There was no doubt, Harry was in a trance.
“You’re lying on a floor,” Ståle said slowly and calmly. “You’re on the floor of the living room in Rakel’s and your house. And above you, you see a crystal chandelier where the crystals form the letter S. What else can you see?”
Harry’s lips moved. His eyelids fluttered. The first two fingers on his right hand flexed in an involuntary twitch. His lips moved again, but no sound came out, not yet. He started to move his head back and forth at the same time as he pushed himself harder against the back of the chair, with a look of pain on his face. Then, like someone having a fit, two strong jolts ran through his long body, and Harry sat there with his eyes wide open, staring in front of him.
“Harry?”
“I’m here.” Harry’s voice was hoarse, thick. “It didn’t work.”
“How do you feel?”
“Tired.” Harry stood up. Swayed. He blinked hard and stared into space. “I need to go home.”
“Maybe you should sit down for a while,” Ståle said. “If you don’t finish the session properly, it can leave you feeling dizzy and disorientated.”
“Thanks, Ståle, but I have to go. Goodnight.”
“In the worst cases it can lead to anxiety, depression and other unpleasantness. Let’s just take a little while to make sure you’re back on your feet, Harry.”
But Harry was already on his way to the door. Ståle got to his feet, but by the time he reached the hall the front door was already closing.
Harry managed to get to his car and bend over behind it before he threw up. Then again. Only when his half-digested breakfast, the only thing he had eaten that day, was completely out of his stomach did he stand up, wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, blink away the tears and unlock the car. He got in and stared through the windshield.
He took out his phone. Called the number Bjørn had given him.
After a few seconds, a groggy male voice muttered his surname, like a tic, a habit from the stone age of telephony.
“Sorry to wake you, Freund. This is Inspector Harry Hole again. Something’s cropped up that’s made things urgent, so I was wondering if you can let me have your preliminary findings from the wildlife camera?”
The sound of a long yawn. “I’m not finished.”
“That’s why I said preliminary, Freund. Anything at all would be a help.”
Harry heard the expert at 3-D analysis of 2-D images talk in a whisper to someone else before he came back.
“It’s tricky to determine the height and width of the man entering the house because he’s crouching,” Freund said. “But it could — and I emphasise could — look like the person who comes back out again — assuming that this person is standing upright in the doorway and isn’t wearing heels or anything like that — is between one metre ninety and one ninety-five. And it looks like the car, based on the design and distance between the brake and rear lights, could be a Ford Escort.”
Harry took a deep breath. “Thanks, Freund, that’s pretty much all I needed to know. Take as long as you need with the rest, there’s no longer any rush. In fact, you can leave it at that. Send me the memory card and your invoice at the return address that was on the envelope.”
“Addressed to you personally?”
“It’s more practical that way. We’ll be in touch if we need a more detailed description.”
“Whatever you want, Hole.”
Harry ended the call.
The 3-D expert’s conclusion merely confirmed what Harry already knew. He had already seen everything when he was sitting in Ståle Aune’s armchair. He remembered everything now.
36
The white Escort was parked in Berg, where the clouds were chasing across the sky as if they were fleeing something, but the night wasn’t yet showing any signs of retreat.
Harry Hole rested his forehead against the inside of the damp, ice-cold windshield. He felt like turning the radio on, Stone Hard FM, hard rock, turning the volume as loud as it would go and blasting his head empty for a few seconds. But he couldn’t, he needed to think.
It was almost incomprehensible. Not the fact that he had suddenly remembered. But the fact that he had managed not to remember, to shut it out. It was as if Ståle’s command about the living room and the S-shape, the sound of Rakel’s name, had forced his eyes open. And in that instant it was there, all of it.
It was night, and he had woken up. He was staring directly up at the crystal chandelier. He realised he was back, back in the living room on Holmenkollveien. But he didn’t know how he had ended up there. The lighting was subdued, the way he and Rakel liked it when they were alone. He could feel that his hand was lying in something wet, sticky. He lifted it. Blood? Then he had rolled over. Rolled over and looked right into her face. She hadn’t looked like she was sleeping. Or like she was staring blankly at him. Or like she had lost consciousness. She looked like she was dead.
He was lying in a pool of blood.
Harry had done what you’re always supposed to do — he pinched himself in the arm. He dug his fingernails into his skin as hard as he could, hoping that the pain would make the vision go away, that he would wake up, yawn with relief and thank the God he didn’t believe in that it had only been a nightmare.
He hadn’t tried to revive her, he had seen too many dead bodies and knew it was too late. It looked like she’d been stabbed with a knife, her cardigan was soaked with blood, darker around the stab wounds in her stomach. But it was the blow to the back of her neck that had killed her. An efficient and deadly wound, inflicted by someone who knew that was what it would be. Someone like him.
Had he killed Rakel?
He had looked around the room in search of evidence to the contrary.
There was no one else there. Just him and her. And the blood. Could that be right?
He had got to his feet and stumbled over to the front door.
It was locked. If anyone had been there and left, they must have used a key to lock it from the outside. He had wiped his bloody hand on his trousers, opened the drawer in the chest. Both sets of keys were there. Hers and his. The ones he had given back to her one afternoon at Schrøder’s, when he had pestered her to take him back, even though he had promised himself that he wasn’t going to do that.
The only other keys were a little way south of the North Pole, in Lakselv with Oleg.
He had looked around. There was too much to take in, too much to grasp, too much for him to be able to find any sort of explanation. Had he killed the woman he loved? Destroyed what he valued more than anything? When he expressed it the first way, when he whispered Rakel’s name, it seemed impossible. But when he said it the other way, about destroying everything he had, it didn’t seem impossible at all. And all he knew, all he had learned from experience, had taught him that facts beat gut feeling. Gut feeling was just a collection of ideas that could be trumped by a single, crushing fact. And the fact here was this: he was a spurned husband who was in a room with his murdered spouse, a room that had been locked from the inside.
He knew what he was doing. That, by going into detective mode, he was trying to protect himself against the unbearable pain he couldn’t yet feel but knew was on its way, like an unstoppable train. That he was trying to reduce the fact that Rakel was lying there dead on the floor to a murder case, something he could handle, the way he had — before he had started to drink alone — made his way to the nearest bar the moment he felt that the pain of living needed to be combated with his talent for drinking, with performing in an arena where he had once imagined himself its master. And why not? Why not assume that the part of the brain governed by instinct is making the only logical, necessary choice when you see your life, your only reason for living, lying broken in front of you? When it chooses to take flight. Alcohol. Detective mode.