Beyond the Truth

by Anne Holt

  “Bingo!”

  Billy T. had a wide grin on his face.

  “Do you know anyone who can open this kind of thing, Silje?”

  The safe was badly mounted. There were gaps between the metal and the plaster on the wall on both sides, and the contraption was obviously off level.

  “This could probably just be ripped out,” Billy T. said, touching the simple lock tentatively with his finger. “But it would be a fucking nuisance to have to haul it with us. Bloody heavy, for sure.”

  “It’s a code lock,” Silje said, sounding discouraged. “We’ll have to bring someone here who can pick it open.”

  “That’s probably not necessary,” Billy T. said. “When was CC born?”

  “Don’t mess around. He must have a better code than that!”

  Billy T. rapped hard on the safe with his knuckles.

  “A man who sets up a safe like this is thick enough to choose his date of birth as a code – his or his wife’s or their children’s. Everybody warns against it, most people do it. Quite simply because we have so many numbers we have to carry in our heads that we choose the simple option when we can. Fish out your notebook, then! Now at last we can make use of those clever-girl facts of yours.”

  Silje pulled a pink notebook out of her handbag.

  “August the seventeenth 1967. But that can’t be the code. You only need four digits. Not six.”

  Billy T. fiddled with the combination lock.

  “One seven zero eight,” he said aloud.

  The handle did not budge.

  “What did I say?” Silje muttered.

  “One nine six seven,” Billy T. ventured.

  This time the metal handle slid down with a mechanical click and the door opened easily.

  “Look at this,” Billy T. said. “What have we here, then?”

  Silje leaned toward the container. It could not be more than forty square centimeters. A shelf divided the little safe into two spaces. The lower part held a green metal canister. In the upper part there were three cardboard boxes, one of them with an open lid.

  “Billy T.,” she whispered. “It’s ammunition.”

  “Of course. What had you expected? That he stored his aftershave here?”

  “But—”

  “Not very professional to keep something like this in a place where we’ll obviously find it. That depends, then, on what kind of ammunition this is. If I’m not entirely mistaken, then …”

  He pulled the green canister from the safe and placed it on the unmade bed. The lid was not lockable. He opened it.

  “Look at this!”

  Excited, he lifted the revolver from the container, holding it up to the harsh light from the ceiling lamp.

  “This, Silje, is one of the most exquisite handguns ever made. Korth Combat Magnum. I’ve never seen the like.”

  He looked tempted to take off his rubber gloves, feel the metal, run his fingers over the stock, and feel the heavy tactility of a handcrafted revolver.

  “It weighs close to a kilo,” he said as he felt it, moving his hand up and down as he smiled broadly. “It takes four months to construct one. Do you see this screw here?”

  He pointed with his little finger.

  “This is where you make fine adjustments to the pressure on the trigger. Look how solid everything is! Compact and heavy. And feel that stock!”

  He seemed unwilling to hand over the revolver.

  “Walnut,” he mumbled. “This is the Rolls-Royce of revolvers, Silje. Costs just under five thousand dollars in the USA. Haven’t a clue what the price is in this country. Have you seen …”

  Billy T. turned the gun over, weighing it in his hand yet again, turning it toward the light; the steel gleamed harshly blue.

  “But what about this?” Silje said; she had lifted out one of the boxes and took hold of something farther back in the safe. “This doesn’t belong to a revolver, does it?”

  At last Billy T. looked up. He squinted at the object Silje was presenting to him, using a pincer grip between thumb and forefinger.

  “This belongs to a pistol, don’t you think?”

  Billy T. put down the revolver, reluctantly and carefully, wrapping it in a soft cloth and replacing the lid of the green container.

  “A cartridge clip,” he said. “That’s a cartridge clip. And this …”

  He opened one of the cardboard boxes.

  “… is 9mm subsonic ammunition. For use with a silencer. And it can’t be used with this baby here at all.”

  His fingers tapped on the green metal as he shook his head slowly.

  “But it suits a Glock excellently. And I don’t see such a gun anywhere. If that cartridge clip there slides into a pistol of the same type …”

  He smacked his lips and shook his head.

  “… then Carl-Christian and Co. are up shit creek, I must say.”

  “They have been for some time now,” Silje replied.

  It was already past three o’clock in the afternoon when Hanne Wilhelmsen walked along the corridor to her own office, with a large hat pulled down over her forehead.

  “Wilhelmsen,” Audun Natholmen said, obviously relieved. “You’re here at last.”

  He leapt up from a chair he had dragged over to the wall.

  “Lots of people have been looking for you,” he said, his smooth forehead wrinkling as he took in her swollen, bleary eyes. “Is something wrong? Are you ill?”

  “Yes,” Hanne lied. “An eye infection. It’s kept me at home. Have you been waiting long?”

  “I’ve been searching for you all day long,” he said; only now did she notice that he kept looking around, as if afraid of something or someone. “I must …”

  His voice cracked. He swallowed noisily.

  “Chief Inspector, I’m really in hot water now.”

  “Come in,” she said, unsure whether it was curiosity or annoyance she felt. “You could just have let yourself in and waited in my office. Sitting here in the corridor, like any other visitor …”

  He followed so closely behind her that she could feel his breath on her neck. The moment they were inside, he closed the door behind him, emphatically, as if he really wanted to lock it.

  “I’ve found the guns,” he said.

  Hanne was about to sit down. She stood for a moment with her knees bent, tensed, before plumping herself down in the seat.

  ‘You’ve what, did you say?”

  “The guns,” he said in a loud whisper. “I found a Glock and a .357 Magnum. In the tarn. The lake I told you about, you know. The place where I—”

  “What … what is it …?” She tore off her hat and tossed it on the floor. Her mouth opened, but her thoughts would not form into words.

  “Well, you said that you would have done it,” he complained.

  “I said it would be really crazy!”

  “But that you would have done it and kept your mouth shut.”

  “I was joking! I was joking, for God’s sake!”

  She desperately struggled to gather her thoughts. Rational, she thought, be rational. All she heard was the scraping sound of her own teeth as she ground them together. Audun Natholmen just sat there, like a lanky schoolboy with a guilty conscience; too small for his uniform, with a blank face, a childish face, a puppyish parody of a policeman.

  “You’re a police officer, Audun.”

  “Trainee,” he muttered.

  “Where are they now?”

  “At home,” he said.

  “At your house?”

  “Yes. I’ve been so scared, and then I didn’t quite know … My pal said he was going to phone the VG newspaper, because there’s lots of money in—”

  “Let’s go.”

  Most of all, she wanted to give him a thrashing.

  He tagged along after her, subdued and with head bowed, but nevertheless with a childish, irrepressible delight that he might have solved the biggest homicide case in the history of the Oslo Police Force.

  Annmari had to c
ompose herself, to avoid turning away in disgust. As a police prosecutor, she had seen enough pornography to feel pretty inured. She had fast-forwarded through endless amounts of evidence from inner-city dives, searching for molestation of children. As far as sexual congress between adults was concerned, there was hardly anything that had the ability to shock her. However, this was something else. The young woman and the far older man were pictured in sexual activity that to some extent was not unfamiliar to Annmari, but all the same it knocked her sideways. She felt physically sick.

  “It’s just because you know them,” Erik Henriksen said quietly; he stood leaning over her as she flicked through the photographs.

  “I don’t know them.”

  “You know who they are. That makes it worse. More embarrassing. All that shit we have to watch after those useless raids Chief Puntvold insists on conducting from time to time, they only have to do with strangers. Nameless, almost faceless people. This is far worse. Don’t you think?”

  Annmari nodded imperceptibly.

  “But it doesn’t help that they’re so bad,” she said. “From a purely technical point of view, I mean. If I screw up my eyes a bit, I can barely identify the two of them.”

  “The images must have been taken with a hidden camera,” Erik said, straightening up. “Now things are really getting serious.”

  He pulled a grimace as he rubbed the small of his back.

  “When did you last get some sleep?” he asked.

  “Don’t remember. Do you think Hermine’s the one who’s ensured that these photos are found?”

  “Difficult to say. They were in her possession, of course. Brilliant that you ordered a more thorough ransacking of her apartment, by the way. She had some sort of hidden cupboard. Behind a set of drawers in the kitchen she had mounted a sheet of plywood. The pictures were inside there, together with an empty bag with traces of what we provisionally believe to be heroin. From experience, I’d say it’s most likely that he’s the one who’d want to preserve them. You know, to relive and enjoy later. Anyway, it’s too early to say where the photographs were taken. We’re investigating that, of course, and since they were found at Hermine’s … No, I don’t know.”

  “Damn and blast,” Annmari said in disgust, turning the pictures over. “It’s nothing to do with me, what people do behind closed doors, and maybe I’m being judgmental. But there must be forty years between them. And then they’re uncle and niece. Good Lord, what a family! Killing and fucking each other … yuck!”

  “Is it illegal, what they’re doing?”

  “No. She’s an adult, after all. But … yuck!”

  Erik laughed and patted her on the shoulder.

  “Now you’re being just a tiny bit childish, Prosecutor Skar.”

  “Maybe so. In any case …”

  She glanced fleetingly at the clock. It was twenty minutes to five.

  “Where’s Hanne?”

  “I’ve no idea. Everybody’s asking for her. Her cellphone’s switched off. Even Billy T. doesn’t know what’s become of her. But what are we going to do with this, in actual fact?”

  Again he pointed at the photographs. They were now stacked, picture side down, at the far edge of Annmari’s desk, as if she had no wish to defile her workplace any more than was strictly necessary.

  “We’ll go straight to Alfred Stahlberg’s house, of course. He obviously has a closer relationship to Hermine than we thought.” Once again she made a tart grimace and added in slight irritation: “Has the guy been interviewed at all, in connection with Hermine’s disappearance?”

  “Oh yes. Over the phone.”

  “Over the phone,” Annmari fumed. “I can make sure it’s not over the phone this time. Send a patrol car. Uniforms. I want the man here. Now. And if he won’t come willingly, then I’ll write a blue-form summons.”

  “For what, though? What would you charge the man with, then?”

  “No idea. Something or other. Obstruction of justice. But try the straightforward way first. I’d really prefer you to go in person, Erik. But what on earth’s happened to Hanne?”

  “I was wondering that too,” Billy T. said, having crashed into the room without knocking on the door. “Someone had seen her around three o’clock, but she just left after that.”

  “Hello,” Annmari said. “I see you’re the same polite boy as usual.”

  “Cut it out. We’re all shattered, Annmari. No need to be sharp for that reason. Look at this little gizmo here. I’m sure that’ll put you in a better humor.”

  He placed a transparent bag in front of her.

  “A … a cartridge clip?”

  Annmari poked at the bag with her pen.

  “It’s not dangerous, you know! Not for us. But I’ll bet CC won’t find it very easy to explain. It’s a Glock cartridge, Annmari. Which was lying in a badly mounted safe in Mabelle’s apartment in Kampen. I’ve just had it confirmed that it does in fact belong to a Glock. The problem for Carl-Christian is, of course, that he doesn’t have such a gun registered in his name, and there was nothing resembling a pistol in the apartment, either. A revolver, yes, a legal one, I’ve checked that out, too. But no pistol; just this, plus a whole box of 9mm parabellum. Subsonic ammunition. For use with a silencer.”

  It seemed as though Annmari could not quite absorb the information she was given. When four bodies had been found in Eckersbergs gate eight days earlier, they had all prepared themselves for an investigation that would take months and, in the worst-case scenario, even years. Homicide cases normally took time. A quadruple murder was something she had never faced before, but she had reckoned that the investigation would have to be comprehensive: a slow and painstaking inquiry, building toward something that might only result in an indictment in the distant future. She had lain in bed last Thursday night, tossing and turning with dread: she had anticipated a procedural nightmare, with lengthy periods of stagnation and actual setbacks of various kinds. Instead they were heading for a solution in record-quick time.

  She sat vacantly staring at the cartridge clip. Billy T. scratched his crotch, swearing loudly.

  “Say something, then! This is an honest-to-goodness breakthrough, isn’t it? There’s a fair amount for our ballistics team and gun technicians to work their way through for a while yet, but I’ll bet you a cup of coffee that this is starting to get interesting for them!”

  The phone rang.

  Annmari picked up the receiver and barked a greeting. Then she fell silent. Her expression changed from irritation to interest, before she said with a look of incredulity: “Then come straight up to my office. We’ll take it from there. Thanks.”

  She slowly put the receiver back in place.

  “A witness,” she said, “has come forward. A man who distinctly believes he saw a woman running along Eckersbergs gate in the direction of Gyldenløves gate last Thursday night.”

  “Eh?”

  Billy T. squinted at her in disbelief.

  “And he’s only now phoning in? Eight days later?”

  “It was the sergeant at the duty desk who called. The man’s downstairs. He tried to phone us last Friday, but got annoyed when he couldn’t get through on the phone. Only to the central switchboard, he said, and then it went quiet once he was being transferred through.”

  “Well, it was like the Wild West here last Friday,” Billy T. commented.

  “Exactly. This guy then went to Italy with his wife for the Christmas holidays, and gave up on the entire business. Came home today. After reading the past week’s newspapers, he was so shocked that he’s now downstairs at the front desk.”

  “Shocked?”

  “Yes,” Annmari said, slowly stroking her cheeks. “He’s seen the pictures in the papers. He says it was Hermine he saw. In a real fucking hurry away from Eckersbergs gate five. ‘Running like a madwoman’ was apparently the expression he used. ‘Running like a madwoman’ …”

  Then she slapped her hand on the desk.

  “But what in hell has b
ecome of Hanne Wilhelmsen?”

  Hermine Stahlberg was not dead. Her lower arm was uncovered, and a vein was only just pulsating under her skin. Signs of life were also visible in the hollow of her neck. Silje felt it, to be on the safe side. She did not dare to move the woman, who was stretched out, half naked, on the floor in a storeroom. A bottle of detergent had fallen from a shelf just above her. The synthetic fragrance combined with a whiff of urine and feces. Silje spread a tartan blanket over her. Hermine was clutching a toy rabbit, a grubby pink creature with a torn ear and staring, over-large plastic eyes. Silje cautiously tried to loosen her grip. It was as if her fingers were frozen stiff to the dirty nylon fur. She let Hermine keep the soft toy.

  Erik Henriksen struggled to decide what he had actually expected. The thought of what, at worst, might meet them in Alfred’s apartment had been so repulsive that for the entire drive he had tried to memorize the lyrics of old pop songs and rivers in Asia.

  “Phone for an ambulance, Erik.”

  Silje strode across the room and poked him hard in the side. He stood, feet astride and hands in the air, fingers slightly fanned out, as if about to pick up a child.

  “Summon two,” she insisted. “We need two ambulances, Erik.”

  “I don’t know what I had expected,” he said.

  “Erik! Take out your phone and call an ambulance. Now!”

  He did not know why she didn’t do this herself. His hands refused to budge. There was a cold prickle of running perspiration in his armpits.

  “She wanted to go to the police,” Alfred complained from the corner beside the kitchen. “She wanted to go to the police, you see. I couldn’t find the photographs! I searched everywhere at Hermine’s, but I found … You understand I couldn’t let her go to the police.”

  The corpulent man heaved himself up from the corner. Now and again his arms lunged vigorously into the air in a comical parody of karate.

  “I haven’t done anything wrong, you know,” he said loudly and laughed. “Just take her with you. Just take her with you and disappear.”

  A fresh pounce with stiff fingers struck Silje in the stomach as she tried to approach the man.