by Jo Nesbo
“Jesus Christ,” Harry said after a pause.
“Agreed,” Torhus said.
“Did you know his wife had a lover?”
Torhus chuckled quietly. “No, but you’d have had to give me very good odds if I was betting she didn’t have one.”
“Why?”
“First of all, because I assume homosexual husbands would turn a blind eye to that kind of thing. Secondly, there is something in the culture of the Ministry that seems to encourage extramarital affairs. Indeed, sometimes new marriages spring up from them. Here at the Ministry you can barely move in the corridors for bumping into ex-spouses, or lovers, ex or current. The service is notorious for its inbreeding. We’re worse than the bloody Norwegian Broadcasting Company.”
Torhus continued to chuckle.
“The lover isn’t from the Ministry,” Harry said. “There’s a Norwegian who’s a kind of local Gekko here, a bigtime currency broker. Jens Brekke. I thought at first he was involved with the daughter, but it turns out it’s Hilde Molnes. They met almost as soon as the family arrived and according to the daughter it’s more than the odd roll in the hay. In fact, it’s quite serious and the daughter reckons they’re going to move in together sooner or later.”
“News to me.”
“At least that gives the wife a possible motive. And the lover.”
“Because Molnes was an obstruction?”
“No, on the contrary. According to the daughter, Hilde Molnes refused to let go of her husband. After he pared down his political aspirations I suppose the cover his marriage afforded wasn’t so important anymore. She must have used visiting rights to her daughter as blackmail. Isn’t that what usually happens? No, the motive is probably even less noble. The Molnes family owns half of Ørsta.”
“Exactly.”
“I asked Crime Squad to check if there was a will and what Atle was sitting on in terms of family shares and other assets.”
“Well, this isn’t my field, Hole, but aren’t you making things a bit complicated now? It could quite simply have been a nutter who knocked on the ambassador’s door and stabbed him to death.”
“Maybe. Does it matter in principle if this nutter is Norwegian, Torhus?”
“What do you mean?”
“Real nutters don’t stab a guy and then remove all useful evidence from the crime scene. They leave a series of puzzles so that we can play cops and robbers afterward. In this case we have a decorative knife, and that’s it. Believe me, this was a carefully planned murder by someone not disposed to playfulness, who wanted the job done and the case dropped for lack of evidence. But who knows—perhaps you need to be just as insane to commit such a murder. And the only nutters I’ve met so far on this case have been Norwegian.”
22
Tuesday, January 14
At length Harry found the entrance between two strip bars in Soi 1 in Patpong. He went up the stairs and entered a semidark room where a gigantic fan in the ceiling circled lazily. Harry ducked involuntarily under the immense blades; he already had the marks to show that doorways and other domestic constructions were not adapted to his one meter ninety-two.
Hilde Molnes was sitting at a table at the back of the restaurant. Her sunglasses, meant to give her anonymity, had the effect of attracting attention to her, he thought.
“Actually I don’t like rice wine,” she said, draining the glass. “Mekhong is the exception. May I offer you a glass, Officer?”
Harry shook his head. She flicked her fingers and had the glass filled.
“They know me here,” she said. “They stop when they think I’ve had enough. And by then as a rule I have had enough.” She laughed huskily. “I hope it’s all right meeting here. Home is … a bit sad now. What’s the purpose of this consultation, Officer?”
She enunciated the words clearly, the way people who habitually try to hide that they’ve been drinking do.
“We’ve just been told that you and Jens Brekke regularly went to the Maradiz Hotel together.”
“There you go!” Hilde Molnes said. “Finally someone who does his job. If you talk to the waiter here he’d be able to confirm that herr Brekke and I also met here on a regular basis.” She spat the words out. “Dark, anonymous, never any other Norwegians, and on top of that they serve the town’s best plaa lòt. Do you like eel, Hole? Saltwater eels?”
Harry was reminded of the man they dragged ashore outside Drøbak. He had been in the sea some days, and his pale cadaverous face had looked at them with a child’s surprise. Something had eaten his eyelids. But what had caught their attention was the eel. Its tail protruded from the man’s mouth and lashed back and forth like a silver whip. Harry could still remember the salty aroma in the air, so it must have been a saltwater eel.
“My grandfather ate almost nothing but eels,” she said. “From just before the war until he died. Stuffed them down, couldn’t get enough.”
“I’ve also been given some information regarding the will.”
“Do you know why he ate so much eel? Oh, of course you don’t. He was a fisherman, but this was before the war and people didn’t want to eat eel in Ørsta. Do you know why?”
He saw the same pain flash across her face as he had seen in the garden.
“Fru Molnes—”
“I’m asking if you know why.”
Harry shook his head.
Hilde Molnes lowered her voice and tapped a long red fingernail on the tablecloth as she pronounced every syllable. “Well, a boat had gone down that winter, it happened in calm weather and only a few hundred meters from land, but it was so cold that not one of the nine men on board survived. There’s a channel under where the boat capsized and not a single body was found. Afterward people claimed that a huge number of eels had come to the fjord. They say eels eat drowned men, you know. Many of the victims were related to people in Ørsta, so the sale of eels took a nosedive. People wouldn’t dare be seen returning home with eel in their shopping bags. So Grandad reckoned it was worth his while selling all the other fish and eating the eel himself. Born and bred in Sunnmøre, you know …”
She drank from her glass and placed it on the table. A dark ring spread across the cloth.
“Then I suppose he got a taste for it. ‘There were only nine of them,’ Grandad said. ‘That can’t have been enough for so many of them. I might have eaten one or two who fed on the poor fellers, but so what? I didn’t taste any difference anyway.’ No difference! That’s a good one.”
It sounded like an echo of something.
“What do you think, Hole? Do you think the eels ate the men?”
Harry scratched behind an ear. “Well, some people claim mackerel eat human flesh too. I don’t know. They probably all have a bite, I imagine. Fish, that is.”
Harry let her finish her drink.
“A colleague of mine in Oslo has just spoken to your husband’s business lawyer, Bjørn Hardeid, in Ålesund. As you perhaps know, lawyers can revoke client confidentiality when the client has died and in their opinion the information won’t harm the client’s reputation.”
“I didn’t, no.”
“Well, Bjørn Hardeid didn’t want to say anything. So my colleague rang Atle’s brother, but unfortunately there wasn’t a lot to be got out of him, either. He went particularly quiet when my colleague proposed the theory that Atle didn’t own as much of the family fortune as many might have thought.”
“What makes you think that?”
“A man who can’t pay a gambling debt of 750,000 kroner doesn’t necessarily have to be poor, but he is definitely not someone who has a substantial share of a family fortune amounting to two hundred million kroner at his disposal.”
“Where—?”
“My colleague called the Brønnøysund register and got the figures for Molnes Furniture. The capital on the books is less of course, but he discovered that the company is listed on the SMB, so he rang a broker who worked out the stock exchange value for him. The family company Molnes Holding has four
shareholders—three brothers and a sister. All the siblings are on the board of Molnes Furniture, and there are no reports of any sales of shares since they were transferred from Molnes Senior to the holding company; so unless your husband sold his part of the holding company to one of the others he should be good for at least …” Harry glanced at his notepad where he had written down every word of what was said over the phone. “Fifty million kroner.”
“They have been thorough, I can see.”
“I didn’t understand half of what I just said, I only know it means someone is holding back your husband’s money, and I’d like to know why.”
Hilde Molnes peered at him over her glass. “Do you really want to know?”
“Why not?”
“I’m not so sure that those who sent you imagined they would have to delve so deep into the ambassador’s … private life.”
“I know too much already, fru Molnes.”
“Do you know about …?”
“Yes.”
“Exactly …”
She paused while finishing her Mekhong. The waiter came with a top-up, but she waved him away.
“If you also know that the Molnes family has a long tradition as pew warmers at the Inner Mission chapel and members of the Christian Democratic Party, you can perhaps work out the rest.”
“Perhaps. But I would appreciate it if you told me.”
She shivered as if it was only now she could savor the sharp taste of the rice spirit.
“It was Atle’s father who decided. When the rumors began to spread in connection with his candidacy for party leader, Atle told his father the truth. A week later his father had rewritten his will. It stated that Atle’s share of the family fortune would be in his name, but the right of disposal was transferred to Runa. The right comes into effect when she is twenty-three.”
“And who has the right to the money until then?”
“No one. Which just means it stays in the family business.”
“And what happens now that your husband is dead?”
“Now,” Hilde said, running a finger around the rim of the glass. “Now Runa will inherit all the money. And the right of disposal is transferred to the person with parental rights until she is twenty-three.”
“So, if I understand you correctly that means the money has been released and is at your disposal.”
“Looks like it, yes. Until Runa is twenty-three.”
“Exactly what does right of disposal entail?”
Hilde Molnes shrugged. “I really haven’t thought about it much. I was only told a few days ago. By Hardeid.”
“So this clause about the right of disposal being transferred to you wasn’t something you knew about before?”
“It might have been mentioned. I signed some papers, but this is terribly complicated, don’t you think? Anyway, I never paid any attention before.”
“Didn’t you?” Harry said airily. “I thought you said something about people from Sunnmøre …”
She smiled wanly. “I’ve always been a bad Sunnmøring.”
Harry studied her. Was she pretending she was drunker than she was? He scratched his neck.
“How long have you and Jens Brekke known each other?”
“How long have we been fucking, do you mean?”
“Well, that too.”
“So let’s put this in the right sequence. Let me see …” Hilde Molnes knitted her brows and squinted up at the ceiling. She tried to support her chin on her hand, but it slipped off, and he knew he was wrong. She was as drunk as a skunk.
“We met at Atle’s welcome party two days after arriving in Bangkok. It started at eight, the whole of the Norwegian colony was invited and it took place in the garden in front of the ambassador’s residence. He fucked me in the garage, that must have been two or three hours later, I suppose. I say he fucked me because I was probably so drunk at that point he hardly needed my cooperation. Or consent. But he had it next time. Or the time after, I don’t remember. At any rate, after a few bouts we got to know each other. Was that what you asked? Yes, and since then we’ve continued to get to know each other. We know each other pretty well now. Is that good enough for you, Officer?”
Harry was annoyed. Perhaps it was the way she made a show of her indifference and self-contempt. Anyway, she gave him no reason to continue treating her with silk gloves.
“You said you were at home the day your husband died. Exactly where were you from five o’clock in the evening until you were told he’d been found dead?”
“I don’t remember.”
She screeched with laughter. It sounded like a raven screaming in a quiet forest, and Harry could see they had started to attract attention. For a moment she almost fell off her chair, until she regained her balance.
“Don’t look so worried, Officer. I have an alibi, you see. Isn’t that what it’s called? Yes, indeed, a fantastic alibi, I can tell you. I think my daughter will be willing to testify that I was unable to move much that evening. I remember opening a bottle of gin after dinner and my guess is I fell asleep, woke up, had another drink, fell asleep, woke up and so on. You understand, I’m sure.”
Harry understood.
“Anything else you wanted to ask, Hole?”
She drawled the two vowels in his name, not much, but enough to provoke him.
“Just if you killed your husband, fru Molnes.”
In one astonishingly quick, supple movement she grabbed the glass, and before he could stop her he felt it brush against his ear and heard it smash against the wall behind them. She grimaced.
“You might not believe it after that, but I was the top scorer for Ørsta Girls 14–16 Division.” Her voice was calm, as though she had already put what happened behind her. Harry looked at the frightened faces that had turned toward them.
“Sixteen years old, that’s an awfully long time ago. I was the best-looking girl in … hm, I’ve probably already told you that. And I had curves, not like now. A girlfriend and I used to go into the referees’ changing room accidentally on purpose, wearing tiny towels, and say we’d gone in the wrong door on the way from the shower. All for the team of course. But I don’t think it had much effect on the referees. They were probably wondering why we were having a shower before the game.”
Suddenly she got up and shouted: “Ørstagutt hei, Ørstagutt hei, Ørstagutt hei, hei, hei!” She slumped back down on her chair. The room had gone quiet.
“That was how we cheered. We shouted for Ørsta boys because the word for girls doesn’t work, does it. The rhythm’s all out. Well, who knows, perhaps we just liked showing off.”
Harry took her by the arm and helped her down the stairs. He gave the taxi driver her address, a five-dollar bill and told him to make sure she got home. He probably didn’t understand much of what Harry said, but he seemed to grasp what he meant.
He went into a bar in Soi 2, at the end, toward Silom district. The counter was almost empty and on the stage there were a couple of go-go girls who hadn’t been bought for the evening and clearly didn’t have much hope of that happening. They might as well have been doing the washing-up as they dutifully shook their legs and their breasts bounced up and down to “When Susannah Cries.” Harry wasn’t sure which he thought was sadder.
Someone put a beer in front of him that he hadn’t ordered. He left it untouched, paid and rang the police station from a pay phone by the men’s toilet. He couldn’t see a door for the ladies’.
23
Tuesday, January 14
A light breeze blew through his cropped hair. Harry was standing on a brick overhang at the edge of the roof surveying the city. When he pinched his eyes it was like a carpet of glittering, twinkling lights.
“Get down from there,” a voice said behind him. “You’re making me nervous.”
Liz was sitting in a deck-chair with a can of beer in her hand. Harry had gone to the station and found her snowed under piles of reports that had to be read. It was almost midnight, and she had agree
d it was time to call it a day. She had locked the office, they had taken the lift up to the eleventh floor, discovered the door to the roof was closed for the night, climbed out of a window, pulled down a fire escape and clambered up.
The blast from a foghorn sounded through the woollen blanket of car traffic.
“Did you hear that?” Liz asked. “When I was little my father used to say that in Bangkok you could hear elephants calling to each other when they were being freighted by ship. They came from Malaysia because the forests in Borneo had been cut down, and the elephants were chained to the deck on their way to the forests in northern Thailand. For ages after I got here I thought it was the elephants blowing through their trunks.”
