by Jo Nesbo
He stared at the phone.
And he thought the same thing he had thought every day as he passed the phone box in Hong Kong so many years ago. That she was there. Right then, her and Oleg. Inside the phone. Twelve tapped digits away.
But even that was long after Rakel and Harry met for the first time.
That happened fifteen years ago. Harry had driven up the steep, winding road to her wooden house in Holmenkollen. His car had breathed a sigh of relief when he arrived, and a woman emerged from the house. Harry asked after Sindre Fauke as she locked the front door, and it wasn’t until she turned round and came closer that he noticed how pretty she was. Brown hair; pronounced, almost wild eyebrows above brown eyes; high, aristocratic cheekbones. Dressed in a simple, elegant coat. In a voice that was deeper than her appearance suggested, she told him that was her father, that she had inherited the house and he no longer lived there. Rakel Fauke had a confident, relaxed way of speaking, with exaggerated, almost theatrical diction, and she looked him right in the eye. When she walked off, she walked in an absolutely straight line, like a ballet dancer. He had stopped her, asked for help jump-starting his car. Afterwards he gave her a lift. They discovered that they had studied law at the same time. That they had attended the same Raga Rockers concert. He liked the sound of her laughter; it wasn’t as deep as her voice, but bright and light, like a trickling stream. She was going to Majorstua.
“It’s by no means certain this car’s going to make it that far,” he had said. And she agreed with him. As if they already had an idea of what hadn’t yet begun, what really couldn’t happen. When she was about to get out, he had to shove the broken passenger door open for her, breathing in her scent. Only thirty minutes had passed since they’d met, and he wondered what the hell was going on. All he wanted to do was kiss her.
“Maybe see you around,” she said.
“Maybe,” he replied, then watched as she disappeared down Sporveisgata with a ballerina’s steps.
The next time they met was at a party in Police Headquarters. It turned out that Rakel Fauke worked in the foreign section of POT, the Police Surveillance Agency. She was wearing a red dress. They stood talking together, laughing. Then they talked some more. He about his upbringing, his sister Sis who had what she herself described as “a touch of Down’s Syndrome,” about his mother who died when Harry was young, and that he had had to look after his father. Rakel had told him about studying Russian in the Armed Forces, her time at the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow, and the Russian man she had met, who ended up becoming the father of her son, Oleg. And that when she left Moscow, she had also left her husband, who had alcohol problems. And Harry had told her that he was an alcoholic, something she might already have guessed when she saw him drinking Coke at a staff party. He didn’t mention the fact that his intoxicant that evening was her laughter—clear, spontaneous, bright—and that he was willing to say the most revealing, idiotic things about himself just to hear it. And then, towards the end of the evening, they had danced. Harry had danced. To a turgid version of “Let It Be” played on panpipes. That was the proof: he was hopelessly in love.
A few days later he went on a Sunday outing with Oleg and Rakel. At one point, Harry had held Rakel’s hand, because it felt natural. After a while she pulled her hand away. And when Oleg was playing Tetris with his mum’s new friend, Harry had felt Rakel staring darkly at him and knew what she was thinking. That an alcoholic, possibly similar to the one she had walked away from, was now sitting in her house with her son. And Harry had realised he was going to have to prove himself worthy.
He had done it. Who knows, maybe Rakel and Oleg saved him from drinking himself to death. Obviously things hadn’t been one unbroken triumphal march after that, he had fallen flat on his face several times, there had been breaks and separations, but they had always found their way back to each other. Because they had found laughter in each other. Love, with a capital L. Love so exclusive that you should count yourself bloody lucky if you ever get to experience it—and have it reciprocated—just once in your life. And for the past few years they had woken up each morning to a harmony and happiness that was simultaneously so strong and so fragile that it had frightened the life out of him. It made him creep about as if he were walking on thin ice. So why had it cracked anyway? Because he was the man he was, of course. Harry fucking Hole. Or “the demolition man,” as Øystein called him.
Could he follow that path again? Drive up the steep, winding, difficult road to Rakel and introduce himself again. Be the man she had never met before. Of course he could try. Yes, he could do that. And now was as good a time as ever. The perfect time, in fact. There were just two problems. Firstly, he didn’t have the money for a taxi. But that was easily fixed, it would take him ten minutes to walk home, where his Ford Escort, his third one, was sitting covered in snow in the car park in the backyard.
Secondly, the voice inside him telling him it was a terrible idea.
But that could be stopped. Harry downed his drink. Just like that. He stood up and walked towards the door.
“See you, mate!” the bartender called after him.
Ten minutes later Harry was standing in the backyard on Sofies gate, looking dubiously at the car, which was parked in eternal shadow between the snowboards covering the basement windows. It wasn’t as badly covered with snow as he had expected, so he just had to go upstairs, fetch the keys, start it up and put his foot on the gas. He could be at hers in fifteen minutes. Open the front door to the big, open room that served as hall, living room and kitchen, covering most of the ground floor. He would see her standing at the worktop by the window looking out over the terrace. She would give him a wry smile, nod towards the kettle and ask if he still preferred instant coffee over espresso.
Harry gasped at the thought of it. And there it was again, the claw in his chest.
* * *
—
Harry was running. After midnight on a Sunday in Oslo, that meant you had the streets to yourself. His cracked trainers were held together with gaffer tape around the ankles. He was taking the same route the daughter on Borggata had said she had run, according to the report. Along illuminated paths and tracks through the hillside sculpture park—a gift to the city from property tycoon Christian Ringnes, and an homage to women. It was perfectly still, the only sounds were Harry’s own breathing and the crunch of the grit beneath his shoes. He ran up to where the park flattened out towards Ekebergsletta, then down again. He stopped at Damien Hirst’s Anatomy of an Angel, a sculpture in white stone that Rakel had told him was Carrera marble. The graceful, seated figure had made Harry think of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, but Rakel—who as usual had read up on what they were going to see—had explained that the inspiration was Alfred Boucher’s L’Hirondelle from 1920. Maybe, but the difference was that Hirst’s angel had been cut open by knives and scalpels so that her innards, muscles, bones and brain were visible. Was that what the sculptor wanted to show, that angels were also people inside? Or that some people are actually angels? Harry tilted his head. He could agree on the latter point. Even after all these years and everything he and Rakel had been through together, and even if he had dissected her as much as she had dissected him, he had found nothing but an angel. Angel and human, all the way through. Her capacity for forgiveness—which had obviously been a precondition for being with someone like Harry—was almost limitless. Almost. But obviously he had managed to find that limit. And then crossed it.
Harry looked at his watch and ran on. Sped up. Felt his heart work harder. He increased his speed a little more. Felt the lactic acid. A bit more. Felt the blood pumping around his body, tugging at the rubbish. Ironing out the past few bad days. Rinsing away the shit. Why did he imagine that running was the opposite of drinking, that it was the antidote, when it merely gave him a different type of rush? But so what? It was a better rush.
He emerged from the forest in fro
nt of the Ekeberg Restaurant, the once run-down modernist structure where Harry, Øystein and Tresko had drunk their first beers in their youth, and where the seventeen-year-old Harry was picked up by a woman he remembered as being really old, but who was probably only in her thirties. Either way, she had given him an uncomplicated initiation under her experienced direction, and he probably hadn’t been the only one. Occasionally he wondered if the investor who had refurbished the restaurant might have been one of them, and had done it as a gesture of gratitude. Harry could no longer remember what she looked like, just the cooing whisper in his ear afterwards: Not bad at all, lad. You’ll see, you’re going to make some women happy. And others unhappy.
And one woman, both.
Harry stopped on the steps of the closed, dark restaurant.
Hands on his knees, head hanging down. He could feel his gag reflex tickling deep in his throat, and heard his own rasping breath. He counted to twenty as he whispered her name. Rakel, Rakel. Then he straightened up and looked down at the city beneath him. Oslo, an autumn city. Now, in spring, she looked like she had woken up reluctantly. But Harry wasn’t bothered about the centre of the city, he was looking towards the ridge, towards her house, on the far side of what, in spite of all the lights and febrile human activity, was really nothing but the crater of a dead volcano, cold stone and solidified clay. He cast another glance at the timer on his watch and started to run.
He didn’t stop until he was back in Borggata.
There, he stopped his watch and studied the numbers.
He jogged the rest of the way home at an easy pace. As he unlocked the door to his flat he heard the rough sound of grit against wood under his trainers and remembered what Katrine had said about picking his feet up.
He used his phone to play more of his Spotify list. The sound of The Hellacopters streamed from the Sonos Playbar that Oleg had got him for his birthday, which had overnight reduced the record collection on the shelves behind him to a dead monument to thirty years of laborious collecting, where anything that hadn’t stood the test of time had been pulled out like weeds and thrown away. As the chaotic guitar and drum intro to “Carry Me Home” made the speakers vibrate and he picked the grit from the sculpture park from the soles of his shoes, he thought about how the nineteen-year-old had willingly retreated into the past with vinyl records, whereas Harry was unwillingly backing into the future. He put his shoes down, looked for The Byrds, who weren’t on any of his playlists—sixties and early seventies music were more Bjørn Holm’s thing, and his attempts to convert Harry with Glen Campbell had been futile. He found “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, and moments later Roger McGuinn’s Rickenbacker guitar was echoing around the room. But she had been converted. She had fallen in love with it even though it wasn’t her music. There was something about guitars and girls. Four strings were enough, and this guy had twelve.
Harry considered the possibility that he might be the one who was wrong. But the hairs on the back of his neck were rarely wrong, and they had stood up when he recognised one of the names from the record sleeve in the interview transcript. And connected it to the picture of the guy with the Rickenbacker guitar. Harry lit a cigarette and listened to the double guitar solo at the end of “Rainy Days Revisited.” He wondered how long it would be before he fell asleep. How long he would manage to leave his phone alone before checking to see if Rakel had replied.
5
“We know you’ve answered these questions before, Sara,” Harry said, looking at the nineteen-year-old girl sitting opposite him in the cramped interview room that felt a bit like a doll’s house. Truls Berntsen was sitting in the control room with his arms folded, yawning. It was ten o’clock, they had been going for an hour and Sara was showing signs of impatience as they went through the sequence of events, but no emotion beyond that. Not even when Harry read out loud from the report about the injuries her mother had suffered from the thirteen knife wounds. “But, as I said, Officer Berntsen and I have taken over the investigation, and we’d like to understand everything as clearly as possible. So—did your father usually help with the cooking? I’m asking because he must have been very quick to find the sharpest kitchen knife, and must have known exactly which drawer it was in, and where.”
“No, he didn’t help,” Sara said, her displeasure even more apparent now. “He did the cooking. And the only person who helped was me. Mum was always out.”
“Out?”
“Meeting friends. At the gym. So she said.”
“I’ve seen pictures of her, it looks like she kept herself in shape. Kept herself young.”
“Whatever. She died young.”
Harry waited. Let the answer hang in the air. Then Sara pulled a face. Harry had seen it in other cases, the way that someone left behind struggled with grief as if it were an enemy, an irritating nuisance that needed to be cajoled and tricked. And one way of doing that was to downplay the loss, to discredit the dead. But he suspected that wasn’t actually the case this time. When Harry had suggested Sara might like to bring a lawyer she had dismissed the offer. She just wanted to get it over with, she said, she had other plans. Understandable enough, she was nineteen, alone, but she was adaptable, and life went on. And the case had been solved, which was presumably why she had relaxed. And was showing her true feelings. Or rather her lack of feelings.
“You don’t get as much exercise as your mother,” Harry said. “Not running, anyway.”
“Don’t I?” she replied with a half-smile and looked up at Harry. It was the self-assured smile of a young person from a generation in which you were one of the thin ones if you had a body Harry’s generation would have thought of as average.
“I’ve seen your running shoes,” Harry said. “They’ve barely been used. And that isn’t because they’re new, because they stopped making that sort two years ago. I’ve got the same ones.”
Sara shrugged. “I’ve got more time to go running now.”
“Yes, your father’s going to be in prison for twelve years, so you won’t have to help him with the cooking for a while.”
Harry looked at her and saw that he had hit home. Her mouth was hanging open and her black-painted eyelashes were fluttering up and down as she blinked hard.
“Why are you lying?” Harry asked.
“Wh…What?”
“You said you ran from home to the top of the sculpture park, down to the Ekeberg Restaurant, then back home again in thirty minutes. I ran the same distance last night. It took me almost forty-five minutes, and I’m a pretty good runner. I’ve also spoken to the police officer who stopped you when you got back. He said you weren’t sweating or particularly out of breath.”
Sara was sitting up straight now on the other side of the little doll’s-house table, staring unconsciously at the red light on the microphones that indicated they were recording, when she replied.
“OK, I didn’t run all the way to the top.”
“How far?”
“To the Marilyn Monroe statue.”
“So you must have run along those gritted paths, like me. When I got home I had to pick small stones out of the soles of my shoes, Sara. Eight in total. But the soles of your shoes were completely clean.”
Harry had no idea if there had been eight stones or only three. But the more precise he was, the more incontestable his reasoning would seem. And he could see from Sara’s face that it was working.
“You didn’t go running at all, Sara. You left the flat at the time you told the police, at 20:15, while your father called the police claiming that he’d murdered your mother. Maybe you ran around the block, just long enough for the police to arrive, then you jogged back. Like your father told you to. Isn’t that right?”
Sara didn’t answer, just went on blinking. Harry noted that her pupils had expanded.
“I’ve spoken to your mother’s lover. Andreas. Professional name Bom-Bom. He may not sing
quite as well as he plays his twelve-string guitar.”
“Andreas sings…” The anger in her eyes faded and she stopped herself.
“He admitted that you and he had met a few times, and said that was how he met your mother.” Harry looked down at his notepad. Not because he couldn’t remember what was written in it—nothing—but to lower the intensity, to give her a bit of breathing room.
“Andreas and I were in love.” There was a faint tremor in Sara’s voice.
“Not according to him. He said you’d had a couple of…”—Harry pulled his head back slightly to read what wasn’t written in his notebook—“ ‘groupie fucks.’ ”
Sara twitched.
“But you wouldn’t leave him alone, apparently. He said there’s a fine line between groupie and stalker, in his experience. That things were simpler with a mature, married woman who accepted things for what they were. A bit of excitement to liven up the daily routine, spice things up a bit. That’s how he put it. A way to spice things up.”
Harry looked at her.
“It was you who borrowed your mother’s phone, not your father. And discovered that she and Andreas had been having an affair.”
Harry checked to see how his conscience was doing. Bulldozing a nineteen-year-old with no lawyer, a lovesick teenager who had been betrayed by her mother and a guy she had managed to convince herself belonged to her.
“Your father isn’t just self-sacrificing, Sara, he’s smart too. He knows that the best lie is one that’s as close to the truth as possible. The lie is that your father was at the local shop picking up some things for dinner before going home, borrowing your mother’s phone, finding the messages and killing her. The truth is that while he was at the shop, you found the messages, and from that point on I’m guessing that if we swap your and your father’s roles in the report, we’d get a fairly accurate description of what happened in the kitchen. You argued, she turned her back on you to walk out, you knew where the knife was, and the rest played out more or less of its own accord. And when your father got home and discovered what had happened, you came up with this plan together.”