Knife

by Jo Nesbo

  Alexandra would be working on the sweater by now.

  Harry put the pieces together in his head.

  If it was Rakel’s blood, then the case was sorted. On the night of the murder, Peter Ringdal left the Jealousy Bar around 22:30 and paid Rakel an unannounced visit, possibly under the pretext of trying to persuade her to remain as chairperson. She let him in, gave him a glass of water. She turned down his offer. Unless perhaps she said yes. Perhaps that was why he stayed longer, because they had things to discuss. And perhaps the conversation had slipped on to more personal subjects. Ringdal probably told Rakel about Harry’s outrageous behaviour in the bar earlier, and Rakel would have told him about Harry’s problems and—this was the first time Harry had considered this—that Harry had set up a wildlife camera that he didn’t think Rakel knew anything about. Rakel might even have told Ringdal where the camera was mounted. They had shared their troubles, and possibly their joys, and at some point Ringdal evidently thought the time was right to make a more physical move. But this time he was definitely rejected. And in the rage that followed this humiliation, Ringdal grabbed the knife from the block on the kitchen counter and stabbed her. Stabbed her several times, either in ongoing rage or because he realised it was too late, the damage was done, and he had to finish the job, kill her and get rid of the evidence. He managed to keep a clear head. Do what had to be done. And when he left the scene, he took a trophy with him, a certificate, like when he took a photograph of the other woman he had killed. The red scarf that was hanging next to Rakel’s coat under the hat rack. Then, when he was sitting in his car, he remembered just in time about the camera Rakel had mentioned, got out and removed it. He got rid of the memory card at the petrol station. Tossed the sweater with Rakel’s blood on it on the floor with his dirty washing. Maybe he hadn’t even seen the blood, because presumably then he would have washed it at once. That was what had happened.

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  Twenty-five years’ experience as a murder detective had taught Harry that the chain of events was almost always more complicated and incomprehensible than it seemed at first.

  But that the motive was almost always as simple and obvious as it seemed at first glance.

  Peter Ringdal had been in love with Rakel. Hadn’t Harry seen the desire in his eyes the first time he came to view the Jealousy? Maybe he had been viewing Rakel as well. Love and murder. The classic combination. When Rakel rejected Ringdal in her home, maybe she told him she was going to take Harry back. And we’re all stuck in our ways. Bed-hoppers, thieves, drunks, murderers. We repeat our sins and hope for forgiveness, from God, other people, ourselves. So Peter Ringdal had killed Rakel Fauke the way he killed his ex-wife, Andrea Klitchkova.

  Harry had originally been thinking along different lines. That it was the same person who had been there earlier that evening, that the murder had happened then, and then the perpetrator—who knew Rakel would be alone—had come back later to clean up. From the images on the wildlife camera they had seen Rakel in the doorway when she opened the door, but not the second time. Could that be because she was already dead. Maybe the murderer had taken her keys, let himself in, cleaned up and then left the keys behind when he left the house? Or had the murderer sent someone else to clean up after him? Harry had a vague notion that the silhouettes of the two visitors couldn’t belong to the same person. Either way, Harry had rejected that theory because the Forensic Medical Institute’s written report had been so certain about the time of the murder, that because of the temperature of the body and the room, the murder must have taken place after the first visit. In other words, while the second visitor was there.

  Harry heard the needle of the record player bump gently against the label, as if to point out discreetly that the record needed to be turned over. His brain was suggesting more loud, numbing hard rock, but he resisted, the way he routinely resisted the same bastard brain’s suggestion to have a drink, just a sip, a few drops. Time to go to bed. And if he managed to get some sleep, that would be a bonus. He lifted the record from the deck without touching the grooves, without leaving any fingerprints. Ringdal had forgotten to clean the glass in the dishwasher. Odd, really. Harry slid the album into the inner sleeve, then the cover. He ran his finger over the spines of his records. Alphabetical by artist’s name, then chronologically by date of acquisition. He inserted his hand between the eponymous albums The Rainmakers and Ramones to make space for the new acquisition. He caught sight of something tucked between the albums. He pushed them aside a bit harder to see better. Shut his eyes. His heart began to beat faster, as if it had understood something his brain hadn’t yet taken in.

  His phone rang.

  Harry answered.

  “It’s Alexandra. I’ve done a first sweep and I can already see differences in the DNA profiles that mean the blood on this Ringdal guy’s sweater can’t possibly be Rakel’s.”

  “Mm.”

  “And it doesn’t match yours either. And the blood on your jeans isn’t yours either.”

  Silence.

  “Harry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it must be blood from his nose on his sweater and my jeans, then. We’ve still got fingerprints tying him to the scene. And Rakel’s scarf in the drawer in his home, it smells of her, it’s bound to have her DNA on it. Hair, sweat, skin.”

  “OK. But there’s a difference between the DNA profiles of the blood on the sweater and on your trousers as well.”

  “Are you saying that the blood on the sweater doesn’t belong to Rakel, me or Ringdal?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  Harry realised she was giving him time to figure out the other possibilities for himself. The other possibility. It was a matter of logic.

  “The blood on my trousers isn’t Ringdal’s. And you began by saying it wasn’t mine. So whose is it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Alexandra said. “But…”

  “But?” Harry stared in between the records. He knew what she was going to say. There were no longer any loose stones warning of a landslide. That had already happened. The whole mountainside had given way.

  “So far, the blood on your trousers doesn’t show any deviation from Rakel’s DNA,” Alexandra said. “Obviously there’s a lot of work left before we get to the 99.999 percent probability that we count as a complete match, but we’re already up to 82 percent.”

  Eighty percent. Four out of five.

  “Of course,” Harry said. “I was wearing the trousers when I was at the scene after Rakel was found. I knelt down beside her body. There was a pool of blood there.”

  “That explains that, if it really is Rakel’s blood on your trousers. Do you want me to carry on with the analysis that could rule out the possibility that the blood on the sweater is Rakel’s?”

  “No, there’s no need,” Harry said. “Thanks, Alexandra. I owe you one.”

  “OK. You’re sure everything’s OK? You sound so—”

  “Yes,” Harry interrupted. “Thanks, and goodnight.” He ended the call.

  There had been a pool of blood. He had knelt down. But that wasn’t what had triggered the scream inside Harry’s head, the landslide that was already starting to bury him. Because he hadn’t been wearing those trousers when he was in Rakel’s house with the crime-scene investigators, he had left them in the laundry basket the morning after the night she was murdered. That much he did remember. Until now, his memory had been as blank as a crystal ball when it came to that night, from the time he walked into the Jealousy Bar at seven in the evening until the time the woman collecting for charity rang on the door and woke him the next day. But images were starting to appear, connect, become a sequence. A film with him in the lead role. And what was screaming inside his head, in a trembling, broken voice, was his own voice, the soundtrack from Rakel’s liv
ing room. He had been there on the night of the murder.

  And squeezed between The Rainmakers and the Ramones lay the knife Rakel had loved. A Tojiro knife with an oak handle and a white guard of water-buffalo horn. The blade was smeared with something that could only be blood.

  35

  Ståle Aune was dreaming. At least, he assumed it was a dream. The siren that had been cutting through the air had stopped abruptly, and now he could hear the distant rumble of bombers as he ran through the empty street to the air-raid shelter. He was late, everyone else had got inside long before, and now he could see that a man in uniform was closing the metal door at the end of the street. He could hear himself panting for breath, he should have tried to lose some weight. But on the other hand, it was only a dream, everyone knew Norway wasn’t at war. But perhaps we’ve been attacked suddenly? Ståle reached the door and discovered that the opening was much smaller than he had thought. “Come on!” the man in uniform yelled. Ståle tried to get in, but it was impossible, all he could do was get his shoulder and one foot inside. “Get in or get lost, I have to close the door!” Ståle kept pushing. And now he was stuck, he couldn’t get in or out. The air-raid siren started to blare again. Damn. But he could comfort himself with the fact that all the evidence suggested that this was a dream, nothing more.

  “Ståle…”

  He opened his eyes and felt his wife Ingrid’s hand shaking his shoulder. There you go, the professor was right again.

  The bedroom was dark, and he was lying on his side with the alarm clock on the bedside table right in front of him. The luminous numbers said it was 3:13.

  “Someone’s at the door, Ståle.”

  And there it was again. The siren.

  Ståle heaved his overweight body out of bed and into his silk dressing gown, and pushed his feet into the matching slippers.

  He was downstairs and on his way to the front door when the thought struck him that whoever was outside might be less than welcome. A paranoid schizophrenic patient with voices in his head telling him to kill his psychologist, for instance. But on the other hand, perhaps the air-raid shelter had been a dream within a dream, perhaps this was the real dream. So he opened the door.

  And once again the professor was proved right. The person outside was less than welcome. It was Harry Hole. More precisely: the Harry Hole you don’t want to see. The one with eyes that were more bloodshot than usual, with the hunted, desperate expression that could only mean trouble.

  “Hypnosis,” Harry said. He was out of breath, and his face was wet with sweat.

  “Good morning to you too, Harry. Would you like to come in? Assuming the door isn’t too small, of course.”

  “Too small?”

  “I dreamed I couldn’t get through the door to an air-raid shelter,” Ståle said, then followed his stomach through the hallway and into the kitchen. When his daughter Aurora was little, she used to say it always looked like Daddy was walking uphill.

  “And the Freudian interpretation of that is?” Harry asked.

  “That I need to lose weight.” Aune opened the fridge. “Truffle salami and cave-aged Gruyère?”

  “Hypnosis,” Harry said.

  “Yes, so you said.”

  “The husband in Tøyen, the one we thought had killed his wife. You said he had suppressed his memories of what happened. But that you could bring them back with hypnosis.”

  “If the subject was susceptible to hypnosis, yes.”

  “Shall we find out if I am?”

  “You?” Ståle turned towards Harry.

  “I’ve started to remember things from the night Rakel died.”

  “Things?” Ståle closed the fridge door.

  “Images. Random pictures.”

  “Fragments of memory.”

  “If I can get them to link up, or dig out more of them, I think I might know something. Know something I don’t know, if you see what I mean.”

  “Put them together into a sequence? I can try, obviously, but there are no guarantees. To be honest, I fail more often than I succeed. It’s hypnosis as a method rather than me that’s at fault, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “When you say you think you know something, what sort of knowledge are we talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But it’s clearly urgent.”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. Do you remember anything definite from these fragments of memory?”

  “The crystal chandelier in Rakel’s living room,” Harry said. “I’m lying right under it, looking up, and can see the pieces of glass form the letter S.”

  “Good. That gives us a location and a situation, so we can try associative memory retrieval. Just let me get my pocket watch first.”

  “You mean the sort you can swing in front of me?”

  Ståle Aune raised an eyebrow. “Any objections?”

  “No, not at all, it just seems…a bit old-school.”

  “If you’d rather be hypnotised in a more modern way, I can recommend a number of respected but obviously less qualified psychologists who—”

  “Get the watch,” Harry said.

  * * *

  —

  “Fix your eyes on the face of the watch,” Ståle said. He had sat Harry on the tall-backed armchair in the living room, and was himself sitting on a footstool alongside. The old watch was swinging on its chain, back and forth, twenty centimetres in front of the detective’s pale, anguished face. Ståle couldn’t remember ever having seen his friend in such a state before. And he felt guilty about not going to see Harry since the funeral. Harry wasn’t the sort of person who found it easy to ask other people for help, and when he did it meant that things were pretty bad.

  “You’re safe and relaxed,” Ståle chanted slowly. “Safe and relaxed.”

  Had Harry ever been that? Yes, he had. When he was with Rakel, Harry had become someone who seemed to be at peace with both himself and his surroundings. He had—however much of a cliché it might sound—found the right woman for him. And on the occasions when Harry had invited Ståle to give guest lectures at Police College, Ståle got the distinct impression that Harry was genuinely happy with his job and his students.

  So what had happened? Had Rakel thrown Harry out, had she left him just because he had fallen off the wagon? When you choose to marry a man who has been an alcoholic for so long, who has fallen apart so many times, you know that the chances of him doing so again are pretty high. Rakel Fauke had been an intelligent and realistic woman, would she really wreck a driveable car just because there was a dent in it, because it had gone into the ditch? The thought had obviously occurred to him that Rakel might have met someone else, and that she had used Harry’s alcohol abuse as an excuse to leave him. Maybe the plan was to wait until the dust had settled, until Harry had come to terms with the break-up, before showing herself in public with her new man.

  “You’re sinking deeper and deeper into a trance each time I count down from ten.”

  Ingrid had had lunch with Rakel after they broke up, but Rakel hadn’t mentioned another man. On the contrary, when she got home Ingrid had said Rakel seemed sad and lonely. They weren’t close enough friends for Ingrid to feel comfortable asking Rakel, but she said that if there had been another man, she thought Rakel had already dumped him and was trying to find a way back to Harry. Nothing Rakel had said gave any basis for that sort of speculation, but the professor of psychology was under no illusions that when it came to reading other people, Ingrid was far superior to him.

  “Seven, six, five, four…”

  Harry’s eyelids were half closed now, and his irises looked like pale blue half-moons. People’s susceptibility to hypnosis varied. Only 10 percent were what were regarded as extremely unreceptive, and some didn’t react at all to this sort of intervention. In Ståle’s experience, y
ou could pretty much assume that people with imagination, who were open to new experiences, and who often worked in the creative industries, were the easiest to hypnotise. Anyone who had anything to do with engineering was harder. This made it tempting to believe that murder detective Harry Hole, who wasn’t exactly a tea-drinking daydreamer, would be a tough nut to crack. But without Ståle ever having performed any of the more popular personality tests on Harry, he had a suspicion that he would score unusually highly on one point: imagination.

  Harry’s breathing was even, like someone asleep.

  Ståle Aune counted down one more time.

  There was no doubt, Harry was in a trance.

  “You’re lying on a floor,” Ståle said slowly and calmly. “You’re on the floor of the living room in Rakel’s and your house. And above you, you see a crystal chandelier where the crystals form the letter S. What else can you see?”

  * * *

  —

  Harry’s lips moved. His eyelids fluttered. The first two fingers on his right hand flexed in an involuntary twitch. His lips moved again, but no sound came out, not yet. He started to move his head back and forth at the same time as he pushed himself harder against the back of the chair, with a look of pain on his face. Then, like someone having a fit, two strong jolts ran through his long body, and Harry sat there with his eyes wide open, staring in front of him.

  “Harry?”

  “I’m here.” Harry’s voice was hoarse, thick. “It didn’t work.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Tired.” Harry stood up. Swayed. He blinked hard and stared into space. “I need to go home.”

  “Maybe you should sit down for a while,” Ståle said. “If you don’t finish the session properly, it can leave you feeling dizzy and disorientated.”