“Yours?”
“The owner of the sweater and I had a little boxing match. He had a nosebleed, my knuckles were bleeding, so it isn’t impossible that that’s where the blood on the sweater comes from.”
“OK. You and Rakel are in the DNA database, so you’re fine. But if I need to exclude a match with the sweater’s owner, I’ll need something I can get his DNA profile from.”
“I’ve thought about that. I’ve got a pair of bloodstained jeans in my laundry basket, and there’s too much blood for it all to have come from my knuckles, so some of that must be from his nose. Sounds like you’re still at work?”
“I am.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Alexandra was waiting when Harry pulled up outside the entrance to the Rikshospital, freezing with her arms wrapped round her. She was wearing high-heeled shoes, tight trousers and a lot of make-up. Alone at work, but looking like she was going to a party. He’d never seen her any other way. Alexandra Sturdza said life was too short not to make yourself look as good as you could all the time.
Harry wound the window down. She bent over.
“Evening, mister.” She smiled. “Five hundred for a hand job, seven for—”
Harry shook his head and handed her two plastic bags: one containing Ringdal’s sweater, the other with his own jeans. “You know no one in Norway works at this time of the night?”
“Oh, is that why I’m alone here? You Norwegians truly have a lot to teach the rest of the world.”
“Working less?”
“Lowering the bar. Why go to the moon when you’ve got a cabin in the mountains?”
“Mm. I really appreciate this, Alexandra.”
“In that case, you ought to choose something from the price list,” she said without smiling. “Is it that Kaja who’s lured you away? I’ll kill her.”
“Her?” Harry leaned over and looked at her more closely. “I thought it was people like me you hated?”
“I hate you, but she’s the one I want to kill. If you get that?”
Harry nodded slowly. Killing. He was about to ask if that was a Romanian saying, something that sounded worse when it was translated into Norwegian, but decided against it.
Alexandra took a step back from the car and looked at him as the window slid silently closed.
Harry looked in the mirror as he drove off. She was still standing there, arms by her sides, under the light of the street lamp, getting smaller and smaller.
He called Kaja as he was passing under Ring 3 and told her about the sweater. And the scarf in the drawer. About Ringdal showing up, and his pistol. He asked her to check if he had a gun license, as soon as she could.
“One more thing—” Harry said.
“Does this mean you’re not on your way here?” she interrupted.
“What?”
“You’re five minutes away from me and you say ‘one more thing’ like we’re not going to be seeing each other soon.”
“I need to think,” Harry said. “And I think best on my own.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean to nag.”
“You’re not nagging.”
“No, I...” She sighed. “What’s the last thing?”
“Ringdal has a photograph of the shattered body of a woman on the wall above his computer. You know, so he can see her the whole time. Like a certificate or something.”
“Bloody hell. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. But do you think you could find a photograph of his ex-wife, the Russian one who disappeared?”
“Shouldn’t be too hard. If there’s nothing on Google, I’ll call her friend again. I’ll text it to you.”
“Thanks.” Harry drove slowly down Sognsveien, between the brick houses in the quiet, English-style garden district. He saw a pair of headlights coming towards him. “Kaja?”
“Yes?”
It was a bus. Pale, ghostly faces looked out at him from inside the illuminated vehicle as it passed. And among them Rakel’s face. They were coming more frequently now, the flashes of memory, like loose stones before a landslide.
“Nothing,” Harry said. “Goodnight.”
Harry was sitting on the sofa listening to the Ramones.
Not because the Ramones meant anything special to him, but because the album had been sitting on the record player ever since Bjørn had given it to him. And he realised he’d been steering clear of music since the funeral, that he hadn’t turned the radio on once, not here at home or in the Escort, and seemed to have preferred silence. Silence to think. Silence while he tried to hear what it was saying, the voice out there, on the other side of the darkness, behind a half-moon-shaped window, behind the windows of the ghostly bus, saying something he could almost hear. Almost. But now it needed to be drowned out instead. Because now it was talking too loudly, and he couldn’t bear to hear it.
He turned the volume up, closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the shelves of records behind the sofa. The Ramones. Road to Ruin. Joey’s punchy lyrics. Even so, it still sounded more pop than punk. That was what tended to happen. Success, the good life, age, they all made even the angriest of people more conciliatory. The way they had with Harry, making him milder, kinder. Almost sociable. Happily tamed by a woman he loved in a marriage that worked. Not perfect. Well, fuck it, as perfect as anyone could bear. Until one day, like a bolt from the blue, she picked at a sore point. Confronted him with her suspicions. And he had confessed. No, not confessed. He always told Rakel what she wanted to know, it was just up to her to ask. And she had always known better than to ask about more than she needed to know. So she must have thought she needed to know. One night with Katrine. Katrine had taken care of him on a night when he was so drunk that he couldn’t look after himself. Had they had sex? Harry didn’t remember, he had been rat-arsed, probably so drunk that even if he had tried he wouldn’t have managed it. But he told Rakel the truth, that it couldn’t be ruled out entirely. And then she had said that it didn’t make any difference, that he had betrayed her anyway, that she didn’t want to see him again, and told Harry to pack his things.
Just the thought of it now hurt so much that it left Harry gasping for breath.
He had taken a bag of clothes, his bathroom stuff and his records, leaving the CDs behind. Harry hadn’t drunk a drop of alcohol since the night Katrine picked him up, but the day Rakel threw him out he went straight to the liquor store. And was stopped by one of the staff when he started to unscrew one of the bottles before he was out of the shop.
Alexandra would be working on the sweater by now.
Harry put the pieces together in his head.
If it was Rakel’s blood, then the case was sorted. On the night of the murder, Peter Ringdal left the Jealousy Bar around 22:30 and paid Rakel an unannounced visit, possibly under the pretext of trying to persuade her to remain as chairperson. She let him in, gave him a glass of water. She turned down his offer. Unless perhaps she said yes. Perhaps that was why he stayed longer, because they had things to discuss. And perhaps the conversation had slipped on to more personal subjects. Ringdal probably told Rakel about Harry’s outrageous behaviour in the bar earlier, and Rakel would have told him about Harry’s problems and — this was the first time Harry had considered this — that Harry had set up a wildlife camera that he didn’t think Rakel knew anything about. Rakel might even have told Ringdal where the camera was mounted. They had shared their troubles, and possibly their joys, and at some point Ringdal evidently thought the time was right to make a more physical move. But this time he was definitely rejected. And in the rage that followed this humiliation, Ringdal grabbed the knife from the block on the kitchen counter and stabbed her. Stabbed her several times, either in ongoing rage or because he realised it was too late, the damage was done, and he had to finish the job, kill her and get rid of the evidence. He managed to keep a clear head. Do what had to be done. And when he left the scene, he took a trophy with him, a certificate, like when he took a photograph of the other woman he had killed. The red scarf that was hanging next to Rakel’s coat under the hat rack. Then, when he was sitting in his car, he remembered just in time about the camera Rakel had mentioned, got out and removed it. He got rid of the memory card at the petrol station. Tossed the sweater with Rakel’s blood on it on the floor with his dirty washing. Maybe he hadn’t even seen the blood, because presumably then he would have washed it at once. That was what had happened.