by Jo Nesbo
“Thanks, Bjørn.” Harry ended the call. Tapped in R for Rakel. The other entries in his contacts were O for Oleg, Ø for Øystein, K for Katrine, B for Bjørn, S for Sis and A for Ståle Aune. That was all. That was enough for Harry, even if Rakel had told Ståle that Harry was open to meeting new people. But only if those letters weren’t already taken.
He keyed in Rakel’s work number without her extension.
“Roar Bohr?” he said when the receptionist answered.
“It looks like Bohr isn’t here today.”
“Where is he, and when will he be back?”
“It doesn’t say anything about that here. But I’ve got a mobile number.”
Harry made a note of the number and tapped it into the app for directory inquiries. It came up with an address between Smestad and Huseby, and a landline number. He looked at his watch. Half past one. He called the number.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice said after the third ring.
“Sorry, wrong number.” Harry hung up and started to walk towards the tram stop at the top of Birkelunden. He rubbed his upper arm. That wasn’t where the itch was either. It wasn’t until he was on the metro heading towards Smestad that he realised that the itch was probably in his head. And that it had almost certainly been triggered by Ringdal’s possibly well-meant, possibly calculated gesture. And that he would actually have preferred to have gone on being barred, rather than be the recipient of irritating, broad-minded benevolence. And that he might possibly have underestimated judo.
* * *
—
The woman who opened the door of the yellow house exuded the sort of sharp vitality that was typical of women between thirty and fifty in the upper social segment here on the west side of the city. It was difficult to know if it was an ideal they were trying to live up to, or their true energy level, but Harry had a suspicion that there was something status-related about the effortless, loud way they marshalled their two children, gun dog and husband, preferably in a public place.
“Pia Bohr?”
“How can I help you?” No confirmation, and gently dismissive politeness, but said with a confident smile. She was short, wasn’t wearing makeup, and her wrinkles suggested she was closer to fifty than forty. But she was as slim as a teenager. A lot of time at the gym and plenty of outdoor living, Harry guessed.
“Police.” He held up his ID.
“Of course, you’re Harry Hole,” she said without looking at it. “I’ve seen your face in the paper. You were Rakel Fauke’s husband. My condolences.”
“Thank you.”
“I presume you’re here to talk to Roar? He isn’t here.”
“When…”
“This evening, possibly. Give me your number and I’ll ask him to contact you.”
“Mm. Perhaps I could talk to you, Mrs. Bohr?”
“To me? What for?”
“It won’t take long. There are just a couple of things I need to know.” Harry’s eyes roamed across the shoe rack behind her. “Can I come in?”
Harry noticed the hesitation. And found what he was looking for on the bottom shelf of the rack. A pair of black, Soviet military boots.
“Now isn’t a good time, I’m in the middle of…something.”
“I can wait.”
Pia Bohr smiled quickly. Not obviously beautiful, but cute, Harry decided. Possibly what Øystein would call a Toyota: not the boys’ first choice when they were teenagers, but the one that stayed in the best shape as the years passed.
She looked at her watch. “I need to go and get something from the chemist. We can talk while we walk, OK?”
She grabbed a coat from a hook, came out onto the steps and closed the door behind her. Harry had noted that the lock was the same sort as Rakel’s, no self-locking mechanism, but Pia Bohr didn’t bother to look for a key. Safe neighbourhood. No strange men who’d just walk into your house.
They walked past the garage, through the gate and down the road, where the first Tesla cars were humming home from their short days at work.
Harry put a cigarette between his lips without lighting it. “Are you going to pick up sleeping pills?”
“Sorry?”
Harry shrugged his shoulders. “Insomnia. You told our detective that your husband was at home all night of the tenth and eleventh of March. To know that for certain, you can’t have slept much.”
“I…Yes, it’s sleeping pills.”
“Mm. I needed sleeping pills after Rakel and I split up. Insomnia eats away at your soul. What have they put you on?”
“Er…Imovane and Somadril.” Pia was walking faster.
Harry lengthened his stride as he clicked the lighter beneath the cigarette but failed to get it to light. “Same as me. I’ve been on them for two months. You?”
“Something like that.”
Harry put the lighter back in his pocket. “Why are you lying, Pia?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Imovane and Somadril are heavy stuff. If you take them for two months, you’re hooked. And if you’re hooked, you take them every night. Because they work. So well that if you did take them that night, you were in a coma and would have no idea what your husband was doing. But you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’s hooked on sedatives. You’re a little too energetic, a little too quick-witted.”
Pia Bohr slowed down.
“But of course you could easily prove me wrong,” Harry said. “By showing me the prescription.”
Pia stopped walking. She put her hand in the back pocket of her tight jeans. Pulled out and unfolded a piece of blue paper.
“See?” she said with a light vibrato in her voice, holding it up and pointing. “So-ma-dril.”
“I see,” Harry said, taking the paper from her before she had time to react. “And when I look more closely, I see that it’s been prescribed for Bohr. Roar Bohr. He evidently hasn’t told you how strong the medication he needs is.”
Harry handed the prescription back to her.
“Perhaps there are other things he hasn’t told you, Pia?”
“I…”
“Was he at home that night?”
She swallowed. The colour in her cheeks was gone, her energetic vitality punctured. Harry adjusted his estimate of her age by five years.
“No,” she whispered. “He wasn’t.”
* * *
—
They skipped the chemist and walked down to Smestaddammen, then sat down on one of the benches on the slope on the eastern side, looking out at the little island that had room for a single willow tree.
“Spring,” Pia said. “Anything but spring. In the summer it’s so green here. Everything grows like mad. Loads of insects. Fish, frogs. It’s so full of life. And when the trees get their leaves and the wind plays through the willow, they dance and rustle loud enough to drown out the motorway.” She smiled sadly. “And autumn in Oslo…”
“Finest autumn in the world,” Harry said, lighting his cigarette.
“Even winter’s better than spring,” Pia said. “At least it used to be, when you could count on it being properly cold, with solid ice. We used to bring the children here to go skating. They loved it.”
“How many…?”
“Two. One girl and one boy. Twenty-eight and twenty-five. June’s a marine biologist in Bergen, and Gustav’s studying in the U.S.”
“You started early.”
She smiled wryly. “Roar was twenty-three and I was twenty-one when we had June. Couples who get moved around the country on Army postings often become parents early. So the wives have something to do, I suppose. As an officer’s wife you have two options. To let yourself be tamed and accept life as a breeding cow. Stand in your stall, give birth to calves, give milk, chew the cud.”
“And the second option?”
“Not to
become an officer’s wife.”
“But you chose option number one?”
“Looks like it.”
“Mm. Why did you lie about that night?”
“To spare us from questions. From becoming the focus. You can imagine how it would have damaged Roar’s reputation if he’d been called in for questioning in a murder investigation, surely? He doesn’t need that, if I can put it like that.”
“Why doesn’t he need that?”
She shrugged. “No one needs that, do they? Especially not in our neighbourhood.”
“So where was he?”
“I don’t know. Out.”
“Out?”
“He can’t sleep.”
“Somadril.”
“It was worse when he got home from Iraq; they gave him Rohypnol for his insomnia that time. He got hooked in two weeks and it gave him blackouts. So now he refuses to take anything. He puts his field uniform on, says he has to go out on reconnaissance. Keep watch. Keep an eye out. He says he just walks from place to place, like a night patrol, staying out of sight. I suppose it’s typical of people with post-traumatic stress disorder that they’re frightened the whole time. He usually comes home and gets a couple of hours’ sleep before he goes to work.”
“And he manages to keep this hidden at work?”
“We see what we want to see. And Roar has always been good at making whatever impression he wants to make. He’s the sort of man people trust.”
“You too?”
She sighed. “My husband isn’t a bad person. But sometimes even good people fall to pieces.”
“Does he take a gun with him when he’s out on night patrol?”
“I don’t know. He goes out after I’ve gone to bed.”
“Do you know where he was on the night of the murder?”
“I asked him after you’d asked me. He said he slept in June’s old room.”
“But you didn’t believe him?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because then you would have told the police that he’d slept in another room. You lied because you were worried we had something else. Something that meant he needed a stronger alibi than the truth.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting that you suspect Roar, Hole?”
Harry looked at a pair of swans that were paddling towards them. He glimpsed a flash of light from the hillside beyond the motorway. A window opening, perhaps.
“Post-traumatic,” Harry said. “What’s the trauma?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. A combination of things. Rough stuff from his childhood. And Iraq. Afghanistan. But when he came home from his last tour and told me he’d left the Army, obviously I realised that something had happened. He’d changed. Was more shut off. After a lot of nagging, I finally got it out of him that he’d killed someone in Afghanistan. Of course that’s what they were there for, but this one had got to him, and he didn’t want to talk about it. But he was able to function, at least.”
“And he isn’t now?”
She looked at Harry with the eyes of someone who’d been shipwrecked. And he realised why she had opened up to him, a stranger, so easily. Not in our neighbourhood. She had wanted this, had been longing desperately for it, she just hadn’t had anyone to talk to about it until now.
“After Rakel Fauke…after your wife’s death, he went completely to pieces. He…he’s not functioning, no.”
That flash of light again. And it struck him that it must be coming from roughly the same part of the hillside where the Bohrs’ house was. Harry stiffened. He had seen something from the corner of his eye, something between them on the white backrest of the bench, something trembling that had moved and disappeared, like a quick, red, silent insect. There were no insects here in March.
Harry leaned forward instantly, dug his heels in the slope, pushed off and threw himself against the back of the bench. Pia Bohr screamed as the bench tipped over and they fell backwards. Harry wrapped his arms round her as they slid off the backrest, pressing her down into the shallow ditch behind the bench. Then he began to snake his way across the mud, pulling Pia behind him. He stopped and peered up towards the hillside. He saw that the willow tree was between them and where he had seen the flash of light. Farther away on the path, a man in a hooded sweater walking a Rottweiler had stopped, and looked like he was considering getting involved.
“Police!” Harry cried. “Get back! There’s a sniper!”
Harry saw an elderly lady turn and hurry away, but the man with the Rottweiler didn’t move.
Pia tried to pull free, but Harry lay with the whole of his body weight on top of the slight woman so that they were lying face to face.
“Looks like your husband’s at home after all,” he said, pulling out his phone. “That’s why I couldn’t come in. That’s why you didn’t lock the door when we left.” He called a number.
“No!” Pia cried.
“Emergency Control,” a voice said on the phone.
“Inspector Harry Hole here. Reporting an armed man—”
The phone was snatched from his hand. “He’s just using the rifle sight as a telescope.” Pia Bohr put the phone to her ear. “Sorry, wrong number.” She ended the call and gave the phone back to Harry. “Isn’t that what you said when you called me?”
Harry didn’t move.
“You’re quite heavy, Hole. Could you…”
“How do I know I’m not going to get a bullet in my forehead when I stand up?”
“Because you’ve had a red dot on your forehead since we sat down on the bench.”
Harry looked at her. Then he put his hands down on the cold mud and pushed himself up. Got to his feet. Squinted towards the hillside. He turned to help Pia, but she was already up. Her jeans and jacket were black and dripping with mud. Harry pulled a bent cigarette from his packet of Camels. “Is your husband going to disappear now?”
“I imagine so,” she sighed. “You need to understand that he’s in a bad way mentally, and very jittery right now.”
“Where does he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know you can be prosecuted for obstructing the police, Mrs. Bohr?”
“Are you talking about me or my husband?” she asked, brushing her thighs. “Or yourself?”
“Sorry?”
“You’d hardly be allowed to investigate the murder of your own wife, Hole. You’re here as a private detective. Or should we say pirate detective?”
Harry tore off the bent tip of the cigarette and lit what was left. He looked down at his own filthy clothes. His coat was torn where one of the buttons had been pulled off. “Will you tell me if your husband comes back?”
Pia nodded towards the water. “Watch out for that one, it doesn’t like men.”
Harry turned and saw that one of the swans had set off towards them.
When he turned back, Pia Bohr was already heading up the slope.
* * *
—
“A pirate detective?”
“Yep,” Harry said, holding the door to Bjølsenhallen open for Kaja.
The hall lay nestled among the more ordinary buildings around it. Kaja had said that Kjelsås Table Tennis Club was based above the large supermarket on the ground floor.
“Still not keen on the whole lift concept?” Kaja asked as she struggled to keep up with Harry on the stairs.
“It’s not the concept, it’s the size,” Harry said. “How did you find out about this military police officer?”
“There weren’t that many Norwegians in Kabul, and I’ve talked to most of the people I know there now. Glenne is the only person who sounds like he might have something to tell us.”
The girl in reception told them where to go. The sound of shoes on hard floors and the clatter of ping-pong balls reached them befor
e they turned the corner and found themselves in a large, open room where a few people, most of them men, were dancing and crouching and swinging at either end of green table-tennis tables.
Kaja set off towards one of them.
Two men were hitting a ball diagonally across the net at each other, the same trajectory every time, forehand with topspin. They were barely moving, just repeating the same movement, striking the ball with their arms bent and a flick of the wrist, accompanied by a hard step with one foot. The ball was moving so fast that it looked like a white line between the men, who seemed locked into this duel, like a computer game that had got stuck.
Then one of them hit the ball too far and it bounced away across the floor between the tables.
“Damn,” the player said. He was a fit-looking man in his forties or fifties, with a black headband over cropped, silver-grey hair.
“You’re not reading the spin,” the other man said as he went to fetch the ball.
“Jørn,” Kaja said.
“Kaja!” The man with the headband grinned. “Here’s a sweaty soldier for you.” They hugged each other.
Kaja introduced him to Harry.
“Thanks for agreeing to see us,” Harry said.
“No one turns down a meeting with this young lady,” Jørn Glenne said with his smile still in his eyes, squeezing Harry’s hand just hard enough for it to be taken as a challenge. “But if I’d known she was going to be bringing backup…”
Kaja and Glenne laughed.
“Let’s grab a coffee,” Glenne said, putting his paddle on the table.
“What about your partner?” Kaja asked.
“My trainer, bought and paid for,” he said, showing them the way. “Connolly and I are going to be meeting up in Juba this autumn. I need to get in practice.”
“An American colleague,” Kaja explained to Harry. “They had a never-ending table-tennis tournament while we were in Kabul.”
“Fancy coming along?” Glenne asked. “I’m sure your lot could find a job for you there.”
“South Sudan?” Kaja asked. “What’s it like there now?”
“Same as before. Civil war, famine, Dinkas, Nuers, cannibalism, gang rape and more weapons than the whole of Afghanistan put together.”