Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (11 page)

She had been told why.

And she had listened to the sick but limpid logic as the blood slowed in her veins, as if it were already coagulating. Then she had been told how. In detail. And the loop had begun to glow, first red then white. That was when she had swung her arm in horror, felt the recently sharpened hatchet blade cut through the material under the raised arm, seen the jacket and sweater open as if she had unzipped them and seen the steel slice a red line through the bare skin. As the figure had staggered backwards and fallen on the floorboards slippery with chickens’ blood, she had raced to the door at the back of the barn. The one leading into the forest. Into the darkness.

The numbness had spread over her knees, and her clothes were soaked up to her navel. But she knew she would soon be on the gravel road. And from there it was no more than a quarter of an hour’s run to the nearest farm. The stream turned. Her left foot kicked something protruding from the water. There was a crack, it felt like someone had grabbed her foot, and the next moment Sylvia Ottersen was falling headlong. She landed on her stomach, swallowed water tasting of earth and rotten leaves, then pushed herself into a kneeling position. Once she knew she was still alone, and the first panic had passed, she discovered that her foot was trapped. She groped with her hand under the water expecting to find entwined tree roots around her foot, but instead her fingers felt something smooth and hard. Metal. A metal ring. Sylvie’s gaze scoured around for what she had kicked. And there on the snowy bank she saw it. It had eyes, feathers and a pale red cockscomb. She felt her terror mounting again. It was a severed chicken’s head. Not one of the heads she had just cut off, but one of the ones Rolf used. As bait. After writing to the local council that a fox had killed sixteen chickens last year, they had been given permission to set a limited number of fox traps – so-called swan necks – at a certain radius around the farm, well off the beaten
track. The best place to hide traps was underwater with the bait sticking up. After the fox had taken the bait, the trap snapped shut, breaking the neck of the animal and killing it instantly. At least in theory. She felt with her hand. When they had bought the traps at Jaktdepotet in Drammen, they had said the springs were so strong that the jaws could break the leg of an adult, but she couldn’t feel any pain in her frozen foot. Her fingers found the thin steel wire attached to the swan neck. She wouldn’t be able to force open the trap without the lever, which was in the farm tool shed, and anyway they usually tied the swan neck to a tree with steel wire so that a half-dead fox, or anything else, would not be able to run off with the expensive equipment. Her hand traced the wire through the water and up onto the bank. There was the metal sign bearing their names, as per regulations.

She stiffened. Wasn’t that a twig she heard breaking in the distance? She felt her heart pounding again as she stared into the dense murk.

Numb fingers followed the wire through the snow as she crawled up onto the bank of the stream. The wire was fastened around the trunk of a solid young birch tree. She searched for and found the knot under the snow. The metal had frozen into a stiff, unyielding lump. She had to open it, had to get away.

Another twig cracked. Closer this time.

She leaned against the trunk, on the opposite side to where she had heard the sound. Told herself not to panic, that the knot would come loose after she had yanked at it for a while, that her leg was intact, that the sounds she heard coming closer were made by a deer. She tried pulling at one end of the knot and didn’t feel the pain when a fingernail broke down the middle. But it was no use. She bent over and her teeth crunched as she bit into the steel. Shit! She could hear light, quiet footsteps in the snow and held her breath. The steps paused somewhere on the other side of the tree. She might have been imagining things, but she thought she could hear it scenting the air, inhaling the smell. She sat utterly motionless. Then it began to move again. The sounds were softer. It was going away.

She took a deep, quivering breath. Now she would have to free herself. Her clothes were soaked and she would certainly freeze to death at night if no one found her. At that moment she remembered. The hatchet! She had forgotten the hatchet. The wire was thin. Put it on a stone, a couple of well-aimed blows and she would be free. The hatchet must have fallen in the stream. She crawled back into the black water, put her hands down and searched the stony bottom.

Nothing.

In despair, she sank to her knees, scanning the snow on both banks. And then she caught sight of the blade poking up out of the water two metres in front of her. And already she knew, before she felt the wire jerk, before she lay down flat in the water with the melted snow gurgling over her, so cold that she thought her heart would stop, stretching like a desperate beggar for the hatchet, already she knew that it was half a metre too far. Her fingers curled around air fifty centimetres from the handle. Tears came, but she forced them back; she could cry afterwards.

‘Is this what you’re looking for?’

She had neither seen nor heard a thing. But in front of her sat a figure, crouched down.
It
. Sylvia scrambled back, but the figure followed with the hatchet held out to her.

‘Just take it.’

Sylvia got to her knees and took the hatchet.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ the voice asked.

Sylvia felt the fury surge up inside her, the fury that always accompanies fear, and the result was ferocious. She lunged forward with the hatchet raised and swung low with an outstretched arm. But the wire tugged at her, the hatchet just sliced the darkness and the next moment she was lying in the water again.

The voice chuckled.

Sylvia fell onto her side. ‘Go away,’ she groaned, spitting pebbles.

‘I want you to eat snow,’ the voice said, getting up and briefly holding the side where the jacket had been slashed open.

‘What?’ Sylvia exclaimed, in spite of herself.

‘I want you to eat snow until you piss yourself.’ The figure stood slightly outside the radius of the steel wire, tilted its head and watched Sylvia. ‘Until your stomach is so frozen and full that it can’t melt the snow any longer. Until it’s ice inside. Until you’ve become your true self. Something that can’t feel.’

Sylvia’s brain perceived the words, but could not absorb the meaning. ‘Never!’ she screamed.

A sound came from the figure and blended into the gurgle of the stream. ‘Now’s the time to scream, dear Sylvia. For no one will hear you again. Ever.’

Sylvia saw it raise something. Which lit up. A loop formed the outline of a red, glowing raindrop against the dark. It hissed and smoked as it came into contact with the surface of the stream. ‘You’ll choose to eat snow. Believe me.’

Sylvia realised with a paralysing certainty that her final hour had come. There was only one possibility left. In the past minutes night had fallen quickly, but she tried to focus her gaze on the figure between the trees as she weighed the hatchet in her hand. The blood tingled in her fingers as it streamed back, seeming to know that this was the last chance. They had practised this, the twins and her. On the barn wall. And every time she had thrown and one of them had pulled the hatchet out of the fox-shaped target, they had cheered with jubilation: ‘You killed the beast, Mummy! You killed the beast!’ Sylvia put one foot slightly in front of the other. A one-step run-up, that was the optimum to get the right combination of power and accuracy.

‘You’re crazy,’ she whispered.

‘Of that …’ the figure said, and Sylvia thought she could discern a little smile, ‘there is little doubt.’

The hatchet whirled through the thick, almost tangible darkness with a low hum. Sylvia stood perfectly balanced with her right arm pointed forward and watched the lethal weapon. Watched it whistle through the trees. Heard it cut off a thin branch. Watched it disappear into the darkness and heard the dull thud as the hatchet buried itself in the snow somewhere deep in the forest.

She leaned back against the tree trunk and slowly slumped to the ground. Felt the tears come without attempting to stop them this time. Because now she knew. There would be no afterwards.

‘Shall we begin?’ the voice said softly.

‘W
AS THAT
GREAT
OR WHAT
?’

Oleg’s enthusiastic voice drowned out the spitting fat in the kebab shop crowded with people pouring in after the concert at Oslo Spektrum. Harry nodded to Oleg who was standing in his hoody, still sweaty, still moving to the beat, as he prattled on about the members of Slipknot by name, names Harry didn’t even know since Slipknot CDs were sparing with personal data, and music magazines like
MOJO
and
Uncut
didn’t write about bands like that. Harry ordered hamburgers and looked at his watch. Rakel had said she would be standing outside at ten o’clock. Harry looked at Oleg again. He was talking non-stop. When had it happened? When had the boy turned eleven and decided to like music about various stages of death, alienation, freezing and general doom? Perhaps it ought to have worried Harry, but it didn’t. It was a starting point, a curiosity that had to be satisfied, clothes the boy had to try on to see if they fitted. Other things would come along. Better things. Worse things.

‘You liked it too, didn’t you, Harry?’

Harry nodded. He didn’t have the heart to tell him the concert had been a bit of an anticlimax for him. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was; perhaps it just wasn’t his night. As soon as they had joined the
crowd in Spektrum, he had felt the paranoia which regularly accompanied drunkenness, but which during the last year had come when he was sober. And instead of getting into the mood he had had the feeling he was being observed and stood scanning the audience, studying the wall of faces around them.

‘Slipknot rules,’ Oleg said. ‘And the masks were übercool. Especially the one with the long, thin nose. It looked like a … sort of …’

Harry was listening with half an ear, hoping Rakel would come soon. The air inside the kebab shop suddenly felt dense and suffocating, like a thin film of grease lying on your skin and over your mouth. He tried not to think his next thought. But it was on its way, had already rounded the corner. The thought of a drink.

‘It’s an Indian death mask,’ a woman’s voice behind them said. ‘And Slayer was better than Slipknot.’

Harry spun round in surprise.

‘Lots of posing with Slipknot, isn’t there?’ she continued. ‘Recycled ideas and empty gestures.’

She was wearing a shiny, figure-hugging, ankle-length black coat buttoned up to her neck. All you could see under the coat was a pair of black boots. Her face was pale and her eyes made up.

‘I would never have believed it,’ Harry said. ‘You liking that kind of music.’

Katrine Bratt managed a brief smile. ‘I suppose I would say the opposite.’

She gave him no further explanation and signalled to the man behind the counter that she wanted a Farris mineral water.

‘Slayer sucks,’ Oleg mumbled under his breath.

Katrine turned to him. ‘You must be Oleg.’

‘Yes,’ Oleg said sulkily, pulling up his army trousers and looking as if he both liked and disliked this attention from a mature woman. ‘How d’ya know?’

Katrine smiled. ‘“How d’ya know?” Living on Holmenkollen Ridge as you do, shouldn’t you say “How do you know?”’ Is Harry teaching you bad habits?’

Blood suffused Oleg’s cheeks.

Katrine laughed quietly and patted Oleg’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, I’m just curious.’

The boy’s face went so red that the whites of his eyes were shining.

‘I’m also curious,’ Harry said, passing a burger to Oleg. ‘I assume you’ve found the pattern I asked for, Bratt. Since you’ve got time to come to a gig.’

Harry looked at her in a way that spelt out his warning: Don’t tease the boy.

‘I’ve found something,’ Katrine said, twisting the plastic top off the Farris bottle. ‘But you’re busy so we can sort it out tomorrow.’

‘I’m not
so
busy,’ Harry said. He had already forgotten the film of grease, the feeling of suffocation.

‘It’s confidential and there are a lot of people here,’ Katrine said. ‘But I can whisper a couple of key words.’

She leaned closer, and over the fat he could smell the almost masculine fragrance of perfume and feel her warm breath on his ear.

‘A silver Volkswagen Passat has just pulled up on the pavement outside. There’s a woman sitting inside trying to catch your attention. I would guess it’s Oleg’s mother …’

Harry straightened up with a jolt and looked out of the large window towards the car. Rakel had wound down the window and was peering in at them.

‘Don’t make a mess,’ Rakel said as Oleg jumped onto the back seat with the burger in his hand.

Harry stood beside the open window. She was wearing a plain, light blue sweater. He knew that sweater well. Knew how it smelt, how it felt against the palm of his hand and cheek.

‘Good gig?’ she asked.

‘Ask Oleg.’

‘What sort of band was it actually?’ She looked at Oleg in the mirror. ‘Those people outside are a bit oddly dressed.’

‘Quiet songs about love and so on,’ Oleg said, sending a quick wink to Harry when her eyes were off the mirror.

‘Thank you, Harry,’ she said.

‘My pleasure. Drive carefully.’

‘Who was that woman inside?’

‘A colleague. New on the job.’

‘Oh? Looked as if you knew each other pretty well already.’

‘How so?’

‘You …’ She stopped in mid-sentence. Then she slowly shook her head and laughed. A deep but bright laugh that came from down in her throat. Confident and carefree at the same time. The laugh that had once made him fall in love.

‘Sorry, Harry. Goodnight.’

The window glided upwards; the silver car glided off the pavement.

Harry walked the gauntlet down Brugata, between bars with music blaring out of open doors. He considered a coffee at Teddy’s Softbar, but knew it would be a bad idea. So he made up his mind to walk on by.