The third person. The one you loved more than your partner.
But in Katrine’s case, the third person had been there all along.
Once. Just once she had lain like this, in this very bed with him, the third person. Listened to him breathing while an autumn storm made the windows rattle, the walls creak, and her world collapse. He belonged to someone else, she was only borrowing him, but if that was all she could get, she’d take it. Did she regret that attack of madness? Yes. Yes, of course she did. Was it the happiest moment of her life? No. It was despair and a peculiar numbness. Could the whole thing have been avoided? Definitely not.
“What are you thinking about?” Bjørn whispered.
What if she said it? What if she told him everything?
“The case,” she said.
“Oh?”
“How can you lot have absolutely nothing?”
“Like we’ve said, the perpetrator cleaned up after himself. Are you really thinking about the case, or…something else?”
Katrine couldn’t see the expression in his eyes in the darkness, but she could hear it in his voice. He had always known about the third person. Bjørn Holm was the person she had confided in back when he was just a friend and she had only just moved to Police Headquarters, when she had a hopeless, silly infatuation with Harry. It was so long ago. But she had never told him about that night.
“A married couple who live in Holmenkollen were driving home on the night of the murder,” Katrine said. “They saw an adult male walking down Holmenkollveien at quarter to midnight.”
“Which fits the presumed time of the murder, between 22:00 and 02:00,” Bjørn said.
“Sober adults in Holmenkollen drive cars. The last bus had gone, and we’ve checked the security cameras at Holmenkollen metro station. A tram arrived at twenty-five minutes to midnight, but the only person who got off was a woman. What’s a pedestrian doing out that late at night? If he was walking all the way home from a bar in the city, he’d have been walking uphill, and if he was heading back into the city, he’d have gone to the metro station, don’t you think? Unless he wanted to avoid any security cameras.”
“A man, out walking. It’s a bit thin, isn’t it? Did they give a description?”
“Just the usual. Average height, between twenty-five and sixty, unknown ethnicity, but rather dark-skinned.”
“So the reason you’ve got hung up on this is…”
“…that it’s the only lead of any value at all.”
“So you didn’t get anything useful from the neighbour?”
“Mrs. Syvertsen? Her bedroom is at the back of the house, and the window was open. But she says she slept like a baby all night.”
Like an ironic response, a tentative whimpering sound came from the crib. They looked at each other and almost started to laugh.
Katrine turned away from them and pressed her ear down into the pillow, but couldn’t shut out two further whines, then the usual pause before the siren started. She felt the mattress move as Bjørn rolled out of bed.
She wasn’t thinking about the baby. She wasn’t thinking about Harry. And she wasn’t thinking about the case. She was thinking about sleep. A mammal’s deep sleep, the sort with both sides of the brain switched off.
—
Kaja ran her hand over the rough, hard grip of the pistol. She had switched off all sources of noise in the living room and was listening to the silence. He was out there, she had heard him. She had got hold of the pistol after what happened to Hala in Kabul.
Hala and Kaja had been two of the nine women in the group of twenty-three people who shared the same living quarters, most of them employed by the Red Crescent or Red Cross, but a few held civilian positions in the peacekeeping forces. Hala was an unusual person with an unusual background, but what really set her apart from the others in the building was that she wasn’t foreign but Afghan. The building wasn’t far from the Kabul Serena Hotel and Afghan Presidential Palace. The Taliban attack on the Serena had demonstrated that nowhere in Kabul was completely safe, but everything was relative, and they had felt protected by the security guard behind the tall railings. In the afternoons, Hala and Kaja would go up onto the flat roof and fly the kite they had bought at the Strand Bazaar for a dollar or two. Kaja had assumed it was just a romantic cliché from a best-selling book—the idea that the kites in the skies above Kabul were a symbol that the city was free from the Taliban regime, which had banned kite-flying in the nineties because it took people’s time and attention away from prayer. But at the weekends now there were hundreds, thousands of kites in the air. And according to Hala, the colours of the kites were even brighter than they were before the Taliban, because of the new ink that had come onto the market. Hala had known just how they had to work together when they flew the kite—one steering it, the other watching the line—otherwise they wouldn’t stay clear of other kites that were looking for a fight, trying to cut their line or kite with their own lines, which had slivers of glass attached to them. It wasn’t hard to see the parallels with the West’s self-imposed mission in Afghanistan, but it was still a game. If they lost a kite, they just sent up another one. And even more beautiful than the kites in the sky was the glow in Hala’s beautiful eyes when she looked up at them.
It was past midnight, and Kaja had heard sirens and seen blue police lights from the living-room window. She was already worried because Hala hadn’t come home, so she got dressed and went outside. The police cars were parked by an alley. There was no cordon, and a crowd of onlookers had already gathered. Young Afghan men in leather jackets, copies of Gucci and Armani, were pretty much the only people on the streets at that time of night. How many crime scenes had Kaja attended as a detective in the Crime Squad Unit? Even so, she still woke up from nightmares about that night. The knife had cut large flaps in Hala’sshalwar kameez, baring the skin beneath, and her head was bent back at an impossible angle, as if her neck was broken, making the wound in her neck gape open, and Kaja could see right into the pink, already-dry innards. When she crouched over the body, a swarm of sandflies had emerged from the wound, like an evil spirit emerging from a lamp, and Kaja had flailed her arms about her.
The post-mortem revealed that Hala had had intercourse right before the murder, and even if the physical evidence couldn’t rule out the possibility that it had been voluntary, they all assumed—given the circumstances and the fact that she was a single young woman who followed the strict rules of the Hazaras—that it was rape. The police never found the perpetrator or perpetrators. People said that the risk of being raped in the street in Kabul was a fraction of the risk of being blown up by an IED. And even if the number of rapes had risen since the fall of the Taliban, the police had a theory that the Taliban were behind the attack, to show what would happen to Afghan women who worked for ISAF, Resolute Force and other Western organisations. Despite that, the rape and murder in Kabul had frightened the other women in the group. Kaja had taught them how to handle a gun. And in a strange way, this pistol—which was passed around like a baton whenever one of them had to go out after dark—brought them together as a team. A kite team.
Kaja felt the weight of the pistol. When she was in the police, holding a loaded pistol had always filled her with a mixture of fear and security. In Afghanistan she had started to think of it as a necessary tool, something you valued having. Like the knife. It was Anton who had taught her to use it. Who had taught her that even in the Red Cross—at least, in his Red Cross—you defended your own life if necessary by killing. She remembered that the first time she met Anton she had thought that the refined, almost jovial, tall blond Swiss man—who was far too handsome—wasn’t for her. She had been wrong. And right. But when it came to Hala’s murder, she wasn’t wrong, only right.
It wasn’t the Taliban who had been behind it.
She knew who it was, but had no evidence.
