Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  “There’s no question at all,” Jan from Sigdal said, pushing his police cap farther back on his head. “The driver shot out through the windshield, hit the rocks and died instantly. The body’s been carried downstream in the river. The water’s so high right now that it probably won’t have stopped until it reached Solevatn. And that’s still frozen, so we won’t see any sign of him for a while.”

  “What did the truck driver say?” Sung-min Larsen asked.

  “He said the Escort veered across into his lane, the driver must have been looking for something in the glove compartment, something like that, then suddenly realised what was about to happen and lurched back onto the right side of the road in the nick of time. The driver said it all happened so fast that he didn’t really have time to see what happened, but when he looked in the mirror the car was gone. But, seeing as the road was straight, he should have been able to see it. So he stopped and called us. There’s rubber on the road, white paint on the crash barrier and a hole in the ice where the Escort went through.”

  “What do you think?” Larsen asked. There was another gust of wind and he automatically put his hand over his tie, even if it was held in place with a tie clip with the Pan-Am logo on it. “Dangerous driving or attempted suicide?”

  “Attempted? He’s dead, I tell you.”

  “Do you think he intended to drive into the truck and lost his nerve at the last moment?”

  The policeman stamped the mixture of mud and snow from his knee-length boots. Looked down at Sung-min Larsen’s smartly polished Loake shoes. Shook his head. “They don’t usually.”

  “They?”

  “People who come here to the green mile. They’ve made their minds up. They’re…” He took a deep breath. “Motivated.”

  Larsen heard a branch snap behind them and turned round to see the head of the Crime Squad Unit, Katrine Bratt, making her way down the slope in stages, bracing herself against the trees. When she reached them she wiped her hands on her black jeans. Sung-min studied her face as she held her freshly dried hand out to the local police officer and introduced herself.

  Pale. Newly applied make-up. Did that mean she’d been crying on the way from Oslo and had put more on before she got out of the car? Obviously, she knew Harry Hole well.

  “Have you found the body?” she asked, and nodded when Jan from Sigdal shook his head. Sung-min guessed her next question would be if there was any chance Hole might be alive.

  “So we don’t actually know that he’s dead?”

  Jan let out a deep sigh and adopted his tragic expression again. “When a car falls twenty metres, it reaches a speed of seventy kilometres an—”

  “They’re sure he’s dead,” Sung-min said.

  “And presumably you’re here because you think there’s a connection to the murder of Rakel Fauke,” Bratt said without looking at Sung-min, focusing instead on the grotesque sculpture of the wrecked car.

  Aren’t you? Sung-min was about to ask, but realised that it probably wasn’t that strange for a head of department to visit the location where one of her colleagues had died. Maybe. Almost two hours’ driving, fresh make-up. Maybe it was more than just a professional relationship?

  “Shall we go back up to my car?” he asked. “I’ve got some coffee.”

  Katrine nodded, and Sung-min cast a quick glance at Jan as if to let him know that no, he wasn’t invited as well.

  Sung-min and Katrine got in the front seats of his BMW Gran Coupé. Even if he got a decent petrol allowance, he was still taking a loss by driving his own car instead of one of Kripos’s, but as his father used to say: life’s too short not to drive a good car.

  “Hello,” Bratt said, reaching her hand back between the seats to pat the dog lying on the back seat with its head on its front paws, looking up at them sadly.

  “Kasparov’s a retired police dog,” Sung-min said as he poured coffee from a flask into two paper cups. “But he outlived his owner so I’ve taken him in.”

  “You like dogs?”

  “Not especially, but he didn’t have anyone else.” Sung-min handed her one of the cups. “To get to the point. I was at the point of arresting Harry Hole.”

  Katrine Bratt spilled some of the coffee as she was about to take her first sip. And Sung-min knew it wasn’t because the coffee was too hot.

  “Arrest him?” she said, accepting the handkerchief he offered her. “Based on what?”

  “We got a phone call. From a guy called Freund. Sigurd Freund, in fact. A specialist in 3-D analysis of film and photographs. We’ve used him before, as have you. He wanted to check the formalities regarding a job he’d done for Detective Inspector Harry Hole.”

  “Why did he call you? Hole works for us.”

  “Maybe that’s why. Freund said Hole had asked him to send the invoice to his private address, which is obviously highly irregular. Freund just wanted to make sure it was all above board. He had also found out rather late that Harry Hole is between one metre ninety and one ninety-five tall, the same as the man in the footage in question. Then Freund checked with Police Headquarters to see if Hole drives a Ford Escort, the same as in the recording. He sent us the files. They were taken using a so-called wildlife camera outside Rakel Fauke’s house. The time matches the presumed time of the murder. The camera has been removed, presumably by the only person who knew it was there.”

  “The only person?”

  “When people install cameras like that in built-up areas, they’re usually used to spy on people. Their partner, for instance. So we sent Hole’s photograph to the people who sell wildlife cameras in Oslo, and Harry Hole was recognised by an elderly man who used to own Simensen Hunting and Fishing.”

  “Why would Har…Hole request analysis of the footage if he knew it would incriminate himself?”

  “Why would he request analysis without anyone in the police knowing about it?”

  “Hole is suspended. If he was going to investigate the murder of his wife, it would have to be in secret.”

  “In which case the brilliant Harry Hole has just achieved his greatest triumph by uncovering the brilliant Harry Hole.”

  Katrine Bratt didn’t answer. She hid her mouth behind the paper cup, turning it in her hand as she stared out through the windshield at the dwindling daylight.

  “I actually think it was the other way around,” Sung-min said. “He wanted to check with an expert if it was technically possible to see that it was him being filmed on his way in and out of Rakel Fauke’s home right in the middle of the presumed time of the murder. If Sigurd Freund hadn’t been able to tell that it was Hole, Hole could have safely handed the footage over to us, because it proves that someone was in Rakel Fauke’s house at the time when Hole apparently had an alibi. His alibi would have been strengthened because the images confirm the medical officer’s conclusion that Rakel Fauke was murdered sometime between ten o’clock and two o’clock, more precisely after 23:21, which is when the person caught on film arrives.”

  “But he does have an alibi!”

  Sung-min was about to state the obvious, that the alibi was reliant on a single witness, and that experience shows that witness statements couldn’t always be relied upon. Not because witnesses are unreliable by nature, but because our memories play tricks and our senses are less reliable than we think. But he had heard the despair in her voice, seen the naked pain in her eyes.

  “One of our detectives has gone to see Gule, Hole’s neighbour,” he said. “They’re reconstructing the circumstances in which he gave Hole his alibi.”

  “Bjørn says Harry was dead drunk when he left him in his flat, that Harry couldn’t possibly have…”

  “Appeared to be dead drunk,” Sung-min said. “I’m assuming an alcoholic is more than capable of acting intoxicated. But it’s possible he overplayed it.”

  “Oh?”

  “A
ccording to Peter Ringdal, the owner of—”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Ringdal says he’s seen Hole drunk before, but never in such a state that he had to be dragged out. Hole can handle his drink better than most, and Ringdal says he hadn’t drunk that much more than he had seen him drink before. It may be that Hole wanted to look more incapacitated than he was.”

  “I haven’t heard any of this before.”

  “Because it was assumed that Hole had an alibi, no one looked into it particularly thoroughly. But I paid a visit to Peter Ringdal this morning, after I’d spoken to Freund. It turns out that he’d just had a visit from Harry Hole, and from what Ringdal says, I get the impression Hole realised that the net was starting to close in around him, and was searching desperately for a scapegoat. But once he realised that Ringdal was no use, he’d run out of options, and…” Sung-min gestured towards the road in front of them, leaving Bratt to finish the sentence for herself if she wanted to.

  Katrine Bratt raised her chin, the way men of a certain age do to pull the skin of their necks from shirt collars that are too tight, but here it made Sung-min think of an athlete trying to motivate herself mentally, shake off a lost point before launching into battle for the next. “What other lines of inquiry are Kripos looking into?”

  Sung-min looked at her. Had he expressed himself imprecisely? Didn’t she realise that this wasn’t a line of inquiry, but a well-lit four-lane highway where even Ole Winter couldn’t get lost, where they—apart from the fact that they weren’t in possession of the culprit’s earthly remains—had already reached their goal?

  “There aren’t any other lines of inquiry now,” he said.

  Katrine Bratt nodded and nodded as she alternated between closing her eyes and staring ahead of her, as if this simple fact was something that took a lot of brain power to process.

  “But if Harry Hole is dead,” she said, “there isn’t really any rush to go public with the fact that he’s Kripos’s prime suspect.”

  Sung-min began to nod too. Not because he was promising anything, but because he realised why she was asking.

  “The local police have issued a press statement saying something along the lines of ‘man missing after a car ended up in the river next to Highway 287,’ ” Sung-min said, pretending he didn’t know it was an exact quote, because experience had taught him that it made people nervous and less communicative if you let them see too much of your good memory, your ability to read people, your deductive brain. “I can’t see any pressing reason for Kripos to issue any more information to the public, but of course that’s a decision for my bosses.”

  “Winter, you mean?”

  Sung-min looked at Bratt, wondering why she had felt it necessary to mention his boss by name. Her face revealed no ulterior motive, and there was no reason to suspect she knew how uncomfortable it made Sung-min every time he was reminded of the fact that Ole Winter was still his superior. Sung-min had never told a soul that he considered Ole Winter a mediocre detective and a distinctly weak leader. Not weak in the sense that he was too soft, quite the reverse, he was old-fashioned, authoritarian and stubborn. Winter lacked the confidence to admit when he was wrong, and to accept that he ought to delegate more of the management to younger colleagues with younger ideas. And, truth be told, sharper detectives. But Sung-min had kept all of this to himself because he assumed he was alone in these opinions within Kripos.

  “I’ll talk to Winter,” Katrine Bratt said. “And Sigdal Sheriff’s Office. They won’t want to go public with the name of the missing man until his family have been informed, and if I undertake to inform them, that puts me in control of when the local police can identify Harry Hole.”

  “Good thinking,” Sung-min said. “But sooner or later his name’s going to get out, and neither you nor I can stop the public and media speculating when they find out that the dead man—”

  “Missing man.”

  “…is the husband of the woman who was murdered recently.”

  He saw a shiver run through Bratt. Was she going to start crying again? No. But when she was alone in her own car, almost certainly.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” she said, feeling for the door handle. “Let’s keep in touch.”

  * * *

  —

  At Solevatn, Katrine Bratt pulled off the road into an empty lay-by. She parked and looked out across the large, ice-covered lake as she concentrated on her breathing. When she had got her pulse down she took out her phone and saw that she had received a text from Kari Beal, Dagny Jensen’s bodyguard, but that could wait. She called Oleg. Told him about the car, the river, the accident.

  There was silence at the other end. A long silence. And when Oleg spoke again, his voice sounded surprisingly calm, as if it wasn’t as much of a shock to him as Katrine had anticipated.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Oleg said. “He’s committed suicide.”

  Katrine was about to reply that she didn’t know, then realised that it wasn’t a question.

  “It might take a while to find him,” she said. “There’s still ice on the lake.”

  “I’ll come down,” Oleg said. “I’ve got a diving certificate. I used to be afraid of water, but…”

  Another silence, and for a moment she thought the line had been broken. Then she heard a deep, shaky breath, and when he went on, it was in a voice that was fighting back tears.

  “…he taught me how to swim.”

  She waited. And when he spoke again, his voice was steady. “I’ll contact Sigdal Sheriff’s Office and ask if I can join the diving team. And I’ll talk to Sis.”

  Katrine told him to get in touch if there was anything she could do, gave him her direct office number, then hung up. There. It was done. No reason to fight it anymore, she was alone in her own car.

  She leaned her head back and burst into tears.

  42

  It was half past four. The last client. Erland Madsen had recently had a discussion with a psychiatrist about the conceptual boundary between a client and a patient. Was it dependent upon the professional’s own title, whether they were a psychologist or a psychiatrist? Or did the distinction run between medicated patients and non-medicated clients? As a psychologist, it sometimes felt like a disadvantage not to be able to prescribe medication when he knew exactly what his client needed but still had to refer them to a psychiatrist who knew less about post-traumatic stress disorder than he did, for instance.

  Madsen clasped his hands together. He usually did that when he and the client were done with the pleasantries and were about to start what they were there for. He did it without thinking, but when he became aware of the ritual, he had done a bit of research and found a religious historian who claimed it dated back to the time when a prisoner’s hands were tied with rope, so that clasped hands came to be seen as a symbol of submission. In the Roman Empire, a defeated soldier could surrender and plead for mercy by showing his clasped hands. Christians’ prayers for mercy from an omnipotent God were presumably another aspect of the same thing. So when Erland Madsen clasped his hands together, did that mean he was subordinating himself to his client? Hardly. It was more likely that the psychologist, on behalf of his client as well as himself, was subordinating himself to the questionable authority and shifting dogma of psychology, the way priests, the weathervanes of theology, asked their congregations to cast off the eternal truths of the past in favour of those of today. But while priests clasped their hands together and said “Let us pray,” Madsen’s opening line was: “Let’s start where we left off last time.”

  He waited until Roar Bohr nodded before he went on.

  “Let’s talk about when you killed someone. You said you were…”—Madsen checked his notes—“a freak. Why is that?”

  Bohr cleared his throat, and Madsen noted that he too had clasped his hands together. Unconscious mirroring, that was fairl
y common. “I realised fairly early that I was a freak,” Bohr said. “Because I wanted to kill someone so badly…”

  Erland Madsen tried to keep his face neutral, and not show that he was keen to hear the rest, just that he was open, receptive, safe, non-judgemental. Not curious, not eager to hear anything sensational, not keen to hear an entertaining story. But Madsen couldn’t help but admit that he had been looking forward to this appointment, this session, this conversation. But who was to say that there couldn’t be a confluence between a key experience for the client and an entertaining story for the therapist? Yes, after thinking it through, Madsen had concluded that whatever was good for the client ought automatically to trigger curiosity in any serious psychologist who had his client’s best interests at heart. The fact that Madsen was curious depended upon the fact that these questions were important for his client, because of course he was a conscientious psychologist. And now that he had figured out which order cause and effect came in, he not only knitted his fingers, but pressed his palms together.

  “I wanted to kill someone so badly,” Roar Bohr repeated. “But I couldn’t. That’s why I was a freak.”

  He stopped. Madsen had to count in his head to stop himself intervening too quickly. Four, five, six.

  “You couldn’t?”

  “No. I thought I could, but I was wrong. In the Army there are psychologists whose job is to teach soldiers to kill. But specialist units like Special Forces don’t use them. Experience indicates that the people who apply to units like that are already so supremely motivated to kill that it would be a waste of time and money to employ psychologists. And I felt motivated. Nothing I thought or felt when we trained to kill suggested I would ever encounter any resistance. Quite the opposite, in fact.”