Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  * * *

  —

  He looked down at the cloud below him.

  Held up the fragment of mirror and looked at his face. He had a white band round his head. He could hear singing.

  He looked down at the cloud again.

  Ever since it had got light, that little clump of cloud had been lying down in the valley, obscuring the view of the frozen river, colouring the forest grey. But as the sun rose higher it started to burn off the cloud, improving the visibility. And hopefully the intense birdsong around him would calm down a bit.

  He was freezing. That was OK. It made it easier to see.

  He looked in the piece of mirror again.

  The halo or bandage he had found in one of the drawers in the cabin had a red stain where the blood had seeped through. He was probably going to end up with another scar, in addition to the one running from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

  He stood up from the chair that was leaning against the wall of the cabin and went inside.

  Past the newspaper cuttings on the wall, one of them bearing the same face he had just seen in the mirror.

  He went into the bedroom where he had spent the night. Pulled off the bloody sheets and duvet cover, just as he had pulled off the bloody duvet cover two weeks ago in his own flat. But this time it was his blood, and his alone.

  He sat down on the sofa.

  Looked at the High Standard pistol lying beside the Yahtzee game. Bohr had said E14 had got hold of them without them being registered. He turned the pistol over in his hand.

  Was he likely to need it?

  Maybe, maybe not.

  Harry Hole looked at the time. Thirty-six hours had passed since he had stumbled out of the forest towards the cabin, to the broken window, and let himself in. He had got out of his wet clothes, cleaned himself off, found clean clothes, a sweater, long johns, a camouflage uniform, thick woollen socks. He’d put everything on and laid down under a blanket on the bunk bed, and stayed there until the worst of the shivering stopped. He had considered lighting the stove but decided against it; someone might see the smoke from the chimney and get it into their head to investigate. He had looked through the cupboards until he found a first-aid kit, and managed to staunch the bleeding from the wound on his forehead. He wrapped a bandage around his head, then used the remainder to cover his knee, which was already so swollen it looked like it had eaten an ostrich egg. He breathed in and out, and tried to figure out if the pain meant his ribs were broken, or if he was just badly bruised. Otherwise he was in one piece. Some would doubtless call it a miracle, but it was really just simple physics and a bit of luck.

  Harry breathed in again, heard it whistle and felt a stab of pain in his side.

  OK, more than a bit of luck.

  He had tried to avoid thinking about what had happened. That was the new advice for police officers who had suffered serious trauma: not to talk about it, not to think about it until at least six hours had passed. Recent research showed—in marked contrast to previous assumptions—that “talking things through” directly after a traumatic experience didn’t reduce the probability of developing PTSD, but the opposite.

  Obviously it hadn’t been possible to shut it out altogether. It kept playing in his head like a YouTube clip that’s gone viral. The way the car had toppled over the edge of the waterfall, the way he had hunched up in his seat to see out of the windshield; the weightlessness when everything was falling at the same speed, which had made it oddly easy to grip the seat belt with his left hand and the buckle with his right, it just made his movements slower because they were happening underwater. The way he had seen the white foam bursting from the huge black rock that was rushing towards him as he pushed the seat belt into the lock. And then the pressure. And then the noise.

  And then he was dangling in the seat belt with his head against the airbag on the steering wheel, and realised he could breathe, that the sound of the waterfall was no longer muffled, but sharp, hissing as it crashed and spat at him through the shattered back window. It took him a few seconds to realise that he wasn’t just alive, but remarkably unharmed.

  The car was standing on end, the front and the steering wheel pressed towards the seats, or the other way around, but not so badly that his legs were cut or trapped. All the windows were broken, so the water inside the car must have drained out within a second or two. But the resistance of the dashboard and front windshield had probably stopped the water draining away just long enough for it to act as an extra cushion for Harry’s body, counteracting the crumpling of the chassis. Because water’s strong. The reason deep-sea fish don’t get squashed flat in the depths of the ocean under pressure that would crumple an armoured tank to the size of a tin can is because the fishes’ bodies largely consist of something that can’t be compromised, no matter how much pressure it’s put under: water.

  Harry closed his eyes and played the rest of the film.

  The way he had hung from his seat, unable either to undo the buckle or slip out of the belt, because both the buckle and the spool mechanism were wrecked. He had looked around, and in the broken wing mirror it looked as if two waterfalls were crashing down on him. He managed to free one piece of the mirror. It was sharp, but his hands were shaking so much that it seemed to take him an eternity to cut through the seat belt. He fell against the steering wheel and what was left of the airbag, tucked the piece of mirror into his jacket pocket in case he needed it again later, then climbed carefully out through the windshield and hoped the car wasn’t going to fall on top of him. Then he swam the short distance from the black rock to the right-hand side of the river, waded ashore, and that was when he realised that his chest and left knee hurt. The adrenaline had probably acted as a painkiller, and the Jim Beam still was, so he knew it was only going to get worse. And as he stood there, so cold that his head was throbbing, he felt something warm running across his cheek and down his neck, pulled out the fragment of mirror and saw that he had a large cut on one side of his forehead.

  He looked up at the hillside. Pine trees and snow. He waded one hundred metres down the river before he found somewhere the slope seemed easy enough to climb, and started to make his way upward, but his knee gave way and he slid on a mixture of mud and snow back towards the river again. The pain in his chest was so bad that he felt like screaming, but the air had gone out of him and all that came out was an impotent wheeze, like a puncture. When he opened his eyes again, he didn’t know how long he’d been out, ten seconds or several minutes. He couldn’t move. And it dawned on him that he was so cold that his muscles wouldn’t obey him. Harry howled up at the blue, innocent, merciless sky above him. Had he survived all that, only to freeze to death here on dry land?

  Like hell he would.

  He staggered to his feet, broke a branch off a dead tree that was half lying in the river, and used it as a crutch. After struggling ten metres up the wretched slope, he found a path through the patches of snow. Ignoring the throbbing pain in his knee, he walked north, against the current. Because of the waterfall and the chattering of his own teeth he hadn’t heard any traffic, but when he got a bit higher he saw that the road was on the other side of the river. Highway 287.

  He saw a car drive past.

  He wasn’t going to freeze to death.

  He stood there, breathing as carefully as he could to avoid the pain in his chest.

  He could get back down to the river, cross it, stop a car and get back to Oslo. Or, even better, he could call Sigdal Sheriff’s Office and get them to pick him up. Maybe they were already on their way; if the truck driver had seen what happened on 287 he had probably called them. Harry felt for his phone. Then he remembered it had been lying on the passenger seat along with the Jim Beam and his pistol, and was now lying dead and drowned somewhere in the river.

  And that was when it struck him.

  That he too was dead and dr
owned.

  That he had a choice.

  He walked back along the path, and stopped where he had scrambled up the slope. He used his hands and feet to shovel snow back over his tracks. Then he began to limp north again. He knew that the road followed the river, and if the path did the same, it wasn’t far to Roar Bohr’s cabin. As long as his knee held out.

  His knee hadn’t held out. It took two and a half hours.

  Harry looked down at the swelling bulging out from either side of the tight bandage.

  It had had one night’s rest, and could have a few more hours.

  Then it would just have to bear his weight.

  He pulled on the woolen hat he had found, then took out the fragment of the Escort’s mirror again to see if it covered the bandage. He thought about Roar Bohr, who’d had to make his way from Oslo to Trondheim with just ten kroner. He had no money at all, but the distance was shorter.

  Harry closed his eyes. And heard the voice in his head.

  Farther along we’ll know more about it,

  Farther along we’ll understand why;

  Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,

  We’ll understand it all by and by.

  Harry had heard the song many times. It wasn’t just about the idea that the truth would come out one day. It was about how the deceitful lived happy lives, while those they had deceived suffered.

  48

  The driver of the new Eggedal Express to Oslo looked at the tall man who had just climbed up the steps into her bus. The bus stop was situated on a deserted stretch of Highway 287, and the man was wearing camouflage trousers, so she assumed he was one of the hunters who came up from Oslo to shoot their wildlife. There were three things that didn’t quite make sense, though. It wasn’t hunting season. His clothes were at least two sizes too small, and he had a white bandage sticking out from below the edge of his black woolly hat. And he had no money for a ticket.

  “I fell in the river, injured myself and lost both my phone and my wallet,” he said. “I’m staying in a cabin, and I have to get into the city. Can you let me have an invoice?”

  She looked at him, considering the situation. The bandage and the ill-fitting clothes seemed to fit his story. And the express bus to Oslo hadn’t been an overnight success; people still seemed to prefer taking the local bus to Åmot and changing to the hourly express service there, so there were plenty of free seats. The question was, what was likely to cause more trouble: turning him away from the bus, or letting him come on board?

  He may have noticed her hesitation, because he cleared his throat and added: “If I could borrow a phone, I can arrange for my wife to meet me at the bus station with money.”

  She looked at his right hand. He had a prosthetic middle finger made of some sort of greyish-blue metal. On the next finger he was wearing a wedding ring. But she had no inclination to let that hand touch her phone.

  “Sit down,” she said, then pressed a button and the door closed behind him with a drawn-out hiss.

  * * *

  —

  Harry limped towards the back of the bus. He noticed that the other passengers, or at least those who had overheard his conversation with the driver, averted their gaze. He knew they were praying silently that this slightly disconcerting man who looked like he had come straight from the battlefield wasn’t going to sit down next to them.

  He found a free double seat.

  He looked out at the forest and landscape gliding past. He looked at his watch, which had confirmed what the advertisements had claimed: it could survive most things, including a waterfall or two. Five minutes to five. He’d be in Oslo just after it got dark. Darkness suited him fine.

  Something was sticking into him just beneath his sore rib. He put his hand inside his jacket and moved the barrel of the High Standard pistol he had taken with him from the cabin. He closed his eyes when they passed the lay-by where he had turned the car around before. He felt the bus and his heart rate speed up.

  It had come to him in a moment of clarity. The song with the line “We’ll understand it all” hadn’t been a piece of a puzzle, but a door that had swung open in the darkness and shown him the light. Not the whole picture, not the context, but enough for him to know that the story didn’t make sense, that something was missing. Or, to be more accurate, that something had been inserted into it. Enough for him to change his mind and wrench the steering wheel.

  He had spent the past twenty-four hours piecing the whole thing together. And he was now reasonably sure that he knew what had happened. It had been relatively easy to imagine how the crime scene could have been manipulated and cleaned by someone with a degree of insight into detection methods. And how the murder weapon with Rakel’s blood had been planted in his record collection, seeing as only two other people had been to his flat since the murder. He just had to prove either the manipulation of the scene or the planting of evidence.

  It had been trickier to figure out the motive.

  Harry had ransacked his memory for signs, for an explanation. And this morning, when he was lying half awake, half asleep in the bunk bed, when he finally found it—or it found him—he had at first dismissed it as nonsense. That couldn’t be it. He chewed it over. Could it? Could it really be so straightforward that the motive had come out that night he had been lying in bed in Alexandra’s flat?

  * * *

  —

  Sung-min Larsen slipped unseen into a seat at the back of the conference centre in Kripos’s new premises at Nils Hansens vei 25.

  In front of him sat an unusually large gathering of journalists and photographers, even though the press conference had been called outside normal working hours. He guessed Ole Winter had made sure someone had leaked the name that had lured them here: Harry Hole. Now Winter was sitting with Landstad—Winter’s latest favourite detective—behind the table on the podium, checking the second hand on his watch. Presumably they wanted to synchronise the start with the news on some television channel or other. Beside Winter and Landstad sat another detective from the team, and the head of the Criminal Forensics Unit, Berna Lien. And, slightly apart from the others, on the far right, sat Katrine Bratt. She looked out of place, and was staring down at some papers in front of her. Sung-min doubted there was anything relevant there, or that she was even reading it.

  He saw Ole Winter take a deep breath, literally inflating himself. Winter had swapped his cheap old suit for a new one Sung-min thought he recognised from the Swedish label Tiger. He guessed it had been bought specially after he had conferred with the recently appointed female head of PR, who seemed to have a degree of fashion sense.

  “So, welcome to this press conference,” Winter said. “My name is Ole Winter, and as head of the preliminary investigation I’d like to give an account of our work on the murder of Rakel Fauke, in which we have had a number of breakthroughs, and—after a lot of intensive teamwork—are now confident that we have solved.”

  Winter should have left a dramatic pause at that point, Sung-min thought, for maximum effect, but the detective ploughed on, and who knows, perhaps that came across as more professional, more credible. You shouldn’t make a spectacle of murder. Sung-min made a mental note, storing it for later use. Because one day he would be the person sitting up there. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it now. He was going to pull that tired, grizzled old monkey down from his perch.

  “We hope and believe that this will reassure those directly involved, those around them, and the public in general,” Winter said. “Tragically, it appears that the person we have now found evidence to link to Rakel Fauke’s murder has taken his own life. I shan’t speculate about the motives for that, but obviously we can’t help wondering if it’s connected to the fact that he realised that Kripos were closing in on him.”

  Sung-min noted that Winter said “the person we have now found evidence to link to Rakel Fa
uke’s murder” rather than “the suspect,” “taken his own life” rather than “missing,” and “closing in on” rather than “about to arrest.” And that Winter was churning out speculations in the same sentence as saying he wasn’t going to speculate. Sung-min also noted that a more cautious, professionally sober choice of words would have worked better.

  “When I say ‘appears to have taken his own life,’ ” Winter said, “that’s because the person in question is still officially missing. Some of you will be aware that a car drove into the river beside Highway 287 yesterday morning. We can now make public the fact that the car belonged to the suspect, Harry Hole…”

  Here Winter didn’t need to leave a dramatic pause, because he was stopped by the loud groans, gasps and exclamations that rose from the crowd of reporters.

  * * *

  —

  Harry was woken by flickering lights and discovered that they were driving through the Lysaker tunnel and would soon be arriving. When they emerged at the other end, Harry noted that, sure enough, it was now dark. The bus climbed to the top of the hill, then headed down towards Sjølyst. He looked down at the armada of small boats in Bestumkilen. OK, not so small. And even if you could afford to buy one of those boats, how much would they cost in administration fees, maintenance and running costs per hour at sea during the mayfly Norwegian boating season? Why not hire a boat on those few decent days instead, then tie up at the end of the day and walk away without any worries? The largely empty bus was quiet, but from the seat in front of him he could hear the insect buzz of music in earphones, and in the gap between the two seats he could see the glow of a screen. They evidently had Wi-Fi on board, because he saw it was showing the news on VG’s website.

  He looked out at the boats again. Maybe it wasn’t the number of hours you spent at sea that was the important thing, maybe it was the fact of ownership. The fact that at any hour of the day, you could think that there was a boat out there that was yours. A carefully maintained, expensive boat that you knew people passing by would point at and say your name, say that it was yours. Because of course we aren’t what we do, but what we own. And when we’ve lost everything, we no longer exist. Harry knew where his thoughts were heading, and pulled himself free of them.