Knife by Nesbo Jo

Author:Nesbo,Jo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2019-04-18T13:56:37+00:00

29

Two and a half years earlier

Roar Bohr wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked up at the sky above the desert.

The sun had melted, that was why he couldn’t see it. It had dissolved, spreading out like a layer of golden copper across the hazy blue. And beneath it: a monk vulture, its three-metre wingspan etching a black cross on the yellow copper.

Bohr looked around again. There were only the two of them out here. The two of them, and open, empty, stony desert, sloping hillsides and rocky outcrops. Obviously it was a breach of operational safety manuals to drive out into the field without more protection, just two men in one vehicle. But in his report he would say he judged it to be a gesture to Hala’s home village, an appeal to Afghan hearts, that Hala’s boss had driven her body home in person, with no more protection than she herself had had.

One more month, then he’d be going home, home from his third and final tour in Afghanistan. He was longing to go home, he always longed to go home, but he wasn’t happy. Because he knew that when he got home, after just two or three weeks he would start longing to be back here again.

But there weren’t going to be any more tours, he had applied and been accepted to fill the post of head of the NHRI in Oslo, a newly established national institute for human rights. The NHRI was subject to Parliament, but operated as an independent body. They would be investigating human rights issues, providing information and advice to the national assembly, though beyond that their remit was rather vague. But that just meant that he and the eighteen other members of staff could influence what their purpose should be. In many ways it was a sort of continuation of what he had been doing in Afghanistan, just without guns. So he was going to take the job. He wasn’t going to end up being a general, in any case. That was the sort of thing they let you know in a very respectful, discreet manner. That you weren’t one of the chosen few. But that wasn’t why he had to get away from Afghanistan.

In his mind’s eye he could see Hala lying on the ground. She was usually dressed in Western clothes and a modest hijab, but that night she had been wearing a blue shalwar kameez tunic that was pulled up around her waist. Bohr remembered her bare hips and stomach, the skin with that glow that would slowly fade. The way the life in those beautiful, beautiful eyes had faded. Even when she was dead, Hala had looked like Bianca. He had noticed when she introduced herself as his interpreter, that Bianca was looking out through those eyes, that she had come back from the dead, from the river, to be with him again. But obviously Hala couldn’t know that, it wasn’t the sort of thing he could ever have explained to her.

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