The Redbreast

by Jo Nesbo

  Her bosom heaved, her nostrils quivered. Her eyes filled slowly with tears.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry.’ Her voice was barely audible.

  ‘You’ll have to speak up.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Brandhaug beamed.

  ‘There, there, Rakel.’ He dried a tear from her cheek. ‘This will be fine. You only have to get to know me. I want us to be friends. Do you understand, Rakel?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Sure?’

  She sniffled and nodded again.

  ‘Excellent.’

  He stood up and loosened his belt buckle.

  It was an unusually cold night and the old man had slipped into his sleeping-bag. Even though he was lying on a thick layer of spruce twigs the cold from the ground penetrated his body. His legs had gone stiff, and every now and then he had to rock from side to side to prevent his upper body from losing feeling too.

  The windows in the house were still lit, but it was now so dark outside that he could no longer see much through the rifle sights. The situation wasn’t hopeless yet though. If the man returned home this evening the outside lamp above the garage entrance, facing the forest, was lit. The old man looked through the sights. Even though the lamp did not give off much light, the colour of the garage door was bright enough to outline him clearly against it.

  The old man turned over on to his back. It was quiet here; he would hear the car coming. Provided he didn’t fall asleep. The bout of stomach pains had drained him, but he couldn’t sleep. He had never slept on duty before. Never. He could feel the hatred and tried to warm himself on it. This was different, this was not like the other hatred which burned on a low, steady flame, which had been there for years, consuming and clearing the undergrowth of small thoughts, creating a perspective and allowing him to see things better. This new hatred burned with such ferocity that he wasn’t sure whether he was controlling it or it was controlling him. He knew he must not let himself be dragged along; he had to stay cool.

  He looked at the starry sky between the spruce trees above him. It was quiet. So still and cold. He was going to die. They were all going to die. It was a good thought; he tried to keep it in mind. Then he closed his eyes.

  Brandhaug stared at the chandelier on the ceiling. A strip of blue light from a Blaupunkt advert outside was reflected in the prisms. So still. So cold.

  ‘You can go now,’ he said.

  He didn’t look at her, just heard the sound of the duvet being folded back and felt the bed rise. Then he heard the sound of clothes being pulled on. She hadn’t said a word. Not when he touched her, not when he had ordered her to touch him. She lay there with these large, wide-open, black eyes. Black with fear. Or hatred. That was what had made him so uncomfortable that he hadn’t . . .

  At first he had ignored it. He had waited for the feeling. Thought of other women he had had, all the times it had worked. But the feeling didn’t come and after a while he had asked her to stop touching him. There was no reason why she should be allowed to humiliate him.

  She obeyed like a robot. Made sure she kept her end of the bargain, no more, no less. There were six months to wait until Oleg’s custody case became time-barred. He had plenty of time. No point getting het up; there would be other days, other nights.

  He had gone back to the beginning, but he clearly shouldn’t have had the drinks. They had numbed him, made him unresponsive to her caresses and his own.

  He had ordered her into the bathtub and made a drink for them both. Hot water, soap. He had held long monologues about how beautiful she was. She hadn’t said a word. So quiet. So cold. In the end the water had gone cold too and he had dried her and taken her to bed again. Her skin afterwards was bumpy and dry. She had started to tremble and he had felt her beginning to respond. Finally. His hand had moved downwards, downwards. Then he had seen her eyes again. Big, black, dead. Her gaze fixed on a point on the ceiling. And the magic was gone again. He felt like slapping her, slapping life into her lifeless eyes, slapping her with the flat of his hand, seeing the skin flare up, become inflamed and red.

  He heard her taking the letter from the table and opening the clasp on her bag.

  ‘We’ll have to drink less next time,’ he said. ‘That goes for you too.’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Next week, Rakel. Same place, same time. You won’t forget, will you?’

  ‘How could I?’ she said. The door closed and she was gone.

  He got up, mixed himself another drink. Jameson and water, the only good thing to . . . He drank it slowly. Then he lay back.

  Soon it was midnight. He closed his eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. From the adjacent room he could hear someone had put on pay-TV. If it was pay-TV, that is. The groans sounded fairly lifelike. A police siren cut through the night. Damn! He tossed and turned. The soft bed had already made his back go stiff. He always had problems sleeping here, not solely because of the bed. The yellow room was and always would be a hotel room, an alien place.

  A meeting in Larvik, he had told his wife. And, as usual, when she asked he couldn’t remember the name of the hotel they were staying in. Was it Rica, he wondered? If it finished late, he would ring, he had said. But you know how it is with these late-night suppers, darling.

  Well, she had nothing to grumble about. He had provided her with a life that was more than she could ever have hoped for with her background. Thanks to him, she had travelled the world, lived in luxurious embassy residences staffed with servants in some of the world’s most beautiful cities, learned foreign languages and met exciting people. She had never had to lift a finger all her life. What would she do if she were left on her own, never having worked? He was the basis of her existence, her family, in short everything she had. No, he wasn’t that bothered about what Elsa might or might not think.

  Nevertheless, it was her he was thinking about right now. He should have been there, with her. A warm, familiar body against his back, an arm round him. Yes, a little warmth after all that coldness.

  He looked at his watch again. He could say the supper had finished early and he had decided to drive home. Not only that, she would be happy. She absolutely hated being on her own at night in that big house.

  He lay there listening to the sounds coming from the neighbouring room.

  Then he got up and quickly began to dress.

  The old man is no longer old. And he is dancing. It is a slow waltz and she has rested her cheek against his neck. They have been dancing for a long time, they are sweaty and her skin is so hot it burns against his. He can feel her smiling. He wants to continue dancing like this, to go on simply holding her until the building burns down, until time stands still, until they can open their eyes and see that they have come to a different place.

  She whispers something, but the music is too loud.

  ‘What?’ he says, bending his head. She places her lips against his ear.

  ‘You have to wake up,’ she says.

  He thrust open his eyes. He blinked in the dark before seeing his breath hang rigid and white in front of him. He hadn’t heard the car arrive. He turned over, gave a low groan and tried to pull his arms from underneath him. It was the noise of the garage door that had awoken him. He heard the car revving up and just caught the blue Volvo being swallowed up by the dark garage. His right arm had gone to sleep. In a few seconds the man would come out again, stand in the light, close the garage door and then . . . it would be too late.

  The old man fumbled desperately with the zip on the sleeping-bag and pulled out his left arm. The adrenaline was coursing through his veins, but sleep wouldn’t let go, like a layer of cotton wool muffling all the sounds and preventing him from seeing clearly. He heard the sound of the car door being closed.

  Now he had both arms out of the sleeping-bag and fortunately the starlit sky gave him enough light quickly to locate the rifle and put it in position. Hurry, hurry! He rested his cheek against the cold rifle butt. He squinted t
hrough the sights. Blinked, couldn’t see a thing. With trembling fingers he took off the cloth he had wrapped around the sights to keep the frost off the lens. That’s it! Rested his cheek against the butt again. What now? The garage was out of focus, he must have moved the rangefinder. He heard the bang of the garage door as it was closed. He twisted the rangefinder and the man below came into focus. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a wool coat and standing with his back to him. The old man blinked twice. The dream still hung like a thin mist in front of his eyes.

  He wanted to wait until the man turned, until he could establish beyond all doubt that he was the right one. His finger curled around the trigger, pressed it carefully. It would have been easier with the weapon he had trained on for years, when the trigger pressure had been in his blood and all the movements had been automatic. He concentrated on his breathing. Killing someone is not difficult. Not if you have trained to do it. At the opening of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 two newly recruited companies had stood fifty metres apart and fired off round after round at each other without anyone being hit – not because they were bad marksmen, but because they had aimed above one another’s heads. They simply had not been able to cross the threshold to killing another person. But when you have done it once . . .

  The man in front of the garage turned. He seemed to be looking directly at the old man. It was him, no doubt about it. His upper body almost filled the whole of the rifle sights. The mist in the old man’s head was beginning to disperse. He held his breath and increased the pressure on the trigger slowly and calmly. The first shot had to hit because it was pitch-black away from the circle of light by the garage. Time froze. Bernt Brandhaug was a dead man. The old man’s brain was utterly clear now.

  That was why the feeling that he had done something wrong came a thousandth of a second before he knew what it was. The trigger wouldn’t move. The old man pressed harder, but the trigger wouldn’t budge. The safety catch. The old man knew it was too late. He found the safety catch with his thumb, flicked it open. Then he stared through the sights at the empty cone of light. Brandhaug was gone, was walking towards the front door on the other side of the house, facing the road.

  The old man blinked. His heart was beating against the inside of his ribs like a hammer. He let the air out of his aching lungs. He had fallen asleep. He blinked again. His surroundings seemed to be swimming in a kind of haze now. He had failed. He punched the ground with his clenched fist. It wasn’t until the first hot tear fell on to the back of his hand that he realised he was crying.

  73

  Klippan, Sweden. 10 May 2000.

  HARRY WOKE UP.

  It took a second before he knew where he was. After he had let himself into the flat the first thing that had occurred to him was that it would be impossible to sleep. There was only a thin wall and a single pane of glass separating the bedroom from the busy road outside. But as soon as the supermarket on the other side of the road had closed for the night, the place seemed to go dead. Hardly a car had passed and the local population seemed to have been swallowed up.

  In the supermarket Harry had bought a pizza grandiosa which he heated in the oven. He thought how odd it was to be sitting in Sweden, eating Italian food made in Norway. Afterwards, he switched on the dusty TV which was standing on a beer crate in the corner. There was obviously something wrong with the TV because all the people’s faces had this strange green shimmer. He sat watching a documentary. A girl had put together a personal account of her brother, who had spent her entire childhood in the 1970s travelling the world and sending her letters. From the homeless milieu in Paris, a kibbutz in Israel, a train journey through India and the verge of despair in Copenhagen. It had been made very simply. A few film-clips, but mostly stills, a voiceover and a strangely melancholic, sad story. He must have dreamed about it because when he woke up the characters and places were still playing on his retina.

  The sound that had woken him came from the coat he had left hanging over the kitchen chair. The high-pitched bleeps bounced off the walls of the bare room. He had switched on the electric panel radiator to full, but he was still freezing under the thin duvet. He placed his feet on the cold lino and took the mobile phone out of his inside coat pocket.

  ‘Hello?’

  No answer.

  ‘Hello?’

  All he could hear at the other end was breathing. ‘Is that you, Sis?’

  She was the only person he could immediately think of who had his number and who might conceivably ring him in the middle of the night.

  ‘Is something the matter? With Helge?’

  He’d had doubts about giving the bird to Sis, but she had seemed so happy and had promised she would take good care of it. But it wasn’t Sis. She didn’t breathe like that. And she would have answered.

  ‘Who is it?’

  Still no answer.

  He was about to hang up when there was a little whimper. The breathing began to quiver; it sounded as if the person at the other end was going to cry. Harry sat down on the sofa bed. In the gap between the thin blue curtains he could see the neon sign of the ICA supermarket.

  Harry eased a cigarette out of the packet on the coffee table beside the sofa, lit it and lay back. He inhaled deeply as he heard the quivering breathing change into low sobbing.

  ‘Don’t cry now,’ he said.

  A car passed outside. Had to be a Volvo, Harry thought. Harry covered his legs with the duvet. Then he told the story about the girl and her elder brother, more or less as he remembered it. When he had finished she wasn’t crying any more and right after he said goodnight, the line was cut.

  When the mobile phone rang again it was past 8.00 and light outside. Harry found it under the duvet, between his legs. It was Meirik. He sounded stressed.

  ‘Come back to Oslo immediately,’ he said. ‘Looks like that Märklin rifle of yours has been used.’

  Part Seven

  BLACK CLOAK

  74

  Rikshospital. 10 May 2000.

  HARRY RECOGNISED BERNT BRANDHAUG AT ONCE. HE HAD a broad smile on his face and was staring at Harry with wide-open eyes.

  ‘Why’s he smiling?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Klemetsen said. ‘The facial muscles go stiff and people have all sorts of weird expressions. Now and then we have parents here who can’t recognise their own children because they’ve changed so much.’

  The autopsy table stood in the middle of the room. Klemetsen removed the sheet so they could see the remains of the body. Halvorsen did a swift about-turn. He had rejected Harry’s offer of menthol cream before they went in. As the room temperature in Autopsy Room No. 4 in the forensics department at the Rikshospital was twelve degrees, the smell wasn’t the worst thing. Halvorsen couldn’t stop retching.

  ‘Agreed,’ Knut Klemetsen said. ‘He’s not a pretty sight.’

  Harry nodded. Klemetsen was a good pathologist and a considerate man. He was aware that Halvorsen was new and didn’t want to embarrass him. Brandhaug looked no worse than most bodies. In other words, he looked no worse than the twins who had lain in water for a week, the eighteen-year-old who had crashed at 200 kph escaping from the police or the junkie who had set fire to herself, sitting naked except for a quilted anorak. Harry had seen most things and as far as his top ten nasties were concerned, Bernt Brandhaug was well out of the running. But one thing was clear: for a bullet through the back Bernt Brandhaug looked horrific. The gaping exit wound in his chest was big enough for Harry to stick his fist in.

  ‘So the bullet entered through his back?’ Harry said.

  ‘Right between his shoulder-blades, angled downwards. It smashed the vertebral column on entry and the sternum on its way out. As you can see, parts of the sternum are missing. They found traces of it on the car seat.’

  ‘On the car seat?’

  ‘Yes, he had just opened the garage door, probably on his way to work, and the bullet went through him at an angle, through the front and the rear wind
screens, and lodged in the wall at the back of the garage, no less.’

  ‘What kind of bullet could it be?’ asked Halvorsen, who seemed to have recovered.

  ‘The ballistics experts will have to answer that one,’ Klemetsen said. ‘But its performance was like a cross between a dumdum and a tunnel drill. The only place I have ever seen anything like this was when I was working on a UN assignment in Croatia in 1991.’

  ‘A Singapore bullet,’ Harry said. ‘They found the remains embedded half a centimetre into the wall. The cartridge they found in the trees nearby was the same kind as the one I found in Siljan last winter. That was why they contacted me straight away. What else can you tell us, Knut?’

  There wasn’t much. He said that the autopsy had already been carried out, with Kripos present as required by law. The cause of death was obvious and otherwise there were only two points he considered worthy of mention – there were traces of alcohol in Brandhaug’s blood and vaginal secretions had been found under the nail of his right middle finger.

  ‘His wife’s?’ Halvorsen asked.

  ‘Forensics will establish that,’ Klemetsen said, looking at the young policeman over his glasses. ‘If they think it necessary. There may not be any need to ask her that sort of thing now, unless you consider it relevant for the investigation.’

  Harry shook his head.

  They drove up Sognsveien and then up Peder Ankers vei before arriving at Brandhaug’s house.

  ‘Ugly house,’ Halvorsen said.

  They rang the bell and some time passed before a heavily made-up woman in her fifties opened the door.

  ‘Elsa Brandhaug?’

  ‘I’m her sister. What’s it about?’

  Harry showed his ID.

  ‘More questions?’ the sister asked with suppressed anger in her voice. Harry nodded and knew more or less what was about to come.

  ‘Honestly! She’s completely worn out and it won’t get her husband back, all your —’

  ‘I apologise, but we’re not thinking about her husband,’ Harry interrupted politely. ‘He’s dead. We’re thinking about the next victim. We’re hoping no one else will have to go through what she is experiencing now.’