Jo Nesbo - Knife

Not that Johan didn’t have his good qualities. He did. He was kind. Considerate. Loyal. He was . Alise had known men who had far fewer scruples about deceiving their wives than Johan Krohn. The question that had begun to worry Alise, though, wasn’t Johan’s loyalty to his family, but what she herself was getting out of it. No, she hadn’t had a carefully thought-out plan when she embarked upon the affair with Johan, it wasn’t that calculated. As a newly qualified lawyer she had obviously been star-struck by the hotshot lawyer who had been permitted to practise in the Supreme Court when he had barely started shaving, and was a partner in one of the best law firms in the city. But Alise was also fully aware of what she, with her average grades, had to offer a law firm, and what with her youth and appearance she had to offer a man. At the end of the day (Johan had stopped correcting her Anglicisms and had instead started to copy them), the reasons why you choose to have an affair with someone were a combination of rational and apparently irrational factors. (Johan would have pointed out that factors lead to a product , not a combination .) It was hard to know what was what, and perhaps it wasn’t that useful to know anyway. What was more important was that she was no longer sure if the combination was positive. She may have got a slightly larger office than the others on the same level as her, and perhaps slightly more interesting cases as a result of working for Johan. But her annual bonus was the same, symbolic amount that the other non-partners got. And there hadn’t been any indication that she could expect anything more. And even if Alise knew how much married men’s promises to leave their wives and families were worth, Johan hadn’t even bothered to make any of those.

“In general terms,” Svein Finne said, and smiled.

Brown teeth, she noted. But also that he didn’t smoke, seeing as he was sitting so close to her that she could feel his breath on her face.

“Twenty-five,” he said. “You kn-know you’re heading past the most fruitful time for having children?”

Alise stared at Finne. How did he know how old she was?

“The best age is your late t-teens, up to twenty-four,” Finne said, as his eyes slid over her. Yes, slid, Alise thought. Like a physical thing, like a snail leaving a trail of slime behind it.

“From then on, the health risks increase, and also the chances of spontaneous miscarriage,” he said, tugging up one cuff of his flannel shirt. He pressed a button on the side of his digital watch. “While the quality of men’s semen remains the same throughout their lives.”

That isn’t true, she thought. She had read that compared to a man her age, the risk of a man over the age of forty-one getting you pregnant was five times lower. And he was five times as likely to give you a child suffering from some sort of autism. She’d googled it. She had been invited by Frank to join him and a couple of fellow students on a trip to the mountains. When she and Frank were together he had been rather too fond of partying, without any clear goal or good grades, and she had written him off as a daddy’s boy with no motivation of his own. That turned out to be wrong, Frank had done surprisingly well in his father’s law firm. But she still hadn’t replied to the invitation.

“So look upon this as my and Johan Krohn’s gift to you,” Finne said, undoing his jacket.

Alise looked at him intently. A thought flew through her head, that he was going to attack her, but she dismissed it. Johan would be here any minute, and they were in a very public place. OK, there was nobody in their immediate vicinity, but she could see someone on the other side of the lake, maybe two hundred metres away, sitting on another bench.

“What...” Alise began, but got no further. Svein Finne’s left hand had locked around her throat, and his right hand was shoving his jacket aside. She tried to breathe but couldn’t. His erect penis had a curve, like a swan’s neck.

“Don’t be scared, I’m not like the others,” Finne said. “I don’t kill.”

Alise tried to get up from the bench, tried to push his arm away, but his hand was like a claw that had locked around her throat.

“Not if you do as I say,” Finne said. “First, look .”

He was still holding her with just one hand, and sat there, legs apart, exposed, as if he wanted her to look at it, see what she had coming. And Alise looked. Saw the white swan’s neck with its veins and a dancing red dot that was moving up the shaft.

What was that? What was that?

Then the head of his penis exploded as she heard a muffled sound, like when she tenderised a steak extra hard with the meat hammer. She felt a warm rain on her face and got something in her eye, and closed them as she heard thunder roll over them.

For a moment Alise thought it was her screaming, but when she opened her eyes again she saw that it was Svein Finne. He was holding both hands to his groin, blood was pumping between his fingers, and he was staring at her with big, shocked, accusing eyes as if she was the person who had done this to him.

Then the red dot was there again, on his face this time. It slid over his furrowed cheek, up to his eye. She could see the red dot on the white of his eye. And perhaps Finne saw it too. Either way, he whispered something that she didn’t hear until he repeated it.

“Help.”

Alise knew what was coming, closed her eyes and managed to put one protective hand in front of her face before she heard the sound again, more like a whip crack this time. And then, with a long delay, as if the shot had been fired from a long way away, the same rolling thunder.

Roar Bohr looked through the sniper sight.

The last headshot had thrown the target backwards, then he had slid sideways off the bench and was now lying on the gravel path. He moved the sight. Saw the young woman running along the path towards Hegnar Media, saw her throw her arms around a man who was hurrying towards her. Then the man took out a phone and started tapping at it, as if he knew exactly what he should do. Which he probably did, but what did Bohr know?

No more than he wanted to know.

No more than Harry Hole had told him twenty-four hours ago.

That he had found the man Bohr had been looking for all these years.

In a conversation with what Harry said was an extremely reliable source, Svein Finne had claimed to have raped Bishop Bohr’s daughter many years ago in Mærradalen.

The case had long since passed the statute of limitations, of course.

But Harry had what he called a “solution.”

And he had told Bohr all he needed to know, and no more. Just like when he was in E14. Two o’clock by Smestaddammen, on the same bench that Harry and Pia had sat on.

Roar Bohr moved the sight, and from the other side of the lake he saw a woman walking away quickly. As far as he could tell, she seemed to be the only other witness. He closed the basement window and put the rifle down. Looked at the time. He had promised Harry Hole that it would be done within two minutes of the target arriving, and he had stuck to that, even if he had given in to the temptation of letting Svein Finne have a little foretaste of his impending death when he exposed himself. But he had used so-called frangible bullets, bullets with no lead that disintegrate and stay inside the body of the target. Not because he needed them to in order to be fatal, but because the police’s ballistics experts wouldn’t have a projectile that could be matched to a weapon, or any point of impact in the ground that would enable them to work out where the shots had been fired from. In short, they would be left standing there, looking up helplessly at a hillside covered with something like a thousand houses, and with absolutely no idea where they should start looking.