Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  “When did you discover that you were unable to kill another person?”

  Bohr took a deep breath. “In Basra, in Iraq, during a raid with an American specialist unit. We’d used the snake tactic, had blown our way into the building where the lookouts said the shots had come from. Inside was a young girl of fourteen or fifteen. She was wearing a blue dress, her face was grey from the dust of the blast, and she was holding a Kalashnikov that was as big as she was. It was aimed at me. I tried to shoot her, but froze. I ordered my finger to pull the trigger, but it wouldn’t do it. It was as if the problem wasn’t in my head, but in my muscles. The girl started firing, but luckily she was still blinded by the dust, and the bullets hit the wall behind me. I remember feeling fragments of brick hit my back. And still I just stood there. One of the Americans shot her. Her little body fell backwards onto a sofa covered with colourful blankets, and a small table with a couple of photographs on it, they looked like her grandparents.”

  He paused.

  “What did that make you feel?”

  “Nothing,” Bohr said. “I felt nothing for the next few years. Apart from abject panic at the thought of finding myself in the same situation and messing up again. Like I said, there was nothing wrong with my motivation. There was just something inside my head that wouldn’t work. Or was working too well. So I focused on leadership instead of active duty, I thought I was better suited to that. And I was.”

  “But you didn’t feel anything?”

  “No. Apart from those panic attacks. And seeing as they were the alternative to not feeling anything, it felt fine not to feel anything.”

  “ ‘Comfortably Numb.’ ”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “When I was first made aware that I was showing signs of PTSD—insomnia, irritability, rapid heart rate, lots of little things—it didn’t really bother me much. Everyone in Special Forces knew about PTSD, obviously, but even if the official version is that we take it very seriously, it wasn’t something we ever spoke about much. No one said out loud that PTSD was for weaklings, but Special Forces troops are pretty self-aware, we know perfectly well that we have higher NPY levels and all that.”

  Madsen nodded. There was research that suggested the way soldiers were recruited to specialist units like Special Forces filtered out those with average or low levels of neuropeptide Y, or NPY, a neurotransmitter that lowers stress levels. Some Special Forces troops believed that this genetic disposition, together with their training and strong camaraderie, made them immune to PTSD.

  “It was OK to admit you’d had a few nightmares,” Bohr said. “That proved you weren’t a complete psychopath. But apart from that I think we regarded PTSD a bit like our parents regarded smoking: as long as almost everyone had a go, it couldn’t be that dangerous. But then it got worse…”

  “Yes,” Madsen said, leafing back through his notes. “We talked about that. But you also said that it got better at one point.”

  “Yes. It got better when I finally managed to kill someone.”

  Erland Madsen looked up. He took his glasses off, without it being a particularly dramatic gesture.

  “Who did you kill?” Madsen could have bitten his tongue. What sort of question was that for a professional therapist? And did he really want to know the answer?

  “A rapist. It doesn’t really make much difference who he was, but he raped and killed a woman named Hala. She was my interpreter in Afghanistan.”

  A pause.

  “Why do you say ‘rapist’?”

  “What?”

  “You say he killed your interpreter. Isn’t that worse than rape? Wouldn’t it be more natural to say that you’d killed a murderer?”

  Bohr looked at Madsen as if the psychologist had said something he’d never thought of himself. He moistened his lips as if he was about to say something. Then he did it again.

  “I’m searching,” he said. “I’m searching for the man who raped Bianca.”

  “Your younger sister?”

  “He needs to make amends for what he did. We all need to make amends for what we’ve done.”

  “Do you need to make amends for what you’ve done?”

  “I need to make amends for the fact that I didn’t manage to protect her. The way she protected me.”

  “How did your sister protect you?”

  “By holding on to her secret.” Bohr took a deep, shaky breath. “Bianca was ill when she finally told me that she’d been raped when she was seventeen years old, but I knew it was true, it all fitted. She told me because she was convinced she was pregnant, even though it was several years later. She said she could feel it, it was growing very slowly, that it was like a swelling, a stone, and that it would kill her in order to get out. We were at the cabin, and I said I would help her to get rid of it, but she said that then he—the rapist—would come and kill her, like he’d promised. So I gave her a sleeping pill, and the next morning I told her it was an abortion pill, that she was no longer pregnant. She became hysterical. Later, when she was in hospital again and I went to visit her, the psychiatrist showed me a sheet of paper where she’d drawn an eagle calling my name, and told me she’d said something about an abortion and that she and I had killed me. I chose to keep our secret. I don’t know if it made any difference. Either way, Bianca would rather die herself than let me, her big brother, die.”

  “And you were unable to prevent that. So you had to make amends?”

  “Yes. And I could only do that by avenging her. By stopping men who rape. That was why I joined the Army, why I applied to Special Forces. I wanted to be prepared. And then Hala was raped as well…”

  “And you killed the man who did the same thing to Hala that had been done to your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did that make you feel?”

  “Like I said. Better. Killing someone made me feel better. I’m no longer a freak.”

  Madsen looked down at the blank page in his notebook. He had stopped writing. He cleared his throat.

  “So…have you made amends now?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I haven’t found the man who took Bianca. And there are others.”

  “Other rapists who have to be stopped, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’d like to stop them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kill them?”

  “Looks like it. It makes me feel better.”

  Erland Madsen hesitated. Here was a situation that needed to be dealt with, from both a therapeutic and a judicial perspective.

  “These killings, are they something you mostly just like to think about, or are they something you’re actively planning to carry out?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Would you like someone to stop you?”

  “No.”

  “What would you like, then?”

  “I’d like you to tell me if you think it will help next time as well.”

  “Killing someone?”

  “Yes.”

  Madsen looked at Roar Bohr. But all his experience told him that you could never find answers in faces, expressions, body language, too much of that is learned behaviour. It was in people’s words that you found the answers. And now he had been asked a question that he couldn’t answer. Not openly. Not honestly. Madsen looked at his watch.

  “Time’s up,” he said. “Let’s continue with this on Thursday.”

  * * *

  —

  “I’m going now,” a woman’s voice said from the doorway.

  Erland Madsen looked up from the folder he had found in his clients’ archive that was now lying on his desk. It was Torill, the receptionist shared by the six psychologists in the practice. She had her coat on, and was looking at E
rland with an expression he knew meant there was something he needed to remember, but that she was too tactful to broach directly.

  Erland Madsen looked at the time. Six o’clock. He remembered what it was. He was supposed to be putting the children to bed that evening; his wife was helping her mother clear out her loft.

  But first he needed to figure this out.

  Two clients. There were several points of contact. They had both worked in Kabul, partly overlapping there. Both had been referred to him because they had shown signs of PTSD. And now he had found it in the notes: they had both had a close relationship with someone called Hala. Obviously it could be a common woman’s name in Afghanistan, but the chance that there could be more than one Hala working as an interpreter for Norwegian forces in Kabul struck him as unlikely.

  With Bohr it had been the usual thing when it came to his relationships with women who were either his subordinates or younger than him: he felt responsible for them, in the same way he had for his younger sister, a responsibility that bordered on the obsessive, a form of paranoia.

  The other client had had an even closer relationship to Hala. They had been lovers.

  Erland Madsen had taken detailed notes, and read that they had both got the same tattoo. Not their names, because that would have been dangerous if it had been discovered by the Taliban or anyone else with a strict faith. Instead they’d had the word “friend” tattooed on their bodies, something that would bind them together for the rest of their lives.

  But none of this was the most important point of connection.

  Madsen ran his finger down the page and found what he was looking for, just as he thought he’d remembered it: both Bohr and the other client had said that they had felt better after killing someone. At the bottom of the page he had made a note for future reference: NB! Dig deeper into this next time. What does “better after killing someone” mean?

  Erland Madsen looked at his watch. He would have to take the notes home and read the rest after the children were asleep. He closed the folder and put a red rubber band around it. The band ended up running across the name written on the folder.

  Kaja Solness.

  43

  Three months earlier

  Erland Madsen snuck a glance at his watch. The hour was almost over. That was a shame, because even if it was only their second therapy session, there was no doubt that the client, Kaja Solness, was an interesting case. She was responsible for security in the Red Cross, a post that shouldn’t necessarily have exposed her to the traumas that triggered PTSD in soldiers. All the same, she had told him how she had experienced acts of war and the daily horrors that only soldiers on active duty usually experience, and that sooner or later end up damaging their psyche. It was interesting—but not unusual—that she didn’t seem to recognise that she had not only ended up in these dangerous situations, but that she herself had more or less consciously sought them out. It was also interesting that she hadn’t shown any symptoms of PTSD during her debriefing in Tallinn, but had taken the initiative to seek therapy herself. Most soldiers who came were referrals, they were more or less forced to have counselling. And most of them didn’t want to talk, some of them came straight out and said they thought therapy was for sissies, and became irritable when they realised Madsen couldn’t prescribe the sleeping pills they had come for. “I just want to sleep!” they said, unaware of how ill they actually were until the day they sat with their mouth over the end of the rifle and tears streaming down their cheeks. Those who refused to have therapy got their pills, of course, their antidepressants and sleeping tablets. But Madsen’s experience told him that what he was engaged in, trauma-based cognitive therapy, helped. It wasn’t the acute crisis therapy that had been so popular until research showed that it didn’t work at all, but long-term treatment in which the client worked through the trauma and gradually learned to tackle and live with their physical responses. Because believing that there was a quick fix, that you could heal those wounds overnight, was naive and, at worst, dangerous.

  But that seemed to be what Kaja Solness was after. She wanted to talk about it. Quickly, and a lot. So quickly, and so much, that he’d had to try to slow her down. But it felt like she didn’t have time, she wanted answers straightaway.

  “Anton was Swiss,” Kaja Solness said. “A doctor, working for the ICRC, the Swiss branch of the Red Cross. I was deeply in love with him. And he loved me. I thought he did, anyway.”

  “Do you think you were wrong?” Madsen asked as he took notes.

  “No. I don’t know. He left me. Well, ‘left’ probably isn’t the right word. When you work together in a war zone, it’s difficult to physically leave someone—we live and work in close proximity. But he told me he’d met someone else.” She let out a short laugh. “ ‘Met’ isn’t the right word either. Sonia was a nurse in the Red Cross. We literally ate, slept and worked together. She was also Swiss. Anton prefers beautiful women, so it goes without saying that she was beautiful. Intelligent. Perfect manners. From a good family. Switzerland’s still the sort of country where that kind of thing matters. But the worst thing was that she was nice. A genuinely likeable person who threw herself into her work with energy, courage and love. I used to hear her crying in her sleep on days when they’d had to deal with a lot of dead and serious injuries. And she was nice to me. She gave the impression that I was the one who was being nice to her. Merci vilmal, she used to say. I don’t know if that’s German, French or both, but she said it all the time. Thank you, thank you, thank you. As far as I know, she never knew that Anton and I had been together before she came into the picture. He was married, so we’d kept it quiet. And then it was Sonia’s turn to keep their relationship secret. Ironically, I was the only person she confided in. She was frustrated, said he’d promised to leave his wife, but that he kept putting it off. I listened and comforted her and hated her more and more. Not because she was a bad person, but because she was a good person. Don’t you think that’s odd, Madsen?”

  Erland Madsen started slightly at the mention of his name. “Do you think it’s odd?” he asked.

  “No,” Kaja Solness said, after thinking for a few moments. “It was Sonia—not Anton’s chronically ill, wealthy wife—who was standing between me and Anton. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “It sounds logical. Go on.”

  “It was outside Basra. Have you ever been to Basra?”

  “No.”

  “The hottest city on earth, you have to drink or die, as the journalists in the hotel bar at the Sultan Palace used to say. At night, huge, carnivorous honey badgers would come in from the desert and roam the streets, eating whatever they could find. People were terrified of them; farmers outside the city said the badgers had started eating their cows. You can get great dates in Basra, though.”

  “At least that’s something.”

  “Well, we got called to a farm where some cows had trampled the badly maintained fence around a minefield. The farmer and his son had run after them to get them out. Afterwards we found out that they thought there were only anti-personnel mines there. They look like flowerpots with spikes sticking out of them, and are easy to see and avoid. But there were PROM-1s there as well, and they’re much harder to spot. And PROM-1s are also called Bouncing Betties.”

  Madsen nodded. Most landmines hit their victims’ legs and groins, but these bounced up when you triggered them and exploded at chest height.

  “Almost all the animals had emerged unscathed, I don’t know if that was by luck or instinct. The father had almost managed to get out of the minefield when he triggered a PROM-1 right next to the fence. It flew up and peppered him with shrapnel. But because these mines fly up, the shrapnel often hits people a long way away. The son had run thirty or forty metres into the minefield to rescue the last cow, but he still got hit by a piece of shrapnel. We’d managed to get the father out and were trying to save his life, bu
t the boy was lying in the minefield screaming. Those screams were unbearable, but the sun was going down and we couldn’t go into a field of PROM-1s without metal detectors; we had to wait for backup. Then one of the ICRC’s vehicles turned up. Sonia jumped out. She heard the screams, ran over to me and asked what sort of mines they were. She put her hand on my arm the way she always did, and I saw she was wearing a ring that hadn’t been there before. An engagement ring. And I knew he’d done it, that Anton had finally left his wife. We were standing a little way from the others, and I told her there were anti-personnel mines. And as I took a breath and was about to say there were PROM-1s as well, she was already on her way into the minefield. I called after her, obviously not loud enough, the boy’s screams must have drowned me out.”

  Kaja picked up the cup of tea Erland had given her. She looked at him, and he saw her realise that he was waiting for the end of the story.

  “Sonia died. The father too. But the boy survived.”

  Erland drew three vertical lines on his notepad. Struck through two of them.

  “Did you feel guilty?” he asked.

  “Obviously.” Her face looked surprised. Was that a trace of irritation in her voice?

  “Why is it obvious, Kaja?”

  “Because I killed her. I killed someone who didn’t have an ounce of malice in her.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on yourself now? Like you say, you tried to warn her.”

  “Don’t you get paid enough to think you have to listen carefully, Madsen?”

  Erland noted the aggression in her voice, but also that there was no trace of it in the mild expression on her face.

  “What do you think I didn’t hear, Kaja?”

  “It doesn’t take so long to breathe in and shout ‘PROM-1’ that someone has time to turn away from you, jump over a fence and stand on one of those fuckers. Your voice doesn’t get drowned out by a boy lying half a football pitch away, Madsen.”