In Dust and Ashes

by Anne Holt

  Henrik nodded. He had obtained what he had come here for. And a bit more besides. He felt unsteady when he rose from the deep armchair, and pain was stabbing at the small of his back. He glanced hurriedly at the clock.

  “Many thanks,” he said, lifting the kitchen roll from the table, where he had left it neatly folded. “I’m very grateful you took the time to see me. And that you didn’t make a fuss about …”

  He hesitated. It was probably stupid to remind her that she had paid unusually scant attention to her duty to keep Anna Abrahamsen’s mental state to herself.

  “My duty of confidentiality?” Herdis Brattbakk said, with a smile. She had also stood up now. “Sooner or later you’d probably have got me released from that anyway. As I said, I’m too old to wait for that kind of bureaucracy. But may I ask …”

  Approaching him, she placed a warm hand on his arm. Her breath smelled faintly of garlic and peppermint as she leaned in closer.

  “Anna never got as far as taking her own life,” she said in almost a whisper. “She was murdered. And the case is really old now. Dare I ask why a man like you has started digging into this again?”

  Her eyes were sparkling. Henrik felt faint.

  “Because,” he began, and had to take a step back. “Because …”

  Herdis Brattbakk released his arm.

  “Unfortunately I’m not at liberty to tell you,” he said, rapidly backtracking. “But thanks for your kindness. It’s been an extremely useful conversation.”

  Then he made a dash for the door, racing downstairs from the sixth floor, out the main exit from the beautiful apartment block in Skillebekk and on out into the wintry weather. He went on running along the sidewalk, cutting diagonally across roads jammed with honking cars and ill-tempered drivers. He jogged along the icy streets en route to Kruses gate, risking life and limb, until it suddenly dawned on him that he was no longer on speaking terms with Hanne Wilhelmsen.

  And came to an abrupt halt.

  “Hanne Wilhelmsen here,” Hanne said as cheerfully as she could when the man at the other end had introduced himself. “From Oslo police. I’m in charge of the officer you spoke to yesterday, Henrik Holme.”

  “Yes, I see. Hello.”

  “Thanks for being so forthcoming with your answers to my officer’s questions. We really appreciate cooperation from the public.”

  “It’s the least I could do. All the same, I have to admit I couldn’t quite see what the young man was after. We weren’t exactly talking about any kind of crime. It was all actually so odd that I mentioned it to the pastor here, his name is–”

  “Just to be brief,” Hanne cut in. “The last thing I want is to take up too much of your time. We actually have just one more question, and then we’ll leave Østre Gravlund in peace from the police for all eternity.”

  “Unless a body turns up,” the chapel custodian said, laughing heartily before becoming serious again in short order. “I’d feel more comfortable if you spoke directly to the pastor. He was slightly concerned about–”

  “I’m just wondering one thing,” Hanne hurried to say. “And that is which company was responsible for Iselin Havørn’s funeral. It’s a shame to bother the pastor with such a minor detail.”

  She heard a door open and close in the background, and the chapel custodian’s voice dropped a notch.

  “I really can’t,” he began, speaking in almost a whisper. “The pastor, he says–”

  “Was it Jølstad?” Hanne asked, staking everything on one card.

  The minuscule pause before the man hung up was all the confirmation she needed. Hanne Wilhelmsen had never had a particular talent for calculating probabilities. Intuition and deduction were her forte. However, life had taught her that what was probable was not always right, but throwing out the name of by far the largest funeral directors in Norway turned out to have been a sensible ploy.

  The chapel custodian’s hesitation had given her the confirmation she required.

  Jølstad had six offices in Oslo. The ones nearest the apartment in Tjuvholm must be Smestad and Kirkeveien. On the other hand, the funeral had taken place at the Østre Gravlund cemetery, on the opposite side of the city. Of course, there could be any number of reasons for choosing a graveyard far from home, with family connections being one of them. All the same Hanne reckoned that the need for anonymity had been the deciding factor. They had gone to great lengths to avoid the press, and Østre Gravlund was huge, impersonal and surrounded by traffic interchanges. It was also one of only two graveyards in Oslo where you could be buried no matter where in Oslo you lived. If you were to make a guess based on Iselin Havørn’s sizable ego, most people would have put their money on Vår Frelsers graveyard in the city center. That was probably what the journalists had reckoned, the location where she would have shared eternal rest with Henrik Ibsen and other distinguished personages.

  Jølstad had branches in Abildsø, Holtet, Grefsen and Kalbakken, none of them particularly close to the Østre Gravlund cemetery, but they were closer than the others.

  “Eeny meeny,” Hanne said sotto voce before calling the branch in Holtet.

  A friendly, bright and probably extremely young female voice answered at once.

  “Hello,” Hanne said mildly. “My name is Astri Selbekk.”

  Giving a false name came automatically, though she did not quite understand why. Fortunately she had a withheld number, and anyway it would entail a convoluted rigmarole to discover her true identity via Telenor.

  If anyone were to go to the bother.

  “My cousin has just buried her wife,” she said, and found no difficulty sounding sympathetic. “Last week. Last Friday. And I just have one question in that regard, if it’s possible to–”

  “Unfortunately we can’t answer third party inquiries about forthcoming or past funeral arrangements,” the woman interrupted her, no longer quite so friendly.

  “But you see,” Hanne said, lowering her voice to a confidential tone. “My cousin has had a terrible time, understandably, her wife was Iselin Havørn, you know, and only today she’s discovered that she’s lost her Filofax.”

  “Her Filofax?”

  “Yes, it’s a diary. A calendar. An appointment book, if you like. The sort of thing you …”

  Hanne broke off for a moment to avoid sounding too upset.

  “It was something we used in the past. And that some people still use. Losing it is like losing your … cellphone.”

  Yet another pause. The woman at the other end said nothing.

  “Even worse,” Hanne added. “It’s not linked to iCloud, so it’s impossible to restore it. And when I managed to tear her away from her grief for a moment or two, she thought she might have left it behind at the funeral.”

  Hanne gave a silent oath and grimaced at her own overkill.

  “How awful,” the woman said. “Losing something like that, I mean. Just a second.”

  The telephone went dead. Completely dead. No music while you wait. Hanne took the phone from her ear and looked at it. The call had not been disconnected.

  “Hello?”

  Still silence.

  “Apologies,” the voice returned at last. “I just had to do some checking. You’ve come to the wrong branch, you see. Maria Kvam … that’s your cousin, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “She was at Abildsø. I can give you the number if–”

  “No thanks. I’m sitting with your home page in front of me. Thanks very much for your help. Have a nice day.”

  Hanne hung up. She had found exactly what she was looking for.

  For almost a fortnight she had believed Iselin Havørn was the person she had to examine more closely. For thirteen days she had studied a life she only knew through the Internet, a woman she knew only as an Islamophobe and an eccentric.

  Hanne may not have been personally harmed by having spent two years of her life scrutinizing extremism, as Henrik had hinted. Nevertheless it struck her that she had beco
me a bit narrow-minded as a result, while she rolled out to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

  Iselin Havørn had not merely been Tyrfing. Of course not, Hanne thought, really berating herself now. She had also been a wife, a friend and a businesswoman. Maybe she had elderly parents. She might have siblings as well, even though the unimpressive death notice had not mentioned any other relatives apart from Maria. Iselin was a rounded human being. She could have acquired enemies in areas other than the Internet and entirely different adversaries from the ones she herself described so contemptuously as the multicultural mafia.

  And they could be far closer to her, of course.

  Hanne sat watching the kettle boil.

  Maria Kvam had made arrangements for the ceremony at which Iselin Havørn had been laid to rest. In a casket the chapel custodian had called a cardboard box, the cheapest possible. It was Maria who had decided that Iselin should be lowered into the earth, even though she must have known this was in direct opposition to the deceased’s wishes. Maria had not even gone to the expense of a floral tribute for her wife of more than eight years.

  The kettle shone with a blue light and gave off a little peep. Hanne picked out a teabag and dropped it into a cup before pouring in some water.

  Hostile treatment was what Mauritz Bolle had called Maria’s behavior.

  Hanne sat lost in thought until her cup was empty.

  Maybe Maria Kvam was the person she should take a closer look at, not Iselin Havørn or the racist blogger, Tyrfing.

  If only Henrik had been here, Hanne thought, as she trundled back to her home office.

  A long strip of gray paper was festooned around Henrik Holme’s tiny living room. It ran from wall to wall, divided in two along a thick line drawn with a broad marker pen. Here and there along the line, yellow Post-it notes and printouts were attached, as well as a few pictures and individual copies of interviews. Henrik himself stood in the middle of the room studying it all and chewing a pen.

  The time line began on December 28, 2003, the point when Jonas had initially claimed to be the last time he saw Anna alive. It ended when court proceedings were initiated against him in July 2004. Since very little had happened from December 28 until New Year’s Eve, and from January 4 until summer, these periods were compressed into fifty centimeters on either side of the preeminent New Year’s Eve.

  Henrik had not dared do this in his office. He was reluctant to risk having the Superintendent discover that the statistical work had only taken a few hours, and that Henrik was now spending all his time working on Bonsaksen’s blue ring binder.

  The time line looked like a gigantic children’s drawing of a centipede. Its head was the killer indictment, and the tail a picture of Jonas Henrik had taped to the gray paper.

  The interesting part of the centipede lay in the middle.

  At 10.30 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, the neighbor, who was later in the day to have a house full of guests in party mood, exchanged a few words with Anna. She was seated in her car, on the way up their shared drive. The neighbor had signaled that he wanted to talk to her to give her warning of the forthcoming party. Anna rolled down the window and seemed perfectly normal during their brief conversation. Which meant reserved, serious and polite, as the neighbor put it. Then she drove up to the garbage bins, where she had left the car engine running for the few seconds it took her to dispose of something in the large, communal containers.

  The timing agreed with the statement from the Oslo Pistol Club.

  At 11.00 a group of old competitive marksmen held their annual New Year get-together at Ekeberg. It came as a surprise to most of them when Anna turned up. Admittedly, she had just resumed shooting earlier that autumn, but she had not shown any interest in returning to their social scene. Quite the opposite – she had firmly turned down a couple of friendly invitations.

  She had shown no interest in chatting on New Year’s Eve either. An introductory, informal competition was the traditional start to the meeting, with a bottle of champagne and a paper crown as the prize. After that their guns were put away and the subsequent fairly boozy bottle party lasted until the participants wended their way onward to their own New Year parties.

  Anna only wanted to fire a few shots.

  She had completed five rounds before she put her Glock 17 back in its regular case and left. The club chairman, who had written the statement, had bumped into her on the way out and tried to persuade her to stay. She seemed down and very different from the time when she competed and they had known each other well. On the other hand, she had been like that all through the autumn, he wrote. When her daughter died, she had been really ‘wired’, as he described it. She had wanted company all the time. Both he and several others from the club had visited her a lot. As 2002 progressed, it had tailed off, and Anna had become increasingly withdrawn. When she appeared at the Løvenskioldbanen firing range in September 2003, he had not seen her for at least a year. She seemed distant then and would hardly talk to anyone about anything other than the purely practical with regard to the shooting practice.

  It was as if it had finally dawned on her that Dina was dead, Henrik read aloud to himself from the report. This certainly supported what Herdis Brattbakk had told him earlier that day.

  Henrik would have to extend the time line.

  With military precision, he cut off a meter of gray paper and fixed it behind the centipede’s tail – it ended up at a ninetydegree angle, jutting out to the next wall. He bit the lid off a marker pen and drew the mid-line all the way back to autumn 2001.

  Monday December 3, he jotted down after checking the papers.

  Dina dies.

  He had searched for the case in the archives without finding anything of note. It should have come up on the computer system. Even though the police had struggled terribly to digitize their records, most of them should have been transferred systematically as late as 2001. Judging by the sparse report of the accident in the criminal records, no crime had been committed. An accident, no less, a tragic chance encounter when the child was killed by a car while her father sorted through that day’s Christmas post at the mailbox. It seemed that the case had been left lying somewhere without being entered into the digital archives.

  It probably wasn’t important enough, Henrik thought, rubbing his forehead; the wretched case had been dropped because there was “no evidence of criminal conduct”.

  Just a dead child.

  Above the date of Dina’s death, and through the entire ensuing autumn, he wrote: Cheerful. Easy-going. Full of fun. Sociable. Lively. Self-deprecating. Super saleswoman.

  These were all characteristics he had found in the documents in which Anna Abrahamsen was described by colleagues and friends, by her sister and by the chairman of the Oslo Pistol Club. She had quite simply been a woman people liked. Admired, even, for her approachable manner and her capacity for work. When Dina was born, she had taken only three months’ maternity leave. She preferred working to staying at home, and Jonas had loved the idea of being a full-time Dad for nine months. Very soon afterward, Anna had been promoted to the post of sales manager in Bilia. On this point Bonsaksen’s thorough ring binder also agreed with the psychologist’s account.

  Henrik pictured the family of three in his mind’s eye. Attractive. Successful. Affluent. A perfect little family. If such a thing existed.

  He drew back across the room to take in the whole time line. It struck him that Jonas and Anna had reacted to the calamity in totally different ways. He went back and began to write above the mid-line: In shock. Withdrawn. Weeping. Lost weight. Rejected friends. Deep depression.

  That was how Jonas was described in the documents.

  Below the line he wrote: Sought contact, clinging, sought comfort, became religious, drank too much.

  This was Anna following her daughter’s death.

  Henrik knew little about grief. However, he did know a lot about loneliness. He had experienced pain and despair over always being the outsider, and he wou
ld prefer to forget his teenage years. Life had not always landed butter-side-up.

  But he did not complain.

  At least not now. When, as an eight-year-old, he had come home from school in his stocking soles with his schoolbag turned inside out and a disgusting aftertaste of dog shit in his mouth, he had promised himself he would be a policeman. It became a goal that kept his spirits up throughout a school career he had later drawn a mental line under. Although his exam results were so outstanding that they would have enabled him to enter medical studies after high school, the physical entrance requirements for Police College had almost cost him his childhood dream. Hard work and iron discipline had got him in all the same.

  He was not only a policeman but also an exceptionally good policeman. He enjoyed it. He had his own little apartment. He had his mother, who could admittedly be a persistent nuisance at times, but who loved him so dearly that it was almost enough.

  He had that lovely, odd family in Kruses gate – if he could make friends with Hanne again. He probably could.

  Henrik Holme was content with his life and knew little about real sorrow.

  Sorrow such as this, he thought as he read the descriptions of Anna and Jonas over again.

  Henrik could not imagine having his own children.

  If it had been his child who had come home with his mouth full of dog shit, he would have been raging. He would have found the tormentors, shouted at them, complained to the school, informed the parents, reported them to the Child Welfare Service. To the police. Something along those lines, anyway: he would have been furious.

  He would not have dumped the youngster in the bathtub and made hot chocolate with cream and put on a video. He would not have whispered to his child that he would have to take a roundabout route back from school, keep his head down, and maybe they would go to the circus at the weekend. Henrik Holme would most certainly not have told his son that it would have to stay between them, his Mum and him, and that Dad probably wouldn’t want to hear about all this tiresome stuff.

  He would not have let it happen again, time after time.