In Dust and Ashes

by Anne Holt

  “Do you think she was hounded?”

  Hanne shrugged nonchalantly.

  “In point of fact she certainly was. After her identity was revealed, she’s hardly ventured out of her apartment, from what I’ve read. And it’s clearly been more or less under siege.”

  “Yes, I suppose so, but hounded? After all it was her own fault that–”

  “Were you thinking of moving in here?” Hanne interrupted him, glancing demonstratively at the clock.

  Henrik blushed and touched the side of his nose.

  “No, of course not. But hounded? Do you really think that?”

  Hanne did not reply. She switched off the TV and nodded at the door.

  “Iselin Havørn wasn’t stupid. Ergo she was evil. I don’t shed a single tear that she’s dead, but there are probably a few others who do. What she’s had to endure in the past few weeks would have been enough to tip the greatest stoic into depression and suicidal thoughts. But now you have to leave. You don’t need to come back or get in touch until another cold case turns up.”

  “Not even when sentence is passed, you mean?”

  “You don’t need to. They’ll be convicted, one and all.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  He had stood up and was heading for the door when Hanne began to trundle to the kitchen. All of a sudden she stopped and looked at him.

  “Thanks to us, they most certainly will. Or in actual fact …”

  An almost imperceptible smile crossed her face.

  “Thanks to you, Henrik. All thanks to you.”

  Henrik had been allocated his own office.

  It was far from spacious, but it was his. For several years he had been shunted into impersonal shoeboxes he was allowed to keep for a few days, a few weeks or in one case a month and a half. This one, however, he had kept ever since several days after May 17, 2014, when sixteen people were killed by homemade bombs hidden in a tuba and four big bass drums during the two-hundred-year anniversary of the Norwegian Constitution. The total number of deaths would have been far greater if it had not been for Hanne Wilhelmsen and himself. They were too late to prevent the attack, but just in time to reduce its scale and have firstly two people arrested and later twenty more in a network so terrifying that it had given him sleepless nights for ages afterward. Since Hanne had downright refused to move into Police Headquarters at Grønlandsleiret 44 for the duration of the subsequent intense and lengthy investigation, he was upgraded to a deputy of sorts. And errand boy, as he already had been for a while.

  He loved that office.

  His mother had called in only a few days after he had moved in. She hated the curtains, which in her opinion looked like municipal issue, and had sent him new ones in the mail. At first he had hesitated to hang them up, after all there could be some sort of proscription against adding any personal touches to government property. When one of the older female civilians in the Violent Crime Section had come across the bundle of fabric on the spare seat in his office, she had insisted on helping him to hang them. Along with a couple of posters he had bought in IKEA, and a potted plant at the window that he contented himself with watering every Monday and Thursday, the curtains made his office look very nice, to tell the truth.

  Henrik Holme arrived at work every day at quarter past seven in the morning and seldom went home before ten o’clock at night. He headed for Hanne’s whenever she asked him to come, and returned to Police Headquarters when she ordered him out of the apartment in Kruses gate. For the first six months following the terrorist attacks, he had for the most part worked every weekend without exception. Eventually, when the case was close to being submitted to the Public Prosecutor, they had once again been given a couple of old, unsolved cases to keep them busy. They never managed to figure out one of these, and the other, an ancient homicide case, was solved only a couple of months before the time limit expired. The killer turned out to have been dead for sixteen years, but the aged mother of his victim could at least rest more easily in the knowledge of what had actually taken place.

  Now it was half past eight in the evening, and Henrik Holme was staring despondently at the empty in-tray on his office desk.

  They had no cases on the go.

  Nothing to do. No excuse to visit Hanne.

  In fact he ought to report to the Chief Inspector: Police Chief Silje Sørensen had given him a roving commission on the assumption that he would inform his superiors whenever he had time to spare.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  A burly man with a broad smile stood in the doorway, knocking lightly on the door frame. A small bag was slung over his right shoulder.

  “Quite a few,” Henrik answered. “Come on in.”

  “Bonsaksen,” the man said, holding out a huge hand. “Superintendent Kjell Bonsaksen, Stovner Police Station.”

  His stubby fingers touched the police badge suspended on a blue cord around his neck.

  “Henrik Holme,” Henrik reciprocated, trying to avoid grimacing at the overly firm handshake. “But of course you knew that. Since you …”

  He smiled sheepishly, tapping his forehead with his fist before he sat down.

  “Since I’m the one who looked you up,” Bonsaksen said, nodding, as he subsided on to the empty chair.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re starting to make a name for yourself, Holme.”

  Henrik did not answer. He had enough to cope with as he battled with increasingly flushed cheeks and struggled to tuck his hands safely under his thighs.

  “People talk about you. With respect. The way they once spoke about Hanne Wilhelmsen.”

  He smiled again.

  “Or … you’ve got some way to go before you reach that stage, I suppose. I worked here in the bad old days, so I know what I’m talking about. We never worked together, Wilhelmsen and I, but my goodness what a reputation she had. Queen of them all, near the end. Before that … before she was shot and became a bit …”

  His index finger rotated slowly above his forehead.

  The room fell silent. The sound of a siren in the backyard finally penetrated the walls and floor.

  “Much to do?”

  Bonsaksen ran his eyes over the almost clear surface of the desk. They stopped at the wire basket, empty of contents.

  “Not right now.”

  “Excellent. I’d actually like to …”

  The older policeman lifted the bag from his lap and pulled out a blue ring binder. It was so crammed with paper that it was bulging open. He placed it on the desk with a dull thud.

  “I’d really like you to take a look at this case,” he said.

  “We … It’s the Police Chief who gives us cases. We can’t simply–”

  “I know, I know.”

  Kjell Bonsaksen ran his finger thoughtfully along the ridge of his nose.

  “You’ve been here for only … three years?”

  “Five this summer.”

  “Five.”

  Bonsaksen nodded.

  “I retire on full pension in exactly one week,” he continued. “I’ll be fifty-eight on the fourteenth of January. I’ve been in the police for nearly thirty-nine years.”

  Henrik stared intently at the blue ring binder that looked terribly worn and faded.

  “And in so many years, making the occasional mistake can’t be avoided,” Bonsaksen went on. “Even though I may have made fewer than most. But as I said …”

  He glanced around the room and caught sight of Henrik’s Moccamaster coffee machine on a sideboard in the corner.

  “Could I have a cup?”

  “It’s been standing for a while, I’m afraid.”

  “That makes no odds,” Bonsaksen said as he got to his feet. “I just told you I’ve spent more than a lifetime in the force.”

  He crossed the room and picked up a clean cup from the tray beside the coffee machine. Lifting the cup to his nose, he sniffed loudly and swallowed a mouthful.

  “Absolutely fine,” he said ters
ely, resuming his seat.

  “You were saying?” Henrik reminded him. “You started to–”

  “As I said,” Bonsaksen broke in, lifting the cup to his mouth once more before changing his mind and putting it down again, “… it’s inevitable to have made one or two mistakes. Letting people go too easily. Maybe not putting everything into solving a case. It can’t be discounted that now and again you haven’t been able to remain as objective as you should, according to the book. All the same, Holme, it’s true that …”

  He sniffed slightly and ran his finger several times under his nose.

  “There’s nothing I can’t live with. Nothing that’s going to niggle me when I put my belongings in a box in a week’s time and trudge out of my office to step foot on the first plane to France. There’s nothing I’ve done in all these years, or nothing I haven’t done, that’s going to cost me a minute’s sleep in all the years that lie ahead. Not one single minute.”

  He emphasized the point by slamming his fist on the desk.

  “Except for this one,” he added, tapping the blue ring binder. “This has rankled like a stone in my shoe since 2004.”

  “I see. I know how exasperating it can be when an offender gets away with it.”

  “This one didn’t get away.”

  “What?”

  “He certainly didn’t get away. He was charged, tried and convicted.”

  “Then … then in that case …”

  Henrik swallowed. He could still feel a slight tenderness around his larynx, where at the beginning of December he had undergone an operation to have his Adam’s apple reduced in size. Considerably. Now he went about in high-necked sweaters or with a scarf around his neck, dreading the warmer weather to come. It was true that the operation incision was made so precisely in the spot between his neck and his chin that it was barely visible any longer, but everyone would notice the great change in his neck itself. Which had of course been the intention, when he came to think of it.

  He fiddled with the collar of his army-green sweater.

  “Hanne Wilhelmsen and I work on unsolved cases,” he said, trying to give the impression of firmness. “Cold cases. I’m afraid we can’t … and anyway, as I said earlier, we’re subject to the Police Chief and no one else.”

  “I dare say,” Kjell Bonsaksen said. “There’s probably nobody else here at headquarters with any hope of keeping any sort of control over Wilhelmsen, eh? But this case …”

  He laid his hand on the ring binder and pushed it insistently across to Henrik, who stepped back a little, as if the collection of documents scared him.

  “This has to do with an error,” the older policeman went on. “A miscarriage of justice. Or …”

  Leaning back abruptly in his chair, he fished out a half-smoked cigar from his breast pocket and stuck it into his mouth.

  “Only sucking on it,” he murmured reassuringly. “I won’t light it.”

  “A miscarriage of justice,” Henrik reiterated in a monotone. “If you mean that a wrongful conviction occurred, then the Criminal Cases Review Commission is the place to take that up.”

  “Yes, I know. If the guy had been interested in doing so, yes. The problem is…”

  Kjell Bonsaksen gave a slight groan as he stood up. He was at least twenty kilos overweight, and the cigar had obviously found its customary place at the corner of his mouth, in a tiny crevice between his lips formed by decades of habitual pressure. Henrik, who thought the cigar resembled a dry puppy turd, cast his eyes down.

  “I’ve consoled myself that he never fought back,” the soon-to-be-retired policeman said, staring out into the darkness. “For nearly twelve years now I’ve tried to placate myself with the fact that he was never willing to fight. Could anyone like that be innocent, I wonder?”

  Henrik did not reply.

  “I think …”

  Bonsaksen spat out invisible tobacco flakes without removing the cigar from his lips.

  “All the evidence pointed to him. He told an obvious lie. Two courts of law found him guilty. Bloody hell, not even the poor guy’s own defense lawyer believed him!”

  He turned to face Henrik and flung out his arms.

  “Do you understand?”

  Henrik wanted to say no. Instead he stared intently at the ring binder in front of him.

  “In fact I was the only one who doubted it,” Kjell Bonsaksen ploughed on. “I was the chief investigator in the case. Of course, that could have been a fucking advantage for the guy, that the chief investigator wasn’t entirely convinced that he was guilty of killing his wife, but–”

  “Killing his wife?”

  Henrik looked up.

  “Yes. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison for murdering his wife.”

  “So he’s …”

  Henrik did a rapid mental calculation.

  “He’s out now, then? He didn’t serve his whole sentence, did he?”

  The other man nodded and sat down again.

  “He was released after serving eight years. I know that now. Did some digging, you see, after I bumped into him recently. On New Year’s Day, in fact, at a gas station out on the E18. Completely by chance. He had lost his good looks, to put it mildly. Emaciated. Nearly bald and the few wisps of hair left on his head were totally gray. In the past, he was quite a guy. A real showoff, with a brilliant job at Statoil. Now he drives a trailer truck between Norway and Sweden and looks like it too. Pale and drawn and so chock-full of coffee that you’re knocked wide-awake just by looking at him. Absolutely unrecognizable. But his eyes, Holme …”

  He placed both strong hands on the desk and leaned forward unexpectedly.

  “They were exactly the same as that time. Absolutely identical.”

  “I see,” Henrik said meekly. “Eyes probably don’t change so much in twelve years.”

  “Yes they can. But not these ones.”

  Henrik could detect a sharp, cloying smell from the cold cigar and drew his chair even further back.

  “Do you know what my wife says is the worst thing about me after all these years in the police force?” Kjell Bonsaksen asked in deadly earnest.

  “No.”

  “That I’ve become so damned cynical. She says it’s as if I don’t believe in anybody, that I come out with objections and reexamine everything that’s said. It’s probably true. An occupational injury, that’s what it is.”

  Finally he took his cigar from the corner of his mouth and tucked it back inside his breast pocket.

  “But do you know what Bjørg-Eva thinks is the best thing to emerge from all these years?”

  Henrik shook his head energetically.

  “That I can tell – just from people’s eyes – when they’re lying.”

  Henrik sat quiet as a mouse.

  “Of course I can’t really,” Bonsaksen said. “But almost. And the problem at that time was, I saw no trace of a lie in his eyes when he said he hadn’t done it. But there was no spark behind them, sort of thing. No indignation at being unfairly treated. Just …”

  He used both hands to snatch up the ring binder and he stood it edgeways on the desk. Henrik could see that the man’s wedding ring was disappearing into his ring finger, and he recognized an equally tight Odd Fellow ring on the other hand.

  “Resignation,” Bonsaksen completed his sentence. “The guy seemed totally resigned. As if he had no energy left, in a sense. So I’ve tried to allay my concerns by telling myself that justice was up to the mark at that time. As I said, the case has just been like an irritating stone in my shoe: uncomfortable, but far from dangerous. A nuisance, but something I can live with.”

  He set the bulky ring binder down again, and yet again shoved it across the desk to Henrik Holme.

  “But not now,” he added, with a heavy sigh. “That look he gave me out there at the gas station–”

  “What’s the guy’s name?” Henrik asked merely to say something rather than through genuine interest.

  “That look told the truth, Holm
e. And then …”

  Kjell Bonsaksen got to his feet, grabbed his almost empty bag and hooked it over his right shoulder before heading for the door. The ring binder was left on Henrik Holme’s office desk, as if he had already accepted responsibility for it.

  “… then he really does qualify for the title of the most anguished soul in the country. That man lost everything. Absolutely everything, and in such a short space of time. Take a gander at the case, please. Give the man the chance I should have given him twelve years ago.”

  “What’s his name?” Henrik repeated.

  “He’s called Jonas,” Kjell Bonsaksen said as he opened the door. “Jonas Abrahamsen, and I hope to God the two of you can help him.”

  FRIDAY JANUARY 8, 2016

  “This is a gift. Despite everything. A gift.”

  Halvor Stenskar, General Manager of the health food firm VitaeBrass AS, gave a loud sigh and placed his hand over hers. She pulled back, just slowly enough to appear dismissive rather than downright rude.

  “I mean …”

  He stood up and walked to the window, where the accursed weather cast the fjord in shades of dark gray beneath a sky that seemed only slightly paler. The Nesoddland peninsula lay like an oppressive predator on the other side of the water, only just visible in the low clouds above the city of Oslo.

  November weather in January.

  “Of course suicide is a tragedy,” he said.

  It dawned on him that this was probably the fifth time he had done so since his arrival. He cleared his throat and began over again.

  “Nevertheless, suicide is a voluntary act. I’m sure it isn’t undertaken lightly. Not by anyone. Not even by Iselin. But despite all that, it is a choice, after all.”

  He turned again to face the living room. Even though the apartment was located in an eye-wateringly expensive area of Tjuvholm, it was not impressively large. Besides, there were too many items of furniture here, which made it all seem cramped. Furniture and bric-a-brac and strong colors, completely different from the strict minimalism his own wife favored. A gigantic painting above the fireplace of a sea eagle in flight was the only picture in the entire room. Otherwise there were only curios, made of ceramic and wood, of copper and wrought iron. And brass. There were objects made of brass everywhere. Admittedly, the pale-yellow metal was the key to the company’s success, but there had to be a limit as to quantity. He had counted candlesticks and arrived at a total of fourteen before he had given up. The room reminded him of a boudoir most of all, with its dark red settees, countless soft cushions and the scent of incense that was making him feel slightly queasy. Boudoir was appropriate to some extent, since two lesbians, getting on in years, had lived together here.