Beyond the Truth

by Anne Holt

  That was actually not so strange.

  He was working on an article about the police force. Knut Sidensvans was going to write about the police, and naturally had sources there.

  Not particularly strange.

  The very last phone call in the man’s life.

  Once again, Hanne felt that unfamiliar anxiety. It swamped her, a sadness mixed with anxiety that left her feeling indecisive and longing to go home. She struggled to remember when she had last felt like this, whether she had ever before felt that a case terrified her and made her want to let go.

  When it dawned on her, she felt hot. As she keyed in Directory Enquiries, she noticed that her hands were ice-cold.

  “Åshild Meier,” she requested. “In Drøbak. Put me through, please.”

  The publishers’ editor picked up after three rings, obviously half asleep.

  “So,” she said, taken aback, once Hanne had duly apologized for the lateness of the hour. “This book is quite comprehensive. It will be more of a reference book, a … altogether more than thirty articles, in fact, and when we’ve decided on the order of the articles, instead of a more chronological, uniform—”

  “What was Sidensvans to write about?” Hanne interrupted her. “I just want to know what he was to write about.”

  “He had taken it upon himself to describe the development of crime in the major cities,” Åshild Meier said. “From 1970 until the present day. With Sidensvans’s knowledge of statistics, we thought he would be well suited to draw some pictures of … trends, you might say. He was going to compare the development in Oslo and Bergen with three selected smaller cities. An enormous task, of course. Several of the articles could be considered more as dissertations. But then we don’t plan to have the book ready for publication until January 2006, either. By then the Police Directorate will have been in existence for five years. But of course you know that.”

  “How far had he reached?”

  Hanne thought the woman at the other end must be able to hear her pulse, and tried not to seem breathless.

  “Well …”

  Åshild Meier paused.

  “We’ve had some difficulty obtaining researcher status for him,” she said. “You see, he’s not attached to any research institution. It was necessary for him to have access to all the archives, and that sort of thing. But in the end the Directorate arranged it.”

  “So how far had he reached?”

  “Not very far. He hadn’t yet written anything, I believe. But according to what he told me the last time I spoke to him, he had ploughed through a considerable amount of material. Why – what’s this about, actually?”

  Hanne did not answer. Cold sweat was running from her left armpit. She thought she could hear footsteps in the corridor. It was normal to hear footsteps in the corridor, she thought, but these were slow and, when she pricked up her ears, they were gone.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m still here,” she said swiftly. “Had he told you anything about what he had discovered?”

  “No—”

  “And you’re absolutely sure of that?”

  “Yes!”

  For the first time Åshild Meier seemed impatient.

  “Sorry,” Hanne said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I’m really sorry for waking you.”

  “That’s okay,” said the tired voice at the other end of the line. “Was there anything else you wanted?”

  “No. Thanks. Goodnight. Apologies again.”

  When she put down the phone, the actual click of the receiver in its cradle was enough to terrify her. She must go home. Her brain needed some rest. Her nerves.

  Years before, she had felt like this. Then she had been young and popular, almost worshiped, with her cool control of everything and everyone. When she shut her eyes, she could remember the day. A Sunday. Late afternoon. She was in the midst of an inquiry into a case with dramatic consequences reaching all the way into the government quarter. Outside her own office she had been struck down: suddenly, unexpectedly, and unseen. The blow had left her with a headache that, admittedly, eased off for spells, but at times like this, with fluctuating temperatures and cold, damp air, it made her depressed and often unable to sleep.

  However, it wasn’t the attack itself she was thinking about.

  It was the anxiety of that time that seized her. The terror of the first few seconds, after waking in hospital, suddenly felt so immediate on this post-Christmas night more than ten years later. Hanne tried to understand her own reactions. With her fingers pressed on her temples, she counted to ten over and over again, like a mantra.

  Now she knew what had come over her. It was alarm at being unprotected. Fear that there was no longer a secure bulkhead against them out there.

  This time it was the silence outside the door that threatened her.

  SATURDAY DECEMBER 28

  It was ten to nine in the morning and once again Hanne stood in Knut Sidensvans’s apartment. She was alone and spent some time sensing the atmosphere in the over-filled living room. The towering piles of books and periodicals spread over the floor created a miniature city: skyscrapers of knowledge with narrow streets in between. She walked slowly from the door to the writing desk – one step to the left, two to the right, and then straight-ahead. She peered at the top book in a stack that reached to her thigh. It was about Schnauzers and was written in German.

  This time she risked switching on the desk lamp. She carefully took out silicone gloves, drew them on, and touched the switch. The light was pointing diagonally; all of a sudden she noticed a passport, partly visible underneath a newspaper on the far edge of the vast work table.

  Warily, she jiggled the passport out, moving the small red booklet ever so slightly. She had only seen Sidensvans once, after he had been shot in the head. A dog had eaten parts of his ear and feasted upon his brain. She leafed through the pages.

  The photograph showed a serious man with a round face, and there was something indecisive about the soft contours of his chin. His nose was small, his forehead broad with a high, receding hairline, and he had a peculiar quiff of combed-back hair, elegantly slicked down at the crown with something that must be hair cream or gel. Sidensvans was neither handsome nor ugly. He looked pretty ordinary, a cliché of a public servant. Hanne held the photograph up to the lamplight.

  It was the eyes that made him special.

  The passport photograph was in color, but so small that Hanne had to lean in to the beam of light in order to study it. Sidensvans had deep-set eyes, emphasizing the unsympathetic expression given by his sullen mouth, turned down defiantly at the corners.

  She returned the passport to the desk and set to work.

  The first thing she did was to photograph the apartment. It crossed her mind that others should have done this, as she diligently made sure to document the striking difference between the chaos on the floor and the meticulous piles on the massive desk. This was not her job, but she continued all the same. Determined and purposeful: her anxiety of the previous night was changing into a fanatical tension. It seemed as if the camera helped her to see more clearly, as if the restricted segment in the viewfinder made it easier to concentrate. She slowly lowered the device. Her eyes ran again over the table, over the bundles of blank sheets of paper, a book about an old master thief, and an organization chart of Oslo Police District. She lifted a newspaper and found an offprint of an article about unlawful use of police custody. Underneath a glass paperweight she found a report from the Aftenposten newspaper. The author was a well-known criminologist and the article dealt with the police practice of dropping cases in which the identity of the perpetrator was known. Hanne remembered the piece, even though it was several years old. She carefully put the paperweight back in place.

  Something was missing.

  She knew something was missing.

  Even though Knut Sidensvans had not reached very far in his work on the article about the development of crime in major cities, he must have made good
progress. Less than two hours ago Hanne Wilhelmsen had soft-soaped her way into a visit at first light to the long-term archives, where all dropped and closed cases in Oslo Police District were stored. A grumpy archivist had made an early rise in order to assist. It had taken only minutes to establish that Knut Sidensvans had never set foot in there. His name was not to be found in any of the records. Hanne’s disappointment must have been obvious. The yawning archivist ran his hand thoughtfully over his hair and shuffled off on his own initiative to check the folders of mail.

  “Here,” he said eventually. “So that’s where I got the name from. I thought that, you see, when I saw that unusual name of his in the newspaper. I’ve heard of that bloke, I thought. But then I couldn’t think where. Here you are.”

  He handed her a letter.

  It was from the Police Directorate and dated October 23. The text pointed out to Oslo’s Police Chief that Knut Sidensvans would require access to all archived cases in the course of the following year. He would be grateful for the greatest possible cooperation.

  “Copy to us,” the man said, pointing farther down on the sheet of paper. “It is addressed to the Chief of Police. And it’s to Bergen, you see. You ought to phone the Bergen police. He may have started there, you know. I knew I had heard of that guy before!”

  He yawned again, and Hanne left him. She wanted to leave Grønlandsleiret, get away from her colleagues’ field of vision, away from questions to which she did not yet know the answers. Not until she passed the Munch Museum on her way to Sidensvans’s apartment did she stop to call her old pal from work, Severin Heger. He had at last dared to apply for a post in his home town, after having come out of both the closet and the Security Service with a bang. Now he was Superintendent in the Bergen Police and, impressively enough, it took him only nineteen minutes to return her call.

  “He’s been here, Hanne. A number of times.”

  His dialect was stronger now than when he had hidden himself away on the top, secret stories of police headquarters. He continued to talk enthusiastically.

  “Odd guy, or so they say here. And Hanne … I don’t like to say this, but there’s a lot to suggest that he was permitted to take copies of quite a few cases. My friend in our archives section here couldn’t entirely see the logic of Sidensvans being allowed to take as many notes as he wanted, but not to take copies. So he—”

  “Severin,” Hanne had interrupted him. “Why the hell has no one from your district told us that Sidensvans has been in contact with you? Here we are, in the middle of the homicide case of the century, and someone over at your place is skulking around, someone who might well have vital information about one of our victims! I get—”

  “It’s a holiday period, Hanne. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake!”

  “Find out which cases he took away with him, Severin. Find that out for me.”

  “That could take time.”

  “As fast as possible. And you—”

  “You sound really fucking stressed out, Hanne.”

  “Keep your mouth shut about it. Until after the weekend.”

  “But you asked me to find out—”

  “As discreetly as possible, okay?”

  The phone line crackled as he laughed.

  “Same old Hanne, I see. Secretive and—”

  “After the weekend. Please, Severin. Thanks.”

  Hanne had severed the connection before he managed to answer. By then she had almost reached the apartment at Ola Narr. A neighbor had greeted her in the stairwell on her way up, as if she belonged there. It didn’t feel like that to her. Sidensvans’s living room had taken on the character of a graveyard: a dusty mausoleum dedicated to a learned man that no one would miss.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen’s knowledge of computers was far more than could be expected of a police officer. Nevertheless, what she now embarked upon was totally unacceptable. They had their own people for tasks such as this: competent specialists who knew exactly what they were doing, and who would not be in danger of damaging anything. Hanne was aware that there were viruses that destroyed the workings as soon as any intruders tried to log on. There were advanced programs that would delete evidence, if it existed, on the hard disk she was starting up. She was aware of all of this when her finger closed in on the On switch. She could wipe everything with one keystroke, and yet she pressed the key.

  The computer began to hum.

  The image on the screen flickered.

  The Microsoft tune suddenly boomed from the loudspeakers; startled, she turned down the volume.

  He had not even protected the computer with a password.

  Knut Sidensvans can’t have been afraid. He had not felt threatened by anything or anyone. The computer was an open book, and there were no codes, secret passwords, or automatic viruses. No sly programs that could protect what he must have discovered and stored. Hanne began her search.

  It was hardly credible.

  The computer was almost empty.

  Her fingers raced over the keyboard, picking up speed.

  In the folder for My Documents she found a short text about the rhododendron plant and a scanned article about the pattern of immigrant settlement in Oslo. Nothing else. She opened folder after folder. Some he had created himself. They were empty, with meaningless file names. In the folder for My Photos she found a photograph of a red luxury car.

  The room felt hot. Surprised, Hanne realized that she was still wearing her outdoor jacket. She pulled it off and laid it carefully on the floor, where there was only just space for it among all the piles of magazines and books.

  She opened Outlook Express, without connecting to the Internet.

  The mailbox contained six or seven spam emails and a message from Telenor about cheaper broadband. Apart from that, nothing. She checked Sent Mail. Three uninteresting emails. Drafts. Nothing. Deleted Messages. Empty.

  She hesitated, but not for long.

  With her eyes nailed to the Inbox image on the screen, she connected the computer to the Internet. Four seconds later, the messages pinged in.

  The recipient was sidensvans@online.no.

  But it was the sender’s email address that took her aback.

  knutsiden@online.no.

  The man had sent four emails to himself.

  The way Nefis sometimes did.

  Hanne broke out in a sweat: again that cold sweat, running in fat droplets along the sides of her body. Thirst made her tongue seem too large for her mouth. Slowly, still careful not to topple anything, she picked her way out of the living room and into the kitchen. A sour stench of rotting food assailed her when she opened the door. They should have asked someone to empty the fridge, to remove the half-eaten bread, gone disgustingly moldy, lying in a breadbox of transparent plastic. If nothing else, then out of respect for the murder victim: a man who had lived so quietly and had then been slaughtered in the shadow of something so much greater than himself.

  Hanne let the water run for a long time. Instead of finding a glass in the old-fashioned wall cabinets, she leaned over the sink and put her mouth to the stream of water.

  When she straightened up, wiping her chin with the back of her hand, she recalled why Nefis had two email addresses and often sent documents to herself at the end of the working day. With her eyes closed, Hanne could hear her voice, singsong, with the trace of accent that had almost disappeared now: “An extra safeguard. If the back-up fails and the computer goes on fire overnight, then my work is on a server somewhere out there in the ether and can be downloaded tomorrow morning.”

  Knut Sidensvans was not afraid of a break-in. He was afraid of losing important documents.

  Hanne turned off the tap. Then she entered Sidensvans’s living room and opened the files he had sent to himself. There were not many. It took her ten minutes to get them printed out and sorted. Half an hour later she had read them all. It took another thirty minutes for her to understand what she had read.

  Painstakingly she folded the sheets of paper and logge
d out of the machine. She tucked the papers down the waistband of her trousers, before pulling on her jacket. The anxiety of the last twenty-four hours, that deep unease that had bothered her in recent days, for which she had not found any explanation, was gone.

  She swore instead. She uttered all the oaths she could think of, blaspheming as she locked the door behind her. When she dashed downstairs to get hold of a taxi as fast as possible, she mumbled in time to the clicking of her heels on the concrete: Shit. Shit. Shit!

  There was a lot to be done. The first priority was to speak to Henrik Heinz Backe.

  It was a different woman this time. She was younger and did not seem so friendly. Carl-Christian Stahlberg wondered whether they used women to make him more cooperative. More truthful. He was keen to be cooperative and truthful, but it was too difficult to arrive at what was not a lie without telling lies.

  “So, Hermine bought a gun,” the woman insisted. “Do you know anything about that?”

  Her voice was light, with a very slight lisp around the “s”. She had a name that contained a number of lisping sounds, but he couldn’t remember what it was. It felt as if the glue in his brain was used up; he remembered so little, and no names. Not even the lawyer’s. He was a well-known personality in the media, that much CC did know. Mabelle must have pulled some strings. Hawk-eyed and vigorous, the lawyer listened attentively throughout the interview, but Carl-Christian could no longer recollect his name.

  “What?”

  “Have you taken in anything at all of what I’ve been saying?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Have you any knowledge of your sister Hermine buying a gun on November the sixteenth this year?”

  “No.”

  He wanted to say yes, but it was as if his mouth was choosing its own words, completely independent of his thoughts. Maybe that was fine. His thoughts were so jumbled, and there was nothing but nonsense inside his head. It was just as well that his mouth was running away with itself of its own volition. He smiled.

  “This isn’t actually very amusing,” the woman said.