Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  Harry nodded. In the silence that settled he heard a clock ticking somewhere inside the house, and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it last time he was there. It sounded like a countdown. And it struck him that that could well be what it was, a clock inside his head counting down his last hours, minutes, seconds.

  It felt like he needed all his strength to get to his feet. He took out his wallet. Opened it and looked inside. He pulled out the only note, five-hundred kroner, and put it on the table.

  “What’s that for?”

  “The broken glass in your door,” Harry said.

  “Thanks.”

  Harry turned to leave. He stopped and turned back, and looked thoughtfully down at the picture of Sigrid Undset on the note. “Mm. Have you got any change?”

  Ringdal laughed. “It’s going to cost at least five hundred to—”

  “You’re right,” Harry said, and picked the money up again. “I’ll have to owe you. Good luck with the Jealousy Bar. Goodbye.”

  The sound of the whining dog faded away, but the ticking sound grew louder as Harry walked down the road.

  38

  Harry was sitting in the car, listening.

  He had realised that the ticking was his own heart beating. Rakel’s half.

  Racing away.

  And it had been doing that ever since the moment he saw the bloody knife on his shelf.

  That was ten hours ago now, and his brain had spent those hours frantically searching for an answer, for a way out, for alternatives to the only explanation he could think of, skittering hither and thither like a rat below deck on a sinking ship, finding nothing but closed doors and dead ends as the water rose higher and higher towards the ceiling. And that half of his heart was beating faster and faster, as if it knew what was coming. Knew it was going to have to speed up if it was going to have time to use up the two billion heartbeats the average human life was made up of. Because he had woken up now. Had woken up, and was going to die.

  That morning—after the hypnosis, but before he went to see Ringdal—Harry had rung the doorbell of the flat immediately below his, on the first floor. Gule—who worked nights on the trams—had come to the door in just his boxers, but if he thought it was early he didn’t mention it. Gule hadn’t been living in the building back when Harry had his own flat on the third floor, so Harry didn’t really know him. Perched on his nose was a pair of round, steel-rimmed glasses that must somehow have survived the seventies, eighties and nineties and had therefore achieved retro status. A bit of wispy hair that wasn’t entirely sure what it was doing meant that he could just about avoid being described as bald. He spoke in a jerky, toneless way, like the voice of a satnav. Gule confirmed what he had told the police, which was in the report. He had got home from work at quarter to eleven in the evening, when he had met Bjørn Holm who was on his way down the stairs, having put Harry to bed. When Gule went to bed at three o’clock in the morning, he still hadn’t heard a sound from Harry’s flat.

  “What were you doing that night?” Harry had asked.

  “I was watching Broadchurch,” Gule said. When Harry showed no reaction, he added: “It’s a British television series. Crime.”

  “Mm. Do you watch a lot of television at night?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. My daily routine is a bit different to most people’s. I work late and it always takes me a while to wind down after I finish.”

  “It takes a while to wind down after driving trams?”

  “Yes. But three o’clock is bedtime. Then up at eleven. You don’t want to fall outside normal society altogether.”

  “If the soundproofing here is as bad as you say, and you watch television at night, how come I live right above you, and sometimes go up and down the stairs late at night, and have never heard anything from your flat?”

  “That’s because I’m considerate and wear headphones.” A couple of seconds passed before Gule asked: “Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “Tell me,” Harry said. “How can you be so sure you would have heard me going out if you were wearing headphones?”

  “It was Broadchurch,” Gule said. Then, when he remembered his neighbour hadn’t seen it: “It’s not exactly loud, if I can put it like that.”

  Harry persuaded Gule to put on his headphones and start watching Broadchurch, which he said he could find on the NRK website, then see if he could hear anything from Harry’s flat or the stairwell. When Harry rang the doorbell again, Gule answered and asked him if they were going to start the test soon.

  “Something’s come up, we’ll have to do this some other time,” Harry had said. He decided not to tell Gule that he’d just walked from his bed, downstairs to the front door, then back again.

  Harry didn’t know much about panic attacks. But what he had heard fitted pretty well with what he was feeling right now. His heart, the sweating, the feeling of not being able to sit still, thoughts that wouldn’t settle and kept swirling around his head to the beat of his racing heart, as he careered towards the wall. The daily wish to carry on living, not forever, but another day, and therefore forever, like a hamster constantly running faster so the wheel doesn’t overtake it, and dying of a heart attack long before it realises that that’s all it is, a wheel, a meaningless race against time where time has already reached the finish line and is waiting for you, waiting for you, counting down, tick-tock, tick-tock.

  Harry hit his head on the steering wheel.

  He had woken up from his slumber, and now it was true.

  He was guilty.

  * * *

  —

  In the blackness of that night, on that windswept hillside in a storm of alcohol and God knows what else—because of course it was still a total, utter blank—it had happened. He had got home and was put to bed. He had got up as soon as Bjørn had left. He had driven to Rakel’s, arriving there at 23:21, according to the wildlife camera, which all fitted. Still so drunk that he was hunched over as he walked up to the house and straight in through the unlocked door. He had gone down on his knees and begged, and Rakel told him she had thought about it, but had made her mind up: she didn’t want him back. Or had he, in the full madness of drink, already decided before he went in that he was going to kill her, and himself, because he didn’t want to live without her? Then stuck the knife into her before she had time to tell him what he didn’t know at the time, that she had spoken to Oleg and had made up her mind to give Harry another chance? The thought of that was unbearable. He hit his head against the wheel again and felt the skin on his forehead tear.

  Killing himself. Had he been thinking about that even then?

  Even if the hours before he woke up on the floor of Rakel’s house were still blank, he had realised—and then suppressed the fact—that he was guilty. And had immediately started looking for a scapegoat. Not for his own sake, but for Oleg’s. But now, when it had proved impossible to find a scapegoat, or at least one who deserved to be the victim of a miscarriage of justice, Harry had played out his role. He could leave the stage. Leave everything.

  Kill himself. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it.

  He had stood over bodies where as a murder detective he had to decide if this was someone who had taken their own life, or if someone else had done it. He was rarely in any doubt. Even where brutal means of death had been chosen, and the scenes were chaotic and bloody, most suicides had something simple and lonely about them: a decision, an act, no interaction, few complicated forensic issues. And the scenes tended to be still. Not that the scenes of suicides didn’t speak to him, because they did, but it wasn’t a cacophony of voices and conflict. Just an internal monologue that he—on a particularly good or a particularly bad day—could hear. And that always made him think about suicide as a possibility. A way of exiting the stage. An escape route for the rat on a sinking ship.

  During the course of some o
f those investigations, Ståle Aune had guided Harry through the most common motives for suicide. From the infantile—revenge on the world, now-you’ll-be-sorry—through self-loathing, shame, pain, guilt, loss, all the way to the “small” motive—people who saw suicide as a comfort, a consolation. Who weren’t seeking an escape route, but just liked knowing it was there, the way a lot of people live in big cities because they offer everything from opera to strip clubs that they never think of making use of. Something to fend off the claustrophobia of being alive, of living. But then, in an unbalanced moment, prompted by drink, pills, romantic or financial problems, they take a decision, as heedless of the consequences as having another drink or punching a bartender, because the consolation thought has become the only thought.

  Yes, Harry had considered it. But it had never—until now—been the only thought. He might be suffering from angst, but he was sober. And the thought had more to it than merely a conclusive end to pain. There was consideration of others, those who would go on living. He had thought it through. A murder investigation was supposed to serve several purposes. To bring certainty and peace to those left behind and society in general was only one of them. Others—such as removing a dangerous person from the streets, maintaining order by showing potential criminals that criminals got punished, or by fulfilling society’s tacit need for vengeance—fell by the wayside if the perpetrator was dead. In other words: society expended fewer resources on an investigation that they suspected would at best give them a dead perpetrator, than on one where they risked the perpetrator remaining at large. So if Harry were to disappear now, there was a good chance that the investigation would focus on everything except the dead man Gule had already given an alibi for at the time of the murder. The only thing that could come out—and that pointed vaguely in Harry’s direction—was a 3-D expert who claimed that the perpetrator could be taller than one metre ninety, and that the car could be a Ford Escort. But for all Harry knew, that information may get no further than Bjørn Holm, whose loyalty to Harry was unshakeable and who over the years had crossed the line of professional ethics on more than one occasion. If Harry died now, there would be no trial; Oleg would be the focus of a lot of publicity, but he wouldn’t be stigmatised for the rest of his life, nor would Harry’s younger sister Sis, or Kaja, or Katrine, Bjørn, Ståle, Øystein or anyone else whose name was marked by a single letter in his phone. It was for them he had composed the three-sentence letter it had taken him an hour to write. Not because he thought the words in themselves would mean much either way, but because his suicide could obviously rouse suspicions that he was guilty, and because he wanted to give the others—the police—the answer they needed to put the case to bed.

  I’m sorry for the pain this will cause you, but I can’t bear the loss of Rakel and life without her. Thanks for everything. I’ve enjoyed knowing you. Harry.

  He had read the letter three times. Then he had taken out his cigarettes and lighter, lit a cigarette, then the letter, and flushed it down the toilet. There was a better solution. Dying in an accident. So he had got in his car and driven to Peter Ringdal’s, to tug at the last thread, extinguish his last hope.

  And now it had been extinguished. In some ways it was a relief.

  Harry had another think. Thought things through to see if he had remembered everything. Last night he had sat in his car, like he was now, and had seen the city below him, its lights shining in the darkness, bright enough to join the dots. But now he could see the whole picture, the city laid out beneath a high, blue sky, bathed in the sharp spring light of the new day.

  His heart was no longer beating as fast. Unless that was just the way it felt, that the countdown slowed down as it approached zero.

  Harry put his foot on the clutch, turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear.

  39

  Highway 287.

  Harry was driving north.

  The glare from the snow-covered hillsides was so bright that he had taken his sunglasses out from the glove compartment. His heart had begun to beat more normally after he left Oslo, on roads where there was less and less traffic the farther he got from the city. The sense of calm was presumably because the decision was made, that he in some ways was already dead, that one relatively simple act was all that remained. Or it could be because of the Jim Beam. He had made one stop on his way out of the city, the liquor store on Thereses gate where he had given them the note with Sigrid Undset on it in return for a half-bottle and some change. Then another stop at the Shell garage in Marienlyst where he used up the change to put some petrol in his almost empty tank. Not that he needed that much petrol. But he wasn’t going to need the change either. Now the bottle was lying three-quarters empty on the passenger seat, next to his pistol and phone. He had tried calling Kaja again but there was still no answer. He couldn’t help thinking that was probably just as well.

  He’d had to drink almost half the bourbon before he noticed any effect, but now he felt just detached enough from what was going to happen, but not so much that he risked killing anyone who shouldn’t be killed.

  The green mile.

  The police officer at the site of the accident two days earlier hadn’t told them exactly where on Highway 287 the crash had taken place, but that didn’t really matter. Any of the long straight sections would do the job.

  There was a truck in front of him.

  After the next bend Harry accelerated, pulled out, slipped past, saw that it was an articulated truck. He pulled in ahead of it. Glanced in the mirror. A tall cab.

  Harry sped up a bit more, staying above 120 even though the speed limit was 80. A couple of kilometres farther on he reached another long straight. Towards the end of it was a lay-by on the left-hand side. He indicated, crossed the road and drove into the empty lay-by, past a toilet and some bins, then turned the car around so it was facing south again. He pulled over to the side of the road and let the engine idle in neutral as he looked back down the road. He saw the air shimmering above the pavement, as if it were crossing a desert rather than a Norwegian valley in March with an ice-covered river beyond the crash barriers on the right-hand side. Maybe the alcohol was playing tricks on him. Harry looked at the bottle of Jim Beam. The sunshine made its golden contents shimmer.

  Something was telling him that it was cowardly to take his own life.

  Possibly, but it still demanded courage.

  And if you didn’t have that courage, it could be bought in a bottle for 209.90 kroner.

  Harry unscrewed the lid, drank the rest of the bourbon and replaced the lid.

  There. Detached enough. Courage.

  But, more important: the post-mortem would show that the notorious drunk had such a high percentage of alcohol in his blood when he crashed that it couldn’t be ruled out that he had simply lost control of the car. And there would be no suicide note or anything else to suggest that Harry Hole had planned to kill himself. No suicide, no suspicions, no shadow of the wife-killer falling on anyone who didn’t deserve it.

  He could see it way off to the south now. The articulated truck. A kilometre away.

  Harry checked in the left wing mirror. They had the road to themselves. He put the engine into first gear and released the clutch, then pulled out onto the road. He looked at the speedometer. Not too fast, because that would encourage suspicions of suicide. And it wasn’t necessary anyway, as the police officer had said at the scene of the accident: when a car drives into the front of a truck at eighty or ninety, seat belts and airbags didn’t count for much. The steering wheel would end up behind the back seat.

  The speedometer hit ninety.

  One hundred metres in four seconds, a kilometre in forty. If the truck was going at the same speed, they’d meet in less than twenty seconds.

  Five hundred metres. Ten…nine…

  Harry wasn’t thinking about anything, apart from his intention: to hit the truck in the middle
of its radiator. He was grateful he lived in an age where it was still possible to steer your car straight into your own and other people’s deaths, but this funeral was going to be his alone. He would damage the truck and leave its driver scarred for life, prone to recurrent nightmares, but as the years passed hopefully that would happen less and less frequently. Because ghosts really did fade.

  Four hundred metres. He steered the Escort onto the other side of the road. Tried to make it look like he was swerving, so the truck driver could tell the police it looked like the driver of the car had simply lost control of his car or fallen asleep at the wheel. Harry heard the howl of the truck’s horn rise in volume and tone. The Doppler effect. It cut into his ear like a knife of disharmony, the sound of approaching death. And to drown out its shriek, to stop himself dying to that music, Harry reached out his right hand and turned the radio on, full blast. Two hundred metres. The speakers were crackling.

  Farther along we’ll know more about it…

  Harry had heard the slow version of the gospel song before. The violins…

  Farther along we’ll understand why.

  The front of the truck was growing larger. Three…two…

  Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine.

  So completely right. So completely…wrong. Harry wrenched the wheel hard to the right.

  The Ford Escort veered back onto its own side of the road, only just missing the left-hand corner of the front of the truck. Harry was heading straight towards the crash barriers and braked, turning the wheel sharply to the left. He felt the tires lose their grip, the back of the car slide right, and felt the centrifugal force push him into his seat as the car spun round, aware that this couldn’t possibly end well. He had time to see the truck disappear ahead of him, it was already a long way away, before the back of the car hit the crash barrier and he became weightless. Blue sky, light. For a moment he thought he was dead, that it was like they said: that you left your body and rose up towards paradise. But the paradise he was heading towards was spinning, as were the forest-covered hillside, the road and the river, while the sun was going up and down like a time-lapse film about the seasons, to the accompaniment of a voice that, in the sudden, strange silence, sang “We’ll understand it all…” before it was interrupted by another crash.