“We understand.” Kaja smiled. “If you could call him or her, we’d be very grateful.”
The woman left them and disappeared inside the red and yellow building. Harry and Kaja stood there looking down at the artificial grass pitch where a couple of boys were practising the latest Neymar tricks they’d no doubt seen on YouTube.
After a while, Kaja looked at her watch. “Shall we go in and ask how it’s going?”
“No,” Harry said.
“Why not?”
“The knife isn’t in the container.”
“But you said...”
“I was wrong.”
“And what makes you so sure about that?”
“Look,” Harry said, pointing. “Security cameras. That’s why no one dumps anything in here. And a murderer who’s had the presence of mind to remove a well-camouflaged wildlife camera from the crime scene isn’t going to drive straight into a petrol station with cameras to get rid of the murder weapon.”
Harry started to walk towards the football pitch.
“Where are you going?” Kaja called after him.
Harry didn’t answer. Largely because he didn’t have an answer. Not until he reached the back of the petrol station and saw a building with the logo of the Ready sports club above the entrance. There were six green plastic bins beside the building. Outside the reach of the cameras. Harry opened the lid of the largest one and was hit by the rancid smell of rotting food.
He tilted the bin onto the two wheels at the back and moved it out into the open. There he tipped it over, spilling its contents.
“What a terrible smell,” Kaja said as she caught up with him.
“That’s good.”
“Good?”
“It means it hasn’t been emptied in a while,” Harry said, crouching down and starting to hunt through the waste. “Can you start with one of the others?”
“There was nothing about poking through rubbish in the job description.”
“Given the terrible salary you’re on, you should probably have realised that rubbish was going to crop up at some point.”
“You’re not paying me a salary at all,” Kaja said as she tipped over the smallest bin.
“That’s what I meant. And yours doesn’t smell as bad as mine.”
“No one can say you don’t know how to motivate your staff.” Kaja crouched down, and Harry noted that she started with the top left, the way they were taught to search at Police College.
A man had come out onto the steps and was standing under the Ready sign. In jeans with the Ready logo on. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Harry stood up, walked over to the man and showed him his police ID. “Do you know if anyone might have seen anyone here on the evening of the tenth of March?”
The man stared at the ID, then back at Harry with his mouth half open. “You’re Harry Hole.”
“That’s right.”
“The super-detective himself?”
“Don’t believe everything—”
“And you’re looking through our rubbish.”
“Sorry if you’re disappointed.”
“Harry...” Kaja called.
Harry turned round. She was holding something between her thumb and forefinger. It looked like a tiny piece of black plastic. “What is it?” he asked, screwing his eyes up as he felt his heart start to beat faster.
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s one of those...”
Memory cards, Harry thought. The sort you use in wildlife cameras.
The sun was shining into the kitchen on Lyder Sagens gate, to where Kaja was standing, removing her memory card from the slot of what looked to Harry like a cheap camera, but which Kaja had said was a Canon G9, bought in 2009 for a small fortune, and which had actually stood the test of time. She inserted the memory card from the rubbish bin into the empty slot, connected the camera to her MacBook with a cable and clicked on the Pictures folder. A series of thumbnails appeared. Some of them showed Rakel’s house in various stages of daylight. Some were taken in darkness, and all Harry could see was the light from the kitchen window.
“There you go,” Kaja said, and went over to the hissing espresso machine that was working on cup number two, but Harry realised that was mostly to leave him alone.
The thumbnails were marked with dates.
The second to last was marked 10 March, the last 11 March. The night of the murder.
He took a deep breath. What did he want to see? What was he worried about seeing? And what was he hoping to see?
His brain felt like a wasps’ nest under attack, so it was just as well to get it done.
He clicked the Play symbol on the thumbnail for 10 March.
Four smaller thumbnails appeared, with the times marked.
The camera had been activated four times before midnight on the night of the murder.
Harry clicked on the first recording, which was labelled 20:02:10.
Darkness. Light behind the curtain in the kitchen window. But someone, or something, was moving in the darkness and had triggered the recording. Damn, he should have followed the advice of the guy in the shop and bought a more expensive camera with Zero Blur technology. Or was it No Glow? Either way, something that meant you could see what was in front of the camera even in the middle of the night. Suddenly, there was light on the steps as the front door opened, and in the doorway stood a shape that could only be Rakel. She stood there for a couple of seconds before she let a different shape in, then the door closed behind them.
Harry was breathing hard through his nose.
Several long seconds passed, then the image froze.
The next recording started at 20:29:25. Harry clicked on it. The front door was open, but the lights in the living room and kitchen were switched off, or dimmed, so he could hardly see the shape that came out, closed the door behind it and went down the steps before disappearing into the darkness. But this was half past eight in the evening, an hour and a half before the window suggested by Forensics. The next clips were the important ones.
Harry could feel his palms sweating as he clicked on the third thumbnail, labelled 23:21:09.
A car swept across the drive. The headlights lit up the wall of the house before it came to a stop right in front of the steps and the lights went out. Harry stared at the screen, trying in vain to make his eyes bore into the darkness.
The seconds ticked past on the clock, but nothing happened. Was the driver sitting inside the dark car waiting for someone? No, because the recording hadn’t stopped, so the camera’s sensor was still detecting movement. Then, at last, Harry saw something. Faint light fell across the steps as the front door opened and what looked like a hunched figure went inside. The door closed, and the image went dark again. And froze a few seconds later.
He clicked on the last recording before midnight. 23:38:21.
Darkness.
Nothing.
What had the camera’s PIR sensor detected? Something that was moving and had a pulse, at least; a different temperature to everything else.
After thirty seconds the recording stopped.
It could have been someone moving across the drive in front of the house. But also a bird, a cat, a dog. Harry rubbed his face hard. What the hell was the point of a wildlife camera with sensors that were far more sensitive than the lens? He vaguely remembered the sales assistant in the shop saying something along those lines when he was trying to persuade Harry to spend a bit more money on the camera. But that was back when Harry was first starting to have trouble financing his drinking and still keeping a roof over his head.
“Have we got anything?” Kaja asked, putting one of the cups down in front of him.