“I just want to take a look in his house,” Harry said.
“Do you think he killed Rakel?”
“Don’t think about that.”
“No, because that’s really easy to do,” Øystein groaned. “OK, if I was stupid enough to say yes, what’s in it for me?”
“The satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done your best and only friend a favour.”
“And unemployment benefit when the Jealousy’s owner ends up in prison.”
“OK, good. Say you’re taking the rubbish out, then meet me in the backyard at nine o’clock. That’s in... six minutes.”
“You know this is a really bad idea, don’t you, Harry?”
“Let me think about it. OK, I’ve thought about it. And you’re right. A really bad idea.”
Øystein hung up and told Ringdal he was taking a cigarette break, went out through the back door, stopped between the parked cars and rubbish bins, lit a cigarette and pondered the same two eternal mysteries: how could it be that the more expensive players Vålerenga bought, the greater their chances of fighting to avoid relegation rather than competing for medals seemed to be? And how come the more hair-raising things Harry asked Øystein to do, the greater the chances were of him saying yes? Øystein rattled the key ring he had taken from the Catalina jacket and tucked in his pocket as he thought about Harry’s concluding argument: A really bad idea. But it’s the only one I’ve got.
33
It took Harry barely ten minutes to drive from Grünerløkka, across Storo, to Kjelsås. He parked the Escort on one of the side streets off Grefsenveien, on a street named after a planet, and walked around to one named after another one. The drizzle had turned into a steady downpour and the dark streets were deserted. A dog started barking on a balcony as Harry approached the house where Peter Ringdal lived. Kaja had found his address in the population register. Harry pulled up the collar of his coat, turned in through the gate and walked up the paved drive to the blue-painted house that consisted of one traditional rectangular section and another part shaped like an igloo. Harry wasn’t sure if the neighbourhood had taken a collective decision to have space as their theme, but in the garden there was a sculpture that looked like a satellite. Harry assumed it was supposed to look as if it was floating around the blue, dome-shaped part of the house: the earth. Home. The impression was only strengthened by the half-moon-shaped window in the front door. There was no sticker warning that the house was alarmed. Harry rang the bell. If anyone answered, he would say he’d got lost and ask the way to the street where his car was parked. No answer. He put the key in the lock and turned it. He opened the door and stepped into the dark hallway.
The first thing that struck him was the smell. That there was no one there. Every home Harry had been in had a smelclass="underline" clothes, sweat, paint, food, soap or something else. But walking in from the torrent of smells outside felt like it did when you left most houses: the smells stopped.
There was no Yale lock, so you had to turn the knob from the inside to lock the door. He turned on the light on his mobile phone, then swept it across the walls of the hallway that ran like an axis through the centre of the house. The walls were lined with artistic photographs and paintings, bought with what looked to Harry like a keen eye for taste. It was the same with food: Harry couldn’t cook, he couldn’t even put together a sensible three-course meal when he was sitting in a restaurant with an extensive menu. But he had the sense to recognise a good order when he watched Rakel smile and tell the waiter quietly what she wanted, and would copy her without embarrassment.
There was a chest of drawers just inside the door. Harry opened the top drawer. Gloves and scarves. He tried the next one down. Keys. Batteries. A flashlight. A judo magazine. A box of bullets. Harry picked it up: 9mm. Ringdal had a pistol somewhere. He put the box back and was about to close the drawer when he noticed something. There was no longer a total absence of smell; an almost imperceptible smell was rising from the drawer.
A smell of sun-warmed forest.
He moved the judo magazine.
There was a red silk scarf under it. He stood frozen to the spot for a moment. Then he picked it up and held it to his face, inhaling its smell. There was no doubt. It was hers, it was Rakel’s.
Harry stood there for a few seconds before he pulled himself together. He thought for a moment, then put the scarf back under the magazine, closed the drawer and carried on along the hallway.
Instead of going into what he assumed was the living room, he went upstairs. Another passageway. He opened a door. Bathroom. Seeing as there were no windows that could be seen from outside, he turned the light on. Then it struck him that if Ringdal had had one of those new electricity monitors fitted, and if what the workman from Hafslund had said was right, they would be able to tell if someone had been inside the house by checking the meter and seeing that the electricity usage had gone up a tiny bit just before half past nine in the evening. Harry checked the shelf under the mirror and the bathroom cabinet. Just the usual toiletries a man would need. No interesting pills and potions.
Same thing with the bedroom. A clean, neatly made bed. No skeletons in the closets. The light on his mobile evidently used a lot of power, he could see that the charge in the battery had already sunk alarmingly quickly. He sped up. A study. Barely used, it looked almost abandoned.
He went down to the living room. The kitchen. The house was silent, it wasn’t telling him anything.
He found a door leading to the cellar. His phone died as he was about to go down the narrow staircase. He hadn’t seen any basement windows from the outside of the house facing the road. He switched the light on and went down.
There was nothing that spoke to him there either. A freezer, two pairs of skis, tins of paint, some white and blue rope, worn hiking boots, a board of tools beneath an oblong basement window, the same sort Rakel’s house had, facing the back of the building. Four separate, fenced-off compartments. The house had probably been semi-detached once upon a time, with the igloo and the more conventional part of the house as separate homes. So why were there padlocks on the compartment doors if there was only one person living there? Harry looked through the wire mesh towards the top of one of them. Empty. The same with two of the others. But the last one had chipboard over the opening.
That was where it was.
The first three compartments were locked and visibly empty, to fool an intruder into thinking that the fourth was as well.
Harry thought. He wasn’t hesitating, he was just taking a bit of time to think through the consequences, weighing up the advantages of finding something against the disadvantages of the break-in being discovered, meaning that whatever he found couldn’t be used as evidence. There had been a crowbar hanging on the board. He reached a conclusion, went back to the tools, grabbed a screwdriver and returned to the door. It took him three minutes to remove the screws from the door hinges. He lifted the door aside. The light inside must have been connected to the switch at the top of the stairs, because the compartment was lit up. An office. Harry’s eyes scanned the desk and computer, the shelves of files and books. He stopped at the picture that was fixed to the bare grey wall above the desk with a piece of red tape. Black and white. Maybe it had been taken using a flash, which was why the contrast between the white glare of the skin and the darkness of the blood and shadows was so noticeable, like an ink drawing. But the drawing showed her oval face, her dark hair, her lifeless eyes, her mutilated, dead body. Harry closed his eyes. And there, on the red skin on the inside of his eyelids, there it was again. Burned on. Rakel’s face, the blood on the floor. It felt like a knife being driven into his chest, with such force that it made him stagger back.