Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  Harry was pushed back into his seat, looked at the sky above him, which had stopped spinning, but now it seemed to be dissolving, taking on a greenish hue before a pale, transparent curtain was pulled across it. It was getting darker, they were sinking, down, underground. It’s hardly that surprising, he found himself thinking, that I’m heading to hell instead. Then he heard a muffled thud, like the door of an air-raid shelter closing. The car straightened out, then slowly turned around, and he realised what had happened. The car had landed in the river, rear end first, had gone through the ice, and now he was underneath it. It was like landing on an alien planet with a strange, green landscape lit up by rays of sunlight filtered through ice and water, where everything that wasn’t rock or the rotting remains of trees swayed dreamily as if dancing to the music.

  The current had caught hold of the car, and it floated slowly down the river like a hovercraft as it rose gently to the surface. There was a scraping sound as the roof hit the ice. Water was pouring in from the bottom of the car doors, so cold that it numbed Harry’s feet. He undid the seat belt and tried to shove the door open. But the water pressure just one metre below the surface made it impossible. He’d have to get out through the window. The radio and the headlights were still working, so the water hadn’t yet short-circuited the electrics. He pressed the button to open the window, but nothing happened. A short circuit, or the water pressure. The water had risen to his knees. The roof of the car was no longer scraping against the ice, the car had stopped rising, he was floating between the bottom and the surface of the river. He would have to kick the front windshield out. He leaned back in his seat, but there wasn’t enough room, his legs were too long, and he could feel the alcohol making his movements sluggish, his thoughts slow, his coordination clumsy. His hand fumbled under the seat and found the lever to push it backwards. Above it another lever, and he lowered the back of the seat until he was almost lying down. A fragment of memory. From when he had last adjusted the seat. At least now he could pull his legs out from beneath him. The water had almost reached his chest now, the cold clutching at his lungs and heart like a claw. Just as he was about to kick both feet against the windshield, the car hit something and he lost his balance, fell towards the passenger seat and his kick struck the steering wheel instead. Fuck, fuck! Harry saw the rock he had collided with glide past as the car spun around in a slow waltz before it carried on, backwards, hit another rock and turned the right way around again. The song fell silent in the middle of another “We’ll understand it all….” Harry took a deep breath up by the roof, then ducked under to get in position to kick again. This time he hit the windshield, but he was surrounded by water now and he felt his feet hit the glass as gently and devoid of force as an astronaut’s boots on the moon.

  He crawled up onto the seat, had to press his head against the roof to get to the air. He inhaled deeply a couple of times. The car stopped. Harry ducked under again and saw through the windshield that the Escort had caught on the branches of a rotten tree. A blue dress with white dots was waving at him. Panic seized him. Harry beat his hand against the side window, tried to shove it open. In vain. Suddenly two of the branches snapped off and the car slid sideways and came loose. The light from the headlamps, which, bizarrely, were still working, swept across the bottom of the river, towards the shore, where he saw a flicker of something that could have been a beer bottle, something made of glass, anyway, before the car drifted on, faster now. He needed more air. But the car was now so full of water that Harry had to close his mouth and press his nose against the car roof, and breathe in through his nostrils. The headlights went out. Something drifted into his field of vision, rocking on the surface of the water. The Jim Beam bottle, empty, with its lid on. As if it wanted to remind him of a trick that had saved him once before, a long time ago. But that wouldn’t make any difference now; the air in the bottle would only give him a few more seconds of painful hope after resignation had granted him a little peace.

  Harry closed his eyes. And—just like the cliché—his life passed before his eyes.

  The time when he got lost as a boy, and ran around the forest in terror just a couple of stones’ throws from his grandfather’s farm in Romsdalen. His first girlfriend, in her parents’ bed with the house to themselves, the balcony door open, the curtain swaying, letting in the sun as she whispered that he had to look after her. And him whispering “yes,” then reading her suicide note six months later. The murder case in Sydney, the sun off to the north, meaning that he got lost there as well. The one-armed girl who plunged into the pool in Bangkok, her body cutting through the water like a knife, the peculiar beauty of asymmetry and destruction. A long hike in Nordmarka, just Oleg, Rakel and him. Autumn sun falling on Rakel’s face, smiling at the camera as they waited for the timer, Rakel noticing him looking at her, turning towards him, her smile growing even wider, reaching her eyes, until the light evens out and she’s the one shining like the sun, and they can’t take their eyes off each other and have to take the picture again.

  Evens out.

  Harry opened his eyes again.

  The water hadn’t risen any higher.

  The pressure had finally evened out. The basic, complex laws of physics were permitting this strip of air to remain beneath the roof and the surface of the water, for the time being.

  And there was—literally—light at the end of the tunnel.

  Through the rear window, back where they had come from, what he saw had been coloured an increasingly dark green, but in front of him it was getting lighter. That had to mean that the river up ahead was no longer covered in ice, or was at least shallower, possibly both. And if the pressure had evened out, he should be able to open the car door. Harry was about to duck under and try when he realised he was still under the ice. That it would be a ridiculous way to drown, seeing as here in the car he had enough air to last until they reached what was hopefully a shallow section of the river, free from ice. And it wasn’t far away now, they seemed to be drifting faster, and the light was getting brighter.

  You don’t drown if you’re going to be hanged.

  He didn’t know why the old saying had popped into his head.

  Or why he was thinking about the blue dress.

  Or Roar Bohr.

  A noise was getting closer.

  Roar Bohr. Blue dress. Younger sister. Norafossen. Twenty metres. Smashed on the rocks.

  And when he emerged into the light, the water became a white wall of bubbles ahead of him, and the noise rose to a rumbling roar. Harry felt beneath him, grabbed hold of the back of the seat, took a deep breath, pulled himself under the water as the front of the car tipped forward. He stared through the water, through the windshield, straight down into something black, where cascades of white water splintered into white nothingness.

  Part 3

  40

  Dagny Jensen looked out at the schoolyard, at the rectangle of sunlight that had started over by the caretaker’s house that morning, but that now—towards the end of the school day—had moved to right below the staffroom. A wagtail was hopping across the road. The large oak tree was in bud. What was it that had suddenly made her notice buds everywhere? She looked across the classroom, where the students were hunched over their English coursework and the only sound breaking the silence was the rhythmic scratch of pencils and pens. It was actually their homework, but Dagny’s stomach had been hurting so badly that she hadn’t felt up to doing what she had been looking forward to, a study of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. About Charlotte, who had worked as a teacher and had preferred an independent life to entering into a socially acceptable marriage with a man whose intellect she didn’t respect, an almost unheard-of idea in Victorian England. About the orphaned Jane Eyre, who falls in love with the master of the house where she works as a governess, the apparently brusque and misanthropic Mr. Rochester. About how they declared their love for each other but that she—when they w
ere about to get married—discovered that he was still bound to his wife. Jane leaves and meets another man who falls in love with her, but to Jane he is no more than a mediocre surrogate for Mr. Rochester. And the tragic, happy ending where Mrs. Rochester is killed so that Jane and Mr. Rochester can finally be together again. The famous exchange where Mr. Rochester, defaced by the fire that destroyed the house, asks: “Am I hideous, Jane?” And she replies: “Very, sir; you always were, you know.”

  And right at the end, the tear-jerking chapter in which Jane gives birth to their child.

  Dagny felt sweat break out on her forehead when another jolt of pain cut through her stomach. The pains had been coming and going over the past couple of days, and the indigestion pills she had been taking hadn’t helped. She had made an appointment to see her doctor, but that wasn’t until next week, and the thought of having to spend a week in this much pain was anything but appealing.

  “I’m just popping out for a couple of minutes,” she said, and stood up.

  A few faces looked up and nodded, then concentrated on their schoolwork again. They were good, industrious students. A couple of them were genuinely talented. And sometimes Dagny couldn’t help herself dreaming about one day, after she had retired from teaching, when one of them—one of them would be enough—called to thank her. Thank her for showing them a world that was about more than vocabulary, grammar and the most basic nutrients of the linguistic world. Someone who had found and been inspired by something during her English lessons. Something that put them on the track to creating something themselves.

  When Dagny came out into the corridor outside the classroom a policeman got up from his chair and followed her. His name was Ralf, and he had taken over guard duty from Kari Beal.

  “Toilet,” Dagny said.

  Katrine Bratt had assured Dagny that she would have a bodyguard with her for as long as they thought Svein Finne was a threat to her. Katrine and Dagny hadn’t spoken about the reality: that it wasn’t a question of how long Finne was free, or alive, but how long Bratt’s budget or Dagny’s patience could last.

  The school corridors had a peculiar silence when lessons were taking place, as if they were resting between the bursts of frantic activity that occurred whenever there was a break. Like the periodical cicadas that swarm around Lake Michigan precisely every seventeen years. She had been invited to the next swarm by an uncle over there who said you just had to experience it, both the intense music of billions of insects, and the taste. The cicadas were apparently related to prawns and other shellfish, and he had told her during a meal of prawns on his visit to Norway that they could be eaten the same way: hold the hard shell tightly, remove the feet and head, and pull out the soft, protein-rich parts. It didn’t sound particularly appetising, though, and she never took invitations from Americans seriously, especially when they were—if she had calculated correctly—for 2024.

  “I’ll wait here,” the policeman said, stopping outside the girls’ bathroom.

  She walked in. Empty. She went into the last of the eight cubicles.

  She pulled down her trousers and underwear, sat down on the toilet, leaned forward, then pushed the door to lock it. She discovered that it wouldn’t close properly. She looked up.

  There was a hand sticking between the door and the frame, four large fingers, one of them with a ring in the shape of a snake. And in the palm of the hand she could see one edge of a hole that went right through.

  Dagny just managed to take a deep breath before the door was thrown open and Finne’s hand shot forward, grabbing her by the throat. He held the snake-like knife up in front of her face, and his voice whispered right next to her ear:

  “So, Dagny? Morning sickness? Stomach ache? Weak bladder? Tender breasts?”

  Dagny closed her eyes.

  “We can soon find out,” Finne said, then slipped down onto his knees in front of her and, putting the knife into a sheath inside his jacket without taking his hand from her throat, pulled something that looked like a pen from his pocket and stuck it between her thighs. Dagny waited for it to touch her, penetrate her, but it didn’t happen.

  “Be a good girl and pee for Daddy, will you?”

  Dagny swallowed.

  “What’s wrong? That is what you came in here for, isn’t it?”

  Dagny wanted to do as he said, but it was as if all her bodily functions had frozen, she didn’t even know if she’d be able to scream if he loosened his grip.

  “If you don’t pee before I count to three, I’ll stick the knife in you, then into the idiot standing out in the corridor.” His whispered voice made every word, every syllable, sound like an obscenity. She tried. She really did try.

  “One,” Finne whispered. “Two. Three…There, that’s right! Clever girl…”

  She heard the trickle hit the porcelain, then the water.

  Finne pulled the hand holding the pen towards him and put it on the floor. He wiped his hand on the toilet roll hanging from the wall.

  “In two minutes we’ll know if we’re pregnant,” he said. “Isn’t that wonderful, darling? Pens like this, they didn’t exist, we couldn’t even dream of things like this the last time I was free. And just imagine all the wonderful things the future is going to bring. Is it any wonder that we want to bring a child into this world?”

  Dagny closed her eyes. Two minutes. Then what?

  She heard voices outside. A short conversation before the door opened, running steps, a girl whose teacher had allowed her to go to the toilet went into the cubicle closest to the corridor, finished, washed her hands and ran out again.

  Finne let out a deep sigh as he stared at the pen. “I’m looking for a plus on here, Dagny, but I’m afraid it shows a minus. Which means…”

  He stood up in front of her, started to undo his trousers with his free hand. Dagny jerked her head back and pulled free of his other hand.

  “I’ve got my period,” she said.

  Finne looked down at her. His face was in shadow. And casting a shadow. His whole being cast a shadow, like a bird of prey circling in front of the sun. He pulled the knife from its sheath again. She heard the door creak, then the policeman’s voice:

  “Everything OK, Dagny?”

  Finne pointed at her with the knife as if it were a magic wand that forced her to do whatever he wanted.

  “Just coming,” she said, without taking her eyes off Finne’s.

  She stood up, pulled up her pants and trousers, standing so close to him that she breathed in the smell of sweat and something else, something rank and nauseating. Sickness. Pain.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, holding the door open for her.

  Dagny didn’t run, but walked quickly past the other cubicles, past the washbasins, out into the corridor. She let the door close behind her. “He’s in there.”

  “What?”

  “Svein Finne. He’s got a knife.”

  The policeman stared at her for a moment before he unfastened the holster on his hip and drew his pistol. He inserted an earpiece with his free hand, then pulled off the radio that was attached to his chest.

  “Zero-one,” he said. “I need backup.”

  “He’s escaping,” Dagny said. “You have to get him.”

  The policeman looked at her. Opened his mouth as if to explain that his prime objective was to protect her, not take offensive action.

  “Otherwise he’ll come back,” Dagny said.

  Maybe it was something about her voice, or the expression on her face, but he closed his mouth. He took a step towards the door, put his head next to it and listened for a few seconds, with both hands round the pistol, which was pointing at the floor. Then he shoved the door open. “Police! Hands above your head!” He disappeared into the bathroom.

  Dagny waited.

  She heard the cubicle doors being thrown open.

 
All eight of them.

  The policeman came back out.

  Dagny took a trembling breath. “The bird has flown?”

  “God knows how,” the policeman said, reaching for his radio again. “He must have climbed up the bare wall and out through the window right up by the ceiling.”

  “Flown,” Dagny repeated quietly while the policeman called 01, central command, again.

  “What?”

  “Not climbed. Flown.”

  41

  “Twenty metres, you said?” asked Kripos detective Sung-min Larsen.

  He gazed up towards the top of Norafossen, where the torrent of water was gushing out. He wiped his face, which was wet from the spray the westerly wind carried all the way to the bank of the river. The roar of the falls drowned out the traffic on the main road that ran along the top of the slope they had scrambled down to reach the river.

  “Twenty metres,” the police officer confirmed. He had a bulldog face, and had introduced himself as Jan from Sigdal Sheriff’s Office. “It only takes a couple of seconds, but by the time you hit the ground you’re already going at seventy kilometres an hour. You don’t stand a chance.” He pointed one of his short, slightly protruding arms at the compressed wreckage of a white Ford Escort that was perched on top of a large, black rock that the water had worn smooth as it struck it and sprayed out in all directions. Like an art installation, Sung-min Larsen thought. An imitation of Lord, Marquez and Michels’s ten half-buried Cadillacs in the desert at Amarillo in Texas, where he had driven with his father when he was fourteen. His father was a pilot, and had wanted to show his son the wonderful country where he had learned to fly the Starfighter, a plane that his father claimed was more of a danger to its pilot than the enemy, a joke that his father had repeated many times on that trip, between coughing fits. Lung cancer.