Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel

by Anne Holt

  “We’ve caught the guy! The double murderer from Smestad! He was arrested on board a ferry to Denmark!”

  Then she bounded out again.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen and Billy T. exchanged glum looks.

  “We’ll go and pick up Maren Kalsvik,” Hanne decided.

  • • •

  At Spring Sunshine Foster Home, the situation was far from satisfactory. All the duty rosters had gradually broken down as people died or went on sick leave, and Maren Kalsvik had her hands full organizing the entire ménage. The children knew how to capitalize on this disarray and were noisier, quarreling more, and stretching all the boundaries with any scope for flexibility. Raymond was virtually looking after himself, less worrying than Glenn, who had been caught shoplifting earlier that day. Anita, grouchy as a toad, was not speaking to anyone. Maren suspected that her boyfriend had dumped her. The twins had made up their minds to drive Jeanette to distraction, and had almost succeeded the previous evening by peeing in her bed without her noticing it before lying down in all the mess. Kenneth was more anxious than ever and had become convinced that a pirate was living in the basement.

  “Now I want you to be quiet!”

  She was yelling at the top of her voice.

  An uncontrolled outburst from Maren Kalsvik was so infrequent that she achieved the result she wanted. All at once. After a few minutes, however, they started all over again.

  It was three o’clock, and only an hour since the first ones had begun to arrive home from school. Her headache had started two minutes after Kenneth turned up, and since then it had become steadily worse.

  She moved into the TV room, closing the door behind her. Christian would have to deal with them for a while. He was quite good with the children, although sometimes he allowed them to do far more than they should.

  Air. She needed some fresh air. She walked over to the window and opened it wide. It felt beneficial, and she gulped down deep breaths. Her nostrils moved in time to her breathing, out and in, out and in. She closed her eyes.

  In a way she wished she never needed to open them again.

  • • •

  “There! There he is again!”

  The trainee police officer had his face plastered to the car’s side window and was attempting to point in the right direction, but it turned into more of a vague thumping on the glass.

  “There he is, in that garden!”

  “Call up the nearest patrol car and get them to cut him off at the other side of that housing estate. And tell them to turn off those bloody sirens!”

  Several seconds after the trainee had relayed his superior’s orders, they could hear the distant sirens disappear.

  “If we don’t succeed in catching that boy now, I’m going to fucking hand in this badge,” the older man in the car said obstinately, executing an unnecessary, illegal, and extremely effective skid to turn the car around.

  • • •

  He had managed it. If he hadn’t been so exhausted, he would have been proud of himself. Maren was going to be proud of him. Twice he had plucked up the courage to ask for directions. In a few places he had spotted buildings he recognized, and now he had reached his destination. But it was crawling with police around here. There had been more and more of them, and in the end he had tramped through gardens and over bushes in order to be as invisible as possible from the road.

  He had managed it. But how would he make contact with Maren without the others seeing him?

  Uncertain, he sheltered underneath some bare overhanging trees. It was still light enough for him to be seen from a distance, so he positioned himself as close to the trunk as he could manage. There was only one road, one gate, and one garden path separating him from the entrance door at Spring Sunshine.

  About fifty meters.

  • • •

  Eventually Maren Kalsvik opened her eyes. Slowly and hesitantly. She covered her face with her hands. Her skin was cold, but she did not feel chilled. She leaned in toward the window frame. It squeezed her pelvis, but the pain was in a sense welcome, as it reminded her that she was still alive. Her head was empty and yet chaotically full at the same time. She was overwhelmed with dizziness and noticed in astonishment she had been holding her breath for a long time. Gasping, she managed to breathe in some reviving air.

  It was just beginning to grow dark; the shadows were no longer as sharp and here and there seemed to merge into the dark earth. Someone had left the gate open. It should always be kept closed.

  Something was moving underneath the trees on the other side of the road. The contours of a figure were just beginning to become clear when a delivery truck with a carpentry firm logo on its side appeared, blocking her view for a moment. Once the vehicle had driven past, she had to screw up her eyes to verify whether she had seen correctly.

  Although the figure—because it was definitely a person—had pulled in closer to the tree trunk encroaching on the sidewalk, the outline was now quite obvious. Not particularly tall, but all the same it appeared to be large and broad.

  “My God, it’s Olav,” she said aloud.

  Rushing toward the door, she almost slid on Lego bricks scattered across the floor as she headed for the stairs in her haste to reach the front door. However, she kept her balance, and without even putting on any shoes, she thundered down the stairs and out onto the gravel path.

  “Olav!” she shouted, holding her arms out wide. “Olav!”

  As she saw him step from the shadows to become more clearly visible, she noticed the car. She did not realize at first that it was a police vehicle; she registered simply that it was driving far too fast.

  The boy crossed the sidewalk and took a preliminary step onto the road. She herself had reached only halfway down the garden path.

  “Stop!” she screamed, halting abruptly herself in the hope that it would have an effect on the boy.

  But he ran on.

  Now she could see his face, only fifteen meters away. He was smiling, a completely different smile from what she had seen before. He looked happy.

  Two meters across the road he staggered feebly, starting to raise his arm in a gesture probably intended as a greeting.

  The car was traveling far too fast. Too fast for the speed limit of thirty kilometers an hour, and far too fast to have a chance to stop for a twelve-year-old suddenly tottering out into the road.

  The brakes squealed. Maren Kalsvik screamed. An elderly lady, who lived four houses farther down the road and who was out to let her poodle do his business in the remaining daylight, shrieked as though possessed.

  The front of the car hit the boy at knee height, and both bones broke instantly. He was thrown up onto the hood, and his heavy body smashed the windscreen before continuing up onto the roof. The police officer driving lost his grip on both the steering wheel and the road, and the vehicle swerved sideways ten meters farther down the gravelly asphalt before colliding with and demolishing a meter-high metal fence and juddering to a sudden stop at a tree stump. Both car doors were badly dented and the two police officers tugged at their door handles in agitation.

  Olav still lay on the road.

  Maren Kalsvik reached the boy at the precise moment he opened his eyes.

  “Lie still. Olav, you must lie quite still.”

  He smiled once more, that unfamiliar, genuine smile. She sat down on the ground beside him, wanting more than anything to lift him up and hold him. But he could have broken his neck, so instead she bent her face right down toward his head and stroked her fingers, light as a feather, across his cheek.

  “It’ll be all right, Olav. Just lie completely still, and everything’ll be okay.”

  Saliva was dribbling from his mouth, and she pulled her sleeve down to wipe him carefully on the chin.

  “I saw you, Maren,” he whispered, almost inaudibly. “You were running. In the garden. Did you hear . . .”

  He pulled a slight grimace, and she hushed him.

  “Did you hear that I . . .” he moane
d after all. “You . . .”

  Maren Kalsvik was feeling terribly cold. The chill came flooding over her and had nothing to do with sitting in her stocking feet, wearing no outdoor clothes, on a muddy road in Oslo one February afternoon. The bitter blast came from inside her, from a room she had locked, sealed, and then thrown away the key. Now the door was wide open. Her teeth were chattering as she hushed the boy.

  “Lie still, Olav. You have to lie still.”

  In desperation, she raised her upper body and screamed, “Ambulance, has nobody phoned for an ambulance?”

  The old lady had sat down on the sidewalk and was crying so vehemently that the poodle was going crazy around her, whining and barking. The police officers had still not managed to extract themselves from the wrecked car. Another car arrived around the bend and screeched to a standstill as soon as the driver realized what had happened.

  “Phone for an ambulance,” Maren yelled again, this time directed at Christian, who was standing like a pillar of salt on the stairs, clutching the door handle as five youngsters tried to pull it toward them from inside.

  “You were crying,” Olav whispered, so faintly she had to place her ear right down beside his mouth. “You . . . I saw you running, Maren.”

  Then he smiled again and whispered something indistinct into her ear.

  Just as Hanne Wilhelmsen and Billy T. arrived, having sprinted the fifteen meters from their car that was now blocking the road, Olav Håkonsen sighed softly, almost inaudibly, and died.

  • • •

  After an hour and a half of questioning Maren Kalsvik, Hanne Wilhelmsen had not achieved anything other than making Cecilie inordinately cross. It had taken time to sort things out at the foster home. Staring at the almost black windowpane, Hanne thought morosely that by now their guests would have finished eating the first course. If Cecilie had been capable of concocting something different from the asparagus that had unfortunately not reached home.

  If only Billy T. would arrive soon. It was his turn to have his children for the weekend, but he had promised to return as soon as the boys were all tucked up in bed. His sister would babysit. Hanne rumpled her hair and massaged her scalp.

  She was making no progress whatsoever.

  Maren Kalsvik had relinquished her right to legal counsel. Hanne Wilhelmsen had stated explicitly that Maren was charged with falsifying her diploma, but provisionally only suspected of the murder of Agnes Vestavik.

  “So she doesn’t have any rights at all as far as that’s concerned, not yet anyway,” Billy T. had quite correctly pointed out.

  She was entitled to an attorney, regardless, but she said no thanks. As far as the diploma was concerned, she acknowledged all of her wrongdoing in an impassive tone and without batting an eyelid. She had sat like a wooden doll during the entire interview, confining herself to answering in single syllables as truthfully as possible. When Hanne, more from personal curiosity than professional necessity, inquired why Maren had failed so many times, her facial features became, if possible, even more dispassionate. She would not answer that question.

  There were two things she denied repeatedly, every single time Hanne thought she had enticed her into a corner: that Agnes had told her she had exposed her, and that she had anything to do with the director’s murder.

  “I’d no idea she had found that out,” she said. “I had absolutely no reason at all to kill Agnes.”

  Lighting a cigarette, Hanne Wilhelmsen propped her feet up on the desk, then stared into midair before letting her eyes slide closed. Olav’s heavy, dead body had fixed itself to the inside of her eyelids, so she quickly opened them again. She scrutinized the other woman.

  “You were actually quite fond of that boy,” she said softly.

  Maren Kalsvik shrugged her shoulders, not allowing herself to be tempted into changing her countenance.

  “I saw it in you. You were fond of him, weren’t you?”

  She had not shed any tears. She had held the boy tightly, but when they finally made her understand he was dead, she had released him, risen to her feet, and composed her features into the stiff expression she had retained ever since. It was beginning to get on Hanne’s nerves.

  “Well,” she said when Maren Kalsvik had been given two minutes to respond without taking the opportunity to do so, “we’re not getting anywhere with this and it’s becoming late now. So I’ll tell you what I believe and you can sit down in a cell to contemplate it overnight. Contemplate whether it isn’t best to confirm what we already know.”

  “Cell” was not strictly true. But it worked: a tiny, almost imperceptible trembling appeared at the corner of the woman’s mouth, and remained there. For a considerable length of time.

  Hanne stood up and stepped around to the opposite side of the desk. Perching her posterior on the desktop edge, she crossed her legs. Maren Kalsvik was sitting a meter away, staring at a point in the center of her stomach.

  “You had a dental appointment that day. Agnes’s discussion with Terje took so long you had to be excused. You had to get to the dentist’s in time. It strikes me that Agnes would not have been pleased about that. She must have been in a bad mood that day. Very understandable. One untrustworthy member of staff after another.”

  Maren was still staring at a spot or something on her sweater, but Hanne noticed the trembling in the corner of her mouth was no longer visible.

  “Perhaps Agnes did not want to make a fuss. Perhaps you had plans for the rest of the day as well. I don’t know. But I think it’s likely she asked you to return later in the evening. Late in the evening. She would put her own child to bed first. And have peace and quiet at the foster home too. What do I know? Perhaps you had some inkling there was something unpleasant in store. Probably you did, because she must have insisted on holding the meeting. In any case . . .”

  She left the desk and returned to her seat once more. Taking a blank sheet of paper from a drawer, she started to make a paper airplane.

  “In any case, you came back. About half past ten, perhaps. You were quiet, because you knew fine well some of the children would be going to sleep at that time. Maybe you popped your head in to say hello to Eirik Vassbunn, but when you saw he was asleep, you did not bother. That may have been because you wanted to show consideration.”

  She folded and refolded.

  “But it might also have been for other reasons. Anyway, he did not notice that you had arrived.”

  The plane was almost completed. Taking a fresh sheet of paper, she tore it carefully to form a splendid tail.

  “Then you learned what it was about. Or what proof she had obtained. Or that you were being fired. Something totally upsetting.”

  Hanne shifted her eyes from the paper plane to the other woman’s face. Still completely expressionless. Still as though hewn from stone. It no longer irritated Hanne. Now it was a good sign. A damn good sign.

  “You obviously kept your voices fairly low. There were children sleeping on that entire floor. Even though several rooms separated you from them. But to be honest . . .”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen broke off and sent the airplane in a beautiful curve up toward the ceiling, where it hovered, almost still, as it reached the top of the arc, before flying in a lightning loop and coming in to land on the window ledge. Maren Kalsvik did not allow it to disturb her composure, offering the plane not a single glance.

  “I’ve tried to step into your shoes,” Hanne said in a friendly tone. “Tried to think about what it would be like to be discovered. That my boss found out I hadn’t been to Police College after all. That everybody got to know about it. That I got sacked and became unemployed.”

  Dripping a few drops of coffee into the overflowing ashtray, she poured the wet contents into the wastepaper basket before stretching her hand into a drawer and withdrawing four Kleenex tissues to wipe the ashtray. She then lit another cigarette.

  “I would quite simply have fallen apart. I mean, after so many years, after demonstrating I was really compete
nt at what I was doing, for a trivial piece of paper to turn my whole life upside down.”

  She shook her head and smacked her lips.

  “I’m not making fun of you, Maren,” she said gently. “I mean it. I would have fallen completely apart. And though my job means so much to me, I think yours is even more important to you. That’s obvious from the way you handle the children.”

  A chain of smoke rings dissipated on its journey to the ceiling. The two women remained sitting in silence for a while. The only sounds they heard were footsteps coming and going in the corridor outside. The station was about to empty for the weekend.

  “Tell me if I’m wrong, then,” Hanne suddenly encouraged her, finally making eye contact with the other woman, who changed her sitting position and shook her head, muttering something that Hanne did not catch. Then she returned to her role as Sphinx.

  “You begged for mercy, perhaps. I would have done that,” Hanne continued indefatigably. “But Agnes . . . Do you know, by the way, what the name Agnes means? Pure or virginal. Saint Agnes was maidenly but stubborn. It cost her her life. Was our Agnes equally stubborn?”

  Maren naturally made no reply, but her face was now almost transparent and livid.

  “She probably was,” Hanne said for want of a verbal confirmation from Maren. “And then something happened, something I’d like some details about. Look at me!”

  She banged both fists on the desk, causing Maren Kalsvik to flinch. They glanced at each other fleetingly, before looking away. Hanne shook her head.

  “There were some knives lying there. Agnes’s own newly sharpened knives. On the desk, possibly, or perhaps on the bookshelf. It’s not so important where they were. Anyway, you moved across the floor, around the desk, and were standing behind Agnes when you suddenly snapped. It happened in the blink of an eye. Before you’ve had time to think, it happened. You grabbed a knife and thrust it into her back. You were furious, you were desperate, and you were completely out of control. There’s an enormous amount here for a defense counsel to work with, Maren. An enormous amount. Perhaps someone will even come to the conclusion that you were suffering from impaired mental capacity at the time of the attack. A lawyer might help you.”