Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  Katrine zipped up the bag containing the case files and papers she needed to take home, walked towards the door, turned out the light and was about to leave her office when the phone on her desk started to ring.

  She picked it up.

  “It’s Sung-min Larsen.”

  “Great,” Katrine said, in a toneless voice. Not that she meant that it wasn’t great, but if this phone call meant he had decided to accept her offer of a job in Crime Squad, the timing wasn’t exactly good.

  “I’m calling because…Is now a good time, by the way?”

  Katrine looked out of the window, towards Botsparken. Bare trees, brown, withered grass. It wouldn’t be long before the trees grew leaves and blossoms, before the grass turned green. And then, after that, it would be summer. Or so they said.

  “Yes,” she said, and heard that she still wasn’t managing to sound enthusiastic.

  “I’ve just experienced a remarkable coincidence,” Larsen said. “Earlier today I received information that sheds new light on the Rakel Fauke case. And I’ve just had a phone call from Johan Krohn, Sv—”

  “I know who Krohn is.”

  “He says he’s at Smestaddammen, where he and his assistant had arranged to meet his client, Svein Finne. And that Svein Finne has just been shot and killed.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know why Krohn called me in particular, he says he’ll explain that later. Either way, this is primarily a case for Oslo Police District, which is why I’m calling you.”

  “I’ll pass it on to the uniforms,” Katrine said. She saw a deer creep across the brown lawn in front of Police Headquarters, heading towards the old prison block, Botsfengselet. She waited. Noted that Larsen was also waiting. “What did you mean when you said it was a coincidence, Larsen?”

  “It seems odd that Svein Finne has been shot just an hour after I received information that means Finne is back as a suspect in the Fauke case.”

  Katrine let go of her bag and sank down on the chair behind the desk. “You’re saying…”

  “Yes, I’m saying I’m in possession of information that indicates that Harry Hole is innocent.”

  Katrine felt her heart start to beat. Blood was coursing through her body, pricking her skin. And something else, something that had been lying dormant, woke up.

  “When you say ‘in possession of,’ Larsen…”

  “Yes?”

  “It sounds as if you haven’t shared this information with your colleagues yet. Is that correct?”

  “Not entirely. I’ve shared it with you.”

  “All you’ve shared with me is your own conclusion that Harry’s innocent.”

  “You’ll end up reaching the same conclusion, Bratt.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ve got a suggestion.”

  “I thought you might have.”

  “That you and I meet at the crime scene, and we’ll take it from there.”

  “OK. I’ll come over with the uniforms.”

  Katrine called the duty officer, then let her parents-in-law know she was going to be late. While she was waiting for them to answer she looked down at Botsparken again. The deer was gone. Her late father, Gert, had told her that badgers hunt everything. Anytime, anywhere. They’ll eat anything, and fight anything. And that some detectives had the badger in them, and some didn’t. And what Katrine could feel right now was the badger waking from hibernation.

  52

  Sung-min Larsen was already there when Katrine arrived at Smestaddammen. Between his legs stood a quivering, trembling dog, as if it was trying to hide. There was a thin but insistent bleeping sound, like an alarm clock, coming from somewhere.

  They walked over to the body, which was lying on the ground beside the bench. Katrine realised that the bleeping was coming from the dead body. And that the body was Svein Finne. That the deceased had been shot in the groin and through one eye, but that there were no exit wounds in his back or head. Special ammunition, perhaps. Even if Katrine knew it couldn’t be the case, it felt like the monotonous electronic bleeping from the dead man’s watch was gradually getting louder.

  “Why hasn’t anyone…” she began.

  “Fingerprints,” Sung-min said. “I have a preliminary witness statement, but it would be good to be able to know for certain that no one else has touched his watch.”

  Katrine nodded. Then gestured that they should move away.

  The officers were setting up cordon tape as Sung-min told Katrine what he had found out about the sequence of events from Alise Krogh Reinertsen and her boss, Johan Krohn, who were standing on the other side of the lake with a small crowd of curious onlookers. Sung-min told Katrine that he had ushered them all over there to get them out of the line of fire, seeing as it couldn’t be ruled out entirely that Svein Finne was merely a random victim, and that the perpetrator was looking for others.

  “Hmm,” Katrine said, squinting up at the hillside. “You and I must be right in the line of fire right now, so we don’t really believe that, do we?”

  “No,” Sung-min said.

  “So what do you think?” Katrine said, crouching down to pat the dog.

  “I don’t think anything, but Krohn has a theory.”

  Katrine nodded. “Is it the body that’s upset your dog?”

  “No. He got attacked by a swan when we arrived.”

  “Poor thing,” Katrine said, scratching the dog behind one ear. She got a lump in her throat, as if there was something familiar about the trusting look in the dog’s eyes as it gazed up at her.

  “Has Krohn explained why he called you specifically?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I think you should talk to him yourself.”

  “OK.”

  “Bratt?”

  “Yes?”

  “Like I said before, Kasparov used to be a police dog. Is it OK if he and I start to look into which direction Finne came from?”

  Katrine looked at the trembling dog. “I can have the dog unit here within half an hour. I presume that’s one of the reasons why Kasparov was retired.”

  “His hips are worn out,” Larsen said. “But I can carry him if it turns out to be a long way.”

  “Really? But don’t dogs’ sense of smell get weaker as they get older?”

  “A little,” Larsen said. “Same as human beings.”

  Katrine looked at Sung-min Larsen. Was he referring to Ole Winter?

  “Get going,” she said, patting Kasparov’s head. “Good hunting.”

  And, as if the old dog recognised what she said, its tail, which had been drooping down, started to wag.

  Katrine walked around the lake.

  Krohn and his assistant both looked pale and cold. A slight but chill north wind had started to blow, the sort that puts a temporary stop to Oslo’s inhabitants’ thoughts of spring.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through everything again, from the start,” Katrine said, taking out her notebook.

  Krohn nodded. “It started when Finne came to see me a few days ago. All of a sudden he was just standing there on my terrace. He wanted to tell me he’d killed Rakel Fauke, so I could help him if and when you started to close in on him.”

  “And Harry Hole?”

  “After the murder he drugged Harry Hole and left him at the scene. He fiddled with the thermostat to make it look like Rakel was killed after Hole arrived there. Finne’s motive was that Harry Hole had shot his son when he was trying to arrest him.”

  “Really?” Katrine didn’t know why she didn’t instantly buy this story. “Did Finne tell you how he got inside Rakel Fauke’s house? Seeing as the door was locked from the inside, I mean.”

  Krohn shook his head. “The chimney? I have no idea. I’ve seen that man arrive and leave in the most inex
plicable ways. I agreed to meet him here because I wanted him to hand himself in to the police.”

  Katrine stamped her feet on the ground. “Who do you think shot Finne? And why?”

  Krohn shrugged. “A man like Svein Finne, who assaulted children, gets plenty of enemies in prison. He managed to stay alive in there, but I know that several of them who’d been released were just waiting for Finne to get out. Men like that often have access to firearms, sadly, and some of them know how to use them as well.”

  “So we’ve got loads of potential suspects, all of whom have served time for serious offences, some of them for murder, is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Bratt.”

  Krohn was a persuasive storyteller, there was no doubt about that. Maybe Katrine’s skepticism was based on the fact that she had heard too many of the stories he had told in court. She looked at Alise. “I’ve got a few questions, if that’s OK?”

  “Not yet,” Alise said, folding her arms over her chest. “Not until six hours have passed. New research shows that dwelling on dramatic experiences before that increases the risk of long-term trauma.”

  “And we’ve got a killer who’s getting a bit harder to catch with each minute that passes,” Katrine said.

  “Not my responsibility, I’m a defense lawyer,” the woman said, with a defiant look in her eyes but in a shaky voice.

  Katrine felt sorry for her, but this wasn’t the time for kid gloves.

  “In that case you’ve done a terrible job, because your client’s dead,” she said. “And you’re not a defense lawyer, you’re a young woman with a law degree and a boss you’re fucking because you think it’ll help you climb the ladder. It won’t. And it won’t help you to try and play tough with me, OK?”

  Alise Krogh Reinertsen stared at Katrine. Blinked. A first tear began to make its way through the powder on the young woman’s cheek.

  Six minutes later, Katrine had all the details. She had asked Alise to close her eyes, relive the first shot, and say “now” when the bullet hit, and “now” when she heard the rumble. There was over a second between them, so the shot had come from at least four hundred metres away. Katrine thought about the points of impact. The man’s genitals, then one of his eyes. That wasn’t an accident. The killer had to be either a competitive marksman or have specialist military training. There couldn’t be many people like that who had served time at the same time as Svein Finne. Probably none, at a guess.

  And a suspicion, almost a hope—no, not even that, just a vain wish—ran through her. Then disappeared. But that glimpse of an alternative truth left something warm and soothing behind it, like the faith religious people cling to even though their intellect rejects it. And for a few moments Katrine couldn’t feel the northerly wind as she looked at the park in front of her and imagined it in the summer, the island with the willow tree, the flowers, insects buzzing, birds singing. All the things she would soon be able to show Gert. Then another thought struck her.

  The stories she was going to tell Gert about his father.

  The older he got, the more he would want to know about that part of him, the man he had come from.

  Something that would make him either proud or ashamed.

  It was true that the badger in her had woken up. And that a badger, in theory, could dig right through the planet in the course of its lifetime. But how deeply did she want to dig? Maybe she’d found out all she wanted to know.

  She heard a sound. No, it wasn’t a sound. Silence.

  The watch on the other side of the lake. It had stopped bleeping.

  * * *

  —

  A dog’s sense of smell is, roughly speaking, a hundred thousand times more sensitive than a human’s. And, according to recent research that Sung-min had read, dogs can do more than just smell. A dog’s Jacobson’s organ, located in its palate, also allows it to detect and interpret scentless pheromones and other information without any smell. This means that a dog—in perfect conditions—can follow the trail left by a human being up to a month later.

  The conditions weren’t perfect.

  The worst of it was that the trail they were following ran along a sidewalk, which meant that other people and animals had confused the scent. And there wasn’t much vegetation for scent particles to cling to.

  On the other hand, both Sørkedalsveien and the sidewalk—which ran through a residential area—weren’t as heavily trafficked as the city centre. And it was cold, which helped preserve scent. But, more important, even if there were large clouds blowing in from the northwest, it hadn’t rained since Svein Finne had been there.

  Sung-min felt tense each time they approached a bus stop, sure that the trail was about to end, that that was where Finne had got off a bus. But Kasparov just kept going, straining at his leash—he seemed to have forgotten all about his aching hips—and on the slopes heading up towards Røa, Sung-min began to regret not changing out of his suit into jogging gear.

  But as he sweated he was getting more and more excited. They had been going for almost half an hour, and it seemed unlikely that Finne would have used public transport at all, only to walk such an unnecessarily long way after he got off.

  * * *

  —

  Harry stared out across Porsanger Fjord, towards the sea, towards the North Pole, towards the end and the beginning, towards where there was probably a horizon on clearer days. But today, the sea, sky and land all blurred together. It was like sitting under a huge, grey-white dome, and it was as quiet as a church, the only sounds the occasional plaintive cry of a gull and the sea lapping gently against the rowing boat the man and boy were sitting in. And Oleg’s voice:

  “…and when I got home and told Mum that I put my hand up in class and said that Old Tjikko isn’t the oldest tree in the world, but the oldest roots, she laughed so much I thought she was going to start crying. And then she said that the three of us had roots like that. I didn’t tell her, but I thought that couldn’t be right, because you’re not my father the way the roots are Old Tjikko’s father and mother. But as the years passed, I realised what she meant. That roots are something that grow. That when we used to sit there talking about…I don’t know, what did we talk about? Tetris. Skating. Bands we both like…”

  “Mm. And both…”

  “…hate.” Oleg grinned. “That’s when we grew roots. That was how you became my father.”

  “Mm. A bad father.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “You think I was an average father?”

  “An unusual father. Lousy grades in some subjects, world’s best in others. You saved me when you came back from Hong Kong. But it’s funny, I remember the little things best. Like the time you tricked me.”

  “I tricked you?”

  “When I finally managed to beat your Tetris record, you boasted that you knew all the countries in the world atlas in the bookcase. And you knew exactly what was going to happen after that.”

  “Well…”

  “It took me a couple of months, but by the time my classmates looked at me weirdly when I mentioned Djibouti, I knew the names, flags and capital cities of every country in the world.”

  “Almost all.”

  “All.”

  “Nope. You thought San Salvador was the country and El Salvador—”

  “Don’t even try.”

  Harry smiled. And realised that was exactly what it was. A smile. Like the first glimpse of sun after months of darkness. Even if a new period of darkness lay ahead of him, now that he had finally woken up, but it couldn’t be worse than the one that lay behind him.

  “She liked that,” Harry said. “Listening to us talk.”

  “Did she?” Oleg looked off to the north.

  “She used to bring the book she was reading, or her knitting, and sit down near us. She didn’t bother to inter
rupt or join in the conversation, she didn’t even bother to listen to what we were talking about. She said she just liked the sound. She said it was the sound of the men in her life.”

  “I liked that sound too,” Oleg said, pulling the fishing rod towards him so that the tip bowed respectfully towards the surface of the water. “You and Mum. After I’d gone to bed I used to open the door just so I could listen to you. You used to talk quietly, and it sounded like you’d already said pretty much everything, understood each other. That all that needed adding was the occasional key word here or there. Even so, you used to make her laugh. It was such a safe sound, the best sound to fall asleep to.”

  Harry chuckled. Coughed. Thought that sound carried a long way in this weather, possibly all the way to land. He tugged dutifully at his own fishing rod.

  “Helga says she’s never seen two grown-ups as in love with each other as you and Mum. That she hopes we can be like you.”

  “Mm. Maybe she ought to hope for more than that.”

  “More than what?”

  Harry shrugged. “Here comes a line I’ve heard too many men say. Your mother deserved better than me.”

  Oleg smiled briefly. “Mum knew what she was getting, and it was you she wanted. She just needed that break to remember that. For the pair of you to remember Old Tjikko’s roots.”

  Harry cleared his throat. “Listen, maybe it’s time for me to tell—”

  “No,” Oleg interrupted. “I don’t want to know anything about why she threw you out. If that’s OK with you? And nothing about the rest of it either.”

  “OK,” Harry said. “It’s up to you how much you want to know.” That was what he used to say to Rakel. She had made a habit of asking for less rather than more information.

  Oleg ran his hand along the side of the boat. “Because the rest of the truth is bad, isn’t it?”