by Jo Nesbo
Of course there was the biker from Los Lobos he had drilled a hole in, but that had been a complete accident. And now he was part of the terrace up in Høyenhall.
Then there was the trip he’d taken to Ila Prison when he’d spread the rumour that Valentin Gjertsen was behind the killings in Maridalen and Tryvann. Not that they were a hundred per cent sure he’d done it, but if he hadn’t there were enough other reasons for the bastard to get as long a sentence as possible. But he couldn’t know the nutters would kill the guy. If it was him they’d killed, that is. The communication on the police radio at the moment suggested not.
The closest Truls had been to murder was of course the lady boy with the make-up in Drammen. But that was something that had to be done, he’d been asking for it. He really fucking had. Mikael had come to Truls and told him about the call he’d received. Some guy claimed he knew that Mikael and a colleague had beaten up the homo working at Kripos. And he had proof. And now he wanted money to stop him taking it further. A hundred thousand kroner. He wanted the money delivered to a deserted area outside Drammen. Mikael told Truls to sort it out, Truls was the one who had gone too far this time, who had caused the problem. And when Truls got in his car to go and meet the guy he knew he was on his own. Completely on his own. And he always had been.
He had followed the signs up some deserted forest roads outside Drammen and stopped at a turnaround by a cliff plummeting down towards the river. Waited for five minutes. Then the car had arrived. It pulled up, with the engine running. And Truls had done as agreed, taken the brown envelope to the car. The side window slid down. The guy was wearing a woollen hat and had a silk scarf tied around the lower half of his face. Truls wondered if the guy was a retard; it was unlikely the car had been stolen, and the plates were fully visible. In addition, Mikael had already traced the conversation to a club in Drammen. There couldn’t be many employees so it wouldn’t be hard to track him down.
The guy had opened the envelope and counted the money. Obviously he had lost count. He started again, frowned and looked up with annoyance. ‘This isn’t a hund-’
The blow had hit him in the mouth, and Truls had felt the baton sink in as his teeth cracked. The second blow had smashed his nose. Easy. Cartilage and thin bones. The third made a soft crunch as it hit the forehead.
Then Truls had walked round and got into the passenger seat. Waited until the guy regained consciousness. And when he did, a short conversation followed.
‘Who. .?’
‘One of them. What proof have you got?’
‘I. . I. .’
‘This is a Heckler amp; Koch and it’s dying to speak. So which of you is going to do it first?’
‘Don’t-’
‘Come on then.’
‘The one you two beat up. He told me. Please, I only needed-’
‘Did he name us?’
‘What? No.’
‘So how do you know who we are?’
‘He only told me the story. Then I checked out the descriptions with someone at Kripos. And it had to be you two.’ When the guy saw his face in the mirror it had sounded like the whine a Hoover makes after you switch it off. ‘My God! You’ve destroyed my face!’
‘Shut up and sit still. Does the man you say we beat up know you’re blackmailing us?’
‘Him? No, no, he’d never-’
‘Are you his lover?’
‘No! He might think so, but-’
‘Anyone else know?’
‘No! I promise! Just let me go. I promise not to-’
‘So no one else knows you’re here now.’
Truls enjoyed the sight of the guy’s gawping expression as the implication of what Truls had said laboriously trickled through to his brain. ‘Yes, yes, they do! Lots of people do-’
‘You’re not that bad at lying,’ Truls said, putting the barrel to the man’s forehead. The gun had felt surprisingly light. ‘But not that good, either.’
Then Truls had pulled the trigger. It hadn’t been a difficult decision. Because there had been no choice. It was just something that had to be done. Sheer survival instinct. The guy had something on them, which sooner or later he would find a way to use. That was the way hyenas like him ticked. Cowardly and subservient face to face, but greedy and patient. They would allow themselves to be humiliated, to be cowed, and wait, but attack as soon as you turned your back.
Afterwards he had wiped the seat and wherever he had left fingerprints, wrapped a scarf around his hand as he released the handbrake and put the car into neutral. Rolled it over the cliff. Listened to the eerie silence as the vehicle fell. Followed by a dull report and the sound of metal buckling. Looked down at the car lying in the river beneath him.
He had got rid of the baton as quickly and efficiently as possible. Quite a way down the forest road he had opened the window and slung it through the trees. It was unlikely to be found, but if it was, there still wouldn’t be any fingerprints or DNA to link it to the murder or him.
The gun was a different matter; the bullet could be linked to the gun and so to him.
Thus he had waited until he drove over Drammen Bridge. He had driven slowly and watched the gun fly over the railing and down to where the river meets the fjord. A place where it would never be found, under ten or twenty metres of water. Brackish water. Dubious water. Neither completely salt water nor completely fresh water. Neither completely wrong nor completely right. Death in marginal areas. But he had read somewhere that there were species which specialised in surviving in these hybrid waters. Species that were so perverted they couldn’t cope with the water normal life forms had to have.
Truls pressed the remote before he reached the car park, and the alarm was silenced right away. There was no one to be seen outside or on the balconies surrounding him, but Truls thought he could detect a collective sigh from the blocks: about bloody time too, pay more attention to your car, you could have set the length of the alarm, you muppet.
A side window was smashed in, that was true. Truls stuck his head in. He couldn’t see any sign of anyone having tampered with the radio. What had Aronsen meant by. . and who was Aronsen? C block, could be anyone. Anyone at all. .
Truls’s brain had come to a conclusion a fragment of a second before he felt the steel on his neck. He instinctively knew it was steel. The steel of a gun barrel. He knew there was no Aronsen. No gang of youths breaking in.
The voice whispered by his ear:
‘Don’t turn, Berntsen. And when I put my hand in your trousers, don’t move. Well, well, feel that. Nice tight abs. .’
Truls knew he was in danger, he just didn’t understand what kind. There was something familiar about Aronsen’s voice.
‘Oooh, bit sweaty, eh, Berntsen? Or do you like it? But this is what I was after. Jericho? What were you going to do with this? Shoot someone in the face? Like you did to René?’
And now Truls Berntsen knew what kind of danger.
Mortal danger.
43
Rakel stood by the kitchen window squeezing the phone and staring into the dusk again. She may have been imagining things, but she thought she’d seen a movement between the spruces on the other side of the drive.
But she was always seeing movements in the darkness.
That was how deep the wound was. Don’t think about it. Be frightened, but don’t think about it. Let your body play its stupid games, but ignore them the way you ignore an unreasonable child.
She was bathed in the light from the kitchen, so if there was really someone outside they would be able to study her at their leisure. But she didn’t move. She had to practise, mustn’t let fear determine what she did, where she stood, this was her house, her home, for goodness’ sake!
Music was coming from the first floor. He was playing one of Harry’s old CDs. One of them she liked as well. Talking Heads. Little Creatures.
She looked down at the phone again, urging it to ring. Twice she had rung Harry, but still there was no answer. They had planned it
as a nice surprise. The news had come from the clinic the day before. It was earlier than the date they’d set, but they had decided he was ready. Oleg had been so excited and it had been his idea not to say anything before they arrived. Just go home and then when Harry came home, jump out and say boo.
That was the word he had used: ‘boo’.
Rakel had had her doubts. Harry didn’t like surprises. But Oleg had insisted. Harry would bloody well have to put up with suddenly being happy. And so she had gone along with it.
But now she regretted having done so.
She went from the window, put the phone down on the worktop beside his coffee cup. Usually he was painfully scrupulous about clearing everything away before leaving the house. He must have been stressed by these police murders. He hadn’t mentioned Beate Lønn in their nightly conversations recently, a sure sign that he was thinking about her.
Rakel spun round. It wasn’t her imagination this time, she had heard something. Shoes crunching on the gravel. She went back to the window. Stared into the darkness, which seemed to her to be deepening by the second.
Froze.
Someone was there. A figure had just moved from the tree it had been standing by. And it was coming this way. A person dressed in black. How long had it been there?
‘Oleg!’ Rakel shouted, her heart racing. ‘Oleg!’
The music upstairs was turned down. ‘Yes?’
‘Come down here! Now!’
‘Is he coming?’
Yes, she thought. He’s coming.
The figure that approached was smaller than she’d thought at first. It was moving towards the front door, and as it came closer in the light from the outside lamps, she saw to her surprise and relief that it was a woman. No, a girl. In a tracksuit, it appeared. Three seconds later, the bell rang.
Rakel hesitated. Glanced at Oleg, who had stopped halfway down the stairs and was looking at her with a quizzical expression.
‘It’s not Harry,’ Rakel said with a quick smile. ‘I’ll get it. Just go back up, Oleg.’
The girl standing on the step calmed Rakel’s heart rate even further. She looked frightened.
‘You’re Rakel,’ she said. ‘Harry’s girlfriend.’
It struck Rakel that this introduction ought to have unsettled her. A beautiful young girl with a trembling voice addressing her with a reference to her husband-to-be. Probably she ought to check the tight-fitting tracksuit top for an incipient stomach bulge.
But she wasn’t unsettled, and she didn’t check. Just nodded by way of a response.
‘That’s me.’
‘And I’m Silje Gravseng.’
The girl looked at Rakel expectantly, as though waiting for a reaction, thinking the name should mean something to her. Rakel noticed the girl had her hands behind her back. A psychologist had once told her people who hid their hands had something to hide. Yes, she’d thought. Their hands.
Rakel smiled. ‘So how can I help you, Silje?’
‘Harry is. . was my lecturer.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘There’s something I have to tell you about him. And about me.’
Rakel frowned. ‘Really?’
‘May I come in?’
Rakel hesitated. She didn’t want anyone else in the house. She wanted only Oleg, herself and Harry, when he came. The three of them. No one else. And definitely not someone who had to tell her something about Harry. And about herself. And then it happened anyway. Her eyes involuntarily scanned the young girl’s stomach.
‘It won’t take long, fru Fauke.’
Fru. What had Harry told her? She considered the situation. Heard Oleg had turned his music up again. Then she opened the door.
The girl stepped inside, bent down and started untying her trainers.
‘Don’t bother with that,’ Rakel said. ‘We’ll wrap this up quickly, OK. I’m a bit busy.’
‘Right,’ the girl said. It was only now, in the brighter light in the hall, that Rakel saw the glistening layer of sweat on the girl’s face. She followed Rakel into the kitchen. ‘The music,’ she said. ‘Is Harry at home?’
Rakel sensed it now. The anxiety. The girl had automatically connected the music with Harry. Was that because she knew this was the kind of music Harry listened to? And the thought came too fast for Rakel to reject: music that he and this girl had listened to together?
The girl sat down at the big table. Laid her palms on the surface and stroked the wood. Rakel eyed her movements. She stroked it as if she already knew how the rough, untreated wood felt against her skin, pleasant, alive. Her gaze was fixed on Harry’s coffee cup. Had she. .?
‘What did you want to tell me, Silje?’
The girl smiled a sad, almost painful smile, without taking her eyes off the cup.
‘Has he really not said anything about me, fru Fauke?’
Rakel closed her eyes for an instant. This wasn’t happening. She trusted him. She opened her eyes again.
‘Say what you want to say as if he hasn’t, Silje.’
‘As you wish, fru Fauke.’ The girl looked up from the cup and at her. It was an almost unnaturally blue-eyed gaze, as innocent and unknowing as a child’s. And, Rakel thought, as cruel as a child’s.
‘I want to talk to you about rape,’ Silje said.
Rakel suddenly noticed she had difficulty breathing, as though someone had sucked the air from the room, like vacuum-packing.
‘What rape?’ she managed to ask.
Darkness was beginning to descend when Bjørn Holm finally found the car.
He had turned off by Klemetsrud and continued eastwards on the B155, but had obviously passed the sign for Fjell. It was on his way back, after he’d realised he’d gone too far and had had to turn, that he’d seen it. The side road was even less busy than the B-road, and now, in the darkness, it seemed like total wasteland. The dense forest on both sides seemed to be creeping closer when he saw the rear lights of the car beside the road.
He slowed down and glanced in his mirror. Only darkness behind him, only a couple of solitary red lights in front of him. Bjørn pulled in behind the car. Got out. A bird hooted from somewhere in the forest, a hollow, melancholy sound. Roar Midtstuen was crouching in the ditch in the light from the headlamps.
‘You came,’ Roar said.
Bjørn grabbed his belt and hitched up his trousers. This was something he’d started doing — he had no idea where he’d got it from. Oh, yes, in fact, he did. His father had always hitched up his trousers by way of an introduction, a preface to something weighty that had to be said or done. He’d started behaving like his father. Except that he seldom had anything weighty to say.
‘So this is where it happened?’ Bjørn said.
Roar nodded. Then looked down at the bouquet of flowers he had laid on the tarmac. ‘She’d been climbing here with friends. On her way home she stopped to have a pee in the woods. Told the others to go on ahead. They think it must have happened when she ran back out and jumped on her bike. Keen to catch up with the others, right? She was that kind of girl, enthusiastic, you see. .’ He was already fighting to keep his voice under control. ‘And then she probably veered into the road, her bike was still wobbling, and so. .’ Roar lifted his head to show where the car had come from. ‘. . and there were no skid marks. No one remembered what the car looked like, even though it must have passed Fia’s friends straight afterwards. But they were busy talking about the climbs they’d tried and they said lots of cars must have passed them. They were well on their way to Klemetsrud before it struck them that Fia should have caught them up long ago and that something must have happened.’
Bjørn nodded. Cleared his throat. Wanted to get it over and done with. But Roar wouldn’t let him get a word in.
‘I wasn’t allowed to investigate, Bjørn. Because I was the father, they said. Instead they put novices on the case. And when at last they realised this case wasn’t going to be child’s play, that the driver wouldn’t turn himself in or give any clues, it was
too late to trundle in the big guns. The trail was cold and people’s memories were blank.’
‘Roar. .’
‘Bad police work, Bjørn. Nothing less. We spend our whole lives working for the force, we give it everything we’ve got and then — when we lose the dearest thing we have — what have we got left? Nothing. It’s a dreadful betrayal, Bjørn.’ Bjørn watched his colleague’s jaws moving in a regular ellipse as he tightened and slackened, tightened and slackened the muscles. Must be giving the chewing gum a right hammering, he thought. ‘Makes me ashamed to be a police officer,’ Midtstuen said. ‘Just like with the Kalsnes case. Terrible workmanship from start to finish. We let the murderer slip through our fingers and afterwards no one is held to account. And no one holds anyone to account. Foxes in the henhouse, Bjørn.’
‘The girl who was found burned in Come As You Are this morning-’
‘Anarchy. That’s what it is. Someone has to be held to account. Someone-’
‘It was Fia.’
In the ensuing silence Bjørn heard the bird hoot again, but from somewhere else this time. It must have moved. A thought struck him. That it was another bird. There could be two of them. Two of the same species. Which hooted to each other in the forest.
‘Harry’s rape of me.’ Silje looked at Rakel as calmly as if she had just told her the weather forecast.
‘Harry raped you?’
Silje smiled. A fleeting smile, no more than a muscle twitch, an expression that had no time to reach her eyes before it was gone. Along with everything else, steadfastness, indifference. And her eyes, instead of lighting up with a smile, filled with tears.