1222

by Anne Holt

  I listened to the wind. During the night I had been sure that the storm was abating. It was no longer attacking us with the same fury. It was as if it had gradually realized that the buildings at Finse could be lashed, they could be buried in snow and severely damaged, but they could never really be conquered. The buildings around the little railway station between Hallingskarvet and Hardangerjøkulen had been built in an era when things were allowed to take their own time, by people who knew the mountain and the caprices of the weather gods better than they knew their own children. I discovered to my surprise that the lower part of the windows facing out towards Finsevann were covered in solid snow. I didn’t really know, but I assumed it must be three or four metres down to the ground in summer. Maybe more. Only through the upper third of the windows could I still see whirling snow, as if it were in some kind of madly spinning centrifuge, grey-white flakes illuminated from inside against the pitch-black morning sky outside.

  The wind had not begun to die down; we were in the process of being buried in snow.

  There were no longer thick walls against which it could batter. Up to now the snow had piled up in enormous drifts a couple of metres away from the walls facing the lake. I presumed this had something to do with both the wind and the heat from the buildings, but there were ramparts of air between us and the terrifying quantities of snow. Now these were being filled in. A covering of driving snow had settled around the building, protecting us from the worst of the onslaught. Only from the side wing, which was the highest part of the hotel as it was on a slope, could I still hear the familiar creaking from the walls.

  I didn’t know whether I ought to be relieved or afraid.

  I had no idea how much snow could actually fall from the sky once it had really started to play up.

  ii

  Nobody came.

  True, Berit had only just been here, but otherwise I was completely alone in the lobby. The chef and his two colleagues were already in the kitchen. From time to time I heard the clank of metal and other human noises, blending with the monotonous background roar of the storm.

  It was making me feel hungry.

  But most of all I was tired.

  I’m used to getting up at six o’clock, but this felt like one o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t stop yawning, and my eyes were streaming. That’s why I noticed the dog that came rushing in as more of a blurred movement, a pale yellow shadow moving at full speed across the floor. Before I had time to wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, the dog was already halfway between the stairs and the Millibar, while I sat there in my wheelchair without a clue about what was going on.

  Suddenly every sound disappeared.

  A fuse had blown. It was as if my body didn’t have sufficient energy to keep all my senses working. It was more important to see, and I saw. The whole thing can’t have taken more than three or four seconds, but once again I had the experience of registering every detail. Every single one. It was neither the Portuguese water dog nor the nervous setter that was hurtling towards me. Nor was it the poodle, which I hadn’t actually seen at all since the first evening.

  As I am always sitting down, I have a different perspective on life from other adults. In a literal sense as well. This can often be valuable; I see things that others miss. But I also miss some elements that others see. In many ways I see the world as a child sees it.

  The pit bull terrier is not exactly a large dog. A fully-grown male can weigh up to thirty solid kilos, but since there is no breed standard, the variations are great. At any rate, they are banned in Norway. However, since the similarity with other fighting dogs is so striking that they can easily pass for a different breed, there are still plenty of them around.

  The specimen that was hurtling towards me was more monster than dog. Its chest was broader than the length of its legs, and from its enormous mouth lolled the longest tongue I have ever seen on any creature. I don’t really know why, but I realized immediately that the dark patch on its yellowish-brown, short fur was blood. When the animal was just five metres from me I could see that its teeth were dripping with pale red saliva, splashing around its mouth every time its front paws hit the floor.

  The eyes were colourless: clear, with an almost imperceptible hint of pale, pale blue. It looked as if the dog were blind, yet could see at the same time. Its gaze was fixed on me, but only as if I were sitting at the end of a dark tunnel, and there was nothing else in the room.

  Fortunately, there was.

  Suddenly I could hear again. A faint, muted thud as something soft and solid landed on the floor. Although everything I have read since about fighting dogs and their behaviour maintains that the dog should not have allowed itself to be distracted, it did. It didn’t take its eyes off me, but a slight turn of the head made it lose its rhythm and stumble without actually falling.

  I just wished I was able to use my legs. I realized the only way I could defend myself would be to lift my foot and kick out just as the dog was about to take its final leap. If the dog got anywhere near my face I was lost. Every ounce of my strength and concentration was therefore focused on this one impossibility: raising my knee and extending my leg in front of me with full force and at exactly the right moment.

  The miracle didn’t happen.

  I was still crippled, just as I will be until the day I die.

  And I couldn’t understand where Mikkel had come from. He was a metre away from me with the beast underneath him. His right arm was locked around the dog’s neck, with the crook of his arm across its throat. His left hand, clenched into a fist to avoid the jaws, pushed the nose upwards until Mikkel jerked his arm in a sudden, violent movement. The dog’s neck vertebrae snapped with a crunching, meaty sound. The paws scrabbled spasmodically at the floor a couple of times before Mikkel got to his feet, kicked the corpse and mumbled:

  ‘Fucking mongrel.’

  I leaned over to my left and threw up.

  He made no attempt to help me. He didn’t offer me water, didn’t ask if there was anything he could do. He was obviously intending to leave the dog where it was, but he half-turned and said:

  ‘I think the ptarmigan’s bust. I had to jump over the desk and I knocked it down.’

  He tugged at the waistband of his trousers and walked away.

  On the floor in front of the reception desk lay a shattered winter bird, a sad heap of white, tufted feathers. It was the companion of the stuffed raven, which was still standing there with its wings outstretched, gazing into space with its dead eyes. The noise that distracted the dog must have been the little ptarmigan falling on the floor. I thought it was strange that I had heard only that soft thud, and nothing of the storm, nothing of Mikkel. I could only imagine what he might have been doing hidden on the other side of the desk, where only the staff were allowed, early in the morning, without giving away his presence.

  But I hadn’t the strength at that moment.

  Mikkel, the lout from Bærum, had saved my life.

  And Berit was running across the floor. When she caught sight of the dog lying there dead, she stopped and put her hands up to her head. Only then did I notice that she was crying. It was unlikely to be out of sympathy with the yellow monster with blood around its mouth and froth along the thick, shining lips.

  iii

  They had found Roar Hanson behind the third door they opened. Fortunately Berit was there at the time, because she was the only one who knew that the remote room in the cellar had been made into temporary quarters for the dangerous dog from the train. The owner, a man of about forty who had more or less kept himself to himself since the accident, used to go in and see the dog every two hours. He had taken it upon himself to keep the room clean, and according to Berit he seemed conscientious and decent. At night the dog was alone behind a locked door, from bedtime until the owner got up.

  He hadn’t got up yet. Fortunately.

  Roar Hanson was dead, but it wasn’t the pit bull that had killed him. Although it had looked that way at
first.

  iv

  We had learned one thing, at any rate. Roar Hanson’s body was not moved to the kitchen, the delivery area, or anywhere else where people might trip over him. For the time being he was rolled up in a tarpaulin packed with snow and ice in a room a few doors away from the room where he was found. The door was locked with a key and an extra padlock. Cato Hammer’s body had also been moved there during the quiet hours of the night. The dead dog had been removed from the floor in reception, but I hadn’t bothered to ask where it had gone. The room where the dog had been locked in with the body of the priest had been emptied and cleaned. The owner had a key. Since his surprise at finding the dog missing would probably be more than enough, at least he wouldn’t have to be faced with an empty room covered in blood and shredded newspaper before he was given the sad news about the animal’s demise.

  I still felt dizzy and sick.

  ‘I just think we’re in the middle of a Roald Dahl short story here,’ said Magnus, who seemed to be so excited he was verging on the euphoric. ‘I have examined the body very carefully and my goodness ...’

  He took a deep breath and let the air out very slowly between his front teeth. A low, whistling hum filled the room, which was extremely small.

  Berit Tverre had allowed us to use the office behind reception. As I understood it, the chef had finally put his foot down when it came to any further use of his kitchen domain. I can’t say I blamed him. The stale smell of unwashed bodies was distinctly unpleasant in this small space where three desks, office equipment, shelves and files were all over the place in a complete mess. Even if only a few of us had managed to bring our luggage and toiletries from the train, it should still have been possible for most of us to keep ourselves clean. It was as if we had all allowed ourselves to fall for the cliché: it was OK to stink in the mountains.

  Magnus was waving his arms excitedly. Large rings of sweat under his arms were framed by a circle of dried, grey, bodily salts.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he shouted, clapping his hands softly. ‘A real live story!’

  I was presumably the only one who knew what he meant, even though I was also the only one who had not seen Roar Hanson’s body.

  Berit had produced a flip chart. Magnus found a clean sheet of paper and drew a sketch of an adult, so quickly that the marker pen squeaked across the paper. He didn’t have quite enough room for the legs, because he had made the torso exaggeratedly large.

  ‘The feet are of no interest in any case,’ he said, drawing a circle on the figure’s stomach, just below the ribs and above the navel. ‘This is what we’re going to focus on. You see ...’

  He put the cap on the pen and used it as a pointer, short and chubby just like him.

  ‘The dog only licked the body. It licked it clean, so to speak. Not that I know much about dogs.’ He smiled, almost coquettishly. ‘But I have read a little. Canis familiaris is an exciting creature. A tamed dog, but still with much of the wolf about it. To varying degrees, of course, but this example of the pit bull breed is a fighting dog.’

  ‘The owner said it was a cross breed,’ Berit interrupted.

  ‘Mongrel, pit bull ... only a DNA analysis could determine the difference. However, this one was so big that I choose to believe what I want to believe. Well. In any case.’

  He banged the marker pen against the paper.

  ‘Fighting dogs are, as the name clearly states, dogs that fight. With a very short fuse, you could say. Powerful body, immensely strong jaws. And yet we have seen really sweet pictures of dogs faithfully and patiently guarding small children, even tiny babies; these children can tug away at the dog’s ear, and yet they are just as safe as they would be in their mother’s arms!’

  He looked from one to the other for confirmation that we had all seen pictures like this. None of us nodded.

  ‘These dogs are first and foremost a danger to other dogs. As we saw when we arrived at the hotel, in fact. The more peaceful animals were absolutely terrified as soon as that yellow creature showed its teeth.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  Geir looked unhappy. The lines around his eyes were more pronounced than before, and his stubble was well on the way to becoming a full beard.

  ‘If the dog didn’t kill Roar Hanson, then why are we wasting so much time on it?’

  ‘Just bear with me on this,’ Magnus Streng said mildly. ‘I’m trying to draw a timeline here. And that means we have to understand what really happened. You could actually help me on that point.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. What did you do when you opened the door?’

  ‘To the room where Roar Hanson was lying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I ...’

  Geir looked at Berit, who shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Berit said the dog seemed dangerous, and that I should be careful. So I opened the door just a little bit. As best I could. I saw Roar Hanson. He was just lying there on the floor, and I realized at once that he was dead. Nobody lies down on —’

  ‘And the dog?’

  ‘The dog? It growled and stuck its nose through the gap in the door. Because it wanted to get out, I presume.’

  ‘And you were frightened, of course.’

  Geir frowned and looked at him blankly.

  ‘He was frightened, wasn’t he?’

  The doctor turned to Berit. She tried to hide a smile, but said nothing.

  ‘Well, I mean, it was barking like mad,’ Geir exclaimed. ‘And showing its teeth!’

  ‘So what did you do next?’

  ‘Well, I was convinced that that bloody animal ... It was covered in blood, for God’s sake! I thought it had gone for Hanson and killed him! I was terrified!’

  ‘I can totally understand that,’ Magnus nodded reassuringly. ‘But what did you do?’

  ‘He opened the door,’ Berit said slowly. ‘When the dog tried to get out through the door, he kicked it. Hard. I heard the crunch.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Magnus, raising his index finger in the air. ‘You reconfigured the monster’s code! With your well-aimed kick you ...’

  He broke off and looked at Berit.

  ‘Do we know what the dog was called.’

  ‘Muffe.’

  I must have been overtired, because I laughed. The others looked at me as if I’d lost the plot.

  ‘Muffe,’ I repeated, and I couldn’t help smiling. ‘A pit bull?’

  ‘But it was a sweet little doggy,’ said Magnus eagerly. ‘Muffe wasn’t dangerous at all! Not to people, at any rate. Here we have one of the closest relatives of the wolf; it spends several hours locked in a room with a body, and it doesn’t help itself. It licks off the blood, it lies down next to the body and gets covered in more blood, but it doesn’t start eating! A friendly pet when it comes to human beings, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what our little Muffe was!’

  ‘Maybe he was full,’ said Geir sourly.

  ‘Maybe. But what happens when you land your doubtless well-aimed kick is that his already short fuse runs out. He is afraid, angry, in pain, terrible pain, but instead of attacking, which is his real instinct, he runs away. Up in the lobby, he spots Hanne. Whether he was completely possessed by that time and wanted to hurl himself at your throat ...’

  He nodded in my direction before turning back to the flip chart.

  ‘We simply don’t know. Perhaps Muffe just wanted to be comforted.’ ‘It didn’t look that way,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Get to the point,’ said Geir, whose mood was deteriorating noticeably.

  ‘This,’ said Magnus, pressing his marker pen against the red circle on his sketch. ‘This is a wound caused by a murder weapon I have never come across before, to tell the truth. It certainly wasn’t a dog. As you can see, the entry wound is ...’

  Presumably he suddenly realized that all we could see was a slapdash sketch.

  ‘... or to put it more accurately: having examined the deceased, I can tell you that the entry wound is relatively large. Sev
en, eight, nine centimetres, in fact. Then the wound narrows as it goes further into the body. It’s sort of conical. The liver has been penetrated. An organ that contains a great deal of blood, the liver. It’s very critical if it’s ruptured.’

  His face creased into a serious expression before he shook his head and regained his enthusiasm.

  ‘I can’t be absolutely certain, of course, pathology is far from my speciality. It is well known that the internal organs have the troublesome capacity to move around. And yet all the indications are that the murder weapon looks like this.’

  He turned to a clean sheet of paper and drew a pyramid.

  A pyramid with a very pronounced point.

  ‘A crowbar?’ said Geir enquiringly.

  ‘No, no, no. I can say with comparative certainty that the weapon was this shape because I turned the body over. And I discovered ...’

  Suddenly he tore off the sheet with the outline of a man on it. He held it up in front of him for a moment before handing it to Berit with the blank side uppermost. Through the paper we could still make out the red strokes of the pen and the large, gaping hole he had drawn on the midriff, above and to the right of the navel just below the ribs.

  ‘So now we are looking at his back,’ Magnus said seriously. ‘I found a lesion. Here.’

  The pen was pointing at the exact centre of the circle.

  ‘So the weapon didn’t go right through the body. But almost. Just a few millimetres short. The bleed on this side indicates that the object was pointed at the end, but slender.’

  ‘Not to mention sharp,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Sharp. And slender.’

  ‘But what on earth is it?’ asked Berit, pointing at the drawing of the alleged weapon.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Magnus. ‘I do have a theory, but of course I can’t know.’

  ‘But you said something about Roald Dahl?’

  ‘Well, it’s definitely not a leg of lamb,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know it gets on your nerves,’ said Geir with an air of resignation. ‘But I still have to ask: a leg of lamb?’