by Jo Nesbo
33
It took Harry barely ten minutes to drive from Grünerløkka, across Storo, to Kjelsås. He parked the Escort on one of the side streets off Grefsenveien, on a street named after a planet, and walked around to one named after another one. The drizzle had turned into a steady downpour and the dark streets were deserted. A dog started barking on a balcony as Harry approached the house where Peter Ringdal lived. Kaja had found his address in the population register. Harry pulled up the collar of his coat, turned in through the gate and walked up the paved drive to the blue-painted house that consisted of one traditional rectangular section and another part shaped like an igloo. Harry wasn’t sure if the neighbourhood had taken a collective decision to have space as their theme, but in the garden there was a sculpture that looked like a satellite. Harry assumed it was supposed to look as if it was floating around the blue, dome-shaped part of the house: the earth. Home. The impression was only strengthened by the half-moon-shaped window in the front door. There was no sticker warning that the house was alarmed. Harry rang the bell. If anyone answered, he would say he’d got lost and ask the way to the street where his car was parked. No answer. He put the key in the lock and turned it. He opened the door and stepped into the dark hallway.
The first thing that struck him was the smell. That there was no one there. Every home Harry had been in had a smell: clothes, sweat, paint, food, soap or something else. But walking in from the torrent of smells outside felt like it did when you left most houses: the smells stopped.
There was no Yale lock, so you had to turn the knob from the inside to lock the door. He turned on the light on his mobile phone, then swept it across the walls of the hallway that ran like an axis through the centre of the house. The walls were lined with artistic photographs and paintings, bought with what looked to Harry like a keen eye for taste. It was the same with food: Harry couldn’t cook, he couldn’t even put together a sensible three-course meal when he was sitting in a restaurant with an extensive menu. But he had the sense to recognise a good order when he watched Rakel smile and tell the waiter quietly what she wanted, and would copy her without embarrassment.
There was a chest of drawers just inside the door. Harry opened the top drawer. Gloves and scarves. He tried the next one down. Keys. Batteries. A flashlight. A judo magazine. A box of bullets. Harry picked it up: 9mm. Ringdal had a pistol somewhere. He put the box back and was about to close the drawer when he noticed something. There was no longer a total absence of smell; an almost imperceptible smell was rising from the drawer.
A smell of sun-warmed forest.
He moved the judo magazine.
There was a red silk scarf under it. He stood frozen to the spot for a moment. Then he picked it up and held it to his face, inhaling its smell. There was no doubt. It was hers, it was Rakel’s.
Harry stood there for a few seconds before he pulled himself together. He thought for a moment, then put the scarf back under the magazine, closed the drawer and carried on along the hallway.
Instead of going into what he assumed was the living room, he went upstairs. Another passageway. He opened a door. Bathroom. Seeing as there were no windows that could be seen from outside, he turned the light on. Then it struck him that if Ringdal had had one of those new electricity monitors fitted, and if what the workman from Hafslund had said was right, they would be able to tell if someone had been inside the house by checking the meter and seeing that the electricity usage had gone up a tiny bit just before half past nine in the evening. Harry checked the shelf under the mirror and the bathroom cabinet. Just the usual toiletries a man would need. No interesting pills and potions.
Same thing with the bedroom. A clean, neatly made bed. No skeletons in the closets. The light on his mobile evidently used a lot of power, he could see that the charge in the battery had already sunk alarmingly quickly. He sped up. A study. Barely used, it looked almost abandoned.
He went down to the living room. The kitchen. The house was silent, it wasn’t telling him anything.
He found a door leading to the cellar. His phone died as he was about to go down the narrow staircase. He hadn’t seen any basement windows from the outside of the house facing the road. He switched the light on and went down.
There was nothing that spoke to him there either. A freezer, two pairs of skis, tins of paint, some white and blue rope, worn hiking boots, a board of tools beneath an oblong basement window, the same sort Rakel’s house had, facing the back of the building. Four separate, fenced-off compartments. The house had probably been semi-detached once upon a time, with the igloo and the more conventional part of the house as separate homes. So why were there padlocks on the compartment doors if there was only one person living there? Harry looked through the wire mesh towards the top of one of them. Empty. The same with two of the others. But the last one had chipboard over the opening.
That was where it was.
The first three compartments were locked and visibly empty, to fool an intruder into thinking that the fourth was as well.
Harry thought. He wasn’t hesitating, he was just taking a bit of time to think through the consequences, weighing up the advantages of finding something against the disadvantages of the break-in being discovered, meaning that whatever he found couldn’t be used as evidence. There had been a crowbar hanging on the board. He reached a conclusion, went back to the tools, grabbed a screwdriver and returned to the door. It took him three minutes to remove the screws from the door hinges. He lifted the door aside. The light inside must have been connected to the switch at the top of the stairs, because the compartment was lit up. An office. Harry’s eyes scanned the desk and computer, the shelves of files and books. He stopped at the picture that was fixed to the bare grey wall above the desk with a piece of red tape. Black and white. Maybe it had been taken using a flash, which was why the contrast between the white glare of the skin and the darkness of the blood and shadows was so noticeable, like an ink drawing. But the drawing showed her oval face, her dark hair, her lifeless eyes, her mutilated, dead body. Harry closed his eyes. And there, on the red skin on the inside of his eyelids, there it was again. Burned on. Rakel’s face, the blood on the floor. It felt like a knife being driven into his chest, with such force that it made him stagger back.
* * *
—
“What did you say?” Øystein Eikeland called over David Bowie, staring at his boss.
“I said the two of you can manage!” Ringdal cried, putting his hand on the back of the door of the back room and pulling on his jacket.
“B-but…” Øystein stammered. “She’s only just started!”
“And she’s proved to us that she’s worked behind a bar before,” Ringdal said, nodding at the girl who was pouring two glasses of beer at the same time as she chatted to a customer.
“Where are you going?” Øystein asked.
“Home,” Ringdal said. “Why?”
“So early?” Øystein muttered desperately.
Ringdal laughed. “That’s kind of the point of employing someone else, Eikeland.” He zipped his jacket up and took his car keys out of his trouser pocket. “See you tomorrow.”
“Hold on!”
Ringdal raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
Øystein just stood there, scratching the back of his hand hard, trying to think fast, which wasn’t one of his strong points. “I…I was wondering if I could leave early this evening instead. Just this once.”
“What for?”
“Because…the clan are practising some new songs tonight.”
“Vålerenga’s supporters club?”
“Er, yes.”
“They can manage without you.”
“Manage? We could get relegated!”
“Two matches into the season? I doubt that. Ask me again in October.” Ringdal smiled as he walked through the back room towards the door. Then he was gone.
<
br /> Øystein pulled out his phone, leaned back against the inside of the bar and called Harry.
A woman’s voice answered after two rings.
“The person you have called has turned their phone off…”
“No!” Øystein exclaimed, ending the call and trying again. Three rings this time. But the same woman’s voice and the same message. Øystein tried for a third time, and thought he could detect a note of irritation in the woman’s voice this time.
He tapped out a text message.
“Øyvind!” A woman’s voice. Definitely irritated. The new bargirl was mixing a cocktail as she nodded towards the queue of impatient, thirsty drinkers behind him.
“Øystein,” he said quietly, before turning and glaring at a young woman who ordered a beer with a resigned, patronising sigh. Øystein’s hand was shaking so much that he spilled the drink, so he wiped the glass and put it down on the bar as he looked at the time. Kjelsås? All hell would break loose in ten minutes. Harry locked up and him with no job. Fuck Harry, the crazy idiot! The young woman had evidently tried to communicate with him, because now she was leaning forward and shouting into his ear: “I said a small glass, you jerk, not half a litre!”
“Suffragette City” was blaring from the speakers.
* * *
—
Harry was standing in front of the photograph. Taking in the details. The woman was lying in the boot of a car. Now that he was standing closer, he could see two things. That it wasn’t Rakel, but a younger woman with the same colouring and facial features as Rakel. And that what had initially made him think it was a drawing and not a photograph was that there were several things wrong with the body. It had indentations and protrusions where it shouldn’t, as if the artist didn’t quite know his anatomy. This body wasn’t just dead, it had been shattered, with rage and force, as if it had been thrown off a mountain. There was nothing about the picture to indicate where it had been taken, or who had taken it. Harry turned the picture over without removing the tape. Glossy photographic paper. Nothing on the back.
He sat down at the desk, which was strewn with drawings of small, two-person carriages hanging from rails running between masts. In one someone was using a laptop, in another someone was sleeping on a chair that had been folded back, and in a third an elderly couple were kissing. There were ramps for people to get on every hundred metres or so along the street, with empty carriages waiting beside them. Another drawing showed a bird’s-eye view of a cross, the rails forming a four-pointed star. One large sheet of paper showed a map of Oslo with a grid that Harry assumed was the network of rails.
He opened the desk drawers. Pulled out futuristic sketches of aerodynamically shaped carriages hanging from cables or rails, bright colours, extravagant lines, smiling people, an optimistic view of the future that made Harry think of adverts from the sixties. Some of them had captions in English and Japanese under them. The pictures evidently weren’t Ringdal’s own idea, just related proposals. But no more pictures of bodies, just the one stuck to the wall right in front of him. What did it mean, what were the walls telling him this time?
He tapped the keyboard in front of him and the screen lit up. No password. He clicked the email icon. Tapped Rakel’s address into the search box, but got no results. Not surprising, seeing as all the folders turned out to be empty. Either they weren’t used, or he emptied them as he went along, which might explain why he wasn’t worried about protecting access to his computer. The police’s IT experts might be able to reconstruct Ringdal’s email correspondence, but Harry was aware that had become harder rather than easier in the past few years.
He looked through the list of documents, opened a couple of them. Notes about transport. An application for increased opening hours for the Jealousy Bar. Six-monthly accounts that showed the bar had made a healthy profit. Nothing of interest.
Nothing on the shelves of files—about transport theory, research into urban development, traffic accidents, game theory—either. But one worn hardback book. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. When he was younger, Harry had leafed through this mythologised book out of curiosity without finding anything about Übermensch or the purported Nazi ideology, just a story about an old man in the mountains who—except for the bit about God being dead—said completely incomprehensible things.
He looked at the time. He had been there half an hour. With no charge in his phone he couldn’t take a picture of the dead girl so he could find out who she was. But there was no reason to believe that the photograph and Rakel’s scarf would be gone when they came back with a search warrant.
Harry stood up and left the office, screwed the door hinges back in place, hung the screwdriver on the board, jogged up the stairs, switched off the light and went out into the hallway. He heard the neighbour’s dog barking outside. On his way to the front door, he opened the door to the only room he hadn’t been in. A combination of toilet and utility room. He was about to close it again when he caught sight of a white sweater lying on the tiled floor in the heap of dirty underwear and T-shirts in front of the washing machine. The sweater had a blue cross on the chest. And flecks of what looked like blood. To be more precise: sprays of blood. Harry closed his eyes. The cross had triggered something in his memory. He saw himself walk into the Jealousy Bar, Ringdal behind the counter. That was the sweater Ringdal had been wearing that night, the night Rakel died.
Harry had punched Ringdal. They had both bled. But that much?
If the sweater got washed before the house was searched, they would never know.
Harry hesitated for a moment. The dog had stopped barking. Then he bent down, carefully rolled the sweater up and squeezed it into his coat pocket. He stepped back out into the passageway.
And stopped abruptly.
The sound of footsteps on gravel.
Harry moved back, into the darkness farther along the passageway.
Through the half-moon glass he saw a shape step into the light out on the steps.
Shit.
The glass was too low for him to see the other man’s face, but he saw a hand searching in the pockets of a blue Catalina jacket, followed by subdued swearing. The door handle was pushed down. Harry tried to remember: had he turned the lock?
The man outside tugged at the door. Cursed more loudly now.
Harry silently let the air out of his lungs. He had locked it. And, once again, it was as if something had been triggered. Rakel’s lock. He had checked it, as if to make sure it was locked.
Something lit up outside. A mobile. A pale face was pressed against the half-moon in the door, nose and cheek pressed flat against the glass, lit up by the phone being held to his ear. Ringdal was almost unrecognisable, his face like a bank robber’s under a nylon stocking, demonic, but his eye was staring into the darkness of the hallway.
Harry stood motionless, holding his breath. They were five metres apart, at most. Could Ringdal really not see him? As if in response, Ringdal’s voice echoed through the half-moon window with an odd, muffled resonance, low and calm.
“There you are.”
Shit, shit.
“I can’t find the keys to the house,” Ringdal said. The heat of his mouth settled as grey condensation on the glass.
* * *
—
“Eikeland,” Øystein had said rather stiffly when, after a moment of panic, he had gone into the back room to take Ringdal’s call.
“There you are,” Ringdal had said. Then: “I can’t find the keys to the house.”
Øystein closed the door so he could hear better.
“Oh?” Øystein did his best to sound calm. Where the hell was Harry, and why the hell had he turned his phone off?
“Can you see if they’re lying on the floor under the hook where I hang my jacket?”
“OK, hang on a moment,” Øystein said, and took the phone from
his mouth. He was breathing hard, as if he’d been holding his breath, which he might well have been. Think, think!
“Eikeland? Are you there, Eikeland?” Ringdal’s voice sounded thin and less threatening when Øystein was holding the phone farther away from him. Reluctantly he moved it closer to his ear again.
“Yes. No, I can’t see any keys. Where are you?”
“I’m standing outside my house.”
Harry’s inside, Øystein thought. If he’s heard Ringdal approach, he needs time to get away, a window at the back, a back door.
“Maybe the keys are out in the bar,” Øystein said. “Or in the toilet. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll go and check.”
“I never put my keys down anywhere, Eikeland.” This was said with such certainty that Øystein realised there was no point trying to sow any doubt. “I’ll just have to break the glass.”
“But…”
“I can get the window mended tomorrow, it’s no big deal.”
* * *
—
Harry was looking right into Ringdal’s eyes behind the glass, and it was a complete mystery to him that the other man couldn’t see him. He thought about retreating towards the door to the cellar and crawling out through one of the basement windows. But he knew that the slightest movement would give him away. Ringdal’s face moved away from the window. Harry saw Ringdal put his hand inside his jacket, under a dark pullover. He pulled out something black. A pistol with what Bjørn called a “stuck-up nose,” an extremely short barrel, possibly a Sig Sauer P320. Easy to fire, easy to use, quick trigger, effective at short range.
Harry gulped.
He imagined he could hear Ringdal’s defense lawyer. The accused thought a burglar was coming towards him through the darkness in the hallway, so he fired in self-defense. The defense lawyer asking Katrine Bratt in the witness stand: “On whose orders was Hole inside the house?”
