The Redbreast hh-3

by Jo Nesbo

  'Don't be frightened, Signe,' he said, leaning over and fastening something on to her coat. She tried to bend her head to see what it was, but he forced her head up.

  'Let's go for a walk,' he said. As we used to.'

  He got out of the car, opened the rear door, pulled her out and shoved her in front of him. She stumbled and fell on the gravel in the grass beside the path, but he caught hold of the rope which bound her hands behind her back and pulled her to her feet. He positioned her directly in front of one of the floodlight projectors, with the light in her eyes.

  'Stand still. I forgot the wine,' he said. 'Red Ribeiros. You can remember it, can't you? Quite still, otherwise I…'

  She was blinded by the light and he had to put the knife right in front of her face for her to see it. Despite the piercing light, the pupils were so large that her eyes seemed almost completely black. He went down to the car and scouted around. No one in sight. He listened and all he heard was the usual drone of the town. Then he opened the boot. He shoved the black rubbish bag to the side and could feel that the body of the dog inside had already begun to go stiff. The steel of the Marklin rifle twinkled darkly. He took it out and sat in the front seat. He rolled the window half-down and rested the gun on it. When he looked up he could see her gigantic shadow dancing on the yellowish brown sixteenth-century wall. The shadow had to be visible all the way across the bay from Nesodden. Beautiful.

  He started up the car with his right hand and revved the engine. He took a last look around before peering through the sights. The distance was barely fifty metres and her coat filled the whole of the circle in the sight lens. He shifted his aim marginally to the right and the black cross-hair found what he was searching for-the white piece of paper. He released the air from his lungs and crooked his finger around the trigger.

  'Welcome back,' he whispered.

  Part Eight

  THE REVELATION

  85

  Vienna. 14 May 2000.

  Harry treated himself to three seconds of relishing the sensation of cool leather against the back of his neck and forearms on the seats of Tyrolean Air. Then he went back to his reflections.

  Beneath them the countryside lay like an unbroken patchwork of green and yellow, with the Danube glittering in the sun like a weeping brown wound. The air stewardess had just informed them that they were about to land in Schwechat, and Harry prepared himself.

  He had never been ecstatic about flying, but in recent years he had begun to be downright frightened. Ellen had once asked him what he was frightened of. 'Crashing and dying, what the fuck else?' he had answered. She had told him that the odds of dying in a plane on the occasional trip were thirty million to one against. He had thanked her for the information and said he wasn't frightened any longer.

  Harry breathed in deep and then out as he listened to the changing sounds of the engine. Why did the fear of death get worse as you got older? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Signe Juul was seventy-nine years old. Presumably she had been scared out of her wits. One of the guards at Akershus Fortress had found her. They had received a telephone call during their watch from a sleepless millionaire celebrity at Aker Brygge, informing them that one of the projectors on the southern wall had gone out, and the duty officer had sent one of the young guards out. Harry had questioned him two hours later, and he had told Harry that as he approached the projector he had seen a lifeless woman slumped across it, obstructing the light. At first he had thought she was a junkie, but as he moved closer and saw the grey hair and old-fashioned clothes, he realised she was an elderly woman. His next thought was that she had been taken ill, but then he discovered her hands were tied behind her back. It was only when he was right up close that he saw the gaping hole in her coat.

  'I could see that her spine had been smashed,' he had told Harry. 'Shit, I could see her spine.'

  Then he had told him how he had propped himself against the rock-face as he threw up, and it was only later when the police had come to take away the body and the light shone on the wall again that he realised what the sticky stuff on his hand was. He had shown Harry his hand, as if it were important.

  The Crime Scene Unit had arrived and Weber had walked across to Harry while studying Signe Juul through sleepy eyes. He said God wasn't the bloody judge, it was the bloke down below.

  The only witness was a night-watchman who kept an eye on the warehouses. He had met a car going down Akershusstranda on its way east at 2.45, but because the driver's lights had been on full beam he had been dazzled and hadn't been able to see the make of the car or the colour.

  It felt as if the pilot was accelerating. Harry imagined they were trying to gain height because the captain had suddenly seen the Alps right in front of the cockpit. Then it felt as if the air beneath the wings of the Tyrolean Air plane had vanished and Harry felt his stomach shoot up under his ears. He groaned out loud when the next moment they bounced up again like a rubber ball. The captain came on to the intercom and said something in German and English about turbulence.

  Aune had pointed out that if someone didn't have the capacity to feel fear, they would not survive a single day. Harry squeezed the arm of the chair and tried to find comfort in that thought.

  In fact it had been Aune who had supplied the impetus for Harry taking the first available plane to Vienna. Once he'd had the facts laid on the table, he had immediately said that time was of the utmost importance.

  'If we're dealing with a serial killer, he's on the point of losing control,' Aune had said. 'Not like the classical serial killer who looks for sexual release, but is then disappointed every time and increases the frequency of the killings out of sheer frustration. This murderer clearly isn't sexually motivated. He has some sick plan or other which has to be completed, and up until now he has been cautious and has behaved rationally. The fact that the murders are close to each other and that he has gone to great lengths to emphasise the symbolism of his actions-as with this execution at Akershus Fortress-suggests that he either feels invincible or he's losing his grip, maybe developing a psychosis.'

  'Or perhaps he's still totally in control,' Halvorsen had said. 'He hasn't slipped up yet. We still don't have any clues.'

  And he was absolutely bloody right, Halvorsen was. There were no clues.

  Mosken had been able to account for his movements. He had picked up the telephone in Drammen when Halvorsen rang in the morning to check, since the surveillance boys hadn't caught a sniff of him in Oslo. Of course they couldn't know if what he said was true: that he had driven to Drammen after Bjerke Stadium closed at half past ten and had arrived at half past eleven. Or if he had arrived at half past two in the morning and had thus been in a position to shoot Signe Juul.

  Harry, without much hope, had asked Halvorsen to ring the neighbours and ask if they had heard or seen Mosken arrive. And he had asked Moller to talk to the Public Prosecutor to see if they could get a search warrant for both of Mosken's flats. Harry knew that their arguments were weak and, quite rightly, the Public Prosecutor had answered that he at least wanted to see something that resembled circumstantial evidence before he would give the go-ahead.

  No clues. It was time to start panicking.

  Harry closed his eyes. Even Juul's face was still imprinted on his retina. Grey, closed. He had sat slumped in the armchair in Irisveien with the dog lead in his hand.

  Then the wheels touched down, and Harry could confirm that he was among the thirty million fortunate ones.

  The policeman whom the police boss in Vienna had kindly placed at his disposal as driver, guide and interpreter was standing in the arrivals hall with dark suit, sunglasses, bull-like neck and an A4 piece of paper with mr hole written on it in felt-pen.

  The bull-neck introduced himself as Fritz (Someone has to be called Fritz, Harry thought) and led Harry to a navy-blue BMW which a moment later was whizzing north west on the motorway towards the city, past the factory chimneys spewing out white smoke and past well-behaved motorists who
tucked into the right as Fritz accelerated.

  'You'll be staying at the spy hotel,' Fritz said.

  'The spy hotel?'

  'The venerable old Imperial. That's where the Russian and the Western agents defected during the cold war. Your boss must be floating in funds.'

  They arrived at the Karntner Ring and Fritz pointed.

  'That's the spire of Stephansdom you can see across the rooftops to the right,' he said. 'Beautiful, isn't it? Here's the hotel. I'll wait while you check in.'

  The receptionist at the Imperial smiled when he saw Harry eyeing the reception area with admiration.

  'We've renovated it at a cost of forty million schillings so that it's exactly as it was before the war. It was almost completely destroyed by bombing in 1944 and it was fairly run down a few years ago.'

  When Harry left the lift on the second floor it was like walking on springy peat, the carpets were so thick and soft. The room was not particularly big, but there was a broad four-poster bed that looked as if it was at least a hundred years old. On opening the window he could smell the bakery of the cake shop across the street.

  'Helena Mayer lives in Lazarettegasse,' Fritz informed him when Harry was back in the car again. He hooted at a car switching lanes without signalling.

  'She's a widow and has two grown-up children. She worked as a teacher after the war until she retired.'

  'Have you spoken to her?'

  'No, but I've read her file.'

  The address in Lazarettegasse was a property that must have been elegant at one time. But now the paint was peeling from the walls in the spacious stairwell, and the echoes of their shuffling steps mingled with the sound of dripping water.

  Helena Mayer stood smiling by the entrance to her flat on the third floor. She had lively brown eyes and apologised for the stairs.

  The flat was slightly over-furnished and full of all the knick-knacks people collect over the course of their lives.

  'Please sit down,' she said. 'I only speak German, but you may talk to me in English. I can understand well enough,' she said, turning to Harry.

  She brought in a tray with coffee and cakes. 'Strudel,' she explained, pointing to the cake dish.

  'Yum,' Fritz said and helped himself.

  'So you knew Gudbrand Johansen,' Harry said.

  'Yes, I did. That is, we called him Uriah. He insisted on that. At first we thought he wasn't all there. Because of his injuries.'

  "What sort of injuries?'

  'Head injuries. And his leg, of course. Dr Brockhard was on the point of amputating it.'

  'But he recovered and was sent to Oslo in the summer of 1944, wasn't he?'

  'Yes, that was the idea.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?'

  'Well, he disappeared, didn't he? And I don't suppose he turned up in Oslo, did he?'

  'Not as far as I know, no. Tell me, how well did you know Gudbrand Johansen?'

  'Very well. He was extrovert and a good storyteller. I think all the nurses, one after the other, fell in love with him.’

  ‘You too?'

  She laughed a bright, trill laugh. 'Me too. But he didn't want me.'

  'No?'

  'Oh, I was good-looking, I can tell you-it wasn't that. Uriah wanted someone else.’

  ‘Really?'

  'Yes, her name was Helena too.'

  'Which Helena is that?'

  The old lady furrowed her brow.

  'Helena Lang, it must have been. Their love for each other was what caused the tragedy’

  ‘What tragedy?'

  She stared at Harry and Fritz in surprise and then looked back at Harry again.

  'Isn't that why you're here?' she said. 'Because of the murder?'

  86

  Palace Gardens. 14 May 2000.

  It was Sunday. People were walking more slowly than usual and the old man kept up with them as he walked through the Palace Gardens. He stopped by the guardhouse. The trees were light green, the colour he liked best of all. All except for one tree, that is. The tall oak tree in the middle of the gardens would never be any greener than it was now. You could already see the difference. After the tree had awoken from its winter slumber, the life-giving sap had begun to circulate and spread the poison around the network of veins. Now it had reached every single leaf and promoted a luxuriant growth, which in a week or two would cause the leaves to wither, go brown and fall, and finally the tree would die.

  But they didn't know that yet. They obviously didn't know anything. Bernt Brandhaug had not been part of the original plan, and the old man realised that the killing had confused the police. Brandhaug's comments in Dagbladet were just one of those weird coincidences and he had laughed out loud when he read them. My God, he had even agreed with Brandhaug. The defeated should swing, that is the law of war.

  But what about all the other clues he had given them? They hadn't even managed to connect the great betrayal with the execution at Akershus Fortress. Perhaps it would dawn on them the next time the cannons were fired on the ramparts.

  He looked around for a bench. The pains were coming closer and closer together now. He didn't need to go to Buer to find out that the cancer was spreading through his whole body; he knew that himself. It wouldn't be long now.

  He leaned against a tree. A royal birch, the symbol of occupation. Government and King flee to England. German bombers are overhead, a line from a poem written by Nordahl Grieg, made him feel nauseous. It presented the King's betrayal as an honourable retreat, as if leaving his people in their hour of need were a moral act. And in the safety of London the King had just been yet another of these exiled majesties who held moving speeches for sympathetic upper-class women over entertaining dinners as they clung to the hope that their little kingdom would one day want them back. And when the whole thing was over, there was the reception as the boat carrying the Crown Prince moored on the quayside and all those who had turned out screamed themselves hoarse to drown out the shame, both their own and the King's. The old man turned towards the sun and closed his eyes.

  Shouted commands, boots and AG3 guns smacked into the gravel. Handover. Changing of the guard.

  87

  Vienna. 14 May 2000.

  'So you didn't know?' Helena Mayer said.

  She shook her head and Fritz was already on the phone to get someone to search through old filed murder cases.

  'I'm sure we'll find it,' he whispered. Of that Harry had no doubt.

  'So the police were positive that Gudbrand Johansen killed his own doctor?' Harry asked, turning to the old lady.

  'Yes, indeed. Christopher Brockhard lived alone in one of the flats at the hospital. The police said that Johansen smashed the glass in the outside door and killed him as he was sleeping in his own bed.'

  'How…?'

  Frau Mayer flashed a dramatic finger across her throat. I saw him myself afterwards,' she said. 'You could almost have believed the doctor had done it himself, the cut was so neat.’

  ‘Hm. And why were the police so sure it was Johansen?' She laughed.

  'Yes, I can tell you that-because Johansen had asked the guard which flat Brockhard lived in and the guard had seen him park outside and go in through the main entrance. Afterwards he had come running out, started his car and driven off at full speed towards Vienna. The next day he was gone and no one knew where, only that according to his orders he was supposed to be in Oslo three days later. The Norwegian police waited for him but he never turned up.'

  'Apart from the guard's testimony, can you remember if the police had any other evidence?'

  'If I can remember? We talked about that murder for years! The blood on the glass door matched his blood type. And the police found the same fingerprints in Brockhard's bedroom as on Uriah's bedside table and bed in the hospital. Furthermore, he had the motive…'

  'Really?'

  'Yes, they loved each other, Gudbrand and Helena. But she was to be Christopher's.’

  ‘They were engaged?'

  'No, no.
But Christopher was crazy about Helena. Everyone knew that. Helena was from a rich family that had been ruined after her father had ended up in prison, and a marriage into the Brockhard family was her and her mother's way of getting back on their feet. And you know how it is-a young woman has certain obligations to her family. At least, she did, at that time.'

  'Do you know where Helena Lang is today?'

  'But you haven't touched the strudel, my dear,' the widow exclaimed.

  Harry took a big bite, chewed and nodded in approval to Frau Mayer.

  'No,' she said. 'That I don't know. When it became known that she had been with Johansen on the night of the murder, she was investigated, but they didn't find anything. She stopped working at the Rudolf II Hospital and moved to Vienna. She started up her own sewing business. Yes, she was a strong, enterprising woman. I occasionally saw her walking in the streets here. But in the mid-fifties she sold up and after that I didn't hear any more. Someone said she had gone abroad. But I know who you can ask-if she's alive, mind you. Beatrice Hoffmann, she worked as the house help for the Lang family. After the murder the family could no longer afford her and she worked for a time at the Rudolf II.'

  Fritz was already on the telephone again.

  A fly buzzed desperately around the window. It was following its own microscopic logic and kept banging into the glass without understanding quite why. Harry stood up.

  'Strudel…?'

  'Next time, Frau Mayer. Right now we don't have the time.'

  'Why's that?' she asked. 'This happened more than half a century ago. It isn't going anywhere.'

  'Well…' Harry said, watching the black fly under the lace curtains in the sun.

  Fritz received a call on his mobile on the way to the police station and did a highly improper U-turn which made the motorists behind them jump on their horns.