“She was found in the house this morning. It looks like murder.”
“Looks like?”
“I’ve only just found out myself. The crime team are already there, I’m about to head over.”
“How...?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But...”
Oleg didn’t get any further, and Harry knew there was no continuation to that all-encompassing “but.” It was just an instinctive objection, a self-sustaining protest, a rejection of the possibility that things could be the way they actually were. An echo of his own “but...” in Katrine Bratt’s office twenty-five minutes ago.
Harry waited while Oleg struggled to hold back tears. He replied to Oleg’s next five questions with the same “I don’t know, Oleg.”
He heard the hiccough in the boy’s voice, and thought that, as long as he’s crying, I won’t.
Oleg ran out of questions and the line went quiet.
“I’ll keep my phone on, and I’ll call as soon as I know more,” Harry said. “Are there any flights...?”
“There’s one that leaves Tromsø at one o’clock.” Oleg’s heavy, laboured breathing echoed through the phone.
“Good.”
“Call as soon as you can, OK?”
“I will.”
“And, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let them...”
“No, I won’t,” Harry said. He didn’t know how he knew what Oleg was thinking. It wasn’t a rational thought, it just... appeared. He cleared his throat. “I promise that no one at the scene will see more than they need to in order to do their job. OK?”
“OK.”
“OK.”
Silence.
Harry tried to think of some words of comfort, but found nothing that didn’t sound meaningless.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“OK.”
They ended the call.
8
Harry walked slowly up the hill to the black timber house, in the glare of the rotating blue lights of the police cars parked in the drive. The orange and white cordon tape had started down by the gate. Colleagues who didn’t know what to say or do stared at him as he passed. It felt like he was walking underwater. Like a dream he hoped he was about to wake up from. Maybe not wake up, actually, because it offered a numbness, a peculiar absence of sensation and sound, just hazy light and the muffled sound of his own steps. As if he had been injected with something.
Harry walked up the three steps to the open door leading into the house he, Rakel and Oleg had shared. Inside, he could hear the chatter of police radios and Bjørn Holm’s clipped commands to the other crime-scene investigators. Harry took several trembling breaths.
Then he stepped across the threshold and automatically walked outside the white flags the forensics team had set up.
Investigation, he thought. This is an investigation. I’m dreaming, but I can do an investigation in my sleep. It’s just a matter of doing it properly, getting it going, and I won’t wake up. As long as I’m not awake, it isn’t true. So Harry did it properly, he didn’t look directly at the sun, at the body he knew was lying on the floor between the kitchen and living-room areas. The sun — that, even if it hadn’t been Rakel — would blind him if he stared straight at it. The sight of a body does something to your senses even if you’re an experienced murder detective; it overwhelms them to a greater or lesser extent, numbs them and makes them less sensitive to other, less violent impressions, all the small details of a crime scene that can tell you something. That can help piece together a coherent, logical narrative. Or the reverse, something that jars, that doesn’t belong in the picture. He let his eyes roam across the walls. A single red coat hung from the hooks under the hat rack. Where she used to hang the coat she had used last, unless she knew she wasn’t going to wear it next time, in which case she hung it in the wardrobe with her other jackets. He had to pull himself together to stop himself clutching the coat and pressing it to his face to breathe in the smell of her. Of forest. Because no matter what perfume she used, the symphony of smells always had an underlying note of sun-warmed Norwegian forest. He couldn’t see the red silk scarf she usually wore with that coat, but her black boots were standing on the shoe rack directly beneath it. Harry looked on towards the living room, but there was nothing different there. It looked just like the room he had walked out of two months, fifteen days and twenty hours ago. None of the pictures were hanging crookedly, none of the rugs were out of place. He looked across to the kitchen. There. There was a knife missing from the pyramid-shaped wooden block on the kitchen worktop. His eyes began to circle towards the body.
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Hello, Bjørn,” Harry said without turning around, unable to stop his eyes systematically photographing the crime scene.
“Harry,” Bjørn said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You ought to be telling me I shouldn’t be here,” Harry said. “You ought to be saying I’m disqualified, that this isn’t my case, that I’ll just have to wait to see her like any other civilian until I’m called in to formally identify her.”
“You know I can’t say any of that.”
“If you don’t, someone else will,” Harry said, noting the blood sprayed across the bottom of the bookcase, across the spines of Hamsun’s collected works and an old encyclopaedia that Oleg used to like looking at while Harry explained the things that had changed since the encyclopaedia was printed and why. “And I’d rather hear it from you.” Only now did Harry look at Bjørn Holm. His eyes were shiny and bulging even more than usual in his pale face, framed by bright red sideburns à la 1970s-era Elvis, a beard and the new cap that had replaced his Rasta hat.
“I’ll say it if you want me to, Harry.”
Harry’s eyes ventured closer to the sun, hit the edge of the pool of blood on the floor. The outline revealed that it was large. He had said “reported dead” to Oleg. As if he didn’t quite believe it until he had seen it for himself. Harry cleared his throat. “Tell me what you’ve got first.”
“Knife,” Bjørn said. “The forensic medical officer’s on the way, but it looks to me like three blows, no more. And one was at the back of the neck, directly below the skull. Which means that she died—”
“Quickly and painlessly,” Harry said. “Thanks for that, Bjørn.”
Bjørn nodded curtly, and Harry realised that the forensics officer had said it as much for his own sake as Harry’s.
He looked back at the wooden block on the kitchen worktop again. The ultra-sharp Tojiro knives that he had bought in Hong Kong, traditional Santoku-style, with oak handles, but these had a water-buffalo-horn collar. Rakel had loved them. It looked like the smallest one was missing, an all-purpose knife with a blade between ten and fifteen centimetres long.
“And there’s no sign of sexual assault,” Bjørn said. “All her clothes are still in place, and intact.”
Harry’s eyes had reached the sun.
Mustn’t wake up.
Rakel was lying curled up with her back to him, facing the kitchen. More tightly curled than when she was asleep. She had no obvious injuries or knife wounds to her back, and her long dark hair was covering her neck. The roaring voices in his head were trying to drown each other out. One was screaming that she was wearing the traditional cardigan he had bought her during a trip to Reykjavik. Another that it wasn’t her, that it couldn’t be her. A third was saying that if it was the way it looked at first glance, that she had been stabbed from the front at first, and that the perpetrator hadn’t been standing between her and the door, so she hadn’t made any attempt to escape. The fourth was saying that she was going to get up any moment, walk towards him with a smile and point at the hidden camera.