by Jo Nesbo
‘Can’t?’
Hagen held Harry’s gaze, but then it happened. Hagen blinked, his eyes wandered. Just for a fraction of a second, but it was enough.
‘There are other considerations,’ Hagen said.
Harry tried to maintain an innocent expression as he twisted the knife. ‘What sort of considerations, boss?’
Hagen looked down at his hands.
‘What do you think? Senior officers. The press. Politicians. If we still haven’t got the murderer after three months, who do you think will have to answer questions about the unit’s priorities? Who will have to explain why we put four people on to this case because small groups are better suited to …’ Hagen spat out the words like rotten shrimps: ‘free thinking and games of chess? Have you considered that, Harry?’
‘No,’ Harry said, crossing his arms on his chest. ‘I’ve thought about how we’ll catch this guy, not about how I’m going to justify not catching him.’
Harry knew it was a cheap shot, but the words hit home. Hagen blinked twice. Opened his mouth and shut it again, and Harry instantly felt ashamed. Why did he always have to instigate these childish, meaningless wall-pissing contests, just to have the satisfaction of giving someone else – anyone at all – the finger? Rakel had once said that he wished he’d been born with an extra middle finger that was permanently sticking up.
‘There’s a man in Kripos called Espen Lepsvik,’ Harry said. ‘He’s good at leading large investigations. I can talk to him, get him to set up a group which reports to me. The groups will work in parallel and independently. You and the Chief Superintendent take care of the press conference. How does that sound, boss?’
Harry didn’t need to wait for an answer. He could see the gratitude in Hagen’s eyes. And he knew he’d won the pissing contest.
The first thing Harry did when he was back in his own office was to ring Bjørn Holm.
‘Hagen said yes, it’s going to be as I said. Meeting in my office in half an hour. Will you ring Skarre and Bratt?’
He put down the phone. Thought about what Hagen had said about hawks wanting their own war. And pulled out the drawer in a vain hunt for a Dispril.
‘Apart from the footprints, we haven’t found a single trace of the perp at what we assume is the crime scene,’ Magnus Skarre said. ‘What’s harder to understand is how we haven’t found a trace of the body, either. After all, he cut off the woman’s head, there ought to have been masses of evidence left behind. But there was nothing. The dogs didn’t even react! It’s a mystery.’
‘He killed and decapitated the woman in the stream,’ Katrine said. ‘Her footprints came to an end further up the stream, didn’t they. She ran in the water so as not to leave prints, but he caught up with her.’
‘What did he use?’ Harry asked.
‘Hatchet or a saw, what else?’
‘What about the burn marks around the skin where he cut?’
Katrine looked at Skarre and they both shrugged.
‘OK, Holm, check that out,’ Harry said. ‘And then?’
‘Then maybe he carried her through the stream down to the road,’ Skarre said. He had slept for two hours and his sweater was on back to front, but no one had had the heart to tell him. ‘I say maybe because we’ve found nothing there, either. And we should’ve done. A streak of blood on a tree trunk, a lump of flesh on a branch or a shred of clothing. But we found his footprints where the stream flows under the road. And beside the road there were imprints in the snow of what might have been a body. But, for Christ’s sake, the dogs didn’t pick it up. Not even the bloody cadaver dog! It’s a –’
‘Mystery,’ Harry repeated, rubbing his chin. ‘Isn’t it pretty impractical to cut off her head while standing in a stream? It’s just a narrow ditch. You wouldn’t have enough elbow room. Why?’
‘Obvious,’ Skarre said. ‘The evidence is carried away with the water.’
‘Not obvious,’ retorted Harry. ‘He left her head, so he’s not worried about leaving any traces. Why there’s no trace of her on the way down to the road –’
‘Body bag!’ said Katrine. ‘I’ve just been wondering how he managed to carry her so far in that terrain. In Iraq they used body bags with straps like a rucksack.’
‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘That would explain why the cadaver dog didn’t pick up a scent by the road.’
‘And why he could risk letting her lie there,’ Katrine said.
‘Lie there?’ Skarre queried.
‘The imprint of a body in the snow. He put her there while he went to fetch his car. Which was probably parked somewhere near the Ottersen farm. That would’ve taken half an hour, don’t you agree?’
Skarre mumbled a grudging ‘something like that’.
‘The bags are black, look like run-of-the-mill bin bags to anyone passing in a car.’
‘No one drove past,’ Skarre said sourly, stifling a yawn. ‘We’ve spoken to everyone up in that bloody forest.’
Harry nodded. ‘What should we think about Rolf Ottersen’s story about him being in his shop between five and seven?’
‘The alibi isn’t worth shit if there weren’t any customers,’ Skarre said.
‘He might’ve driven there and back while the twins were having their violin lessons,’ Katrine said.
‘But he’s not the type,’ Skarre said, leaning back in the chair and nodding as if to corroborate his own conclusion.
Harry was tempted to make a sweeping statement about the general police perception of their ability to tell a murderer when they saw one, but this was the phase when everyone was supposed to say what they thought without fear of contradiction. From experience, the best ideas originated from flights of fancy, half-baked guesswork and erroneous snap judgements.
The door opened.
‘Howdy!’ sang out Bjørn Holm. ‘’Pologies all round, but I’ve been on the trail of the murder weapon.’
He pulled off his waterproof and hung it on Harry’s coat stand which was tilting wildly. Underneath he was wearing a pink shirt with yellow embroidery and a legend on the back proclaiming that Hank Williams – despite the death certificate from the winter of 1953 – was alive. Then he flung himself down on the last free chair and looked at the others’ upturned faces.
‘What’s up?’ he smiled, and Harry waited for Holm’s favourite one-liner. Which was not long in coming. ‘Someone died?’
‘The murder weapon,’ Harry said. ‘Come on.’
Holm grinned and rubbed his hands together. ‘I was wondering of course where the burn marks on Sylvia Ottersen’s neck came from. The pathologist didn’t have a clue. She just said that the small arteries had been cauterised, the same way you stop amputations bleeding. Before the leg’s sawn off. And when she talked about sawing, that made me think of something. As you know, I grew up on a farm …’
Bjørn Holm leaned forward, his eyes alight, reminding Harry of a father about to open a Christmas present, a big train set he has bought for his newborn son.
‘If a cow was calving, and the calf was already dead, sometimes the carcass was too big for the cow to force out unaided. And if, on top of that, it was lying crooked, we couldn’t get it out without risking injury to the cow. In that case the vet would have to use a saw.’
Skarre grimaced.
‘It’s a sort of very thin, flexible blade type thing you can put inside a cow, kind of round the calf, like a noose. And then you pull and wriggle the blade to and fro, and cut through the body.’ Holm demonstrated with his hands. ‘Until it’s in two bits, and you can take out half the carcass. And then as a rule the problem’s solved. As a rule. Because the blade sometimes cuts the mother too as it goes to and fro inside her, and the mother bleeds to death. So a couple of years ago some French farmers came up with a practical gadget which solved the problem. A looped electrical filament that can burn through flesh. There’s a plain plastic handle with a dead thin, super-strong metal wire attached to each end of the handle, forming a loop you can put round whatever
you want to cut off. Then you switch on the heat. The wire is white hot in fifteen seconds, and you press a button on the handle and the loop begins to tighten and cut through the body. There’s no sideways movement and thus less chance of cutting the mother. And if you should cut her, there are two further advantages –’
‘Are you trying to sell us this instrument or what?’ Skarre asked with a grin, searching Harry’s eyes for a reaction.
‘Because of the temperature the wire is perfectly sterile,’ Holm continued. ‘It doesn’t transmit bacteria or poisoned blood from the carcass. And the heat cauterises the small arteries and restricts the bleeding.’
‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘Do you know for certain that he used a tool like this?’
‘No,’ Holm said. ‘I could’ve tested it if I’d got hold of one, but the vet I spoke to said that electric cutting loops haven’t been approved by the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture yet.’ He looked at Harry with an expression of deep and heartfelt regret.
‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘if it isn’t the murder weapon, it would at least explain how he could have cut off her head while standing in the stream. What do the rest of you think?’
‘France,’ Katrine Bratt said. ‘First the guillotine and now this.’
Skarre puckered his lips and shook his head. ‘Sounds too weird. Anyway, where did he get hold of this loop gizmo? If it isn’t approved, I mean?’
‘We can start looking there,’ Harry said. ‘Would you check that out, Skarre?’
‘I said I don’t believe all that stuff.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. I meant to say: Check it out, Skarre. Anything else, Holm?’
‘No. There must’ve been masses of blood at the crime scene, but the only blood we found was in the barn after the chickens had been slaughtered. Talking of the chickens, their body temperatures and the room temperature showed that they were killed at approximately half past six. Bit unsure though cos one chicken was warmer than the other two.’
‘Must’ve been feverish,’ Skarre laughed.
‘And the snowman?’ Harry asked.
‘You don’t find fingerprints on piles of snow crystals changing form from one hour to the next, but you ought to be able to find scraps of skin, since the crystals are sharp. Possibly fibres from gloves or mittens, if he wore them. But we didn’t find either.’
‘Rubber gloves,’ Katrine said.
‘Otherwise not a sniff,’ Holm said.
‘OK. At least we have a head. Have you checked the teeth—?’
Harry was interrupted by Holm, who had straightened up with an offended expression on his face. ‘For traces left on her teeth? Her hair? Fingerprints on her neck? Other things forensic officers don’t think about?’
Harry nodded a ‘Sorry’ and checked his watch. ‘Skarre, even if you don’t think Rolf Ottersen is the type, find out where he was and what he was doing at the time Birte Becker disappeared. I’ll have a chat with Filip Becker. Katrine, you hunker down with all the missing persons cases, including these two, and look for matches.’
‘OK,’ she said.
‘Compare everything,’ Harry said. ‘Time of death, phase of moon, what was on TV, hair colour of victims, whether any of them borrowed the same book from the library, attended the same seminar, the sum of their telephone numbers. We have to know how he selects them.’
‘Hang on a moment,’ Skarre said. ‘Have we already decided that there is a connection? Shouldn’t we be open to all possibilities?’
‘You can be as open as you fucking like,’ Harry said, getting up and making sure his car keys were in his pocket. ‘As long as you do what your boss says. Last person turns off the light.’
Harry was waiting for the lift when he heard someone coming. The footsteps stopped right behind him.
‘I spoke to one of the twins in the school break this morning.’
‘Oh yes?’ Harry turned to Katrine Bratt.
‘I asked what they’d been doing on Tuesday.’
‘Tuesday?’
‘The day Birte Becker disappeared.’
‘Exactly.’
‘She, her sister and her mother were in town. She remembered that because they were at the Kon-Tiki Museum looking for a toy after a visit to the doctor. And they spent the night at an aunt’s while their mother was visiting a girlfriend. The father was at home keeping an eye on the house. Alone.’
She was standing so close that Harry could smell her perfume. It wasn’t like anything he had ever known a woman to wear. Very spicy, nothing sweet about it.
‘Mm. Which twin did you speak to?’
Katrine Bratt held his gaze. ‘No idea. Does it matter?’
A pling told Harry that the lift had reached their floor.
Jonas was drawing a snowman. The idea was to make it smile and sing, to make it a happy snowman. But he couldn’t get it right; it just stared back at him blankly from the enormous white sheet. Around him, in the large auditorium, there was hardly a sound, just the scratch of his father’s chalk, now and then a bang on the board in front of him, and the whisper of students’ ballpoint pens on paper. He didn’t like pens. If you used a pen you couldn’t rub it out, you couldn’t change anything, what you drew was there for ever. He had woken up today thinking that his mother was back, that everything was fine again, and he’d run into her bedroom. But his father had been in there getting dressed and he told Jonas to get dressed as well because he was going to the university today. Pens.
The room sloped down to where his father stood and was like a theatre auditorium. His father had not said a word to the students, not even when he and Jonas entered. Just nodded to them, pointed to the seat where Jonas was to sit and then went straight to the board and began to write. And the students were clearly used to that, for they had been sitting ready and started taking notes at once. The boards were covered with numbers and small letters and a few strange doodles that Jonas did not recognise. His father had once explained to him that physics had its own language, one which he used to tell stories. When Jonas asked if they were adventure stories, his father had laughed and said that physics could only be used to explain things that were true, that it was a language that couldn’t lie if it tried.
Some of the doodles were funny. And very elegant.
Chalk dust floated down onto his father’s shoulders. A fine white layer settled like snow on his jacket. Jonas looked at his father’s back and tried to draw him. But this didn’t turn out to be a happy snowman, either. And suddenly the lecture room went absolutely still. All the pens stopped writing. Because the piece of chalk had stopped. It stood motionless at the top of the board, so high up that his father had to stretch his arm over his head to reach. And now it looked as if the chalk was stuck and that his father was hanging from the board, like when Wile E. Coyote was hanging from a tiny branch on a cliff face and it was a very, very long way down. Then his father’s shoulders began to shake, and Jonas thought he was trying to free the chalk, get it to move again, but it wouldn’t. A ripple ran through the auditorium as if everyone was opening their mouths and sucking in breath at the same moment. Then his father freed the chalk at last, walked to the exit without turning and was gone. He’s going to get some more chalk, Jonas thought. The buzz of students’ voices around him grew gradually louder. He caught two words: ‘wife’ and ‘missing’. He looked at the board, which was almost completely covered. His father had been trying to write that she was dead, but the chalk could only say what was true, so it had got stuck. Jonas tried to rub out his snowman. Around him people were packing up their things, and the seats banged as they got up and left.
A shadow fell over the failed snowman on the paper, and Jonas looked up.
It was the policeman, the tall one with the ugly face and the kind eyes.
‘Would you like to come with me, and we’ll see if we can find your father?’ he asked.
Harry knocked gently on the office door with the sign saying Prof. Filip Becker.
As there was n
o answer, he opened it.
The man behind the desk raised his head from his hands. ‘Did I say you could come in …?’
He paused when he saw Harry. And shifted his gaze down to the boy standing next to him.
‘Jonas!’ Filip Becker said, the tone somewhere between bewilderment and a reprimand. His eyes were red-rimmed. ‘Didn’t I say you should sit quietly?’
‘I brought him with me,’ Harry said.
‘Oh?’ Becker looked at his watch and stood up.
‘Your students have left,’ Harry said.
‘Have they?’ Becker dropped back into his chair. ‘I … I only meant to give them a break.’
‘I was there,’ Harry said.
‘Were you? Why …?’
‘We all need a break once in a while. Can we have a chat?’
‘I didn’t want him to go to school,’ Becker explained after sending Jonas into the coffee room with instructions to wait there. ‘All the questions, speculation, I quite simply didn’t want it. Well, I’m sure you understand.’
‘Yes.’ Harry took out a packet of cigarettes, shot Becker a questioning look and put it back when the professor firmly shook his head. ‘That at any rate is much easier to understand than what was on the board.’
‘It’s quantum physics.’
‘Sounds weird.’
‘The world of atoms is weird.’
‘In what way?’
‘They break our most fundamental physical laws. Like the one about an object not being able to be in two places at the same time. Niels Bohr once said that if you aren’t profoundly shocked by quantum physics, then you haven’t understood it.’
‘But you understand it?’
‘No – are you crazy? It’s pure chaos. But I prefer that chaos to this chaos.’
‘Which one?’
Becker sighed. ‘Our generation has turned itself into servants and secretaries of our children. That applies to Birte as well, I’m afraid. There are so many appointments and birthdays and favourite foods and football sessions that it drives me insane. Today someone rang from a doctor’s surgery in Bygdøy because Jonas hadn’t turned up for an appointment. And this afternoon he has training God knows where, and his generation has never heard of the possibility of catching a bus.’