by Jo Nesbo
“Thanks, Ståle, but I have to go. Goodnight.”
“In the worst cases it can lead to anxiety, depression and other unpleasantness. Let’s just take a little while to make sure you’re back on your feet, Harry.”
But Harry was already on his way to the door. Ståle got to his feet, but by the time he reached the hall the front door was already closing.
* * *
—
Harry managed to get to his car and bend over behind it before he threw up. Then again. Only when his half-digested breakfast, the only thing he had eaten that day, was completely out of his stomach did he stand up, wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, blink away the tears and unlock the car. He got in and stared through the windshield.
He took out his phone. Called the number Bjørn had given him.
After a few seconds, a groggy male voice muttered his surname, like a tic, a habit from the stone age of telephony.
“Sorry to wake you, Freund. This is Inspector Harry Hole again. Something’s cropped up that’s made things urgent, so I was wondering if you can let me have your preliminary findings from the wildlife camera?”
The sound of a long yawn. “I’m not finished.”
“That’s why I said preliminary, Freund. Anything at all would be a help.”
Harry heard the expert at 3-D analysis of 2-D images talk in a whisper to someone else before he came back.
“It’s tricky to determine the height and width of the man entering the house because he’s crouching,” Freund said. “But it could—and I emphasise could—look like the person who comes back out again—assuming that this person is standing upright in the doorway and isn’t wearing heels or anything like that—is between one metre ninety and one ninety-five. And it looks like the car, based on the design and distance between the brake and rear lights, could be a Ford Escort.”
Harry took a deep breath. “Thanks, Freund, that’s pretty much all I needed to know. Take as long as you need with the rest, there’s no longer any rush. In fact, you can leave it at that. Send me the memory card and your invoice at the return address that was on the envelope.”
“Addressed to you personally?”
“It’s more practical that way. We’ll be in touch if we need a more detailed description.”
“Whatever you want, Hole.”
Harry ended the call.
The 3-D expert’s conclusion merely confirmed what Harry already knew. He had already seen everything when he was sitting in Ståle Aune’s armchair. He remembered everything now.
36
The white Escort was parked in Berg, where the clouds were chasing across the sky as if they were fleeing something, but the night wasn’t yet showing any signs of retreat.
Harry Hole rested his forehead against the inside of the damp, ice-cold windshield. He felt like turning the radio on, Stone Hard FM, hard rock, turning the volume as loud as it would go and blasting his head empty for a few seconds. But he couldn’t, he needed to think.
It was almost incomprehensible. Not the fact that he had suddenly remembered. But the fact that he had managed not to remember, to shut it out. It was as if Ståle’s command about the living room and the S-shape, the sound of Rakel’s name, had forced his eyes open. And in that instant it was there, all of it.
It was night, and he had woken up. He was staring directly up at the crystal chandelier. He realised he was back, back in the living room on Holmenkollveien. But he didn’t know how he had ended up there. The lighting was subdued, the way he and Rakel liked it when they were alone. He could feel that his hand was lying in something wet, sticky. He lifted it. Blood? Then he had rolled over. Rolled over and looked right into her face. She hadn’t looked like she was sleeping. Or like she was staring blankly at him. Or like she had lost consciousness. She looked like she was dead.
He was lying in a pool of blood.
Harry had done what you’re always supposed to do—he pinched himself in the arm. He dug his fingernails into his skin as hard as he could, hoping that the pain would make the vision go away, that he would wake up, yawn with relief and thank the God he didn’t believe in that it had only been a nightmare.
He hadn’t tried to revive her, he had seen too many dead bodies and knew it was too late. It looked like she’d been stabbed with a knife, her cardigan was soaked with blood, darker around the stab wounds in her stomach. But it was the blow to the back of her neck that had killed her. An efficient and deadly wound, inflicted by someone who knew that was what it would be. Someone like him.
Had he killed Rakel?
He had looked around the room in search of evidence to the contrary.
There was no one else there. Just him and her. And the blood. Could that be right?
He had got to his feet and stumbled over to the front door.
It was locked. If anyone had been there and left, they must have used a key to lock it from the outside. He had wiped his bloody hand on his trousers, opened the drawer in the chest. Both sets of keys were there. Hers and his. The ones he had given back to her one afternoon at Schrøder’s, when he had pestered her to take him back, even though he had promised himself that he wasn’t going to do that.
The only other keys were a little way south of the North Pole, in Lakselv with Oleg.
He had looked around. There was too much to take in, too much to grasp, too much for him to be able to find any sort of explanation. Had he killed the woman he loved? Destroyed what he valued more than anything? When he expressed it the first way, when he whispered Rakel’s name, it seemed impossible. But when he said it the other way, about destroying everything he had, it didn’t seem impossible at all. And all he knew, all he had learned from experience, had taught him that facts beat gut feeling. Gut feeling was just a collection of ideas that could be trumped by a single, crushing fact. And the fact here was this: he was a spurned husband who was in a room with his murdered spouse, a room that had been locked from the inside.
He knew what he was doing. That, by going into detective mode, he was trying to protect himself against the unbearable pain he couldn’t yet feel but knew was on its way, like an unstoppable train. That he was trying to reduce the fact that Rakel was lying there dead on the floor to a murder case, something he could handle, the way he had—before he had started to drink alone—made his way to the nearest bar the moment he felt that the pain of living needed to be combated with his talent for drinking, with performing in an arena where he had once imagined himself its master. And why not? Why not assume that the part of the brain governed by instinct is making the only logical, necessary choice when you see your life, your only reason for living, lying broken in front of you? When it chooses to take flight. Alcohol. Detective mode.
Because there was still someone who could be—who needed to be—saved.
Harry already knew he wasn’t afraid of any personal punishment. On the contrary, any punishment, especially death, would feel like liberation, like finding a window on the hundredth floor of a burning skyscraper when you’re surrounded by flames. And no matter how irrational, crazy or simply unfortunate he had been at the moment of the deed, he knew he deserved this punishment.
But Oleg didn’t deserve it.
Oleg didn’t deserve to lose his father, his real, non-biological father, at the same time as he had lost his mother. To lose the beautiful story of his life, the story of growing up with two people who loved each other so much, the story that in and of itself was proof that love did exist, could exist. Oleg, who was now standing on the threshold of settling down with someone, perhaps of having a family of his own. He may have had to watch Rakel and Harry split up a few times, but he had also been the closest witness to the fact that two people loved each other, two people who always wanted what was best for the other. And that they had therefore always found their way back to each other. Taking that idea—no, that truth, damn it!—away from Oleg would
destroy him. Because it wasn’t true that he had murdered Rakel. There was no doubt that she was lying there on the floor, and that he had caused her death, but all the associations, the conclusions that followed automatically when it was discovered that a spurned husband had murdered his wife, were lies. That wasn’t why.
The chain of events was always more complicated than you assumed at first, but the motives were simple and clear. And he hadn’t had any motive, any desire to kill Rakel, never! That was why Oleg needed to be protected from this lie.
Harry had cleaned up after him as well as he could without looking at Rakel’s body, telling himself it would only shake his resolve, and that he had seen what he needed to see: that she wasn’t here, that all that was left was an uninhabited body. Harry couldn’t give a detailed account of what this cleaning had entailed, he had been feeling dizzy and was now trying in vain to remember the critical moment, to push through the total darkness that shrouded the hours from when he reached a certain level of intoxication in the Jealousy Bar until he woke up here. How much does anyone really know about themselves? Had he gone to see her, had she, as she stood there in the kitchen with this raving, drunk man, realised that she couldn’t actually do what she had intimated to Oleg that she might do: take Harry back? Had she said as much to Harry? Was that what had tipped him over the edge? The rejection, the sudden awareness that he would never, ever get her back, had that managed to turn love into uncontrollable hatred?
He didn’t know, he didn’t remember.
All he could remember was that after he woke up, as he was cleaning up, an idea had started to take shape. He knew he would be the police’s first prime suspect, that much was obvious. So to mislead them, to save Oleg from the lie about the classic murder, to save his young, unsullied faith in love, save him from the realisation that he’d had a murderer as his role model, he needed someone else. A lightning rod. An alternative suspect, someone who could and should be hung on the cross. Not a Jesus, but a sinner worse than him.
Harry stared out through the windshield, where the condensation from his breath made the lights of the city below him look like they were dissolving.
Was that what he had been thinking? Or had his brain, like the manipulative illusionist it was, merely invented this business about Oleg, clutching at any excuse instead of admitting the real, simpler motive: to escape. To evade punishment. To hide somewhere and suppress the whole thing because it was a memory, a certainty that it was impossible to live with, and survival was, when it came down to it, the only real function of the body and brain.
That, at any rate, was what he had done. Suppressed it. Suppressed the fact that he had left the house, making sure to leave the door unlocked so it couldn’t be concluded that the killer must have a key to the house. He had got in his car, then remembered that the wildlife camera could give him away if the police found it. He tore it down. Removed the memory card and ditched it in one of the bins outside the Ready sports club. Later, a fragment had swirled up from the suppressed sludge when, in a moment of deep concentration, he reconstructed the killer’s probable line of retreat and where he might have got rid of the memory card. How could he have imagined it was a coincidence that he had guided Kaja and himself back there, when there were a million other possibilities? Even Kaja had been astonished at his confidence.
But then Harry’s suppressed memories had turned against him, threatened to bring him down. Without a moment’s hesitation he had handed the memory card to Bjørn, and as a result Harry’s meticulous investigation, the intention of which had been to find another deserving culprit—a violent rapist like Finne, a killer like Bohr, an enemy like Ringdal—had begun to close in on himself.
Harry’s thoughts were interrupted when his phone rang.
It was Alexandra.
On his way to see Ståle he had stopped off to see Alexandra and given her a cotton bud with blood on it. He hadn’t told her it was blood from the presumed murder weapon, the knife he had found among his records. While he was driving he had realised why he had left the knife between The Rainmakers and the Ramones. Simple. Rakel.
“Did you find anything?” Harry asked.
“It’s the same blood group as Rakel’s,” she said. “A.”
The most common, Harry thought. Forty-eight percent of the Norwegian population belong to blood group A. A match was like tossing a coin, it didn’t mean anything. All the same, right now it did mean something. Because he had decided in advance—like Finne and his dice—to let this toss of a coin decide.
“There’s no need to do a full DNA analysis,” Harry said. “Thanks. Have a good day.”
There was just one loose thread, one other possibility, one thing that could save Harry: breaking an apparently solid alibi.
* * *
—
It was ten o’clock in the morning when Peter Ringdal woke up in his bed.
It wasn’t his alarm clock that had woken him, that was set for eleven. It wasn’t the neighbour’s dog, the neighbour’s car setting off to work, kids on their way to school or the garbage truck—his sleeping brain had learned to ignore all those noises. It was something else. It had been a loud noise, like a cry, and it sounded like it had come from the floor below him.
Ringdal got up, pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt and grabbed the pistol that he kept on the bedside table every night. He felt a cold draft around his bare feet as he crept down the stairs, and when he reached the hall he discovered the cause. There was broken glass on the floor. Someone had smashed the half-moon-shaped window in the front door. The door to the basement was standing half open, but the light was off. They had arrived. It was time.
The scream, or whatever it had been, had sounded like it had come from the living room. He crept in, holding the pistol out in front of him.
He realised at once that the sound hadn’t been made by someone screaming, but that the noise that had woken him had been made by a chair leg scraping against the parquet floor. One of the heavy armchairs had been moved, turned around so its back was facing him, with a view of the picture window and the garden containing the satellite sculpture. A hat was sticking up above the back of the chair. Peter assumed that the man in the chair hadn’t heard him coming, but obviously it was possible he had positioned the chair like that so he could see anyone entering the room reflected in the window without them seeing him. Peter Ringdal took aim at the back of the chair. Two bullets to the base of the spine, two higher up. The neighbours would hear the shots. It would be difficult to get rid of the body without being discovered. And even more difficult to explain why he had done it. He could tell the police it was self-defence, that he had seen the broken glass, that his life had been threatened.
He squeezed the trigger more tightly.
Why was it so difficult? He couldn’t even see the face of the person in the chair. For all he knew there might be no one there, just a hat.
“It’s only a hat,” a hoarse voice whispered in his ear. “But what you can feel against the back of your head is a very real pistol. So drop yours and stand very still, or I’ll shoot you with a very real bullet right through the brain I’m suggesting you now use for your own good.”
Without turning round, Ringdal dropped the pistol, which hit the floor with a thud.
“What do you want, Hole?”
“I want to know why your fingerprints are on a glass in Rakel’s dishwasher. Why you’ve got her scarf in the drawer in your hallway. And who this woman is.”
Ringdal stared at the black-and-white photograph the man behind him held up in front of his face. The photograph from his office in the basement. The photograph of the woman he, Peter Ringdal, had killed. And then stuffed into a cold car boot and photographed as she lay there.
37
Peter Ringdal was staring bitterly through the front windshield of the car, into the snowdrift. He couldn’t see much, but put his foot dow
n anyway. There wasn’t much traffic up here on the mountain on a Saturday night, not in this weather, anyway.
He had set off from Trondheim two hours earlier, and realised from the weather reports on the radio that he must have been one of the last vehicles allowed onto the E6 across Dovrefjell before it was closed to traffic because of the bad weather. He’d had a hotel room in Trondheim, but couldn’t bear the thought of the banquet. Why not? Because he was a bad loser and had just lost the final of the featherweight class at the Norwegian Judo Championship. If only he had lost against someone better than him instead of sabotaging himself in such an unnecessary way. There had been only seconds to go in the match, and he was leading by two yuko to one koka, and all he had to do was see it through. And he had been in control, he really had! But then he had started thinking about his victory interview, and something funny he could say, and had lost concentration for a fraction of a second, and suddenly he was flying through the air. He managed to avoid landing on his back, but his opponent was awarded a waza-ari, and therefore emerged victorious when the match was over a few seconds later.
Peter hit the steering wheel hard.
In his locker room afterwards he opened the bottle of champagne he had bought for himself. Someone had made a comment, and he had replied that the point of holding the senior finals on a Saturday afternoon for once instead of on Sunday morning was surely that they could have a bit of a party, so what the hell? He had managed to drink more than half the bottle before his coach came in, snatched the bottle away from him and said he was sick of seeing Peter drunk after every meeting, whether he won or lost. And then Peter had said he was sick of having a coach who couldn’t even help him beat people who were obviously worse than him. His coach had started with the philosophical bullshit about judo meaning “soft power,” that Peter needed to learn to give way, let his opponent find himself, show humility, not believe he was best, because after all it was only two years since he had been a junior, and that pride came before a fall. And Peter had replied that judo was all about fake humility. About tricking your opponent by pretending to be weak and submissive, luring him into a trap and then striking without mercy, like a beautiful, wide-open carnivorous plant, a lying whore. It was a stupid, fake sport. And Peter Ringdal had stormed out of the locker room, yelling that he’d had enough. How many times had he done that?