by Jo Nesbo
The guard looked at his watch. ‘I need to be at the next address in twenty-five minutes, but we’ve probably got time to check if anyone’s hiding.’
‘A lot can happen in that time,’ she said.
The guard met her gaze, chuckled quietly, rubbed his chin and walked out of the room.
He headed towards what he assumed was the bedroom door, and was struck by how thin the walls were. He could make out individual words being spoken by a man in the next flat. He opened the door. Dark. He found a light switch. A weak ceiling lamp came on.
Empty. Unmade bed. Empty bottle on the bedside table.
He carried on, opened the door to the bathroom. Dirty tiles. A mouldy shower curtain pulled in front of the bath. ‘Looks like it’s safe!’ he called back towards the kitchen.
‘Sit yourself down in the living room,’ she called back.
‘OK, but I have to leave in twenty minutes.’ He went into the living room and sat down on the sagging sofa. Heard the chink of glasses in the kitchen, then her shrill voice.
‘Would you like a drink?
‘Yes.’ He thought how unpleasant her voice was, the sort of voice that could make a man wish he had a remote control. But she was voluptuous, almost a bit motherly. He fiddled with something in the pocket of his guard’s uniform, it had got caught on the lining.
‘I’ve got gin, white wine,’ the voice whined from the kitchen. Like a drill. ‘A bit of whiskey. What would you like?’
‘Something else,’ he said in a low voice to himself.
‘What did you say? I’ll bring everything!’
‘D-do, Mother,’ he whispered, freeing the metal contraption from the lining of his pocket. He put it down gently on the coffee table in front of him, where he was sure she would see it. He could feel his erection already. Then he took a deep breath. It felt like he was emptying the room of oxygen. He leaned back in the sofa and put his cowboy boots up on the table, next to the iron teeth.
Katrine Bratt let her eyes wander over the pictures in the light of the desk lamp. It was impossible to tell that they were sex offenders just by looking at them. That they had raped women, men, children, old people, in some instances torturing them, and in a few cases murdering them. OK, if you were told what they had done in the most gruesome detail, you could probably see something in the downcast and often frightened eyes in these custody photographs. But if you passed them in the street, you would walk on without having the faintest idea that you had been observed, evaluated and hopefully rejected as a victim. She recognised some of the men from her time in Sexual Offences, but not others. There were a lot of new ones. A new perpetrator was born every day. An innocent little bundle of humanity, the child’s cries drowned out by its mother’s screams, linked to life by an umbilical cord, a gift to make its parents weep with joy, a child who in later life would slice open the crotch of a bound woman while he masturbated, his hoarse groans drowned out by the woman’s screams.
Half the investigative team had started to contact these offenders, those with the most brutal records first. They were gathering and checking alibis, but hadn’t yet managed to place a single one in the vicinity of the crime scene. The other half were busy interviewing former boyfriends, friends, colleagues and relatives. The murder statistics for Norway were very clear: in eighty per cent of cases the murderer knew the victim, and in over ninety per cent if the victim was a woman killed in her own home. Even so, Katrine didn’t expect to find him in that statistic. Because Harry was right. This wasn’t that sort of murder. The identity of the victim was less important than the act itself.
They had also been through the list of offenders that Elise’s clients had testified against, but Katrine didn’t think the perpetrator – as Harry had suggested – was killing two birds with one stone: sweet revenge and sexual gratification. Gratification, though? She tried to imagine the murderer lying with one arm round the victim after the hideous act, with a cigarette in his mouth, smiling as he whispered, ‘That was wonderful.’ In marked contrast, Harry used to talk about the serial killer’s frustration at never quite being able to attain what he was after, making it necessary to keep going, in the hope that next time he would manage it, everything would be perfect, he would be delivered and born again to the sound of a screaming woman before he severed the umbilical cord to the rest of humanity.
She looked at the picture of Elise Hermansen on her bed again. Tried to see what Harry could have seen. Or heard. Music – wasn’t that what he said? She gave up and buried her face in her hands. What was it that had made her think she had the right mentality for a job like this? ‘Bipolarity is never a good starting point for anyone but artists,’ her psychiatrist had said the last time they’d met, before he wrote a fresh prescription for the little pink pills that kept her afloat.
It was almost the weekend, normal people were doing normal things, they weren’t sitting in an office looking at terrible crime-scene photographs and terrible people because they thought one of the faces might reveal something, only to move on to looking for a Tinder date to fuck and forget. But right now she desperately longed for something to connect her to normality. A Sunday lunch. When they were together, Bjørn had invited her to Sunday lunch with his parents out at Skreia several times, it was only half an hour’s drive away, but she had always found an excuse to say no. Right now, though, there was nothing she would have liked more than to be sitting round a table with her in-laws, passing the potatoes, complaining about the weather, boasting about the new sofa, chewing dried-up elk steak as the conversation ground on tediously but comfortingly, and the looks and the nods would be warm, the jokes old, the moments of irritation bearable.
‘Hi.’
Katrine jumped. There was a man standing in the doorway.
‘I’ve ticked the last of mine off the list,’ Anders Wyller said. ‘So if there’s nothing else, I’ll head home and get some sleep.’
‘Of course. Are you the only one left?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Berntsen?’
‘He finished early. He must just be more efficient.’
‘Right,’ Katrine said, and felt like laughing, but couldn’t be bothered. ‘I’m sorry to ask you this, Wyller, but would you mind double-checking his list? I’ve a feeling—’
‘I’ve just done it. It seemed OK.’
‘It was all OK?’ Katrine had asked Wyller and Berntsen to contact the various telephone companies to get hold of lists of numbers and names of people the victim had spoken to in the past six months, then divide them up and check their alibis.
‘Yes. There was one guy in Åneby up in Nittedal, first name ending in “y”. He called Elise a few too many times early in the summer, so I double-checked his alibi.’
‘Ending in “y”?’
‘Lenny Hell. Yes, really.’
‘Wow. So do you suspect people based on the letters in their names?’
‘Among other things. It’s a fact that “-y” names are over-represented in crime statistics.’
‘And?’
‘So when I saw that Berntsen had made a note that Lenny’s alibi was that he had been with a friend at Åneby Pizza & Grill at the time Elise Hermansen was murdered, and that this could only be confirmed by the owner of the pizzeria, I called the local sheriff to hear for myself.’
‘Because the guy’s name is Lenny?’
‘Because the owner of the pizzeria’s name is Tommy.’
‘And what did the sheriff say?’
‘That Lenny and Tommy were extremely law-abiding and trustworthy citizens.’
‘So you were wrong.’
‘That remains to be seen. The sheriff’s name is Jimmy.’
Katrine laughed out loud. Realised that she needed that. Anders Wyller smiled back. Maybe she needed that smile too. Everyone tries to make a good first impression, but she had a feeling that if she hadn’t asked, Wyller wouldn’t have told her he was doing Berntsen’s work as well. And that showed that Wyller – like her – d
idn’t trust Truls Berntsen. There was one thought that Katrine had been trying to ignore since it first appeared, but now she changed her mind.
‘Come in and close the door behind you.’
Wyller did as she asked.
‘There’s something else I’m sorry to have to ask you to do, Wyller. The leak to VG. You’re the one who’s going to be working most closely with Berntsen. Can you …?’
‘Keep my eyes and ears open?’
Katrine sighed. ‘Something like that. This stays between us, and if you do discover something, you only talk to me about it. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
Wyller left, and Katrine waited a few moments before picking up her phone from the desk. Looked up Bjørn. She had added a photograph of him that popped up in conjunction with his number. He was smiling. Bjørn Holm was no oil painting. His face was pale, slightly puffy, his red hair eclipsed by a shining white moon. But it was Bjørn. The antidote to all these other pictures. What had she really been so scared of? If Harry Hole could manage to live with someone else, why couldn’t she? Her forefinger was getting close to the call button beside the number when the warning popped into her head again. The warning from Harry Hole and Hallstein Smith. The next one.
She put the phone down and concentrated on the pictures again.
The next one.
What if the murderer was already thinking about the next one?
‘You need to t-try harder, Ewa,’ he whispered.
He hated it when they didn’t make an effort.
When they didn’t clean their flats. When they didn’t look after their bodies. When they didn’t manage to keep hold of the man whose child they had given birth to. When they didn’t give the child any supper and locked it in the wardrobe and said it needed to be really quiet, and then it would get chocolate afterwards, while they received visits from men who were given supper, and all the chocolate, and all the things they played with, shrieking with joy, the way the mother never played with the child.
Oh no.
So the child would have to play with the mother instead. And others like the mother.
And he had played. Played hard. Up until the day when they had taken him away and locked him in another wardrobe, at Jøssingveien 33: Ila Prison and Detention Centre. The statutes said it was a facility for male prisoners from all around the country who had ‘specific intervention requirements’.
One of the faggot psychiatrists there had told him that both the rapes and his stammer were the consequence of psychological trauma while he was growing up. Idiot. He had inherited the stammer from a father he had never met. The stammer and a filthy suit. And he had dreamt of raping women for as long as he could remember. And then he had done what these women never managed. He had tried harder. He had almost stopped stammering. He had raped the female prison dentist. And he had escaped from Ila. And he had gone on playing. Harder than ever. The fact that the police were after him only gave an edge to the game. Right up to the day when he had stood face-to-face with that policeman and had seen the determination and hatred in his eyes, and had realised that this man was capable of catching him. Was capable of sending him back to the darkness of his childhood in the closed wardrobe where he tried to hold his breath so as not to have to breathe in the stench of sweat and tobacco from his father’s thick, greasy woollen suit that was hanging up in front of him, and which his mother said she was keeping in case his father showed up again one day. He knew he couldn’t handle being locked up again. So he had hidden. Had hidden from the policeman with murder in his eyes. Had sat still for three years. Three years without playing. Until that too had started to become a wardrobe. Then he had been presented with this opportunity. A chance to play safely. It shouldn’t be too safe, obviously. He needed to be able to detect the smell of fear in order to get properly turned on. Both his own and theirs. It didn’t matter how old they were, what they looked like, if they were big or small. As long as they were women. Or potential mothers, as one of the idiot psychiatrists had said. He tilted his head and looked at her. The walls of the flat may have been thin, but that no longer bothered him. Only now, when she was so close and in this light, did he notice that Ewa with a ‘w’ had little pimples around her open mouth. She was evidently trying to scream, but there was no way she was going to manage that, no matter how hard she tried. Because beneath her open mouth she had a new one. A bleeding, gaping hole in her throat where her larynx had been. He was holding her tightly against the living-room wall, and there was a gurgling sound as pink bubbles of blood burst where her severed airway protruded. Her neck muscles tensed and relaxed as she tried desperately to get air. And because her lungs were still working, she would live a few more seconds. But that wasn’t what fascinated him most right now. It was the fact that he had managed to put a conclusive stop to her insufferable chatter by biting through her vocal cords with his iron teeth.
And as the light in her eyes dimmed, he tried to find something in them that betrayed a fear of dying, a desire to live another second. But he found nothing. She ought to have tried harder. Maybe she didn’t have enough imagination. Didn’t love life enough. He hated it when they gave up on life so easily.
10
SATURDAY MORNING
HARRY WAS RUNNING. Harry didn’t like running. Some people ran because they liked it. Haruki Murakami liked it. Harry liked Murakami’s books, apart from the one about running – he had given up on that one. Harry ran because he liked stopping. He liked having run. He liked weight training: a more concrete pain that was limited by the performance of his muscles, rather than a desire to have more pain. That probably said something about the weakness of his character, his inclination to flee, to look for an end to the pain even before it had started.
A skinny dog, the sort the wealthy people of Holmenkollen kept even if they didn’t go hunting more than one weekend every other year, leapt away from the path. Its owner came jogging along a hundred metres behind it. That year’s Under Armour collection. Harry had time to notice his running technique as they approached each other like passing trains. It was a shame they weren’t running in the same direction. Harry would have tucked in behind him, breathing down his neck, then pretended to lose ground only to crush him on the climb up towards Tryvann. Would have let him see the soles of his twenty-year-old Adidas trainers.
Oleg said Harry was incredibly childish when they ran, that even though they had promised to jog calmly all the way, it would end with Harry suggesting they race up the last hill. In Harry’s defence, it should be pointed out that he was asking for a thrashing, because Oleg had inherited his mother’s unfairly high oxygen absorption rate.
Two overweight women who were more walking than running were talking and panting so loudly that they didn’t hear Harry approaching, so he turned off onto a narrower path. And suddenly he was in unknown territory. The trees grew more densely there, shutting out the morning light, and Harry had a fleeting taste of something from his childhood. The fear of getting lost and never being able to find his way back home again. Then he was out in open country again, andt he knew exactly where he was now, where home was.
Some people liked the fresh air up here, the gently rolling forest paths, the silence and smell of pine needles. Harry liked the view of the city. Liked the sound and smell of it. The feeling of being able to touch it. The certainty that you could drown in it, sink to the bottom of it. Oleg had recently asked Harry how he’d like to die. Harry had replied that he wanted to go peacefully in his sleep. Oleg had chosen suddenly and relatively painlessly. Harry had been lying. He wanted to drink himself to death in a bar in the city below them. And he knew that Oleg had also been lying – he would have chosen his former heaven and hell and taken a heroin overdose. Alcohol and heroin. Infatuations they could leave but never forget, no matter how much time passed.
Harry put in a final spurt on the driveway, heard the gravel kick up behind his trainers, caught a glimpse of fru Syvertsen behind the curtain of the house next door.<
br />
Harry showered. He liked showering. Someone ought to write a book about showering.
When he was finished he went into the bedroom, where Rakel was standing by the window in her gardening clothes: wellington boots, thick gloves, a pair of tatty jeans and a faded sun hat. She half turned towards him and brushed aside a few strands of hair sticking out from under the hat. Harry wondered if she knew how good she looked in that outfit. Probably.
‘Eek!’ she said quietly, with a smile. ‘A naked man!’
Harry went and stood behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and massaged her gently. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking at the windows. Should we do something about them before Emilia arrives, do you think?’
‘Emilia?’
Rakel laughed.
‘What?’
‘You stopped that massage very abruptly, darling. Relax, we’re not having visitors. Just a storm.’
‘Oh, that Emilia. I reckon this fortress could cope with a natural disaster or two.’
‘That’s what we think, living up here on the hill, isn’t it?’
‘What do we think?’
‘That our lives are like fortresses. Impregnable.’ She sighed. ‘I need to go shopping.’
‘Dinner at home? We haven’t tried that Peruvian place on Badstugata yet. It’s not that expensive.’
That was one of Harry’s bachelor habits that he’d tried to get her to adopt: not cooking dinner for themselves. She had more or less bought his argument that restaurants are one of civilisation’s better ideas. That even back in the Stone Age they had figured out that cooking and eating together was smarter than the entire population spending three hours every day planning, buying, cooking and washing-up. When she objected that it felt a bit decadent, he had replied that ordinary families installing kitchens that cost a million kroner, that was decadent. That the most healthy, un-decadent use of resources was to pay trained cooks what they deserved to prepare food in large kitchens, so that they could pay for Rakel’s help as a lawyer, or Harry’s work training police officers.