by Jo Nesbo
* * *
—
Johan Krohn was still sitting in his car in the visitors’ car park at Hegnar Media. He had arrived early, he mustn’t be at the lake in the park on the other side of the road before five past two. He took out the new packet of Marlboro, got out of the car—because Frida didn’t like the smell of smoke in the car—and tried to light a cigarette. But his hands were shaking too much and he gave up. Just as well, he’d decided to stop anyway. He looked at his watch again. The plan was for him to get two minutes. They hadn’t been in direct contact, it was safest that way, but his message had said that two minutes were all he needed.
He followed the second hand with his eyes. There. Two o’clock.
Johan Krohn closed his eyes. Naturally it was terrible, something he would have to live with for the rest of his life, but when it came down to it, it was the only solution.
He thought about Alise. What she was having to go through right now. She would survive, but the nightmares would obviously haunt her. All because of the decision he had taken, without saying a word to her. He had deceived her. It was him, not Finne, who had done this to Alise.
He looked at his watch again. In one and a half minutes he would walk into the park, making out that he was just a bit late, comfort her as well as he could, call the police, act appalled. Correction: he would hardly have to act. He would give the police an explanation that was 90 percent true. And Alise an explanation that was 100 percent lie.
Johan Krohn caught sight of his own reflection in the car window.
He hated what he saw. The only thing he hated more was Svein Finne.
* * *
—
Alise looked at Svein Finne, who had sat down on the bench beside her.
“Do you know why we’re here, Alise?” he asked.
He had a red bandana tied around his black hair, with just a few strands of grey.
“Only in general terms,” she said. All Johan had told her was that it was to do with the Rakel Fauke case. Her first thought had been that they were going to press charges against the police for the physical injuries inflicted on their client by Harry Hole in the bunker in Nordstrand. But when she asked, Johan had simply replied curtly that it was to do with a confession, and that he didn’t have time to explain. He had been like that for the past few days. Cold. Dismissive. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was starting to lose interest. But she did know better. She had seen him like this before, during the brief periods when his conscience was getting at him and he suggested taking a break, saying he needed to focus on his family, the firm. Yes, he had tried. And she had stopped him. Dear Lord, it didn’t take much. Men. Or, to be more accurate: boys. Because every so often she got the feeling that she was the older of the pair of them, that he was just an overgrown Boy Scout equipped with a razor-sharp legal brain but not much else. Even if Johan liked to play the role of master to her slave, they both knew it was the other way around. But she let him play that role, the way a mother plays a frightened princess when her child wants to pretend to be a troll.
Not that Johan didn’t have his good qualities. He did. He was kind. Considerate. Loyal. He was. Alise had known men who had far fewer scruples about deceiving their wives than Johan Krohn. The question that had begun to worry Alise, though, wasn’t Johan’s loyalty to his family, but what she herself was getting out of it. No, she hadn’t had a carefully thought-out plan when she embarked upon the affair with Johan, it wasn’t that calculated. As a newly qualified lawyer she had obviously been star-struck by the hotshot lawyer who had been permitted to practise in the Supreme Court when he had barely started shaving, and was a partner in one of the best law firms in the city. But Alise was also fully aware of what she, with her average grades, had to offer a law firm, and what with her youth and appearance she had to offer a man. At the end of the day (Johan had stopped correcting her Anglicisms and had instead started to copy them), the reasons why you choose to have an affair with someone were a combination of rational and apparently irrational factors. (Johan would have pointed out that factors lead to a product, not a combination.) It was hard to know what was what, and perhaps it wasn’t that useful to know anyway. What was more important was that she was no longer sure if the combination was positive. She may have got a slightly larger office than the others on the same level as her, and perhaps slightly more interesting cases as a result of working for Johan. But her annual bonus was the same, symbolic amount that the other non-partners got. And there hadn’t been any indication that she could expect anything more. And even if Alise knew how much married men’s promises to leave their wives and families were worth, Johan hadn’t even bothered to make any of those.
“In general terms,” Svein Finne said, and smiled.
Brown teeth, she noted. But also that he didn’t smoke, seeing as he was sitting so close to her that she could feel his breath on her face.
“Twenty-five,” he said. “You kn-know you’re heading past the most fruitful time for having children?”
Alise stared at Finne. How did he know how old she was?
“The best age is your late t-teens, up to twenty-four,” Finne said, as his eyes slid over her. Yes, slid, Alise thought. Like a physical thing, like a snail leaving a trail of slime behind it.
“From then on, the health risks increase, and also the chances of spontaneous miscarriage,” he said, tugging up one cuff of his flannel shirt. He pressed a button on the side of his digital watch. “While the quality of men’s semen remains the same throughout their lives.”
That isn’t true, she thought. She had read that compared to a man her age, the risk of a man over the age of forty-one getting you pregnant was five times lower. And he was five times as likely to give you a child suffering from some sort of autism. She’d googled it. She had been invited by Frank to join him and a couple of fellow students on a trip to the mountains. When she and Frank were together he had been rather too fond of partying, without any clear goal or good grades, and she had written him off as a daddy’s boy with no motivation of his own. That turned out to be wrong, Frank had done surprisingly well in his father’s law firm. But she still hadn’t replied to the invitation.
“So look upon this as my and Johan Krohn’s gift to you,” Finne said, undoing his jacket.
Alise looked at him intently. A thought flew through her head, that he was going to attack her, but she dismissed it. Johan would be here any minute, and they were in a very public place. OK, there was nobody in their immediate vicinity, but she could see someone on the other side of the lake, maybe two hundred metres away, sitting on another bench.
“What…” Alise began, but got no further. Svein Finne’s left hand had locked around her throat, and his right hand was shoving his jacket aside. She tried to breathe but couldn’t. His erect penis had a curve, like a swan’s neck.
“Don’t be scared, I’m not like the others,” Finne said. “I don’t kill.”
Alise tried to get up from the bench, tried to push his arm away, but his hand was like a claw that had locked around her throat.
“Not if you do as I say,” Finne said. “First, look.”
He was still holding her with just one hand, and sat there, legs apart, exposed, as if he wanted her to look at it, see what she had coming. And Alise looked. Saw the white swan’s neck with its veins and a dancing red dot that was moving up the shaft.
What was that? What was that?
Then the head of his penis exploded as she heard a muffled sound, like when she tenderised a steak extra hard with the meat hammer. She felt a warm rain on her face and got something in her eye, and closed them as she heard thunder roll over them.
For a moment Alise thought it was her screaming, but when she opened her eyes again she saw that it was Svein Finne. He was holding both hands to his groin, blood was pumping between his fingers, and he was staring at her with bi
g, shocked, accusing eyes as if she was the person who had done this to him.
Then the red dot was there again, on his face this time. It slid over his furrowed cheek, up to his eye. She could see the red dot on the white of his eye. And perhaps Finne saw it too. Either way, he whispered something that she didn’t hear until he repeated it.
“Help.”
Alise knew what was coming, closed her eyes and managed to put one protective hand in front of her face before she heard the sound again, more like a whip crack this time. And then, with a long delay, as if the shot had been fired from a long way away, the same rolling thunder.
* * *
—
Roar Bohr looked through the sniper sight.
The last headshot had thrown the target backwards, then he had slid sideways off the bench and was now lying on the gravel path. He moved the sight. Saw the young woman running along the path towards Hegnar Media, saw her throw her arms around a man who was hurrying towards her. Then the man took out a phone and started tapping at it, as if he knew exactly what he should do. Which he probably did, but what did Bohr know?
No more than he wanted to know.
No more than Harry Hole had told him twenty-four hours ago.
That he had found the man Bohr had been looking for all these years.
In a conversation with what Harry said was an extremely reliable source, Svein Finne had claimed to have raped Bishop Bohr’s daughter many years ago in Mærradalen.
The case had long since passed the statute of limitations, of course.
But Harry had what he called a “solution.”
And he had told Bohr all he needed to know, and no more. Just like when he was in E14. Two o’clock by Smestaddammen, on the same bench that Harry and Pia had sat on.
Roar Bohr moved the sight, and from the other side of the lake he saw a woman walking away quickly. As far as he could tell, she seemed to be the only other witness. He closed the basement window and put the rifle down. Looked at the time. He had promised Harry Hole that it would be done within two minutes of the target arriving, and he had stuck to that, even if he had given in to the temptation of letting Svein Finne have a little foretaste of his impending death when he exposed himself. But he had used so-called frangible bullets, bullets with no lead that disintegrate and stay inside the body of the target. Not because he needed them to in order to be fatal, but because the police’s ballistics experts wouldn’t have a projectile that could be matched to a weapon, or any point of impact in the ground that would enable them to work out where the shots had been fired from. In short, they would be left standing there, looking up helplessly at a hillside covered with something like a thousand houses, and with absolutely no idea where they should start looking.
It was done. He had shot the mink. He had finally avenged Bianca.
Roar felt ecstatic. Yes, that was the only way he could describe it. He locked the rifle away in the gun cabinet, then went and had a shower. On the way he stopped and pulled his phone from his pocket. Called a number. Pia answered on the second ring.
“Is anything wrong?”
“No.” Roar Bohr smiled. “I just wondered if you’d like to go out for dinner this evening?”
“Out for dinner?”
“It’s been ages since we last did that. I’ve heard good things about Lofoten, that fish restaurant on Tjuvholmen.”
He heard her hesitation. Suspicion. He followed her train of thought on towards the same why not? that he had thought.
“OK,” she said. “Are you going—”
“Yes, I’ll book a table. How does eight o’clock sound?”
“Great,” Pia said. “That all sounds great.”
They hung up, and Roar Bohr undressed, got in the shower and turned the water on. Warm water. He wanted to have a warm shower.
* * *
—
Dagny Jensen left the park the same way she had come. She thought about how she really felt. She had been sitting too far away to see any of the details on the other side of the lake, but she had seen enough. Yes, she had let herself be persuaded by Harry Hole’s almost hypnotic request, but this time he hadn’t deceived her, he had kept his promise. Svein Finne was out of her life. Dagny thought about Hole’s deep, hoarse voice on the phone, when he had told her what was going to happen, and why she must never, ever tell anyone. And even if she had already felt a peculiar excitement, and knew she wasn’t going to be able to resist, she had asked why, and if he thought she was the sort of person who would allow themselves to be entertained by a public execution.
“I don’t know what entertains you,” he had replied. “But you said it wasn’t enough for you to see him dead for him not to haunt you. You needed to see him die. I owe you that much, after everything I’ve put you through. Take it or leave it.”
Dagny thought about her mother’s funeral, the young female priest who had said that no one knew for certain what lay beyond the threshold of death, just that those who crossed it never came back.
But Dagny Jensen knew now. She knew that Finne was dead. And how she really felt.
She didn’t feel brilliant.
But she did feel better.
* * *
—
Katrine Bratt was sitting behind the desk, looking around.
She had packed the last of the things she wanted to take home. Bjørn’s parents were in the flat looking after Gert, and she knew that any good mother would probably have wanted to get home as quickly as she could. But Katrine wanted to wait a little longer. Catch her breath. Stretch this pause from the suffocating grief, the unanswered questions, the nagging suspicions.
The grief was easier to deal with when she was alone. When she didn’t feel she was being watched, didn’t have to stop herself from laughing at something Gert did, or from saying something wrong, like she was looking forward to spring or something. Not that Bjørn’s parents reacted—they were sensible, they understood. They were wonderful people, actually. But she clearly wasn’t. The grief was there, but she was able to chase it away when no one else was there to remind her constantly that Bjørn was dead. That Harry was dead.
The unspoken suspicion she knew they must be feeling, but didn’t show. That she, one way or another, must be the reason why Bjørn had taken his own life. But she knew she wasn’t. On the other hand, though: Should she have realised something was wrong with Bjørn when he had gone completely to pieces when he heard that Harry was dead? Should she have known that it was more than that, that Bjørn was struggling with something bigger, a deep depression he had managed to fend off and keep hidden until Harry’s death came along. Not just the drop that made his cup overflow, but burst the entire dam. What do we really know about the people we share our beds, our lives with? Even less than we know about ourselves. Katrine found it an unpalatable idea, but the impressions we have of the people around us are precisely that: impressions.
She had raised the alarm when Bjørn handed Gert over without wanting to talk to her.
Katrine had just got home from the terrible press conference with Ole Winter, to an empty flat and no message saying where Bjørn and Gert were, when someone rang the front doorbell. She had picked up the entryphone and heard Gert crying, and opened the door to the flat in case Bjørn had forgotten his keys, then pressed the button to open the door down on the street. But she hadn’t heard the whirr of the lock, just the baby crying close to the microphone. After saying Bjørn’s name several times without getting any response, she had gone downstairs.
The Maxi-Cosi baby carrier with Gert in it was sitting on the pavement right outside the door.
Katrine had looked up and down Nordahl Bruns gate, but couldn’t see any sign of Bjørn. Nor had she seen anyone in any of the darkened doorways on the other side of the street, although that didn’t necessarily mean there was no one there, of course. And then a random thought
occurred to her: that it hadn’t been Bjørn who rang the bell.
She had taken Gert up to the flat and called Bjørn’s number, only to be told that his phone was switched off or out of reach of the network. She realised something was wrong and called Bjørn’s parents. And it was the fact that she had instinctively called them rather than any of Bjørn’s friends or workmates, who, after all, lived in the city, that made her realise that she was worried.
His parents had reassured her, saying that he was bound to get in touch with a good explanation, but Katrine could hear from Bjørn’s mother’s voice that she too was concerned. Perhaps she too had noticed that Bjørn didn’t seem to have been himself recently.
You might think that a murder detective would eventually come to accept that there are some things, some questions you will never get an answer to, and you just have to move on. But some of them never managed that. Like Harry. Like her. Katrine didn’t know if this was an advantage or a hindrance from a professional perspective, but one thing was certain: for life outside of work it was nothing but a disadvantage. She was already dreading the weeks and months of sleepless nights that lay ahead of her. Not because of Gert. You could set your watch by when he slept and woke up. It was the restless, compulsive activity of her brain in the darkness that would stop her sleeping.