Smoke Screen Read online

  Emma closed her eyes again.

  The funeral.

  She had to be there, of course. Kasper would have to be taken back to Denmark first. His clothes, suitcase, toothbrush, toiletry bag. Emma would send them everything. She didn’t want anything of his left behind; there should be nothing to remind her of what had happened, how incredibly foolish she had been.

  She stared at the Advent candles on the coffee table. Four of them, all purple and almost completely burned down to the wick. A little glass Santa was sat next to them, as if he had chosen to plop himself down there to watch the flames. She had asked Kasper to help her take down the Christmas decorations the day before.

  ‘You want to do that now?’ he had asked.

  ‘Christmas is over.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘And the tree is shedding everywhere. I wouldn’t have bothered getting one if Martine hadn’t insisted.’

  He had asked politely if they could keep the decorations up for a few more days, and she had agreed to wait until today before she would take them down.

  The lioness had picked up one of her cubs, barely two weeks old. Holding it by the scruff of its neck, she carried it up a small mound, into a den. She laid it down carefully and gently licked it clean. Emma closed her eyes. A tear trickled down her cheek. Wiped it away with her thumb.

  There was a knock at the door. Emma couldn’t be bothered getting up. It didn’t matter who it was. She curled up tighter under the blanket and continued to watch the lions.

  A few moments of silence followed, then another knock. ‘Emma?’

  It was Anita. She knocked a few more times, accompanied by an: ‘Are you there?’

  Emma sat up. Resting her elbows on her knees, she buried her face in her hands. She was dizzy. She didn’t know how she was even going to stand up. Didn’t know how she was going to manage to walk. Talk. Think.

  She could hear keys rattling on the other side of the door. Emma turned and watched as Anita pulled the key out of the lock and stepped into the flat in one swift motion. The door slammed shut behind her.

  ‘Shit,’ Anita uttered, casting a look at the door as if to tell it off. ‘Made me jump.’

  She smiled meekly at Emma, held up the key between two fingers.

  ‘I spoke to your sister,’ she explained. ‘Told her what had happened. She’d been called in to work, so I went to Ullevål and borrowed her extra key. Something told me you weren’t going to let me in.’

  Emma couldn’t bring herself to answer.

  ‘She told me to say hi,’ Anita carried on, filling the silence as she took her boots off. ‘And to ask that you call her.’

  Anita glanced briefly at Kasper’s suitcase before she sat down on the other end of the sofa. She left her phone on the table.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asked, after a pause. Emma raised her head to look at her.

  ‘Forget it,’ Anita said with a gesture. ‘Dumb question.’

  She looked around, nodding to herself, as if she recognised the flat. She turned to watch the family of lions drinking from a watering hole. The lioness looked up, surveyed her surroundings.

  ‘Where’s Martine?’ Emma asked.

  Anita smiled reassuringly.

  ‘With a neighbour. Karina, I think.’

  ‘Karin.’

  ‘That’s right, Karin.’

  They were silent again.

  Anita peered over at Emma’s now-cold teacup. ‘Shall I make you a new one?’

  ‘It’s fine, it’s not a big deal.’

  ‘No, but it’s important. You need to remember to eat and drink.’

  Emma couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘You know, I knew this photographer from AFP once,’ Anita began. ‘From France. Really sweet guy.’ She shook her head and smiled, as if reminiscing about something he had said or done. ‘We got to know each other pretty well, while I was on an assignment in Afghanistan. We had dinner together once or twice, shared a few bottles of wine.’

  Emma watched Anita.

  ‘The day after I left to come home, there was an incident in Kabul. Double suicide attack. Twenty-six people died.’ She paused. ‘Pierre was one of them.’

  Anita picked up the remote and muted the TV.

  She remained silent for a while before continuing.

  ‘I found out the second I landed. My bosses asked if I could go back and cover the attack. But I…’

  She looked away.

  ‘At first I was in shock, naturally. And I was scared. If I had delayed my trip home by just two days, it could have been me.’

  They sat in silence again.

  ‘But I thought about it for all of three minutes, and I called back and asked them to book me onto the next flight. Do you know why?’

  Emma shook her head.

  ‘Because, first and foremost, I wanted to report on what had happened. Cover it like a regular journalist. I felt there was an extra significance in reporting it, since Pierre had been a close friend. But I also did it because I was scared. I couldn’t let the fear or my grief for Pierre overwhelm me. I had to be there. For myself, so I could see it, where it happened, and process the event. The best way for me to do that was to work. Work like hell. Prove that it wasn’t going to break me.’

  A text popped up on Anita’s phone. She checked to see who it was, but didn’t open it.

  ‘I’ve always been like that,’ she continued. ‘And I think you’re the same, Emma. You’re tough. This won’t break you.’

  Emma stared down at the floor.

  ‘But I’m not going to push you to come back to work. You need to figure that out for yourself, when you’re ready. And I won’t lie: we need you. Now more than ever. So, from your cynical boss: come back as soon as you can. From Anita, who only wishes you well…’ Anita lay a hand on her arm. ‘Come back whenever you feel like it. We’re always here for you.’

  Emma felt the walls start to close in again.

  ‘Right,’ Anita said, squeezing her arm. ‘I’ll leave you be.’

  She took Irene’s spare key out of her jacket pocket and left it on the coffee table. ‘Your sister wants that back tonight,’ she added. ‘She said something about a New Year’s Day tradition?’

  Anita stood there, looking down at Emma for a few seconds, before she headed back into the hallway and put her boots on.

  ‘Call me,’ she said, taking hold of the door handle. ‘Keep me updated.’

  With that, she stepped outside and gently closed the door behind her.

  Emma lifted her shoulders and released them slowly. She rubbed her fingers over her forehead and watched the lioness unsuccessfully hunt for her prey, watched as she slunk back into the tall grass, ready to pounce again.

  Emma got up and took the teacup with her. Standing in front of the sink, she scooped the bag out and poured the contents away. She put it aside, grasped the edge of the counter with both hands.

  You are tough.

  You will not let this break you.

  Emma pushed herself away, put the kettle on and fetched a fresh tea bag from the cupboard. It only took a few seconds for the water to start boiling. As she waited, she picked up her phone and turned it back on. She had received a torrent of calls and texts. The last one was from her therapist. Gorm Fogner. A long message that filled the entire screen. He was sorry that the very thing she had feared had become a reality. He offered to bring forward the appointment she had booked for ten o’clock on Friday.

  With everything that had happened last autumn, she had started going to therapy sessions once a fortnight. She felt that the conversations they shared had helped her to process everything she had gone through with the countdown murders, and that the sessions had finally given her the opportunity to talk through the experiences she had been carrying with her since her childhood. The fact that her father had killed her mother, and that he had then been shot and killed by Blix. She knew that she needed to talk to Fogner soon, but she couldn’t bear the thought of verbalising what she
felt just yet. She swiped the message away with her thumb and began to type out a text to her sister instead.

  Hi, Irene. I’m fine, surviving. Not everyone did.

  She stopped herself, unsure whether to delete that and start again. She erased the last part and replaced it with:

  There’s something I wanted to ask you. I helped to rescue a woman from the harbour last night after the explosion. She was probably taken to one of your wards. I want to know who she is and whether she survived. Can you help me? Would be nice to know if I helped at least one person last night.

  10

  An extensive collection of recordings from various cameras in the area had been gathered, stretching back over the forty-eight hours before the explosion, and for the hours that had followed. A dedicated unit had been set up to analyse the footage, to first find an image of the man who had placed the bomb, and to then track his subsequent movements. Blix, however, was most interested in seeing whether they could find Ruth-Kristine in any of the recordings.

  ‘You’re better on that than I am,’ he told Kovic, nodding at her computer.

  She turned it on and logged into the shared server, where all the files for the investigation were stored. She spent some time clicking around the folders before she found the one with the images from the cameras closest to the square.

  ‘God, there’s so many,’ she exclaimed, opening the first file.

  The image that popped up had been taken by a CCTV camera located just below the Akershus Fortress, higher up and quite a distance from the edge of the harbour where the bomb had gone off. Although it did provide a useful bird’s eye view of the area, there were so many people walking between the harbour and the fortress that night, it was quite hard to even see the rubbish bin.

  Kovic clicked through the shots until she reached the image that had captured the moment the man had placed the bomb in the bin. The footage they were looking at was from a slightly different angle and a greater distance than the image that had been sent through the internal police bulletin.

  The man with the Kiwi shopping bag appeared from the right of the frame. It looked as if he had been waiting for a crowd of teenagers to pass by before he walked over to the bin and placed the bag gently on top. He stood with his back to the camera for a few seconds before hurrying away. There was nothing particularly memorable about his clothes or his movements. Nothing identifiable.

  Kovic adjusted the settings and played it back at double speed. Blix squinted at the screen. Once or twice, someone would stop at the bin and throw something in before quickly moving on. The quality of the recording was only good enough to decipher the shape of people’s bodies, and to just about determine the clothes they were wearing, but certainly not enough to distinguish their facial features.

  ‘We need to keep an eye out for a woman in a dark-green jacket too,’ Blix reminded her.

  He leaned forwards, closer to the screen. Every now and then, fireworks illuminated the area surrounding the harbour, making it easier to see what was going on.

  The time on the recording passed 23:45. Another five minutes went by as more and more people gathered in the square to watch the fireworks display. People were lingering in front of the camera, blocking the view of the rubbish bin.

  A person in a dark-green jacket appeared at 23:55, strolling towards the harbour, the hood on their jacket pulled low over their face. Blix pointed to her without saying anything. Kovic paused the clip and let the recording play at the normal speed.

  ‘That’s a woman, right?’ Blix asked.

  ‘Think so,’ she answered.

  It looked as if the person were slowing down. She came to a stop about a metre away from one of the other bins dotted along the edge of the harbour, but not the one with the bomb in it.

  ‘What the hell is she doing?’ Kovic asked.

  Blix wasn’t sure either. The woman paced around the bin before moving closer and peering into it. Without throwing anything in, she moved on.

  ‘Strange,’ Blix commented quietly. They lost the woman in the crowd.

  ‘Load the next video,’ Blix said, noting the time. ‘I want to see it from a different angle.’

  On the next recording, the camera was aimed almost directly at the rubbish bin. Kovic fast forwarded to the 23:58 mark. Again, they watched the woman take a lap around the bin, at about a metre away, as if trying to inspect it from the outside.

  ‘Can we zoom in a bit?’ Blix requested. ‘On the woman and then on the bin?’

  ‘I can try,’ Kovic said. ‘But it’ll probably be quite pixelated.’

  They followed the woman as she made her way further down the edge of the harbour, over to the next bin. She walked around it, exactly as she had done with the previous one, before moving on to the last bin, where the bomb was.

  Blix blinked hard, trying to focus. The camera was placed so far from the bin that her face was completely blurred. Not to mention the fact that it was, naturally, dark out at that time, and that most of her face was hidden beneath the hood. But Blix was certain that it was Ruth-Kristine.

  She stopped at the next bin. Fireworks were filling the night sky now, shooting upwards one after the other. The time on the screen read 23:59:50. A man in a dark coat walked by. He had curly hair. Blix thought of Kasper, Emma’s boyfriend. She still hadn’t returned any of his calls. Blix would visit her as soon as he had the chance.

  They watched the screen as the entire area was blanketed in a blaze of light. Even though Blix knew it would come, it still made him jump. A pillar of flames burst into the sky, closely followed by a thick, grey cloud of smoke.

  People fled in panic. Bedlam. As the blanket of smoke dissipated, they could see the bodies of the dead and the injured who had been left behind. A man pushed himself up into a sitting position. They watched as Blix ran towards them from the right of the frame, Kovic just a few metres behind. Watching it back, it was almost as if Blix were reliving the chaos, as if he could hear the screams and the sounds of the fireworks still soaring above them. He could almost smell the smoke.

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said with a nod to the screen.

  Kovic stopped the recording just as Blix was getting ready to dive into the water.

  Neither of them said anything. Blix sat and fiddled with a pen, thinking about Ruth-Kristine, about how she had gone from one bin to the next.

  ‘It was like she was looking for something,’ he said eventually.

  Gard Fosse entered the room. The police superintendent clocked Blix and Kovic and walked over to them.

  ‘I was expecting you both here earlier today,’ he said. ‘You missed the briefing.’

  ‘We were following up on a lead from last night,’ Blix replied.

  Fosse didn’t seem too interested in hearing the details.

  ‘Did we miss anything?’ Kovic asked.

  ‘Well you’ve received the footage of course,’ Fosse said, pointing at the computer. ‘The bomb was probably home-made, most likely triggered by a remote control. Other than that, it wasn’t particularly advanced. The images have been printed out and pinned up in the common room.’

  Kovic opened another folder. All of the items that had been recovered from the site of the explosion had been photographed and given a number, with no explanation yet as to what the objects were. A distorted piece of metal could easily be part of the bomb, or part of the bin. Still, Kovic immediately started clicking through the full-screen images. Most of the items were obviously contents from the bin. She paused when she arrived at the image of a larger, blackened piece of metal.

  ‘That’s part of the bin,’ Blix commented.

  ‘Look at those marks though,’ Kovic said.

  Blix and Fosse bent down, leaning towards the screen. Kovic zoomed in on a particularly charred section of the bin that had a white streak across it.

  ‘Is that chalk?’ she asked.

  Fosse unfolded a pair of glasses from his chest pocket.

  ‘Some kind of symbol,’ he concluded.
‘Maybe an Arabic or Muslim character?’ He straightened up. ‘I’ll call PST and see if anyone else has noticed it. Maybe they’ve found more.’

  Blix ran his finger across the part of the screen where it was just about possible to discern some of the blurry white lines.

  ‘I think it’s a cross,’ he said after Fosse left. ‘Someone had labelled the bin. That’s what Ruth-Kristine was looking for.’

  ‘But why?’

  Blix shrugged. ‘Maybe there was something she was meant to pick up. Or it could’ve been a meeting place. Remember what her boyfriend, Haugseth, said? That he thought she had something planned with someone?’

  Kovic carried on clicking through the images. A photo of a shoe that had obviously come off amid the havoc, a phone that looked as if it had been retrieved from the water. It took them three minutes to look through the entire collection.

  ‘No house keys,’ Blix noted. ‘Do you remember seeing if she had any keys on her?’

  Kovic shook her head. ‘Just a bank card, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.’

  Blix stood up.

  ‘Let’s go have a look at her flat anyway.’

  11

  Ruth-Kristine Smeplass.

  Emma stared at the name Irene had sent her, wondering where she had heard it before. She sluggishly made her way back into the living room, to the coffee table where she had left her laptop, opened it and logged in. It felt good to be doing something. Her fingers sailed over the keyboard. She typed the name in and hit enter.

  ‘Shit,’ she exhaled, scrolling through the first articles that had come up. It didn’t take long to realise that the face of the woman who had been launched into the water the previous night had dominated the news once before. But it had been a while since anyone had written anything about her daughter, or the father of her child, who had become a murderer not long after.

  Emma opened one of the articles, all about the scene Christer Storm Isaksen had caused during the trial. He had thrown repeated accusations at Ruth-Kristine, who he firmly believed to have been behind the kidnapping. Emma guessed that the police must have made that assumption too.