Jo Nesbo - Knife

Harry had noted that Krohn said “we,” as if they were already a team. And something else had changed in Krohn. His face had a bit of colour in it again, he was breathing deeper, his pupils had dilated. Like a carnivore that’s caught sight of some prey, Harry thought. The same prey as me.

“There’s a widespread misconception that a scapegoat has to be innocent,” Krohn said. “But the purpose of the scapegoat isn’t to be innocent, but to take the blame, regardless of what he has or hasn’t done. Even under the current rule of law, we see that offenders who arouse public disgust but who are only tangentially guilty receive disproportionately severe sentences.”

“Shall we get to the point?” Harry said.

“The point?”

“Svein Finne.”

Krohn looked at Harry. Then gave a brief nod to indicate that they understood each other.

“With this new information,” Krohn said, “Finne no longer has an alibi for the time of the murder, he hadn’t arrived at the maternity ward by then. And he has a motive: he hates you. You and I can ensure that an active rapist ends up behind bars. And he isn’t an innocent scapegoat. Think about all the suffering he’s caused people. Do you know, Finne admitted... no, he boasted about assaulting the daughter of Bishop Bohr, who lived just a couple of hundred metres away from here.”

Harry took his cigarette packet from his pocket. He tapped out a bent cigarette. “Tell me what Finne’s got on you.”

Krohn laughed. Raised his cup to his lips to camouflage the fake laughter.

“I haven’t got time for games, Krohn. Come on, all the details.”

Krohn swallowed. “Of course. I’m sorry, I haven’t slept. Let’s go and have coffee in the library.”

“What for?”

“My wife... Sound doesn’t carry as far there.”

The acoustics were dry and muffled among the books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Harry listened as he sat slumped in a deep leather armchair. This time it was his turn not to touch his coffee.

“Mm,” he said when Krohn had finished. “Shall we skip the bit where we beat around the bush?”

“Of course,” said Krohn, who had put a raincoat on and reminded Harry of a flasher who used to hang around in a patch of woodland in Oppsal when Harry was a boy. Øystein and Harry had snuck up on the flasher and shot at him with water pistols. But what Harry remembered most was the look of sorrow in the wet, passive flasher’s eyes before they ran off, and that he regretted it afterwards without really knowing why.

“You don’t want Finne behind bars,” Harry said. “That wouldn’t stop him telling your wife what he knows. You want Finne out of the way. For good.”

“So...” Krohn began.

“That’s your problem with taking Finne alive,” Harry continued. “Mine is that if we manage to find him at all, he may still have an alibi for between 18:00 and 22:00 that we don’t know about. It may be that he was with the pregnant woman during the hours before they went to the maternity ward. Not that I imagine that she’d come forward if Finne was killed, of course.”

“Killed?”

“Liquidated, terminated, annulled.” Harry took a drag on the cigarette, which he had lit without asking permission. “I prefer ‘killed.’ Bad things deserve bad names.”

Krohn let out a short, bemused laugh. “You’re talking about cold-blooded murder, Harry.”

Harry shrugged. “Murder, yes. Cold-blooded, no. But if we’re going to manage this, we need to lower the temperature. If you understand me?”

Krohn nodded.

“Good,” Harry said. “Let me think for a minute.”

“Can I have one of your cigarettes?”

Harry handed him the packet.

The two men sat in silence, watching the smoke rise towards the ceiling.

“If—” Krohn began.

“Shhh.”

Krohn sighed.

His cigarette had almost burned down to the filter when Harry spoke again.

“What I need from you, Krohn, is a lie.”

“OK?”

“You need to say that Finne confessed to killing Rakel. And I’ll be inviting two more people to participate in this. One works at the Forensic Medicine Institute. The other is a sniper. None of you will know the names of the others. OK?”

Krohn had nodded.

“Good. We need to write an invitation to Finne, telling him when and where to meet your assistant, then you need to attach it to the grave with something I’m going to give you.”

“What?”

Harry took one last drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in his coffee cup. “A Trojan horse. Finne collects knives. If we’re lucky, it’ll be enough to kill any other speculation stone dead.”

Sung-min heard a crow somewhere among the trees as he looked up at the sheer rock face in front of him. The meltwater was painting black stripes down the grey granite, which rose up some thirty metres above him. He and Kasparov had been walking for almost three hours, and it was obvious that Kasparov was in pain now. Sung-min didn’t know if it was loyalty or the hunting instinct that was driving him on, but even when they had been standing at the end of the muddy forest track looking at the fragile rope-bridge across the river, with snow and pathless forest on the other side, he had been straining at the leash to keep going. Sung-min had seen footsteps in the snow on the other side, but he would have to carry Kasparov over the bridge while at the same time holding on with at least one hand. He found himself wondering: Then what? Sung-min’s hand-sewn Loake shoes were long since soaked through and ruined, but the question now was how far he would get on the slippery leather soles on the rugged, snow-covered terrain on the other side of the river.

Sung-min had crouched down in front of Kasparov, rubbed both hands together and looked into the old dog’s tired eyes.

“If you can, then so can I,” he had said.

Kasparov had whimpered and squirmed as Sung-min picked him up and carried him towards their wet fate, but somehow or other they had managed to get across.

And now, after twenty minutes of sliding about, their path was blocked by this rock face. Or was it? He followed the tracks that led to the side of the cliff, and there he saw a worn, slippery rope that was tied to a tree trunk farther up the almost vertical surface. Then he spotted that the rope carried on through the trees, and that there were some steps cut into the ground to make a path. But he wouldn’t be able to climb the rope and carry Kasparov at the same time.

“Sorry, my friend, this is bound to hurt,” Sung-min said, then knelt down, put Kasparov’s front legs around his neck, turned and strapped the dog’s legs around him tightly with his belt.

“If we don’t see anything up there, we’ll go back,” he said. “I promise.”

Sung-min grabbed the rope and braced his feet. Kasparov howled as he hung helplessly round his owner’s neck like a rucksack, his back legs scratching and scrabbling at the jacket of Sung-min’s suit.

It went quicker than Sung-min expected, and suddenly they were standing at the top of the cliff, where the forest carried on in front of them.

There was a red cabin twenty metres away.

Sung-min freed Kasparov, but instead of following the trail that led straight to the cabin, the dog shrank between his owner’s legs, whimpering and whining.

“There now, there’s nothing to be scared of,” Sung-min said. “Finne’s dead.”

Sung-min spotted animal tracks — large tracks, at that. Could that be what Kasparov was reacting to? He took a step towards the cabin. He felt the wire against his leg, but it was too late, and he knew he’d walked into a trap. There was a hissing sound, and he had time to see a flash of light from the object filled with explosive that flew up in front of him. He closed his eyes instinctively. When he opened them again, he had to lean his head back to see the object as it rose up into the sky, leaving a thin trail of smoke behind it. Then there was a damp kerblam as the rocket exploded, and even though it was daylight he saw the shower of yellow, blue and red, like a miniature Big Bang.