by Anne Holt
That psychiatrist could not possibly have had any children.
He could never have known the joy of holding a newborn in his arms for the very first time, only seconds old and so beautiful that the world would never be the same again. He could never have felt the wafting fragrance of a newly bathed one-year-old in pajamas. That bloody doctor had never held his dearest, most precious person in his arms as the light in her eyes faded and she breathed her last.
The doctor was wrong. Guilt about Dina’s death did not prevent Jonas from living.
Grief at Dina’s death was the only thing that made it worthwhile for him to stay alive.
Sorrow, and those fleeting moments when he felt blessedly guilt-free. They were what gave Jonas Abrahamsen the strength to live yet another day, yet another month and perhaps yet another year: eternal sorrow and the occasional, sporadic glimmer of intense hatred.
SATURDAY JANUARY 9, 2016
The murder of Anna Abrahamsen, née Hansen, had been handled in exemplary fashion by the police, prosecution service and courts. Henrik Holme had already arrived at that conclusion on first reading the case notes the night before last. Nevertheless, the stark reflection in Hanne Wilhelmsen’s living room windows had given him an idea that made him take the thick ring binder home with him for the weekend.
Now it was four o’clock in the afternoon, and he had been through the almost five hundred pages again, far more thoroughly this time. Considering that the case seemed so conclusive, and the court case had not taken more than three days in each instance, it was impressively well documented.
Anna was killed on New Year’s Eve, 2003.
It was difficult to establish with any precision whether she had died before or after midnight, and she was not found until the morning of New Year’s Day. All the same, the forensics team had decided it was unlikely that she had managed to see anything of the New Year. Late evening, in other words, and since there are always a lot of people who jump the gun with fireworks, it was not difficult to understand how the sound of a pistol shot behind closed doors could be drowned out by all the noise.
It turned out that the murder weapon had probably been her own.
Anna Abrahamsen had been an enthusiastic competitive markswoman before her only daughter died in a tragic accident. That had occurred almost exactly two years before Anna herself was killed. This scrap of information had escaped Henrik’s attention on Thursday, as the accident was only mentioned in passing in the papers pertaining to the criminal proceedings. First in a report from the Oslo Pistol Club, where they gave an account of the deceased’s relationship to the club. It had lasted from her early teenage years, and Anna had served two periods on their committee. When her daughter died, she dropped all activities. Not until four months prior to her own homicide had Anna turned up again for the occasional training session.
She had totally stopped taking part in competitions.
The second time the child was mentioned was in the actual court case.
Defense counsel had made subsidiary reference to the tragic death as a mitigating circumstance. The judge had alluded to this briefly before rejecting it.
Anna Abrahamsen died as the result of a shot in the head.
It had been fired at close range, without killing her immediately. The ammunition was the most common in the world, a 9-millimeter Parabellum. She herself had four boxes of such cartridges, stored strictly in accordance with regulations. They belonged to a Glock 17 that she owned in addition to three other pistols and a saloon rifle. They were all in their normal places, in a locked cabinet as laid down by the rules. Apart from the Glock, which was missing and never subsequently found.
The police had tried to find bullets fired by the gun at the firing range she had visited that same day, in order to conduct a ballistic comparison. This had turned out to be impossible for countless reasons. So it was far from certain that Anna’s own Glock had been the murder weapon, but it seemed likely.
Only two people knew where the keys to the gun cabinet and the locked ammunition were kept.
Anna herself, and Jonas.
Henrik had taken all the documents from the ring binder and sorted them according to his own system. The judgments from the District Court and the Court of Appeal lay on the far right of the coffee table. All the interviews conducted lay stacked beside them. Five were of Jonas Abrahamsen, all carried out by the then Chief Inspector Kjell Bonsaksen. A total of eleven friends, neighbors and colleagues of both spouses were also questioned in the course of the weeks and months after the homicide, in addition to Anna’s sister Benedicte. Their parents were dead, and no other family members survived. In addition there were several special reports made by police officers who had talked to other neighbors, including a group of guests at a New Year party close by the Abrahamsen house. The party had lasted until the opening notes of the first Strauss waltz at the New Year Concert in Vienna chased the staggering guests home. One of the partygoers had apparently been in possession of a profoundly interesting piece of evidence.
It was included on top of the bundle of interviews and Henrik Holme, with arm outstretched, held a photocopy of it out in front of him.
The guests at Anna’s neighbor’s house had been the impatient sort and had already streamed out on to the terrace an hour or so before midnight. One of them, a young man who later ended up at Accident & Emergency with a broken arm after tumbling down from that same terrace, was able the next day, now considerably more sober, to show the police a photograph he had taken with his cellphone.
The display gave the time as 22.58.
The picture was pretty indistinct.
In the first place, the weather was far from the best. Admittedly, the low clouds had cleared slightly during the course of New Year’s Eve, but light drizzle and a suspicion of mist filled the air. A young woman in the center of the photo was waving a gigantic sparkler that made the rest of the picture even darker than it otherwise would have been. To make matters worse, the photographer was paralytic.
Nevertheless, in this not-entirely-ideal photograph, you could still see a garden lamp just above and behind the woman’s right shoulder. It was later identified as part of the lighting in the driveway leading to Anna Abrahamsen’s villa. Since the girl in the picture had tilted her head sideways, so much so that it almost looked as if she was about to topple over, a figure was visible beneath the lamp. A man, it looked like, on his way up from the brick building in the little cul-de-sac in Nordberg.
Jonas Abrahamsen, in fact, as closer analysis of the photograph demonstrated.
It was a shame, Henrik thought, as he replaced the picture on the table, that the man had commenced his very first police statement with a lie. Bonsaksen had not managed anything more than a run-through the introductory caution before Jonas explained that he had not set foot anywhere near Stugguveien 2B since 28 December.
In addition to all the documents from 2004, Kjell Bonsaksen had included a summary of the case as he saw it. Henrik had read this twice already, but snatched up the bundle on the far left of the coffee table and headed into the kitchen. He preferred to work at the little dining table beneath the window with its view of street life below, but the table was too small to hold all these documents. Now he poured tea into a big cup already sitting there, before lighting the candle in a Christmas candlestick his mother had brought a few weeks ago. He should have packed it away last weekend, but he liked the jolly Santa Claus who sat on the sledge with the candle placed inside. He offered some kind of company.
Henrik read the document for a third time.
Anna and Jonas’s marriage had completely broken down before the homicide took place. Only three days earlier Jonas had picked up the last of his belongings. The separation application had been signed that autumn, and Jonas’s new address for the last two months had been a temporary bedsit in Grünerløkka.
Marriage on the rocks.
Check, Henrik mumbled.
Anna Abrahamsen had sole ownership of the
house, a cottage in Hemsedal and part-share of a smallholding outside Arendal that they used as a summer house.
Sole ownership of almost everything. The house was her childhood home, and her parents had given her and her sister each a generous sum of money when they sold the family business. With conditions attached, naturally, such as sole ownership. Following a divorce, Jonas would be left high and dry, in his mid-thirties. He could not have known that he would also be disinherited if Anna died. Judicial authorization for the separation had apparently been granted as early as 28 December. It had reached Anna and was found in a kitchen drawer in the course of the investigation. Jonas’s copy, on the other hand, had gone astray in the slow delivery of Christmas mail and did not turn up until he was in custody. The motive held water, then; it was about money, a story as old as time itself.
Check, Henrik said. Louder this time.
Only a few days after the murder, during examination of the couple’s finances, the police had discovered that Jonas had siphoned money from a joint savings account on more than one occasion. In the course of the last two months he had transferred a total of 200,000 kroner to a local bank located in Western Norway, in a small village where neither of them had ever set foot.
There was little to indicate that Anna had known about these transactions. DnB NOR, the bank they normally used, would also have complained about a lack of paperwork if she had not sanctioned it all, as the conditions of the joint account specified.
So, Jonas had misappropriated money from his wife.
Moreover, he had lied to the police as soon as he opened his mouth.
Check and check and double check, Henrik said, sounding discouraged.
Jonas Abrahamsen had more than enough reason to wish his wife dead. He was a thief into the bargain. Also, he had been present at the crime scene when the homicide took place, and later refused to admit to that until proof was thrown on the table in front of him.
His defense lawyer had definitely been faced with quite a challenge.
Henrik drank some of the boiling hot tea. It had already grown dark outside. He was not very fond of winter, at least not here in the big city. Not primarily because of the darkness – that could actually be pleasant, in fact – but because the endless slush and rain made walking so disagreeable.
Henrik Holme was a walker.
He walked up and down the streets and in the forest. He walked to go to places and in order to think. Most of all he walked because he liked to walk. To use his body. He had never been fond of ball games and running made his knees sore. His slim figure, bottle-shaped shoulders and pale complexion, even in the six months of summer, all contributed to give an impression of a man who spent hardly any time outdoors. Just as most people mistook most things about Henrik Holme, neither did they appreciate that he was actually in good shape. In excellent shape, and very careful about using sunscreen because his mother had always felt that his skin was delicate.
He also walked in winter, but spring was nevertheless the best time of year, as far as he was concerned. He never walked as much as he did in spring. He loved the spring. He could clean the windows then, he thought, just as his mother always did as soon as the low March sun revealed their true condition. He was annoyed by his own windows, which even in the dark were obviously dirty. They never looked good in winter, no matter how much he rubbed and polished. Either the cold temperatures drew frost roses with the cleaning water, or else it rained outside and everything became speckled again almost at once.
All the same, he had noticed yesterday that the recently cleaned windows in Hanne’s apartment had been sparkling. Not only were they shiny and the reflection of the standard lamp disturbingly distinct, but there had also been a faint odor in the room that Henrik had not been able to identify at first. Only when his thoughts strayed to how clean and tidy it had been in Anna Abrahamsen’s house on the day she was murdered had he realized that Hanne’s apartment smelled of vinegar water.
The rinsing water used after window-cleaning the old-fashioned way.
Only in one place in the crime scene report was there any mention of Anna’s house seeming thoroughly cleaned. No one had seen the point of it, neither in one direction nor another. The report writer had simply made passing reference matter-of-factly in his attempts to write an objective description of what it looked like inside Stugguveien 2B.
But there were plenty of photographs.
Most of them were of the bathroom, of course, where she had been found. In the case file, there were pictures of the deceased before she was moved and also of the room afterward: close-ups and wide-angle photographs in which almost the whole of the bathroom was included.
Naturally, it was not particularly tidy in there.
But the remaining rooms looked as if they were about to participate in an interior design competition. The house was attractive. Inviting, as it usually says in that kind of article in weekend magazines. The house seemed large for only two people, but after all they’d had completely different plans for how their lives and family would turn out. The furniture was appealing and everything was well matched, but Henrik Holme did not know very much about furnishings. He did not recognize any items from IKEA, anyway, though he was there fairly often. They had cheap candles, good meatballs, and it took exactly an hour and a half to walk there.
It bothered him that everything was so tidy inside Anna’s house.
However, it had not bothered any of the investigators in the late winter of 2004.
No one kept things so tidy all the time, Henrik Holme reflected as he stood up. Not even him, and he was very particular about it and on his own to boot. As soon as he had finished the Friday cleaning, suddenly a dirty cup appeared here and a newspaper was tossed aside there.
He returned to the living room, teacup in hand. He stood at the window and looked out at the street through the grimy windows. The serried ranks of Christmas stars shed their pale light on the street all the way along Markveien. They had hung there ever since November and the season seemed to extend with every year that passed.
He noticed his cactus was in need of water. It sat on the window ledge and had survived for nearly three years now. He saw that the soil was so dry that it had shrunk from the sides of the pot.
There had been no flowers in Anna’s house either. No plants. No Christmas stars or centerpieces of the type almost everyone had on display during the festive season. In fact, there had been nothing reminiscent of Christmas in the house. No Christmas tree or angels, Advent candles or star in the window.
She could have celebrated Christmas at someone else’s house. When he thought about it, he knew that this could not be right. In Bonsaksen’s summary of the case it had emerged that Anna had spent Christmas at home alone. On Christmas Eve, just before the Sølvguttene boys’ choir concert was shown on TV, her neighbor had seen her returning home from something or other. And on Boxing Day she had been spotted up at the garbage bins disposing of a bag of rubbish and an old rucksack. On the morning of New Year’s Eve, in fact, her neighbor had spoken to her when she was on her way up the driveway in her car.
The very last person who had seen her alive was her sister, elder by seven years, Benedicte. She had called in to see Anna on New Year’s Eve around half past five to wish her Happy New Year before she headed off to a party. Anna was also invited, but she had turned down the invitation.
All of a sudden, Henrik put down his cup and turned to the coffee table. He grabbed the bundle of photographs and began to flick through them. There. Photos of the kitchen. Just as perfect and immaculate as the rest of the house. He could see the fridge in the left corner. An immaculate, white door. Not a single magnet, no souvenirs or children’s drawings or Christmas cards with pictures of children wearing pixie hoods.
He simply could not get it to make sense. Of course the lack of Christmas spirit could have something to do with her daughter’s death. But after all, the accident had happened two years before these pictures were taken.
Henrik would have liked to have a picture of the opened fridge. He had looked through the sheaf of papers and knew it was no use looking for one. Nevertheless he browsed through everything one last time.
If the white, shiny fridge matched the rest of the house, it would be virtually empty.
The house actually looked as if the occupant was about to move out. Or to be more precise, as if she intended to travel somewhere, quite soon and for some considerable length of time.
There was absolutely nothing to that effect in Kjell Bonsaksen’s cumbersome ring binder.
In not a single instance in all the more than five hundred pages of exemplary police work was there any mention whatsoever that the victim’s house seemed so obviously scoured clean for someone who lived alone at home, despite no indication that the dead woman had intended to leave.
That specific point was really impossible to apprehend.
“What are you watching?”
“The debate on NRK.”
“On a Saturday night?” Nefis asked, bewildered, stopping short in the middle of the room.
“Recording,” Hanne said. “I didn’t manage to see it on Thursday. Pizza?”
“Yes please,” Nefis answered, plumping down beside Hanne on the enormous settee. “What are they discussing?”
“Themselves.”
“What?”
“They’re discussing the power of the media. To what extent the media witch hunt Iselin Havørn was exposed to drove her to take her own life.”
“Glory be,” Nefis murmured as she grabbed a slice of pizza. “If anything good is ever to come out of a suicide, then it might as well be this time. And hopefully we’ll not hear any more either from or about that woman.”
