sagens gate. And Volkswagens. Estates. The expensive models. In Smestad it was more Audis and BMWs. The gardens here weren’t as obsessively neat as in his neighbourhood, but the more relaxed look didn’t necessarily take any less work and planning. Kaja’s wilderness of a garden was the exception; anarchy ruled here. In her defence, she hadn’t lived at home much in the past few years. And he wasn’t complaining. The overgrown shrubs and trees gave him better camouflage than in Kabul. Once he’d had to hide behind a burned-out car on top of a garage roof, where he had been far too exposed, but it was the only place where he had a complete view of the hostel where the girls lived. He had spent enough hours there watching Kaja Solness through the sights of his rifle to know that she wouldn’t let a garden get overgrown unless she had more important things to do. And she did. People do so many peculiar things when they think they’re not being seen, and Roar Bohr knew things about Kaja Solness that other people had no idea about. With his Swarovski rifle sight he could easily read the text on the screen of the computer on her desk when Kaja wasn’t sitting in the way. And now she had just tapped a key to make the screen light up. There was an image on the screen. Taken at night, it showed a house with one window lit up.

  It took Bohr a few moments to realise that he was looking at Rakel’s house.

  He adjusted the sight and brought the screen into focus. He saw that it wasn’t a still picture but a recording. It must have been filmed from where he used to stand. What the hell? Then the door of Rakel’s house opened and a figure was silhouetted in the opening. Bohr held his breath so that the rifle was completely still and he could read the date and time at the bottom of the clip.