by Jo Nesbo
“Here?”
“My computer has been moved from the desk to the living-room table. Tell me it was you, or I’ll start to worry.”
Harry stared into the lamplight.
“Harry? Where are you? You sound so—”
“It was me,” Harry said. “Nothing to worry about. Listen, I’m in the middle of something right now. I’ll call you later, OK?”
“OK,” she said, sounding doubtful.
Bohr tapped to end the call and put the phone on the table. “Why didn’t you sound the alarm?”
“If there was any point in doing that, you wouldn’t have let me speak to her.”
“I think it’s because you believe me, Harry.”
“You’ve got me taped to a chair. What I think is completely irrelevant.”
Bohr stepped into the light again. He was holding a large, broad-bladed knife. Harry tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. Bohr moved the knife closer to Harry. To the underside of the right armrest of the chair. Cut. Did the same with the left armrest. Harry lifted his arms and took the knife.
“I taped you to the chair so you wouldn’t attack me before you’d heard everything,” Bohr said as Harry cut through the tape around his ankles. “Rakel told me about the problems you and she had had in relation to a couple of your murder investigations. From people who were on the loose. So I kept an eye on you both.”
“Us?”
“Mostly her. I kept watch. Like I kept watch on Kaja in Kabul after Hala was raped and murdered. And now in Oslo.”
“You know that’s called paranoia?”
“Yes.”
“Mm.” Harry straightened up and rubbed his lower arms. He kept hold of the knife. “Tell me.”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Start with the sergeant.”
“Understood. No one in Special Forces is an idiot, exactly. The entrance criteria are too strict for that. But Sergeant Waage was one of those soldiers with more testosterone than brains, if I can put it like that. In the days following Hala’s death, when everyone was talking about her, I heard that someone had said Hala must like Norway because she had a Norwegian word tattooed on her body. I looked into the matter and found out that it was Sergeant Waage who had said this after a few drinks in the bar. But Hala was always covered up, and that tattoo was right above her heart. There was no way she would have got mixed up with Waage. And I know Hala kept the tattoo secret. Even if the use of henna is widespread, many Muslims regard permanent tattoos as a ‘sin of the skin.’ ”
“Mm. But the tattoo wasn’t a secret from you?”
“No. I was the only person apart from the tattooist who knew about it. Before she got the tattoo, Hala asked me about the correct spelling, and any possible double meanings she might not have been aware of.”
“What was the word?”
Bohr smiled sadly. “ ‘Friend.’ She had such a fascination with languages, she wanted to know if the different spellings of the word meant different things, had different connotations.”
“Waage could have heard about the tattoo from the people who found her or conducted the post-mortem.”
“That’s the point,” Bohr said. “Two of the knife wounds…” He stopped, took a deep, shuddering breath. “Two of the sixteen knife wounds had pierced the tattoo, making the word illegible unless you already knew what it said.”
“Unless you were the person who raped her and saw the tattoo before you began to stab her.”
“Yes.”
“I understand, but that doesn’t exactly count as proof, Bohr.”
“No. Under the immunity regulations covering international forces, Waage would have been sent back to Norway, where any half-decent lawyer would have got him off the hook.”
“So you appointed yourself judge and jury?”
Roar Bohr nodded. “Hala was my interpreter. My responsibility. The same with Sergeant Waage. My responsibility. I contacted Hala’s parents and told them that I would personally be taking her earthly remains to their village. It was a five-hour drive from Kabul. Mostly empty desert. I ordered Waage to drive. After a couple of hours’ driving I told him to stop, held a pistol to his head and got a confession. Then I tied him to the Land Rover and drove. So-called D and Q.”
“D and Q?”
“Drawing and quartering. The penalty for high treason in England between 1283 and 1870. The condemned man was hanged until he was almost dead, then they cut his stomach open, pulled out his innards and burned them while he watched. Before they cut his head off. But before all that he was dragged to the gallows behind a horse, the drawing. And if it was a long way from the prison to the gallows, he might be fortunate enough to die at that point. Because when he could no longer walk or run after the horse, he got dragged along on his chest. The flesh got scraped off, layer by layer. It was a slow and extremely painful death.”
Harry thought about the long trail of blood they had found on the ground.
“Hala’s family were extremely grateful to have her body back home,” Bohr said. “And for the corpse of her murderer. Or what was left of it. It was a beautiful burial ceremony.”
“And the sergeant’s body?”
“I don’t know what they did with it. Quartering is probably an English thing. But decapitation is evidently pretty international, because his head was found on a pole outside the village.”
“And you reported that the sergeant went missing on the way back?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. Why do you watch over these women?”
Silence. Bohr had sat down on the edge of the table, and Harry tried to read the expression on his face.
“I had a sister.” His voice was toneless. “Bianca. My younger sister. She was raped when she was seventeen. I should have been looking after her that evening, but I wanted to go and see Die Hard at the cinema. It was rated 18. It wasn’t until several years later that she told me she was raped that evening. While I was watching Bruce Willis.”
“Why didn’t she tell you straightaway?”
Bohr took a deep breath. “The rapist threatened to kill me, her older brother, if she said anything. She didn’t know how the rapist could have known she had an older brother.”
“What did the rapist look like?”
“She never got a good look at him, she said it was too dark. Unless her mind had blocked it. I saw that happen in Sudan. Soldiers who experienced such terrible things that they simply forgot about them. They could wake up the next day and, perfectly sincerely, deny having been there and seen anything. For some people suppression works absolutely fine. For others it pops up later, in the form of flashbacks. Nightmares. I think everything came back to Bianca. And she couldn’t handle it. The terror of it broke her.”
“And you think it was your fault?”
“Of course it was my fault.”
“You know you’re damaged, don’t you, Bohr?”
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“What were you doing in Kaja’s house?”
“I saw that she had a video on her computer, a man leaving Rakel’s house on the night of the murder. So when she went out, I went in to take a closer look at it.”
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing. Poor-quality images. Then I heard the door. I left the living room and went into the kitchen.”
“So you could approach me from behind in the hallway. And you just happened to have some chloroform on you?”
“I always have chloroform on me.”
“Because?”
“Anyone who tried to break into any of my ladies’ houses ends up in the chair where you’re sitting.”
“And?”
“And pays the price.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Bohr?”
Bohr clasped his hand
s. “I have to admit that I thought you’d killed Rakel at first, Harry.”
“Oh?”
“The spurned husband. It’s the classic, isn’t it? The first thing you think. And I thought I could tell from the look in your eyes at the funeral. A mixture of innocence and remorse. The look that belongs to someone who’s killed for no other motive than their own hatred and lust, and who regrets it. Who regrets it so much that he’s managed to suppress it. Because that’s the only way he can survive, the truth is too unbearable. I saw that look in Sergeant Waage. It was as if he’d managed to forget what he’d done to Hala, and only remembered it again when I confronted him with it. But then, when I found out that you had an alibi, I realised that the guilt I’d seen in your eyes was the same I felt. Guilt because you hadn’t been able to prevent it happening. And the reason why I’m telling you this…”—Bohr got up from the table and disappeared into the darkness as he went on—“is because I know you want the same thing as me. You want to see them punished. They took someone we loved away from us. Prison isn’t enough. An easy death isn’t enough.”
The fluorescent lights flickered a few times, then the room was bathed in light.
Sure enough, it was an office. Or had been. The six or seven desks, the pale patches where computers had stood, the wastepaper bins, random office equipment, a printer—everything suggested that the office had been abandoned in some haste. There was a picture of the king hanging on the white wooden wall. Military people, Harry thought automatically.
“Shall we go?” Bohr asked.
Harry stood up. He felt dizzy and walked rather unsteadily towards the wooden door where Bohr was waiting, holding Harry’s phone, pistol and lighter out towards him.
“Where were you?” Harry asked as he put the phone and lighter away and weighed the pistol in his hand. “The night Rakel was killed? Because you weren’t at home…”
“It was a weekend, I was at the cabin,” Bohr said. “In Eggedal. Alone, I’m afraid.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Yes, what was I doing? Polishing weapons. Keeping the stove alight. Thinking. Listening to the radio.”
“Mm. Radio Hallingdal?”
“Yes, actually, it’s the only station you can get there.”
“They had radio bingo that night.”
“They did. Do you spend a lot of time in Hallingdal?”
“No. Do you remember anything special?”
Bohr raised an eyebrow. “About the bingo?”
“Yes.”
Bohr shook his head.
“Nothing?” Harry said, feeling the weight of the pistol. He concluded that the bullets hadn’t been removed from the magazine.
“No. Is this an interview?”
“Think.”
Bohr frowned. “Maybe something about all the winners being from the same place? Ål. Or Flå.”
“Bingo,” Harry said quietly, and put the pistol in his coat pocket. “You’re hereby removed from my list of suspects.”
Roar Bohr looked at Harry. “I could have killed you in there without anyone finding out. But radio bingo is what got me off your list?”
Harry shrugged. “I need a cigarette.”
They walked down some worn, creaking wooden steps and out into the night as a clock started to chime.
“Bloody hell,” Harry said, breathing in the cold air. In the square in front of them people were hurrying towards bars and restaurants, and above the rooftops he could see the City Hall. “We’re in the middle of the city.”
Harry had heard the City Hall bells play both Kraftwerk and Dolly Parton, and once Oleg had been delighted to recognise a tune from the game Minecraft. But this time they were playing one of the regular tunes, “Watchman’s Song” by Edvard Grieg. Which meant it was midnight.
Harry turned around. The building they had come out of was a barrack-like wooden building just inside the gates of Akershus Fortress.
“Not exactly MI6 or Langley,” Bohr said. “But this did actually used to be the headquarters of E14.”
“E14?” Harry dug out his packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket.
“A short-lived Norwegian espionage organisation.”
“I vaguely remember it.”
“Started in 1995, spent a few years doing James Bond–style action stuff, then there were power struggles and political rows about its methods, until it was shut down in 2006. The building’s been empty since then.”
“But you’ve got the keys?”
“I was here for its last few years. No one ever asked for them back.”
“Mm. A former spy. That explains the chloroform.”
Bohr smiled wryly. “Oh, we did more interesting things than that.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Harry nodded towards the clock on the City Hall tower.
“Sorry I ruined your evening,” Bohr said. “Can I bum a cigarette off you before we call it a night?”
* * *
—
“I was a young officer when I was recruited,” Bohr said, blowing smoke up towards the sky. He and Harry had found a bench on the ramparts behind the cannons pointing out across the Oslo Fjord. “It wasn’t just people from the military in E14. There were diplomats, waiters, carpenters, police officers, mathematicians. Beautiful women who could be used as bait.”
“Sounds like a spy film,” Harry said, sucking on his own cigarette.
“It was a spy film.”
“What was the mandate?”
“Gathering information from places Norway could imagine having a military presence. The Balkans, the Middle East, Sudan, Afghanistan. We were given a lot of freedom; we were supposed to operate independently of the American intelligence network and NATO. For a while it actually looked like we might manage it. A strong sense of camaraderie, a lot of loyalty. And maybe a bit too much freedom. In closed environments like that you end up developing your own standards for what is acceptable. We paid women to have sex with our contacts. We equipped ourselves with unregistered High Standard HD 22 pistols.”
Harry nodded. That was the pistol he had seen in Bohr’s cabin, the pistol CIA agents preferred because it had a lightweight and efficient silencer. The pistol the Soviets found on Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the U2 spy plane that was shot down over Soviet territory in 1960.
“With no serial numbers, they couldn’t be traced back to us if we ever had to use them for liquidation.”
“And you did all that?”
“Not the bit about paying for sex or liquidating anyone. The worst thing I did…” Bohr rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Or the one that felt worst…was the first time I deliberately got someone to trust me, then betrayed them. Part of the admission test was to get from Oslo to Trondheim as quickly as possible with only ten kroner in your pocket. The point was to show you had the social skills and imagination that an active situation might require. I offered the money to a kind-looking woman at the Central Station in return for borrowing her phone to call my mortally ill younger sister in the district hospital in Trondheim, to tell her that my luggage had just been stolen, along with my wallet, train ticket and phone. I called one of the other agents and managed to cry on the phone. When I hung up the woman was crying as well, and I was just about to ask to borrow money for the train fare when she offered to drive me in her car, which was in the car park next to the station. We drove as fast as we could. The hours passed, and we talked about everything, our deepest secrets, the way you only do with strangers. My secrets were lies I had learned, good training for someone hoping to be a spy. We stopped at Dovre after four hours. Watched the sun go down over the plateau. Kissed. Smiled through the tears and said we loved each other. Two hours later, just before midnight, she dropped me off in front of the main entrance to the hospital. I told her to find somewhere to park while I found out where my sister was. I said I’d wai
t in reception. I walked straight through the reception area, out through the other side, and ran as fast as I could to the statue of Olav Tryggvason where the head of recruitment for E14 was waiting with a stopwatch. I was the first person to get there, and was celebrated as a hero that night.”
“No bitter aftertaste?”
“Not at the time. That came later. Same thing with Special Forces. You’re under the sort of pressure normal people never experience. And after a while you start to think that the rules for normal people don’t apply to you. In E14 it started with a bit of gentle manipulation. Exploitation. A few little breaches of the law. And ended with moral questions about life and death.”
“So you’re saying that those rules do actually apply to people with jobs like that?”
“On paper…” Bohr tapped his thigh with his finger. “Of course. But up here…” He tapped his forehead. “Up here you know you’re going to have to break a few rules in order to protect them. Because it’s your watch, the whole time. And it’s a lonely watch—us watchers only have each other. No one else is ever going to thank us, because most people never know that they’ve been watched over.”
“The rule of law—”
“Has its limitations. If the rule of law had its way, a Norwegian soldier who raped and murdered an Afghan woman would have been sent home to serve a short sentence in a prison that would have seemed like a five-star hotel to a Hazara. I gave him what he deserved, Harry. What Hala and her family deserved. An Afghan punishment for a crime committed in Afghanistan.”
“And now you’re hunting the man who killed Rakel. But if you follow the same principle, a crime committed in Norway should be punished according to Norwegian law, and we don’t have the death penalty.”
“Norway might not, but I have the death penalty, Harry. And so do you.”
“Do I?”
“I don’t doubt that you, along with the majority of people in this country, have a genuine belief in humane punishment and fresh starts. But you’re also human, Harry. Someone who’s lost someone you loved. Someone I loved.”
Harry sucked hard on his cigarette.