“Something, but not enough.” Harry clicked the thumbnail for 11 March. One recording. 02:23:12.
“Cross your fingers,” he said, and pressed Play.
The front door opened, and a shape could just be made out in the weak grey light from the hall. It stood there for a few seconds, looked like it was swaying. Then the door closed and everything was completely dark again.
“He’s leaving,” Harry said.
Light.
The car’s headlights came on; the rear lights glowed red as well. The reversing light came on. Then they all went out again and everything was dark.
“He’s switched the engine off again,” Kaja said. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” Harry leaned closer to the screen. “There’s someone approaching, can you see?”
“No.”
The picture jolted, and the outline of the house became crooked. Another jolt, and it was even more crooked. Then the recording stopped.
“What was that?”
“He pulled the camera down,” Harry said.
“Surely we should have seen him if he walked from the car to the camera?”
“He approached it from the side,” Harry said. “You could just see him approach, from off to the left.”
“Why walk around? If he was going to get rid of the recordings, I mean?”
“He was avoiding the area with most snow. Less work to get rid of his footprints afterwards.”
Kaja nodded slowly. “He must have reconnoitred carefully in advance if he knew about the camera.”
“Yes. And he carried out the murder with almost military precision.”
“Almost?”
“He got in the car first, and came close to forgetting the camera.”
“He hadn’t planned it?”
“Yes,” Harry said, lifting the cup to his lips. “Everything was planned, down to the last detail. Such as the fact that the light inside the car didn’t come on when he got in and out of the car. He’d switched it off beforehand in case any of the neighbours heard the car and looked over to see who it was.”
“But they’d still have seen his car.”
“I doubt it was his car. If it had been, he’d have parked farther away. It looked almost as if he wanted to have the car at the scene.”
“So that any eventual witnesses could mislead the police?”
“Mm.” Harry swallowed the coffee and pulled a face.
“Sorry I haven’t got any freeze-dried,” Kaja said. “So what’s the conclusion? Was it perfectly executed or not?”
“I don’t know.” Harry leaned back to pull his cigarettes from his trouser pocket. “Almost forgetting about the camera doesn’t fit with the rest of it. And it looked like he was swaying in the doorway, did you see? Almost as if the person coming out isn’t the same person who went in. And what was he doing in there for two and a half hours?”
“What do you think?”
“I think he was high. Drugs or drink. Does Roar Bohr take any pills?”
Kaja shook her head and fixed her gaze on the wall behind Harry.
“Is that a no?” he asked.
“It’s an I-don’t-know.”
“But you’re not ruling it out?”
“Ruling out the possibility that a Special Forces officer who’s been on three tours to Afghanistan is on pills? Absolutely not.”
“Mm. Can you remove the memory card? I’ll take it to Bjørn, maybe Forensics can get something out of the images.”
“Sure.” Kaja took hold of the camera. “What are your thoughts about the knife? Why doesn’t he get rid of it in the same place as the memory card?”
Harry inspected the remains of his coffee. “The crime scene indicates that he had some idea of how the police work. So he probably also knows the way we search the area around the scene for a possible murder weapon, and that the chances that we’d find a knife in a rubbish bin less than a kilometre from the scene is relatively large.”
“But the memory card...”
“...was OK to get rid of. He wasn’t counting on us even looking for that. Who would know that Rakel had a camouflaged wildlife camera in her garden?”
“So where’s the knife?”
“I don’t know. But I’d guess it’s in the perpetrator’s home.”
“Why?” Kaja asked as she looked at the camera screen. “If it gets found there, he’s as good as convicted.”
“Because he doesn’t think he’s a suspect. A knife doesn’t rot, it doesn’t melt, it needs to be hidden somewhere it will never be found. And the first place we can think of good hiding places is where we live. Having it nearby also gives us a sense of being in control of our own fate.”
“But if he used a knife he took from the scene and wiped his prints off it, the only way it could be traced back to him is if it’s found in his home. Home is the last place I’d have chosen.”
Harry nodded. “You’re right. Like I said, I don’t know, I’m just guessing. It’s just...” He tried to find the right word.
“Gut feeling?”
“Yes. No.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “I don’t know. Do you remember the warnings we were given when we were young before we took LSD, that we could have flashbacks and start tripping again without any warning later in life?”
Kaja looked up from the camera. “I never took or was offered LSD.”
“Smart girl. I was a rather less clever boy. Some people say those flashbacks can be triggered. Stress. Heavy drinking. Trauma. And that sometimes those flashbacks are actually a new trip, that the remnants of old drugs get activated because LSD is synthetic and doesn’t get broken down in the same way as cocaine, for instance.”
“So now you’re wondering if you’re having an LSD trip?”
Harry shrugged his shoulders. “LSD is consciousness-raising. It makes the brain work in top gear, interpret information on such a detailed level that it gives you a feeling of cosmic insight. That’s the only way I can describe why I felt we had to check those green rubbish bins. I mean, you don’t just find such a tiny piece of plastic in the first rather odd place you look in, one kilometre from the crime scene by chance, do you?”
“Maybe not,” Kaja said, still staring at the camera screen.
“OK. Well, the same cosmic insight is telling me that Roar Bohr isn’t the man we’re looking for, Kaja.”
“And what if I tell you that my cosmic insight is saying you’re wrong?”
Harry shrugged. “I’m the one who took LSD, not you.”
“But I’m the one who’s looked at the recordings from before the tenth of March, not you.”
Kaja turned the camera around and held the screen up in front of Harry.
“This is a week before the murder,” she said. “The person obviously approaches from behind the camera, so when the recording starts we only see his back. He stops right in front of the camera, but unfortunately he doesn’t turn around and show his face. Nor when he leaves two hours later.”
Harry saw a large moon hanging directly above the roof of the house. And silhouetted against the moon Harry saw all the details of the barrel of a rifle and parts of the butt sticking up over the shoulder of someone standing between the camera and the house.
“Unless I’m mistaken,” Kaja said, and Harry already knew that she wasn’t mistaken, “that’s a Colt Canada C8. Not exactly your standard rifle, to put it mildly.”
“Bohr?”
“It’s the sort of rifle Special Forces used in Afghanistan, anyway.”
“Are you aware of the situation you’ve put me in?” Dagny Jensen asked. She had kept her coat on and was sitting bolt upright on the chair in front of Katrine Bratt’s desk as she hugged her handbag in her arms. “Svein Finne has walked free of all charges, he doesn’t even have to hide. And now he knows that I reported him for rape.”