“You’re aware that those categories of yours don’t exactly narrow it down much?” Kaja said. She had turned and was looking down at the city. “At some point in our lives we all fit into one or other of those descriptions.”
“Mm. But actually going through with a premeditated, cold-blooded murder?”
“Why are you asking, if you already know the answer?”
“Maybe I just want to hear someone else say it.”
Kaja shrugged. “Killing is just a question of context. There’s no problem taking a life if you see yourself as the city’s respected butcher, the fatherland’s heroic soldier or the long arm of the law. Or, potentially, the righteous avenger of justice.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it, that came from your own lecture at Police College. So who killed Rakel? Someone with personality traits from one of those categories killing without any context, or a normal person killing for a reason they’ve come up with themselves?”
“Well, I think that even a crazy person needs some sort of context. Even in outbursts of rage there’s a moment when we manage to convince ourselves that we’re acting in a justifiable way. Madness is a lonely dialogue where we give ourselves the answers we want. And we’ve all had that conversation.”
“Have we?”
“I know I have,” Harry said, looking down the drive where the dark, heavy fir trees stood on watch on either side. “But to answer your question: I think the process of narrowing down potential suspects starts here. That’s why I wanted you to see the scene. It’s been cleaned up. But murder is messy, emotional. It’s as if we’re facing a murderer who is both trained and untrained at the same time. Or perhaps trained, but emotionally unbalanced, typical for a murder motivated by sexual frustration or personal hatred.”
“And because there are no signs of sexual assault, you’ve concluded that we’re dealing with hatred?”
“Yes. That’s why Svein Finne looked like the perfect suspect. A man accustomed to using violence who wants to avenge the death of his son.”
“In which case surely he should have killed you?”
“I reasoned that Svein Finne knows that living after losing the person you love is worse than dying. But it looks like I was wrong.”
“The fact that you got the wrong person doesn’t necessarily mean that you got the wrong motive.”
“Mm. You mean it’s hard to find anyone who hated Rakel, but easy to find people who hate me?”
“Just a thought,” Kaja said.
“Good. That could be a starting point.”
“Perhaps the investigative team have got something that we don’t know about.”
Harry shook his head. “I went through their files last night, and all they’ve got are separate details. No definite line of inquiry or actual evidence.”
“I didn’t think you had access to the investigation?”
“I know the access code of someone who has. Because he was pissed off that IT had given him his bust measurement: BH100. I guessed the password.”
“His date of birth?”
“Almost. HW1953.”
“Which is?”
“The year Hank Williams was found dead in a car on New Year’s Day.”
“So, nothing but random thoughts, then. Shall we go and think them somewhere warmer than this?”
“Yes,” Harry said, about to take a last drag on the cigarette.
“Hold on,” Kaja said, holding out her hand. “Can I...?”
Harry looked at her before passing her the cigarette. It wasn’t true that he was able to see. He was more blind than any of them, blinded by tears, but now it was as if he had managed to blink them away for a moment and, for the first time since they’d met again, actually saw Kaja Solness. It was the cigarette. And the memories flooded back, suddenly and unexpectedly. The young police officer who had travelled to Hong Kong to fetch Harry home so he could hunt a serial killer the Oslo Police hadn’t managed to catch. She had found him on a mattress in Chungking Mansions, in a kind of limbo between intoxication and indifference. And it wasn’t exactly clear who had needed rescuing most: the Oslo Police or Harry. But here she was again. Kaja Solness, who denied her own beauty by showing her sharp, irregular teeth as often as she could, thereby spoiling her otherwise perfect face. He remembered the morning hours they had spent in a large, empty house, the cigarettes they had shared. Rakel used to want the first drag of a cigarette, Kaja always wanted the last.
He had abandoned them both and fled to Hong Kong again. But he had come back for one of them. Rakel.
Harry saw Kaja’s raspberry lips close around the yellow-brown filter and tense ever so slightly as she inhaled. Then she dropped the butt onto the damp brown earth between the puddle and the gravel, trod on it and set off towards the car. Harry was about to follow her, but stopped.
His eyes had been caught by the squashed cigarette butt.
He thought about pattern recognition. They say that the human brain’s ability to recognise patterns is what distinguishes us from animals, that our automatic, never-ending search for patterns repeating is what allowed our intelligence to develop and made civilisation possible. And he recognised the pattern in the shoeprint. From the pictures in the file titled “Crime-scene photographs” in the investigative team’s material. A short comment attached to the photograph said they hadn’t found a match in Interpol’s database of shoe-sole patterns.
Harry cleared his throat.
“Kaja?”
He saw her thin back stiffen as she made her way to the car. God knows why, perhaps she detected something in his voice that he himself hadn’t heard. She turned towards him. Her lips were drawn back, and he could see those sharp teeth.
26
“All infantry soldiers have dark hair,” the stocky, fit-looking man sitting in the low armchair at the end of the coffee table said. Erland Madsen’s chair was positioned at a ninety-degree angle to Roar Bohr’s, instead of directly opposite him. That was so Madsen’s patients could decide for themselves if they wanted to look at him or not. Not having to see the person you were talking to had the same effect as talking in a confessionaclass="underline" it gave the patient a feeling of talking to themselves. When you don’t see a listener’s reactions in the form of body language and facial expressions, the threshold for what you tell them is lowered. He had toyed with the idea of getting hold of a couch, even if that would have a been a cliché, something of a showpiece.
Madsen glanced down at his notepad. At least they had been allowed to keep those. “Can you elaborate?”
“Elaborate on dark hair?” Roar Bohr smiled. And when the smile reached those slate-grey eyes, it was as if the tears in them — the silent, dry tears that just lay there — emphasised the smile, the way the sun shines extra strongly when it’s at the edge of a cloud. “They have dark hair, and they’re good at putting a bullet in your skull from a couple of hundred metres. But the way to recognise them when you approach a checkpoint is that they have dark hair and are friendly. Terrified and friendly. That’s their job. Not to shoot the enemy as they’ve been trained, but the last thing they ever thought they’d have to do when they applied to join the corps and went through hell to be accepted into Special Forces. Smiling and being friendly to civilians passing through a checkpoint that has been blown to pieces by suicide bombers twice in the previous year. It’s called winning hearts and minds.”
“Did it ever win any?”
“No,” Bohr said.
As a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, Madsen had become a sort of Doctor Afghanistan, the psychologist whom people who were struggling after their experiences in war-torn areas heard about and sought out. But even if Madsen had learned a lot about the life and feelings they talked about, he also knew from experience that it was better to be a blank page. To let the patients talk as long as they liked about concrete, simple things. Nothing could be taken for granted, he needed to get them to realise that they had to paint the whole picture for him. His patients weren’t always aware of where their pressure points were; occasionally they lay in things the patients themselves regarded as trivial and unimportant, in things they may otherwise have skipped over, in things their unconscious was working through in secret, out of sight. But right now, it was a sort of limbering up.