Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  He saw the pistol being raised, then the hand swing back.

  * * *

  —

  “I can see them!” Øystein shouted into his phone.

  Silence at the other end.

  “That was in the nick of time,” Ringdal’s voice finally said. “Where—”

  “On the floor. Below the hook, where you said. They’re behind the broom.”

  “Broom? There’s no broom…”

  “I put it in there, I kept kicking it behind the bar,” Øystein said, leaning through the doorway to look at the bar, where a throng of unserved, thirsty customers was waiting. He grabbed the brush and put it behind the door, beneath the hook.

  “OK, hang on to them, I’m on my way.”

  The line went dead.

  Øystein called Harry’s number. Still the same woman’s voice reciting her mantra about the phone being switched off. Øystein wiped the sweat from his brow. Relegation. The season had hardly begun, but it was already decided, it was the law of gravity, which could at best be counterbalanced rather than avoided.

  “Øyvind! Where are you, Øyvind?”

  “Øy-STEIN!” Øystein bellowed towards the crowd on the other side of the doorway. “I’m definitely an Øy, but I’d much prefer to be a -stein, OK?”

  * * *

  —

  Harry watched the shape move away from the window. He heard quick footsteps down the steps. The dog started barking again.

  Keep them there, I’m on my way.

  Øystein must have persuaded Ringdal that he had his keys.

  He heard a car start, then disappear.

  His own car was parked on a different planet. There was no way he could get to the Jealousy Bar ahead of Ringdal. And his phone was dead, so he couldn’t contact Øystein. Harry tried to think. It was as if his brain had lost its steering, and kept thinking about the photograph of the dead girl. And something Bjørn had said about developing pictures from crime scenes back when they still had a darkroom in Forensics. That new staff always tended to use too much contrast, meaning that there was less detail in both black and white. The contrast in the photograph in the basement wasn’t exaggerated because of the flash, but because it had been developed by an amateur. Harry was suddenly sure. Ringdal had taken the picture himself. Of a girl he had killed himself.

  34

  Øystein saw the door swing open from the corner of his eye. It was him, Ringdal. He walked in, but was so short that he immediately vanished in the crowd of customers. But Øystein could see them moving, could tell he was on his way over, like the jungle moving above the Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park. Øystein went on pouring beer. He saw the brown liquid fill the glass, then the head form on top of it. The tap spluttered. An air bubble, or was it time to change the barrel again already? He didn’t know. He didn’t know if this was the end, or just a bump in the road. All he could do was wait and see. Wait and see if everything was going to go to hell. No question about that “if,” really. Everything always went to hell, it was all just a question of time. At least if your best friend was called Harry Hole.

  “It’s the barrel,” he said to the girl. “I’ll go and change it, tell Ringdal I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Øystein went into the back room, locked himself inside the staff toilet, which also functioned as a storage space for everything from glasses and napkins to coffee and filters. He took out his phone and made one last attempt to call Harry. With the same deflating result.

  “Eikeland?”

  Ringdal had come into the back room. “Eikeland!”

  “In here,” Øystein mumbled.

  “I thought you were changing the barrel?”

  “It wasn’t empty after all. I’m on the bog.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “On the bog, as in having a shit.” Øystein underlined the claim by straining his stomach muscles and pressing the air from his lungs in a long, loud groan. “Help out in the bar and I’ll be out soon.”

  “Push the keys under the door. Come on, Eikeland, I want to get home!”

  “I’ve got a magnificent cable halfway out, boss, we could be talking a world record here, so I’m reluctant to pinch it off halfway.”

  “Keep your toilet humour for people who appreciate it, Eikeland. Now.”

  “OK, OK, just give me a minute.”

  Silence.

  Øystein wondered how long he could delay things. Delaying was everything. Wasn’t that what life came down to in the end, anyway?

  After counting slowly to twenty and still not managing to come up with a better excuse than the ten hopeless ones he had already thought of, he flushed the toilet, unlocked the door and went out into the bar.

  Ringdal was handing a customer a glass of wine, took his bank card and turned towards Øystein, who had put his hands in his pockets and adopted an expression that he hoped conveyed surprise and dismay. That wasn’t far from what he was actually feeling.

  “I had them right here!” Øystein called over the music and buzz of conversation. “I must have lost them somewhere.”

  “What’s going on, Eikeland?” More abstract than interested.

  “Going on?”

  Ringdal’s eyes narrowed. “Go-ing on,” he said. Slowly, almost in a whisper, yet it still cut through the noise like a knife.

  Øystein swallowed hard. And decided to give up. He had never understood people who let themselves be tortured and then told the truth. He couldn’t help thinking that was just lose-lose.

  “OK, boss. It’s—”

  “Øystein!”

  It wasn’t the girl this time, finally getting his name right. The cry came from over by the door, and this person didn’t pass below the canopy of customers, but stood a head taller than them, as if he were swimming through them. “Øystein, my Øystein!” Harry repeated, with a wild grin. And seeing as Øystein had never seen Harry with that sort of grin before, it was quite a disconcerting sight. “Happy birthday, old friend!”

  The other customers turned towards Harry, and a few glanced at Øystein. Harry reached the bar and threw his arms round Øystein, pressing him to him with one hand between his shoulder blades and the other at the base of his spine. In fact it slid even lower down, and came dangerously close to his buttocks.

  Harry let him go and straightened up. Someone began to sing. And someone—it must have been the girl—turned the music off. Then more of them joined in.

  “Happy birthday to you…”

  No, Øystein thought, not that, I’d prefer the rack and having my fingernails pulled out.

  But it was too late, even Ringdal joined in, somewhat reluctantly, presumably keen to show everyone what a great guy he was. Øystein bared his brown teeth in a stiff smile as embarrassment burned his cheeks and ears, but that just made them laugh and sing even louder.

  The song ended with everyone raising their glasses to Øystein, and with Harry giving him a hard slap on the backside. And only when he noticed something sharp pressing into his buttock did he realise what the opening hug had been about.

  The music came back on, and Ringdal turned to Øystein and offered him his hand. “Happy birthday, Eikeland. Why didn’t you say it was your birthday when you asked to have the evening off?”

  “Well, I didn’t want…” Øystein shrugged. “I suppose I just like to keep things to myself.”

  “Really?” Ringdal said, looking genuinely surprised.

  “Oh, by the way,” Øystein said. “I remembered where I put your keys.” With what he hoped didn’t look like too exaggerated a gesture, he put his hand in the back pocket of his trousers.

  “Here.”

  He held up the key ring. Ringdal stared at it for a moment, then glanced at Harry. Then he snatched it from Øystein.

  “Have a good night, boys.”

  Ringdal strod
e towards the door.

  “Fucking hell, Harry,” Øystein hissed as he watched him leave. “Fucking hell!”

  “Sorry,” Harry said. “A quick question. After Bjørn got me out of here on the night of the murder, what did Ringdal do?”

  “Do?” Øystein thought. He stuck one finger in his ear as if the answer might be in there. “That’s right, he went straight home. He said his nose wouldn’t stop bleeding.”

  Øystein felt something wet against his cheek. He turned towards the girl, who was standing there, her lips still in a pout. “Happy birthday. I’d never have guessed you were an Aries, Øyvind.”

  “You know what they say.” Harry smiled, putting one hand on Øystein’s shoulder. “Up like a lion, down like a ram.”

  “What did he mean by that?” the girl asked as she watched Harry march off towards the door in Ringdal’s wake.

  “You tell me. He’s a man of mystery,” Øystein mumbled, hoping Ringdal wouldn’t pay any attention to his date of birth on his next wage slip. “Let’s put some Stones on and get this place going, OK?”

  * * *

  —

  His phone woke up after a few minutes’ charging in the car. Harry brought up a name, pressed Call and got an answer as he braked at a red light on Sannergata.

  “No, Harry, I don’t want to have sex with you!”

  The acoustics suggested Alexandra was in her office at the Forensic Medical Institute.

  “Great,” Harry said. “But I’ve got a bloodstained sweater that—”

  “No!”

  Harry took a deep breath. “If Rakel’s DNA is in the blood, that puts the owner of the sweater at the scene on the night Rakel died. Please, Alexandra.”

  There was silence at the other end of the line. A noisy drunk stopped on the crossing in front of the car, swayed, stared at Harry with a dark, foggy look in his eyes, hit the hood with his fist, then wandered off into the darkness.

  “You know what?” she said. “I hate bed-hoppers like you.”

  “OK, but you love solving murders.”

  Another pause.

  “Sometimes I wonder if you even like me at all, Harry.”

  “Of course I do. I may be a desperate man, but not when it comes to who I go to bed with.”

  “Someone you go to bed with? Is that all I am?”

  “No, don’t be daft. We’re professional colleagues who catch criminals who would otherwise plunge our society into chaos and anarchy.”

  “Ha ha,” she groaned drily.

  “Obviously I’m willing to lie to you to get you to do this,” Harry said. “But I like you, OK?”

  “Do you want to have sex with me?”

  “Well. No. Yes, but no. If you get what I mean.”

  It sounded like there was a radio playing quietly in her office. She was on her own.

  She let out a deep sigh. “If I do this, Harry, you need to be clear that it isn’t for your sake. But I still can’t do a full DNA analysis for a while—there’s a long queue, and Kripos and Bratt’s team are breathing down my neck the whole time.”

  “I know. But a partial profile that excludes matches against certain other profiles takes less time, doesn’t it?”

  Harry heard Alexandra hesitate. “And who do you want to have excluded?”

  “The owner of the sweater’s DNA. Mine. And Rakel’s.”

  “Yours?”

  “The owner of the sweater and I had a little boxing match. He had a nosebleed, my knuckles were bleeding, so it isn’t impossible that that’s where the blood on the sweater comes from.”

  “OK. You and Rakel are in the DNA database, so you’re fine. But if I need to exclude a match with the sweater’s owner, I’ll need something I can get his DNA profile from.”

  “I’ve thought about that. I’ve got a pair of bloodstained jeans in my laundry basket, and there’s too much blood for it all to have come from my knuckles, so some of that must be from his nose. Sounds like you’re still at work?”

  “I am.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  * * *

  —

  Alexandra was waiting when Harry pulled up outside the entrance to the Rikshospital, freezing with her arms wrapped round her. She was wearing high-heeled shoes, tight trousers and a lot of make-up. Alone at work, but looking like she was going to a party. He’d never seen her any other way. Alexandra Sturdza said life was too short not to make yourself look as good as you could all the time.

  Harry wound the window down. She bent over.

  “Evening, mister.” She smiled. “Five hundred for a hand job, seven for—”

  Harry shook his head and handed her two plastic bags: one containing Ringdal’s sweater, the other with his own jeans. “You know no one in Norway works at this time of the night?”

  “Oh, is that why I’m alone here? You Norwegians truly have a lot to teach the rest of the world.”

  “Working less?”

  “Lowering the bar. Why go to the moon when you’ve got a cabin in the mountains?”

  “Mm. I really appreciate this, Alexandra.”

  “In that case, you ought to choose something from the price list,” she said without smiling. “Is it that Kaja who’s lured you away? I’ll kill her.”

  “Her?” Harry leaned over and looked at her more closely. “I thought it was people like me you hated?”

  “I hate you, but she’s the one I want to kill. If you get that?”

  Harry nodded slowly. Killing. He was about to ask if that was a Romanian saying, something that sounded worse when it was translated into Norwegian, but decided against it.

  Alexandra took a step back from the car and looked at him as the window slid silently closed.

  Harry looked in the mirror as he drove off. She was still standing there, arms by her sides, under the light of the street lamp, getting smaller and smaller.

  He called Kaja as he was passing under Ring 3 and told her about the sweater. And the scarf in the drawer. About Ringdal showing up, and his pistol. He asked her to check if he had a gun license, as soon as she could.

  “One more thing—” Harry said.

  “Does this mean you’re not on your way here?” she interrupted.

  “What?”

  “You’re five minutes away from me and you say ‘one more thing’ like we’re not going to be seeing each other soon.”

  “I need to think,” Harry said. “And I think best on my own.”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean to nag.”

  “You’re not nagging.”

  “No, I…” She sighed. “What’s the last thing?”

  “Ringdal has a photograph of the shattered body of a woman on the wall above his computer. You know, so he can see her the whole time. Like a certificate or something.”

  “Bloody hell. What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. But do you think you could find a photograph of his ex-wife, the Russian one who disappeared?”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard. If there’s nothing on Google, I’ll call her friend again. I’ll text it to you.”

  “Thanks.” Harry drove slowly down Sognsveien, between the brick houses in the quiet, English-style garden district. He saw a pair of headlights coming towards him. “Kaja?”

  “Yes?”

  It was a bus. Pale, ghostly faces looked out at him from inside the illuminated vehicle as it passed. And among them Rakel’s face. They were coming more frequently now, the flashes of memory, like loose stones before a landslide.

  “Nothing,” Harry said. “Goodnight.”

  * * *

  —

  Harry was sitting on the sofa listening to the Ramones.

  Not because the Ramones meant anything special to him, but because the album had been sitting on the record player ev
er since Bjørn had given it to him. And he realised he’d been steering clear of music since the funeral, that he hadn’t turned the radio on once, not here at home or in the Escort, and seemed to have preferred silence. Silence to think. Silence while he tried to hear what it was saying, the voice out there, on the other side of the darkness, behind a half-moon-shaped window, behind the windows of the ghostly bus, saying something he could almost hear. Almost. But now it needed to be drowned out instead. Because now it was talking too loudly, and he couldn’t bear to hear it.

  He turned the volume up, closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the shelves of records behind the sofa. The Ramones. Road to Ruin. Joey’s punchy lyrics. Even so, it still sounded more pop than punk. That was what tended to happen. Success, the good life, age, they all made even the angriest of people more conciliatory. The way they had with Harry, making him milder, kinder. Almost sociable. Happily tamed by a woman he loved in a marriage that worked. Not perfect. Well, fuck it, as perfect as anyone could bear. Until one day, like a bolt from the blue, she picked at a sore point. Confronted him with her suspicions. And he had confessed. No, not confessed. He always told Rakel what she wanted to know, it was just up to her to ask. And she had always known better than to ask about more than she needed to know. So she must have thought she needed to know. One night with Katrine. Katrine had taken care of him on a night when he was so drunk that he couldn’t look after himself. Had they had sex? Harry didn’t remember, he had been rat-arsed, probably so drunk that even if he had tried he wouldn’t have managed it. But he told Rakel the truth, that it couldn’t be ruled out entirely. And then she had said that it didn’t make any difference, that he had betrayed her anyway, that she didn’t want to see him again, and told Harry to pack his things.

  Just the thought of it now hurt so much that it left Harry gasping for breath.

  He had taken a bag of clothes, his bathroom stuff and his records, leaving the CDs behind. Harry hadn’t drunk a drop of alcohol since the night Katrine picked him up, but the day Rakel threw him out he went straight to the liquor store. And was stopped by one of the staff when he started to unscrew one of the bottles before he was out of the shop.