Dead Joker

by Anne Holt

  “But, Chief Inspector …” Sigurd Halvorsrud protested, and Hanne could see for the first time something resembling alertness glittering in his eyes. “I was there when my wife was murdered! Don’t you understand? I did nothing—”

  He plumped down into a chair. Either he had forgotten the blood on his hands or else he couldn’t care less. Regardless, he rubbed the bridge of his nose vigorously, before running his hand several times over his head, as if making a futile attempt to bring himself some comfort.

  “You were there,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said slowly, without daring to look at Erik Henriksen. “For the record, I have to let you know that you don’t need to make a statement without—”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen was interrupted by an entirely different man from the sobbing, brand-new widower who, until a few minutes earlier, had been sitting like an overgrown schoolboy in a barrel chair beside his wife’s beheaded remains. This was the Chief Public Prosecutor Sigurd Halvorsrud she had known previously. The sight made her shut her mouth.

  His eyes were steel gray. His mouth was no longer a shapeless hole in his face. His lips stretched across unusually even teeth. The wings of his nose quivered slightly, as if he had caught the scent of a truth he suddenly found too good to share with others. Even the arrogant little toss of his head, crass and abrupt, with his neck jutting forward, happened so quickly that Hanne Wilhelmsen fleetingly thought she must be mistaken.

  “I wasn’t just there,” Halvorsrud said lamely, in a low voice into empty space, as if on second thoughts he had decided to wait until a more appropriate juncture to return to his former self, “I can give you the name of the killer. And his address, for that matter.”

  The window was open a crack, even though it was only March and it looked as if spring had been seriously delayed. An ammonia smell wafted into the room and a cat wailed so suddenly that everyone jumped. In the glow from a garden light beside the gate, Hanne could see that it had started to snow, in soft, sparse flakes. The trainee wrinkled her nose and moved to close the window.

  “So you know the … Was it a man?”

  The Chief Public Prosecutor ought not to say anything. Hanne should not listen to him. Hanne Wilhelmsen was obliged to convey Sigurd Halvorsrud to police headquarters at Grønlandsleiret 44 as speedily as possible. The man required a lawyer. He had to have a shower and clean clothes. He needed to get away from this house where his wife lay dead and mutilated on the living room floor.

  Hanne ought to keep her mouth shut.

  Halvorsrud did not look at her.

  “A man,” he said with a nod.

  “Someone you know?”

  “No.”

  The Chief Public Prosecutor finally looked up again. He caught Hanne’s eye, and what followed was a silent contest that Hanne could not interpret. She could not figure out the expression in his eyes. She was perplexed by the conspicuous shifts in the Public Prosecutor’s behavior. One minute he was totally absent, and the next his usual arrogant self.

  “I don’t know him at all,” Sigurd Halvorsrud said in a remarkably steady voice. Then he got to his feet and let Hanne follow him up to the first floor to pack an overnight bag.

  The bedroom was spacious, with double doors opening on to a small balcony. Hanne’s hand automatically slid over the light switch by the door. Amazingly, the six downlighters in the ceiling came on. Sigurd Halvorsrud did not react in surprise at the upstairs lights actually working. He had pulled out two drawers in a tall green chest. Now he hunched over them, apparently rummaging aimlessly among underpants and shirts.

  A gigantic four-poster bed dominated the room. The footboard was intricately carved, and the carpenter had made generous use of gold leaf. A virtual sea of cushions and quilts lent the room a fairytale character, an impression intensified by three oil paintings on the wall depicting scenes from Asbjørnsen and Moe’s famous nineteenth-century Norwegian folk tales.

  “Can I help?” Hanne Wilhelmsen asked.

  The Public Prosecutor was no longer grubbing around for something he could not find. His hand was clutching a silver-framed photograph displayed alongside five or six other family portraits on the green-lacquered chest of drawers. Hanne Wilhelmsen wasn’t even sure if the man was still breathing.

  She crossed the room and stopped two paces from Halvorsrud. As she’d anticipated, the picture was of his wife. She was on horseback, with a young child straddled between her and the pommel. The child looked nervous and was clinging to his mother’s arm, which was angled protectively across the youngster’s shoulder and stomach, like a seatbelt. The woman was smiling. In contrast to the face that had stared expressionlessly at Hanne Wilhelmsen from the pale-pink driving license, this photograph revealed that Doris Flo Halvorsrud had been an attractive woman. Her face was cheerful and guileless, and her strong nose and wide chin suggested an appealing tenacity rather than a lack of femininity.

  Sigurd Halvorsrud held the picture in his right hand, his thumb pressed against the glass inside the embossed frame. His finger went white. Suddenly the glass cracked with a faint snap. Halvorsrud did not react, not even when blood began to pour from a deep cut on his hand.

  “I don’t know the man who killed my wife,” he said. “But I know who he is. You can have his name.”

  The woman and child in the photograph had almost disappeared, lost beneath the splintered glass and dark blood. Hanne Wilhelmsen took hold of the picture and coaxed it out of the man’s grasp. She replaced it gently on top of the chest of drawers, beside a silver hairbrush.

  “Let’s go, Halvorsrud.”

  The Chief Public Prosecutor shrugged and went with her. Drops of red were dripping from his injured thumb.

  3

  Journalist Evald Bromo had always enjoyed working at Aftenposten. It was an excellent newspaper. At least to work for. You avoided most of the adultery stories in the tabloids, and the pay was good. Now and then he even got the chance to immerse himself in a topic and study it in depth. Evald Bromo had worked on the financial pages for eleven years and usually looked forward to going to work.

  But not today.

  Evald Bromo’s wife put a plate with two pancakes on the table in front of him, sandwiched with butter and smothered in Canadian maple syrup, just the way she knew he liked them. Instead of launching himself greedily at his breakfast, he took a tight grip of his knife and fork, absent-mindedly tapping them tunelessly on the tabletop.

  “Don’t you think?”

  He flinched and dropped his fork on the floor.

  Evald Bromo’s wife was called Margaret Kleiven. She was skinny, as if the childlessness she had never come to terms with had eaten her up from the inside. Her skin seemed too large for her slight body, making her appear ten years older than her husband, even though they were the same age. They had never discussed adoption, so Margaret Kleiven had dedicated her life to discharging her duties as a high-school teacher to the best of her ability and to treating her husband as a substitute for the child she had never had. She leaned over him and tucked his napkin more neatly into his shirt collar before retrieving his fork.

  “Spring’s obviously late this year,” she repeated, mildly irritated, as she pointed insistently at the pancakes. “Eat up now. You’re behind time.”

  Evald Bromo stared at his plate. The syrup had run down the sides and the butter had melted, and now everything was mixed together in a greasy mess around the edges of the pancakes, making him feel nauseous.

  “I’m not very hungry today,” he mumbled, pushing the food away.

  “Aren’t you feeling well?” she asked anxiously. “Are you coming down with something? There’s such a lot going around just now. Maybe you should stay at home.”

  “Not at all. It’s just that I didn’t sleep too well. I can get something to eat at work. If I’m hungry, I mean.”

  He forced a faint smile. Sweat was pouring from his armpits, even though he had taken a shower that morning.

  He stood up abruptly.

  “But, darling
, you must have something to eat,” she said firmly, placing her hand on his shoulder to make him sit down again.

  “I’m going,” Evald Bromo snarled, pulling away from her unwelcome touch.

  Margaret Kleiven’s narrow face became all eyes; her mouth and nose disappeared, creating an overpowering sense of gigantic gray-blue irises.

  “Relax,” he said, attempting a smile. “I may have to nip into a meeting at … a meeting. Not sure, you see. I’ll phone, okay?”

  Margaret Kleiven did not reply. When Evald Bromo leaned across to give her a routine goodbye kiss, she drew back. He shrugged, muttering something she could not catch.

  “Hope you feel better soon,” she said in an injured tone as she turned her back on him.

  Once he had left, she nevertheless stood staring at him until his back vanished behind their neighbor’s overgrown hedge. She rubbed the curtains with her fingers and it occurred to her in her distraction that they needed a spring clean. It also struck her that her husband’s back had become thinner over the years.

  When Evald Bromo knew his wife could no longer see him, he halted. The chill spring air jarred on a decayed molar as he opened his mouth and took a deep breath.

  Evald Bromo’s world was about to be shattered. It was all going to happen on the first of September. He would have the spring and the summer, but then right at the beginning of autumn, everything would be over. For Evald Bromo the coming six months would be blighted by pain, shame and fear at the thought of what lay ahead.

  His bus arrived and he grabbed the one vacant seat before an old lady could reach it. He never usually did that kind of thing.

  4

  Evald Bromo was not at work. Out of habit, he had got off the bus on Akersgata at his usual stop, between the government tower block and the Ministry of Culture. He didn’t even shoot a glance in the direction of Aftenposten, situated fifty meters down the street; instead, his feet had almost automatically taken him up to Vår Frelsers graveyard.

  The graveyard was silent. The occasional high-school pupil hurried along the network of paths to make it in time for the first class of the day at the nearby Cathedral School. Despite the signs bearing stern reminders about using a leash, a stray dog was sniffing amongst the graves. The mongrel, black and burly, was wagging its tail madly at everything it found. The owner had to be the equally burly man in an equally black coat who was leaning on a lamp post reading a newspaper.

  Evald Bromo was freezing.

  He opened the zipper of his leather jacket and loosened the scarf around his neck. Suddenly he felt ravenous. He was thirsty too, come to think of it. He sat down on a grimy bench beside a gravestone whose inscription was no longer legible and removed his gloves, placing them neatly by his side. He was plagued by thoughts about how cold he felt and how tormented with hunger and thirst he was. He conjured up images of food and recalled the sensation of ice-cold water filling his mouth after a long run; he felt the liquid progress from his palate down his throat. He decided to take off his jacket all the same.

  Now his teeth were chattering.

  He had received two emails. One anonymous, and with a meaningless address: pokerface@hotmail.com. The other signed “Someone who never forgets”. Forgets what?

  Perhaps it was possible to trace a Hotmail address. Perhaps there were records of that kind of thing. Evald Bromo knew very well that the police sometimes had problems obtaining permission from internet service providers to check where an email might have originated. It must be even worse for an ordinary citizen. He had decided to enlist the help of a colleague who knew considerably more than he did about electronic communications, but when it came to it, he could not bring himself to ask. When he’d felt the color rise in his cheeks, he had instead asked about searching an archive he had not been able to access.

  Worst of all, however, was the thought that these emails were stored somewhere in Aftenposten’s colossal IT system. When they’d pinged onto his screen, he had opened them and read them twice before deleting them. He’d wanted to escape them, to get rid of them. Only after he had deleted the second one, the one that had arrived yesterday morning and had put him into a state of total panic, had it dawned on him that both emails were retrievable. Evald Bromo vaguely remembered receiving a circular a few months earlier. Since he hadn’t really understood what it was about, he had only skimmed it. But he had noted its warning that IT staff might, for technical reasons, occasionally need to access employees’ private mail. And that deleted documents could remain in the system for some considerable time.

  Evald Bromo was a good journalist. At the age of forty-six, he had still not tired of it. He lived quietly, with a limited social circle and an apparent concern for his elderly mother that was touching. Over the years he had obtained a rudimentary education in economics, taking the odd accountancy qualification and distance-learning course. Enough to satisfy pertinent questions. More than sufficient to find weaknesses wherever they might lie, as a good business journalist should. Evald Bromo’s approach was as thorough in his work as it was in his hobby of building model boats, something that had developed into a time-consuming obsession.

  Building boats and writing were about the same thing.

  Attention to detail. Fastidiousness. Just as every tiny detail had to be exactly right on a ship, from the cannon balls to the stitches on the sail and the drapery on the figurehead, so the stories he covered also needed to be correct. They might be critical, or presented from a particular point of view, but they were always meticulous. Everything in order. Everyone having a say.

  Evald Bromo had only one real weakness.

  Certainly there were sad aspects to his life. His father, who had died in a drinking binge when Evald was only six, had haunted his dreams ever since. However, his mother had done what she could for the boy. These days she lay in her decrepit shell of a body with a brain that had short-circuited long ago, but Evald Bromo derived a quiet pleasure from his almost daily visits to her nursing home. His marriage to Margaret Kleiven had never been a bed of roses, but at least it offered comfort. For the past fourteen years he had been looked after and given food, and peace and quiet.

  Evald Bromo’s weakness was little girls.

  He could not remember when it had started. It had probably always been like that. In a sense, he had never grown out of them. Giggling, gum-chewing girls with pigtails and long stockings under short skirts had swarmed around him that spring when he was twelve years old and had been given five hundred kroner by an aunt. Eventually the girls grew bigger, but Evald Bromo did not keep up with them. He could never forget what one of them had given him in return for fifty shiny coins, behind the gymnasium and sworn to secrecy.

  As a youth, he had buried his urges in work and exercise. He ran like a hare; for an hour before anyone else had risen, and usually for two hours in the early evening. The legal training he embarked on fell through after one and a half semesters. The hours he spent in the reading room, head bowed over books that did not interest him in the slightest, became unbearable. They provided too much room for thoughts he was reluctant to acknowledge. Evald Bromo ran: he ran like a madman, away from university and away from himself. At twenty-two years of age, in 1974, he arrived at a temporary post with Dagbladet newspaper. And the running he was so fond of became fashionable.

  On his twenty-fifth birthday, Evald Bromo became a criminal.

  He had never had a girlfriend. His only sexual experience with another person was the one he had bought for fifty kroner coins threaded on a string when he was twelve and a half years old.

  When he was double that age, he was aware of the difference between right and wrong. The young girl who had run away from home could not have been older than thirteen. She was begging for money when he staggered home after attending a celebration in town with a group of people who might be called friends. The girl received three hundred kroner and a pack of cigarettes. In return, Evald Bromo got five minutes of intense pleasure and endless nights of regret and
remorse.

  But he had made a start.

  He always paid. He was really generous, and never used force. Sometimes it amazed him how easy it was to find these youngsters. They were lost, superfluous in a city that closed its eyes to them as long as they did not hang around in gangs. And they didn’t. Not these ones. They were alone, and even though they used make-up to look older, Evald Bromo possessed an expert eye when it came to what was hidden underneath those skintight blouses and bras stuffed with cotton wool. He could determine a girl’s age almost to the exact month she was born. He shopped for illegal sex for a period of six years. Then he met Margaret Kleiven.

  Margaret Kleiven was quiet, thin and small. She was friendly. She was the first grown woman to show more than a sisterly interest in him. Sexually, she demanded very little. They married after three months’ acquaintance, and when Evald Bromo slipped the ring on her finger, the emotions he felt were hope and relief. Now someone would keep him under control. Everything would be much more difficult, and finally simple again.

  He had never been unfaithful. He did not regard it as such. When by chance he came across an address in a porn magazine he found lying around at work, the temptation was too great. It seemed safe. The arrangement cost far more than picking up strays in the street, but on the other hand he could keep the home he shared with Margaret clean. Over the years, there had been new addresses in other shady magazines and also from time to time even younger girls, but he had always kept himself to a boundary of ten years old. That’s where he said stop. What he was doing was wrong, terribly wrong, but it became worse the younger the girls were.

  He was never unfaithful.

  He bought sex once a month.

  First and foremost, he was a journalist, and he built model boats.

  Evald Bromo was forty-six years old and skipped work for the first time in his life. The morning rush hour in Ullevålsveien had subsided, and one or two little birds seemed to believe that spring had already arrived. There was a smell of wet earth and an indefinable scent of the city, and he was chilled to the bone.