by Jo Nesbo
The voice chuckled.
Sylvia fell onto her side. ‘Go away,’ she groaned, spitting pebbles.
‘I want you to eat snow,’ the voice said, getting up and briefly holding the side where the jacket had been slashed open.
‘What?’ Sylvia exclaimed, in spite of herself.
‘I want you to eat snow until you piss yourself.’ The figure stood slightly outside the radius of the steel wire, tilted its head and watched Sylvia. ‘Until your stomach is so frozen and full that it can’t melt the snow any longer. Until it’s ice inside. Until you’ve become your true self. Something that can’t feel.’
Sylvia’s brain perceived the words, but could not absorb the meaning. ‘Never!’ she screamed.
A sound came from the figure and blended into the gurgle of the stream. ‘Now’s the time to scream, dear Sylvia. For no one will hear you again. Ever.’
Sylvia saw it raise something. Which lit up. A loop formed the outline of a red, glowing raindrop against the dark. It hissed and smoked as it came into contact with the surface of the stream. ‘You’ll choose to eat snow. Believe me.’
Sylvia realised with a paralysing certainty that her final hour had come. There was only one possibility left. In the past minutes night had fallen quickly, but she tried to focus her gaze on the figure between the trees as she weighed the hatchet in her hand. The blood tingled in her fingers as it streamed back, seeming to know that this was the last chance. They had practised this, the twins and her. On the barn wall. And every time she had thrown and one of them had pulled the hatchet out of the fox-shaped target, they had cheered with jubilation: ‘You killed the beast, Mummy! You killed the beast!’ Sylvia put one foot slightly in front of the other. A one-step run-up, that was the optimum to get the right combination of power and accuracy.
‘You’re crazy,’ she whispered.
‘Of that …’ the figure said, and Sylvia thought she could discern a little smile, ‘there is little doubt.’
The hatchet whirled through the thick, almost tangible darkness with a low hum. Sylvia stood perfectly balanced with her right arm pointed forward and watched the lethal weapon. Watched it whistle through the trees. Heard it cut off a thin branch. Watched it disappear into the darkness and heard the dull thud as the hatchet buried itself in the snow somewhere deep in the forest.
She leaned back against the tree trunk and slowly slumped to the ground. Felt the tears come without attempting to stop them this time. Because now she knew. There would be no afterwards.
‘Shall we begin?’ the voice said softly.
9
DAY 3.
The Pit.
‘WAS THAT GREAT OR WHAT?’
Oleg’s enthusiastic voice drowned out the spitting fat in the kebab shop crowded with people pouring in after the concert at Oslo Spektrum. Harry nodded to Oleg who was standing in his hoody, still sweaty, still moving to the beat, as he prattled on about the members of Slipknot by name, names Harry didn’t even know since Slipknot CDs were sparing with personal data, and music magazines like MOJO and Uncut didn’t write about bands like that. Harry ordered hamburgers and looked at his watch. Rakel had said she would be standing outside at ten o’clock. Harry looked at Oleg again. He was talking non-stop. When had it happened? When had the boy turned eleven and decided to like music about various stages of death, alienation, freezing and general doom? Perhaps it ought to have worried Harry, but it didn’t. It was a starting point, a curiosity that had to be satisfied, clothes the boy had to try on to see if they fitted. Other things would come along. Better things. Worse things.
‘You liked it too, didn’t you, Harry?’
Harry nodded. He didn’t have the heart to tell him the concert had been a bit of an anticlimax for him. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was; perhaps it just wasn’t his night. As soon as they had joined the crowd in Spektrum, he had felt the paranoia which regularly accompanied drunkenness, but which during the last year had come when he was sober. And instead of getting into the mood he had had the feeling he was being observed and stood scanning the audience, studying the wall of faces around them.
‘Slipknot rules,’ Oleg said. ‘And the masks were übercool. Especially the one with the long, thin nose. It looked like a … sort of …’
Harry was listening with half an ear, hoping Rakel would come soon. The air inside the kebab shop suddenly felt dense and suffocating, like a thin film of grease lying on your skin and over your mouth. He tried not to think his next thought. But it was on its way, had already rounded the corner. The thought of a drink.
‘It’s an Indian death mask,’ a woman’s voice behind them said. ‘And Slayer was better than Slipknot.’
Harry spun round in surprise.
‘Lots of posing with Slipknot, isn’t there?’ she continued. ‘Recycled ideas and empty gestures.’
She was wearing a shiny, figure-hugging, ankle-length black coat buttoned up to her neck. All you could see under the coat was a pair of black boots. Her face was pale and her eyes made up.
‘I would never have believed it,’ Harry said. ‘You liking that kind of music.’
Katrine Bratt managed a brief smile. ‘I suppose I would say the opposite.’
She gave him no further explanation and signalled to the man behind the counter that she wanted a Farris mineral water.
‘Slayer sucks,’ Oleg mumbled under his breath.
Katrine turned to him. ‘You must be Oleg.’
‘Yes,’ Oleg said sulkily, pulling up his army trousers and looking as if he both liked and disliked this attention from a mature woman. ‘How d’ya know?’
Katrine smiled. ‘“How d’ya know?” Living on Holmenkollen Ridge as you do, shouldn’t you say “How do you know?”’ Is Harry teaching you bad habits?’
Blood suffused Oleg’s cheeks.
Katrine laughed quietly and patted Oleg’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, I’m just curious.’
The boy’s face went so red that the whites of his eyes were shining.
‘I’m also curious,’ Harry said, passing a burger to Oleg. ‘I assume you’ve found the pattern I asked for, Bratt. Since you’ve got time to come to a gig.’
Harry looked at her in a way that spelt out his warning: Don’t tease the boy.
‘I’ve found something,’ Katrine said, twisting the plastic top off the Farris bottle. ‘But you’re busy so we can sort it out tomorrow.’
‘I’m not so busy,’ Harry said. He had already forgotten the film of grease, the feeling of suffocation.
‘It’s confidential and there are a lot of people here,’ Katrine said. ‘But I can whisper a couple of key words.’
She leaned closer, and over the fat he could smell the almost masculine fragrance of perfume and feel her warm breath on his ear.
‘A silver Volkswagen Passat has just pulled up on the pavement outside. There’s a woman sitting inside trying to catch your attention. I would guess it’s Oleg’s mother …’
Harry straightened up with a jolt and looked out of the large window towards the car. Rakel had wound down the window and was peering in at them.
‘Don’t make a mess,’ Rakel said as Oleg jumped onto the back seat with the burger in his hand.
Harry stood beside the open window. She was wearing a plain, light blue sweater. He knew that sweater well. Knew how it smelt, how it felt against the palm of his hand and cheek.
‘Good gig?’ she asked.
‘Ask Oleg.’
‘What sort of band was it actually?’ She looked at Oleg in the mirror. ‘Those people outside are a bit oddly dressed.’
‘Quiet songs about love and so on,’ Oleg said, sending a quick wink to Harry when her eyes were off the mirror.
‘Thank you, Harry,’ she said.
‘My pleasure. Drive carefully.’
‘Who was that woman inside?’
‘A colleague. New on the job.’
‘Oh? Looked as if you knew each other pretty well already.’
‘How so?�
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‘You …’ She stopped in mid-sentence. Then she slowly shook her head and laughed. A deep but bright laugh that came from down in her throat. Confident and carefree at the same time. The laugh that had once made him fall in love.
‘Sorry, Harry. Goodnight.’
The window glided upwards; the silver car glided off the pavement.
Harry walked the gauntlet down Brugata, between bars with music blaring out of open doors. He considered a coffee at Teddy’s Softbar, but knew it would be a bad idea. So he made up his mind to walk on by.
‘Coffee?’ repeated the guy behind the counter in disbelief.
The jukebox at Teddy’s was playing Johnny Cash, and Harry passed a finger over his top lip.
‘You gotta better suggestion?’ Harry heard the voice that came out of his mouth; it was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
‘Well,’ said the guy, running a hand through his oily, glistening hair, ‘the coffee’s not exactly fresh from the machine, so what about a freshly pulled beer?’
Johnny Cash was singing about God, baptism and new promises.
‘Right,’ Harry said.
The man behind the counter grinned.
At that moment Harry felt the mobile phone in his pocket vibrate. He grabbed it, quickly and greedily, as though it was a call he had been expecting.
It was Skarre.
‘We’ve just received a missing persons call that fits. Married woman with children. She wasn’t at home when the husband and children returned a few hours ago. They live way out in the woods in Sollihøgda. None of the neighbours has seen her and she can’t have left by car because the husband had it. And there are no footprints on the path.’
‘Footprints?’
‘There’s still snow up there.’
The beer was banged down in front of Harry.
‘Harry? Are you there?’
‘Yes, I am. I’m thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘Is there a snowman there?’
‘Eh?’
‘Snowman.’
‘How should I know?’
‘Well, let’s go and find out. Jump in the car and pick me up outside Gunerius shopping centre, in Storgata.’
‘Can’t we do this tomorrow, Harry? I’ve got some action lined up for tonight, and this woman is only missing, so there’s no immediate hurry.’
Harry watched the foam coiling its way down the outside of the beer glass like a snake.
‘Basically …’ Harry said, ‘… there’s one hell of a hurry.’
Amazed, the barman looked at the untouched beer, the fifty-krone note on the counter and the broad shoulders making off through the door as Johnny Cash faded out.
‘Sylvia would never have simply left,’ said Rolf Ottersen.
Rolf Ottersen was thin. Or to be more precise, he was a bag of bones. His flannel shirt was buttoned all the way up and from it protruded a gaunt neck and a head that reminded Harry of a wading bird. A pair of narrow hands with long, scrawny fingers that continually curled, twisted and twirled protruded from his shirtsleeves. The nails of his right hand had been filed long and sharp, like claws. His eyes, behind thick glasses in plain, round steel frames, the type that had been popular among seventies radicals, seemed unnaturally large. A poster on the mustard-yellow wall showed Indians carrying an anaconda. Harry recognised the cover of a Joni Mitchell LP from hippy Stone Age times. Next to it hung a reproduction of a well-known self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. A woman who suffered, Harry thought. A picture chosen by a woman. The floor was untreated pine, and the room was lit by a combination of old-fashioned paraffin lamps and brown clay lamps, which looked as if they might have been home-made. Leaning against the wall in the corner was a guitar with nylon strings, which Harry took to be the explanation for Rolf Ottersen’s filed nails.
‘What do you mean, “she would never have left”,’ Harry asked.
In front of him on the living-room table Rolf Ottersen had placed a photograph of his wife with their twin daughters, Olga and Emma, ten years old. Sylvia Ottersen had big, sleepy eyes, like someone who had worn glasses all her life and then started wearing contact lenses or had laser eye surgery. The twins had their mother’s eyes.
‘She would’ve said,’ Rolf Ottersen said. ‘Left a message. Something must’ve happened.’
In spite of his despair his voice was muted and gentle. Rolf Ottersen pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and put it to his face. His nose seemed abnormally big for his narrow, pale face. He blew his nose in one single trumpet blast.
Skarre poked his head inside the door. ‘The dog patrol’s here. They’ve got a cadaver dog with them.’
‘Get going then,’ Harry said. ‘Have you spoken to all the neighbours?’
‘Yep. Still nothing.’
Skarre closed the door, and Harry saw that Ottersen’s eyes had become even bigger behind the glasses.
‘Cadaver dog?’ Ottersen whispered.
‘Just a generic term,’ Harry said, making a mental note that he would have to give Skarre a couple of tips on how to express himself.
‘So you use them to search for living people as well?’ From his intonation, the husband appeared to be pleading.
‘Yes, of course,’ Harry lied, rather than tell him that cadaver dogs sniffed out places where dead bodies had been. They were not used for drugs, lost property or living people. They were used for deaths. Full stop.
‘So you last saw her today at four,’ Harry said, looking down at his notes. ‘Before you and your daughters went to town. What did you do there?’
‘I took care of the shop while the girls had their violin lessons.’
‘Shop?’
‘We have a small shop in Majorstuen selling handmade African goods. Art, furniture, fabric, clothes, all sorts of things. They’re imported directly from the artisans, and they’re paid properly. Sylvia is there most of the time, but on Thursdays we’re open late, so she comes back home with the car and I go in with the girls. I’m at the shop while they have violin lessons at the Barrat Due Institute of Music from five until seven. Then I pick them up, and we come home. We were home a little after half seven.’
‘Mm. Who else works in the shop?’
‘No one.’
‘That must mean you’re closed for a while on Thursdays. About an hour?’
Rolf Ottersen gave a wry smile. ‘It’s a very small shop. We don’t have many customers. Almost none until the Christmas sales, to be honest.’
‘How …?’
‘NORAD. They support shops and our suppliers as part of the government’s trade programme with Third World countries.’ He coughed quietly. ‘The message it sends is more important than money and shortsighted gain, isn’t it.’
Harry nodded even though he wasn’t thinking about development aid and fair trade in Africa but about the clock and driving time in Oslo and district. From the kitchen, where the twins were eating a late snack, came the sound of a radio. He hadn’t seen a TV in the house.
‘Thank you. We’ll be cracking on.’ Harry got up and went outside.
Three cars stood parked in the yard. One was Bjørn Holm’s Volvo Amazon, repainted black with a chequered rally stripe over the roof and boot. Harry looked up at the clear starry sky arching over the tiny farm in the forest clearing. He breathed in the air. The air of spruce and wood smoke. From the edge of the wood he heard the panting of a dog and cries of encouragement from the policeman.
To get to the barn Harry walked in the arc they had determined so as not to destroy any clues they might be able to use. Voices were emanating from the open door. He crouched down and studied the footprints in the snow in the light from the outside lamp. Then he stood up, leaned against the frame and tugged out a packet of cigarettes.
‘Looks like a murder scene,’ he said. ‘Blood, bodies and overturned furniture.’
Bjørn Holm and Magnus Skarre fell silent, turned and followed Harry’s gaze. The big open room was lit by a single bulb han
ging from a cable wrapped around one of the beams. At one end of the barn there was a lathe and, behind it, a board with tools attached: hammers, saws, pliers, drills. No electric gadgets. At the other end there was a wire fence and behind it chickens perched on shelves in the wall or strutted around, stiff-legged, on the straw. In the middle of the room, on grey, untreated, bloodstained floorboards, lay three headless bodies. Harry poked a cigarette between his lips without lighting it, entered, taking care not to step in the blood, and squatted down beside the chopping block to examine the chicken heads. The light from his penlight flashed on matt-black eyes. First he held half a white feather that looked as if it had been scorched black along the edge, then he studied the smooth severing of the chickens’ necks. The blood had coagulated and was black. He knew this was a quick process, not much more than half an hour.
‘See anything interesting?’ asked Bjørn Holm.
‘My brain has been damaged by my profession, Holm. Right now it’s analysing chickens’ bodies.’
Skarre laughed and painted the newspaper headlines in the air: ‘Savage Triple Chicken Murder. Voodoo Parish. Harry Hole Assigned.’
‘What I can’t see is more interesting,’ Harry said.
Bjørn Holm raised an eyebrow, looked around and began to nod slowly.
Skarre looked at them sceptically. ‘And that is?’
‘The murder weapon,’ Harry said.
‘A hatchet,’ Holm said. ‘The only sensible way to kill chickens.’
Skarre sniffed. ‘If the woman did the killing, she must have put the hatchet back in its place. Tidy sorts, these farmers.’
‘I agree,’ Harry said, listening to the cackle of the chickens, which seemed to be coming from all sides. ‘That’s why it’s interesting that the chopping block is upside down and the chickens’ bodies scattered around. And the hatchet is not in its place.’
‘Its place?’ Skarre faced Holm and rolled his eyes.
‘If you can be bothered to take a peek, Skarre,’ Harry said without moving.