“Same rules.”
“...whom we suspect may have been raped by someone we want to prevent from raping others.”
There was silence at the other end.
“Let me know when you’ve finished thinking, London.” She didn’t know why the man’s surname, one of the biggest cities in the world, seemed to suggest loneliness. She switched off the speaker function on her phone, and took it and the glass of juice back into the living room.
“Go ahead and ask, and we’ll see,” he said.
“Thanks. Do you remember a patient called Bianca Bohr?”
“Yes.” He said this in a tone that told Kaja that he also remembered what had happened to her.
“When you were seeing her as a patient, did you think she had been raped?”
“I don’t know.”
“OK. Did she show any behaviour that might indicate—”
“The behaviour of psychiatric patients can indicate a lot of things. I wouldn’t rule out rape. Or assault. Or other traumas. But that’s just speculation.”
“Her father was also admitted for mental health problems. Did she ever talk about him?”
“During conversations between psychiatrists and patients we almost always talk about their relationship to their parents, but I can’t recall anything that struck me in particular.”
“OK.” Kaja tapped a key on her computer and the screen came back to life. The frozen image showed the silhouette of a person leaving Rakel’s house. “What about her older brother, Roar?”
Another long pause. Kaja took a sip from the glass and looked out at the garden.
“You’re talking about a serial attacker who’s still on the loose?”
“Yes,” Kaja said.
“During the period that Bianca was an inpatient with us, one of the nurses noted that she had repeatedly screamed a name in her sleep. The name you just mentioned.”
“Do you think that Bianca could have been raped, not by her father, but by her older brother?”
“Like I said, Solness, I can’t rule out—”
“But the thought has occurred to you, hasn’t it?”
Kaja listened to the sound of his breathing in an attempt to interpret it, but all she heard was the rain outside.
“Bianca did tell me something, but I have to stress that she was psychotic, and when suffering from psychosis patients say all sorts of things.”
“What did she say?”
“That her brother had performed an abortion on her at the family’s cabin.”
Kaja shuddered.
“Naturally, that needn’t necessarily have happened,” London said. “But I remember a drawing she had pinned up above the bed in her room. It was a large eagle swooping down over a little boy. And out of the bird’s beak came the letters R-O-A-R.”
“As in the English verb?”
“That was how I chose to interpret it at the time, yes.”
“But in hindsight?”
Kaja heard him sigh loudly, out there in telephone-land. “It’s quite typical that when a patient takes their own life, you imagine that you misinterpreted everything, that everything you did and thought was wrong. When Bianca died, we thought she was actually getting better. So I looked through my old notes to see what I had misunderstood, where I’d gone wrong. And I discovered that on two occasions — which I had dismissed as psychotic babbling — she told me that they had killed her big brother.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“She herself, and her older brother.”
“What does that mean? That Roar took part in killing himself?”
Roar Bohr lowered the butt of the rifle, but left the barrel resting on the branch.
The person he’d had in his sights had moved away from the illuminated window.
He took in the sounds of the darkness around him.
Rain. The sound of tires on wet pavement not far away. He guessed a Volvo. They liked Volvos here on Lyder Sagens gate. And Volkswagens. Estates. The expensive models. In Smestad it was more Audis and BMWs. The gardens here weren’t as obsessively neat as in his neighbourhood, but the more relaxed look didn’t necessarily take any less work and planning. Kaja’s wilderness of a garden was the exception; anarchy ruled here. In her defence, she hadn’t lived at home much in the past few years. And he wasn’t complaining. The overgrown shrubs and trees gave him better camouflage than in Kabul. Once he’d had to hide behind a burned-out car on top of a garage roof, where he had been far too exposed, but it was the only place where he had a complete view of the hostel where the girls lived. He had spent enough hours there watching Kaja Solness through the sights of his rifle to know that she wouldn’t let a garden get overgrown unless she had more important things to do. And she did. People do so many peculiar things when they think they’re not being seen, and Roar Bohr knew things about Kaja Solness that other people had no idea about. With his Swarovski rifle sight he could easily read the text on the screen of the computer on her desk when Kaja wasn’t sitting in the way. And now she had just tapped a key to make the screen light up. There was an image on the screen. Taken at night, it showed a house with one window lit up.
It took Bohr a few moments to realise that he was looking at Rakel’s house.
He adjusted the sight and brought the screen into focus. He saw that it wasn’t a still picture but a recording. It must have been filmed from where he used to stand. What the hell? Then the door of Rakel’s house opened and a figure was silhouetted in the opening. Bohr held his breath so that the rifle was completely still and he could read the date and time at the bottom of the clip.
It was from the night of the murder.
Roar Bohr let the air out of his lungs and leaned his rifle against the trunk of the tree.
Was the image good enough for the person to be identified?
He ran his left hand over his hip. Over the karambit knife.
Think. Think, then act.
His fingertip slid over the cold, serrated edge of the steel. Up and down. Up and down.
“Watch out,” Harry said by way of warning.
“What now?” Bjørn asked. Harry didn’t know if Bjørn was referring to his exclamation up at the cabin, which had turned out to be groundless.
“Freezing rain.”
“I can see,” Bjørn said, and braked gently before turning onto the bridge in front of them.
It had stopped raining, but a film of ice was glinting on the road ahead of them. The road straightened out again after they crossed the river, and Bjørn accelerated. A sign. Oslo 85 kilometres. There weren’t many vehicles on the road, and if they got a bit of dry road under their tires they could be back in the city in just over an hour.
“Are you quite sure you don’t want to issue an alert?” Bjørn asked.
“Mm.” Harry closed his eyes. Roar Bohr had been at the cabin recently, the newspaper in the wood basket was six days old. But he wasn’t there now. No tracks in the snow outside the door. No food. Mould on the dregs of coffee in the cup on the table. The boots by the door were dry, he must have several pairs. “I called that 3-D expert, Freund. His first name’s Sigurd, by the way.”
Bjørn chuckled. “Katrine suggested we should name the kid after the singer in Suede. Brett. Brett Bratt. What did Freund have to say?”
“That he was going to look at the memory card, and that I could expect a response at the weekend. I explained what was on it, and he said there wasn’t much he could do about the lack of light. But by measuring the height of the doorway and the tread of the steps at Holmenkollveien he reckoned he could give me the height of the person down to the nearest centimetre. If I say that we need to bring Bohr in as a result of what we found after breaking into his cabin without a search warrant, you’d get into trouble as well, Bjørn. It makes more sense to use the fact that the height of the guy in the doorway matches Bohr’s, because there’s no way you can be linked to those images. I’ll call Kripos, explain that I’ve got pictures proving that Bohr was at the crime scene, and suggest that they search his cabin. They’ll find a broken window, but anyone could have done that.”