by Jo Nesbo
“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 have. 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 damn 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 garbage 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 damn 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 prevailing assumption on the part of the police that they could tell a murderer when they saw one, but this was the phase when everyone was supposed to say what he or she thought without fear of contradiction. In his experience, the best ideas originated from flights of fancy, half-baked guesswork and erroneous snap judgments.
The door opened.
“Howdy!” sang out Bjørn Holm. “ ’Pologies all around, but I’ve been on the trail of the murder weapon.”
He pulled off his waterproof jacket and hung it on Harry’s coatrack, 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 all evidence that he died in 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 favorite one-liner. Which was not long in coming. “Someone die?”
“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 cauterized, the same way you stop amputations from 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 around 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 parts, 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 that solved the problem. A looped electric 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 around 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 cauterizes 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. Speaking of the chickens, their body temperatures and the room temperature showed that they were killed at approximately half past six. Bit unsure, though, ’cause 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 fibers 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 color of victims, whether any of them borrowed the same book from the library or 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 elevator when he heard someone coming. The footsteps stopped right behind him.
“I spoke to one of the twins during the school recess 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 elevator 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 forever. 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 theater 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 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 recognize. His father had once explained to him that physics had its own language, one that he used to tell stories. When Jonas asked if they were adventure stories, his father had laughed and said that physics could be used only 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 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 all the students were 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 say only 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 no 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 pack 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 favorite foods and soccer practices that it drives me insane. Today someone rang from a doctor’s office 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.”
“What’s wrong with Jonas?” Harry took out the notepad he never wrote in; in his experience it seemed to focus people’s minds.
“Nothing. Standard checkup, I assume.” Becker dismissed it with an irritated flick of the hand. “And I assume you’re here for a different reason?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “I want to know where you were yesterday afternoon and evening.”
“What?”
“Just routin
e, Becker.”
“Has this anything to do with … with …” Becker nodded toward the Dagbladet newspaper lying on top of a pile of papers.
“We don’t know,” Harry said. “Just answer me, please.”
“Tell me, are you all out of your minds?”
Harry looked at his watch without answering.
Becker groaned. “All right, I do want to help you. Last night I sat here working on an article about wavelengths of hydrogen, which I hope to have published.”
“Any colleagues who can vouch for you?”
“The reason that Norwegian research contributes so little to the world is that the self-satisfaction of Norwegian academics is surpassed only by their indolence. I was, as usual, utterly on my own.”
“And Jonas?”
“He made himself some food and sat watching TV until I got home.”
“Which was when?”
“Just past nine, I think.”
“Mm.” Harry pretended to take notes. “Have you been through Birte’s things?”
“Yes.”
“Found anything?”
Filip Becker stroked the corner of his mouth with one finger and shook his head. Harry held his gaze, using the silence as leverage. But Becker had shut up shop.
“Thank you for your help,” Harry said, stuffing his notepad into his jacket pocket and getting up. “I’ll tell Jonas he can come in.”
“Give me a moment, please.”
Harry found the coffee room where Jonas was sitting and drawing, the tip of his tongue poking out from his mouth. He stood beside the boy, peering down at the paper on which, for the moment, were two uneven circles.
“A snowman.”
“Yes,” Jonas said, glancing up. “How could you see that?”
“Why was your mother taking you to the doctor’s, Jonas?”
“Don’t know.” Jonas drew a head on the snowman.
“What’s the name of the doctor?”
“Don’t know.”
“Where was it?”
“I’m not allowed to tell anyone. Not even Dad.” Jonas leaned over the paper and drew hair on the snowman’s head. Long hair.