Dead Joker

by Anne Holt

  When Margaret Kleiven was finished looking through the contents of the little wooden chest with blue letters on the lid, she stood up and realized that her legs had gone to sleep. Shaking her legs, she walked slowly down to the ground floor, where she lit a fire in the black stove. It did not take long: the wood was dry and she found plenty of newspapers beside the shoe racks in the hallway. After that, she trudged upstairs to the bedroom to fetch her mother-in-law’s chest. One by one she removed the items it contained and threw them onto the flames. Some burned well, such as the report cards and the cardboard box containing an old lock of hair. Other things remained in the flames for some time, like the cameo and a wide gold wedding ring. Eventually even the metal objects blackened, and she knew that if she just left them lying there they would disappear in the end.

  At the very bottom of the large box lay a CD case.

  Margaret was taken aback: all the other items in the chest were old – extremely old – but the CD looked brand new. Momentarily, it crossed her mind to open the plastic case, but something told her it would be best to leave it be.

  She threw it onto the fire.

  It sizzled in the blaze and a clear blue flame rose from the plastic. The case crumpled in the intense heat, and the smell of burned plastic stung her nose. A scrap of paper briefly came into sight when the housing cracked, just for a second, and then it too vanished into the flames.

  Margaret Kleiven closed the stove door.

  She was still just as furious with Evald, and swallowed three sleeping pills before retiring to bed.

  91

  Evald Bromo,

  You have almost certainly forgotten me. In your pursuit of new victims, you probably don’t have time to stop and think about the effect you have on the people you persecute. But if you search through your own archives, you’ll find my name. Many times. It’s true you’ll have to go far back in time. In recent years I’ve not been mentioned in any newspaper. There’s hardly anyone who knows who I am.

  I ran a company called Aurora Data. It was a promising firm. I won’t bother you with the story of how I built up a successful, forward-looking computer company from scratch. You know that story yourself, if you search back far enough in your memory.

  The late eighties was a difficult time. When the nineties began, there were many men of my caliber who went to rack and ruin. Companies like Aurora Data fell like dominoes. But not us. Not until Økokrim, the financial-crimes branch of the police, received a message from a former employee of ours, a disloyal worker I’d done a great favor to by only giving him the sack. I should have reported the guy to the police, of course, since he’d embezzled more than two hundred thousand kroner.

  I had actually done nothing wrong. Not then.

  It was claimed that my son had bought shares in a company on whose board I sat, just a short time before the same firm went public about a major contract that in a flash doubled the share value. Økokrim got a whiff of insider trading and spent a long time ascertaining what was clear all along: the agreement with the Americans had not taken place when my son bought the shares. But the finance police had got to work. They turned Aurora Data upside down. And me. My enemy, the former employee, had concocted so many stories, muddled up so many facts and lied so comprehensively that it took years until the case was dropped. Naturally, a number of small anomalies cropped up in the meantime. A company like Aurora Data can’t be upended without something or other coming to the surface. Trifles, of course, and never anything that could implicate me. None of it would have elicited anything more than a reprimand; a small fine at a pinch. But the investigators found just enough to keep things going.

  You covered the story. Other media outlets followed. But it was you and your newspaper that led the pack. What you wrote was quoted by the others. You were the prominent voice.

  I put up with being investigated. Even today, after everything that’s happened, I maintain that the prosecution authorities had to do something about the serious allegations made against me. What I could not tolerate was being condemned in advance.

  You condemned me by what you wrote. Halvorsrud condemned me by talking to you so frequently and loosely.

  FOUR TIMES I phoned you to explain how it had all actually come about. You listened and feigned interest in my story. Nevertheless, your articles were full of the police’s assumptions and beliefs, accusations and groundless assertions.

  I sent SIX LETTERS to Sigurd Halvorsrud. He did not answer a single one. I asked him for a meeting, but was fobbed off with lengthy interviews with the people who worked for him. I never got to meet the man you so willingly quoted, who claimed to know so much about me and my life.

  You achieved what you wanted.

  Although it was never brought to court, I lost everything. Aurora lost important contracts, and eventually went into receivership. As for myself, I was subjected to “the silent treatment” by increasing numbers of my old business associates, people who had previously expressed such confidence in both Aurora Data and me. I worked twenty-four hours a day in an effort to avert the catastrophe, but to no avail. My wife left me, my son stayed away out of contempt for a father who was no longer someone to admire, and I was left high and dry. When my case was dropped, you saw fit to mention it in just a single column.

  Well, I was not entirely without resources. When everything began to collapse around me, without my having done anything wrong, I was sensible enough to stash away a few hundred thousand in cash. I had already been branded and thrown to the wolves. I did not intend to spend the money on myself. I couldn’t do that.

  For several years I tried to rehabilitate myself. I had created a stock-exchange fairytale in the eighties, and “everyone” knew how capable I was. But no one had really taken in that the case against me had never led to anything. No one would have anything to do with me. In the end I gave up.

  That was when I decided to destroy both you and Sigurd Halvorsrud. The disloyal employee who initiated the whole persecution campaign against me was fortunate enough to die in a car accident in 1995. You two have not been so lucky. For three years I have been pursuing you both. Always from a distance, but all the same more closely than anyone would believe. I have moved in the shadows and left no stone unturned in the lives you call your own. For the past three years I have hardly done anything else but watch the two of you.

  It was easy to find your weakness, Evald Bromo. With Halvorsrud, it was harder. That is why I have treated you both differently.

  You will find a CD-ROM enclosed. You don’t know much about IT, so I’ll give you a brief explanation of what ROM signifies. “Read Only Memory”. That means you cannot manipulate, edit or change anything whatsoever. The CD contains a recording of myself relating what I have done. Among other things, I make it clear that Halvorsrud is innocent of his wife’s murder.

  In fact, I have decided to kill her myself.

  Not only will I kill her, but I will also take her life in the most spectacular fashion. Halvorsrud will discover how the media operates. By beheading Doris Flo Halvorsrud, I will ensure that the headlines are merciless. The press are going to destroy him, as they once destroyed me.

  If all goes well – and it will have done, if you are reading this – there will be so much circumstantial evidence against Halvorsrud that he will at the very least be dogged by suspicion for the rest of his life. That was how my life was left in ruins, and that is how I want to share my fate with him.

  Unless you rescue the man. By now he should already have had a glimpse of the hell that is created by false accusations, a sight that will make him think and may well affect him for the rest of his years.

  He will be let off having endured just these few weeks, if you are willing to sacrifice yourself.

  The prospect of providing you with a moral dilemma amuses me enormously. Is there any morality to be found in a man who abuses children under cover of having a respectable job? You won’t remember it, but when I called you for the fourth time, you spoke of
duty. You had a duty to write about the investigation. You had a duty to repeat what the police believed, felt, thought and assumed. Duty!

  On the CD-ROM I don’t only talk about my extensive and destructive terror campaign against the Halvorsrud family, about the keys I stole from their youngest child while he was at the gym, about the wife’s computer whose hard disk I changed one night, just to create a sinister atmosphere, and about the money I deposited in his name and so on and so forth …

  I also expose you. I talk about the crimes you have committed repeatedly over the past few years. You will be surprised how much I know. A reasonably proficient police force will be able to have you convicted after only a minimum of further enquiries.

  It is your choice.

  When you decide, you should keep in the back of your mind old Pokerface’s promise to send a package to your Chief Editor on September 1. Perhaps Pokerface is lying, perhaps not. Since I am Pokerface, I know the truth.

  You, on the other hand, can only guess.

  You took everything from me. You condemned me to the death I have now sought refuge in. In return, I have sent you both to hell.

  Ståle Salvesen

  Erik Henriksen was first to finish.

  He put down the printout with a gentle shake of the head.

  “The eighth commandment,” he said darkly. “Thou shalt not give false witness against thy neighbor. It can cost you fucking dear.”

  The rustling of papers became a rising hubbub of shocked voices. Hanne Wilhelmsen sat at the head of the table in the cramped incident room, with the Superintendent flanking her on one side and Police Chief Mykland on the other.

  “Karianne,” she said autocratically, raising her hand for silence.

  “So,” Karianne Holbeck began. “This was the only document that could be retrieved from the hard disk. It had been deleted, but was still quite straightforward to find. Salvesen must have used another computer to burn the CD he describes in the letter.”

  “Does that mean we’ve no idea what the CD contains?”

  Billy T. tried to catch Hanne’s eye, but had to abandon the attempt. Instead he stared at Karianne, who was sitting with a laptop in front of her, and deep red roses on her cheeks.

  “It’s really quite thoroughly described in the letter, though. But if we don’t find any more of Salvesen’s equipment … No … You see … Well, we might be fortunate enough to track down the actual CD. Or a copy. The boys have gone out to turn over the whole of Vogts gate 14. They’ve been there all night, but nothing of interest has turned up. So it’s fairly doubtful.”

  “Fuck,” Billy T. said, slamming his fists together.

  “We don’t need that,” Hanne said tersely.

  “No, but just think! It would’ve been damn interesting to get more details! I’ve never heard the like of this set-up. The guy spent years of his life planning his revenge!”

  He glanced at Hanne again. He wanted to acknowledge her, to show her respect. Hanne Wilhelmsen had believed in Halvorsrud’s innocence from the outset. Unmoved by other people’s intransigence, she had put forward her own theory logically and clearly to anyone who could be bothered to listen. Billy T. felt a physical pain in his chest as he observed Hanne standing there, sallow and pale, wearing no make-up, looking older than he had ever seen her, slender hands fiddling with the marker pen and eyes that never made contact with his, no matter how hard he tried. He wanted her back. He wanted forgiveness, the way he had forgiven her. When he went to bed that night, the following night, he had lain awake until two o’clock. He listened to the baby sounds from Jenny, which caused spasms to cross Tone-Marit’s sleeping face. When he felt her hand fumbling in sleep for his, he had forgiven both Hanne and himself. He knew that everything could be as before if she could only do the same.

  She refused to return his gaze.

  “The yogurt in the fridge,” she said abruptly, turning to face the flip chart. “Why should Ståle Salvesen go to so much trouble to put his life and his apartment in order and then forget the dated foodstuffs in his refrigerator?”

  She drew a yogurt carton and a milk carton, not very convincingly. The yogurt carton looked like a damaged bucket and the milk carton like a Danish holiday house.

  “Because he wanted to reinforce the weakest part of his plan,” she answered herself. “Salvesen did not kill himself on Monday March 1. It’s true he was at Staure Bridge. He parked his car. He went up to the top of the bridge and waited until there were people nearby, close enough to see him, but far enough away not to notice that he never disappeared into the sea. He made it look as if he had jumped, but then he snuck underneath the bridge and returned to the city by some other means.”

  “Exactly as you thought,” Billy T. said, immediately regretting his comment; he felt like a puppy dog wagging its tail and licking the mouth of an old, arrogant bitch.

  “How exactly, we’ll probably never know,” Hanne said, unaffected by the pathetic praise. She drew a car. “However, what never crossed my mind …” She lifted a plastic cup filled with water to her mouth and drank deeply. “… was that Ståle Salvesen did not flee abroad. He did not escape to South America or some other place with deficient registration procedures and hostile extradition treaties with Norway.”

  “He definitely committed suicide, but not until after he had murdered Doris,” Erik said slowly, spitting ink: the ballpoint pen he had been chewing was leaking badly. “Ingenious. Halvorsrud would seem crazy when he claimed that a dead man had killed his wife.”

  “Spot on.”

  Hanne drew wheels on the blue car.

  “On Sunday March 7, a stolen Volvo was found in the car park beside Staure Bridge,” she continued. “The owner reported it missing on the afternoon of Thursday 4. That was the night Doris was murdered. The owner lives in Grünerløkka.”

  “Five minutes from Vogts gate,” Karl Sommarøy said. “Salvesen damn well killed Doris, drove out to Staure in the stolen car and finally jumped into the sea. Bloody hell!”

  “But, you know, it was an incredible gamble,” Erik objected. “If he had been found in the course of the first few days, it would have been easy to establish that he hadn’t been in the water the entire time since Monday 1! And where did he hide in the meantime? Between Monday and Thursday night, I mean? And what if he had been caught while driving the stolen car? What if someone had seen him on Thursday night when he really did jump into the sea?”

  “A gamble, yes indeed. Definitely. And there are many questions I’m afraid we’ll never be able to answer.”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen puffed out her cheeks and let the air slowly leak out through gritted teeth.

  “But what did the man have to lose? Salvesen had nothing more to live for. His life had no purpose. A few days ago, I met a strange man who said there are no limits to what people are capable of if they feel seriously threatened.”

  She held back. It seemed so long ago. Eivind Torsvik was of no interest. He was nothing other than a detour on her way home. Closing her eyes for a few seconds, she wondered whether the man himself had been a figment of her imagination.

  “Presumably it’s even easier to cross the line when you’ve already lost everything,” she said softly. “Salvesen kept himself going for a long time simply on the prospect of getting revenge: the thought that Evald Bromo and Sigurd Halvorsrud would get to experience at least a fraction of the hell he himself had endured. And he hoped that it would take time. The longer it took, the more difficult it would be to establish a precise time of death. The less reason the police would have to doubt the witness reports from Monday 1. The yogurt and milk cartons were only tiny pieces of the puzzle. Props, so to speak. A little subtlety we never noticed that gave us a subconscious incentive to see the picture Ståle Salvesen wanted us to see.”

  “Those delayed emails were really clever,” Karianne said, keying in a command on her laptop. “He simply devised a handy little program that sent emails to Bromo long after he himself was dead. The ‘sent’ mailb
ox in the computer in the basement was full of emails sent approximately twenty-four hours apart. He had written a couple to the Chief Editor of Aftenposten as well, by the way.”

  “Your lips are blue, Erik.”

  Hanne rubbed her finger over her own to show him.

  “Go and wash it off before it becomes indelibly imprinted.”

  “But,” Erik said, standing behind his chair, trying to wipe the ink off with his shirtsleeve, “think of all that money, eh! A hundred thousand in the basement and two hundred thousand in the Swedish bank. He gave away a small fortune, just to throw suspicion on Halvorsrud?”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen shrugged as she struggled to make her hair sit behind her ear.

  “What could Salvesen do with the money? After all, we’re not talking about enough to settle abroad, start over again and escape from everything. It was just enough to create a lot of suspicion around Halvorsrud. Naturally he chose Sweden. Just as naturally as he chose to place the money in the basement. We would find it. If he had deposited the money in a bank in Switzerland, we would never have come across a single krone of it.”

  “And that brings us to a substantial point I can’t quite understand.” Karl Sommarøy animatedly toyed with a thermos flask someone had left behind the previous day. Suddenly he loosened the lid, and sour day-old coffee leaked out onto his legs. “Halvorsrud would never be convicted,” he said, without drawing attention to his drenched crotch. “You’ve said it all along, Hanne. We don’t have enough for a conviction.”

  “True,” Police Chief Mykland said, smiling diffidently. “Which of course might explain why Salvesen was willing to let Halvorsrud off the hook if Evald Bromo was willing to sacrifice himself. The point for Salvesen never was to get Halvorsrud convicted. Take the disks we found, for example. Karianne has continually made the point that they were not ‘of particular interest to the police’.” Mykland drew quote marks in the air. “Probably Salvesen just put together material he found in the newspapers. All those cases, of course, were discussed at length in the press. He must have realized we might eventually come to doubt the entire chain of circumstantial evidence. But that barely mattered. The point was to give Halvorsrud a sense of what it’s like to be under suspicion even when you’re innocent. And to be condemned in advance by the media. Salvesen was not a stupid man.”