Killing Moon

9 Monday

Harry walked towards the entrance of the large building in Montebello on Oslo’s fashionable west side. It was nine in the morning and the sun was shining defiantly. All the same, Harry had a knot in his stomach. He had been here before. The Radium Hospital. Over a century ago, when the plans to build a dedicated hospital for cancer treatment became known, the neighbours had protested. They feared having this sinister, mysterious disease so close to them — some believed it was infectious — and that their properties would fall in value. While others gave support and made donations — over thirty million kroner in today’s money — to buy the four grams of radium needed to irradiate and kill cancer cells before they killed their hosts.

Harry walked inside and stood in front of the lift.

Not because he intended on taking it, but in order to try to remember.

He had been fifteen years old when he and his little sister Sis had visited their mother here at the Radium, as they began calling it after a while. She had lain here for four months, growing thinner and more pale each time they came, like a photograph fading in the sunlight, her mild, always smiling face seeming to disappear into the pillowcase. On the particular day he now called to mind, he’d had a fit of rage which in turn left him in tears.

‘Things are how they are, and it’s not your responsibility to take care of me, Harry,’ his mother had said while holding on to him and stroking his hair. ‘Your job is to look after your little sister, that’s what you’ll do.’

On their way down after the visit, Sis had stood leaning against the wall, and when the lift began to move, her long hair had caught between the open back of the lift and the brick wall. Harry had stood rooted to the spot as Sis was lifted up from the floor, screaming for help. She’d had a clump of hair and a big patch of skin from her scalp ripped off, but had survived and quickly forgotten about it. Quicker than Harry, who could still feel the pang of horror and shame when he thought about how soon after his mother’s earnest request he had seized on the first opportunity to let her down.

The lift doors slid open, and two nurses wheeled a bed out past him.

Harry stood motionless as the lift doors slid shut again.

Then he turned and began walking up the stairs to the sixth floor.

There was a smell of hospital; that had not changed since his mother had been here. He located the door with 618 on it and knocked gently. Heard a voice and opened. There were two beds inside, one was empty.

‘I’m looking for Ståle Aune,’ Harry said.

‘He’s gone for a little stroll,’ the man in the occupied bed said. He was bald, looked to be of Pakistani or Indian extraction and around the same age as Aune, somewhere in his sixties. But Harry knew from experience that judging the age of cancer patients could be difficult.

Harry turned, saw Ståle Aune approaching him on shuffling feet, dressed in a Radium Hospital dressing gown, and realised he had just passed him on his way down the corridor.

The once pot-bellied psychologist now had folds of skin to spare. Aune waved with one hand at chest height and gave a pained smile without showing any teeth.

‘Been on a diet?’ Harry asked, after they’d had a proper hug.

‘You won’t believe it, but even my head has shrunk.’ Ståle demonstrated by poking his small, round Freud glasses back up his nose. ‘This is Jibran Sethi. Dr Sethi, this is Inspector Hole.’

The man in the other bed smiled and nodded then put on his headphones.

‘He’s a vet,’ Aune said in a lower voice. ‘Nice fellow, but the adage about us becoming like our patients may be true. He hardly says a word and I can barely keep my mouth shut.’ Aune kicked off his slippers and eased himself onto the bed.

‘Didn’t know you had such an athletic physique underneath the padding,’ Harry said, sitting down on a chair.

Aune chuckled. ‘You’ve always been adept in the art of flattery, Harry. I was actually quite a useful rower at one time. But what about yourself? You need to eat for God’s sake, or you’ll disappear completely.’

Harry didn’t respond.

‘Ah, I see,’ Aune said. ‘You’re wondering which of us is going to disappear first? That would be me, Harry. This is what I shall die from.’

Harry nodded. ‘What are the doctors saying about...?’

‘About how long I have left? Nothing. Because I don’t ask. The value of staring the truth — and particularly that of your own mortality — in the face is, in my experience, greatly overestimated. And my experience is, as you know, long and deep. At the end of the day, people only want to be comfortable, and for as long as possible, preferably right up to a sudden final curtain. This comes as a partial disappointment to me, of course, to find that in that regard I am no different from anyone else, that I am incapable of dying with the courage and dignity I would wish. But I suppose I lack a good enough reason to die with greater bravura. My wife and daughter cry, and there’s no solace for them in seeing me more afraid of death than necessary, so I avoid grim realities and shy away from the truth instead.’

‘Mm.’

‘Well, OK, I can’t help but read the doctors, by way of what they say and their facial expressions. And judging by that I don’t have much time left. But...’ Aune threw his arms out, smiling with sad eyes. ‘There’s always the hope I’m wrong. After all, I’ve gone through my professional life being more often wrong than right.’

Harry smiled. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe. But you understand the way the wind is blowing when they give you a morphine pump, which you administer yourself, without any attendant warnings about overdose.’

‘Mm. So, pain then?’

‘Pain is an interesting interlocutor. But enough about me. Tell me about LA.’

Harry shook his head and thought it must be the jet lag, because his body had begun shaking with laughter.

‘Cut that out,’ Aune said. ‘Death is no laughing matter. Come on, tell me.’

‘Mm. Doctor — patient confidentiality?’

‘Harry, every secret will be taken to the grave here and the clock is ticking, so for the last time, tell me!’

Harry told him. Not everything. Not about what actually happened right before he left, when Bjørn shot himself. Not about Lucille and his own ticking clock. But everything else. About running to escape the memories. About the plan to drink himself to death someplace far away. When he had finished, Harry could see Ståle’s eyes were glazed. Throughout the many murder cases Ståle Aune had assisted the detectives of Crime Squad with, the psychologist’s stamina and powers of concentration when the days were long always impressed Harry. Now he read weariness, pain — and morphine — in his eyes.

‘What about Rakel?’ Aune asked in a weak voice. ‘Do you think about her a lot?’

‘All the time.’

‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

‘That a Paul McCartney quote?’

‘Close,’ Aune smiled. ‘Do you think about her in a good way, or does it just hurt?’

‘It hurts in a good way, I suppose. Or the other way round. Like... well, the booze. The worst are the days I wake up having dreamt about her and for a moment I think she’s still alive, and that what happened is the dream. And then I have to go through the fucking thing all over again.’

‘Remember when you came to me in order to address the drinking, and I asked you if in the periods you were dry you wished that liquor didn’t exist in the world. And you said you wanted liquor to exist, that even though you didn’t want to drink, you wanted another option to be there. The thought of having a drink. That without that everything would be grey and meaningless, and there would be no adversary in the struggle. Is it...?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘That’s what it’s like with Rakel as well. I’d rather have the wound than not have had her in my life.’

They sat in silence. Harry glanced down at his hands. Around the room. Heard the sounds of a low phone conversation coming from the other bed. Ståle rolled onto his side.

‘I’m a little tired, Harry. Some days are better, but today’s not one of them. Thank you for coming.’

‘How much better?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Good enough that you can work? From here, I mean.’

Aune looked at him in surprise.

Harry pulled his chair closer to the bed.

In the conference room on the sixth floor of Police HQ, Katrine was about to wrap up the morning meeting of the investigative team. There were sixteen people sitting in front of her, eleven from Crime Squad and five from Kripos. Of the sixteen, ten were detectives, four were analysts, and two worked in Krimteknisk, the Forensics Unit. Katrine Bratt had gone through the findings of the Crime Scene Unit and the Forensic Medical Institute’s preliminary post-mortem, showing photos from both. Watched her audience stare at the bright screen while shifting uneasily on hard chairs. The Crime Scene Unit hadn’t found much, something they regarded as a discovery in itself.

‘It seems he might know what we’re looking for,’ one of the forensics officers said. ‘Either he’s cleaned up after himself or he’s just been very lucky.’

The only concrete evidence they had were shoeprints on the soft ground from two people, one matching the shoes Susanne was wearing, the other made by a heavier individual wearing a size 42, probably a male. The tracks indicated they had been walking close to one another.

‘As though he’s forced Susanne with him into the woods?’ asked Magnus Skarre, one of the veterans of Crime Squad.

‘Could be, yes,’ the forensics expert confirmed.

‘The Forensic Medical Institute carried out a preliminary post-mortem over the weekend,’ Katrine said, ‘and there’s good and bad news. The good news is that they found a tiny amount of residue from spit or mucus on one of Susanne’s breasts. The bad news is we can’t be certain it came from the killer, given that Susanne’s upper body was clothed when we found her. So if he did assault her, he must have dressed her again, which would be unusual. Anyway, Sturdza was kind enough to run an express DNA analysis on the residue, and the even worse news is that there was no match with any profile in the database of known offenders. So if it didn’t come from the killer, we’re talking...’

‘A needle in a haystack,’ Skarre said.

No one laughed. No one groaned. Just silence. After three weeks in the proverbial wilderness, late nights, threatened cancellation of autumn breaks and friction on domestic fronts, the discovery of a body had extinguished one hope and sparked another. Of leads. Of solving the case. This was now officially a murder investigation, and it was Monday, a new week, with new opportunities. But the faces staring back at Katrine were drained, drawn and tired.

She had been expecting that. And had therefore saved the last slide in order to wake them up.

‘This was discovered when they were concluding the preliminary post-mortem,’ she said, as the next photo came up on the screen. When she had received it from Alexandra on Saturday, Katrine’s first association had been with the monster from the film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Everyone in the room stared in silence at the head with the rough stitches. That was the extent of the reaction. Katrine cleared her throat.

‘Sturdza writes that it appears as though Susanne Andersen has recently received a cut to the head from just above the hairline over the forehead all the way around. And that the wound has been sewn shut again. We don’t know if that might have occurred prior to her disappearance, but Sung-min spoke to Susanne’s parents yesterday.’

‘As well as to a friend who met Susanne the night before she went missing,’ Sung-min said. ‘None of them had any knowledge of her having received stitches to her head.’

‘So we can assume this is the work of her killer. The pathologist will be performing a full clinical autopsy today, so hopefully we’ll find out more.’ She checked the time. ‘Anyone want to add something before we get started on today’s assignments?’

A female detective spoke up. ‘Now we know that one of the girls was forced off the path and into the forest, shouldn’t we intensify our search for Bertine in the woody areas along the footpaths around Grefsenkollen?’

‘Yes,’ Katrine said. ‘That’s already under way. Anything else?’

The faces looking back at her resembled those of fed-up schoolkids just looking forward to break time. If that. Last year someone had suggested they hire a former world champion cross-country skier who gave so-called inspirational speeches aimed at the business sector, about how to get over the mental hump everyone meets sooner or later in a 50-kilometre race. For his services, the national hero in question quoted a fee only a private sector company could pay. Katrine had said they could just as well have a single mother in full-time employment give the talk, and that it was the worst suggestion she had heard about how to use the departmental budget. Now she wasn’t quite so sure.