by Anne Holt
Two hours later, their efforts were concluded. The body was carefully placed on a stretcher and driven to the hospital, where it would shortly lie on an icy metal bench in a yellow room to be picked clean.
“Clear case of suicide, if you ask me,” one of the technicians remarked as he packed his case. “Do you want us to seal the apartment?”
“Yes, but then we really need to put the door back again,” Hanne replied.
Not long afterward, the door was more or less in place, and two eyelet screws were fastened to the frame and doorplate. A fine metal wire was laced through them and the ends joined together with a little seal of lead in the center.
“Thanks very much, boys,” Hanne said in a lackluster voice as she sent Erik off in the technicians’ vehicle.
“I’m going home. Tell them I’m keeping the car until tomorrow morning.”
She was deeply, heartily sorry.
• • •
Erik Henriksen fortunately had the foresight to call a minister. He himself did not feel quite mature enough to break the news to an ex-wife and two little boys that their daddy was dead. The clergyman had promised to attend to it at once. That had been an hour and a half earlier, so he assumed it had all been taken care of. It dawned on him that Maren Kalsvik ought to be told that her anxiety had been well founded. It was not exactly something one did by phone, so he dropped by the foster home on his way home.
It was dinnertime, and from the kitchen the sounds of eating could be heard: the clinking of glass, scraping of cutlery on china, and lots of voices, big and small. As usual, it was Maren Kalsvik who greeted him, and she stiffened when she caught sight of him.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, sounding scared. “Has something happened?”
“Could we go somewhere private?” the police officer said awkwardly, avoiding eye contact with the woman.
She escorted him to a kind of conference room that obviously was adjacent to the kitchen, with a door leading from the dayroom. Flopping down on an office chair, she tugged at her fringe.
“What’s the matter?” she repeated.
“You were right,” he launched into an explanation but caught himself. “I mean, there were grounds for concern. He had . . .”
Now he looked around, walking over to the door to ensure it was properly closed.
“He’s dead,” he said softly, after sitting down at the opposite side of the massive conference table.
“Dead? How is he dead?”
“Well, dead,” the officer said, somewhat discouraged. “He had taken his own life. I’d rather not go into details.”
“My God,” Maren whispered, her face turning more ashen than ever.
She closed her eyes and swayed violently in the chair, which did not have armrests. Quick as a flash, Erik Henriksen dashed around to catch hold of her before she fell to the floor. She blinked her eyes and moaned softly.
“It’s all my fault,” she said, breaking down in wild sobs. “Everything’s just my fault.”
Then she leaned close to the bewildered officer who was not especially well trained to cope with what was going on. But he held her in his arms for a spell.
• • •
“For fuck’s sake,” Christian whispered excitedly as he tumbled out of the archive room into the adjoining office. Erik Henriksen had led Maren Kalsvik from the conference room upstairs to the first floor.
“This is starting to get spooky! Fucking spooky! ”
He adjusted his clothes and rubbed his neck where, from previous experience, he knew a hickey was shortly about to bloom.
Cathrine, the skinny therapist, twentysomething going on thirty, followed after him. They had been sneaking into the archive room while they thought all the others were eating their meal and had been so wrapped up in their own bodies they had not heard the doorbell ring. When Maren and the police officer entered the neighboring room, they were trapped.
They had heard all of it.
“Taken his own life! My God!”
Cathrine was shaken, but not so much so that she refrained from taking the opportunity to lean toward a mirror beside the window to check her makeup. She made an openmouthed grimace as she ran a forefinger under each eye.
“Does that mean he’s the one who whacked Agnes, or what?”
“Probably,” Christian said with steadily increasing delight, grinning broadly.
“Look at you,” she said, rebuking him gently and stroking her hand over his mouth. “Wipe off that grin. This is awful!”
Taking hold of her wrist, he shoved her down onto a chair and sat on the edge of the table beside her.
“I really would never have believed it,” he said.
“Who did you think it was, then?”
Pushing himself farther onto the tabletop, he parked his feet on the seat of a chair. Then he propped his elbows on his knees and cupped his hands to support his face. His smile had vanished, and he looked deep in thought.
“Who did you think it was?” he parried.
Cathrine shrugged her shoulders, hemming and hawing.
“Well, that depends, I didn’t really believe it was anyone in particular, I don’t think.”
“But somebody must have done it,” Christian insisted.
“What about Olav?”
“Hah!”
“Don’t be so high and mighty, of course it could have been him! He ran away and everything!”
“You surely haven’t gone around thinking that boy could have done something like that? He’s only twelve, you know.”
“Well, who did you think it was?” she insisted once again.
“I thought it was Maren.”
“Maren?”
She blinked quickly, thinking for a moment of confusion that she had misheard him. Could Maren, kind, clever, efficient, and almost self-effacing Maren, have killed Agnes? Christian was sweet, but he couldn’t be quite right in the head.
“What in the world made you think that?”
“Look,” he said eagerly, taking her hands in his, “who gains most from Agnes’s death? To start with . . .”
Releasing his grasp, he tapped the tip of her nose lightly with his forefinger.
“. . . it’s Agnes who puts a stop to things every time Maren thinks something or other should be changed. All the time. Do you remember she supported the children when they wanted their bedtime to be put back by half an hour? Agnes said it was out of the question. And the time we were able to get a trip abroad for all the kids for the same price as it cost to hire that bloody awful cabin on the south coast? Agnes put her foot down.”
Before she managed to protest the suggestion that bedtimes and quashed foreign excursions could be a motive for murder, he tapped her on the nose one more time.
“Second, it was Maren who became the boss here when Agnes went. You saw how she just took over straightaway. Terje’s only a fool with fancy papers, everybody knows that.”
“Was,” Cathrine corrected him, immediately feeling somewhat queasy.
The excitement about the scandalous news began to recede in the face of the stark fact of Terje’s death.
“Besides, he wasn’t a fool,” she added.
“Third . . .”
Now she managed to protect her nose from a fresh onslaught.
“. . . Terje was a weakling and a wimp and I could never in my life believe he could work up the courage to kill anybody at all.”
With his arms raised above his head and in the midst of an enormous yawn, he continued. “But I was wrong, darling. It must have been Terje. Why would he commit suicide otherwise? And only a few days after the murder. Case solved.”
Jumping down to the floor, he retreated behind the chair where Cathrine was sitting and squeezed her thin frame.
“Why do we have to be so bloody secretive?” he whispered into her neck.
Wrenching herself out of his embrace, she answered despondently, “You are nineteen years old, Christian. Only nineteen.”
Shakin
g his head and momentarily annoyed, he let her go. Then he recovered his equanimity and disappeared from the room to check if the news of the suicide was official.
Cathrine remained sitting with a vague sense of missing something. Only now did she notice the window was slightly ajar. The curtains were fluttering gently, admitting a brisk gust of air that seemed colder than it actually was, an obscure scent of wet earth and grimy snow and rotting vegetation. She stood up to close it but caught the curtain in the gap between window frame and ledge. As she succeeded in pushing open the tricky window to rescue the cloth, she had a feeling there was something significant that had slipped her memory. It was exactly as if a thought had rushed so swiftly past her mind that she had not quite caught sight of it, had not grasped it properly, and she stood there for a long time struggling to retrieve it. She even closed her eyes in an effort to concentrate. Was there something she had seen? Heard? Overheard, perhaps?
“Cathrine, can you help me wash my hair?”
Jeanette was standing in the doorway tugging at her straggly locks that did look rather greasy.
The thought had vanished. But it was important, and Cathrine hoped it would return another time. She fixed the floral curtain before going upstairs to the bathroom with the chubby eleven-year-old.
• • •
“Have you ever been in love with a boy?” Hanne Wilhelmsen asked in the dark as it was approaching midnight and they had just come to bed.
Cecilie chuckled, a surprised, rolling laugh.
“What on earth kind of question is that?” she inquired, twisting around on her side so she was face-to-face with Hanne. “I’ve never been in love with anyone except for you!”
“Don’t joke! Of course you have. You just haven’t done anything about it. At seventeen it was obvious you’d fallen a little bit in love. I remember that teacher of yours, for example. I was bloody jealous.”
In the gloom, Cecilie could see Hanne’s profile outlined on the blue striped wallpaper, and she let her finger run along her forehead and nose until she stopped and was rewarded with a kiss.
“Does that mean you have been in love at some time?”
“We’re talking about you at the moment,” Hanne insisted. “Have you ever been in love with a boy? A man?”
Cecilie sat up in bed, wrapping herself tightly in her quilt.
“Honestly, what’s this all about?”
“Nothing serious. I’m just asking. Have you?”
“No. I’ve never in all my life been in love with a boy. I thought I was a few times as a teenager, but I was really just in love with the thought of being in love. It was liberating. And the alternative scared me to death.”
Hanne had kicked her quilt halfway off and was lying with her hands under her head. Her entire upper body, half her thigh, and all of one leg were exposed. Her breasts were staring into the room, and just above her navel, Cecilie could see a pulse beating, quietly and evenly.
“But do you never feel a special . . . a kind of benevolence toward some man you like particularly well? The type of good feeling that means you want to be in his company all the time, do fun things, chat, play, the kind of things you long for when you’re in love?”
“Yes, sometimes. But that’s not a description of being in love. Don’t you remember what it was like any longer, Hanne?”
She placed her hand gingerly on the gently pulsating spot on her lover’s stomach.
“You want to do a whole lot of things more than that!”
Hanne turned around, looking at her earnestly. Car headlamps formed a pattern on the ceiling, and in the fleeting shimmer of light Cecilie glimpsed a desperate expression she did not quite recognize.
“You must never, never leave me!”
Hanne snuggled close to her, almost on top of her, and repeated herself.
“You must promise you’ll never leave me. Never never never.”
“Never in this world and universe and all eternity,” Cecilie whispered into her hair.
It was an ancient ritual. But it had been ages since they had resorted to it. Cecilie understood what it was all about.
Strangely enough, though, she did not feel threatened in the slightest.
8
Although this was only Billy T.’s eighth day in his new post as detective, his office already looked like a pigsty. Papers were lying everywhere, some of them important, others scribblings and old newspapers. Beside the door, a pile of empty cola bottles was lying on the floor, and at least three of them toppled over every time someone entered the room. Above the door hung a little miniature basket, and two orange plastic foam balls lay in the center of the room. In addition, he had hung a bulletin board on one wall, directly facing the desk, with several snapshots of four small boys attached with staples from a staple gun. To make matters worse, the room was totally devoid of any item that might bring the slightest hint of hominess. The windows were filthy, though that was something Billy T. could hardly be blamed for.
“I don’t really understand what we’re doing,” he said with resignation to Hanne Wilhelmsen, who by some miracle had avoided knocking over the bottles or trampling on something before taking her place. “Is the case solved now, or what? That’s a bit of a disappointment, if I may say so. Plain and simple and boring: a divorced man with money problems dips his hand in the till, gets caught, murders his boss, and then slashes himself to death in a bout of regret and despair.”
It was as though she had said the words herself. A disappointment. Maren Kalsvik had provided a statement that morning. Conscience stricken and shattered, she had given a full explanation of her deceased colleague’s embezzlement. She herself had discovered it before Christmas and imposed as a condition for keeping quiet that he sort it out before Easter. All the money was to be paid back. Agnes had known about it. No, she had not spoken to the director about it, but she realized from Agnes’s demeanor that her boss had surely known. Terje had admitted being there. He had insisted he was only looking for some papers. But he had told her barefaced lies for a considerable period of time, so she had no good reason to believe him. Neither had the police.
Still.
It could not be so simple.
“There’s no suicide note,” Hanne said thoughtfully, picking up one of the orange balls. Aiming for the basket above the door, she threw the ball in a gentle curve and hit the target. The ball lay dead on the floor. Stretching from the chair, she retrieved it and tried again. Two more points.
“Bloody hell, you’re really good!”
“Used to live in the States, you know.”
Billy T. lifted the other ball, tossing it into the air, where it hovered on the ring for a second before slowly teetering over on the right side.
“Two points,” Hanne called, trying herself one more time. “Bingo! Hanny Wilhelmsen leads by four points!”
Grinning, Billy T. took up position as far away from the basket as possible, right over beside the window. For a few seconds he stood there, swaying up and down from the knees, before the orange ball drifted toward the basket, hitting the board and falling to the floor without even approaching the rim.
“I won,” Hanne said, snatching both balls and placing them underneath her chair before Billy T. had the opportunity to continue the match. “I’m really missing a suicide note.”
“Why? Do you actually think—”
“No, I don’t mean that. I don’t honestly think it’s a murder. But we have to keep the possibilities open, don’t you think?”
They exchanged glances and broke into laughter.
“Okay.” Billy T. grinned. “But it’s bloody tempting to come to the conclusion that Terje Welby killed Agnes. Difficult case solved within one week flat. Huge feather in the cap. Ready for fresh assignments. Fresh, exciting assignments.”
“I haven’t said that wasn’t how it was. It’s quite possible that it was Welby. It probably was him. But there’s something that doesn’t add up. Just a gut feeling. And if he was the one who murdered
Agnes Vestavik, I damn well want better proof of the crime than him stealing some cash and taking his own life. And a question mark hangs over his reputation if he goes to his grave in the shadow of an unresolved murder.”
Billy T. had good reason to take Hanne Wilhelmsen’s gut feeling seriously. Especially when it mirrored his own.
“But where do we go from here, then?” he asked, somewhat daunted. “Strictly speaking, we’re right back where we started!”
“Not quite. There are still some things to go on. A number of things.”
They spent half an hour summarizing. First of all, they could wait for several pieces of technical information. Also, they had the husband. They had a lover of some kind who might have been rejected. They had a youngster, strong as an ox, on the run. Furthermore, they had somebody who had taken a large bite out of the victim’s bank account, either by her giving the person in question large sums of money or by them being stolen. Both possibilities were equally interesting. Besides, there were several members of staff at the foster home who had been questioned only superficially. They had Tone-Marit and Erik’s word, of course, that they were not of interest, but Billy T. should at least scrutinize them more closely. Four of the employees had not even attempted to produce alibis. Cathrine, Christian, Synnøve Danielsen, and Maren Kalsvik all lived on their own and had been at home alone on the night of the murder. The others’ alibis had not been properly checked.
“And we really should look more closely at Olav’s mother, Birgitte Håkonsen,” Hanne said finally, sensing a faint unease when she mentioned the name. “There’s no doubt she hated Agnes.”
“How do you know that?” Billy T. leafed through the case files in front of him, finding nothing about Olav’s mother.
Hanne waved at him dismissively. “I’ll tell you later. But she really can’t be excluded.”
“Sounds a bit far-fetched to me,” Billy T. mumbled, but he jotted something on a sheet of paper he retrieved from all the chaos on his desk.
“And one more thing.”
Hanne rose to her feet and lifted one of the balls. Positioning herself where Billy T. had stood earlier, over by the window, with her back to the glass, she judged the distance to the basket and asked, “That number for Diakonhjemmet College. The one written on the other yellow note in Agnes’s office. Have you checked what that was about?”
