Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  Peter steered the car around a bend as the headlights swept across banks of snow that were still one and a half metres high, even though it was the end of March, so close to the edge of the road that it felt like driving through a tunnel that was far too narrow.

  He emerged onto a straight section and accelerated, more out of anger than haste. Because he had been planning to make a move on Tina at the banquet. He knew she had her eye on him as well. But the fair-haired girl had won gold in the lightweight class, and a female Norwegian champion doesn’t fuck a loser, especially not one who’s half a head shorter than her, and who she might now think she could floor on the judo mat. That’s how evolution works.

  As if by magic it stopped snowing, and the road—which stretched off between the banks of snow like a long, black pencil line on a white page—lay bathed in moonlight. Was this the eye of the storm? No, for fuck’s sake, this wasn’t some tropical storm, it was just a Norwegian one, and they didn’t have eyes, just teeth.

  Peter looked at the speedometer. He felt tiredness settling over him, the result of the long drive to Trondheim yesterday after his lectures at business school, the matches today, the champagne. Hell, he’d thought out some fucking funny remarks for his victory interview, he was going to say—

  And there she was. Tina. Right in front of him in the light of the headlamps, with her long fair hair, a flashing red star above her head, waving her arms as if to welcome him. She wanted him after all! Peter smiled. Smiled because he realised he was only imagining this, and his brain told his foot to press the brake pedal. It wasn’t Tina, he thought, it couldn’t be her, Tina was at the banquet dancing with one of the winners, probably welterweight, and his foot pressed the pedal, because it wasn’t his imagination that there was a girl standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of Dovrefjell, in the middle of the night, with a red star above her head, a real-life girl with fair hair.

  And then the car hit the girl.

  There were two quick thuds, one of them from the roof, and she was gone.

  Peter took his foot off the brake, pulled the seat belt away from his chest and drove on slowly. He didn’t look in the mirror. Didn’t want to look in the mirror. Because maybe he had imagined it after all? The windshield had a large white rose on it where it had hit Tina. Tina or another girl.

  He reached a bend where he wouldn’t be able to see if there was anyone lying on the road behind him. He kept his eyes fixed ahead of him, then slammed the brakes on. A car that had evidently lost its grip or got caught by a gust of wind was standing with its front pressed into the bank of snow, sideways, blocking the road.

  Peter sat there until he got his breath back before putting the car into reverse. He accelerated, heard the engine complain, but he wasn’t about to turn back, he was going to Oslo. He stopped when he saw something in the road, something glinting in the glare of the rear lights. He got out. It was the red star. Or rather, it was a warning triangle. The girl was lying on the windswept pavement just beyond it. An unmoving, shapeless bundle, like a sack of wood someone had stuck a fair-haired head on. Parts of her trousers and jacket had been torn off. He sank to his knees. The whistling of the wind rose and fell in an ominous melody over the moonlit banks of snow.

  She was dead. Shattered. In pieces.

  Peter Ringdal felt sober now. More sober than he had ever felt in his twenty-two-year life. Which was already over. He had been driving at 140 before he started to brake, sixty above the speed limit, and for all he knew they could probably work out what speed the car had been going from the extent of her injuries. Or the length of the trail of blood, the distance between where her body had first hit the ground and where it had ended up. His brain automatically began to identify the variables in that sort of calculation, as if he could somehow escape the more pressing realities that way. Because his speed wasn’t the worst of it. Or the fact that he hadn’t reacted quickly enough. He could blame the weather, he could say visibility had been poor. But what he couldn’t deny, and what was a measurable fact, was the amount of alcohol in his blood. The fact that he had been driving drunk. That he had made a choice, and that choice had killed someone. No, he had killed someone. Peter Ringdal repeated it to himself, he didn’t know why: I have killed someone. And his blood would be tested for alcohol; it always was in car accidents when someone got hurt.

  His brain began its calculations again, couldn’t help it.

  And when it had finished, he stood up and looked out across the desolate, windswept landscape. He was struck by how alien it looked, so different from when he had been driving in the opposite direction the day before. Now it might as well be a desert in a foreign country, apparently empty of people but where enemies might be hiding in every depression in the terrain.

  He reversed his car alongside the girl, took his white judo outfit from his bag, spread it out across the back seat. Then he tried to lift her. He may have been a former Norwegian judo champion, but she still slid out of his grasp. In the end he carried her like a rucksack and bundled her onto the back seat. He turned the heater up full and drove up to her car. A Mazda. The keys were in the ignition. He got out a tow rope, pulled the Mazda out of the snow and parked it beside the bank of snow on the straight section where other vehicles would be able to see it in time to brake. Then he got back into his own car, turned around and drove back towards Trondheim. After two kilometres he reached a turning that probably led to one of the cabins you could see out on the plateau in better weather. He parked the car ten metres along the track, unwilling to drive any farther in case he got stuck. He took off his jacket and sweater because the hot air from the heater was making him sweat. He looked at the time. Three hours had passed since he had drunk almost a full bottle of champagne with a 12 percent alcohol content. He did the quick calculation he’d had plenty of opportunities to practise in the past few years. Alcohol measured in grams divided by his own weight, times 0.7. Minus 0.15 times the number of hours. He concluded it would be another three hours before he was safe.

  It started to snow again. A heavy shower that hung like a wall on all sides of the car.

  Another hour passed. Out on the main road a car passed at a snail’s pace. It was hard to guess where it might have come from, seeing as the radio had said the E6 was closed.

  Peter looked up the emergency number, the one he was going to call when the time was right, once the alcohol had been burned up. He glanced in the mirror. Weren’t dead bodies supposed to leak? But there was no smell. Maybe she’d been to the toilet just before she set off to drive across Dovrefjell. Lucky for her, lucky for him. He yawned. Fell asleep.

  When he woke up the weather was still the same, the darkness was still the same.

  He looked at the time. He had been asleep for an hour and a half. He called the number.

  “My name is Peter Ringdal, I want to report a car accident on Dovrefjell.”

  They said they’d be there as soon as possible.

  Peter waited a bit longer. Even if they were coming from the Dombås side, it would take them at least an hour.

  Then he moved the body into the boot and drove out onto the main road. He parked and waited. An hour passed. He opened his bag and took out his Nikon camera, the one he’d won at a tournament in Japan, got out of the car into the storm and opened the boot. There was plenty of space for the little body in there. He took a few pictures every time the wind eased and there was a slight pause in the snow. He made sure he took a picture of her watch, which, miraculously enough, was undamaged. Then he closed the boot again.

  Why had he taken pictures?

  To prove she had been lying in the boot for a long time rather than inside the car? Or was there some other reason, a thought he hadn’t yet managed to decipher, a sense of something he hadn’t yet realised?

  When he caught sight of the flashing light, like a lighthouse on top of the snowplough, he switched the heater of
f altogether. And hoped that his calculations were correct, when it came to both her and him.

  * * *

  —

  A police car and ambulance were following the snowplow. The paramedics concluded at once that the girl in the boot was dead.

  “Feel her,” Peter said, putting his hand on the girl’s forehead. “She’s still warm.”

  He noticed the policewoman looking at him.

  After the paramedics had taken a blood sample from him inside the ambulance, he was asked to get in the back of the police car.

  He explained how the girl had come rushing out of the snowdrift and ran into his car.

  “More like you ran into her,” the policewoman said, looking down at the pad she was making notes in.

  Peter explained about the warning triangle, about the car that was stuck across the road on the bend, how he had moved it to prevent anyone else driving into it.

  The older policeman nodded approvingly. “It’s good that you had the sense to think about others in a situation like this, lad.”

  Peter felt something in his throat. He tried to clear it before realising that it was a sob. So he swallowed it instead.

  “The E6 was closed six hours ago,” the policewoman said. “If you called us as soon as you hit the girl, you took a hell of a long time to get from the barrier to here.”

  “I had to stop several times because of the visibility,” Peter said.

  “Yes, this is a real spring storm,” the policeman rumbled.

  Peter looked out of the window. The wind had eased, and the snow was settling on the road now. They wouldn’t find any sign of where the girl had hit the road. Nor any other tire tracks crossing the trail of blood on the pavement that might prompt them to look for any vehicles that had crossed Dovrefjell at the time in question. They wouldn’t get a witness statement from someone saying that yes, he had seen a car parked along the straight section, and yes, it was the same make as the girl’s, but no, that had been several hours before Peter Ringdal claimed he hit the girl.

  * * *

  —

  “You got away with it,” Harry said.

  He had sat Peter Ringdal on the sofa and was himself sitting astride the high-backed armchair. Harry’s right hand was resting on his lap, still holding the pistol.

  Ringdal nodded. “There were traces of alcohol in my blood, but not enough. The girl’s parents filed charges against me, but I was acquitted.”

  Harry nodded. He remembered what Kaja had said about Ringdal’s criminal record, and the charge of reckless driving when he was a student.

  “That was lucky,” Harry said drily.

  Ringdal shook his head. “I thought so too, but I was wrong.”

  “Oh?”

  “I didn’t sleep for three years. And by that I mean that I didn’t sleep a single hour, a single minute. That hour and a half I slept up on the plateau, that was the last time I slept. And nothing helped, pills just made me crazy and unhinged, alcohol made me depressed and angry. I thought it was because I was frightened I was going to get caught, that the person who drove across Dovrefjell was going to come forward. And I didn’t get anywhere until I realised that wasn’t the problem. I’d started to have suicidal thoughts and was seeing a psychologist. I told her a different, made-up story but with the same content, with me causing another person’s death. And she told me that the problem was that I hadn’t made amends. You have to make amends. So I made amends. I stopped taking pills, stopped drinking. Started to sleep. Got better.”

  “How did you make amends?”

  “Same way as you, Harry. By trying to save enough innocent lives to make up for the ones you’re responsible for losing.”

  Harry looked at the short, dark-haired man on the sofa.

  “I devoted my life to a project,” Ringdal said, looking out at the satellite sculpture, which the rays of sunlight had now reached, casting sharp shadows into the living room. “A future where lives aren’t ruined by pointless, unnecessary traffic accidents. And by that I don’t just mean the girl’s life, but my own.”

  “Self-driving cars.”

  “Carriages,” Ringdal corrected. “And they’re not self-driving, they’re controlled centrally, like the electronic impulses in a computer. They can’t crash, they maximise speed and choice of route from the position of the other carriages right from the start. Everything follows the logic of the matrix and physics, and eliminates human drivers’ fatal fallibility.”

  “And the photograph of the dead girl?”

  “…I’ve had that in front of me right from the start so I never forget why I’m doing this. Why I’ve let myself be ridiculed in the media, yelled at by investors, why I’ve gone bankrupt and had trouble from car manufacturers. And why I still sit up at night working, when I’m not working in a bar that I hope will make enough profit to finance the project and employ engineers and architects and get the whole thing back on the agenda.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  Ringdal shrugged. “Letters with a certain subtext. People showing up at the door a few times. Nothing you could ever use against them, but enough to make me get hold of that.” He nodded towards the pistol that was still lying on the floor.

  “Mm. This is a lot to take in, Ringdal. Why should I believe you?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “When did that become a reason?”

  Ringdal let out a short laugh. “You might not believe this either, but when you were standing behind me with your arm out and the pistol against my head, you were standing in the perfect position for a seoi nage. If I’d wanted to, you would have been lying on the floor before you realised what was happening, disarmed and with all the air knocked out of you.”

  “So why didn’t you do it?”

  Ringdal shrugged again. “You showed me the photograph.”

  “And?”

  “It was time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To talk. To tell the truth. The whole truth.”

  “OK. So would you like to go on?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve already confessed to one murder. How about confessing to the other one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rakel’s.”

  Ringdal jerked his head back in a movement that made him look like an ostrich. “You think I killed Rakel?”

  “Tell me quickly and without giving yourself time to think, why your fingerprints were found on a blue glass in Rakel’s dishwasher, a dishwasher where nothing dirty is allowed to sit for more than a day, and why you haven’t told the police you were there. And why you’ve got this in a drawer in your hall?” Harry pulled Rakel’s red scarf out of his jacket pocket and held it up.

  “That’s easy,” Ringdal said. “They both have the same explanation.”

  “Which is?”

  “That she was here the morning of the day before she was killed.”

  “Here? What for?”

  “Because I’d invited her. I wanted to persuade her to carry on chairing the committee at the Jealousy. You remember?”

  “I remember you mentioning it, yes. But I also know she’d never have been interested, she only helped out with the bar because of me.”

  “Yes, that’s what she said when she came.”

  “So why did she come at all?”

  “Because she had her own agenda. She wanted to persuade me to buy these glasses, which I understand are made by a Syrian family who have a small glass workshop just outside Oslo. Rakel had brought one glass with her in an attempt to convince me that they were the perfect drinking glasses. I thought it was a bit too heavy.”

  Harry could see Peter Ringdal holding the glass, weighing it in his hand. Giving it back to Rakel. Who took it home again and put it in the dishwasher. Unused, but not quite clean.
/>   “And the scarf?” he asked, already guessing the answer.

  “She left it on the coat rack when she left.”

  “Why did you put it in the drawer?”

  “The scarf smelled of Rakel’s perfume, and my lady friend has a strong sense of smell and is extremely prone to jealousy. She was coming by that evening, and we both have a better time when she doesn’t suspect me of playing the field.”

  Harry drummed the fingers of his left hand on the armrest. “Can you prove that Rakel was here?”

  “Well.” Ringdal scratched his temple. “If you haven’t already wiped everything off, her fingerprints should still be on the armrests of the chair you’re sitting in, I suppose. Or on the kitchen table. No, hang on! The coffee cup she used. It’s in the dishwasher, I never run it before it’s full.”

  “Good,” Harry said.

  “I also went to see that glassworks in Nittedal. Nice glasses. They offered to make them a bit lighter. With the Jealousy’s logo on them. I ordered two hundred.”

  “Last question,” Harry said, even though he knew the answer to this as well. “Why didn’t you tell the police that Rakel was here a day and a half before she was murdered?”

  “I weighed up the consequences of becoming involved in a murder inquiry against the benefit the police might get from the information. Because the police suspected me once before, when my ex-wife suddenly took off back to Russia without telling anyone and was reported missing here in Oslo. She showed up, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience being in the police spotlight, I can assure you. So I concluded that if what Rakel was doing a day and a half before the murder was important to the police, they’d track her phone’s movements, see that she’d been in this neighbourhood and put two and two together. In short, I reasoned it was up to the police, not me. So I chose the selfish option. But I realise I should have told them.”