Wolves at the Door

by Gunnar Staalesen

  ‘Did you contact one of them before Midtbø took the big dive, perhaps?’

  This time she poked a stubby finger into my chest, but without much weight behind it. ‘You’re living bloody dangerously, Veum. If someone takes my daughter, you’ll be top of my to-kill list.’

  ‘Why would anyone take your daughter?’

  ‘They’ve threatened it before. The child-welfare bastards.’

  ‘But you were allowed to keep her, I see.’

  ‘Yes, just imagine that. My solicitor helped me. I can easily set him on you as well.’

  ‘What? Don’t you know there’s a law to keep that sort on a leash?’

  ‘Eh? What are you talking about?’

  I hadn’t been mistaken. She had absolutely no sense of humour. ‘At any rate you’ve piqued my curiosity. If it’s true what they say – that you had men queueing outside your door in Flaktveit…’

  ‘Queueing outside my door? Have you been talking to those crazy neighbours? There was no bloody queue.’

  ‘Well, in that case … if you moved here, with Midtbø, is it conceivable that one of them might’ve been jealous?’

  ‘One of them? Jealous? Are you trying to make some kind of drama out of this as well now? I can easily get one of them to take care of you.’

  ‘In that case I … I can just return the threat. If anything happens to me, you’re bound to lose her.’ I patted my internal breast pocket. ‘I’ve recorded everything you’ve said. So don’t try anything.’ It was a bluff of course, but I assumed she wasn’t going to frisk me.

  We stood glowering at each other, like two professional boxers the day before a championship fight. The mistake was that we each represented our own weight class and I was not at all sure that mine was the heavier of the two.

  ‘Where’s your daughter now?’

  ‘At school. And don’t you dare wait for her today as well. If you do…’ She broke off.

  I carried on: ‘Will you kill me?’

  ‘Go to hell!’

  ‘Svanhild, so many people have recommended I go there, but I’ve never been tempted. Do you think it’s an all-inclusive trip? If so, you might consider it yourself.’

  She made a sweeping gesture with her hand towards the door. ‘Out!’

  I saw no reason to object, but made a small deviation as I walked past her. She hadn’t intimidated me. Anyone could mouth off. But she had given me something to think about. If Mikael Midtbø had been killed, there could be many candidates for the job out there. Here, they wouldn’t even have needed a bat. But whether the same person had seen to Per Haugen was a very different matter. And what about the driver of the grey VW Golf three days ago?

  Was there any connection at all? In order to find out the answers, my only option was to continue my investigations, even if it meant going to Tønsberg to get the full picture of this case.

  18

  From Fyllingsdalen I took the shortest route to Slettebakken. I turned into Adolph Bergs vei and parked a little closer to the relevant block than the last time. The temperature was three or four degrees above zero; normal for Bergen in January.

  I hadn’t made any attempt to ring in advance this time, either. I looked up at what I had worked out were Laila Bratteli’s windows. The blinds were drawn, as on my previous visit, and it was hard to see if there were any lights on behind them. I went up to the second floor and onto the gallery.

  I laid my ear against her door. Not a sound. I rang the bell. Nothing happened. I repeated the action, but without much hope. I might just as well have been selling sand in the Sahara. The result would have been the same.

  Then I went to the adjacent flat and rang the bell. It didn’t take long for Ghulam Mohammad to appear in the doorway. When he recognised me he rolled his eyes. ‘Can’t you leave her in peace?’ he protested.

  I reiterated what I had said the previous time. ‘I don’t want to torment her. I just want to ask a few questions. They’re not even about her; it’s her father I want to ask about.’

  ‘Her father?’ He straightened his large glasses and eyed me sharply.

  ‘Yes. It’s too long to explain … Has anyone else been here since my visit?’ When he didn’t answer, I added: ‘Was anyone here yesterday?’

  ‘Yes. No. No one came after you.’ He studied me thoughtfully, as though I had aroused his suspicions again.

  ‘Well, I spoke to her ex-husband last night. He said it wasn’t him at her door, but probably people she owed money. Have you, or your wife, observed…? Does she still take pills?’

  His eyes went walkabout.

  I seized the opportunity. ‘I see. Does your wife know about this?’

  ‘Fatima, she…’ He paused.

  ‘I gave you my card yesterday. I’m a private investigator. If Laila’s in that kind of trouble, I may be able to help her.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked at me in surprise. ‘How?’

  Well, I would have loved to know that myself. But I stuck to my guns. ‘I know the milieu. If nothing else, I can tip off the police.’

  ‘Uhuh.’ Again he was considering his options. ‘Fatima says she’s been to the doctor’s with her now and then. To a number of surgeries. Usually Laila was in a bad mood afterwards, but sometimes things went better. When the doctor gave her a prescription and Fatima accompanied her to the chemist’s. There’s a branch here.’ He nodded in the direction of Sletten Shopping Centre.

  ‘Is your wife in now?’

  ‘No, they … She’s out.’

  ‘Out with … Laila?’

  His jaw muscles writhed as if he had a nest of vipers under his skin.

  ‘Last time you told me they occasionally go out for a cup of tea.’

  ‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But they did go out together?’

  He nodded silently and pressed his lips together, as a sign that I wasn’t going to get a word out of him. For a moment or two we stood eyeing each other. Then I nodded, thanked him and said I would try the shopping centre. If I didn’t see them, my message was the same as before. If Fatima could pass on the message, I would very much like to have a few words with Laila, and there was nothing to worry about. Not any more, as her father was no longer alive and couldn’t do anything to her at all.

  I walked the two minutes it took to reach the shopping centre. Sletten was the original name, but it had been radically rebuilt since the sixties, when it had been new, and now it offered a lot more than shopping. There was underground parking too – and I saw them coming up from there.

  I realised at once it was them. A muscle-bound man in a dark-brown leather jacket was engaged in a heated conversation with a woman wearing a red windcheater with the hood over her head, while a plump foreign woman in a long, brown winter cloak with her hair hidden under a dark-green hijab vainly tried to separate them. I recognised the man. His name was Bjørn Hårkløv and he was a debt collector I had crossed swords with before, or at least exchanged punches. The last time I saw him he had tried to drag me into a room in Skuteviken to finish me off. Now he had a firm grip on the shoulders of the Norwegian woman and was berating her while jerking her backwards and forwards so hard, she seemed to dangle from his great big fists.

  I quickened my pace, shouting: ‘Hey, hey, hey. What’s going on here?’

  They turned to face me, all three of them, the foreign woman with an expression of gratitude, the woman in the windcheater with one of despair, and Hårkløv with visible annoyance at being interrupted.

  When he saw who it was, his square jaw churned and his biceps looked as if they might burst the seams of his leather jacket. ‘Veum! What the fuck has this got to do with you? Just clear off. This is none of your business.’

  I continued walking until I was standing right in front of him. ‘In fact it is. I have a meeting with Laila now, which you’re holding up, so unless you clear off I won’t be responsible for what might happen.’ I was right. I wouldn’t be responsible for anything. The worst-case scenario
was that I would end up at A&E, but I’d always had a big mouth, and it had helped me out of scrapes before. ‘I don’t think you should behave like this in broad daylight and imagine you can walk away scot-free.’

  He released his grip on Laila Bratteli and brutally shoved her away. She tumbled into Fatima’s arms while he focused his full attention on me.

  ‘And who do you think’s going to stop me? You? That fucking bitch’s up to her ears in debt and it increases by ten thousand for every day that passes. If you fancy helping her, let’s see the colour of your money. Ninety thousand today, a hundred tomorrow!’

  Laila Bratteli sobbed beside us. ‘He’s lying! That’s a lie!’ Her voice cracked. ‘I owe forty … maximum.’

  He sent her a vicious glare. ‘Forty a week ago. A hundred thousand tomorrow.’ He turned back to me. From the corner of my eye I saw Fatima pull Laila away. He shifted his attention to them. ‘Hey! Don’t you bloody try to sneak off!’ He gestured towards them. I moved two steps to the side and stood between them, tensing my stomach muscles as hard as I could and trying to keep his eyes focused on mine.

  The last-mentioned succeeded. But he was so close to me that I had trouble focusing. Now it was my shoulders he had grabbed, but I lifted my arms and struck out and I was free.

  We were no longer alone. More people had come out of the shopping centre, among them a man in a security guard’s uniform who looked as if he had barely left school. ‘Hey you! What’s all this?’ he shouted; at least his voice had broken.

  Hårkløv changed focus once again. ‘Ask this twat. He was trying to pick a fight with me.’

  ‘I broke up a physical assault,’ I said and looked at the young security guard with a teacherly air. ‘This fellow attacked two women.’

  ‘Shall I call the police?’ the guard asked.

  ‘The hell you can,’ Hårkløv said, trying to share his attention between us.

  ‘No one at home in hell,’ I said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Well, you’re here, aren’t you.’

  He watched Fatima and Laila make their escape. They were by Wiers-Jenssens vei and about to cross the street towards Adolph Bergs vei. He eyed those of us around him with contempt. Then he started walking in the same direction. Once again I took a few steps and stood between him and them. It was safer now, with a handful of witnesses around.

  ‘You stay here!’ I said with conviction.

  The guard held a phone in the air. ‘I’m ringing the police.’

  ‘Go to hell, the whole lot of you!’ He turned on his heel, headed for the slope down to the car park and was gone.

  The guard appeared uncertain what to do. ‘Shall I ring?’

  I shrugged. ‘As you like.’ I gave him my card. ‘You can give them this if they want my name.’

  ‘Varg Veum?’

  ‘Correct.’

  He extended a hand. ‘Kalle Blomkvist.’

  ‘Is that really your name? As in Astrid Lindgren’s Master Detective?’

  ‘Yes. Anything wrong with it?’

  ‘Nope. Nothing at all. Welcome to the club.’

  He looked down at the underground car park. ‘And the crook? Do you know what his name is?’

  ‘Bjørn Hårkløv. Well-known heavy.’

  He nodded knowingly, as if it was something he had learned on the course for security guards. ‘Let’s leave it at that then, for now.’

  There was a scream of tyres deep underground and from below came a black Audi with darkened windows. I didn’t have a second’s doubt about who the driver was. Because of the crowd that he himself had attracted he had to brake as he passed and he sounded the horn at anyone who was slow to move. With some satisfaction I noticed Kalle Blomkvist take a photo of his number plate with his mobile phone. He smirked to me: ‘That’s him on record.’

  The Audi swung right, into Wiers-Jenssens vei.

  ‘Good. Let me just …’ I turned and jogged after the car. I reached the street just in time to see him enter Adolph Bergs vei. I speeded up and rounded the corner a few seconds later. He had pulled up outside the block where Laila and Fatima lived.

  He opened the car door and stepped out. On spotting me, he stopped. ‘Are you following me?’

  ‘My car’s here.’

  ‘You want a beating, don’t you.’

  Now I had almost caught up with him. I came to a halt a few metres away. ‘Not really. At any rate we can wait for the police to come.’

  ‘That asshole didn’t call them, did he?’

  ‘They said they were on their way.’

  His face darkened. He cast a final glance at the house where she lived. Then he abruptly turned, jumped into his car and started it up without a word of farewell. He drove down the street, well above the local speed limit.

  I went into the block again and up to the second floor. This time I rang Mohammad’s bell. I heard footsteps inside and a pause before he opened the door.

  ‘Has Fatima told you what happened?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘They’re here, both of them.’

  ‘Could you ask Laila if she’s willing to talk to me now?’

  He nodded and closed the door. I waited. After a short while the door opened again. ‘You can come in,’ he said. ‘She’ll see you.’

  19

  A kind of semi-darkness lay over the flat I entered. In the hallway the floor covering, furniture and furnishings were Scandinavian design, but when we entered the sitting room it was like walking into a different culture. On the floors there were oriental carpets in red, black and gold. On the walls, bright textiles, a mixture of appliqué and embroidery. In the centre of one wall, facing me as I went in, was a fabric with a black background and hanging threads of gold, like golden rain, and at the bottom some enormous crowns of purple flowers opening to the sun that was rarely there. The low furniture was covered with cushions in various patterns, some of them almost modernist in form, others an expression of a thousand-year old culture of such decorative beauty that it took my breath away. Permeating all of this was a faint fragrance of exotic spices.

  The only element to disrupt this atmosphere was the sound of a radio in an adjacent room. Instead of extra-terrestrial tones from bamboo flutes, drums and zither what I heard was the news on NRK Hordaland.

  The two women were sitting on the sofa. Fatima held her arms comfortingly around Laila, who was huddled up and leaning forwards, barely raising her eyes when I appeared. There was not much that reminded me of the good-looking, straight-backed woman I had seen in the photo on the wall of Bjarne Bratteli’s flat. The blonde hair, which presumably had been bleached at the time, had become darker, and looked tangled and unkempt. Her face was lean and her mouth twitched at the corners. Her skin was sallow, but when she opened her mouth, her teeth were surprisingly neat and attractive, like an enamel reminder of the person she had once been.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ she said in a voice so low it was barely audible.

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘Fatima,’ Ghulam said in a peremptory tone.

  She looked up, met his eyes, slowly let go of Laila with a solicitous pat on her shoulder and stood up. She didn’t look at me, but went to the door of the adjacent room.

  ‘We’ll make some tea in the kitchen,’ Ghulam said. ‘So you can talk undisturbed.’ He looked at Laila, as if to reassure her. ‘We are out here. If there is anything, just say.’ He turned his attention to me, sent me a serious look and then accompanied his wife into the kitchen. He closed the door quietly behind him and the somewhat noisy pop music that followed the news on NRK Hordaland became muffled and was eventually switched off.

  Laila watched me shyly as I pulled out a chair, straightened the cushion on it and sat on the opposite side of the low, black, varnished table that separated us. She stared at me expectantly, unsure who I was or what I wanted from her.

  ‘Let me say right from the start: I’m on your side. Whatever has happened in your li
fe and whatever created the problems you now clearly have, I’ll do everything in my power to help you. My name’s Varg Veum. I’m a private investigator, but my background is in child welfare. I know everything about what can happen to children behind closed doors, sadly. I know what traumas it can cause and I know how difficult it can be to recover from such experiences.’

  She nodded gently and ran the tip of her tongue over her dry lips and the red rash at the edges of her mouth.

  ‘The reason I’ve been trying to get hold of you over the last couple of days is that for a variety of reasons I’ve decided to investigate your father’s death.’ I hastened to add: ‘And I’ve already spoken to your mother and brother. And your uncle.’

  She looked at me vacantly. In the same low voice, she said: ‘I see.’

  ‘I understand that this is difficult for you to talk about.’

  She nodded, as before. There was something shrunken and cowed about her, as though what she really wanted was to curl up into a foetal position and never re-emerge. ‘Mm,’ she mumbled.

  ‘But you’ve recovered from this before. You had recovered. I was shown a photo of you, as a model, and nothing seemed to bother you then.’

  Her mouth twitched, but she still didn’t say anything.

  ‘Your husband also said you were completely different when you first met. It was after you testified against your father that—’

  She made a sudden swatting gesture, as if to interrupt me. ‘Stop! I don’t want to hear about that pig!’

  ‘No, I understand this is difficult.’

  There was a knock at the door from the kitchen. Fatima came in holding a tray. She set it down on the table, passed a large china cup and a plate to each of us and poured tea from a pot. Then she proffered a bowl of small, rectangular cakes. I took one and tasted it. It was both sweet and sour. I recognised raisins and candied peel in the dark-brown cake, which reminded me vaguely of those of my boyhood, from the Smith-Sivertsen bakery in Nordnesveien. Then she withdrew with a kindly smile, to the doorway, where Ghulam was waiting for her.