by Anne Holt
“Exactly. Jonas was on the scene at an extremely critical point in time. He had every reason to kill his wife. Disappointment. Rejection. Hate, perhaps, God only knows there can be powerful emotions between couples that separate. Money, too. He didn’t yet know that the separation authority had been granted, and that he wouldn’t inherit anything from Anna. No …”
He pursed his mouth and took a deep breath. Unaccustomed to having Hanne so close to him, he caught himself pushing his chair back a little.
“If Bonsaksen is right that Jonas did not kill his wife, then she must have done it herself,” he said, sounding discouraged. “And got rid of the gun post mortem, somehow. Something of a task trying to unravel that mystery. What I’d most like is to …” He tossed his pen on the desk. “… give up.”
Hanne smiled. “You never give up, Henrik. You’re made of sterner stuff. If you really have decided to find out whether Anna Abrahamsen died by her own hand, then you ought to start with her psychologist.”
She raised her hands suddenly and rolled back her chair. “But first you’re going to speak to that chapel custodian at Østre Gravlund cemetery,” she said. “Tomorrow without fail.”
MONDAY JANUARY 18, 2016
Jonas Abrahamsen had slept all through Sunday and well into the following day. At some time the previous evening his sleep had been slightly disturbed when the catheter and various monitoring devices had been removed while he watched with apathy. Someone said something about being stable, and he slipped back into a blessed, dreamless slumber.
When he awoke at half past five on Monday morning, he felt a sense of peace so unfamiliar that it made him ravenous. The hospital had little to offer at this early hour, but a night nurse had shared her packed meal with him. When the white-clad nurse in clogs left, he wolfed down everything she had given him. Then he pulled the cannula from the back of his right hand and planted his feet on the floor.
He wanted to go home.
It dawned on him that he had been driven here stark naked. The washed out pajamas they had put on him were hardly suitable for wearing outdoors. At any rate, if it was as cold outside as it had been when he lay down near the woodshed barely two days ago.
Jonas tried to walk across the floor.
His legs held. He felt weak and quite dizzy, but had no difficulty reaching the bathroom. The worst of his hunger had been allayed, and he felt an intense craving for coffee. But first of all he had to pee.
The yellow stream sang against the toilet bowl. When he straightened his back, he already felt better. The shower in the corner looked so tempting that he peeled off his pajamas and turned on the water. The scalding hot spray lashed his back like a whip. He soaped himself twice, from head to toe, and stood so long on the white tiles watching the foam disappear down the drain that his skin turned scarlet.
Putting on the used pajamas did not seem tempting, but Jonas had no choice. As he pulled them on before he was properly dry, clouds of steam made it difficult for him to breathe.
“You can’t …”
The nurse had returned.
Jonas had just emerged from the bathroom. The nurse retreated to the open door leading into the corridor, as if she feared he would take off.
“Have you yanked out your cannula?” she asked in alarm, quite unnecessarily: a thin trickle of blood still oozed from the back of his hand where he had forced it off.
“I want to go home,” Jonas said quietly. “You have to sign me out.”
“It’s far too soon, my dear. Come here, now, and I’ll give you a new cannula.”
She crossed to the bed and smacked it with enthusiasm, as if encouraging a dog to jump on to the white bedclothes.
“I’d appreciate talking to the doctor,” Jonas said in a determined voice. “Of course, I’m grateful for you taking good care of me after my … my little accident. But now I want to go home.”
The nurse’s eyes flickered. She looked worried, and Jonas tried to squeeze out a smile. The woman grew noticeably more alarmed as she walked sideways to the door.
“If you lie down, I’ll bring the doctor on duty.”
“I also need some clothes,” Jonas said, walking obediently to the bed. “To borrow, please.”
When she returned fifteen minutes later with a corpulent, completely bald doctor, Jonas had vanished. He had arrived at the hospital without a stitch, and without a single possession.
He left nothing behind either.
For once Henrik had taken a taxi.
Admittedly it was not just as cold now as it had been two days earlier, but it had started to snow. In the course of the night alone, a half-meter-thick blanket of snow had enveloped Oslo, and the biting wind forced the snow to form impassable, steep drifts all over the place. The journey in the white Mercedes had taken three quarters of an hour. On a good day Henrik could have arrived faster on foot.
The taxi set him down outside the main entrance to the Østre Gravlund cemetery in Tvetenveien. Farther along the road, an articulated truck with foreign number plates had jack-knifed, leaving half its trailer in the ditch. The cabin stretched across the traffic lane, and the taxi driver muttered a string of juicy oaths. Henrik hardly had time to pay and secure a receipt before the vehicle began to turn in order to drive back the same way it had come.
Someone had just cleared the couple of hundred meters of straight road leading up to the chapel. It would be necessary to do so again fairly soon. Henrik fished out a cap from his pocket and pulled it well down over his ears, shivering as the wind caught him from the side. He could barely see the long rows of gravestones for the whirling snow flurries. Also, some of the markers were completely buried in all the whiteness.
Henrik was already freezing by the time he reached the doors of the austere chapel, a typical sixties building. Brushing snow from his jacket, he kicked the wall with his feet and crammed the cap into his pocket again. As he made to step inside, the door opened.
“You’re punctual,” said a man in a suit with smoothed-back strands of black hair that looked as if they were glued to his scalp, one by one. “Well done in this weather!”
It crossed Henrik’s mind that his hair must be dyed, and it was also so sparse that his pink scalp was visible in narrow, straight lines between the black stripes. It made the man look like a peculiar insect. He held out his hand: it was slim, bony, and dry as dust.
“This way,” he said, leading Henrik along two corridors and into an office. “Take a seat. Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
Henrik sat down. The room was bright, neutral and showed no sign of belonging to a house of God apart from a big Bible allocated a shelf all to itself. A framed map of the graveyard hung on one wall, and apart from that, the room was fairly bare.
“It’s to do with what I mentioned on the phone, that funeral last Friday,” Henrik said with a friendly smile. “Iselin Havørn.”
“I appreciate that.”
The chapel custodian, Mauritz Bolle, had sat down on a substantial, pale-brown office chair. He made a steeple with his hands and put his elbows on the desk.
“We’ve had a lot of inquiries,” he said, nodding, as if agreeing with himself. “The press, you know. No one had been able to find out where and when the ceremony was to take place. Not until it was too late.”
He kept nodding his head.
“But my lips have been sealed. When it comes to you representatives of the police, though, that’s another matter. Another matter entirely. What can I do for you?”
Before Henrik got as far as answering, Mauritz Bolle began to speak again.
“Dare I ask what is of interest to the police? Regarding a small burial service, I mean?”
“I can’t really divulge any of that,” Henrik told him, leaning forward with a reassuring smile. “I’m sure you understand. But I’m very grateful for you agreeing to see me. Just a couple of questions.”
“Go ahead,” the custodian said, smiling with teeth so pearly white and brilliantly even the
y must have been bought at a knockdown price. “Ask away.”
“Were there many participants … er … mourners at the funeral?”
Henrik set up a new notes page on his iPhone.
“No. Only four or five people. Five, I believe?”
The custodian cocked his head in an exaggerated gesture of contemplation: with his elongated neck and sharp elbows he looked more and more like a praying mantis.
“Five?” Henrik exclaimed. “Did only five people attend Iselin Havørn’s funeral?”
“Yes. Certainly no more than that. I exchanged a few words with the funeral director and as far as I understood, they had gone to great lengths to keep it all sec … discreet. You know. With all these writings and that sort of thing. Probably not too easy for the wife. Yes, they’re all called wives these days, even in these equal-sex relationships.”
“Same-sex,” Henrik said, smiling. “So the wife was present?”
“Maria Kvam,” Mauritz Bolle said, with a nod. “Good-looking woman. Didn’t look in the slightest like …”
His hands lost their steepled pose and he put them on his lap.
“You know,” he said. “She didn’t look at all like that. Devastated, poor woman. On her way out to the burial she seemed on the point of fainting, I thought. Quite ready to drop. Not that she was weeping so terribly much, but she was pale and as I said … she was almost staggering. Anyway, it must have been someone else who made the arrangements with the funeral directors. It really must have been.”
“Why is that?” Henrik asked without glancing up from his cellphone, where he was busy making notes.
“It’s simply not done to be buried like that,” the man answered stiffly. “Not by anyone who’s fond of you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“One wreath. Just one wreath. It was grand enough and beautiful too, but the mourning ribbon was unusually lacking in … warmth? Yes. It wasn’t exactly very personal, to put it that way.”
“What did it say?”
“I don’t quite remember, but it was something about being from friends and colleagues. Nothing from the wife. And that coffin …”
He smacked his lips meaningfully and raised his eyebrows.
“What about it?”
“It’s not for me to judge,” Mauritz Bolle said, showing the flats of his hands. “It’s absolutely not for me to judge!”
“But?” Henrik gave him some encouragement when the man in the pale-brown chair pressed his lips firmly together.
“It was of the very simplest kind, to be honest. Of the type that …”
Now he was wringing his hands, before suddenly laying them on the desk in front of him. They were unusually well manicured for a man, Henrik noticed. His nails were perfectly rounded, clean and so shiny they must have nail varnish on them.
“You know,” he said after yet another pause. “There are some among us who don’t have any family or especially many friends. If anyone at all. The lonely. The extremely poor. The chronically ill. Usually in the mind, if you get my drift. They too have to be laid to rest. Then they usually use the very cheapest kind of coffin. After all, it’s the public authorities that pay in those instances.”
Henrik had no idea that there were price differences even in death.
“I see. And what kind of coffin is that, then?”
“Particleboard.”
Mauritz Bolle leaned forward to add in a whisper: “I call it cardboard, to be honest. You get them for next to nothing.”
“Which means?”
“Four, five thousand.”
Gulping, Henrik looked up from his phone.
“I see. And what do the dearest ones cost?”
“Oh, there’s really no upper limit. When your nearest and dearest sets out on their last journey, it’s normal to spend fifteen to twenty thousand. At least.”
“Is dying so expensive?” slipped out of Henrik. “After all, that coffin’s just going to be burned!”
“In this case it was going into the ground,” the custodian corrected him. “And we’re only talking about the price of the coffin now. In addition there are flowers and other decorations, the funeral programs …”
He counted on his fingers. They were really fascinatingly long.
“… and usually a performance of some kind. A soloist. Also there’s a reception of some sort of course, with food and drink and …”
He broke off by running his left hand over his greasy hair.
“I don’t think that happened in this case either. On the whole I must permit myself to say, and that only because it’s the police asking, and absolutely for that reason alone, that it was a fairly …”
Now he obviously had grounds for weighing his words with care.
“Dismal,” he declared, “it was a dismal little ceremony. I’ve been following the newspaper reports in the past few weeks, and it certainly wasn’t the case that the deceased was without means. Not the widow either. And even though there were rumors of suicide, and you can of course understand that the relatives did not exactly wish … anything extravagant, it was very striking. We were all astounded. All of us.”
He surveyed the room, as if the employees in question at Østre Gravlund cemetery were assembled there.
“But we said nothing, of course,” he added.
Henrik’s phone gave a little growl. “Sorry,” he said quickly and used his thumb to open the text message.
Checked in the database. The pills were not prescribed for Iselin. She has never had any medicines that have had to be registered. Is this of any significance? Amanda
He read the message and quick as a flash, keyed in a response.
Maybe. If I were you, I’d check if any of Iselin’s friends/fam/colleagues use anti-depr. Henrik
“… hostile,” Bolle concluded.
“What did you say?” Henrik asked: he had been lost in thought.
“I said that somebody else must have taken care of the practical arrangements for this funeral. Because if it had been my wife who had given me such a service, I would have interpreted it as hostile, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Hostile?” Henrik repeated in surprise.
“Yes. I would definitely say so. Well, I couldn’t see anything if I was dead, of course, but you can get my point. I’ve worked here at Østre Gravlund for twenty-three years and have seen most things. There can be great dignity in the smallest funeral. With a cardboard coffin and no one present apart from the clergyman and myself. Every person’s meeting with God should be prepared with the decency and the … holiness such an occasion calls for. But when you actually have family, friends and are well off on top of all that …”
Once again he smacked his lips in disapproval.
“Then I’d simply interpret it as a punishment. Of the deceased. Yes. A hostile act and a punishment.”
He flashed a smile, as if to take the edge off his words.
“But as I said, it’s not up to me to judge. And it probably wasn’t the wife who was behind it. I just can’t imagine that it was.”
He stared at Henrik for a moment, before tilting his head to one side and grimacing with his row of pearls once again.
“Or what do you think?”
It had been easier to leave the hospital than Jonas had feared. Only ten meters along the corridor he had come across an outdoor jacket and a pair of Wellington boots in a cleaner’s cupboard that was left open. A net shopping bag with three brochures for charter holidays was also hanging on a hook by the door, and there was a thermos on the floor, the contents of which he did not take any time to examine. Presumably he was helping himself to a cleaner’s belongings, and his pricking conscience had made him hesitate. When he heard someone approach in the corridor, however, he had pulled the door closed and struggled into both the jacket and boots.
The jacket was far too big, and the boots smelled foul.
The latter was particularly noticeable when he hauled himself into one of the taxis idlin
g only fifty meters from the main entrance. The driver had fortunately not managed to catch sight of his pajama trousers before Jonas was ensconced in the back seat.
Only when they arrived at the snowed-in track in Maridalen did it come to light that Jonas had no money. Following a tirade of swearwords in both Norwegian and Urdu, the driver finally realized it would be simpler to let Jonas find his way up to the house through the snow to fetch some money rather than call the police. In these road conditions it was doubtful whether they would take a trip up to Maridalen for a measly unpaid taxi fare anyway.
It was now one o’clock.
Jonas was still shivering with cold. Especially his feet. Wading through the snow with bare feet stuck inside a pair of old rubber boots had taken its toll, and the situation was not improved by the temperature in the little house having dropped to just above freezing point in his absence. He had fed the round stove in the corner before putting on his own clothes. Now at least he had an area measuring a couple of meters around the stove in which the temperature was tolerable. He had dragged a chair across and massaged his bare feet energetically for some time before pulling on his thick woolen socks and perching them on a stool only twenty centimeters from the flames.
It was a long time since he had felt so calm.
He was not happy. Not even content. Far from it – he did not feel much at all. It was liberation. He let himself be filled with the emptiness he had woken to the previous day, the great nothingness that had made it possible for him to sleep for nearly twentyfour hours at a stretch. He was still breathing more deeply and effectively than he could ever remember. The intermittent cramps, the stabbing pains in his heart, and the grumbling aches that had shifted around his body ever since Dina died, were gone.
Only the frost had settled deep inside him.
He had kept the stove going for several hours and put on two woolen sweaters, one on top of the other. All the same it was only here his teeth did not chatter, really close to the dancing flames he could make out through the half-open air vent in the stove door.
