Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel

by Anne Holt

  “You’re quite right. I haven’t been on top of things. I’m sorry about that.”

  Feeling abashed, Billy T. and Erik attempted to brush her off. Tone-Marit sat in silence, looking at her.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  Tone-Marit continued to stare at her, but the suggestion of a smile was lurking in her narrow eyes. Hanne smiled back and went on. “Now we need to try to find our way in this tangle of murderers we’ve become embroiled in.”

  She had divided the contents of a green-covered folder into four bundles. They were sitting neatly in a row front of her, and she placed a slim hand on one of them. Her wedding ring shone up at the three others on the opposite side of the desk, and an old reflex was urging her to pull her hand away. However, something held her back.

  “This is Maren Kalsvik,” she said, giving the bundle a little smack before moving on to the next one. “And this is the Lover who robbed the woman blind before she died. Here . . .”

  Her hand slapped down on the third bundle.

  “Here we have the husband who lied to the police about what he gains from his wife’s demise.”

  The fourth bundle, still inside the green cover, was placed right at the end of the desktop.

  “This is all the rest. Olav Håkonsen, his mother, Terje Welby, and—”

  “Why have you actually written off Terje Welby?” Tone-Marit interrupted. “Despite everything, he’s still of great interest, is he not?”

  “It’s too simple, Tone-Marit. It’s far too obvious and simple. And I don’t like there being no suicide note. The crime scene technicians have no doubt that it was a suicide. If they ever were in doubt. Terje Welby was killed by his own carpet knife. From regret and depression, most likely. Because he had been a villain and a crook and stole money from his employer. But we haven’t found anything else that confirms he murdered Agnes. All my experience suggests there would have been a letter there. A letter that either protests his innocence of the murder and begs forgiveness for whatever else he must have done, or confessing to all of it. This is a suicide committed in the deepest despair. Both escape and atonement. It would not have been accomplished without letting anyone know. What he had done, and what he had not done.”

  “But now we know he did not write a letter,” Billy T. said with a long, loud belch.

  “Yes, oh yes, I think he did,” Hanne said quietly. “I’m pretty certain he wrote a letter of that nature. But someone removed it.”

  Erik spilled cola down the front of his shirt. Tone-Marit’s mouth literally fell open. Billy T. whistled.

  “Maren Kalsvik,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “But it could have been any person at all,” Erik protested. “Why precisely her?”

  “Because she wanted us to content ourselves that the killer was dead. Because her world would fall down around her if she lost her job. A job she lives and breathes for, and a job she obtained by falsifying documents and telling lies.”

  Now it was Tone-Marit who whistled. Low and long drawn out.

  “Maren Kalsvik went to the Diakonhjemmet School of Social Work,” Hanne continued, folding her hands behind her head. “That’s quite true. But she failed her final exams. In the spring of 1990. That wasn’t so critical, because you can resit in the fall. The problem was simply that she failed again. And made one of her life’s most stupid choices. Instead of repeating her final year, and so having two fresh opportunities to sit the examination, she chose to take another resit. And she damn well failed again.”

  “Is she stupid, or what?” Billy T. mumbled. “She really seems so clever!”

  “It’s one thing to be clever at practical things, but theory is something quite different. There might be a thousand reasons for it going so badly. The dramatic point is that after a second resit you’re barred from another attempt. Forever. There is no Maren Kalsvik in the examination records of Diakonhjemmet School of Social Work. Neither in 1990 nor in 1991. Or indeed in any other year either, for that matter. She must have needed to produce a diploma when she got the job, but it’s a forgery, there’s no doubt about it.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Billy T. said.

  “She probably felt something like that, yes. When she failed, I mean.”

  “But do we know that Agnes had told Maren she knew about it?” Tone-Marit asked.

  “No, we don’t,” Hanne replied, shaking her head. “But if she had told her, then Maren knew her life was going to crash down into the famous ruins. And that would be a hundred times worse than sitting in the cooler for stealing thirty thousand kroner. It’s worse than being homeless and penniless too. And besides, I have more . . .”

  Half an hour later all the cola was finished and the temperature in the chief inspector’s office was approaching a dangerous thirty degrees Celsius. Erik was sweaty and excited, Billy T. was smirking, while Tone-Marit once more concluded to herself that Hanne Wilhelmsen was the best detective she had ever encountered.

  None of them any longer harbored any doubt. The Lover was a scoundrel who would receive his comeuppance for theft. The widower was a poor soul, a wimp who had been afraid of telling the truth when it was nowhere near threatening him.

  Maren Kalsvik was a killer.

  But however they twisted it and turned it, it was impossible to prove.

  • • •

  Cathrine Ruge was standing beside the fruit counter trying to remember whether she had some carrots, or whether she ought to buy another pack. They did not look particularly tempting at this time of year in the middle of winter. Perhaps she should take kohlrabi instead. She stood weighing a grayish-yellow oval root in her hand when a noisy gang of teenagers in red quilted jackets with white felt cats sewn on the backs came shrieking into the store.

  My God, the student celebrations begin earlier and earlier, she thought. In her day they were reading furiously right up until, at the earliest, one week prior to the Norwegian National Day, perhaps with the exception of a gathering for coffee in a café on the occasional Saturday. She herself had not dressed up other than possessing a student cap, and that she had worn only on May 17.

  The teenagers emptied a refrigerated cabinet of soft drinks and helped themselves to huge piles of chocolate. They pocketed candies from a pick ’n’ mix stand, and one of the boys, a skinny guy whose voice was shriller than all the others’ put together, was so keen to impress the two girls in their company that he ended up tipping over the entire rack. Chocolate, hard candies, and jelly babies overflowed onto the floor, and suddenly everything went completely silent before they burst out laughing. The young female checkout operator looked devastated; she was probably younger than they were and had never been closer to a student cap than she was at this precise moment, and she did not even dare to launch into a rebuke. Instead she locked her cash register and left to fetch a dustpan and brush. Before she returned, the teenagers had taken all they could carry of both the cola and chocolate, and vanished out the door.

  Cathrine contemplated for a moment the possibility of stopping them but was almost as frightened of the noisy, wild gang as the young girl at the checkout had been. They surged out of the store like a troll with a multitude of heads, leaving four adults standing shamefaced, making an effort to avoid looking at one another, without lifting a finger to stop the monster in its tracks.

  However, she could at least help the checkout operator to tidy up. Hesitantly, she crouched down and started to retrieve the candies. They were mixed together with rubbish and winter mud, and had to be thrown out. The young girl gratefully held out a large garbage bag and whispered, “They come here often. They make a lot of noise, but they don’t usually steal anything.”

  My God, she’s trying to excuse them, Cathrine thought, getting to her feet. “You should certainly report them!”

  “The boss will deal with that. He’ll be here soon.”

  The girl seemed even more frightened of the boss than of the teenagers who had demolished the store, and Cathrine offered to wait until he arri
ved to help her to explain what had taken place.

  “No, no, not at all,” the girl refused. “That would only make it worse.”

  It took them ten minutes to clean up. A quarter of a garbage bag full of spoiled candies.

  “If you tell the school about this, they’ll get into trouble,” she said in an unsuccessful attempt to cheer up the checkout operator who was now back at her post in the little booth. “That cat means they attend the Cathedral School. I can certainly . . .”

  “No, no,” the young girl replied. “Forget it.”

  Shaking her head, Cathrine paid for her groceries and went out the door. She had purchased the kohlrabi, even though it looked soft and spindly. She was almost sure she had carrots in the refrigerator.

  Then it suddenly struck her. The thing that had seemed so important when Christian had talked about Maren having possibly killed Agnes. Enormous, freezing drops of rain splashed her face as she stopped to think more closely about whether it was something the police ought to know. She deposited the plastic carrier bag on the sidewalk and kneaded her cold, wet face.

  It probably meant nothing. Because it must have been Terje, of course, who had murdered Agnes, although it was disconcerting that the police had called them all in for interviews again. Stupid that she had not remembered it yesterday, when she had been down there giving a new statement. Then she could have mentioned it quite naturally, and the police themselves could judge whether it was significant. Now it would be like stabbing Maren in the back if she phoned simply to tell them. It would be a way of expressing a suspicion. And she did not really suspect her. No way. Perhaps that was why she had forgotten about it.

  She lifted her bag and started walking. The kohlrabi bumped against her leg with every second step she took.

  She would have to think about it.

  • • •

  Quite oddly, he was no longer freezing, though his skin felt exactly as it did when he was chilled to the bone, numb and strange with goose bumps. It was even more bizarre that he was not hungry. He had not eaten since yesterday, and he had thrown up the cakes long ago. Instead of the usual feeling of hunger, he felt a faint nausea, but not as bad as last night.

  His head was bothering him most. It was pounding and thumping, as though someone had inserted a screwdriver just behind one of his temples. Now and again he took hold of his ear, as it was so painful you would almost think there was a large hole there.

  Besides, he was thirsty, terribly thirsty. Whenever he had walked past a kiosk or gas station, he had bought a soft drink. But the entire world was probably out looking for him now. There were police cars everywhere; he had never in all his life seen as many patrol cars as he had today. It delayed him considerably, and he became even more exhausted with the effort of constantly having to hide. They did not have their sirens on either, so he had to be on the lookout all the time. Some of them drove excruciatingly slowly. He was the one they were hunting. At one point a police car stopped quite suddenly no more than a hundred meters away from him. A man had emerged from the car and put his hands up to his eyes, peering over toward where he was walking. He had to take to his heels again, and by good luck a basement door had been lying open into a car workshop or something of the sort. By the time he was thrown out—when a bad-tempered, gray-haired man discovered him sitting down in a repair pit—the police had fortunately disappeared again.

  But it was taking an awfully long time. He had to reach there before evening fell. When he was closer to the foster home, he might perhaps be able to travel the final stretch by bus. Perhaps. He’d have to see. He hadn’t made up his mind yet.

  • • •

  “There are loads of cars out hunting for him. They’ve spotted him twice. Here . . .”

  Erik Henriksen pointed with an improbably badly bitten fingernail at a spot on a fairly large map of Oslo lying on Hanne Wilhelmsen’s desk.

  “. . . and here.”

  The chief inspector was fidgeting with an empty cigarette packet, fashioning a stork from the silver paper. When it was completed, she bent over the map and drew vague circles with her pinkie before finding what she was looking for. Then she attempted to make the stork stand there.

  “The foster home,” she said.

  The stork fell over.

  “He’s making his way to the foster home.”

  Using a broken pencil as a pointer, she outlined the route from Storo to Spring Sunshine. The points Erik had indicated to her lay in a more or less straight line between the two places, though closer to Storo than the foster home.

  “Why the hell’s he going there?” Erik Henriksen asked, making an effort to force the stork to stand upright again. “He ran away from there!”

  “It must be completely level underneath it,” Hanne instructed. “Make its feet a fraction bigger.”

  “Why do you think he’s going to Spring Sunshine?” Erik repeated, finally managing to stand the paper bird on its legs.

  Hanne did not answer. She had no idea why Olav Håkonsen was returning to the foster home. But she did not like it. It bothered her. A grumbling unease had settled somewhere between her navel and diaphragm, and was growing gradually more intense. She felt it again. It was the feeling she always had when something cropped up that she did not understand, though it obviously had some kind of significance. Something she was unable to anticipate, something she could not weave into her theories. She really disliked it.

  “I just sincerely hope they get hold of him before he reaches there.”

  “Of course they will,” Erik said reassuringly. “They’ve got five squad cars out looking for him. It can’t be that difficult to catch a twelve-year-old!”

  • • •

  It was well past two o’clock in the afternoon, and they were running out of time. At least if they were going to fulfill the optimistic promise of having the case all wrapped up before the weekend. Hanne Wilhelmsen was already dreading having to phone Cecilie to tell her she would probably be late. They were expecting guests, and she had sworn she’d be home in plenty of time.

  “Oh, shit,” she suddenly exclaimed when it dawned on her she had promised to buy fresh asparagus and eggplants at the greengrocer’s in Vaterland.

  The superintendent raised his eyebrows quizzically.

  “Nothing,” Hanne said quickly. “It was nothing.”

  She turned to face the police attorney, who was half sitting, half sprawling on the chair and at this precise moment was extremely preoccupied by something that seemed to be located inside his ear. First he tried to poke his finger in after it, but when that did not help, he picked up a paper clip and straightened it out to form a little spear he inserted all the way into his head.

  Hanne knew she ought to warn him but could not muster the energy to do so.

  “You’re quite sure there’s not enough evidence to support an arrest?” she asked for the third time.

  “Yes,” the police attorney responded, withdrawing the spear.

  A yellowish-brown lump had attached itself to the tip, and he looked delighted. Hanne turned away.

  He tucked the paper clip into his breast pocket and straightened up in his seat.

  “All you have is a pile of good theories. Nothing tangible. She has a motive, but there’s certainly no shortage of those in this case here. People with motives, I mean. What’s more, you know nothing about whether Agnes had in fact confronted Maren with evidence of the fraudulent diploma. If you can come up with some confirmation of that, I’ll make a fresh evaluation. Then at least we’ll be approaching something resembling grounds for an arrest. I need more, Hanne. Substantially more.”

  “But we know at least that she had falsified a diploma. Can we not haul her in for that?”

  The police attorney smiled indulgently at her and pulled out his ear picker again. Now he set to work boring into his other ear.

  “There’s probably sufficient evidence for that charge,” he said with his head tilted. “But that will be done quietly and calmly
and without any arrests. Totally undramatic. Ouch!”

  Pulling the mistreated paper clip from his ear, he stared at it in dissatisfaction. Then he rubbed the end of it between his thumb and forefinger, before wiping the earwax on his trouser leg and standing up.

  “My advice is to invite her to another interview. Present her with the facts you have and cross your fingers for a confession. She must be quite worn out by now.”

  Then he smiled and left the room.

  “Filthy pig,” Hanne said under her breath as he closed the door behind him, and hoped he had heard it.

  The superintendent did not crack a smile at all but left them behind as well.

  “But he’s right, you know,” Billy T. said dryly as the door closed for a second time.

  “I hate it when people like that are right.”

  “You hate it when anyone other than you is right, if you ask me.”

  “Psssh!” She tapped him on the head.

  “But what’ll we do?”

  “We could invite her to come here and give the excuse that yesterday’s interview was interrupted,” he suggested without any visible enthusiasm.

  “And then she’ll ask again to be interviewed up there, and then we’ll insist that she comes here,” Hanne intoned in an affected monotonous voice. “And then she won’t understand why we can’t wait until Monday, and then we’ll be even sterner and instruct her to come here at once, and then we’ll risk her getting the picture. And taking all the time in the world to eliminate whatever proof exists in this . . .”

  She exploded.

  “. . . damn case!”

  The map of Oslo on the desk, quite new and completely serviceable, in the course of a few seconds was transformed into a crumpled ball of paper. Hanne flung it at the wall, before picking it up again, a little embarrassed, and slowly began to investigate whether the map could be rescued.

  Suddenly shouts, yells, and loud cheering could be heard from the corridor. They looked at each other and competed to see who was less curious. They were speedily relieved of waiting for a decision, because the door was thrown open, and Sergeant Synnøve Lunde came bounding into the room.