Dead Joker

by Anne Holt

  “Go and wash that pen off, Erik,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, sounding annoyed. “You look like a clown. You could get blood poisoning.”

  “Yes, Mum,” he said crossly. “But one more thing first. Does this mean that all the pedophile stuff was just nonsense? That Thea Halvorsrud is after all only a daddy’s girl?”

  “Yes. In all probability.”

  “Yes? But what about Evald Bromo then? Was he a pedophile, or was that a load of balls as well? And who … who the fuck killed Evald Bromo?”

  No one spoke. The room became so silent that Hanne could clearly hear a hungry rumbling in Hasse Fredriksen’s stomach; the technician was sitting at the opposite end of the table, holding his breath in embarrassment, as if that would help. The air in the rectangular room was almost intolerably stuffy. Hanne felt her cheeks burning, and the sticky film on her eyes had come back.

  Evald Bromo did not concern her.

  Evald Bromo’s fate had never really touched Hanne Wilhelmsen.

  Sometimes it happened. More often these days than a year ago. Before that, when she was younger, stronger – and more naive, possibly – every single murder, every bloody rape, every instance of aggravated assault had felt like a violation of her personally. The murders had an impact on her, the rapes hurt her deeply, and knife crime infuriated her. That was why she had spent almost twenty years of her life on a task she knew deep down was hopeless: trying to hold back the tide of criminality in Oslo.

  The knowledge settled like an iron fist around her throat, and she suddenly felt sick: she had started to classify people.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen had been obsessed with solving Doris Flo Halvorsrud’s murder. Doris was a respected professional woman, a mother and wife. Her husband was a competent lawyer. Hanne should, would and must solve the case.

  Evald Bromo, on the other hand, was simply a duty. Evald Bromo was a sex offender who abused unfortunate children.

  “I’ve started to not give a fuck,” she whispered to herself, with a sharp intake of breath as she sat down.

  “Are you okay?” Mykland said in an undertone, placing his hand over hers. “Are you ill?”

  Hanne did not reply. She struggled to pull herself together; she closed her eyes and searched for one last atom of strength. She had to bring this meeting to a close. She had to finish in here, put an end to the Halvorsrud case and pass responsibility for the Bromo killing on to someone suitable. If she could just make it through this meeting, she could take some time off. Extended leave. She should be at home with Cecilie day and night, for as long as necessary, for as long as they had left together, for as long as Cecilie lived.

  If she could just make it through this meeting.

  She rose again, stood half leaning forward with the palms of her hands on the table, and prepared herself.

  “Evald Bromo’s death probably has nothing to do with Halvorsrud at all,” she said in an unnecessarily loud voice. “I’m still of the definite opinion that he’s a pedophile. It’s entirely possible there’s a connection between his sexual perversions and the fact of his homicide. But in our original case, the murder of Doris Flo Halvorsrud, Evald Bromo was only a detour. Of course, a lot of threads still need weaving together, like for example why Halvorsrud’s fingerprints were found in the basement in Vogts gate. My personal theory is that, in a fit of despair, he tried to find something to prove his innocence. Clumsy and stupid, it goes without saying. But on the other hand—”

  “Think how he must have been feeling,” interrupted Annmari Skar, who had sat through the entire meeting in silence, leafing through something that looked to Hanne like a novel. “He has been telling the truth all along. No one has really believed him. Not even you, Hanne.” She gazed provocatively at the Chief Inspector. “If you had really believed Halvorsrud’s story, you would have been more insistent. Put more effort into it. Everybody knows how you’ve worked your butt off.”

  “Literally speaking,” Erik muttered. His lips were now a lighter shade of blue at least, after his visit to the restroom, and he glanced at Karianne, who used her hand to hide a smile.

  “You would have argued more strongly. Persevered more. You would have refused to let him sit there week after week if you’d really believed him. He realized that, of course. He was completely alone. He became increasingly hemmed in. His situation must have seemed progressively more absurd. As if he—”

  “Besides, he’s had to live with having failed his wife,” Hans Christian Mykland said. “Amidst all the false accusations, he has probably been his own worst critic. He let her be killed. He did not defend her.”

  “We’ll wrap it up now,” Hanne said without ceremony.

  It felt as if the walls were beginning to close in on her. She lifted the plastic cup to her mouth again, but it was empty.

  “But, Hanne,” Erik insisted, looking for an argument. “We can’t say for certain that Halvorsrud didn’t murder Bromo! Salvesen assumes a kind of post-mortem responsibility for Doris’s murder, fair enough … but the fact is that the Public Prosecutor’s fingerprints were in the basement beside the body, he had no alibi, and he didn’t turn up to report at the police station as he—”

  “Annmari is right,” Hanne said scathingly, fixing her eyes on her younger colleague with the ridiculous baby-blue mouth against a chalk-white complexion and bright-red hair. “I did not stand up for Halvorsrud enough. So I’m doing it now. He’s innocent. We all know that. The murder of Evald Bromo was a pathetic copycat execution. It’s rudimentary!”

  She flung out her arms emphatically, then embraced herself, as if she was freezing in the overheated room.

  “Serial murders, or signature murders, are easy to recognize. You find a common denominator among the victims. It is sometimes difficult to discover, but it’s there. And how can you tell that a murder has been disguised to look as if it’s a link in a serial killer’s chain of death? Because the victim doesn’t fit! Evald Bromo and Doris Flo Halvorsrud had hardly anything in common apart from both presumably being Norwegian citizens.”

  She began to pack up her belongings, stuffing two folders and an old leather pencil case into her black rucksack. The others in the room watched her closely.

  “And on the subject of Norway,” she said without a smile as she pointed her finger at Erik Henriksen, “your face looks like a flag – red, white and blue!”

  No one laughed. Chairs scraped on the floor. People spoke in hushed tones, and their voices combined into a meaningless buzz that eventually disappeared out through the door. Billy T. lingered for a few seconds in the doorway in the hope that Hanne would follow him, but when he saw that the Chief of Police had laid his hand on her arm, he gave up.

  “What do you want to do now?” Hans Christian Mykland said gently to Hanne. “Tell me what it is you want.”

  “Thanks,” she said in a whisper.

  “What?”

  “Thanks for protecting me recently. I expect there have been complaints.”

  Mykland gave a broad smile as he smoothed back his hair.

  “Three,” he whispered. “They’re lying at the bottom of my drawer, and they’ll stay there for as long as I have any say in the matter.”

  Leaning on the nylon bag beside her on the table, Hanne suddenly reached out to the Police Chief and put her arms around him.

  “Thank you so much,” she confided into his shoulder. “I can’t fathom why you’re so kind to me. So patient. I promise that when it’s all over and Cecilie—”

  “Hush now,” he said quietly, stroking between her shoulder blades.

  He did not want to let go. She noticed that; when she made an effort to withdraw, he would not release her. Strangely enough, she found it pleasant.

  “Let someone else take over the Bromo homicide,” he said. She could feel little puffs of air against her ear as he spoke. “Take some time off now, Hanne. You’re entitled to it.”

  “I will. There are just a couple of things I have to sort out first.”

  “Don�
��t let them be too many, then,” he said, letting her go.

  “No,” she said, slinging her bag onto her back. “Just a couple of odds and ends.”

  “Hanne.”

  She had reached the end of the table, and turned to face him.

  “Yes?”

  “Who should assume responsibility for the Bromo investigation?”

  Hanne shrugged. “One of the other inspectors, I would think.”

  “I was thinking of appointing Billy T. on a temporary basis. What do you think?”

  She hitched up her bag and headed for the door.

  “It’s all the same to me,” she said dully, with her back to the Police Chief. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s of no interest whatsoever what you do with Billy T..”

  92

  The ashtray Billy T. had given her looked out of place. A simple design in black, it had a steel dish inside that could be tilted and emptied every time you stubbed out a cigarette; it looked like something from Alessi and had probably been expensive. Her office was too drab for that sort of thing. She had never really settled in there, and had never taken the trouble to make the place congenial. She had never had the time. Formerly, she had taken great pains, not only for her own sake, but also because it had a reassuring effect on witnesses and suspects if they were interviewed in a room that did not remind them of a prison cell as much as these rooms certainly did.

  She played with the ashtray, repeatedly tilting the moveable dish. Since she had stopped smoking, she would not need it. She dropped it into the wastepaper basket, hoping it would catch the cleaner’s eye and perhaps be taken home.

  There was a polite knock on the door.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Police Sergeant Karsten Hansen smiled at her. Long past fifty, he was never going to earn his inspector’s stripes. Round as a barrel, he plodded across to the visitor’s chair, snorting loudly. Hanne Wilhelmsen had always found it difficult to imagine that Karsten Hansen had ever been slim and fairly active: he had of course managed to pass the entrance exam for police college, just the same as everyone else. Hansen worked in the Traffic and Environment Department now and was happy to stay there, year after year.

  “How are you?” he said cheerfully, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  “Okay, thanks. And you?”

  “Just fine, thanks. Everything’s going well. But you know, I came across something an hour ago.”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen was extremely uninterested in what a traffic cop had come across. She wanted to go home.

  “You know these boxes,” he continued undeterred. “Our speed cameras.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “I was helping the office staff go through some of the rolls of film in preparation for sending out fine notifications and that sort of thing. And what do I find?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “You’re well aware, Hanne, it’s not much fun when colleagues crop up in those pictures.”

  He was sitting uncomfortably and tried to twist his bulky body into a more acceptable position on the narrow seat. Hanne felt a blush spread over her face and tried desperately to remember whether she had been careless enough to exceed the speed limit when driving past one of the boxes. She knew where they all were, so she usually lowered her speed just in time. The journey from Sandefjord, it suddenly struck her. She had driven like a bat out of hell to the hospital at Ullevål.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Hansen,” she stammered, making an effort to suppress the color in her cheeks. “Of course, there’s no excuse … how fast was I driving?”

  “You?”

  He was taken aback, and began to laugh.

  “No, no, Wilhelmsen. It’s not you we’re talking about. Look at this!”

  He produced a photograph from a manila envelope and placed it in front of her. She could still feel her pulse racing: speed violations could be a serious matter for a chief inspector in the police. Especially if it was as serious as it must have been that night she had set a new personal best on the stretch between Sandefjord and Oslo.

  “The violation is only by four kilometers an hour,” Hansen said. “Sixty-four in the sixty section immediately before the Tåsen intersection, in the westbound lane. But what I was wondering …”

  He placed his fat finger on the driver’s face. The image was grainy and indistinct, but nevertheless more than good enough to identify the driver.

  “That’s Iver Feirand, isn’t it? At least, the vehicle is his – I’ve checked that already.”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen did not answer. Hansen was correct. It was interesting. Sensational, even. Hanne had already spotted who the passenger was.

  “When was this taken?” she asked, following his finger down to the corner of the picture where the time was shown.

  Tuesday March 30, 1999 at 17.24.

  Grabbing the photo, Hanne held it up close to her face. She must not be mistaken. She could not be mistaken.

  “And you know, I was bloody surprised, when I saw that buddy of his there – it’s definitely Evald Bromo, who was murdered the other day. There’ve been loads of pictures of him in the newspapers. I couldn’t quite get it to add up that the guy’s traveling with a policeman on the Tuesday, and then he gets beheaded on the Saturday. But then it dawned on me that there could be a lot I’ve no idea about in this case, and it might well be that everything’s as it should be. However, I’m still a bit old-fashioned and …” He gave her a bashful smile. “… it’s better to make a fool of yourself by asking than to sit on the fence with something that doesn’t seem quite right. That’s what I think, anyway.”

  “You’re fantastic.”

  Waving the photo, she grasped his hand and squeezed it.

  “You’re completely amazing,” she said, biting her lip. “I need to make a phone call. Stay there. By all means.”

  She pulled out a yellow slip of paper she had pushed under the desk blotter and called the number she had scribbled down only a few days earlier.

  “Eivind Torsvik,” she eventually heard a voice say, after the phone had been ringing for what seemed like an eternity.

  “Hi there. This is Hanne Wilhelmsen here. Thanks for your hospitality last time we met.”

  “You’re welcome, it was my pleasure.”

  She had not even formulated a strategy. The photograph of Evald Bromo sitting beside a man who had asserted he had never seen him before had made her pounce on a lead that could be ruined if she was not careful.

  “I’m in a dreadful fix,” she said honestly, after a painful silence. “You don’t want to hand over any of the material you’ve gathered. I have to respect that. But I need you to answer one question for me. One single question. Could you do that?”

  “That depends. I’ve promised to give you everything we’ve got when our work is finished. When we’ve collected enough evidence. Not before.”

  “But you must …”

  She glanced at the wastepaper basket, where a brand-new ashtray and a half-full pack of Marlboro Lights had been discarded. Leaning forward, she picked up both, cadged a light from Hansen, who was sitting there in astonishment, listening to a conversation of which he could make no sense at all.

  “Do you have a police officer on your list?” she asked, holding the first drag of her cigarette in her lungs for as long as she was able.

  “You’d be amazed where sex offenders crop up in society. Did you know that pedophiles are over-represented in occupations where people care for or have a great deal of contact with children? Doctors. Aid workers in developing countries. Pre-school teachers. Scout leaders. Clergymen preparing young people for confirmation. Handball trainers.”

  “I know that, Eivind!”

  She had never before called him by his first name. She had never called him anything at all. It made him stop in his tracks.

  “I can’t say anything,” he said eventually. It sounded as if he was moving around; his breath came in fits and starts. “Not yet. But there’s not long to go. I can promi
se you that.”

  “Eivind. Listen to me.”

  Hanne could hear herself talking; it was as if someone else was speaking. There and then, she decided she would set all the IT experts she could find on Eivind Torsvik if he did not answer. She herself would lead the attack, and they would storm into his cottage at Hamburgkilen, ransacking everything they could lay their hands on. If he did not answer her.

  “You must give me an answer. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  Hansen stared anxiously at her. Placing her hand over the receiver, she whispered across the table, “Quite a difficult source. Need to exaggerate.”

  “Yes.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Yes, we have a police officer on our lists. Together with two teachers, one dentist, two clergymen who are foster parents into the bargain—”

  “Is his name Iver Feirand?”

  Silence fell. Hanne closed her eyes in order to hear better: it sounded as if Eivind Torsvik had taken the cordless phone outside with him. She thought she could hear gulls screeching and the distant throb of an outboard motor.

  “Yes,” he said in a monotone. “His name is Iver Kai Feirand. He was the one who took three years to investigate the case against my foster father. It was Iver Kai Feirand who sabotaged my case.”

  “Iver K. Feirand,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said slowly. “Thanks.”

  Eivind Torsvik had already disconnected the call.

  93

  The man who now carried a passport claiming his name was Peder Kalvø was seated on a Lufthansa plane that had just taken off from Copenhagen’s Kastrup airport. It was due to land in Frankfurt in an hour’s time. From there he would fly on to Madrid, where he would stay for a few days. No more than four.