by Karin Fossum
Eva forced her voice to sound normal. ‘I’ll have to go, Dad, the money’s run out. Look after yourself!’ There was a click, and he was gone. The numbers on the display had stopped.
Emma looked at her expectantly. ‘Are they coming now?’
‘Yes, they’re sending a police car. Come on, we’ll go and eat. They’ll ring if they want to speak to us, but I don’t think they’ll need to, at least not yet, perhaps later, but then they’ll get in touch. This has nothing to do with us at all, you see, not really.’ She was almost breathless, talking frantically.
‘Can’t we just wait and see them arrive, please can we?’
Eva shook her head. She crossed the street with the girl in tow, while the red man was still showing. They were an oddly matched pair as they walked into town, Eva tall and thin with slender shoulders and long, dark hair, Emma plump and broad and knock-kneed, with a slightly waddling gait. Both of them felt cold. And the town was cold, in the miasma from the chill river. It’s an inharmonious town, Eva thought, as if it could never really be happy because it was split in two. Now the two halves were struggling to gain the upper hand. The north side with the church, the cinema and the most expensive stores, the south side with the railway, the cheap shopping centres, the pubs and the state off-licence. This last was important and ensured a steady stream of cars and people across the bridge.
‘Mum, why did he drown?’ Emma fixed on her mother’s face and waited for an answer.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps he was drunk and fell into the river.’
‘Perhaps he was fishing and fell out of his boat. He should have been wearing a life jacket. Was he old, Mum?’
‘Not particularly. About Dad’s age perhaps.’
‘At least Dad can swim,’ she said with relief.
They had arrived at the green door of McDonald’s. Emma put her weight against it and pushed it open. The smells within, of hamburgers and French fries, drew her and her unfailing appetite further into the place. Gone was the dead man in the river, gone all life’s problems. Emma’s tummy was rumbling and Aladdin was within reach.
‘Find a table,’ Eva said, ‘and I’ll order.’
She made for the corner as usual and seated herself under the flowering almond tree, which was plastic, while Eva joined the queue. She tried to banish the image that lapped at her inner eye, but it forced itself on her again. Would Emma forget it, or would she tell everyone? Perhaps she’d have nightmares. They must stifle it with silence, never mention it again. In the end she’d think it had never happened.
The queue inched forward. She stared distractedly at the youngsters behind the counter; with their red caps and red short-sleeved shirts they worked at an incredible pace. The fatty haze from the cooking hung like a curtain behind the counter, the smells of fat and frying meat, melted cheese and seasonings of all kinds forced their way into her nostrils. But they seemed oblivious to the thickness of the atmosphere, running back and forth like industrious red ants, smiling optimistically at each and every order. She watched the quick fingers and the light feet that sped across the floor. This was nothing like her own day’s work. She stood in the middle of her studio most of the time, arms folded, fixing a stretched canvas with a hostile stare, or possibly an imploring one. On good days she stared aggressively and went on the attack, full of audacity and aplomb. Once in a blue moon she sold a painting.
‘Happy Meal, please,’ she said quickly, ‘and chicken nuggets and two Cokes. Would you be very kind and put an Aladdin in? She hasn’t got that one.’
The girl went to work. Her hands packed and folded at lightning speed. Over in the corner, Emma raised her head and followed her mother with her eyes as she finally came weaving across with the tray. Suddenly Eva’s knees began to tremble. She sank down at the table and looked in wonderment at the girl who was eagerly struggling to open the little cardboard box. She searched for the toy. The eruption was deafening.
‘I got Aladdin, Mum!’ She raised the figure above her head and showed it to the entire restaurant. They all stared at her. Eva buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
‘Are you ill?’ Emma turned deadly serious and hid Aladdin under the table.
‘No, well – just not a hundred per cent. It’ll soon pass.’
‘Are you upset about the dead man?’
She started. ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I’m upset about the dead man. But we won’t talk about him any more. Never, d’you hear, Emma! Not to anyone! It’ll only make us sad.’
‘But do you think he’s got children?’
Eva wiped her face with her hands. She wasn’t certain of the future any more. She stared at the chicken, at the doughy brown lumps fried in fat, and knew that she couldn’t eat them. The images flashed past again. She saw them through the branches of the almond tree.
‘Yes,’ she said at length, ‘he’s probably got children.’
Chapter 3
AN ELDERLY WOMAN out walking her dog suddenly caught a glimpse of the blue and white shoe amongst the stones. She phoned from the telephone box near the bridge, just as Eva had done. When the police arrived, she was standing somewhat self-consciously by the bank with her back to the corpse. One of the officers, whose name was Karlsen, was first out of the car. He smiled politely when he caught sight of the woman and glanced inquisitively at her dog.
‘He’s a Chinese Crested,’ she said.
It really was an intriguing creature, tiny, wrinkled and very pink. It had a thick tuft of dirty yellow hair on the crown of its head, but was otherwise entirely bald.
‘What’s his name?’ he asked amicably.
‘Adam,’ she replied. He nodded and smiled, diving into the car’s boot for the case of equipment. The policemen struggled with the dead man for a while, but eventually got him up on the bank where they placed him on a tarpaulin. He wasn’t a big man, he just looked that way after his sojourn in the water. The woman with the dog retreated a little. The team worked quietly and precisely, the photographer took pictures, a forensic pathologist knelt by the tarpaulin and made notes. Most deaths had trivial causes and they weren’t expecting anything unusual. Perhaps a drunk who’d toppled into the water, there were gangs of them under the bridge and along the footpaths in the evenings. This one was somewhere between twenty and forty, slim, but with a beer belly, blond, not particularly tall. Karlsen pulled a rubber glove on to his right hand and carefully raised the dead man’s clothing.
‘Stab wounds,’ he said tersely. ‘Several of them. Let’s turn him over.’ They fell silent. The only sound was that of rubber gloves being put on and pulled off, the quiet click of the camera, the breath of one or other of them, and the crackling of the plastic sheeting which they spread out by the side of the body.
‘I wonder,’ Karlsen muttered, ‘if we haven’t found Einarsson at long last.’
The man’s wallet had gone, if he’d ever had one. But his wristwatch was there, a gaudy affair with a lot of extras, like the time in New York and Tokyo and London. Its black strap had dug into his swollen wrist. The corpse had been in the water a long time and had presumably been carried by the current from further upstream, and so the location of the find wasn’t of special interest. Even so, they inspected it a bit, searching the bank for possible footprints, but found only a plastic can which had once contained antifreeze and an empty cigarette packet. A number of people had gathered up on the path, mostly youngsters; now they were craning their necks to steal a glance at the body on the tarpaulin. Decomposition was well under way. The skin had loosened from the body, especially on the hands, as if he were wearing oversized gloves. It was very discoloured. His eyes, which had once been green, were transparent and pale, his hair was falling out in great tufts, his face had puffed up and made his features indistinct. The fauna of the river, crayfish, insects and fish, had all tucked in greedily. The stab wounds in his side were great gaping gashes in the ashen white flesh.
‘I used to fish here,’ said one of the boys on the path, he’d never seen
a dead body in all his seventeen years. He didn’t really believe in death, just as he didn’t believe in God, because he’d never seen either of them. He hunched his chin into the collar of his jacket and shivered. From now on anything was possible.
The post-mortem report arrived a fortnight later. Inspector Konrad Sejer had called five people to a conference room situated in one of the Portakabins behind the courthouse. They’d been erected there in more recent times owing to lack of space, a row of offices hidden from the public and which most people had never seen, apart from the unhappy souls who came into more intimate contact with the police. Some things had already been established. They knew the man’s identity, they’d got that right away because the name Jorun was engraved on his wedding ring. A file from the previous October contained all the information about the missing Egil Einarsson, aged thirty-eight, address: Rosenkrantzgate 16, last seen on 4 October at nine in the evening. He left a wife and a six-year-old son. The file was thin, but would soon get thicker. The new photographs fattened it up well, and they weren’t pretty. A number of people had been interviewed when he’d disappeared. His wife, workmates and relations, friends and neighbours. None of them had much to say. He wasn’t exactly whiter than white, but he had no enemies, at least, none that they knew of. He had a regular job at the brewery, went home to his dinner every day and spent most of his spare time in his garage, tinkering with his beloved car, or with his mates at a pub on the south side. The pub was called the King’s Arms. Einarsson was either a poor sod who’d been the victim of some desperado wanting money – heroin had taken a firm grip, seeing the potential in this cold, windswept town – or he had a secret. Perhaps he was in debt.
Sejer peered down at the report and rubbed his neck. It always impressed him the way criminal pathologists managed to pull together a semi-rotten mass of skin and hair, bones and muscles, and turn it into a complete human being with age and weight and physical attributes, condition, previous complaints and operations, dental hygiene and hereditary disposition.
‘Remnants of cheese, meat, paprika and onion in the stomach,’ he said aloud. ‘Sounds like pizza.’
‘Can they be sure after six months?’
‘Yes, of course. When the fish haven’t eaten it all. That sometimes happens.’
The man called Sejer was made of solid stuff. He was in his forty-ninth year, his forearms were already reasonably tanned, he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves and the blood vessels and sinews were conspicuous beneath the skin, making them look like seasoned wood. His face was well defined and a little sharp, his shoulders straight and broad, his good overall colour gave the impression of something that was well used, but which would also endure. His hair was spiky and steel-coloured, almost metallic and very short. His eyes were large and clear, their irises the colour of wet slate. That was how his wife Elise had once described them years before. He’d found her description charming.
Karlsen was ten years his junior and slight by comparison. At first glance he could give the impression of being a dandy, without solidity or weight, he had a waxed moustache and a high, impressively bouffant head of hair. The youngest and sprightliest of them, Gøran Soot, was struggling to open a bag of jelly babies without making too much of a rustling noise. Soot had thick, wavy hair, a compact, muscular body and a fresh complexion. Taken on its own, each part of his body was a feast for the eye, but all together they were rather too much of a good thing. He, however, was unaware of this interesting fact. Seated by the door was Chief Inspector Holthemann, taciturn and grey, and behind him a female officer with close-cropped fair hair. At the window, with one arm propped on the sill, sat Jakob Skarre.
‘How are things with Mrs Einarsson?’ Sejer asked. He cared about people, knew that she had a young son.
Karlsen shook his head. ‘She seemed a bit bewildered. She asked if this meant she’d get the life insurance money at last, and then broke down in despair because the first thing she’d thought about was the cash.’
‘Why hasn’t she had anything?’
‘We had no body.’
‘I’ll take that up with the appropriate person,’ said Sejer. ‘What have they been living on these past six months?’
‘Social security.’
Sejer shook his head and flipped through the report. Soot stuffed a green jelly baby into his mouth, only its legs protruded.
‘The car,’ Sejer went on, ‘was found at the municipal dump. We rooted through the rubbish for days. In fact he was killed in a completely different location, possibly by the river. Then the killer got into the car and drove it to the rubbish tip. It’s extraordinary if Einarsson really has been in the water for six months and hasn’t turned up until now. That’s quite some time the murderer has been clinging to the hope that he would never surface again. Well, now he’s had a reality check. I imagine it’ll be quite a hard one, too.’
‘Did he get caught up on something?’ Karlsen wondered out loud.
‘Don’t know. It’s a bit strange, that, the riverbed is pure gravel, it’s not long since it was dredged. He may have been swept in towards the bank and got caught up on something there. His appearance was roughly what we’d have anticipated, anyway.’
‘The car had been cleaned and hoovered inside,’ said Karlsen, ‘the dashboard had been polished. Wax and cleaning stuff everywhere. He left home to sell it.’
‘And his wife didn’t know who the prospective purchaser was,’ Sejer recalled.
‘She knew nothing at all, but that was par for the course in that household.’
‘No one phoned asking for him?’
‘No. He told her quite suddenly that he had a purchaser. She thought it was strange. He’d scraped and saved to get that car, tinkered with it for months, treated it like his baby.’
‘Maybe he needed money,’ said Sejer urgently, rising. He began to pace. ‘We’ve got to find that buyer. I wonder what happened between them. According to his wife he had a hundred kroner in his wallet. We ought to go through the car again, someone sat in it and drove it several kilometres, a murderer. He must have left something behind!’
‘The car’s been sold,’ Karlsen put in.
‘Wouldn’t you just know it.’
‘9 p.m.’s pretty late to go showing off a car,’ said Skarre, a curly-haired man with an open face. ‘It’s bloody dark in October at nine in the evening. If I were going to buy a car I’d want to see it in daylight. It could have been planned. A kind of trap.’
‘Yes. And if you want to test drive a car, you head out of town. Away from people.’ Sejer scratched his chin with well-clipped nails. ‘If he was stabbed on the fourth of October, he’s been in the river six months,’ he said, ‘is that consistent with the state of the body?’
‘The pathologists are being difficult about that,’ said Karlsen. ‘Impossible to date that sort of thing, they say. Snorrasson told of a woman who was found after seven years, and she was as good as new. Some lake in Ireland. Seven years! The water was freezing cold, pure preservation. But we can assume it happened on the fourth of October. It must have been quite a strong person, I should have thought, judging by the results.’
‘Let’s look at the stab wounds.’
He selected a photograph from the folder, went to the board and clipped it in position. The picture showed Einarsson’s back and bottom; the skin had been thoroughly washed and the stab wounds left crater-like depressions.
‘They do look rather strange, fifteen stab wounds, half of which are to the lower back, bottom and abdomen, and the remainder in the victim’s right side, directly above the hip, delivered with great force by a right-handed person, striking from above and slicing downwards. The knife had a long, thin blade, very thin in fact. Perhaps a fishing knife. Altogether a strange way to attack a man. But you remember what the car looked like, don’t you?’
All at once he strode over and hauled Soot out of his chair. His bag of goodies fell to the floor.
‘I need a victim,’ Sejer said. ‘Come here!’
He pushed the officer over to the desk, took up position behind him and grabbed the plastic ruler. ‘It could have happened something like this. This is Einarsson’s car,’ he said, pushing the young policeman over on to the desktop. His chin just reached the far edge. ‘The bonnet is up, because they’re busy looking over the engine. The killer pushes the victim on to the engine and holds him down with his left arm while he stabs him fifteen times with his right. FIFTEEN TIMES.’ He wielded the ruler and prodded Soot’s bottom as he counted aloud: ‘One, two, three, four,’ he moved his hand and stabbed him in the side, Soot squirmed a bit, as if he was ticklish, ‘five, six, seven – and then he stabs him in the nether regions …’
‘No!’ Soot leapt up in horror and crossed his legs.
Sejer stopped, gave his victim a small push and sent him back to his chair as he fought to suppress a smile.
‘It’s a lot of times to strike with a knife. Fifteen stabs and a whole lot of blood. It must have spurted out everywhere, over the killer’s clothes, face and hands, over the car and the ground. It’s a bugger that he moved the car.’
‘At any rate, it must have been done in the heat of the moment,’ Karlsen maintained. ‘It’s no normal execution. Must have been an argument.’
‘Perhaps they couldn’t agree on a price,’ quipped Skarre.
‘People who decide to kill using a knife often get a nasty shock,’ said Sejer. ‘It’s a lot harder than they think. But let’s assume it actually was premeditated, and at the opportune moment he pulls out his knife, for example just as Einarsson is standing with his back to him, bending over the engine.’
He narrowed his eyes as if conjuring up the scene. ‘The killer had to strike from behind, so he couldn’t easily get at what he wanted. It’s much harder to reach vital organs from behind. And maybe it took quite a number of stabs before Einarsson finally collapsed. It must have been a terrifying experience, he’s stabbing and stabbing, his victim goes on screaming, that makes him panic and he’s unable to stop. That’s what happens. In his imagination it’ll be one or two lunges. But how often has the killer been content with that in all the many knife murders we’ve dealt with? Off the top of my head I can recall one instance with seventeen stab wounds, and another with thirty-three.’
