Beyond the Truth

by Anne Holt

  “Hello,” she said, screwing up her nose. “Has Mary been allowed to smoke in here?”

  “A tiny exception,” Nefis said, smiling. “She’s done an incredible amount of work today. Have you seen the table?”

  Hanne nodded. A spectacular Christmas table had been set in the living room, with red tablecloth, crystal, and green branches on display, as well as gold-plated candelabra and a dinner service emblazoned with a pattern of Christmas elves. Above it all, suspended from some sort of latticework attached to the ceiling, was a close-packed array of transparent glass balls in all sizes, with painted designs.

  “Beautiful,” she said, with a smile. “You must have helped her. A bit over the top, perhaps. The children will love it.”

  “Come on,” Nefis said, patting the chair beside her. “Sit down. Have you had a hard day?”

  Hanne kissed her lightly on the forehead and sank into the chair.

  “Guess. I’m so tired I probably won’t be able to sleep. You look amazing.”

  Nefis’s hair was hanging loose above a bright-red V-neck sweater. Her make-up looked recently applied and a fresh fragrance wafted from her.

  “I stink like a horse,” Hanne said, sniffing.

  “Just a sweet little pony,” Nefis replied, pouring wine from a dusty bottle. “Are you looking forward to it?”

  “To this?”

  Hesitantly, Hanne looked around.

  “Maybe. A little. Not much.”

  It was a lie and they both knew that. Insofar as Hanne Wilhelmsen was at all able to look forward to anything, she was looking forward to Christmas Eve. She liked the fact that it was not about family. She was happy about Nefis’s hospitality, and that there would be a variety of guests around the table. She realized she had not thought about her father for several hours. That dull, empty feeling of something being too late was about to be laid to rest. She and Nefis had chosen each other. Together they had chosen Mary. Nefis had shaped an existence so full of excess and enveloped in generosity that Hanne sometimes, on occasion, considered following her suggestion about leaving the police. Hanne could set up a small private detective bureau; Nefis pestered her time and again. She would have just the right amount to do. An exclusive little office with three investigators, perhaps, who would not bother about unfaithful spouses and missing tourists in Mediterranean countries, but would concentrate instead on industry and security. She had the start-up capital, and she had a name.

  Hanne would no longer exist outside the police force, and she was well aware of that.

  “I think maybe I’m about to fall out with all the others,” she said, yawning. “In this inquiry of ours. I’ve been wrong before. It’s exactly as if—”

  “As if you must always think along different lines from everyone else,” Nefis completed her sentence. “It’s an excellent quality, as a rule. The world is propelled forward by people who think differently.”

  “That’s a bit of an overstatement,” Hanne muttered into her glass. “I’m not exactly a pioneer like Semmelweiss, you know.”

  “To some degree you are,” Nefis said. “But sometimes you’re wrong, of course.”

  “This time too, perhaps. Anyway, everything points to Carl-Christian Stahlberg or his sister. Or someone working on their behalf. The family, in other words. I must say that …”

  Eagerly, she began to rattle off the links in the chain of circumstantial evidence.

  “Stop,” Nefis said, putting a finger to Hanne’s lips. “This is your time off, Hanna. Think about something else.”

  “It’s difficult.”

  “I want to have a child, Hanna.”

  All of a sudden, Hanne noticed that the parsley intended to represent grass in Mary’s enormous nativity scene on the kitchen worktop had been replaced by chopped-up scraps of crepe paper. She got to her feet and began to rearrange it more neatly around the open stable. When she picked up a sheep, she broke one of its legs.

  “It’s better with paper,” she said. “The parsley was getting shriveled.”

  “Hanna—”

  “I don’t want that. Not children, and not any talk about it. When are our visitors arriving tomorrow?”

  Hanne felt tears sting her eyes. Swallowing, she took a deep breath. No children. That was what Cecilie had fussed about. Continually. Hanne had been right. They should not have had children, because Cecilie had gone and died, hadn’t she?

  “If I only understood why,” Nefis said. “You never want to explain why. You just walk off. Don’t!”

  Hanne had picked up the statuette of the Virgin Mary and was about to tear off her halo. Startled by Nefis’s eruption, she put the figure carefully back in place.

  “I’m tired,” she said, heading for the door.

  Nefis blocked her path.

  “No. You’re not leaving. We’re going to talk about this. I want to have children – you don’t. We need to find out which one of us has the strongest motorating.”

  “Motivation,” Hanne corrected her. “You shouldn’t use words you’re not sure of. Motivation. Mine’s the strongest.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  Hanne was afraid of children. She needed to know them well before she could even speak to them. Children were frightening, boisterous, demanding creatures who required commitment. She had been a child herself. She had spent her entire adult life forgetting what that had been like, and in her encounters with children she grew terrified of all the things she did not want to remember. Then she remembered them all the same.

  She remembered the grand villa where they had lived. Her mother, father, sister and brother. Hanne the afterthought. Hanne who was scared of her room. Scared of the whole house, apart from the attic, where the belongings left by her grandparents aided her escape into dreams, creating her own little home, in the dust, among the things no one needed or thought about any more, the same way no one needed or thought about her.

  Hanne stared at the baby Jesus and recalled those nights. One night. She had gone up to the first floor early, but not to her own room. As usual, she sneaked up into the attic, where she opened the America chest and took out the things stored inside. Hung them around the place, from hooks in the ceiling, from crooked nails banged into beams and joists. The attic was transformed into a theater, and she dressed up. She might have been ten. Possibly older. She play-acted, taking on leading dramatic roles until she fell asleep. The moon was only just visible through the attic window. When she woke, she was stiff with frost and it was daylight. No one had come looking for her. No one had wakened her or carried her back to bed, to her quilt, to the warmth, and maybe even sat down beside her so that she wouldn’t be so afraid, always so terribly afraid.

  Her father’s eyes across the breakfast table, uninterested, indifferent, and Hanne had to go to school in the same clothes that she had worn the previous day, the ones she had been wearing when she had slept in the attic between African facemasks and old photograph albums, holding a stuffed weasel in her arms.

  As an adult, she appreciated they had quite simply been under the impression that she had slept in her room. Probably they would have been alarmed, had they known the truth.

  But no one had checked.

  No one had investigated whether she was okay, before heading for bed. Hanne did not go to school that day. She had gone to the carpenter who lived next door, who cooked her a breakfast of porridge and taught her how to use an angle iron. When she began to cry because she had to go home, it was the carpenter who had taken her on his knee and rocked her, a big girl, until she had calmed down, and who helped her write a fake absence note for the teacher.

  “I can’t have children,” Hanne said quietly as she sat down.

  “Can’t you? Are you … do you know that?”

  “Not in that way. I’ve no idea whether I’m … fertile. Doubtful, at my age.”

  She gave a listless smile.

  “But I just can’t take responsibility for children. I don’t know what a childhood
should be like. Only what it shouldn’t be like.”

  “That might well be more than good enough. You’re kind, Hanna, you’re—”

  “I’m a damaged individual,” Hanne broke in smoothly. “I’ve probably managed fine, considering the circumstances. But I’ve so much crap inside me that cleaning up will take …”

  She glanced warily at the door – always that worry that someone might get to know, other than Nefis, that anyone might find out about her attending a psychologist.

  “… a whole lifetime,” she concluded.

  “A child is a blessing,” Nefis said. “Always.”

  “Maybe for the parents,” Hanne said. “But a child would absolutely not have a good upbringing with me. Not even with you here. You understand that, Nefis. You know me so well. You actually agree. If you think about it, you’ll agree that I’m right.”

  Nefis remained silent. The contents of her glass were untouched. She merely held the stem and let the glass rotate slowly as she studied the light splitting into nuances of red on the tabletop.

  “I’m going to bed, then,” Hanne said. “If that’s okay with you. I’m cross-eyed.”

  Nefis did not reply, but remained in her seat. She had still not touched any of the wine.

  When Hanne rose from bed on the morning of Christmas Eve, Nefis was asleep in the guest bedroom, and the bottle was still full.

  TUESDAY DECEMBER 24

  Oslo was covered in an absolutely extraordinary amount of snow. The banks of snow were several meters high in a number of places. Everything outdoors sounded muffled. The window in Hanne Wilhelmsen’s office was opened slightly, but not even the rumble of trucks in Schweigaards gate reached all the way to the heights where police headquarters curved between a house of God and an ancient prison.

  Hanne stood at the window feeling the cold draft on her face. There was a raw smell of winter and on the extensive snow-covered lawn in front of Oslo Prison three immigrant children were playing with a kick-sled. It would hardly budge. A young lad of about ten tried to push it forward to get the runners to grip properly, as if steering a wheelbarrow. At last the youngest child – a girl, to judge from her pink snowsuit – realized that they needed to venture out into the avenue below the prison. Hanne closed her eyes as the children rushed at top speed toward Grønlandsleiret. A lorry braked abruptly and skidded into a parked Volvo. The youngsters were unharmed, but a police patrol car drew to a halt and the uniformed officers had their hands full trying to restrain the angry driver. The children, laughing and shrieking, took off as soon as the policemen turned their backs. The kick-sled was abandoned, lying upside-down in the middle of the road.

  Hanne shut the window.

  She produced her father’s death notice from her wallet. That old grudge, the involuntary anger mixed with sorrow, seized her again. The scrap of paper was becoming grubby and looked about to tear. She ought to have it laminated, before it was too late. Hanne’s inverted membership card had turned into something that made her remember, after all these years of persistent, resolute forgetting.

  Best of all she remembered the Christmas when she was twelve years old. Both of her siblings studied outside the city. In a way, Hanne had been looking forward to them returning home. It made her mother happier. Her mother was almost invisible in Hanne’s memories of that time: she worked late and was always tired.

  All Hanne wanted was a toolbox, with contents. Her wish list was on the wall above her bed. A couple of times she had wondered whether to pin it up in the kitchen to make sure her parents caught sight of it. Something held her back: a vague feeling that they would be annoyed by her audacity. She wanted a hammer and plane, screwdrivers, and an awl. Hanne so desperately wanted her own tools, for the third year in a row, and as Christmas approached she began to believe that her wish would be granted this time.

  She received a leather-bound deluxe edition of the works of Snorri Sturluson, a new nightdress, and a bottle of perfume that dropped and smashed on the floor when she opened the parcel. No one registered that she slept in the attic again, and no one noticed that she crept over to the carpenter’s house at first light the next morning. There, she had hot chocolate and thick slices of bread, and was presented with the carpenter’s old plane tied with a pink bow.

  The Christmas she was twelve stank of 4711, and in the years that followed she no longer wasted her energies on expecting anything whatsoever of the festivities.

  “Hanne!”

  Quick as a flash, she put the death notice back and turned around.

  “Erik,” she declared.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course. Come in.”

  Only now did she notice that she had been crying and wiped her eyes swiftly with the back of her hand.

  “The draft,” she said, pointing at the window. “I had to close it. What’s it about?”

  “Look at this!”

  Erik’s hair was sticking out in all directions, in boyish contrast to his smart suit and pale-blue, crisply ironed shirt. The knot on his tie was tight and he unconsciously put a finger under his collar.

  “I’m going through all the documents we’ve got, relating to these disputes between the Stahlbergs, father and son. And it is … what a family! That people can … Anyway, look at this.”

  After searching for a document, he handed it over. Hanne sat down slowly as she read.

  “A typed sheet of paper,” she described, somewhat puzzled. “From Hermann to Carl-Christian, as far as I can see. And it has to do with—”

  “With telling CC just to take it easy. You see that the letter is dated March the third 2001. Not very long after Preben had begun to maneuver himself into the family business. His dad assures his youngest son that he will naturally receive what he’s entitled to. He has been as clever as anything, the boy, worked hard for a long time, and there will be no change to what they have agreed on for so long, about the future of the shipping company.”

  “I see.”

  “Signed by Hermann, though not using his name, but as ‘Your Father’. And as you see at the foot of the page—”

  Hanne beat him to it: “ ‘Acceded to. Mother.’ An old-fashioned turn of phrase, I must say!”

  “Yes, yes. What is more important is that Hermann claimed for a long time that he had absolutely no knowledge of this document. That it is forged!”

  “Forged?”

  “Yes. Hermann demanded at one point that a handwriting expert should examine the letter. But then Tutta put her oar in.”

  “What?”

  “Tutta. Turid. The mother!”

  “Yes, I know who she is, but what do you mean by her putting her oar in?”

  Erik laughed aloud and ruffled his hair with both hands. His cheeks were flushed with pleasure.

  “She claimed it was genuine! She said she remembered the letter being written, and that she was present when Hermann signed it. And so the whole application for examination of the handwriting was withdrawn. It may well be that it’s pretty unclear what significance the document has for the case anyway, since it’s nothing other than some kind of letter of reassurance, of course, but according to Annmari, it might—”

  “We should get someone to go through the entire collection,” Hanne interrupted.

  “That’s what we’re doing right now!”

  “I see, yes. But this ought to be investigated by an expert in inheritance matters, family law, contract law … I don’t know what’s required, but anyway it’s essential to get a proper, independent assessment of where the parties actually stood.”

  “Who had the best chance of winning, you mean?”

  “That, too.”

  “You’re almost certainly right. But you haven’t heard all of it! A few weeks ago something must have made Hermann change his mind. He wanted to have a handwriting test all the same. And the result …”

  Erik patted his chest and fished out a little note from his inside pocket.

  “… I received today. Not only
is Hermann’s signature forged. But Turid’s as well!”

  The frown between Hanne’s eyes grew even deeper.

  “Did she lie?”

  “Obviously! She insisted that the document was genuine and that both she and her husband had signed it. So it’s all a forgery. Carl-Christian’s up to here in shit!”

  He ran his finger along his hairline.

  “We don’t know that he’s the one responsible,” Hanne countered.

  “But think about it,” Erik said, leaning toward her. “Who would have any interest in falsifying a letter such as this? No one except CC. And now he was a hairsbreadth away from being exposed! If you stack up everything we have now, it’s looking bad for good old Carl-Christian, Hanne. He has motive, he has—”

  “The gun,” Silje said in a flurry of excitement as she virtually stormed into the office. “He has a permit for a revolver!”

  “Now you’re running away from yourselves,” Hanne said, rubbing her finger along her nose. “Relax, both of you. Sit down, Silje.”

  Hanne’s cellphone rang. She glanced at the display and chose to ignore it.

  “Carl-Christian is a member of a pistol club,” a breathless Silje said. “Not active at all; it looks as if he derived some sort of childish kick from it years ago. Then he grew bored. But he has a gun. A German Magnum.”

  “Not caliber .357?” Erik asked with undisguised hope in his voice.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Good grief!”

  “We really must charge the guy. If for no other reason than to be able to conduct a search—”

  “Have you spoken to Annmari or—”

  “There are three lawyers in the Chief’s office right now and they—”

  “Bloody hell, Silje! This is completely—”

  The two younger officers were both speaking at the same time. As Hanne leaned back, she heard the joints of the chair creak. She massaged her neck, still amazed at how much enthusiasm her colleagues could muster. How they seemed to have such personal engagement; how they regarded a new lead in an already fixed direction as a brilliant triumph.