by Jo Nesbo
* * *
—
Katrine heard the baby crying in the stairwell. It made her quicken her steps, even though she knew the child was in the best of hands. Bjørn’s hands. Pale hands with soft skin and thick, stubby fingers that could do everything that needed doing. No more, no less. She shouldn’t complain. So she tried not to. She had seen what happened to some women when they became mothers, they became despots who thought the sun and all the planets orbited around mother and child. Who suddenly treated their husbands with resigned derision when they didn’t demonstrate lightning-fast reactions and ideally a telepathic understanding of the needs of mother and child. Or, to be more accurate, what the mother decided were the needs of the child.
No, Katrine definitely didn’t want to be one of those. But was that somewhere inside her anyway? Hadn’t she occasionally felt like slapping Bjørn, watching him curl up and submit, humiliate himself? She had no idea why. Nor how on earth it could ever happen, seeing as Bjørn was always one step ahead of her and had already sorted out anything she might be able to base any criticism on. And obviously there’s nothing more frustrating than someone who’s better than you, who constantly holds up a mirror that makes you hate yourself.
No, she didn’t hate herself. That was an exaggeration. She just thought Bjørn was too good for her from time to time. Not “too good” as in too attractive, but too nice, as in annoyingly nice. That they could both have had a slightly better life if he had chosen someone more like himself, a stable, gentle, down-to-earth, kind, slightly plump farmer’s daughter from Østre Toten.
The crying stopped as she was putting the key in the lock. She opened the door.
Bjørn was standing in the hallway with Gert on his arm. The boy looked at her with big, blue, tear-moistened eyes from under those laughably long blond curls that stood out like coiled springs around his head. Gert was named after Katrine’s father, even if it had been Bjørn’s suggestion. And now the child’s face lit up in a smile that was so wonderful that it made Katrine’s heart ache and brought a lump to her throat. She let her coat fall to the floor and walked towards them. Bjørn kissed her cheek before handing her the child. She pressed the little body to her and inhaled the smell of milk, vomit, warm skin and something sweet, irresistible, something that was her child alone. She closed her eyes and was home. Completely at home.
She was wrong. They couldn’t have it any better than this. It was the three of them, now and forever, that was just how it was.
“You’re crying,” Bjørn said.
Katrine thought he was saying it to Gert until she realised he meant her, and that he was right.
“It’s Harry,” she said.
Bjørn looked at her with a frown as she gave him some time. The time an airbag takes to deploy and hopefully muffle some of the impact. Obviously it’s pointless when things really have gone to hell, because then an airbag can’t save anyone, it’s just left hanging in shreds like a deflated balloon out of the front windshield of a Ford Escort that’s standing on end and looks like it tried to dive through the rock, bury itself, wipe itself out.
“No,” Bjørn said, in an equally vain protest against what her silence was telling him. “No,” he repeated in a whisper.
Katrine waited a little longer, still holding Gert, who was tickling her neck with his tiny hands. Then she told Bjørn about the car. About the truck on Highway 287, about the hole in the ice, about the waterfall, about the car. As she spoke, he put one of those pale hands with those stubby fingers to his mouth, and his eyes filled with tears that hung on his thin, colourless eyelashes before falling, one by one, like icicles dripping in the spring sun.
She had never seen Bjørn Holm like this, never seen the big, solid man from Toten lose it so completely. He cried, sobbed, shaking with a force as if something inside him was fighting to get out.
Katrine took Gert into the living room. It was a reflex, to protect the child from his father’s dark grief. He would inherit enough darkness as it was.
An hour later she had put Gert to bed, and now he was asleep in their bedroom.
Bjørn had gone to sit in the office that would eventually become Gert’s bedroom. She could still hear him crying in there. She was standing at the door, wondering if she should go in, when her phone rang.
She went into the living room and answered it.
It was Ole Winter.
“I know you’d prefer to postpone the announcement that Harry Hole is the dead man,” he said.
“Missing,” she said.
“The divers have found a smashed mobile phone and a pistol in the river below the falls. My team have just confirmed that both belonged to Harry Hole. We’re putting together the last pieces that mean we have a watertight case, and that means we can’t wait, Bratt, I’m sorry. But seeing as this was a personal wish…”
“Not personal, Winter, I’m thinking about the force. We need to be as well prepared as possible when it comes to presenting this to the public.”
“As things stand, it will be Kripos presenting the results of Kripos’s work, not the Oslo Police. But I can see your dilemma—the press will obviously want to ask you, as Hole’s employer, a number of detailed questions, and I can appreciate that you all need some time to discuss among yourselves how to answer those. In order to meet you halfway, Kripos won’t be calling a press conference tomorrow morning, as originally planned, but will delay it until tomorrow evening, at 19:00.”
“Thanks,” Katrine said.
“Assuming you can manage to stop Sigdal Sheriff’s Office from publishing the name of the deceased…”
Katrine took a deep breath and managed to stop herself saying anything.
“…until after we at Kripos have made our own announcement.”
You want breaking news with your name on it, Katrine thought. If Sigdal goes public with the name of the deceased, the public will put two and two together, feel that they’ve solved the case themselves, and that Kripos have been slow, so slow that Hole managed to make a quick exit from life. But if you get your way, Winter, you’ll make it look like it was your team’s incisive detective work that outsmarted master detective Harry Hole, got him on the run and finally drove him to take his own life.
But she said none of this either.
Just a quick “OK.” And: “I’ll inform the Chief of Police.”
They ended the call.
Katrine crept into the bedroom. Leaned over the worn, blue crib Bjørn’s parents had given them, the crib all the family’s children and grandchildren had slept in when they were little.
Through the thin wall she could still hear Bjørn crying in the office. Quieter now, but still with the same despair. And as she looked down at Gert’s sleeping face, she thought that Bjørn’s grief was, in a peculiar way, making hers easier to bear. Now she had to be the strong one, the one who couldn’t allow herself the luxury of reflection and sentimentality. Because life went on, and they had a child to take care of.
A child who suddenly opened his eyes.
Blinked, looked around, trying to find something to focus on.
She ran her hand over those strange blond curls.
“Who would have thought that a black-haired girl from the west and a red-headed lad from Toten would have a blond Viking,” Bjørn’s grandmother had said when they took Gert to see her in her nursing home in Skreia.
Then the boy found his mother’s eyes, and Katrine smiled. Smiled, stroked his hair and sang quietly until the child’s eyes closed again. Only then did she shiver. Because the look in those eyes had been like someone looking up at her from the other side of death.
46
Johan Krohn had shut himself away in the bathroom. He was tapping on his phone. He and Harry Hole had communicated enough over the years that he must have his number tucked away somewhere. There it was! In an old email about Silje Gravseng, the p
olice student who tried to get revenge on Hole by accusing him of rape. She had turned to Krohn, wanted him to take the case, but he had seen the charges and managed to stop her. So even if he and Hole had had their disagreements since then, surely Hole owed him a favour when it came down to it? He hoped so. There were other people he could call, police officers who owed him more than Hole, but there were two reasons to ask him specifically. Firstly, Hole was guaranteed to devote all his energy to finding and arresting a man who had recently tricked and humiliated him. And secondly, Harry Hole was the only person in the police who had managed to catch Finne. Yes, Hole was the only person who could help him. Then he would just have to see how long he could keep Finne locked away for threatening behaviour and blackmail. It would obviously be one man’s word against another’s, but he would cross that bridge when he came to it.
“Leave a message if you must,” a gravelly voice said, followed by a bleep.
Krohn was so bemused that he almost hung up. But there was something about that turn of phrase. If you must. He had to, didn’t he? Yes, he had to, and he had to say enough to be sure that Hole would call him back. He swallowed.
“This is Johan Krohn. I need to ask you to keep this message between the two of us. Svein Finne is engaged in blackmail.” He swallowed again. “Of me. And my family. I…er, please, get back to me. Thanks.”
He hung up. Had he said too much? And was he doing the right thing, was asking a police officer for help the right solution? Oh, it was impossible to be sure! Well, until Hole called back, he could still change his mind, tell Hole it was the result of a misunderstanding with his client.
Krohn went into the bedroom, slipped under the covers, picked up his copy of TfR, the Norwegian legal periodical, from the bedside table and started to read.
“You said something out on the terrace,” Frida said beside him. “That you were practising a defense statement.”
“Yes,” Johan said, and saw that she had put her book down on the covers and was looking at him over her reading glasses.
“Who for?” she said. “I didn’t think you were working on a case at the moment.”
Krohn adjusted his pillow. “The defense of a decent man who’s got himself into a bit of a mess.” He let his eyes rest on his own article about double jeopardy. Obviously he knew the article backwards, but he had found that he was able to pretend he’d never read it, and could enjoy its complex but lucid legal reasoning over and over again. “It’s only a potential case at the moment. He’s being blackmailed by a bastard who wants to get hold of his mistress. If he doesn’t give in, his whole family will be taken from him.”
“Hmm,” Frida murmured. “That sounds more like a work of fiction than an actual case.”
“Let’s say it is fiction,” Krohn said. “What would you do if you were him, and you knew that a defense statement wasn’t going to save him?”
“A mistress in exchange for an entire family? That’s fairly straightforward, surely?”
“No. Because if the good guy lets the bastard rape his mistress, the bastard would have even more on him. And then the bastard would come back, demanding more and more.”
“OK,” Frida said with a slight smile. “Then I’d pay a hitman to get rid of the bastard.”
“A bit of realism, maybe?”
“I thought you said it was fiction?”
“Yes, but…”
“The mistress,” Frida said. “I’d let the bastard have the mistress.”
“Thanks,” Krohn said, staring down at the page, fully aware that even the most ingenious formulations about double jeopardy wouldn’t be able to take his mind off Svein Finne tonight. Or Alise. And when he thought of her, on her knees, looking beseechingly up at Johan Krohn with eyes full of tears because he was so big but she was still trying to fit him in her mouth, he knew that option was out of the question. Wasn’t it? What if Harry Hole couldn’t help him? No, even then, he couldn’t do that to Alise. Not only was it morally repugnant, but he loved her! Didn’t he? And now Krohn felt more of a swelling in his heart than his groin. Because what did you do if you loved someone? You took the consequences. You paid the price. If you loved someone, it didn’t matter what it cost. Those were the rules of love, and there was no room for reinterpretation. He could see it so clearly now. So clearly that he had to hurry up before doubt took hold of him again, he had to hurry to tell his wife everything. Absolutely everything about Alise. Alea iacta est. The die is cast. Krohn put the journal down and took a deep breath as he formulated the opening phrases in his head.
“I forgot to say that I caught Simon red-handed today,” Frida said. “He was sitting in his room looking at…well, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Simon?” Krohn said, seeing their firstborn in front of him. “A porn magazine?”
“Almost,” Frida laughed. “Norway’s Laws. Your copy.”
“Oh dear,” Krohn said, as lightheartedly as he could, and swallowed. He looked at his wife as Alise’s image faded away, like in a film. Frida Andresen, now Frida Krohn. Her face was still as pure, as pretty as the first time he had seen it in the lecture hall. Her body was a bit plumper, but the extra kilos had really only given it a more feminine shape.
“I was thinking of making Thai tomorrow, the kids would like that. They’re still going on about Ko Samui. Maybe we could go back there sometime? Sun, warm weather and…” She smiled and let the rest hang in the air.
“Yes,” Johan Krohn said, and swallowed. “Maybe.”
He picked up the journal again and began to read. About double jeopardy.
47
“It was David,” the man said, in a thin, faltering junkie voice. “He hit Birger in the head with an iron bar.”
“Because Birger has stolen his heroin,” Sung-min said, and tried to stifle a yawn. “And the reason your fingerprints are on the bar is because you took it off Birger, but by then it was already too late.”
“Exactly,” the man said, looking at Sung-min as if he’d just solved a third-grade maths problem. “Can I go now?”
“You can go whenever you like, Kasko.” Sung-min gestured with one hand.
The man, who was known as Kasko because he had once sold car insurance, stood up, his legs swaying as if the floor of the Stargate bar was the lurching deck of a ship, and maneuvered towards the door where there was a newspaper cutting announcing where the cheapest beer in Oslo could be found.
“What are you doing?” Marcussen, another Kripos detective, hissed in alarm. “We could have got the whole story, all the details! We had him, damn it! Next time he might change his story. They do that, these smackheads.”
“All the more reason to let him go now,” Sung-min said, switching off the tape recorder. “Right now we’ve got a simple explanation. If we get more details, he’ll either have forgotten them, or changed them by the time he gets to the witness stand. And that’s exactly what a defense lawyer needs to sow doubt on the rest of the explanation. Shall we go?”
“No reason to hang around here,” Marcussen said, getting to his feet. Sung-min nodded and let his gaze roam over the clientele of drinkers who had been queuing up outside when he and Marcussen arrived at the bar with the earliest opening time in Oslo, seven o’clock.
“Actually, I think I’ll stay,” Sung-min said. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“You want to eat here?”
Sung-min knew what his colleague meant. He and Stargate didn’t really go together. They hadn’t done, anyway. But who knew, maybe he’d have to lower his standards? Downgrade his expectations. This was as good a place to start as any.
Once Marcussen had gone, Sung-min picked up the newspaper that was lying on the next table.
Nothing on the front page about the Rakel Fauke case.
And nothing about the accident on Highway 287.
Which must mean that neither Ole Winter nor
Katrine Bratt had gone public with the news that Harry Hole was involved.
In Ole Winter’s case, that was presumably because he wanted time to add a sheen of teamwork to what had been Sung-min’s deductions. Trivial double-checking that would only confirm what Sung-min had already ascertained, but that Winter could later claim was a team victory under his wise leadership.
Sung-min had read Machiavelli’s The Prince when he realised he didn’t understand political game-playing and power strategies. One of Machiavelli’s pieces of advice to a ruler who wanted to stay in power was to ally himself to and give support to weaker players in the country, those who weren’t in a position to threaten him and who would therefore be happy with the status quo. But any stronger potential opponents had to be weakened by all means available. What applied in Italian city states in the 1500s evidently also applied within Kripos.
When it came to Katrine Bratt’s motive for wanting to delay the announcement, Sung-min was in more doubt. She’d had twenty-four hours, Hole’s family must have been informed by now, and she’d had time to prepare the news that one of their own colleagues was suspected of murder. The fact that she may have personal feelings for Hole didn’t explain the fact that she was prepared to expose herself and the Crime Squad Unit to criticism and accusations of special treatment for police officers by protecting him from publicity in this way. It was as if there had to be something else, some consideration that ran deeper than that of a lover. But what could that be?
Sung-min brushed it aside. Perhaps it was something else. A desperate hope for a miracle. That Harry Hole was still alive. Sung-min took a sip of his coffee and looked out at the Akerselva, where the morning sun was starting to shine on the tops of the grey buildings on the other side. If Harry Hole was sharing any of this, it was because he was sitting on a cloud with a halo round his head, listening to the angels singing and watching it all from above.
