Jo Nesbo - Knife

“A knife,” Ståle Aune said, pushing his hands up into his armpits as if he was afraid someone was going to hit them. “There’s something about the idea of a knife. Cold steel pushing through skin and into your body. It just freaks me out, as the young folk would say.”

Harry didn’t reply. He and the Crime Squad Unit had used Aune as a consultant on murder cases for so many years that Harry couldn’t actually put his finger on when he had started to think of the psychologist, who was twenty years his senior, as a friend. But he knew Aune well enough to recognise that his pretending not to know that “freak out” was a phrase older than both of them was an affectation. Aune liked to present himself as an old, conservative type, unfettered by the spirit of the times his colleagues chased after so desperately in an effort to appear “relevant.” As Aune had once said to the press: Psychology and religion have one thing in common: to a large extent, they both give people what they want. Out there in the darkness, where the light of science has yet to reach, psychology and religion have free rein. And if they were to stick to what we actually know, there wouldn’t be jobs for all these psychologists and priests.

“So this was where the husband stabbed his wife... how many times?”

“Thirteen times,” Harry said, looking around. There was a large, framed black-and-white photograph of the Manhattan skyline on the wall facing them. The Chrysler Building in the centre. Probably bought from IKEA. So what? It was a good picture. If it didn’t bother you that lots of other people had the same picture, and that some visitors would look down their noses at it, not because it wasn’t good, but because it was bought at IKEA, then why not go for it? He had used the same line on Rakel when she said she would have liked a numbered print of a photograph by Torbjørn Rødland — a white stretch limo negotiating a hairpin bend in Hollywood — that cost eighty thousand kroner. Rakel had conceded that Harry was entirely right. He had been so happy that he had bought the stretch limo picture for her. Not that he didn’t realise she had tricked him, but because deep down he’d had to admit that it really was a much cooler image.

“He was angry,” Aune said, undoing the top button of his shirt, where he normally wore a bow tie, usually with a pattern that balanced between serious and amusing, like the blue EU flag with gold stars.

A child started to cry in one of the neighbouring flats.

Harry tapped the ash from his cigarette. “He says he can’t remember the details of why he killed her.”

“Suppressed memories. They should have let me hypnotise him.”

“I didn’t know you did that.”

“Hypnosis? How do you think I got married?”

“Well, there was no real need here. The forensic evidence shows that she was heading across the living room, away from him, and that he came after her and stabbed her from behind first. The blade penetrated low on her back and hit her kidneys. That probably explains why the neighbours didn’t hear any screaming.”

“Oh?”

“It’s such a painful place to be stabbed that the victim is paralysed, can’t even scream, then loses consciousness almost immediately and dies. It also happens to be the favoured method among military professionals for a so-called silent kill.”

“Really? What happened to the good old method of sneaking up on someone from behind, putting one hand over their mouth and cutting their throat with the other?”

“Outdated — it was never really that good anyway. It takes too much coordination and precision. You wouldn’t believe the number of times soldiers ended up cutting themselves in the hand that was clamped over the victim’s mouth.”

Aune grimaced. “I’m assuming our husband isn’t a former commando or anything like that?”

“The fact that he stabbed her there was probably sheer coincidence. There’s nothing to suggest that he intended to conceal the murder.”

“Intended? You’re saying it was premeditated rather than impulsive?”

Harry nodded slowly. “Their daughter was out jogging. He called the police before she got home so that we were in position outside and were able to stop her before she came in and found her mother.”

“Considerate.”

“So they say. That he was a considerate man.” Harry tapped more ash from his cigarette. It fell onto the pool of dried blood.

“Shouldn’t you get an ashtray, Harry?”

“The CSI team are done here, and everything makes sense.”

“Yes, but even so.”

“You haven’t asked about the motive.”

“OK. Motive?”

“Classic. The battery in his phone ran out, and he borrowed hers without her knowledge. He saw a text message he thought was suspicious, and checked the thread. The exchange went back six months, and was evidently between her and a lover.”

“Did he confront the lover?”

“No, but the report says the phone’s been checked, the messages found and the lover contacted. A young man, mid-twenties, twenty-five years younger than her. He’s confirmed that they had a relationship.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“The husband is a highly educated man with a secure job, no money worries, and had never been in trouble with the police. Family, friends, workmates and neighbours all describe him as friendly and mild-mannered, solidity personified. And, as you said, considerate. ‘A man prepared to sacrifice everything for his family,’ one of the reports said.” Harry drew hard on his cigarette.

“Are you asking me because you don’t think the case has been solved?”

Harry let the smoke out through his nostrils. “The case is a no-brainer, the evidence has all been secured, it’s impossible to fuck this one up, which is why Katrine has given it to me. And Truls Berntsen.” Harry pulled the corners of his mouth into something resembling a smile. The family was well off. But they chose to live in Tøyen, a cheaper part of town with a large migrant population, and bought art from IKEA. Maybe they just liked it here. Harry himself liked Tøyen. And maybe the picture on the wall was the original, now worth a small fortune.

“So you’re asking because...”

“Because I want to understand,” Harry said.

“You want to understand why a man kills his wife because she’s been having an affair behind his back?”

“Usually a husband only kills if he thinks other people’s opinion of him has been damaged. And when he was questioned, the lover said they had kept the affair strictly secret, and that it was in the process of winding down anyway.”

“Maybe she didn’t have time to tell her husband that before he stabbed her, then?”

“She did, but he says he didn’t believe her, and that she had still betrayed their family.”

“There you go. And to a man who has always put his family above everything else, that betrayal would feel even worse. He’s a humiliated man, and when that humiliation cuts deeply enough it can make anyone capable of killing.”

“Anyone?”

Aune squinted at the bookcases next to the picture of Manhattan. “Fiction.”

“Yes, so I saw,” Harry said. Aune had a theory that killers didn’t read, or, if they did, only non-fiction.

“Have you ever heard of Paul Mattiuzzi?” Aune asked.

“Hmm.”

“Psychologist, an expert in violence and murder. He divides murderers into eight main groups. You and I aren’t in any of the first seven. But there’s room for all of us in the eighth group, which he calls the ‘traumatised.’ We become murderers as a reaction to a simple but massive assault on our identity. We experience the attack as insulting, literally unbearable. It renders us helpless, impotent, and we would be left without any right to exist, emasculated, if we didn’t respond. And obviously being betrayed by your wife can feel like that.”