The Consorts of Death

by Gunnar Staalesen

  Lost in thought, I looked at him. ‘That’s just it, Langeland. The roots of this case go way back. A very long way.’

  ‘This case! Which case?’

  ‘You know he’s wanted by the police?’

  Vibecke’s eyes widened and she looked up at her husband in amazement. He gave a brief nod to her before focusing on me again. ‘And so?’

  ‘He’s suspected of having committed another murder, this time here in Oslo.’

  ‘A murder?’ Vibecke almost whispered. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Someone by the name of Terje Hammersten. Does that mean anything to you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing at all! Who is he?’

  A clinking sound came from the staircase, and we were interrupted by Lin who came in carrying a silver tray crammed with teacups, saucers, spoons, an elegantly shaped teapot, sugar in a bowl and a plate of fresh lemon slices. As if by a flick of the fingers, Vibecke switched into the perfect hostess, helped Lin put out the cups and saucers, offered me sugar and lemon and told Lin, after she had poured tea for us all, that we could manage fine on our own now, thank you.

  When Lin had left, I faced Langeland. ‘But you remember Terje Hammersten, don’t you?’

  ‘Indeed I do. But we never managed to get anything on him, at least not in connection with the cases that concerned Johnny boy.’

  ‘No, we drew a blank there, I regret to say.’

  ‘Probably because there was no connection.’

  ‘Are you still convinced about that?’

  He eyed me with raised eyebrows. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘Not face to face. I had to attend a police interview with him once, behind a two-way mirror – that was the closest I came. He was never taken to court because of the damned alibi.’

  ‘Exactly. And now he’s been killed, in all probability by Jan Egil. I don’t suppose he’s contacted you?’

  ‘Jan Egil? No.’ He shook his head firmly.

  ‘When did you last speak to him?’

  ‘Veum … in fact, I’ve been visiting him regularly. Because it was important that he should have contact with … someone. On a private basis, in other words. But of course I had a finger in the pie when he applied for parole this spring. But that was also the last time I saw him. When he was released, I mean. Some time in May.’

  ‘In other words, you’re ready to help?’

  ‘I’m still his solicitor, yes, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Which is what you’ve been all his life.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘Yes, you were even his mother’s solicitor, before he was born. I think you yourself told me that on one occasion.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He sent me a dismissive glare.

  ‘And you definitely lent a helping hand when he was adopted by Vibecke and Skein Skarnes in 1971, didn’t you.’ I glanced at Vibecke, who was nodding agreement.

  ‘Yes, but that was because I knew them both – from university, as I mentioned. Well, I knew Vibecke better. And, as you yourself said, I assisted his mother with a … spot of bother.’

  ‘And were you sure he was going to a good home?’

  ‘As I said, I knew Vibecke, didn’t I!’

  I shifted my attention back to her. Her eyes wandered for a moment. Then they were back, shiny and reserved. ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Was it a good home?’

  ‘Veum!’ Again Langeland interrupted us. ‘This is none of your or anyone else’s business. This is water under the bridge! Forget it!’ he turned to her. ‘Don’t reply to everything he asks you!’

  He continued, facing me now: ‘I didn’t officially become his solicitor until 1984, when I was called to Førde.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right … but I believe you’d followed his progress, from a distance at any rate, in the meantime, too.’

  ‘Because I felt responsible for him, yes. Both to … his real mother, and because of what happened in 1974 with Svein and Vibecke.’

  ‘We can come back to that but …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But let’s concentrate on 1984 first.’

  ‘What are you actually getting at, Veum?’

  I ignored him. ‘As you know, it was a dramatic case, and what emerged about his foster parents, or foster father anyway, Klaus Libakk, was hardly trivial.’

  He glanced up, resigned. ‘You’re thinking of these rumours about alcohol smuggling?’

  ‘Yes, and about the police interest in Terje Hammersten eleven years earlier over another brutal murder. Perhaps set up by Klaus Libakk, or someone else from the same ring.’

  ‘Another?’

  ‘Yes, and we found that out at the time. But you didn’t make anything of it at the trial. Why not, Langeland?’

  ‘You’re thinking of …’ He was sitting upright in the chair now, and I could see he was uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking.

  ‘What are you talking about now?’ Vibecke burst out.

  ‘You’ve never told her?’ I said.

  ‘Told me what?’ she asked.

  I half-turned to her again. ‘Didn’t you have a clue … didn’t you know that your husband at the time, Svein Skarnes, was one of the main men behind the smuggling racket, mostly in the Sogn and Fjordane district?’

  She stared at me in disbelief. ‘What are you talking about? Smuggling?!’

  ‘Svein Skarnes was the boss. He had contacts in Germany, sorted out the deals with the boats smuggling the goods in, organising the local machinery in Sogn and Fjordane, ably assisted by his office equipment rep, Harald Dale, and he earned big money, of course.’

  ‘Big money! And what happened to it then? Can you tell me that?’

  ‘No. But you two were rolling in it, weren’t you.’

  ‘No more than anyone else. This is completely new to me!’

  ‘But your husband here, he’s known since 1984.’

  She turned on Langeland. ‘Is that right, Jens? Have you known all this without saying a word to me?’

  ‘I … wanted to spare you, Vibecke. Besides, this was never documented.’

  ‘Nevertheless …’

  ‘The whole business was full of uncorroborated claims that …’

  Her eyes filled with tears, and her lips were trembling. ‘I just can’t believe it! That you could keep this hidden from me for so many years, Jens! How could you?’

  They stared at each other with a distance in their eyes that increased as the seconds passed.

  ‘There may be more you haven’t told each other,’ I said.

  Now they both turned towards me.

  ‘About things that went on in 1974, for instance.’

  I had their undivided attention.

  51

  ‘What are you blathering on about now, Veum?’ Langeland exclaimed with annoyance. ‘Haven’t you caused enough trouble yet?’

  ‘Trouble! All I’m asking is for people to stop lying. And to stop taking the blame for other people’s misdeeds, however honest it may seem.’

  I held her eyes with mine. ‘I assume Langeland took this up with you back in 1984, but nevertheless I feel obliged to remind you of what Jan said when I was talking with him at Førde police station at that time. Of what he remembered from the day Svein Skarnes was murdered.’

  Langeland stood up. ‘Veum! I think you should go now!’ I didn’t move. Nor did Vibecke. She raised an arm to her husband and said, in a quivering voice. ‘Don’t … Jens. I want to hear what he has to say.’

  Langeland remained on his feet.

  I said: ‘He did tell you this when he came back from Førde, didn’t he? To me he even said it was a basis for re-assessing the case. We’re talking about your case now.’

  ‘Yes, he did, but I said that … that I couldn’t remember … all the details any more. And Jan must have made a mistake.’

  ‘And that … was perhaps not quite the whole truth?’ I said warily.

  She hesitated. Then she said, so
quietly that it was barely audible: ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘What!’ Now it was Langeland’s turn to be amazed. With an incredulous expression in his eyes he fell back in his chair while staring at his wife. ‘But you’ve always …’

  ‘It was you who insisted that I should confess, Jens. You said I would receive more lenient treatment from the court if we could convince them that it was involuntary manslaughter.’

  ‘And you did! But, my God, I didn’t expect you to confess if you hadn’t done it!’

  She swallowed hard. As she spoke, she was having trouble finding the right words, and what she said came in slow staccato: ‘T-tell me again … what did Jan say?’

  ‘It’s so long ago now that I can’t remember the precise wording, but the main gist was that he had been alone with his father, well, your husband. The foster father. He was sitting and playing with his train. Then he heard the doorbell ring. Your husband went to open the door and he heard a loud altercation with someone. A man, please note. Then everything went still. Later he went into the hall and … in fact I don’t know whether he found him or that happened when you came home. I don’t recall whether he told me that or not. The main point, however, was this: someone came in, argued with your husband, and left again. Who?’

  She did not look at either of us, but somewhere in-between. ‘You … both of you know why I did it.’

  I leaned forward. ‘Did what?’

  ‘Confessed.’

  ‘I’ve always had my suspicions …’

  ‘Because I was sure Jan had done it. To protect him against … this monstrous act.’

  ‘But there was one thing he said to me that day. And it was this: Mummy did it!’

  ‘Yes?’ For a moment her eyes seemed to be flashing sparks. ‘I said that to him when he was standing by the cellar stairs, as stiff as a poker. I crouched down in front of him, looked him straight in the eye and repeated several times: ‘Don’t feel sorry, Johnny boy! Mummy did it …’

  ‘Mummy did it,’ I repeated, the way the sentence had resounded in my head for all the years that had passed since that February day in 1974.

  She looked at her husband with tearstained eyes while nodding in silence.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘But then the question is … Can you tell me what really happened?’

  ‘No. No more than anyone else can.’

  Both Langeland and I waited for her to go on.

  ‘I … had been out. At the doctor’s. When I came home, I unlocked the door and … the first thing I saw was Jan standing in the hall, in front of the open cellar door. He was standing with his back to the wall, on the opposite side of the door, and there was something strange, something lifeless and apathetic about his face, as though he had lost all form of expression. Because he had done something terrible.’

  ‘Done, or seen?’

  ‘My perception was … he had once done something similar, in blind fury. Gone for Svein and bitten his hand so hard that he drew blood. Svein went ballistic and gave him a belting afterwards … but Jan refused to say anything. He didn’t say a word to me, neither that day nor …’ Again tears flowed, and she looked straight at me. ‘That was the last time I saw him! Do you understand? I could never take him in my arms again, never try to help him with all the rest, all the pain in his life which had made him what he was. I lost him that day. Lost him!’

  ‘You unlocked the door, you said?’

  ‘Yes, I did! I didn’t ring the bell. Or if I did, no one opened up. And I didn’t have a row with Svein, either. Not that day. I did not do it. There was never a clash between us which resulted in him falling down the stairs.’

  ‘You just made that up to make the death sound credible, is that it?’

  She nodded mutely.

  ‘He hadn’t been brutal to you, either? All the character witnesses refused to believe that.’

  She whispered: ‘No, that was lies, too. A pretext.’

  ‘Lie after lie after lie,’ I mumbled. ‘And your solicitor … what did he think?’

  Langeland exclaimed: ‘I took her at her word. I always trust my clients!’

  I turned back to him. ‘But you and Vibecke had been on intimate terms since university. Are you asking me to believe that she didn’t tell you what really happened, not even you? Or did you choose to trust her blindly, out of consideration for Jan? You too?’

  ‘Out of consideration for …?’

  ‘Yes? After all, he was your son. Was he not?’

  The large room fell quiet. Vibecke stared at me. ‘What was that you said? I didn’t quite catch …’

  ‘I said to your husband that, after all, Jan was his son,’ I said in a low neutral voice, as though telling her the weather forecast for the following day. ‘In a way that explains his commitment to this case, as I said, from the time Jan was born!’

  She turned to Langeland with a face like one large, open wound. Again we could barely hear what she whispered: ‘Is this true, Jens? Are there any other things you haven’t told me?’

  ‘Vibecke, I …’ All his eloquence was gone now, all his defence mechanisms destroyed. All I could read in Langeland’s face was deep, bottomless despair. ‘I couldn’t … tell … couldn’t tell anyone! I’ve never told …’ He swung round to me again. ‘How this fellow worked it out … I just can’t fathom!’

  I studied him. ‘I remember,’ I started, ‘seeing you together in court, during the review meeting in Førde and later in Bergen … it struck me how similar you were. The same gangling stance, the same toss of the head. You can never completely disguise genetic traces, not a hundred per cent.’

  He brandished an arm, as if to reject everything, but I was past the point where I would let myself be stopped. ‘I seem to remember … the description you gave of Mette Olsen the first time I visited your Bergen office … young and sweet, you called her, and there was a sort of elation about the way you said it. But there was more. What really put me on the trail was the time aspect.’

  ‘The time aspect?’

  ‘When I visited Mette Olsen in Jølster in 1984, I committed the folly of believing that the man she was arrested with in Flesland, David Pettersen … was Jan’s father. But Jan was born in July 1967, and David and Mette were arrested in Flesland on August 30th the year before. Unless they had an unguarded moment at court, which I consider highly unlikely, it is simply impossible for him to be the boy’s father.’

  I let this sink in before carrying on: ‘So which other men was she keeping company with at that time? And don’t forget that she was in remand right through till November when the case was brought before the court. But she must have met her solicitors, I suppose, without police supervision even, if I’m not mistaken …’

  He looked at me with an expression of blank resignation on his face. Vibecke had stopped crying. Her eyes flitted from me to him and back again.

  His voice was now almost as hushed as hers had been. ‘I couldn’t … first of all, I had infringed the solicitors’ code of conduct, and this was one of my very first cases, Veum. I wasn’t even … Bakke had the case. Bakke was a barrister, my superior. But when she became pregnant … it didn’t come out until she had been released. I tried to persuade her … but she insisted on keeping the child. I said to her: ‘But there can never be anything serious between us two.’

  ‘Why not?’ Vibecke snapped, like the crack of a whip.

  ‘Because … she wasn’t the right one. She didn’t have the right …’

  ‘Status, shall we call it perhaps?’ I said. ‘A little hippie girl on her way home from Copenhagen in very unseemly company. And God knows who she might have been with over there … or how many … was that how your mind was working?’

  He half-stood up. ‘Anyway, that’s how things stayed. We made a deal. I was never registered as the child’s father. In recompense I’ve helped her and Jan, as far as I’ve been able all the years since.’

  ‘Have you now?’

  ‘As well as I’ve been able, I said,’
he mumbled despondently, almost to himself.

  ‘And she kept her mouth shut all these years … Mette, I mean?’

  He looked up again. ‘Well, did she?’

  ‘She never banged on the door asking for money?’

  ‘No, she did not!’

  ‘I can understand her,’ Vibecke broke in with a bitter timbre to her voice. ‘At least she had retained her pride!’

  ‘And what help have you been exactly?’ I persisted. ‘You didn’t manage to prevent his foster mother doing time for a murder she had not committed. You didn’t manage to prevent Jan being convicted for a double murder it is highly questionable that he committed.’

  He eyed me with increasing desperation. ‘So who did commit them?’

  I met his eyes with defiance. ‘Yes, who did? Who the hell do you think? Terje Hammersten?’

  ‘Hammersten’s dead. You told me that yourself.’

  ‘Now, yes.’

  My mobile phone suddenly rang. Vibecke gave a start, Langeland looked around, confused, and I made a grab for my inside pocket as if I was having a heart attack.

  I got up and walked over to the window. It had grown dark outside. The sun had long gone down, but the lights from Ullerntoppen and the gleam of the floodlights round Oscarshall Palace orientated me as to where I was, high above the peasantry. I lifted the mobile to my ear and said my name.

  His voice came in fits and starts, as if he too was having problems finding the right words. ‘I’ve spoken to Silje. You said you wanted to meet me.’

  It was Jan Egil.

  52

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked.

  ‘In town. Where are you?’

  ‘With your solicitor, Jens Langeland.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes … Ask Langeland if you can borrow his car.’

  Langeland and Vibecke were following the conversation closely. I lowered the phone and said: ‘It’s Jan Egil … he’s asking whether I can borrow your car.’

  ‘My car!’ Langeland held out his hand. ‘Let me talk to him.’