He heard another deep sigh. “If it’ll keep you away from the bottle for a few hours.”
“Great,” Harry said, then ended the call and slipped his phone into his jacket pocket. He lit the cigarette. Inhaled deeply. He stood with his back to the restaurant’s closed door. He had time to have one beer in there and still be in Borggata in time to meet Aune. The music filtered out. An autotuned declaration of undying love. He held one hand up apologetically towards a car as he lurched out into the road.
The old, working-class facades of Borggata hid newly built flats with bright living rooms, open-plan kitchens, modern bathrooms, and balconies overlooking the inner courtyards. Harry took that as a sign that Tøyen was going to be tarted up as welclass="underline" rents would go up, the residents moved out, the social status of that part of town adjusted upwards. The immigrants’ grocery stores and little cafés would give way to gyms and hipster restaurants.
The psychologist looked uncomfortable as he sat on one of the two flimsy rib-backed chairs Harry had placed in the middle of the pale parquet floor. Harry assumed that was because of the disparity between the chair and Ståle Aune’s overweight frame, as well as the fact that his small round glasses were still steamed up after he had reluctantly foregone the lift and walked up the stairs to the third floor with Harry. Or possibly the pool of blood that lay like a congealed, black wax seal between them. One summer holiday when Harry was young, his grandfather had told him that you couldn’t eat money. When Harry got to his room he took out the five-kroner coin his grandfather had given him and tried. He remembered the way it had jarred his teeth, the metallic smell and sweet taste. Just like when he licked the blood after cutting himself. Or the smell of crime scenes he would later attend, even if the blood wasn’t fresh. The smell of the room they were sitting in now. Money. Blood money.
“A knife,” Ståle Aune said, pushing his hands up into his armpits as if he was afraid someone was going to hit them. “There’s something about the idea of a knife. Cold steel pushing through skin and into your body. It just freaks me out, as the young folk would say.”
Harry didn’t reply. He and the Crime Squad Unit had used Aune as a consultant on murder cases for so many years that Harry couldn’t actually put his finger on when he had started to think of the psychologist, who was twenty years his senior, as a friend. But he knew Aune well enough to recognise that his pretending not to know that “freak out” was a phrase older than both of them was an affectation. Aune liked to present himself as an old, conservative type, unfettered by the spirit of the times his colleagues chased after so desperately in an effort to appear “relevant.” As Aune had once said to the press: Psychology and religion have one thing in common: to a large extent, they both give people what they want. Out there in the darkness, where the light of science has yet to reach, psychology and religion have free rein. And if they were to stick to what we actually know, there wouldn’t be jobs for all these psychologists and priests.
“So this was where the husband stabbed his wife... how many times?”
“Thirteen times,” Harry said, looking around. There was a large, framed black-and-white photograph of the Manhattan skyline on the wall facing them. The Chrysler Building in the centre. Probably bought from IKEA. So what? It was a good picture. If it didn’t bother you that lots of other people had the same picture, and that some visitors would look down their noses at it, not because it wasn’t good, but because it was bought at IKEA, then why not go for it? He had used the same line on Rakel when she said she would have liked a numbered print of a photograph by Torbjørn Rødland — a white stretch limo negotiating a hairpin bend in Hollywood — that cost eighty thousand kroner. Rakel had conceded that Harry was entirely right. He had been so happy that he had bought the stretch limo picture for her. Not that he didn’t realise she had tricked him, but because deep down he’d had to admit that it really was a much cooler image.
“He was angry,” Aune said, undoing the top button of his shirt, where he normally wore a bow tie, usually with a pattern that balanced between serious and amusing, like the blue EU flag with gold stars.
A child started to cry in one of the neighbouring flats.
Harry tapped the ash from his cigarette. “He says he can’t remember the details of why he killed her.”
“Suppressed memories. They should have let me hypnotise him.”
“I didn’t know you did that.”
“Hypnosis? How do you think I got married?”
“Well, there was no real need here. The forensic evidence shows that she was heading across the living room, away from him, and that he came after her and stabbed her from behind first. The blade penetrated low on her back and hit her kidneys. That probably explains why the neighbours didn’t hear any screaming.”
“Oh?”
“It’s such a painful place to be stabbed that the victim is paralysed, can’t even scream, then loses consciousness almost immediately and dies. It also happens to be the favoured method among military professionals for a so-called silent kill.”
“Really? What happened to the good old method of sneaking up on someone from behind, putting one hand over their mouth and cutting their throat with the other?”
“Outdated — it was never really that good anyway. It takes too much coordination and precision. You wouldn’t believe the number of times soldiers ended up cutting themselves in the hand that was clamped over the victim’s mouth.”
Aune grimaced. “I’m assuming our husband isn’t a former commando or anything like that?”
“The fact that he stabbed her there was probably sheer coincidence. There’s nothing to suggest that he intended to conceal the murder.”
“Intended? You’re saying it was premeditated rather than impulsive?”
Harry nodded slowly. “Their daughter was out jogging. He called the police before she got home so that we were in position outside and were able to stop her before she came in and found her mother.”
“Considerate.”
“So they say. That he was a considerate man.” Harry tapped more ash from his cigarette. It fell onto the pool of dried blood.
“Shouldn’t you get an ashtray, Harry?”
“The CSI team are done here, and everything makes sense.”
“Yes, but even so.”
“You haven’t asked about the motive.”
“OK. Motive?”
“Classic. The battery in his phone ran out, and he borrowed hers without her knowledge. He saw a text message he thought was suspicious, and checked the thread. The exchange went back six months, and was evidently between her and a lover.”
“Did he confront the lover?”
“No, but the report says the phone’s been checked, the messages found and the lover contacted. A young man, mid-twenties, twenty-five years younger than her. He’s confirmed that they had a relationship.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“The husband is a highly educated man with a secure job, no money worries, and had never been in trouble with the police. Family, friends, workmates and neighbours all describe him as friendly and mild-mannered, solidity personified. And, as you said, considerate. ‘A man prepared to sacrifice everything for his family,’ one of the reports said.” Harry drew hard on his cigarette.
“Are you asking me because you don’t think the case has been solved?”
Harry let the smoke out through his nostrils. “The case is a no-brainer, the evidence has all been secured, it’s impossible to fuck this one up, which is why Katrine has given it to me. And Truls Berntsen.” Harry pulled the corners of his mouth into something resembling a smile. The family was well off. But they chose to live in Tøyen, a cheaper part of town with a large migrant population, and bought art from IKEA. Maybe they just liked it here. Harry himself liked Tøyen. And maybe the picture on the wall was the original, now worth a small fortune.