Jo Nesbo - Knife

“I thought that was in the autumn,” Harry said.

The woman and girl stared at him silently. At first he interpreted this as hostility, as if he had accused them of fraud. Then he realised it was derision, probably because he was half naked and stank of drink at four o’clock in the afternoon. And was evidently entirely unaware of the nationwide, door-to-door charity collection that had been getting loads of TV coverage.

Harry checked to see if he felt any shame. Actually, he did. A little bit. He stuck his hand into the trouser pocket where he usually kept his cash when he was drinking, because he had learned from experience that it wasn’t wise to take bank cards with him.

He smiled at the girl, who was staring wide-eyed at his bloody hand as he pushed a folded note into the slot on the sealed collection box. He caught a glimpse of a moustache just before the money disappeared. Edvard Munch’s moustache.

“Damn,” Harry said, and put his hand back in his pocket. Empty. Like his bank account.

“Sorry?” the woman said.

“I thought it was a two hundred, but I gave you a Munch. A thousand kroner.”

“Oh...”

“Can I... er, have it back?”

The girl and woman looked at him in silence. The girl cautiously lifted the box a little higher so that he could see the plastic seal across the charity logo more clearly.

“I see,” Harry whispered. “What about change?”

The woman smiled as though he were trying to be funny, and he smiled back to assure her that she was right, while his brain searched desperately for a solution to the problem. 299 kroner and 90 øre before six o’clock. Or 169.90 for a half-bottle.

“You’ll have to console yourself with the fact that the money will go to people who really need it,” the woman said, guiding the girl back towards the stairs.

Harry closed the door, went into the kitchen and rinsed the blood off his hand, feeling a sting of pain as he did so. Back in the living room, he looked around and saw that there was a bloody handprint on the duvet cover. He got down on all fours and found his mobile under the sofa. No texts, just three missed calls from last night, one from Bjørn Holm, the forensics officer from Toten, and two from Alexandra from the Forensic Medical Institute lab. She and Harry had become intimately acquainted fairly recently, after he got thrown out, and going by what he knew — and remembered — about her, Alexandra wasn’t the sort to use menstruation as grounds to cancel on him. The first night, when she had helped him home and they had both searched his pockets in vain for his keys, she had picked the lock with disconcerting ease and laid him — and herself — down on the sofa bed. And when he had woken up again she was gone, leaving just a note thanking him for services rendered. It could have been her blood.

Harry closed his eyes and tried to focus. The events and chronology of the past few weeks were pretty hazy, but when it came to last night his memory was blank. Completely blank, in fact. He opened his eyes and looked down at his stinging right hand. Three bleeding knuckles, with the skin scraped off and congealed blood around the edges of the wounds. He must have punched someone. And three knuckles meant more than one punch. Then he noticed the blood on his trousers. Too much of it to have come from his knuckles alone. And it was hardly menstrual blood.

Harry pulled the cover off the duvet as he returned the missed call from Bjørn Holm. As it started to ring, he knew that somewhere out there a ringtone in the form of a particular song by Hank Williams had gone off, a song Bjørn was convinced was about a forensics officer like him.

“How’s things?” Bjørn asked in his cheery Toten dialect.

“That depends,” Harry said, going into the bathroom. “Can you lend me three hundred kroner?”

“It’s Sunday, Harry. The liquor store’s closed today.”

“Sunday?” Harry pulled his trousers off and stuffed both them and the duvet cover into the overflowing washing basket. “Bloody hell.”

“Did you want anything else?”

“You were the one who called me, around nine o’clock.”

“Yes, but you didn’t answer.”

“No, looks like my phone’s been under the sofa for the past day or so. I was at the Jealousy.”

“I thought as much, so I called Øystein and he told me you were there.”

“And?”

“So I went over there. You really don’t remember any of this?”

“Shit. What happened?”

Harry heard his colleague sigh, and imagined him rolling his slightly protruding eyes, his pale moon of a face framed by a flat cap and the bushiest, reddest beard in Police Headquarters.

“What do you want to know?”

“Only as much as you think I need to know,” Harry said as he discovered something in the basket of dirty washing. The neck of a bottle, sticking up from the dirty underpants and T-shirts. He snatched it up. Jim Beam. Empty. Or was it? He unscrewed the top, put it to his lips and tipped his head back.

“OK, the short version,” Bjørn said. “When I arrived at the Jealousy Bar at 21:15 you were drunk, and by the time I drove you home at 22:30, you had only spoken coherently about one thing. One single person. Guess who?”

Harry didn’t answer, he was squinting cross-eyed at the bottle, following the drop that was trickling down inside it.

“Rakel,” Bjørn said. “You passed out in the car and I got you up into your flat, and that was that.”

Harry could tell by the speed of the drop that he had plenty of time, and he moved the bottle away from his mouth. “Hm. That was that?”

“That’s the short version.”

“Did we fight?”

“You and me ?”

“From the way you stress ‘me,’ it sounds like I had a fight with someone. Who?”

“The Jealousy’s new owner may have taken a bit of a knock.”

“A knock? I woke up with three bloody knuckles and blood on my trousers.”

“Your first punch hit him on the nose, so there was a lot of blood. But then he ducked and you punched the wall instead. More than once. The wall’s probably still got your blood on it.”

“But Ringdal didn’t fight back?”

“To be honest, you were so fucked that there was no way you were going to hurt anyone, Harry. Øystein and I managed to stop you before you did yourself any more damage.”

“Shit. So I’m barred?”

“Oh, Ringdal deserved at least one punch. He’d played the whole of that White Ladder album and had just put it on again. Then you started yelling at him for ruining the bar’s reputation, which you claimed you, Øystein and Rakel had built up.”

“But we had! That bar was a gold mine, Bjørn. He got the whole thing for next to nothing, and I only made one demand. That he should take a stand against all the crap, and only play decent music.”

“ Your music?”

“ Our music, Bjørn. Yours, mine, Øystein’s, Mehmet’s... Just not... just no fucking David Gray!”

“Maybe you should have been more specific... Uh-oh, the little lad’s started crying, Harry.”

“Oh, right, sorry. And thanks. And sorry about last night. Shit, I sound like an idiot. Let’s just hang up. Say hi to Katrine.”

“She’s at work.”

The line went dead. And at that moment, in a sudden flash, Harry saw something. It happened so quickly he didn’t have time to see what it was, but his heart was suddenly beating so hard that he gasped for breath.

Harry looked at the bottle that he was still holding upside down. The drop had trickled out. He looked down. A brown drop was glinting on a filthy white floor tile.

He sighed. He sank to the floor, naked, feeling the cold tiles under his knees. He stuck his tongue out, took a deep breath and leaned forward, resting his forehead on the floor, as if in prayer.