She nudged the door behind her open and went inside. It was as if the organ notes from the last mass were still lingering in the large nave. She walked over to one of the two confessionals against one of the back walls and sat inside it. Pulled the curtain.
“He left,” she said.
“Where?” the voice behind the grille said.
“Don’t know. It’s too late, anyway.”
“Smell?” Harry said, and heard the word echo around the church. And even if he was sure they were alone in there, sitting in the back row, he lowered his voice. “He said he could smell it? And threw a dice?”
Dagny nodded and pointed at the recording device she had placed on the bench between them. “It’s all on there.”
“And he didn’t confess anything?”
“No. He just called himself a sower. You can hear for yourself.”
Harry managed to stop himself swearing and leaned back so hard against the back of the bench that the whole thing wobbled momentarily.
“What do we do now?” Dagny said.
Harry rubbed his face. How could Finne have known? Apart from him and Dagny, Kaja and Truls were the only people who knew about the plan. Maybe he had just read it from Dagny’s face and body language? That was obviously possible; fear acts as an amplifier. Either way, what they were going to do now was a bloody good question.
“I need to see him die,” Dagny said.
Harry nodded. “Finne’s old, and a lot of things can happen. I’ll let you know when he’s dead.”
Dagny shook her head. “You don’t understand. I need to be watching when he dies. If I don’t, my body won’t accept that he’s gone, and he’ll haunt me in my dreams. Like my mother.”
A single buzz announced the arrival of a text message, and Dagny pulled a shiny silver phone from her pocket.
It struck Harry that Rakel hadn’t haunted his dreams after he’d seen her dead. Not yet, at least not that he could remember when he woke up. Why not? He had dreamed that he’d seen her face, lifeless, dead, after all. And then it hit him that he wanted, he really wanted her to haunt him; sooner a death mask and maggots crawling from her mouth than this cold, empty nothingness.
“Dear God...” Dagny whispered.
Her face was lit up by the screen. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide.
The phone fell to the floor with a clatter and lay there, screen upwards. Harry bent over. The video had stopped playing, and was showing the final image, a watch with luminous red numbers. Harry pressed Play, and the clip started again. There was no sound, it was grainy and the camera was moving, but he could see that it was a close-up of a white stomach with blood pumping out of a wound. A hairy hand with a grey watch strap came into shot. It happened so fast. The hand vanished inside the wound, all the way to the screen of the watch, which activated and lit up as more blood pumped out. The camera zoomed in on the watch, then the picture froze. The clip was over. Harry tried to swallow his nausea.
“What... what was that?” Dagny stammered.
“I don’t know,” Harry said, staring at the final image of the watch. “I don’t know,” he repeated.
“I can’t...” Dagny began. “He’s going to kill me too, and you won’t be able to stop him on your own. Because you are on your own, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “I’m on my own.”
“Then I’m going to have to look for help somewhere else. I have to think of myself.”
“Do that,” Harry said. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the frozen image. The picture quality was too poor for the stomach or hand to be used to identify anyone. But the watch was clear enough. And the time. And the date.
03:00. The night Rakel was murdered.
19
The strip of sunlight from the window was making the white papers on Katrine Bratt’s desk glow.
“Dagny Jensen says in her statement that you persuaded her to lure Svein Finne into a trap,” she said.
She looked up from the document, found the long legs that began in front of her desk and led to the man who was half lying in the chair before her. His bright blue eyes were shaded by a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses with black gaffer tape on one arm. He had been drinking. Because it wasn’t just the acrid smell of stale alcohol coming from his clothes and body, reminding her of an amalgam, old people’s homes and rotten blackberries. It was the smell of fresh alcohol on his breath, refreshing, cleansing. In short, the man sitting in front of her was an alcoholic who was partly recovering, and partly on his way towards renewed drunkenness.
“Is that right, Harry?”
“Yes,” the man said, and coughed without covering his mouth. She saw a fleck of saliva glint in the sunlight on the arm of his chair. “Have you found who sent the video?”
“Yes,” Katrine said. “A burner phone. Which is now dead and impossible to trace.”
“Svein Finne. He sent it. He’s the one filming, and it’s him sticking his hand inside her stomach.”
“Shame he didn’t use the hand with the hole in. Then we’d have definite identification.”
“It is him. You saw the time and date on the watch?”
“Yes. And obviously it’s suspicious that the date is the same as the night of the murder. But the time is an hour later than the interval in which Forensics think Rakel died.”
“The keyword there is ‘think,’ ” Harry said. “You know as well as I do that they can’t get it spot-on.”
“Can you identify the stomach as Rakel’s?”
“Come on, it’s a grainy image taken with a moving camera.”
“So it could be anyone. For all we know, it could be something Finne found online and sent to scare Dagny Jensen.”
“Let’s say that, then,” Harry said, putting his hands on the armrests and starting to get up.
“Sit down!” Katrine barked.
Harry sank back into the chair.
She sighed deeply. “Dagny has police protection.”
“Round the clock?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“Yes. I’ve just been informed by the Forensic Medical Institute that Valentin Gjertsen was Svein Finne’s biological son. And that you’ve known about that for a while.”
Katrine looked for some sort of reaction, but saw nothing except her own reflection in those blue mirrored sunglasses.
“So,” she said. “You’ve decided that Svein Finne killed Rakel to avenge himself on you. You’ve ignored all protocols for police work and put another person, a rape victim, in danger in order to achieve something you’re after personally. That isn’t just gross misconduct in service, Harry, that’s a criminal offence.”
Katrine stopped. What was he looking at behind those damn sunglasses? Her? The picture hanging on the wall behind her? His own boots?
“You’re already suspended, Harry. I haven’t got many other sanctions available apart from dismissing you altogether. Or reporting you. Which would also lead to dismissal if you were found guilty. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, it isn’t exactly complicated. Can I go now?”
“No! Do you know what I said to Dagny Jensen when she asked for police protection? I told her she’d get it, but that the police officers who are going to protect her are only human, and they quickly lose their enthusiasm if they know that the person they’re protecting has filed a complaint against a police colleague for being overzealous. I put pressure on her, Harry, an innocent victim. For your sake! What have you got to say about that?”
Harry nodded slowly. “Well. What about: Can I go now?”