by Anne Holt
“He wasn’t exactly like a son to me, but at one period we were very close. When he left my firm to set up on his own, I was disappointed—maybe hurt, too. But we kept in touch. If we could, we had lunch together every Thursday. It was pleasant, and rewarding. For both of us, I think. Over the last six months, though, the lunches became rather sporadic. He was abroad a lot. And didn’t give me such a high priority anyway, I suspect.”
Peter Strup straightened himself up in the uncomfortable little plastic chair, took a deep breath, and continued:
“I was stupid. I thought it was a woman. When he got divorced the first time, I probably came over like a strict father. Lately when he started to withdraw, I assumed that his marriage was failing again and that he wanted to avoid my reproaches.”
“When did you start to realise that something was wrong? Really wrong, I mean.”
“I’m not quite sure. But towards the end of September I began to suspect that a member of the profession was up to something on the side. It all began when one of my clients broke down. A miserable wretch I’ve had for years. He burst into tears with a long tale of woe. It transpired that what he was most concerned about was to get me to take up the case of a friend of his, a young Dutchman, Han van der Kerch.”
“Was he the chap who committed suicide in prison? The one there was so much fuss about?”
“That’s right. You know yourself how some clients are always dragging their friends along to try to get help for them, too. Nothing unusual in that. But after whingeing on for ages he told me he knew there was at least one lawyer behind a drugs ring, virtually a gang. Or a mafia. I was thoroughly sceptical, but thought there was enough in it to warrant further investigation. So I tried initially to make contact with the Dutchman. Offered my services, but Karen Borg wouldn’t budge.”
He gave a short, dry laugh without a trace of amusement.
“That refusal almost cost her her life. Well, with no access to the main source, I had to approach it in a roundabout way. I felt like some tenth-rate American private eye at times. I’ve talked to people in the strangest places and at the oddest hours. Though, in a way, it’s also been quite stimulating.”
“But, Peter,” the other man said in a low voice, “why didn’t you go to the police?”
“The police?”
He looked at his companion as if he’d suggested a pre-prandial massacre.
“What on earth would I have gone to them with? I didn’t have anything tangible. In fact, I think the police and I have had that problem in common: we’ve had hunches and beliefs and assumptions, but we haven’t been able to prove a damn thing. Do you know when I first got any positive evidence of my growing suspicions about Jørgen?”
Bloch-Hansen gave a slight shake of his head.
“I put one of my sources physically in a corner, that is on a chair without a table in front of him. Then I stood right in front of him and stared him straight in the eyes. He was frightened. Not of me, but of a feeling of disquiet in the market that seemed to be affecting everyone. Then I went steadily through the names of a number of Oslo lawyers. When I got to Jørgen Ulf Lavik he was noticeably uneasy, averted his gaze, and asked for something to drink.”
The boisterous youths were going out. Three of them were laughing and grinning and tossing a jacket from one to another, while the fourth, the smallest, was cursing and groaning and trying to intercept it. The two lawyers remained silent until the glass doors closed behind the lads.
“What did that give me? I could have gone to the police and told them that by using what was perhaps a somewhat amateurish lie detector I’d got a nineteen-year-old drug addict to reveal that Jørgen Lavik was a crook. Please go and arrest him for me. No, I had nothing to inform them of. Anyway, I’d begun to see fragments of the real truth even then. And it wasn’t something I could refer to a young attorney on the second floor of police headquarters. I paid a call instead on my old friends in the Intelligence Services. The picture we managed to piece together by our joint efforts wasn’t a pretty one. To be more precise, it was ugly. Bloody ugly.”
“How did they take it?”
“Naturally enough it stirred things up. I don’t think it’s settled down yet. The worst of it is that they can’t touch Harry Lime.”
“Harry Lime?”
“The Third Man. You must remember the film. They’ve got enough on the old man to make things hot for him, but they don’t dare. It would get a bit too warm for them, too.”
“But are they letting him continue in post?”
“They’ve tried to persuade him to retire. They’ll keep on trying. He’s had heart problems, fairly severe ones. There wouldn’t be anything surprising about his retirement on health grounds. But you know our former colleague—he won’t give up until he drops dead. He sees no reason to.”
“Has his boss been told?”
“What do you think?”
“No, probably not.”
“Even the prime minister has been left in ignorance. It’s too horrific. And the police will never succeed in apprehending him; they don’t even have the remotest suspicion.”
The last frame went badly. To his annoyance Peter Strup saw his friend beat him by almost forty points. He must really be getting past it.
“Answer me one thing, Håkon.”
“Wait a minute.”
It was difficult getting his stiff leg into the car. He gave up after three attempts, and asked Hanne to slide the seat back to its full extent. That made it easier. He wedged the crutches in between the seat and the door. The heavy gate of the yard at the rear of police headquarters opened slowly and reluctantly, as if it wasn’t entirely sure whether it was advisable to let them out. At last it made up its mind: they could pass.
“What do you want an answer to?”
“Was it really so important for Jørgen Lavik to kill Karen Borg? I mean, did his case depend so very much just on her?”
“No.”
“No? Just no?”
“Yes.”
It pained him to discuss her. He’d limped over twice to the hospital ward where she was lying bruised and helpless. Her husband had been there both times. With a hostile look and demonstratively holding her pale hands as they lay on the bedcover, Nils had by his very presence thwarted any attempt at saying what Håkon actually wanted to say. She had been distant and discouraging, and though he hadn’t expected any thanks for his lifesaving intervention, it hurt him deeply that she didn’t even mention it. Nor did Nils for that matter. All Håkon did was exchange a few meaningless words for five minutes and then leave again. After the second visit he couldn’t face another; since then not a moment had passed without his thinking of her. Nevertheless he was able to take some comfort from the fact that the case was more or less solved. He just couldn’t bear talking about her. But he made a supreme effort.
“We wouldn’t have got a conviction even with Karen’s statement and testimony. It could only have helped us procure an extension of the custody order. When he was first released, Karen’s role was irrelevant, unless we’d found additional evidence. But Lavik was probably not fully responsible for his actions.”
“Do you mean he wasn’t of sound mind?”
“No, not that. But you have to remember that the higher you are, the further you have to fall. He must have been rather desperate. In one way or another he’d convinced himself that Karen was dangerous. From that point of view it makes sense when our superiors maintain that he was the one who knocked you out. That memo may have caused his obsession.”
“So now it’s my fault that Karen was nearly murdered,” said Hanne peevishly, though she knew he hadn’t meant it like that.
She wound down the window, pressed a red button, and announced her business to a voice of indeterminate sex that crackled out at them from a perforated metal plate. The barrier was raised by unseen hands and she was directed to an empty space in the garage underneath the parliament building.
“Kaldbakken is seeing us straigh
taway,” she said, assisting her colleague out of the car.
It was hard to imagine how a minister of justice could tolerate such wretched conditions. Despite the fact that the room was being redecorated, it was obvious that the youthful minister was still in residence. He stepped over rolls of wallpaper, squeezed past a stepladder on the top of which a can of paint was ominously teetering, gave them a beaming smile, and proffered his hand in greeting.
He was strikingly handsome as well as surprisingly young. He’d only been thirty-two when he took office. He had golden blond hair, even in midwinter, and his eyes could have been a woman’s: large, blue, and with very long, beautifully curling lashes. His darker eyebrows, meeting above the bridge of his nose, formed a stark masculine contrast to all this lightness.
“Wonderful that you could come,” he said enthusiastically. “After everything there’s been in the papers over the past week it’s difficult to know what to believe. I’d be grateful for a briefing. Now that it’s all over, I mean. Quite an incredible affair, and very uncomfortable for us upholders of the law! I’m the one who’s supposed to be responsible for these lawyers, and it’s a nasty business when they hop over the fence.”
His grimace was presumably meant as a fraternal gesture of acknowledgement of the state of the legal profession. The minister had been in the police force himself for three years before his appointment as a public prosecutor in record time at the age of only twenty-eight. He helped Håkon solicitously with one of his crutches that had dropped to the floor as they shook hands.
“Quite a spectacular rescue, I understand,” he said as a friendly overture, pointing at Håkon’s leg. “How are you getting on?”
Håkon assured him that he was fine. Just a little pain still, but otherwise all right.
“Let’s go in here,” the minister said, leading them into the adjacent room. Unlike his own it looked out not over the gigantic building site—where they were at long last trying to make something of what had for so long been a hole in the ground—but onto the helicopter landing pad on the roof of the Department of Trade and Industry.
This room was no bigger, only tidier. There were two magnificent Oriental rugs on the floor, and one of them must have been more than four square metres. They couldn’t possibly be public property. Nor did the paintings on the wall look as if they belonged to the State; if so, they should have been in the National Gallery.
The parliamentary under secretary came in immediately behind them. Since it was his office, he drew up chairs and offered them mineral water. He was twice the age of his boss, but just as jovial. His suit was tailor-made, emphasising the fact that he hadn’t given up the expensive habits acquired during thirty years as a successful barrister. His official salary was probably only pocket money for him, since he was still senior partner in a moderate-sized but much more than moderately prosperous law firm.
The account of events took a good half hour, and it was mainly Kaldbakken who did the talking. Håkon was dozing off by the end. Embarrassing. He shook his head and took a swig of mineral water to keep himself awake.
The reddish, richly patterned rugs were beautiful. From this side they appeared a different shade than from the door: warmer and deeper. The wall shelving seemed more in keeping with the office, a dark brown plain veneer, full of legal books. Håkon had to smile when he saw that the under secretary also had a penchant for old children’s books. There was someone else who had, he remembered, though the powerful medication he was taking was affecting his ability to concentrate. Who was it?
“Sand?”
He gave a start, and made the excuse of his leg. “Sorry. What was the question?”
“Do you agree that the case is solved now? Was it Lavik who killed Hans Olsen?”
Hanne was gazing into the distance with an inscrutable countenance. Kaldbakken nodded decisively and looked him straight in the eyes.
“Well, maybe. Presumably. Kaldbakken thinks so. He’s probably right.”
Correct answer. The others began to gather up their things; they’d been there longer than planned. Håkon heaved himself up and limped over to the bookshelves. Then he remembered.
He felt quite dizzy for a moment and put too much weight on one crutch, which skidded away from him on the shiny floor: he went down with a crash. The under secretary, who was standing nearest, rushed across.
“Steady on, old chap,” he said, offering his hand.
Håkon ignored it, staring at him in consternation for so long that Hanne had time to come over and get her arms round him. He struggled to his feet.
“I’m okay,” he muttered, hoping they would ascribe his confusion to the heavy fall.
After a few more expressions of gratitude they were free to go. Kaldbakken had his own car. When Hanne and Håkon were out of earshot, he tugged at her jacket.
“Fetch those three sheets of code. Meet me at the Central Library as soon as you possibly can.”
With that he hobbled off across the asphalt on his crutches at impressive speed.
“I can drive you,” she shouted after him, but he seemed not to catch it. He was already halfway there.
It was very worn, but the picture on the cover was still clear. A handsome young European pilot lay helpless on the ground in his blue flying suit and old-fashioned leather helmet, being attacked by a savage horde of hostile black Africans. The book was entitled Biggles Flies South. He passed it to Hanne, who was still out of breath. She realised at once.
“South,” she said, dropping her voice, “the code heading on the piece of paper we found in Hansy Olsen’s flat. Oh, my God!”
She leant over his shoulder. In front of him was the complete set of the adventures of the British flying ace. She picked up Biggles in Africa and Biggles in Borneo.
“Africa and Borneo. Jacob Frøstrup’s insurance documents. How did you suddenly come upon it?”
“We can be grateful for all the laborious routine work that’s been done. In the long list of the contents of Lavik’s office, I happened to notice that the Biggles series was among his books. It amused me, because I used to devour them myself as a boy. If the individual titles had been listed, I would have probably seen it then. But it just said ‘Biggles books.’ ”
He ran his hand over the frayed, light-blue spine. His leg wasn’t hurting anymore. Karen Borg was only a faint and distant image in the back of his mind. He was the one who had discovered the key to the code. For ten weeks he’d been jogging along behind Hanne Wilhelmsen. Now it was his turn.
“The under secretary had the same books. The whole set complete.”
It was like a bombshell. There it was in front of them, in the form of three well-thumbed books for boys. Books that for some reason were on the shelves of an under secretary and in the office of a corrupt, deceased lawyer. It couldn’t be coincidence.
In forty minutes they had broken the code. Three incomprehensible pages of rows of numbers were transformed into three seven-line messages. They were quite informative—confirming some of their suspicions. The amounts involved were huge. Three deliveries of a hundred grams each. Heroin. As expected. The letters, written in a hasty backhand—both of them were left-handed—gradually revealed all the collection points and delivery instructions. Price, quantity, and quality were stated, each message ending with a note of the courier’s payoff.
But not a single damned name. Nor address. The places mentioned were obviously specific, but they were in code. The three collection points were given as B-c, A-r, and S-x. The destinations were FM, LS, and FT. Meaningless. For the police. But obviously not for the people for whom the instructions were intended.
They were alone in the big room. Books towered above them in impersonal silence on all four sides, damping the acoustics and muffling the transmission of sound in the venerable building. Not even a class of schoolchildren in the next room could disturb the scholarly peace that resided within those walls.
Hanne struck her fist on her forehead in exaggerated recognition of he
r own stupidity, and then banged her head on the table for emphasis.
“He was in police headquarters the day I was knocked out. Don’t you remember? The minister was having a sightseeing tour of the custody suite and was going to discuss unprovoked violence! The under secretary was with him! I remember hearing them out at the back.”
“But how could he have got away from the group? There were so many journalists in tow.”
“Lavatory key. He could have borrowed a bunch of keys to go to the lavatory. Or got one for some other reason. I don’t know. But he was there. It can’t have been a coincidence, it just can’t.”
They folded up the deciphered codes, handed in the Biggles books to the woman at the issue desk, and went out onto the steps. Håkon was fumbling with his chewing tobacco and getting into the swing of it again after a couple of prods with his tongue.
“We can’t arrest a guy because he’s got books on his shelves.”
They looked at one another and burst into gales of laughter. It sounded raucous and disrespectful between the tall pillars, which seemed to shrink back towards the wall in outrage. Their breath formed puffs of mist in the freezing air before evaporating.
“It’s incredible. We know there’s a third man. We know who he is. A scandal of significant proportions, and yet we can’t do anything. Not a damned thing.”
There was really nothing to be amused about. But they were grinning all the way to the car, which Hanne had rather cheekily left on the pavement outside. She’d put a police sign behind the windscreen to lend legality to her inconsiderate parking.
“Well, we were right, anyway, Håkon,” she said. “Which is rather nice. There was a third man. Exactly as we said.”
She laughed again. More despondently this time.
His flat was still there. It looked quite alien despite its familiarity. The change must be in himself. After three hours’ cleaning, finishing off with a thorough round of the carpets with the vacuum cleaner, he felt more relaxed. The activity didn’t do his leg any favours. But it was good for his soul.
