Dead Joker

by Anne Holt

  “The court is adjourned.”

  The judge’s gavel banged on the table and Judge Bugge limped out through the back door.

  “He did it,” Billy T. heard Halvorsrud say. “He let me go.” The Chief Public Prosecutor stared in disbelief at his defense counsel.

  “That’s right,” Karen Borg said quietly. “You can go home now. Together with Thea.”

  Part 2

  54

  Norway was at war for the first time since the spring of 1945. NATO had carried out its threats, and Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian troops were to be forcibly expelled from Kosovo. The ethnic cleansing that had to date cost several thousand Kosovan Albanians their lives and made a quarter of a million of them homeless, was to be stopped. And Norway was involved in the attack.

  You would not have known it. It was the night before Sunday March 28, 1999, and Evald Bromo could see no unusual signs of unrest anywhere. He wandered through the streets of Oslo carrying a small package measuring about fifteen square centimeters in a carrier bag under his arm.

  Some jostling in front of the entrance to the restaurant at Stortorvets Gjæstgiveri was the closest thing there was to any violence. The streets were full of people who obviously could not care less about the war. They already had enough on their plates and were mostly obsessed with trying to get in to some place or other before closing time.

  He still had not opened the package.

  It might be something entirely innocuous.

  But he was sure of one thing: the package was from Pokerface. The email terrorist. He had no idea how he knew that. It had something to do with the plain script. Something about the grayish-brown, anonymous paper. Something or other about the way the postage stamp was affixed in the corner – at right angles and the exact same distance from the top of the envelope as the side – told him that the person who had wrapped the parcel had taken great pains with it. Nevertheless there were no details about the sender.

  It must be Pokerface.

  As long as he did not open it, he could continue hoping that the package contained something completely innocent. Perhaps it was an advertising promotion. The neutral wrapper could be a way of tricking him into opening it instead of throwing the whole shebang into the garbage where all the other gaudy missives ended up, unopened and unread.

  An unregistered taxi containing two dark-skinned teenagers drove slowly past him in Grensen. He picked up his pace to demonstrate lack of interest. A young woman looked him up and down when he dropped the parcel and bent over quick as a flash to retrieve it. He did not meet her gaze but pulled his jacket more snugly around him as he stared at the ground and hurried onward.

  There was too much activity at the Aftenposten offices on this Saturday night. Of course it was because of the Kosovo crisis. People everywhere. Earlier in the day he had written a report about the impact of the war on the world’s stock exchanges. The article was slipshod and lightweight, and his editor had shaken his head, unimpressed, as he made clear it could not be used.

  Bloody war.

  Evald Bromo left the office ten minutes after he arrived. The plan had been to open the parcel in peace and quiet, but there was no peace and quiet to be found anywhere.

  Bloody war.

  He could grab a coffee. A pub, where he could sit down quietly in a corner and be on his own.

  There were no quiet pubs. Not at two o’clock on a Saturday night.

  He walked aimlessly along Akersgata.

  Pale-green light spilled out from the sixth and top floors of the government tower block. The Minister of Justice and the Prime Minister were obviously at work.

  Bloody, damned war.

  Evald Bromo cut to the right after the ramp leading down into the Ibsen Tunnel. When he passed the Deichman Library he could not muster the energy to go any further. He felt his pulse race alarmingly, despite the fact he had not been running. On the contrary, he had been walking increasingly slowly since he’d left the newspaper offices. Without coming to any real decision, he sat down on the stone steps. The cold traveled along his spine, and he shivered. Then he ripped open the package.

  It contained a CD.

  Music?

  Evald Bromo felt a ferocious sense of relief, as if he was intoxicated; his head felt light and hot, his sight was blurred and his breathing shallow. Someone had sent him a CD. Admittedly, the cover was totally white, but when he opened it, he saw a compact disc. Exactly as he had anticipated.

  And a folded sheet of paper.

  He held it in his hand for a few seconds before opening the paper with leaden fingers. It was covered in microscopic lettering. He blinked energetically in order to read what was written on the cramped lines.

  When he had read the long letter twice over, he folded it carefully. He fumbled slightly in his attempts to return the letter to the constricted space inside the CD cover, but eventually succeeded. He remained seated on the steps of Oslo’s old central library for more than half an hour. He was the only one there and was left alone. Even four boys in their twenties did not give him more than a cursory glance and a slurred comment as they staggered past, yelling. The contents of the letter were so astonishing, so sensational and so catastrophic that in many ways they felt like a relief.

  He slowly got to his feet, pushing the CD case deep into the inside pocket of his leather jacket, and took a deep breath as he was overcome by a sense of having reached the end of the road. A strange, empty sense of peace overwhelmed him. He knew what he had to do. He would pull himself together, perhaps in a couple of days, and then he would speak to Kai.

  Kai would be able to help him.

  Kai had helped him before, and Kai would know how Evald should handle the information he had just received.

  55

  “The door plate is lovely,” Cecilie said with a smile.

  Hanne shrugged her shoulders in embarrassment. “It looks a bit stupid with the faded woodwork around it,” she said. “The old one was bigger than the new one. I should have taken measurements when I placed the order.”

  “Cecilie Vibe & Hanne Wilhelmsen” announced the brass plate that was now screwed onto the front door. Hanne was afraid Cecilie had not noticed it. She had not said anything since she’d got home from the hospital. That was four days ago now.

  “What are you thinking about?” Cecilie asked.

  They had been for a short stroll around the neighborhood at the crack of dawn. Cecilie felt tired and did not say very much. She leaned against Hanne as they walked, and accepted her hand when they returned after twenty minutes and began to climb the difficult stairs. Now she was lying on the settee with a blanket over her legs and a cup of tea in her hands. Hanne sat in the chair opposite, fingering an apple.

  “The door plate,” Hanne replied.

  “It’s lovely. Elegant, really. Beautiful lettering.”

  “Not ours. The one we had at home. At my mother and father’s house.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Cecilie tried to replace her cup on the coffee table. Her hand was shaking and she spilled it all over the carpet. Hanne shuffled off to the kitchen for some kitchen roll. When she returned, she stood with the paper in her hand and squinted at the sunlight slicing through the awnings pulled down over the terrace.

  “I wasn’t included. My mother and father and my two siblings had their names on the door plate. Father’s at the top. Then mother. Inger and Kaare at the bottom, in smaller script. I wasn’t mentioned at all.”

  “But … you did live there?”

  “I was an afterthought, of course. The door plate was already there, you see. When I came along, I mean. There was no room to add another name. And it didn’t occur to anybody that they should really get another one made. The odd thing is …” She kneeled down and wiped the tea with rough, hurried movements. “… I’ve actually never thought about it. I can’t recall being affected by it. Then, I mean. It didn’t strike me until now, when I bought a new one for us, that it was actually … it was rather odd.”


  She moaned softly as she stood up, and remained there with the wet paper in her hands. Tea was dripping onto her jeans, but she was oblivious.

  “Why didn’t it bother me?” she said quietly. “Can you explain to me why it didn’t affect me that I was never listed on our door plate?”

  “Sit down.”

  Cecilie slapped her thigh and drew closer to the back of the settee. Staring at the kitchen paper, Hanne put it down in the fruit bowl in the center of the table, and sat down in the narrow space beside Cecilie’s hips.

  “You’d just forgotten about it,” Cecilie said. “You’d forgotten you were hurt by it.”

  She placed her right hand on Hanne’s. Cecilie’s skin was dry and warm, and Hanne intertwined her fingers in Cecilie’s.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think they meant it badly. Just as … when I started at police college, my mother and father were so disappointed. That didn’t matter to me either. All the same …”

  Cecilie laughed softly. “With parents who were professors of law and zoology, it’s perhaps not so strange that they found it worrying that their daughter was going to play cops and robbers for the rest of her life. They got over it eventually.”

  “Not really. At the beginning it was probably a bit exciting. I always had such amusing stories to tell at the family dinner table. In a way I was the one that kept the family in touch with reality. But now … lately …”

  “You no longer sit at the family dinner table. Not ever. When did you actually last see them?”

  Hanne withdrew her hands. “Let’s not talk about that any more,” she said, making a move to stand up.

  Cecilie held her back. “It doesn’t bother me any longer,” she whispered. “It doesn’t matter to me that I’ve never met them. It’s you I want. You I chose. Not them.”

  “Let’s just drop it,” Hanne said.

  “Karen phoned yesterday,” Cecilie said, reaching out for the empty teacup.

  “Bitch!” Hanne spluttered. “I’m never going to speak to that woman again!”

  She headed for the kitchen and returned with a bowl of cornflakes and milk. “Do you want some?”

  “No, thanks. We’re invited to the cottage at Ula for the Easter weekend. Friday till Monday. I said yes.”

  Cornflakes and milk sprayed from Hanne’s mouth across the table. “YES? You said yes? When you know how furious I am with Karen?”

  She put down the bowl with a thump and tapped the spoon against her knee as she continued.

  “In the first place I don’t want to be with Karen at Easter. Perhaps never. Secondly, it’s far too exhausting for you to travel out to Ula. There’ll be all that noise and fuss with the children. Out of the question.”

  Cecilie fell silent. She straightened the blanket as it began to slide off her. She sank back against the cushions, as if she suddenly felt extremely tired. Her complexion was almost transparent, and Hanne could see her pulse beating in the slender veins above her temple.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Hanne said, pushing her half-eaten bowl of cereal away. “I didn’t mean to get angry.”

  “I would really like to go,” Cecilie said, with her hand over her eyes to shield herself from the strong sunlight flooding through the window. “And you need to come with me. It won’t be too exhausting. I can’t just sit here and rest for what’s left of … Please. Please come with me.”

  Hanne crossed to the verandah door and closed the curtains. “Better?” she asked.

  “Much better. Will you come?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  She refused to promise any more than that.

  56

  Ståle Salvesen would have been unrecognizable to almost anyone, no matter how well they had known him while he was alive. His facial features had disappeared into a grayish-blue, swollen mask. Whole sheets of skin and subcutaneous fat had begun to loosen, and his nose was about to disintegrate.

  He had been lying at a depth of thirty-two meters for several weeks, still caught fast on a forgotten hook in the pilot house of the old fishing boat that had gone down with all hands one winter’s night in 1952.

  Ståle Salvesen’s boots had been bought at a jumble sale four years earlier. They had been more than fit for purpose: sturdy green seaman’s boots. He had used them often; as long as the weather was neither too cold nor too warm, the shabby old boots had offered good protection against slush and other damp conditions.

  Now the leg of the left boot was about to tear.

  The hook on the pilot house wall ate its way though the last few millimeters of rubber as a powerful current caught hold of the partly decomposed corpse.

  Ståle Salvesen’s body slowly floated up to the surface.

  57

  Sigurd Halvorsrud could not settle. He had felt it as he stepped inside the house: he needed to get away. Not now, not in the immediate future, but soon. If he was freed. If he was not convicted.

  The entire place reminded him of Doris. The furniture, carpets, curtains, even the antiques they had purchased together, at auctions, in narrow backstreets in foreign countries and snobbish outlets in Frogner, every object, large and small, bore the unmistakable signature of Doris. It was intolerable. An accusation suffused the walls, and a threat lay in everything around him. He sat in an armchair staring out across the Oslo Fjord and felt something resembling a longing to return to the yellow painted walls of the remand cell. At least he had been on his own there. Entirely alone. Here, Doris was everywhere.

  “Daddy,” he heard behind him, and turned his head.

  “Yes, my sweetheart?”

  “Can I sleep in your bed tonight too?”

  Thea’s legs were bare underneath a gigantic T-shirt. Standing there in the doorway scratching her leg with one foot, without make-up and with her hair falling loosely over her shoulders, she looked younger than her years. It was a relief to see that. Yesterday, when they’d been reunited and she had barely taken her eyes off him for hours on end, her eyes had seemed really old. Today, at the breakfast table, she had smiled. Not broadly and there’d certainly been no warmth in it, but the faint expansion of her mouth had been a sign that things were improving. Sigurd Halvorsrud had been terrified by the conversation he’d had with Professor Glück before he was allowed to see Thea. She was seriously ill, worse than he had imagined. The boys had agreed to stay at their Aunt Vera’s for another couple of days. Until Thea had settled down. Until they saw how things were with her.

  “Of course you can,” he said gently. “I’ll come quite soon. Have you taken your pills?”

  “Mhmm. Night night.”

  He stood up and crossed the floor with his arms extended. His daughter snuggled up to him, burying her face in the large woolen sweater he was wearing; it was chilly in the living room. He had kept the windows open since he’d come home, to air the room.

  “Go to sleep now,” he said, kissing her head. “I’ll come to bed soon.”

  “Are you going to work tomorrow?”

  “No. We’ll stay at home, both of us. Then we can really relax and enjoy ourselves.”

  Naturally she did not know that he had been suspended. She would probably miss the remainder of the school year herself. She had no idea about that either.

  “Good night, then.”

  He kissed her again.

  When, half an hour later, Sigurd Halvorsrud crept upstairs and gingerly opened the door to his own bedroom, he heard the regular, heavy breathing of a sixteen-year-old who was fast asleep. It was the medication that had knocked her out. He had been doubtful about taking her home at all after his discussion with Professor Glück, but the psychiatrist had been convinced that the very best course for Thea was to return home. Together with her dad.

  He closed the door without a sound.

  Then he padded down to the ground floor, took an old oilskin jacket out of the cloakroom closet, pulled a woolen hat onto his head and opened the front door, clutching th
e bunch of keys tightly to prevent them rattling.

  The light from the wrought-iron lamps lining the driveway illuminated the space beside the garage and extended all the way to the massive oak trees bordering his neighbor’s garden. That was how Doris had wanted it. She did not like the dark. Sigurd Halvorsrud lingered for several minutes. All he could see was a brindled cat strutting across the lawn and observing him arrogantly with its shining eyes. In the far distance he could hear the drone of the city, but there was not a soul to be seen. Closing the door behind him, he turned the key in the lock and headed down to the road. There were two cars parked thirty meters down the gentle slope, but he recognized them both. They belonged to Pettersen, who was remodeling his garage and so had to leave the cars outside.

  Turning around, he clambered into his own Opel Omega, switched on the ignition and rolled slowly out of the driveway.

  He was not going back to prison.

  He would make sure he was never convicted.

  Only a hundred meters along the road, he drew to a halt. A police car was parked in the Ruud family’s driveway. It might be a coincidence. He could not see anyone in the car. Nevertheless, he reduced his speed, stopped, turned round and drove back to his own garage, where he locked the car and the garage door, and went back inside his own house.

  He could afford to wait.

  58

  At last, something that might generously be called an incident room. The lack of offices at the police headquarters was annoying, and Hanne Wilhelmsen had felt they could do without one for the time being. Now they were in a situation of having the accused freed on bail, with strange clues pointing in every conceivable direction, and they were obviously farther from securing a conviction than they had been at any point since Doris Flo Halvorsrud was executed. The court had given its judgment. Halvorsrud was a free man until further notice.