by Jo Nesbo
Skarre was still looking at Holm, who nodded towards the board behind the lathe.
‘Shit,’ said Skarre.
In the empty space between a hammer and a rusty saw was the outline of a small hatchet.
From outside came the sound of a dog barking, whimpering, and then the policeman’s loud shout which was no longer encouraging.
Harry rubbed his chin. ‘We’ve searched the whole barn, so for the moment it looks as if Sylvia Ottersen left the place while slaughtering the chickens, taking the hatchet with her. Holm, can you take the body temperatures of these chickens and estimate the time of death?’
‘Yup.’
‘Eh?’ Skarre said.
‘I want to know when she ran off,’ Harry said. ‘Did you get anything from the shoeprints outside, Holm?’
The forensic officer shook his head. ‘Too trampled, and I need more light. I found several of Rolf Ottersen’s bootprints. Plus a couple of others going to the barn, but none from the barn. Perhaps she was carried out of the barn?’
‘Mm. Then the prints of the carrier would have been deeper. Shame no one stepped in the blood.’ Harry peered at the dark walls outside the range of the bulb. From the yard they heard a dog’s pitiful whine and a policeman’s furious curses.
‘Go and see what’s up, Skarre,’ Harry said.
Skarre went, and Harry switched the torch back on and walked towards the wall. He ran his hand along the unpainted boards.
‘What’s …?’ Holm began, but stopped when Harry’s boot hit the wall with a dull thud.
The starry sky came into view.
‘A back door,’ Harry said, staring at the black forest and the silhouette of spruce trees against the dome of dirty-yellow light from the town in the distance. He shone the torch on the snow. The light immediately found the tracks.
‘Two people,’ Harry said.
‘It’s the dog,’ Skarre said on his return. ‘It won’t budge.’
‘Won’t budge?’ Harry lit up the trail of footprints. The snow reflected the light, but the trail vanished in the darkness beneath the trees.
‘The dog handler doesn’t understand. He says the dog seems petrified. At any rate it refuses to go into the forest.’
‘Perhaps it can smell fox,’ Holm said. ‘Lots of foxes in this forest.’
‘Foxes?’ Skarre snorted. ‘That big dog can’t be afraid of foxes.’
‘Perhaps it’s never seen a fox,’ Harry said. ‘But it knows it can smell a predator. It’s rational to be afraid of what you don’t know. The dog that isn’t won’t live long.’ Harry could feel his heart begin to quicken. And he knew why. The forest. The dark. The type of terror that was not rational. The type that had to be overcome.
‘This is to be treated as a crime scene until further notice,’ Harry said. ‘Start work. I’ll check where this trail leads.’
‘OK.’
Harry swallowed before stepping out of the back door. It had been more than thirty years ago. And still his body bristled.
He had been staying at his grandfather’s house in Åndalsnes during the autumn holiday. The farm lay on a mountainside with the mighty Romsdal Mountains towering above. Harry had been ten and had gone into the forest to look for the cow his grandfather was searching for. He wanted to find it before his grandfather, before anyone. So he hurried. Ran like a maniac over hills of soft blueberry bushes and funny, crooked dwarf birch trees. The paths came and went as he ran in a straight line towards the bell he thought he had heard among the trees. And there it was again, a bit further to the right now. He jumped over a stream, ducked under a tree and his boots squelched as he ran across a marsh with a rain cloud edging towards him. He could see the veil of drizzle beneath the cloud showering the steep mountainside.
And the rain was so fine that he had not noticed the darkness descending; it slunk out of the marsh, it crept between the trees, it spilt down through the shadows of the mountainside like black paint and collected at the bottom of the valley. He looked up at a large bird circling high above, so dizzyingly high because he could see the mountain behind it. And then a boot got stuck and he fell. Face down and without anything to grab. Everything went dark, and his nose and mouth were filled with the taste of marsh, of death, decay and darkness. He could taste the darkness for the few seconds he was under. And then he came up again, and discovered that all the light had gone. Gone across the mountain towering above him in its silent, heavy majesty, whispering that he didn’t know where he was, that he hadn’t known for a long time. Unaware that he had lost a boot, he stood up and began to run. He would soon see something he recognised. But the landscape seemed bewitched; rocks had become heads of creatures growing up out of the ground, bushes were fingers that scratched at his legs and dwarf birch trees were witches bent with laughter as they pointed the way, here or there, the way home or the way to perdition, the way to his grandmother’s house or the way to the Pit. Because adults had told him about the Pit. The bottomless swamp where cattle, people and whole carts vanished, never to return.
It was almost night when Harry tottered into the kitchen and his grandmother hugged him and said that his father, grandfather and all the adults from the neighbouring farm were out looking for him. Where had he been?
In the forest.
But hadn’t he heard their shouts? They had been calling Harry, she had heard them calling Harry all the time.
He didn’t remember it himself, but many times later he had been told that he had sat there trembling with cold on the wooden box in front of the stove, staring into the distance with an apathetic expression on his face, and had answered: ‘I didn’t think it was them calling.’
‘Who did you think it was then?’
‘The others. Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma?’
Harry had walked barely a few metres into the forest when he was overtaken by an intense, almost unnatural silence. He shone the torch down on the ground in front of him because every time he pointed it into the forest, shadows ran between the trees like jittery spirits in the pitch black. Being isolated from the dark in a bubble of light didn’t give him a sense of security. Quite the opposite. The certainty that he was the most visible object moving through the forest made him feel naked, vulnerable. The branches scraped at his face, like a blind man’s fingers trying to identify a stranger.
The tracks led to a stream whose gurgling noise drowned his quickened breathing. One of the trails disappeared while the other followed the stream on lower ground.
He went on. The stream wound hither and thither, but he wasn’t concerned about losing his bearings; all he had to do was retrace his steps.
An owl, which must have been close by, hooted an admonitory to-wit-to-woo. The dial on his watch glowed green and showed that he had been walking for over fifteen minutes. Time to go back and send in the team with proper footwear, gear and a dog that was not afraid of foxes.
Harry’s heart stopped.
It had darted past his face. Soundless and so fast that he hadn’t seen anything. But the current of air had given it away. Harry heard the owl’s wings beating in the snow and the piteous squeak of a small rodent that had just become its prey.
He slowly let out the air from his lungs. Shone the torch over the forest ahead one last time and turned to go back. Took one step, then came to a halt. He wanted to take another, two more, to get out. But he did what he had to do. Shone the light behind him. And there it was again. A glint, a reflection of light that should not be there in the middle of the black forest. He went closer. Looked back and tried to fix the spot in his mind. It was about fifteen metres from the stream. He crouched down. Just the steel stuck up, but he didn’t need to brush away the snow to see what it was. A hatchet. If there had been blood on it after killing the chickens, it was gone now. There were no footprints around the hatchet. Harry shone the torch and saw a snapped twig on the snow a few metres away. Someone must have the thrown the axe here with enormous strength.
At that m
oment Harry felt it again. The sensation he had had at Spektrum, earlier that evening. The sensation that he was being observed. Instinctively, he switched off the torch, and the darkness descended over him like a blanket. He held his breath and listened. Don’t, he thought. Don’t let it happen. Evil is not a thing, it cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.
Harry switched on the torch and pointed it towards the clearing.
It was her. She stood erect and immobile between the trees, looking at him without blinking, the same large sleepy eyes as in the photograph. Harry’s first thought was that she was dressed like a bride, in white, that she was standing at the altar, here, in the middle of the forest. The light made her glitter. Harry breathed in with a shiver and grabbed his mobile phone from his jacket pocket. Bjørn Holm answered after the second ring.
‘Cordon off the whole area,’ Harry said. His throat felt dry, rough. ‘I’m calling in the troops.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘There’s a snowman here.’
‘So?’
Harry explained.
‘I didn’t catch the last bit,’ Holm shouted. ‘Poor coverage here …’
‘The head,’ Harry repeated. ‘It belongs to Sylvia Ottersen.’
The other end went quiet.
Harry told Holm to follow the footprints and rang off.
Then he crouched against a tree, buttoned his coat right up and switched off the torch to save the battery while he waited. Thinking he had almost forgotten what it tasted like, the darkness.
Part Two
10
DAY 4.
Chalk.
IT WAS HALF PAST THREE IN THE MORNING AND HARRY WAS exhausted as he finally unlocked the door to his flat. He undressed and went straight into the shower. Tried not to think as he let the burning jets of water numb his skin, massage his stiff muscles and thaw his frozen body. They had spoken to Rolf Ottersen, but the formal questioning would have to wait until the morning. At Sollihøgda they had quickly wrapped up the door-to-door inquiries with the neighbours; there weren’t so many to ask. But the crime scene officers and the dogs were still at work and would be the whole night. They had a brief window of time before the evidence would become contaminated, melted or covered by snow. He turned off the shower. The air was grey with steam, and when he wiped the mirror a new layer of condensation immediately settled. It distorted his face and blurred the contours of his naked body.
Harry was cleaning his teeth when the telephone rang. ‘Harry.’
‘Stormann, the mould man.’
‘You’re up late,’ Harry said in surprise.
‘Reckoned you were at work.’
‘Oh?’
‘It was on the late-night news. Woman in Sollihøgda. Saw you in the background. I’ve got the results back.’
‘And?’
‘You’ve got fungus. A hungry bugger, too. Aspergillus versicolor.’
‘Which means?’
‘That it can be any colour. If and when it’s seen. Apart from that, it means I’ll have to take down more of your walls.’
‘Mm.’ Harry had a vague sense that he ought to show more interest, more concern, or at least ask more questions. But he couldn’t be bothered. Not at this hour.
‘Feel free.’
Harry rang off and closed his eyes. Waited for the ghosts, for the inevitable, just as long as he stayed away from the only medicine he knew for ghosts. Perhaps it would be a new acquaintance this time. He waited for her to come out of the forest, stumping along towards him on a huge white body without legs, a misshapen bowling ball with a head, black sockets with crows pecking at the remainder of her eyeballs, teeth bared after the foxes had helped themselves to the lips. Hard to know if she would come, the subconscious is unpredictable. So unpredictable that when Harry slept, he dreamt that he was lying in a bath with his head underwater listening to a deep rumble of bubbles and women’s laughter. Seagrass grew on the white enamel, stretching out for him like green fingers on a white hand seeking his.
The morning light cast rectangles of light over the newspapers lying on POB Gunnar Hagen’s desk. It lit up Sylvia Ottersen’s smile and the headlines on the front pages. KILLED AND DECAPITATED, DECAPITATED IN THE FOREST and – the shortest and probably the best – DECAPITATED.
Harry’s head ached from the moment he woke up. Now he was holding it gingerly in his hands thinking that he might as well have had a drink last night, it wouldn’t have made the pain any worse. He wanted to close his eyes, but Hagen was staring straight at him. Harry noticed that Hagen’s mouth kept opening, twisting and closing – in short that he was formulating words which Harry was receiving on a badly tuned frequency.
‘The conclusion …’ Hagen said, and Harry knew it was time to prick up his ears, ‘… is that this case has top priority from now on. And that means, of course, that we will increase the size of your investigation team forthwith and –’
‘Disagree,’ Harry said. Just articulating a single word invoked a sense that his cranium was exploding. ‘We can requisition more people as and when, but for the moment I don’t want anyone else at the meetings. Four is enough.’
Gunnar Hagen looked dumbfounded. In murder cases, even the straightforward ones, investigation teams always comprised at least a dozen people.
‘Free thinking functions best in small groups,’ Harry added.
‘Thinking?’ Hagen burst out. ‘What about standard police work? Following up forensic evidence, questioning, checking tip-offs? And what about the coordination of information? A total of –’
Harry held up a hand to stem the flow of words. ‘That’s just the point. I don’t want to drown in all that.’
‘Drown?’ Hagen stared at Harry in disbelief. ‘I’d better give the case to someone who can swim then.’
Harry massaged his temples. Hagen knew that right now there was no one else in Crime Squad apart from Inspector Hole who could lead a murder case such as this one and Harry knew it. Harry also knew that giving the case to the central investigation bureau, Kripos, would be such a huge loss of prestige for the new POB that he would rather sacrifice his extremely hirsute right arm.
Harry sighed. ‘Normal investigation teams fight to stay afloat in the stream of information. And that’s when it’s a standard case. With decapitations on the front pages …’ Harry shook his head. ‘People have gone mad. We received more than a hundred calls just after the news item last night. You know, drunks slurring and the usual nutters, plus a few new ones. People telling you that the murder was described in the Book of Revelation, that sort of thing. So far today we’ve had two hundred calls. And just wait until it emerges that there may be several bodies. Let’s say we have to set aside twenty people to take care of the calls. They check them out and write reports. Let’s say that the team leader has to spend two hours every day physically going through the incoming data, two hours coordinating it and two hours assembling everyone in groups, updating them, answering their questions, and half an hour editing the information that can be revealed at the press conference. Which takes three-quarters of an hour. The worst part is …’ Harry put his forefingers against his aching jaw muscles and grimaced. ‘… that in a standard murder case this is, I suppose, a good use of resources. Because there will always be those out there who know something, who have heard or seen something. Information which we can painstakingly piece together or which enables us to magically solve the whole case.’
‘Exactly,’ Hagen said. ‘That’s why –’
‘The problem is’, Harry continued, ‘that this is not that kind of case. Not that kind of killer. This person has not confided in a friend or shown his face in the vicinity of the murder. No one out there knows anything, so the calls that come in won’t help us, they’ll just delay us. And any possible forensic clues we uncover have been left there to confuse us. In a nutshell, this is a different kind of game.’
> Hagen had leaned back in his chair, pressed his fingertips together, and, immersed in thought, he was now observing Harry. He blinked like a basking lizard, then asked: ‘So you see this as a game?’
As he nodded, Harry wondered where Hagen was going.
‘What sort of game? Chess?’
‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘blindfold chess maybe.’
Hagen nodded. ‘So you envisage a classic serial killer, a cold-blooded murderer with superior intelligence and a proclivity for fun, games and challenges?’
Now Harry had an idea where Hagen was going.
‘A man straight from the serial killings you profiled on that FBI course? The kind you met in Australia that time? A person who …’ the POB smacked his lips as if he were tasting the words, ‘… is basically a worthy opponent for someone of your background.’
Harry sighed. ‘That’s not how I think, boss.’
‘Don’t you? Remember I’ve taught at the military academy, Harry. What do you think aspiring generals dream about when I tell them how military strategists have personally changed the course of world history? Do you think they dream about sitting around quietly hoping for peace, about telling their grandchildren that they just lived, that no one would ever know what they might have been capable of? They might say they want peace, but inside they dream, Harry. About having one opportunity. There’s a strong social urge in man to be needed, Harry. That’s why generals in the Pentagon paint the blackest scenario as soon as a firecracker goes off anywhere in the world. I think you want this case to be special, Harry. You want it so much that you can see the blackest of the black.’
‘The snowman, boss. You remember the letter I showed you?’
Hagen sighed. ‘I remember a madman, Harry.’
Harry knew he ought to give in now. Put forward the compromise suggestion he had already concocted. Give Hagen this little victory. Instead he shrugged. ‘I want to have my group as it is, boss.’
Hagen’s face closed, hardened. ‘I can’t let you do that, Harry.’