Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel

by Anne Holt

  Cecilie smiled. But she didn’t utter a word.

  “It’s just that I . . .” Hanne began, sitting up straight. “I feel it would be wrong for the child.”

  Cecilie protested. “Wrong for the child? Think about what the two of us can offer a child! It’s more than the majority of children in Norway receive: intelligent parents, financial security, at least one pair of grandparents . . .”

  They both smiled fleetingly.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Hanne replied. “We could offer a great deal. But then I think that if I can’t quite dare to accept myself, then it’s bloody unfair to make life difficult for a child. Think of all the shit the youngster would have to put up with. At school. On the street. All the questions. Besides, I really believe all children ought to have a dad.”

  “But it could have a dad! Claus has said he’s willing to take on that role, he’s said that for years now!”

  “Honestly, Cecilie. Should the youngster have two mothers here and two fathers at Claus and Petter’s house? Great fun at end-of-term parties!”

  Cecilie did not protest further, but not because she was in agreement. She disagreed fundamentally, deep within herself. Claus and Petter were good-looking, well-educated, kind, sensible, and stable men. She and Hanne had been quarreling and making love through thick and thin for almost seventeen years now. They would probably go on doing so until the day they died. There was plenty of room for a child in their relationship. There was a lot she wanted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. She had no idea why.

  “I really believe a child should come into being through a mother and a father loving each other,” Hanne continued in low tones, leaning closer toward Cecilie. “Okay, so that’s not always the way it is. Okay, so there are loads of children who come into this world by accident, through carelessness, outside marriage, without love. Many of them get on well, and they’re all equally precious.”

  Taking a deep breath, she sat up to take a gulp of beer and then remained sitting there, turning the glass around and around on its axis while shaking her head listlessly.

  “I know all of that, of course. But I don’t think it should be like that if I have the choice! I want the very best for my child, and I can’t give it that! Don’t you understand that, sweetheart?”

  Cecilie did not. But she realized that Hanne for once in her life had opened her innermost recesses, at least a tiny crack. In itself that was such an earth-shattering event that for the moment she required no more. Smiling, she stroked Hanne’s back.

  “No, I don’t understand it. But it’s great you’re telling me about it.”

  The silence was broken only by the sound of the glass being rotated.

  “Adopting would be a different matter,” Hanne said suddenly, standing up just as abruptly. “There are all those children waiting in a queue out there. All the ones nobody wants. Then a well-established lesbian couple in Oslo would be an alternative that’s a thousand times better. Than a street in Brazil, for example.”

  “Adoption,” Cecilie mumbled weakly. “You know that’s not legal.”

  They stared at each other yet again.

  “No,” Hanne said. “It’s not legal. It ought to be. It will be.”

  “We’ll be too old by then.”

  Neither of them dropped eye contact.

  “I don’t want us to create our own child, Cecilie. I’ll never want that. Never.”

  There was no more to say on the matter.

  Hanne felt herself beaten black and blue. And had a thumping headache. An inexplicable sense of relief filled her without entirely being able to alleviate the ever-present hidden pain of guilt that always tormented her. At certain times strongly, at other times only as an extremely feeble murmur.

  Cecilie stood up also and remained standing, facing Hanne for a few seconds before letting her hand slide slowly over her face.

  “Are we going to eat, or what?”

  Hanne switched on the TV set in order to resume the Friday evening ambience. On NRK, the presenter Petter Nome was chatting as though nothing at all had happened.

  • • •

  The wallpaper on one wall was now completely destroyed, apart from an occasional mountain-shaped fragment he had not been able to tear loose. Large and small curls of paper surrounded him on the floor, almost like a carpenter’s workshop. He wanted to strip that wall entirely before making a start on the next one. It was an amusing way to pass the time, and once or twice he had managed to rip off huge sheets measuring almost a meter in length.

  Although still more canned food remained, he was starting to take a gloomy view of the prospect of lingering there. He could not quite remember what day it was, but it struck him as fairly certain that the residents would not absent themselves forever. He ought to find somewhere else. What’s more, he was stinking. He had already removed one stitch from his tongue, but it had bled so fucking badly he had let the other two stay put.

  The temptation of the telephone persisted. Inside his stomach sat a tender lump of homesickness. Perhaps the police had given up. Then he thrust the thought aside.

  However, it didn’t let itself be chased off so easily. At home he had a bed, a lovely blue Stompa bed, and he could get decent food. Pork chops. He wanted to go to his mum. He really wanted to go home.

  Gingerly, he lifted the telephone receiver but dropped it as soon as he heard the dial tone and started on the other wall. This was more difficult, because someone had painted on top of the wallpaper so it adhered more firmly. The strips were smaller here, some as minuscule as locks of hair. Giving up halfway through, he padded out to the corridor again. Outside it was dark, and the only faint illumination there came from the lamp in a little windowless toilet that he had left switched on the entire time.

  Now he did not hesitate. Tapping in the familiar number, he let it ring. It took ages, and he was just on the point of giving up, intrigued about where on earth his mum could be. It was evening. She was always at home. Then she answered.

  “Hello?”

  He said nothing.

  “Hello?”

  “Mum.”

  “Olav!”

  “Mum.”

  “Where . . . where are you?”

  “I don’t know. I want to come home.”

  Unexpectedly, he started crying, shocking him more than it did his mother. Gulping slightly, he tasted his own tears that contained a faint memory of early childhood. Homesickness overwhelmed him, and he repeated, “I want to come home, Mum.”

  “Olav, listen to me. You have to find out where you are.”

  “Are the police with you?”

  “No. Are you in Oslo?”

  “They’ll send me back to that fucking home. Or to jail.”

  “No children are ever put in prison, Olav. You have to tell me what it looks like where you are.”

  He tried to explain. What the kitchen looked like, what the house looked like. He described the thousand twinkling lights outside the dark windowpane in the living room and the pale pink haze lying like a heavy cloud over the city below him.

  He’s in Oslo. My God, he’s in Oslo, she thought.

  “You need to sneak outside and search for the street sign, Olav. I have to know more exactly where you are.”

  When she heard scraping sounds emanating from the phone, she rushed to give him a helpful warning. “Don’t put down the handset! Just leave it lying at the side of the phone until you come back in again. Do it now. Go out. There’s usually a street sign at the intersections. Look for an intersection. The nearest one.”

  He followed her instructions, returning six or seven minutes later, now able to furnish her with two street names.

  “Now stay there for a while. Half an hour or so. Do you have your watch with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “When exactly half an hour has passed, go down to that intersection and wait for me. You must not be impatient. I’m coming, but it might take me some time to find my way.”

  “I want
to go home, Mum.”

  Now he burst into tears again.

  “I’ll come for you, Olav. I’ll come for you right away.”

  Then he heard the click at the other end.

  She had to gain access to a car, and her mother was the only possibility. Her heart sank, and for a second she weighed the possibility of a taxi but decided that was too risky. Now that the boy had been reported missing on television and all that, it was far too hazardous to involve other people. So it would have to be her mother’s car.

  In fact the plan went more smoothly than she had feared. She gave the excuse of having an appointment with the police, and her mother was too drunk to consider how unlikely it was that the police would want to talk to her late on a Friday evening. Three-quarters of an hour after the boy had phoned, she arrived at an intersection in the Grefsen district. The development was filled with detached houses from the immediate postwar period, with the occasional seventies house built in parents’ gardens, all of them enclosed by low fences. The intersection was brightly lit, but the boy had been smart enough to retreat slightly, and he stood underneath hanging lilac bushes, in their black winter guise, beside one of the gardens, where he clung to a gate, shrinking into the shadows. All the same, she spotted him at once, but then she was on the lookout for him, of course.

  He obviously recognized his grandmother’s car immediately, because he sidled out from the bushes before she had a chance to stop the vehicle. Heavy and clumsy, he scurried around the front to open the passenger-side door. Wheezing, he flopped down on the seat without removing his rucksack, swinging his legs around and slamming the door with far too much force.

  They said nothing. He was no longer crying. An hour later, he was standing in the shower, and then ate heartily before falling fast asleep. They had hardly exchanged a word.

  • • •

  My God, what’ll I do? It’s true I was able to sneak him into the apartment without being seen; for safety’s sake we came through the basement entrance at the back of the building and encountered no one on the stairs. But what now?

  The police phone me every day, though that’s not a problem. They’ve said I have to be interviewed one more time. Next week, probably. That doesn’t matter anyway, for they won’t come here. But of course he can’t be kept hidden forever.

  He’s afraid now. He hates that foster home, and that gives me some control over him, at least for a while.

  Just like that time he demolished the building in the children’s playground. It happened when we were living in Skedsmokorset. Or was it Skårer? No, it must have been Skedsmo, because he was only six years old. Just for a second, some road workers had left a steamroller sitting, unsupervised, with its motor switched on. Somehow he managed to climb up into the huge monster, and it started to move forward. I saw it with my own eyes, from the window. He had just returned home from kindergarten and wanted to go outside. I stood there, paralyzed, watching the steamroller, situated only ten or twelve meters away from the little blue-painted building. He didn’t even have a chance to steer it away. They told me that afterward. The steering wheel is far too heavy for a small child, they said. I think he wanted to. The steamroller was positioned on a slight incline and had picked up some speed by the time it hit the wall. I heard the noise of the massive machine as it nudged against the little house before it gave way. At the same time the road workers discovered what was about to happen, and they came running but were too late to stop it. The impact was a deafening racket. Thank God it was that time of day. The children’s playground had been closed for several hours. If there had been people inside the house, God only knows what the outcome would have been.

  The road workers were courteous about it. It was their fault, they said. They shouldn’t have been so remiss that there was a chance of a child using the steamroller. But everyone in the street knew he was to blame, and we had to move house again.

  For some reason, though, the incident scared him. For a few days he was so amenable that it almost alarmed me. Now I might experience the same thing again. He seems dreadfully frightened.

  But what will I do when he no longer is?

  6

  Outside, blizzard conditions and ten degrees Celsius below freezing; inside, a sweaty Monday morning and Billy T. trying fruitlessly to identify a comfortable sitting position on the cramped chair in Hanne Wilhelmsen’s office. With the rest of the Homicide Section working tenaciously on a double murder case in the upmarket West End and the media swarming all over it, there were now only the two of them, assisted by Erik Henriksen and Tone-Marit Steen, left toiling on the knife murder of an unfortunate foster home worker.

  “At least we’ll be left well alone by the press,” Billy T. remarked. “Every cloud has a silver lining.”

  The crime scene report was lying on the chief inspector’s desk. One day ahead of schedule, just six days since the killing, but it did not reveal anything they did not already know. The most critical information would be contained in the forensic report—ready in four months. The best-case scenario.

  “But I’ve found out a great deal.”

  Billy T. stretched out his legs.

  “We’re left with only known fingerprints. On the windowsills, in the director’s office, on the doors. All the prints naturally correspond to the places they were found. That bloody fire drill destroyed a lot. The footprints are a mess, but the team is still working on checking them against the footwear belonging to the children and staff. We probably won’t find anything significant there either. As far as fibers, hairs, and suchlike are concerned, we don’t have anything to go on in the meantime. The folk in the crime scene team are discouraged, to say the least.”

  “What about the body?” Hanne asked, attempting to feign interest.

  “The postmortem shows the knife hit the bull’s-eye. Between two ribs, the third and fourth, I believe.”

  He rustled his notes.

  “The murderer either got lucky or has a thorough knowledge of anatomy. The knife went straight through the aorta, into the left atrium and ended up in the left ventricle. A considerable amount of force had to be used. Apart from that, the lady was slightly overweight, had some kidney stones and a benign little cyst on one ovary. Plus a punctured lung beside her heart. And a tiny cut on her right forefinger covered by a Band-Aid. In other words, she died from the stab wound.”

  “Who’s been questioned so far?”

  The question was directed at Erik Henriksen, a broad-shouldered, boyish, red-haired police officer who was clever and suffered from a major crush on Hanne Wilhelmsen, now of a somewhat resigned nature. They had worked together for a couple of years, and he was overjoyed at her promotion to chief inspector.

  “Thirteen in total,” he said, placing the interview reports in front of her. “Eleven members of staff, her husband, and her eldest son.”

  “Why not all the staff? Who’s missing?”

  “We haven’t reached Terje Welby yet. Or Eirik Vassbunn, who was on night duty. The one who found the body. Or, to be more specific, I’ve talked to him but only enough to write a secondhand account. He’s in total shock. Can’t see the point of stressing him out any further.”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen refrained from expressing her opinion of that judgment and remained sitting, deep in thought. Clasping her hands together, she raised them to her face as though in silent prayer. No one spoke for twenty seconds, until Billy T. gave a loud, lingering yawn.

  “Have we found anyone with a motive, boys and girls?” the chief inspector asked, once her prayer was concluded.

  “Her widower has a kind of motive, yes,” Billy T. said. “But I still don’t think he did it. As far as the others go, I don’t see much at all. No one profits from the lady’s sudden passing. No one we can see, at least. She was pretty well liked by the staff, and very well liked by the children.”

  “Except Olav, as far as I understand,” Tone-Marit muttered, embarrassed at having to speak up.

  “That’s right, but he mor
e or less hated everybody and everything. With the exception of Maren Kalsvik. She was the only one he listened to.”

  Lighting up a cigarette, Hanne Wilhelmsen ignored Tone-Marit’s disapproving coughing.

  “Let’s begin at the other end, then,” she said, leaning her head back to send a perfect smoke ring into the room. “What kind of motives could anyone think of for killing a little lady who owns a little shop and runs a little foster home and who’s employed by the Salvation Army?”

  Billy T. grinned.

  “A bit of a stumper, boss! Homicides are usually about sex, money, or pure and simple hatred. We can ignore sex in this case . . .”

  “Now you’re showing your damn prejudices, Billy T.,” Hanne protested. “For all we know, she could have a jilted boyfriend somewhere.”

  “Or girlfriend.” Billy T. grinned again, disregarding her immediate glare. “Okay. We’ll have to search for this forty-five-year-old, overweight little dame’s passionate and bloodthirsty former lover. Or else we can concentrate on the money angle.”

  “Who’s responsible for the accounts in a place like that?” Hanne suddenly inquired.

  “Agnes. But this Terje Welby also had access to all the business accounts. He’s the assistant director, at least on paper. Maren Kalsvik, who has filled the deputy director role, doesn’t have any involvement in financial affairs.”

  “Are we talking about large sums of money here?”

  Her increasing interest was obvious.

  “Well, yes, I would think so. Think about what it must cost to run a house like that! With loads of staff! And eight youngsters! I’m skinned alive by my four . . .”

  When his own financial responsibilities crossed his mind, he sat there in gloomy silence.

  “Check that more closely, Tone-Marit. Have a look at the accounts and see if there’s anything in that. It could well be . . .”

  Propping her feet up on the desktop, Hanne took a deep drag of her cigarette.

  “Killing to cover up another crime is a familiar motive as well.”

  “But then it’s all about sex or money all the same,” Billy T. broke in, tearing himself away from his ruminations about his financial worries.