“Here?”
“My computer has been moved from the desk to the living-room table. Tell me it was you, or I’ll start to worry.”
Harry stared into the lamplight.
“Harry? Where are you? You sound so—”
“It was me,” Harry said. “Nothing to worry about. Listen, I’m in the middle of something right now. I’ll call you later, OK?”
“OK,” she said, sounding doubtful.
Bohr tapped to end the call and put the phone on the table. “Why didn’t you sound the alarm?”
“If there was any point in doing that, you wouldn’t have let me speak to her.”
“I think it’s because you believe me, Harry.”
“You’ve got me taped to a chair. What I think is completely irrelevant.”
Bohr stepped into the light again. He was holding a large, broad-bladed knife. Harry tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. Bohr moved the knife closer to Harry. To the underside of the right armrest of the chair. Cut. Did the same with the left armrest. Harry lifted his arms and took the knife.
“I taped you to the chair so you wouldn’t attack me before you’d heard everything,” Bohr said as Harry cut through the tape around his ankles. “Rakel told me about the problems you and she had had in relation to a couple of your murder investigations. From people who were on the loose. So I kept an eye on you both.”
“Us?”
“Mostly her. I kept watch. Like I kept watch on Kaja in Kabul after Hala was raped and murdered. And now in Oslo.”
“You know that’s called paranoia?”
“Yes.”
“Mm.” Harry straightened up and rubbed his lower arms. He kept hold of the knife. “Tell me.”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Start with the sergeant.”
“Understood. No one in Special Forces is an idiot, exactly. The entrance criteria are too strict for that. But Sergeant Waage was one of those soldiers with more testosterone than brains, if I can put it like that. In the days following Hala’s death, when everyone was talking about her, I heard that someone had said Hala must like Norway because she had a Norwegian word tattooed on her body. I looked into the matter and found out that it was Sergeant Waage who had said this after a few drinks in the bar. But Hala was always covered up, and that tattoo was right above her heart. There was no way she would have got mixed up with Waage. And I know Hala kept the tattoo secret. Even if the use of henna is widespread, many Muslims regard permanent tattoos as a ‘sin of the skin.’ ”
“Mm. But the tattoo wasn’t a secret from you?”
“No. I was the only person apart from the tattooist who knew about it. Before she got the tattoo, Hala asked me about the correct spelling, and any possible double meanings she might not have been aware of.”
“What was the word?”
Bohr smiled sadly. “ ‘Friend.’ She had such a fascination with languages, she wanted to know if the different spellings of the word meant different things, had different connotations.”
“Waage could have heard about the tattoo from the people who found her or conducted the post-mortem.”
“That’s the point,” Bohr said. “Two of the knife wounds...” He stopped, took a deep, shuddering breath. “Two of the sixteen knife wounds had pierced the tattoo, making the word illegible unless you already knew what it said.”
“Unless you were the person who raped her and saw the tattoo before you began to stab her.”
“Yes.”
“I understand, but that doesn’t exactly count as proof, Bohr.”
“No. Under the immunity regulations covering international forces, Waage would have been sent back to Norway, where any half-decent lawyer would have got him off the hook.”
“So you appointed yourself judge and jury?”
Roar Bohr nodded. “Hala was my interpreter. My responsibility. The same with Sergeant Waage. My responsibility. I contacted Hala’s parents and told them that I would personally be taking her earthly remains to their village. It was a five-hour drive from Kabul. Mostly empty desert. I ordered Waage to drive. After a couple of hours’ driving I told him to stop, held a pistol to his head and got a confession. Then I tied him to the Land Rover and drove. So-called D and Q.”
“D and Q?”
“Drawing and quartering. The penalty for high treason in England between 1283 and 1870. The condemned man was hanged until he was almost dead, then they cut his stomach open, pulled out his innards and burned them while he watched. Before they cut his head off. But before all that he was dragged to the gallows behind a horse, the drawing. And if it was a long way from the prison to the gallows, he might be fortunate enough to die at that point. Because when he could no longer walk or run after the horse, he got dragged along on his chest. The flesh got scraped off, layer by layer. It was a slow and extremely painful death.”
Harry thought about the long trail of blood they had found on the ground.
“Hala’s family were extremely grateful to have her body back home,” Bohr said. “And for the corpse of her murderer. Or what was left of it. It was a beautiful burial ceremony.”
“And the sergeant’s body?”
“I don’t know what they did with it. Quartering is probably an English thing. But decapitation is evidently pretty international, because his head was found on a pole outside the village.”
“And you reported that the sergeant went missing on the way back?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. Why do you watch over these women?”
Silence. Bohr had sat down on the edge of the table, and Harry tried to read the expression on his face.
“I had a sister.” His voice was toneless. “Bianca. My younger sister. She was raped when she was seventeen. I should have been looking after her that evening, but I wanted to go and see Die Hard at the cinema. It was rated 18. It wasn’t until several years later that she told me she was raped that evening. While I was watching Bruce Willis.”
“Why didn’t she tell you straightaway?”
Bohr took a deep breath. “The rapist threatened to kill me, her older brother, if she said anything. She didn’t know how the rapist could have known she had an older brother.”
“What did the rapist look like?”
“She never got a good look at him, she said it was too dark. Unless her mind had blocked it. I saw that happen in Sudan. Soldiers who experienced such terrible things that they simply forgot about them. They could wake up the next day and, perfectly sincerely, deny having been there and seen anything. For some people suppression works absolutely fine. For others it pops up later, in the form of flashbacks. Nightmares. I think everything came back to Bianca. And she couldn’t handle it. The terror of it broke her.”
“And you think it was your fault?”
“Of course it was my fault.”
“You know you’re damaged, don’t you, Bohr?”
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“What were you doing in Kaja’s house?”
“I saw that she had a video on her computer, a man leaving Rakel’s house on the night of the murder. So when she went out, I went in to take a closer look at it.”
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing. Poor-quality images. Then I heard the door. I left the living room and went into the kitchen.”
“So you could approach me from behind in the hallway. And you just happened to have some chloroform on you?”
“I always have chloroform on me.”
“Because?”
“Anyone who tried to break into any of my ladies’ houses ends up in the chair where you’re sitting.”