“You have no idea. I haven’t seen such a scrum at a press conference since the vampirist case. And that’s partly because the Chief of Police has decided to suspend you until further notice.”
“What? I get that I’m not allowed to work on this case, but suspended from all duties? Really? Because the press are all over a murder investigation?”
“Because you won’t be left in peace no matter what you’re working on, and we don’t need that sort of distraction right now.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Keep going.” Harry raised his glass to his lips.
“There isn’t anything else.”
“Yes, there is. The politics. Let’s hear it.”
Katrine sighed deeply. “Since Bærum and Asker were moved into Oslo Police District, we’re responsible for a fifth of the population of Norway. Two years ago surveys showed that 86 percent of the population had high or very high confidence in us. That figure has now fallen to 65, thanks to a couple of unfortunate individual cases. And that means our beloved Chief of Police, Hagen, has been summoned to see our rather less beloved Minister of Justice, Mikael Bellman. To be blunt: at the present time, Hagen and the Oslo Police District would not find it remotely helpful if the press were to publish an interview with an unhinged officer who was drunk on duty.”
“Don’t forget paranoid. Paranoid, unhinged and drunk.” Harry tipped his head back and drained his glass.
“Please, Harry, no more paranoia. I’ve spoken to Winter at Kripos, and there’s no evidence to suggest it’s Finne.”
“So what is there evidence to suggest, then?”
“Nothing.”
“There was a dead woman lying there, of course there’s evidence.” Harry gestured to Nina that he was ready for his next glass.
“OK, this is what we’ve got from the Forensic Medical Institute,” Katrine said. “Rakel died as the result of a knife wound to the back of her neck. The blade penetrated the part of the medulla oblongata that regulates breathing, between the top vertebra and the cranium. She probably died instantly.”
“I didn’t ask Bjørn about the other two,” Harry said.
“The other two what?”
“Knife wounds.”
He saw Katrine swallow. He could tell she had been hoping to spare him.
“Her stomach,” she said.
“So not necessarily a painless death, then?”
“Harry...”
“Go on,” Harry said harshly, hunching over. It was as if he could feel the stab wounds himself.
Katrine cleared her throat. “As you know, it’s usually extremely difficult to determine the time of death with any degree of accuracy when someone’s been dead for over twenty-four hours, as in this case. But as you may have heard, the Forensic Medical Institute and the Criminal Forensics Unit have together developed a new method where they combine measurements of rectal temperature, eye temperature, hypoxanthine levels in the intraocular fluid, and brain temperature...”
“Brain temperature?”
“Yes. The cranium protects the brain which means that it’s less affected by external factors. They insert a needle-like probe through the nose, into the lamina cribrosa where the base of the skull—”
“You’ve obviously learned a lot of Latin recently.”
Katrine stopped.
“Sorry,” Harry said. “I’m... I’m not...”
“Don’t worry about it,” Katrine said. “There were a couple of fortuitous external factors. We know that the temperature on the ground floor was constant, because all the radiators are controlled by a central thermostat. And because that temperature was relatively low...”
“She used to say she thought better with a woolly jumper and a cold head,” Harry said.
“...the internal organs of the body hadn’t yet quite cooled down to the temperature of the room. Which means that we’ve been able to use this new method to determine that the time of death was somewhere between 22:00 on Saturday and 02:00 on Sunday, 11 March.”
“What about the crime-scene investigation, what did that come up with?”
“The front door was unlocked when the first officers arrived, and because it hasn’t got a Yale lock, that suggests the perpetrator left via that door. There are no signs of a break-in, which suggests that the front door was unlocked when the killer arrived...”
“Rakel always kept that door locked. And all the other doors. That house is a fucking fortress.”
“...or that Rakel let him in.”
“Mm.” Harry turned and looked impatiently for Nina.
“You’re right about it being a fortress. Bjørn was one of the first on the scene, and he says he went through the house from basement to attic, and all the doors were locked from the inside, and all the windows closed with their latches on. So what do you think?”
“I think there must be more evidence.”
“Yes,” Katrine said with a nod. “There’s evidence of someone removing the evidence. Someone who knows what evidence he needs to remove.”
“OK. And you don’t think that Finne knows how to do that?”
“Oh, I do. And obviously Finne is a suspect, he always will be. But we can’t say that publicly, we can’t point the finger at a specific individual based on nothing but gut feeling.”
“Gut feeling? Finne threatened me and my family, I’ve told you that.”
Katrine stayed silent.
Harry looked at her. Then he nodded slowly. “Correction: claims the spurned husband of the murder victim.”
Katrine leaned over the table. “Listen. The sooner we can rule you out of the case, the less fuss there’ll be. Right now Kripos are taking the lead, but we’re working with them, so I can push them to prioritise deciding whether or not you’re beyond suspicion, then we can issue a press release.”
“Press release?”
“You know the papers aren’t saying anything explicitly, but their readers aren’t stupid. And they’re not wrong, because the probability that the husband is the killer in cases like this is around...”
“Eighty percent,” Harry said loudly and slowly.
“Sorry,” Katrine said, turning red. “We just need to stop that in its tracks as soon as possible.”
“I get it,” Harry mumbled, wondering if he ought to try calling for Nina. “I’m just a bit sensitive today.”
Katrine reached her hand across the table and put it on his. “I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like, Harry. Losing the love of your life like that.”
Harry looked at her hand. “Nor me,” he said. “And that’s why I’m planning to be as far away as possible while it eventually sinks in. Nina!”
“They can’t interview you if you’re drunk, so you won’t be ruled out of the case until you sober up.”
“It’s only beer, I’ll be sober again in a few hours if they call. The maternal role suits you, by the way, have I told you?”
Katrine smiled briefly and stood up. “I need to get back. Kripos have asked to use our interview facilities. Look after yourself, Harry.”
“I’ll do my best. Go and get him.”
“Harry...”
“If you don’t, I will. Nina!”
Dagny Jensen was walking along the spring-damp path between the gravestones in the Vår Frelsers Cemetery. There was a smell of scorched metal from some roadworks on Ullevålsveien, as well as decaying flowers and wet earth. And dog shit. This was what spring was like in Oslo just after the snow melted, but she couldn’t help wondering who they were, these dog owners who made use of the usually deserted cemetery, where they could walk away from their dogs’ excrement without any witnesses. Dagny had been visiting her mother’s grave, like she did every Monday after her last class at the Cathedral School, only three or four minutes’ walk away, where Dagny worked as an English teacher. She missed her mother, missed their daily conversations about everything and nothing. Her mother had been such a real, vital part of Dagny’s life that when they called from the old people’s home to say her mother was dead, at first she hadn’t believed it. Not even when she saw the body, which looked like a wax doll, a fake. That’s to say, her brain knew, of course, but her body refused. Her body demanded to have actually witnessed her mother’s death in order to accept it. Sometimes Dagny still dreamed that someone was banging on her door up on Thorvald Meyers gate, and that her mother was standing outside, like it was the most natural thing in the world. And why not? Soon they’d be able to send people to Mars, and who could know for certain that it was medically impossible to breathe life back into a dead body? During the funeral the priest, a young woman, had said that no one knew what lay on the other side of the threshold of death, that all we knew was that those who crossed it never came back. That had upset Dagny. Not that the so-called church of the people had become so feeble that it had surrendered its only real function: to give absolute and comforting answers about what happened after death. No, it was the “never” that the priest had uttered with such confidence. If people needed hope, a fixed belief that their loved ones would one day rise from the dead, why take that away from them? And if what the priest’s faith claimed was true, that it had happened before, then surely it could happen again? Dagny would be forty in two years, she had never been married or engaged, she hadn’t had any children, she hadn’t travelled to Micronesia, she hadn’t realised her dream of starting an orphanage in Eritrea or finished that poetry collection. And she hoped that she would never again hear anyone say the word “never.”