“That’s good.”
“Good?”
“It means it hasn’t been emptied in a while,” Harry said, crouching down and starting to hunt through the waste. “Can you start with one of the others?”
“There was nothing about poking through rubbish in the job description.”
“Given the terrible salary you’re on, you should probably have realised that rubbish was going to crop up at some point.”
“You’re not paying me a salary at all,” Kaja said as she tipped over the smallest bin.
“That’s what I meant. And yours doesn’t smell as bad as mine.”
“No one can say you don’t know how to motivate your staff.” Kaja crouched down, and Harry noted that she started with the top left, the way they were taught to search at Police College.
A man had come out onto the steps and was standing under the Ready sign. In jeans with the Ready logo on. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Harry stood up, walked over to the man and showed him his police ID. “Do you know if anyone might have seen anyone here on the evening of the tenth of March?”
The man stared at the ID, then back at Harry with his mouth half open. “You’re Harry Hole.”
“That’s right.”
“The super-detective himself?”
“Don’t believe everything—”
“And you’re looking through our rubbish.”
“Sorry if you’re disappointed.”
“Harry…” Kaja called.
Harry turned round. She was holding something between her thumb and forefinger. It looked like a tiny piece of black plastic. “What is it?” he asked, screwing his eyes up as he felt his heart start to beat faster.
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s one of those…”
Memory cards, Harry thought. The sort you use in wildlife cameras.
—
The sun was shining into the kitchen on Lyder Sagens gate, to where Kaja was standing, removing her memory card from the slot of what looked to Harry like a cheap camera, but which Kaja had said was a Canon G9, bought in 2009 for a small fortune, and which had actually stood the test of time. She inserted the memory card from the rubbish bin into the empty slot, connected the camera to her MacBook with a cable and clicked on the Pictures folder. A series of thumbnails appeared. Some of them showed Rakel’s house in various stages of daylight. Some were taken in darkness, and all Harry could see was the light from the kitchen window.
“There you go,” Kaja said, and went over to the hissing espresso machine that was working on cup number two, but Harry realised that was mostly to leave him alone.
The thumbnails were marked with dates.
The second to last was marked10 March, the last11 March. The night of the murder.
He took a deep breath. What did he want to see? What was he worried about seeing? And what was he hoping to see?
His brain felt like a wasps’ nest under attack, so it was just as well to get it done.
He clicked the Play symbol on the thumbnail for 10 March.
Four smaller thumbnails appeared, with the times marked.
The camera had been activated four times before midnight on the night of the murder.
