by Jo Nesbo
Wilhelm smiled.
‘I didn’t want to make it too easy, but not too difficult either. And I wanted a little humour. Good tragedies always have a little humour, Harry.’
Harry told himself to sit completely still.
‘You received the first gun a few days before you killed Marius Veland. Is that right?’
‘Yes. The gun was in the litter bin in Frogner Park, as arranged.’
Harry took a deep breath: ‘And how was that, Wilhelm? What was it like to kill?’
Wilhelm pressed his lower lip forward and appeared to be considering the question.
‘They’re right, the people who say the first time is the most difficult. I slipped into the student block without a problem, but it took much more time than I had ever imagined to seal the rubber bag I put him in with the heat gun. And despite having spent half of my life lifting up well-nourished Norwegian ballerinas, it was a tough job carrying the boy up into the loft.’
Pause. Harry cleared his throat.
‘And afterwards?’
‘Afterwards I cycled to Frogner Park to pick up the second gun and the diamond. The German half-breed Sven Sivertsen proved to be as punctual and greedy as I’d hoped. The technique of placing him in Frogner Park at the time every murder was committed was a good touch, don’t you think? After all, he was committing a crime himself, so he would take care not to be recognised and make sure no-one knew where he’d been. I simply made sure that he would not have an alibi.’
‘Bravo,’ Harry said and ran his finger across wet eyebrows.
He felt as if there was damp and condensation everywhere, as if the water was driving in through the walls, through the roof from the terrace, and then there was the shower.
‘But everything you’ve told me up to now I’d worked out for myself, Wilhelm. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me about your wife. What did you do with her? The neighbours saw you on the terrace at regular intervals, so how did you manage to get her out of the flat and hide her before we came?’
Wilhelm smiled.
‘You’re not saying anything,’ Harry said.
‘For a play to retain some of its mystique the author should refrain from explaining too much.’
Harry sighed.
‘OK, but be so kind as to explain this much to me. Why did you make it so complicated? Why couldn’t you have simply killed Sven Sivertsen? You had the chance in Prague. It would’ve been less bother and much safer than killing three innocent people in addition to your wife.’
‘First of all, I needed a scapegoat. If Lisbeth had disappeared and the case was never cleared up, everyone would have thought it was me. Because it’s always the husband, isn’t it, Harry? But primarily I did it this way because love is a thirst, Harry. It needs to drink. Water. A thirst for revenge. It’s a good expression, isn’t it? You know what I’m talking about, Harry. Death is no revenge. Death is a delivery, a happy ending. What I wanted to make for Sven Sivertsen was a true tragedy, suffering without end. And I’ve achieved that. Sven Sivertsen has become one of the restless spirits wandering along the banks of the River Styx and I’m the ferryman, Charon, who refuses to ferry him across to the kingdom of the dead. Is that all Greek to you? I sentenced him to life, Harry. He’ll be consumed by hatred as it consumed me. Hating without knowing whom you hate makes you turn your hatred onto yourself, onto your own miserable fate. That’s what happens when you’re betrayed by the one you love. Sitting behind lock and key, sentenced for something you don’t know you did. Can you imagine a better revenge, Harry?’
Harry rummaged in his pocket to see if the chisel was still there.
Wilhelm chuckled. The next thing he said gave Harry a sense of deja vu.
‘You don’t need to answer, Harry. I can see it in your face.’
Harry closed his eyes and listened to Wilhelm’s voice rumbling on.
‘You’re no different from me. It’s passion that drives you, too. And passion, like lust, always finds…’
‘… the lowest level.’
‘The lowest level. But now I think it’s your turn, Harry. What’s this proof you were talking about? Is it anything I should be concerned about?’
Harry opened his eyes again.
‘First you’ll have to tell me where she is, Wilhelm.’
Wilhelm gave a low laugh and placed a hand against his heart.
‘She’s here.’
‘You’re blathering,’ Harry said.
‘If Pygmalion was capable of loving Galatea, the statue of a woman he had never met, why could I not love a statue of my wife?’
‘I don’t follow you, Wilhelm.’
‘You don’t have to, Harry. I know it isn’t easy for others to understand.’
In the silence which followed, Harry could hear the water beating down in the shower downstairs with undiminished force. How would he get this woman out of the flat without losing control of the situation?
Wilhelm’s deep voice blended into a blur of sounds.
‘The mistake was that I thought it was possible to bring the statue back to life again. But the person who was to do that refused to understand. That illusion is stronger than what we call reality.’
‘Who are you talking about now?’
‘The other one. The living Galatea, the new Lisbeth. She panicked and threatened to ruin everything. Now I can see that I’ll have to be content with living with the statue. But that’s fine.’
Harry could feel something was on its way up. It was cold and came from his stomach.
‘Have you ever felt a statue, Harry? It’s quite remarkable how the skin of a dead person feels. It’s not really warm, and it’s not really cold.’
Wilhelm stroked the blue mattress.
Harry could feel the cold freezing his insides, as if someone had given him an injection of ice water. He felt his throat constrict when he said: ‘You know you’re finished, don’t you?’
Wilhelm stretched out across the bed.
‘Why should I be, Harry? I’m just a storyteller who’s told you a story. You can’t prove a thing.’
He stretched over for something on the bedside table. There was a flash of metal and Harry’s muscles went taut. Wilhelm raised it in the air. A wristwatch.
‘It’s late, Harry. Shall we say visiting time is over? It doesn’t matter if you go before she’s out of the shower.’
Harry didn’t move. ‘Finding the killer was only half the promise you made me make, Wilhelm. The other half was that I should punish him. Severely. And I think you meant it. Part of you is longing to be punished, isn’t that right?’
‘Freud has passed its sell-by date, Harry. Just like this visit.’
‘Don’t you want to hear the proof first?’
Wilhelm sighed with irritation.
‘If it’ll make you leave, go on.’
‘I really should have known everything when we received Lisbeth’s finger with the diamond ring in the post. Third finger on the left hand. Vena amoris. She was the one the murderer wanted to love him. Paradoxically enough, it was also this finger that gave him away.’
‘Gave away…’
‘To be precise, the excrement under the nail…’
‘With my blood. Yes, but that’s old news, Harry. And I’ve already explained that we liked to…’
‘Yes, and when we found that out, the excrement was investigated more carefully. Usually this does not reveal a great deal. The food we eat takes twelve to twenty-four hours to travel from mouth to rectum and in the course of this time the stomach and the network of intestines has turned the food into an unrecognisable waste product. So unrecognisable that even under the microscope it is difficult to determine what a person has eaten. Nevertheless, there are still some things that manage to pass through the digestive tract unscathed. Grape pips and -’
‘Can you skip the lecture, Harry?’
‘Seeds. We found two seeds. Nothing special about that. So it was only today, when I realised who the killer might be, that I
asked the laboratory to examine the seeds closer. And do you know what they found?’
‘No idea.’
‘There was a complete fennel seed.’
‘So what?’
‘I had a chat with the chef at the Theatre Cafe. You were right when you told me that it was the only place in Norway where they make fennel bread with complete seeds. It goes so well with -’
‘Herring,’ Wilhelm said. ‘You know I eat there. What are you getting at?’
‘Earlier you said that the Wednesday Lisbeth disappeared you had herring for breakfast at the Theatre Cafe as usual. Somewhere between nine and ten o’clock in the morning. What I’m wondering is how the seed got from your stomach to under Lisbeth’s nail.’
Harry waited to be sure that Wilhelm was taking everything in.
‘You said that Lisbeth had left the flat at about five o’clock. So, around eight hours after you ate herring for breakfast. Suppose that the last thing you did before she went out was to make love and she penetrated you with her finger. However efficiently your intestines worked they would not have been able to shift the fennel seed to your rectum within eight hours. It’s a medical impossibility.’
Harry noticed a slight twitch in Wilhelm’s open-mouthed face as he enunciated the word ‘impossibility’.
‘The earliest the fennel seed could have reached the rectum is at nine o’clock. So you must have had Lisbeth’s finger inside you at some point in the evening, the night or the following day. All after you had reported her missing. Do you understand what I’m saying, Wilhelm?’
Wilhelm stared at Harry. That is, he was staring in Harry’s direction, but his eyes were fixed on a point a lot further away.
‘That’s what we call forensic evidence,’ Harry said.
‘I understand.’ Wilhelm nodded slowly. ‘Forensic evidence.’
‘Yes.’
‘A specific, irrefutable fact?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Judges and juries love that sort of thing, don’t they. It’s better than a confession, isn’t it, Harry.’
The policeman nodded.
‘A farce, Harry. I thought it was all a farce. People rushing on stage and then off again. I made sure we stayed on the terrace so that the neighbours over the way would see us before I asked Lisbeth to come into the bedroom with me where I took a gun out of the toolbox and she stared – yes, just like in a farce – with widening eyes at the long barrel with the silencer.’
Wilhelm took his hand out from underneath the duvet. Harry stared at the gun with the black lump round the barrel, which was now pointed at him.
‘Sit down, Harry.’
Harry felt the chisel sticking into his side as he dropped down onto the chair again.
‘She misunderstood me in the most amusing way. It would have been such poetic justice. To have her riding on my hand as I ejaculated hot lead into where she’d let him come.’
Wilhelm got up from the bed, which rippled and gurgled behind him.
‘But the essence of farce is speed, speed, so I was forced to arrange a hasty departure.’
He stood up naked in front of Harry and raised the gun.
‘I placed the mouth of the gun against her forehead. She frowned in surprise as she always did when she thought the world was unjust or simply confusing. Like the evening I told her about Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion on which My Fair Lady is based. In it, Eliza Doolittle does not marry Professor Higgins, the man who trained her and transformed her from a market girl into a well-mannered young woman. Instead she runs off with young Freddy. Lisbeth was furious and said that Eliza owed that much to the professor, and that Freddy was a dull person of no consequence. Do you know what, Harry? I started crying.’
‘You’re crazy,’ Harry whispered.
‘Apparently,’ Wilhelm said gravely. ‘What I’ve done is monstrous. There’s none of the control you find in people motivated by hatred. I’m just a simple man who has followed the dictates of his heart. And it dictates love, the love that is given to us by God and makes us God’s instrument. Weren’t the prophets and Jesus thought to be crazy, too, perhaps? Of course we’re crazy, Harry. Crazy, and yet the sanest on this earth. When people say that what I’ve done is insane, that my heart must be crippled inside, then I say: Whose heart is more crippled, the heart that cannot stop loving or the one that is loved but cannot return that love?’
A long silence ensued. Harry cleared his throat.
‘And so you shot her?’
Wilhelm nodded slowly.
‘There was a little lump in her forehead,’ he said with surprise in his voice. ‘And a little black hole. Just as when you hammer a nail into sheet metal.’
‘And then you concealed her. In the only place even a police dog would not find her.’
‘It was hot in the flat.’ Wilhelm had fixed his gaze somewhere above Harry’s head. ‘A fly was buzzing by the window, and I took all my clothes off so that I wouldn’t get any blood on them. Everything was carefully laid out in the toolbox. I used the pincers to cut off the middle finger of her left hand. Then I undressed her, took out the silicon foam spray and quickly sealed the bullet hole, the wound on her finger and all the other orifices of her body. I had let some water out of the bed earlier in the day so that it was only half full. I hardly spilled a drop as I stuffed her in through the hole I’d cut in the mattress. Then I sealed it again with glue, rubber and a heat gun. It went a lot better than the first time.’
‘And she’s been there ever since? Buried in her own waterbed?’
‘No, no,’ Wilhelm said, staring thoughtfully at the point above Harry’s head. ‘I didn’t bury her. On the contrary, I put her back in a womb. That was the start of her rebirth.’
Harry knew that he ought to be frightened. That it would be dangerous not to be frightened now, that his mouth should be dry and he should feel his heart thumping. He ought not to be feeling this exhaustion creeping up on him.
‘And you shoved the severed finger up your anus,’ Harry said.
‘Hm,’ Wilhelm said. ‘The perfect hiding place. As I said, I thought you would use dogs.’
‘There are other places that don’t give off a smell, but perhaps that gave you a perverse thrill? What did you do with Camilla Loen’s finger, by the way? The one you cut off before you killed her.’
‘Camilla, yes…’ Wilhelm nodded with a smile as if it were a happy memory Harry had revived. ‘That will have to remain a secret between her and me, Harry.’
Wilhelm released the safety catch. Harry swallowed.
‘Give me the gun, Wilhelm. It’s all over. There’s no point.’
‘Of course there’s a point.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘The same as always, Harry. The performance has to have a decent ending. You don’t think that the audience will be fobbed off with me going quietly, do you? We need a grand finale, Harry. A happy ending. If there isn’t a happy ending, I make one. That’s my…’
‘Motto in life,’ Harry whispered.
Wilhelm smiled and put the gun to Harry’s temple. ‘I was going to say, my motto in death.’
Harry closed his eyes. All he wanted was to sleep. To be carried down to a gently flowing river. And over to the other side.
Rakel twitched and thrust open her eyes.
She had been dreaming about Harry. They had been aboard a boat.
The bedroom was in the dark. Had she heard something? Had something happened?
She listened to the rain drumming reassuringly onto the roof. For safety’s sake she checked that her mobile phone, which lay on the bedside table, was switched on. In case he phoned.
She closed her eyes. Flowed gently onwards.
Harry had lost track of time. When he opened his eyes he had the impression the light was different in the empty room, and he had no idea whether a second or a minute had passed.
The bed was empty. Wilhelm was gone.
The sounds of water returned. The rain. The shower.
>
Harry struggled to his feet and stared at the blue mattress. He felt as if something was crawling inside his clothes. In the light from the bedside table he could see the contours of a human body inside the waterbed. The face had floated up and formed a mould like a plaster cast.
He left the bedroom. The door to the terrace was wide open. He glanced over the railing and down into the yard. He trod wet footprints on the white staircase as he walked down to the lower floor. He opened the bathroom door. The silhouette of a woman’s body was outlined against the window behind the grey shower curtain. Harry drew it to the side. Toya Harang’s neck was bent towards the stream of water, her chin almost touching her chest. A black stocking was tied round her neck and the top of the shower tap. Her eyes were closed and drops of water hung from the long, black lashes. Her mouth was half open and filled with a yellow mass, like hardened foam. The same material filled her nostrils, ears and the small hole in her temple.
He turned off the shower before he left.
There was no-one around on the stairs.
Harry put one foot carefully in front of the other. He felt numb, as if his body were turning to stone.
Bjarne Moller.
He had to ring Bjarne Moller.
Harry went through the entrance hall and into the yard. The rain settled on his head, but he didn’t feel it. Soon he would be totally paralysed. The rotary dryer was not screeching any longer. He avoided looking at it. He caught sight of a yellow packet on the tarmac and went over to it. He opened it, pulled out a cigarette and shoved it into his mouth. He tried to light it with his lighter but discovered that the end of the cigarette was wet. Water must have got into the packet.
Ring Bjarne Moller. Get them to come here. Go with Moller over to the students’ house. Question Sven Sivertsen there. Record his testimony against Tom Waaler immediately. Listen to Moller giving the order for Inspector Waaler’s arrest. Then go home. Home to Rakel.
He could see the rotary dryer in his peripheral vision.
He swore, tore the cigarette in half, put the filter between his lips and lit it at the second attempt. Why was he so stressed? There was nothing left to do. It was finished, over.