by Jo Nesbo
“Yes.”
“I heard you in the spare room last night. Did you get any sleep?”
“Mm.”
“Mum’s dead, nothing can change that, and for the time being it’s enough for me to know that someone other than you was guilty. If I discover that I do need to know, maybe you can tell me later on.”
“You’re very wise, Oleg. Just like your mother.”
Oleg gave him a sardonic smile and looked at the time. “Helga will be waiting for us. She’s bought some cod.”
Harry looked down at the empty bucket in front of him. “Smart woman.”
They reeled their lines in. Harry looked at his watch. He had a ticket for an afternoon flight back to Oslo. He didn’t know what was going to happen after that; the plan he had worked out with Johan Krohn went no further than this.
Oleg put the oars in the rowlocks and started to row.
Harry watched him. Thought back to the time he used to row while his grandfather sat in front of him, smiling and giving Harry little bits of advice. How he should use his upper body and straighten his arms, row with his stomach, not his biceps. That he should take it gently, never stress, find a rhythm, that a boat gliding evenly through the water moves faster even with less energy. That he should feel with his buttocks to make sure he was sitting in the middle of the bench. That it was all about balance. That he shouldn’t look at the oars, but keep his eyes on the wake, that the signs of what had already happened showed you where you were heading. But, his grandfather had said, they told you surprisingly little about what was going to happen. That was determined by the next stroke of the oars. His grandfather took out his pocket watch and said that when we get back on shore, we look back on our journey as a continuous line from the point of departure to the point of arrival. A story, with a purpose and a direction. We remember it as if it were here, and nowhere but here, that we intended the boat to meet the shoreline, he said. But the point of arrival and the intended destination were two different things. Not that one was necessarily better than the other. We get to where we get to, and it can be a consolation to believe that was where we wanted to get to, or at least were on our way towards the whole time. But our fallible memories are like a kind mother telling us how clever we are, that our strokes with the oar were clean and fitted into the story as a logical, intentional part. The idea that we may have gone off course, that we no longer know where we are or where we are going, that life is a chaotic mess of clumsy, fumbled oar strokes, is so unappealing that we prefer to rewrite the story in hindsight. That’s why people who appear to have been successful and are asked to talk about it often say it was the dream—the only one—they’d had since they were little, to succeed in whatever it was that they had been successful in. It is probably honestly meant. They have probably just forgotten about all the other dreams, the ones that weren’t nurtured, that faded and disappeared. Who knows, perhaps we would acknowledge the meaningless chaos of coincidences that make up our lives if—instead of writing autobiographies—we had written down our predictions for life, how we thought our lives would turn out. We could forget all about them, then take them out later on to see what we had really dreamed about.
Around now his grandfather would have taken a long swig from his hip flask, then looked at the boy, at Harry. And Harry would have looked at the old man’s heavy eyes, so heavy that they looked like they were going to fall out of his head, as if he were going to cry egg white and iris. Harry hadn’t thought about it at the time, but he thought about it now—that his grandfather had sat there hoping his grandson would have a better life than him. Would avoid the mistakes he had made. But perhaps also that one day, when the boy was grown up, he would sit like this, watching his son, daughter, grandchild row. And give them some advice. See some of it help, some get forgotten or ignored. And feel his chest swell, his throat tighten, in a strange mixture of pride and sympathy. Pride because the child was a better version of himself. Sympathy because they still had more pain ahead of them than behind them, and were rowing with the conviction that someone, they themselves perhaps, or at least their grandfather, knew where they were going.
“We’ve got a case,” Oleg said. “Two neighbours, childhood friends, who fell out at a party. There’d never been any trouble between them before, solid types. They each went home, then the next morning one of them, a maths teacher, showed up at the other’s door with a jack in his hand. Afterwards the neighbour accused the maths teacher of attempted murder, said he’d hit out at his head before he managed to close the door. I questioned the maths teacher. And I’m sitting there thinking: no, if he’s capable of murder, then we all are. And we aren’t. Are we?”
Harry didn’t answer.
Oleg stopped rowing for a moment. “I thought the same thing when they told me that Kripos had evidence against you. That it just couldn’t be true. I know you’ve had to kill in the course of duty, to save your own or someone else’s life. But a premeditated, planned murder, the sort of murder where you clean up all the evidence afterwards…You couldn’t have done that, could you?”
Harry looked at Oleg, sitting there waiting for him to answer. The boy, almost a man, with his journey still ahead of him, with the possibility of becoming a better man than him. Rakel had always had a note of concern in her voice when she told him how much Oleg looked up to him, tried to copy him down to the smallest details, the way he walked, with his feet turned out slightly, a bit like Charlie Chaplin. That he used Harry’s special words and expressions, such as the archaic “indubitably.” He copied the way Harry rubbed the back of his neck when he was thinking hard. Repeated Harry’s arguments about the rights and limitations of the state.
“Of course I couldn’t have done it,” Harry said, pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. “It takes a particular type of person to plan a cold-blooded murder, and you and I, we’re not like that.”
Oleg smiled. Looked almost relieved. “Can I bum a—”
“No, you don’t smoke. Keep rowing.”
Harry lit a cigarette. The smoke rose straight up, then drifted off towards the east. He squinted towards the horizon that wasn’t there.
Krohn had looked utterly confused, standing there in the doorway in just his boxer shorts and slippers. He had hesitated for a moment before asking Harry in. They had sat down in the kitchen, where Krohn had served tasteless espresso from a black machine while Harry briefly checked that everything he said was in confidence, then he served up the whole story.
When he had finished, Krohn’s coffee cup was still standing untouched.
“So what you want is to clear your name,” Krohn said. “But without identifying your colleague, Bjørn Holm.”
“Yes,” Harry said. “Can you help me?”
Johan Krohn had scratched his chin. “That’s going to be difficult. As you know, the police don’t like to let go of one suspect unless they’ve got another one. And what we’ve got, the analysis of some blood on a pair of trousers that shows you were drugged with Rohypnol, and the electricity usage that shows the thermostat had been turned up and then down again, those are just corroborating factors. The blood could have come from another occasion, the electricity could have been used in another room, it doesn’t prove anything at all. What we need…is a scapegoat. Someone who hasn’t got an alibi. Someone with a motive. Someone everyone would accept.”
Harry had noted that Krohn said “we,” as if they were already a team. And something else had changed in Krohn. His face had a bit of colour in it again, he was breathing deeper, his pupils had dilated. Like a carnivore that’s caught sight of some prey, Harry thought. The same prey as me.
“There’s a widespread misconception that a scapegoat has to be innocent,” Krohn said. “But the purpose of the scapegoat isn’t to be innocent, but to take the blame, regardless of what he has or hasn’t done. Even under the current rule of law, we see that offenders who arouse public disgust but who are only t
angentially guilty receive disproportionately severe sentences.”
“Shall we get to the point?” Harry said.
“The point?”
“Svein Finne.”
Krohn looked at Harry. Then gave a brief nod to indicate that they understood each other.
“With this new information,” Krohn said, “Finne no longer has an alibi for the time of the murder, he hadn’t arrived at the maternity ward by then. And he has a motive: he hates you. You and I can ensure that an active rapist ends up behind bars. And he isn’t an innocent scapegoat. Think about all the suffering he’s caused people. Do you know, Finne admitted…no, he boasted about assaulting the daughter of Bishop Bohr, who lived just a couple of hundred metres away from here.”
Harry took his cigarette packet from his pocket. He tapped out a bent cigarette. “Tell me what Finne’s got on you.”
Krohn laughed. Raised his cup to his lips to camouflage the fake laughter.
“I haven’t got time for games, Krohn. Come on, all the details.”
Krohn swallowed. “Of course. I’m sorry, I haven’t slept. Let’s go and have coffee in the library.”
“What for?”
“My wife…Sound doesn’t carry as far there.”
The acoustics were dry and muffled among the books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Harry listened as he sat slumped in a deep leather armchair. This time it was his turn not to touch his coffee.
“Mm,” he said when Krohn had finished. “Shall we skip the bit where we beat around the bush?”
“Of course,” said Krohn, who had put a raincoat on and reminded Harry of a flasher who used to hang around in a patch of woodland in Oppsal when Harry was a boy. Øystein and Harry had snuck up on the flasher and shot at him with water pistols. But what Harry remembered most was the look of sorrow in the wet, passive flasher’s eyes before they ran off, and that he regretted it afterwards without really knowing why.
“You don’t want Finne behind bars,” Harry said. “That wouldn’t stop him telling your wife what he knows. You want Finne out of the way. For good.”
“So…” Krohn began.
“That’s your problem with taking Finne alive,” Harry continued. “Mine is that if we manage to find him at all, he may still have an alibi for between 18:00 and 22:00 that we don’t know about. It may be that he was with the pregnant woman during the hours before they went to the maternity ward. Not that I imagine that she’d come forward if Finne was killed, of course.”
“Killed?”
“Liquidated, terminated, annulled.” Harry took a drag on the cigarette, which he had lit without asking permission. “I prefer ‘killed.’ Bad things deserve bad names.”
Krohn let out a short, bemused laugh. “You’re talking about cold-blooded murder, Harry.”
Harry shrugged. “Murder, yes. Cold-blooded, no. But if we’re going to manage this, we need to lower the temperature. If you understand me?”
Krohn nodded.
“Good,” Harry said. “Let me think for a minute.”
“Can I have one of your cigarettes?”
Harry handed him the packet.
The two men sat in silence, watching the smoke rise towards the ceiling.
“If—” Krohn began.
“Shhh.”
Krohn sighed.
His cigarette had almost burned down to the filter when Harry spoke again.
“What I need from you, Krohn, is a lie.”
“OK?”
“You need to say that Finne confessed to killing Rakel. And I’ll be inviting two more people to participate in this. One works at the Forensic Medicine Institute. The other is a sniper. None of you will know the names of the others. OK?”
Krohn had nodded.
“Good. We need to write an invitation to Finne, telling him when and where to meet your assistant, then you need to attach it to the grave with something I’m going to give you.”
“What?”
Harry took one last drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in his coffee cup. “A Trojan horse. Finne collects knives. If we’re lucky, it’ll be enough to kill any other speculation stone dead.”
* * *
—
Sung-min heard a crow somewhere among the trees as he looked up at the sheer rock face in front of him. The meltwater was painting black stripes down the grey granite, which rose up some thirty metres above him. He and Kasparov had been walking for almost three hours, and it was obvious that Kasparov was in pain now. Sung-min didn’t know if it was loyalty or the hunting instinct that was driving him on, but even when they had been standing at the end of the muddy forest track looking at the fragile rope-bridge across the river, with snow and pathless forest on the other side, he had been straining at the leash to keep going. Sung-min had seen footsteps in the snow on the other side, but he would have to carry Kasparov over the bridge while at the same time holding on with at least one hand. He found himself wondering: Then what? Sung-min’s hand-sewn Loake shoes were long since soaked through and ruined, but the question now was how far he would get on the slippery leather soles on the rugged, snow-covered terrain on the other side of the river.
Sung-min had crouched down in front of Kasparov, rubbed both hands together and looked into the old dog’s tired eyes.
“If you can, then so can I,” he had said.
Kasparov had whimpered and squirmed as Sung-min picked him up and carried him towards their wet fate, but somehow or other they had managed to get across.
And now, after twenty minutes of sliding about, their path was blocked by this rock face. Or was it? He followed the tracks that led to the side of the cliff, and there he saw a worn, slippery rope that was tied to a tree trunk farther up the almost vertical surface. Then he spotted that the rope carried on through the trees, and that there were some steps cut into the ground to make a path. But he wouldn’t be able to climb the rope and carry Kasparov at the same time.
“Sorry, my friend, this is bound to hurt,” Sung-min said, then knelt down, put Kasparov’s front legs around his neck, turned and strapped the dog’s legs around him tightly with his belt.
“If we don’t see anything up there, we’ll go back,” he said. “I promise.”
Sung-min grabbed the rope and braced his feet. Kasparov howled as he hung helplessly round his owner’s neck like a rucksack, his back legs scratching and scrabbling at the jacket of Sung-min’s suit.
It went quicker than Sung-min expected, and suddenly they were standing at the top of the cliff, where the forest carried on in front of them.
There was a red cabin twenty metres away.
Sung-min freed Kasparov, but instead of following the trail that led straight to the cabin, the dog shrank between his owner’s legs, whimpering and whining.
“There now, there’s nothing to be scared of,” Sung-min said. “Finne’s dead.”
Sung-min spotted animal tracks—large tracks, at that. Could that be what Kasparov was reacting to? He took a step towards the cabin. He felt the wire against his leg, but it was too late, and he knew he’d walked into a trap. There was a hissing sound, and he had time to see a flash of light from the object filled with explosive that flew up in front of him. He closed his eyes instinctively. When he opened them again, he had to lean his head back to see the object as it rose up into the sky, leaving a thin trail of smoke behind it. Then there was a damp kerblam as the rocket exploded, and even though it was daylight he saw the shower of yellow, blue and red, like a miniature Big Bang.
Someone had evidently wanted to be warned if anything was approaching. Possibly also to scare something off. He could feel Kasparov trembling against his leg.
“It’s only a firework,” he said, patting the dog. “But thanks for the warning, my friend.”
Sung-min walked over to the wooden terrace in front of t
he cabin.
Kasparov had plucked up courage again and ran past him, up to the door.
Sung-min saw from the splintered door frame beside the lock that he wasn’t going to have to break in, that job had already been done for him.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
He noted at once that the cabin had no electricity or water. There were ropes hanging from hooks on the walls, possibly strung up there to stop mice eating them.
But there was food on the bench by the west-facing window.
Bread. Cheese. And a knife.
Not like the short, all-purpose blade with the brown handle he had found when they searched Finne’s body. This one had a blade that he estimated to be just under fifteen centimetres long. Sung-min’s heart started to beat harder, more happily, almost like when he had seen Alexandra Sturdza walk into Statholdergaarden.
“You know what, Kasparov?” he whispered as he looked along the oak handle and horn collar. “I think winter really is almost over.”
Because there was no doubt. This was a Tojiro kitchen knife. This was the knife.
53
“What can I get you?” the white-clad bartender asked.
Harry let his eyes roam along the bottles of aquavit and whisky on the shelves behind him before settling once again on the silent television screen. He was the only person in the bar, and it was oddly quiet. Quiet for Gardermoen Airport, anyway. A sleep-inducing voice was making an announcement at one of the gates in the distance, and a pair of hard shoes was clicking on the floor. It was the sound of an airport that would soon be closing down for the night. But there were still several options. He had arrived on the flight from Lakselv, via Tromsø, an hour ago, and with only his hand luggage he had walked to the transit area instead of the arrivals hall. Harry squinted at the large screen of departures hanging next to the bar. The options were Berlin, Paris, Bangkok, Milan, Barcelona or Lisbon. There was enough time, and the SAS ticket desk was still open.
He looked back at the bartender, who was waiting for his order.