“Knife wounds.”
He saw Katrine swallow. He could tell she had been hoping to spare him.
“Her stomach,” she said.
“So not necessarily a painless death, then?”
“Harry…”
“Go on,” Harry said harshly, hunching over. It was as if he could feel the stab wounds himself.
Katrine cleared her throat. “As you know, it’s usually extremely difficult to determine the time of death with any degree of accuracy when someone’s been dead for over twenty-four hours, as in this case. But as you may have heard, the Forensic Medical Institute and the Criminal Forensics Unit have together developed a new method where they combine measurements of rectal temperature, eye temperature, hypoxanthine levels in the intraocular fluid, and brain temperature…”
“Brain temperature?”
“Yes. The cranium protects the brain which means that it’s less affected by external factors. They insert a needle-like probe through the nose, into the lamina cribrosa where the base of the skull—”
“You’ve obviously learned a lot of Latin recently.”
Katrine stopped.
“Sorry,” Harry said. “I’m…I’m not…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Katrine said. “There were a couple of fortuitous external factors. We know that the temperature on the ground floor was constant, because all the radiators are controlled by a central thermostat. And because that temperature was relatively low…”
“She used to say she thought better with a woolly jumper and a cold head,” Harry said.
“…the internal organs of the body hadn’t yet quite cooled down to the temperature of the room. Which means that we’ve been able to use this new method to determine that the time of death was somewhere between 22:00 on Saturday and 02:00 on Sunday, 11 March.”
“What about the crime-scene investigation, what did that come up with?”
“The front door was unlocked when the first officers arrived, and because it hasn’t got a Yale lock, that suggests the perpetrator left via that door. There are no signs of a break-in, which suggests that the front door was unlocked when the killer arrived…”
“Rakel always kept that door locked. And all the other doors. That house is a fucking fortress.”
“…or that Rakel let him in.”
“Mm.” Harry turned and looked impatiently for Nina.
“You’re right about it being a fortress. Bjørn was one of the first on the scene, and he says he went through the house from basement to attic, and all the doors were locked from the inside, and all the windows closed with their latches on. So what do you think?”
“I think there must be more evidence.”
“Yes,” Katrine said with a nod. “There’s evidence of someone removing the evidence. Someone whoknowswhat evidence he needs to remove.”
“OK. And you don’t think that Finne knows how to do that?”
“Oh, I do. And obviously Finne is a suspect, he always will be. But we can’t say that publicly, we can’t point the finger at a specific individual based on nothing but gut feeling.”
“Gut feeling? Finne threatened me and my family, I’ve told you that.”
Katrine stayed silent.
Harry looked at her. Then he nodded slowly. “Correction:claimsthe spurned husband of the murder victim.”
Katrine leaned over the table. “Listen. The sooner we can rule you out of the case, the less fuss there’ll be. Right now Kripos are taking the lead, but we’re working with them, so I can push them to prioritise deciding whether or not you’re beyond suspicion, then we can issue a press release.”
“Press release?”
