“I managed to take a quick look at the scene before your boss threw me out.”
Larsen tilted his head slightly and looked at Harry. As if he were evaluating him. “I see. Well, the business with the kitchen made us think of a third possibility. That it was a woman.”
“Oh?”
“I know it doesn’t often happen, but I’ve just read that a woman has confessed to the Borggata stabbing. The daughter. Heard of that one?”
“I might have.”
“A woman would be less suspicious of opening the door and letting another woman in, even if they didn’t know each other well. And for some reason or other, I find it easier to imagine a woman going straight into another woman’s kitchen than a man. OK, maybe that’s stretching things a bit.”
“I agree,” Harry said, without specifying if he meant the first, second or both ideas. Or that he agreed in general, that he had thought the same when he was at the scene.
“Are there any women who could have had a motive to harm Rakel Fauke?” Larsen asked. “Jealousy, anything like that?”
Harry shook his head. Obviously he could have mentioned Silje Gravseng, but there was no reason to do that now. A few years ago she had been one of his students at Police College, and the closest thing Harry had had to a female stalker. She had visited him in his office one evening and tried to seduce him. Harry had rejected her advances, and she had reacted by accusing him of rape. But her story had been so full of holes that her own lawyer, Johan Krohn, had stopped her, and the whole thing ended with Silje having to leave Police College. After that she paid a visit to Rakel at the house, not to harm or threaten her, but to apologise. All the same, Harry had run a quick check on Silje yesterday. Perhaps because he remembered the hatred in her eyes when she’d realised he didn’t want her. Perhaps because the lack of physical evidence suggested the killer knew a thing or two about detection methods. Perhaps because he wanted to rule out all other possibilities before reaching a final verdict. And enacting a final sentence. It hadn’t taken long to find out that Silje Gravseng was working as a security guard up in Tromsø, where she had been on duty on Saturday night, 1,700 kilometres from Oslo.
“Going back to the knife,” Larsen said when he got no response. “The knives in the block belong to a Japanese set, and the size and shape of the one that’s missing matches the knife wounds. If we assume that was the murder weapon, that suggests that the murder was spontaneous rather than planned. Agreed?”
“That’s one possibility. Another is that the killer knew about the block of knives before he arrived. A third is that the killer used his own knife, but decided to remove a knife from the scene in an attempt to confuse you, as well as getting rid of the forensic evidence.”
Larsen made some more notes. Harry looked at the time and cleared his throat.
“Finally, Hole. You say you’re not aware of any women who might have wanted to kill Rakel Fauke. What about men?”
Harry shook his head slowly.
“What about this Svein Finne?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You’d have to ask him.”
“We don’t know where he is.”
Harry stood up and took his peacoat from the hook on the wall. “If I run into him, I’ll be sure to let him know you’re looking for him, Larsen.”
He turned towards the window, gave a two-fingered salute to Winter. He got a sour smile and one finger in return.
Larsen stood up and held his hand out to Harry. “Thanks for your help, Hole. Obviously you can find your own way.”
“The big question is whether or not you lot can.” Harry gave Larsen a brief smile, an even briefer handshake, then left.
At the lift he pressed the button and leaned his forehead against the shiny metal beside the door.
She wanted you back.
So, did that make things better or worse?
All these pointless what-ifs. All the self-flagellating I-should-haves. But something else as well, the pathetic hope people cling to about there being a place where those who love each other, those who have Old Tjikko’s roots, will meet again, because the thought of that not being the case is unbearable.
The lift doors slid open. Empty. Just a claustrophobic, constricting coffin inviting him in to carry him down. Down to what? To all-encompassing darkness?
Anyway, Harry rarely used lifts, he couldn’t stand them.
He hesitated. Then stepped inside.
11
Harry woke with a start and stared out at the room. The echo of his own scream was still bouncing between the walls. He looked at the time. Ten o’clock. In the evening. He pieced together the previous thirty-six hours. He had been drunk for pretty much all of them, absolutely nothing had happened, but despite that he had still managed to come up with a workable timeline with no holes in it. He was usually able to do that. But Saturday evening at the Jealousy stood out as a long, complete blackout. Probably the long-term effects of alcohol abuse finally catching up with him.
