by Jo Nesbo
“And that’s where we have you, Bjørn, an employee of the state in your mid-thirties, in the same job you were in ten years ago, thinking that as long as you have long hair and farmer’s clothes that look like they were bought second-hand from the Salvation Army, you can still rise above the younger, short-haired, straighter colleagues who passed you by on the career ladder years ago.”
Endre had said this in a single long sentence without pausing for breath, and Bjørn had listened and thought: Is this true, is this what defines me? Was this what he, a farmer’s son, had fled the rolling fields of Toten to become? A feminised, militant conformist and loser? A failed, backward-looking police officer looking for an image to contradict that? Who used his roots—a quirky old car, Elvis and old country-music heroes, fifties hairstyles, snakeskin boots and his dialect—to trace a line back to something authentic, down to earth, but that was about as honest as the politician from west Oslo who takes off his tie, rolls up his shirtsleeves and says “gonna” and “gotta” as many times as he can when making election speeches in factories.
Maybe. Or, if that wasn’t the whole truth, perhaps it was part of it. But did it define him? No. Just as little as the fact that he had red hair defined him. What defined him was that he was a damn good forensics officer. And one other thing.
“Maybe you’re right,” Bjørn had replied when Endre paused for breath. “Maybe I am a pathetic loser. But I’m nice to people. And you’re not.”
“What the hell, Bjørn, are you upset?” Endre had laughed, putting a comradely, sympathetic hand on his shoulder, and smiling conspiratorially at the onlookers, as if this were a game they were all playing, one where Bjørn hadn’t understood the rules. OK, Bjørn may have drunk one glass too many of the moonshine they were serving for reasons of nostalgia rather than cost, but he had felt it then, just for a moment, had felt what he might be capable of. That he could have planted a fist in the middle of Endre’s sociological smirk, broken his nose and seen the fear in his eyes. Bjørn had never got into fights when he was growing up. Not once. So he’d known nothing about fighting before he started at Police College, where he had learned a thing or two about close combat. Such as the fact that the surest way to win a fight is to strike first and with maximum aggression, which effectively brings nine out of ten fights to an immediate conclusion. He knew that, he wanted to do it, but could he? What was his threshold for resorting to violence? He didn’t know, he had never been in a situation in which violence had looked like an adequate solution to the problem. Which it wasn’t now either, of course. Endre posed no physical threat, and all a fight would accomplish was a scandal and possibly being reported to the police. So why had he wanted to do it so badly: to feel the other man’s face under his knuckles, hear the dead sound of bone against flesh, see the blood spray from his nose, see the fear on Endre’s face?
When Bjørn went to bed in his boyhood bedroom that night he hadn’t been able to sleep. Why hadn’t he done anything? Why had he merely muttered “No, ’course not, I’m not upset,” waited for Endre to take his hand off his shoulder, mumbled something about needing another drink, then found some other people to talk to before leaving the party shortly afterwards? Those insults would have been the real cause. The moonshine could have been used as an excuse for getting into a fight at a party; that would have been acceptable in Toten. And it would have ended with one punch. Endre wasn’t a fighter. And if he had hit back, everyone would have cheered for him, for Bjørn. Because Endre was a wanker, he always had been. And everyone loved Bjørn, they always had. Not that it had been much help to him growing up.
In Year 9, Bjørn had finally manned up and asked Brita if she wanted to go to the local cinema in Skreia. The manager of the cinema had taken the astonishing decision to show Led Zeppelin’s filmed concert, The Song Remains the Same. Fifteen years after it was released, admittedly, but that didn’t bother Bjørn. He had gone looking for Brita and eventually found her behind the girls’ toilet. She was standing there crying, and sobbed to Bjørn that she had let Endre sleep with her at the weekend. Then, during break, her best friend had told her that she and Endre were now together. Bjørn had comforted Brita as best he could, then, without much preamble, asked if she’d like to go to the cinema with him. She had just stared at him and asked if he’d heard what she’d just said. Bjørn said he had, but that he liked both Brita and Led Zeppelin. At first she snorted “no,” but then she seemed to have a moment of clarity and said she’d like to go. When they were sitting in the cinema it turned out that Brita had asked her best friend and Endre to go as well. Brita had kissed Bjørn during the film, first during “Dazed and Confused,” then in the middle of Jimmy Page’s guitar solo in “Stairway to Heaven,” thereby sending Bjørn a fair way up those stairs. Nonetheless, when they were alone again and he had walked her home from the cinema, there hadn’t been any more kissing, just a short “goodnight.” One week later, Endre broke up with the best friend and got back together with Brita.
Bjørn had carried these things inside him, of course he had. The betrayal he should have seen coming, the punch that hadn’t come. And that nonexistent punch had somehow confirmed what Endre had said about him, that the only thing that was worse than the shame of not being a man was the fear of being a man.
Was there a clear thread between then and now? Was there a causal connection, was this explosion of rage something that had built up and just needed a fresh humiliation to detonate it? Was the murder somehow the punch he hadn’t managed to land on Endre?
The humiliation. It had been like a pendulum. The prouder he felt at being a father, the greater the humiliation when he had realised the child wasn’t his. The pride when his parents and two sisters had visited mother, baby and father in hospital and Bjørn had seen the delight on their faces. His sisters who were now aunts, his parents now grandparents. Not that they weren’t already, Bjørn was the youngest and the last to get started, but even so. He realised that they hadn’t been sure it would ever happen for him. His mother hadn’t thought that bachelor style of his had boded well. And they loved Katrine. There had been a slightly strained atmosphere during their first visits to Toten, when Katrine’s direct, chatty Bergen attitude had come up against Toten’s restrained, taciturn understatement. But Katrine and his parents had met each other halfway, and during the first Christmas lunch at the farm, when Katrine came downstairs after making a real effort to look nice, Bjørn’s mother had nudged him in the side and looked at him with a mixture of admiration and astonishment, a look that seemed to ask: How did you manage to catch that?
Yes, he had been proud. Far too proud. Perhaps she had noticed too. And this pride, which was so hard to hide, may in the end have prompted her to ask herself the same question: How did he manage to catch me? And she had left him. Though that wasn’t how he described it to himself—he thought of it as a pause, a temporary break in their relationship, caused by a bout of claustrophobia. Anything else was unthinkable. And eventually she had come back. It happened a few weeks later, maybe a couple of months, he didn’t really remember, he had suppressed that whole period, but it was just after they thought they’d solved the vampirist case. Katrine had fallen pregnant at once. It was as if she had emerged from sexual hibernation, and Bjørn found himself thinking that perhaps the break hadn’t been such a bad thing, that perhaps people needed a break from each other from time to time to realise what they had together. A child conceived in the joy of reconciliation. That was how he had seen it. And he had travelled around Toten with their child, showing him off to family, friends, ever more distant relatives, showing him off like a trophy, proof of his manhood to anyone who had doubted him. It had been stupid, but everyone’s allowed to be stupid once or twice in their life.
And then the humiliation.
It had been unbearable. It was like sitting on a plane during takeoff or landing on the occasions when the narrow passageways inside his ear and nose didn’t manag
e to even out the pressure and he was sure his head was going to explode, had wanted it to explode, anything to escape the pain that just kept getting worse, even when you thought it must have reached its apex. And sent you mad. Willing to jump out of the plane, shoot yourself in the head. An equation with only one variable: pain. And with death as the only liberating common denominator. Your death, other people’s deaths. In his confusion he had thought that his pain—like the difference in pressure—could be evened out by the pain of others. Of Harry Hole.
He had been wrong.
Killing Rakel had been easier than he’d thought. Possibly because he had been planning it for so long, had worked out his game plan, as sportsmen would say. He had gone through it in his mind so many times that when he was actually there and it was about to happen in real life, it had felt almost as if he was still only in his thoughts, looking on from the outside. As Harry said, he had walked down Holmenkollveien, but not towards Sørkedalsveien. Instead he had turned left, into Stasjonsveien, then Bjørnveien, before weaving through smaller streets towards Vinderen, where a pedestrian would be less conspicuous. He had slept well the first night, didn’t even wake up when Gert, according to Katrine, had cried hysterically from five o’clock in the morning. Exhaustion, presumably. The second night he didn’t sleep as well. But it wasn’t until Monday, when he saw Harry at the crime scene, that what he had done began to sink in. Seeing Harry had been like watching a church going up in flames. Bjørn thought back to the footage of Fantoft Stave Church burning in 1992, a fire started by a Satanist at six o’clock in the morning, on the sixth day of the sixth month. There was often an element of beauty to catastrophes, something that meant you couldn’t take your eyes off them. As the walls and roof burned, the skeleton of the church, its true form and personality emerged, naked, unadorned. He had watched the same thing happen to Harry in the days that followed Rakel’s death. And he couldn’t take his eyes off it. Harry was stripped back to his true, pitiful self. He, Bjørn, had become a pyromaniac, fascinated by the spectacle of his destruction. But as he looked on, he suffered. He too was burning. Had he known that would happen from the start? Had he consciously poured the last remnants of the petrol over himself, and stood so close to Harry that he too would be consumed when the church burned? Or had he believed that Harry and Rakel would disappear, and that he would live on, move on with his family, make it his, become whole again?
Whole.
They had rebuilt Fantoft Church. It was possible. Bjørn took a deep, trembling breath.
“You know all this is just your imagination, Harry? A radio station and the adjustment of a car seat, that’s all you’ve got. Anyone could have drugged you. With your history of substance abuse it isn’t even implausible that you did it yourself. You have absolutely no evidence.”
“Are you sure? What about the married couple who say they saw a large man walking down Holmenkollveien at quarter to midnight?”
Bjørn shook his head. “They weren’t able to give a description. And seeing pictures of me wouldn’t prompt their memory, because the man they saw was wearing a false black beard, glasses, and limped whenever anyone could see him.”
“Mm. OK.”
“OK?”
Harry nodded slowly. “If you’re confident you haven’t left any evidence, then OK.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“There aren’t that many people who need to know.”
Bjørn stared at Harry. There was nothing triumphant in his eyes. No trace of hatred towards the man who had killed his beloved. All Bjørn could see in those blank eyes was vulnerability. Nakedness. Something approaching sympathy.
Bjørn looked down at the pistol Harry had given him. He had realised now.
They would know. Harry. Katrine. That was enough. Enough to make it impossible to go on. But if it stopped here, if Bjørn put a stop to it here, no one else would have to know. His colleagues. His family and friends in Toten. And, most important of all, the boy.
Bjørn swallowed. “You promise?”
“I promise,” Harry said.
Bjørn nodded. He almost smiled at the thought that he would finally get what he had wanted. That his head would explode.
“I’m going now,” Harry said.
Bjørn nodded towards the back seat. “Will you…will you take the lad with you? He’s yours.”
“He’s yours and Katrine’s,” Harry said. “But yes, I know I’m his father. And that no one who isn’t under an oath of confidentiality knows. And that’s how it will stay.”
Bjørn fixed his eyes ahead of him.
There was a nice place in Toten, a ridge from which the fields looked like a rolling yellow sea on a moonlit spring night. Where a young guy with a driving license could sit in a car and kiss a girl. Or sit alone with a sob in his throat and dream about one.
“If no one knows, how did you find out?” Bjørn asked, without any real interest in the answer, just to delay his departure for a few more seconds.
“Deduction,” Harry Hole said.
Bjørn Holm smiled tiredly. “Of course.”
* * *
—
Harry got out, unfastened the baby carrier from the back seat and lifted it out. He looked down at the sleeping child. Unsuspecting. All the things we don’t know. All the things we will be spared. The simple sentence Alexandra had uttered that night when Harry declined the condom she offered him.
You don’t want another kid, do you?
Another kid? Alexandra knew perfectly well that Oleg wasn’t his biological son.
Another kid? She knew something, something he didn’t know.
Another kid. A slip of the tongue, a simple mistake. In the eighties, psychologist Daniel Wegner claimed that the subconscious constantly makes sure we don’t blurt out things we want to keep secret. But that when the secret pops up from the subconscious, it informs the conscious part of the brain and forces it to think about it. And from then on it’s only a matter of time before the truth slips out by mistake.
Another kid. Alexandra had checked the cotton bud Bjørn had sent in against the database. Where the DNA profiles of all police officers who worked at crime scenes were stored, so that there would be no confusion if they messed up and left their own DNA at the scene. So not only did she have Bjørn’s DNA and could rule out the possibility that he was the father—she had both parents’ DNA, and could see that there were two matches: Katrine Bratt and Harry Hole. That was the secret that her oath of confidentiality prevented her from telling anyone except the person who had requested the analysis, Bjørn Holm.
The night Harry had sex, or at least some form of intercourse, with Katrine Bratt, he had been so drunk that he didn’t remember anything. Or, more accurately, he remembered something, but thought it was something he’d dreamed. But then he started to suspect when he noticed that Katrine was avoiding him. And when Gunnar Hagen—rather than Harry—was asked to be the child’s godfather, even though Harry was obviously a much closer friend of both Katrine and Bjørn. No, he hadn’t been able to rule out the possibility that something had happened that night, something that had ruined things between him and Katrine. The way it had ruined things between him and Rakel when, after the christening, just before Christmas, she had turned his life upside down by asking him if he had had sex with Katrine in the past year. And he hadn’t had the sense to deny it.
Harry remembered his own confusion after she had thrown him out and he was sitting on his hotel bed with a bag containing a few clothes and toiletries. He and Rakel were, after all, both adults with realistic expectations, they loved each other with all their faults and idiosyncrasies, they were good together. So why would she throw all that away because of a simple mistake, something that had happened and was over, which had no consequences for the future? He knew Rakel, and it didn’t make sense.
That was when he figured out what Ra
kel had already figured out but hadn’t told him. That that night had had consequences, that Katrine’s child was Harry’s, not Bjørn’s. When had she first suspected? At the christening, maybe, when she saw the baby. But why hadn’t Rakel told him, why had she kept it to herself? Simple. Because the truth would help no one, it would just ruin things for even more people than it had already: Rakel herself. But that wasn’t something Rakel could live with. The fact that the man she shared her bed, her life with—but with whom she didn’t have a child—had a child, one that was living among them, one they would have to see.
The sower. Svein Finne’s words on the recording from outside the Catholic church had been echoing through Harry’s head during the past day, like an echo that wouldn’t fade. Because I am the sower. No. It was him, Harry, who was the sower.
He watched as Bjørn turned the key in the ignition and turned the radio on in the same automatic movement. The engine started, then settled into its rhythm, rumbling good-naturedly in neutral. And through the gap at the top of the passenger window, Rickie Lee Jones’s voice floated above Lyle Lovett’s on “North Dakota.” The car slipped into gear and slowly drove away. Harry watched it go. Bjørn, who couldn’t drive without listening to country music. Like gin and tonic. Not even when Harry was lying drugged in the seat beside him and they were on their way to Rakel’s. Perhaps that wasn’t so strange. Bjørn had probably wanted company. Because he could never have felt so alone as he did then. Not even now, Harry thought. Because he had seen it in Bjørn’s eyes before the car drove off. Relief.
50
Johan Krohn opened his eyes. Looked at the time. Five past six. He thought his ears must be mistaken and rolled over to go back to sleep, but then he heard it again. The doorbell downstairs.
“Who’s that?” Frida murmured sleepily beside him.
That, Johan Krohn thought, is the devil himself coming to claim his due. Finne had given him forty-eight hours to leave his response by the gravestone, and that didn’t expire until that evening. But there was no one else who rang doorbells anymore. If there was a murder and they needed a defense lawyer straightaway, they phoned. If there was a crisis at work, they phoned. Even the neighbours phoned if they wanted something.