‘What do you mean, “she would never have left”,’ Harry asked.
In front of him on the living-room table Rolf Ottersen had placed a photograph of his wife with their twin daughters, Olga and Emma, ten years old. Sylvia Ottersen had big, sleepy eyes, like someone who had worn glasses all her life and then started wearing contact lenses or had laser eye surgery. The twins had their mother’s eyes.
‘She would’ve said,’ Rolf Ottersen said. ‘Left a message. Something must’ve happened.’
In spite of his despair his voice was muted and gentle. Rolf Ottersen pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and put it to his face. His nose seemed abnormally big for his narrow, pale face. He blew his nose in one single trumpet blast.
Skarre poked his head inside the door. ‘The dog patrol’s here. They’ve got a cadaver dog with them.’
‘Get going then,’ Harry said. ‘Have you spoken to all the neighbours?’
‘Yep. Still nothing.’
Skarre closed the door, and Harry saw that Ottersen’s eyes had become even bigger behind the glasses.
‘Cadaver dog?’ Ottersen whispered.
‘Just a generic term,’ Harry said, making a mental note that he would have to give Skarre a couple of tips on how to express himself.
‘So you use them to search for living people as well?’ From his intonation, the husband appeared to be pleading.
‘Yes, of course,’ Harry lied, rather than tell him that cadaver dogs sniffed out places where dead bodies had been. They were not used for drugs, lost property or living people. They were used for deaths. Full stop.
‘So you last saw her today at four,’ Harry said, looking down at his notes. ‘Before you and your daughters went to town. What did you do there?’
‘I took care of the shop while the girls had their violin lessons.’
‘Shop?’
‘We have a small shop in Majorstuen selling handmade African goods. Art, furniture, fabric, clothes, all sorts of things. They’re imported directly from the artisans, and they’re paid properly. Sylvia is there most of the time, but on Thursdays we’re open late, so she comes back home with the car and I go in with the girls. I’m at the shop while they have violin lessons at the Barrat Due Institute of Music from five until seven. Then I pick them up, and we come home. We were home a little after half seven.’
‘Mm. Who else works in the shop?’
‘No one.’
‘That must mean you’re closed for a while on Thursdays. About an hour?’
Rolf Ottersen gave a wry smile. ‘It’s a very small shop. We don’t have many customers. Almost none until the Christmas sales, to be honest.’
‘How . . . ?’
‘NORAD. They support shops and our suppliers as part of the government’s trade programme with Third World countries.’ He coughed quietly. ‘The message it sends is more important than money and short-sighted gain, isn’t it.’
Harry nodded even though he wasn’t thinking about development aid and fair trade in Africa but about the clock and driving time in Oslo and district. From the kitchen, where the twins were eating a late snack, came the sound of a radio. He hadn’t seen a TV in the house.
‘Thank you. We’ll be cracking on.’ Harry got up and went outside.
Three cars stood parked in the yard. One was Bjørn Holm’s Volvo Amazon, repainted black with a chequered rally stripe over the roof and boot. Harry looked up at the clear starry sky arching over the tiny farm in the forest clearing. He breathed in the air. The air of spruce and wood smoke. From the edge of the wood he heard the panting of a dog and cries of encouragement from the policeman.
To get to the barn Harry walked in the arc they had determined so as not to destroy any clues they might be able to use. Voices were emanating from the open door. He crouched down and studied the footprints in the snow in the light from the outside lamp. Then he stood up, leaned against the frame and tugged out a packet of cigarettes.
‘Looks like a murder scene,’ he said. ‘Blood, bodies and overturned furniture.’
Bjørn Holm and Magnus Skarre fell silent, turned and followed Harry’s gaze. The big open room was lit by a single bulb hanging from a cable wrapped around one of the beams. At one end of the barn there was a lathe and, behind it, a board with tools attached: hammers, saws, pliers, drills. No electric gadgets. At the other end there was a wire fence and behind it chickens perched on shelves in the wall or strutted around, stiff-legged, on the straw. In the middle of the room, on grey, untreated, bloodstained floorboards, lay three headless bodies. Harry poked a cigarette between his lips without lighting it, entered, taking care not to step in the blood, and squatted down beside the chopping block to examine the chicken heads. The light from his penlight flashed on matt-black eyes. First he held half a white feather that looked as if it had been scorched black along the edge, then he studied the smooth severing of the chickens’ necks. The blood had coagulated and was black. He knew this was a quick process, not much more than half an hour.
‘See anything interesting?’ asked Bjørn Holm.
‘My brain has been damaged by my profession, Holm. Right now it’s analysing chickens’ bodies.’
Skarre laughed and painted the newspaper headlines in the air: ‘Savage Triple Chicken Murder. Voodoo Parish. Harry Hole Assigned.’
‘What I can’t see is more interesting,’ Harry said.
Bjørn Holm raised an eyebrow, looked around and began to nod slowly.
Skarre looked at them sceptically. ‘And that is?’
‘The murder weapon,’ Harry said.
‘A hatchet,’ Holm said. ‘The only sensible way to kill chickens.’
Skarre sniffed. ‘If the woman did the killing, she must have put the hatchet back in its place. Tidy sorts, these farmers.’
‘I agree,’ Harry said, listening to the cackle of the chickens, which seemed to be coming from all sides. ‘That’s why it’s interesting that the chopping block is upside down and the chickens’ bodies scattered around. And the hatchet is not in its place.’
‘Its place?’ Skarre faced Holm and rolled his eyes.
‘If you can be bothered to take a peek, Skarre,’ Harry said without moving.
Skarre was still looking at Holm, who nodded towards the board behind the lathe.
‘Shit,’ said Skarre.
In the empty space between a hammer and a rusty saw was the outline of a small hatchet.
From outside came the sound of a dog barking, whimpering, and then the policeman’s loud shout which was no longer encouraging.
Harry rubbed his chin. ‘We’ve searched the whole barn, so for the moment it looks as if Sylvia Ottersen left the place while slaughtering the chickens, taking the hatchet with her. Holm, can you take the body temperatures of these chickens and estimate the time of death?’
‘Yup.’
‘Eh?’ Skarre said.
‘I want to know when she ran off,’ Harry said. ‘Did you get anything from the shoeprints outside, Holm?’
The forensic officer shook his head. ‘Too trampled, and I need more light. I found several of Rolf Ottersen’s bootprints. Plus a couple of others going
to
the barn, but none
from
the barn. Perhaps she was carried out of the barn?’
‘Mm. Then the prints of the carrier would have been deeper. Shame no one stepped in the blood.’ Harry peered at the dark walls outside the range of the bulb. From the yard they heard a dog’s pitiful whine and a policeman’s furious curses.
‘Go and see what’s up, Skarre,’ Harry said.
Skarre went, and Harry switched the torch back on and walked towards the wall. He ran his hand along the unpainted boards.
‘What’s . . . ?’ Holm began, but stopped when Harry’s boot hit the wall with a dull thud.
The starry sky came into view.
‘A back door,’ Harry said, staring at the black forest and the silhouette of spruce trees against the dome of dirty-yellow light from the town in the distance. He shone the torch on the snow. The light immediately found the tracks.
‘Two people,’ Harry said.
‘It’s the dog,’ Skarre said on his return. ‘It won’t budge.’
‘Won’t budge?’ Harry lit up the trail of footprints. The snow reflected the light, but the trail vanished in the darkness beneath the trees.
‘The dog handler doesn’t understand. He says the dog seems petrified. At any rate it refuses to go into the forest.’
‘Perhaps it can smell fox,’ Holm said. ‘Lots of foxes in this forest.’
‘Foxes?’ Skarre snorted. ‘That big dog can’t be afraid of foxes.’
‘Perhaps it’s never seen a fox,’ Harry said. ‘But it knows it can smell a predator. It’s rational to be afraid of what you don’t know. The dog that isn’t won’t live long.’ Harry could feel his heart begin to quicken. And he knew why. The forest. The dark. The type of terror that was not rational. The type that had to be overcome.
‘This is to be treated as a crime scene until further notice,’ Harry said. ‘Start work. I’ll check where this trail leads.’
‘OK.’
Harry swallowed before stepping out of the back door. It had been more than thirty years ago. And still his body bristled.
He had been staying at his grandfather’s house in Åndalsnes during the autumn holiday. The farm lay on a mountainside with the mighty Romsdal Mountains towering above. Harry had been ten and had gone into the forest to look for the cow his grandfather was searching for. He wanted to find it before his grandfather, before anyone. So he hurried. Ran like a maniac over hills of soft blueberry bushes and funny, crooked dwarf birch trees. The paths came and went as he ran in a straight line towards the bell he thought he had heard among the trees. And there it was again, a bit further to the right now. He jumped over a stream, ducked under a tree and his boots squelched as he ran across a marsh with a rain cloud edging towards him. He could see the veil of drizzle beneath the cloud showering the steep mountainside.
And the rain was so fine that he had not noticed the darkness descending; it slunk out of the marsh, it crept between the trees, it spilt down through the shadows of the mountainside like black paint and collected at the bottom of the valley. He looked up at a large bird circling high above, so dizzyingly high because he could see the mountain behind it. And then a boot got stuck and he fell. Face down and without anything to grab. Everything went dark, and his nose and mouth were filled with the taste of marsh, of death, decay and darkness. He could
taste
the darkness for the few seconds he was under. And then he came up again, and discovered that all the light had gone. Gone across the mountain towering above him in its silent, heavy majesty, whispering that he didn’t know where he was, that he hadn’t known for a long time. Unaware that he had lost a boot, he stood up and began to run. He would soon see something he recognised. But the landscape seemed bewitched; rocks had become heads of creatures growing up out of the ground, bushes were fingers that scratched at his legs and dwarf birch trees were witches bent with laughter as they pointed the way, here or there, the way home or the way to perdition, the way to his grandmother’s house or the way to the Pit. Because adults had told him about the Pit. The bottomless swamp where cattle, people and whole carts vanished, never to return.
It was almost night when Harry tottered into the kitchen and his grandmother hugged him and said that his father, grandfather and all the adults from the neighbouring farm were out looking for him. Where had he been?
In the forest.
But hadn’t he heard their shouts? They had been calling Harry, she had heard them calling Harry all the time.
He didn’t remember it himself, but many times later he had been told that he had sat there trembling with cold on the wooden box in front of the stove, staring into the distance with an apathetic expression on his face, and had answered: ‘I didn’t think it was them calling.’
‘Who did you think it was then?’
‘The others. Did you know that darkness has a
taste
, Grandma?’
Harry had walked barely a few metres into the forest when he was overtaken by an intense, almost unnatural silence. He shone the torch down on the ground in front of him because every time he pointed it into the forest, shadows ran between the trees like jittery spirits in the pitch black. Being isolated from the dark in a bubble of light didn’t give him a sense of security. Quite the opposite. The certainty that he was the most visible object moving through the forest made him feel naked, vulnerable. The branches scraped at his face, like a blind man’s fingers trying to identify a stranger.
The tracks led to a stream whose gurgling noise drowned his quickened breathing. One of the trails disappeared while the other followed the stream on lower ground.
He went on. The stream wound hither and thither, but he wasn’t concerned about losing his bearings; all he had to do was retrace his steps.
An owl, which must have been close by, hooted an admonitory to-wit-to-woo. The dial on his watch glowed green and showed that he had been walking for over fifteen minutes. Time to go back and send in the team with proper footwear, gear and a dog that was not afraid of foxes.
Harry’s heart stopped.
It had darted past his face. Soundless and so fast that he hadn’t seen anything. But the current of air had given it away. Harry heard the owl’s wings beating in the snow and the piteous squeak of a small rodent that had just become its prey.
He slowly let out the air from his lungs. Shone the torch over the forest ahead one last time and turned to go back. Took one step, then came to a halt. He wanted to take another, two more, to get out. But he did what he had to do. Shone the light behind him. And there it was again. A glint, a reflection of light that should not be there in the middle of the black forest. He went closer. Looked back and tried to fix the spot in his mind. It was about fifteen metres from the stream. He crouched down. Just the steel stuck up, but he didn’t need to brush away the snow to see what it was. A hatchet. If there had been blood on it after killing the chickens, it was gone now. There were no footprints around the hatchet. Harry shone the torch and saw a snapped twig on the snow a few metres away. Someone must have the thrown the axe here with enormous strength.