by Anne Holt
She glanced at the clock.
“I think you should go now,” she said firmly. “Kari Thue’s been struck dumb ever since Iselin died. Not a single blog post, no comments anywhere. I’ll bet she’s sitting at home wallowing in grief. Maybe Dag Badminton’s right, that there was something going on between them.”
“Beddington,” Henrik quickly corrected her.
“Whatever. Pay the woman a visit. Try her home address first. Gain some impression. We’ve got masses of information about Tyrfing. Find out as much as you can about Iselin.”
He rose obediently and headed for the door.
“Please,” Hanne added swiftly to his retreating back. “Of course, I really did mean to say please!”
As he noticed she was smiling broadly, he decided against slamming the door.
The way he had done on Monday.
Killing a child wasn’t easy.
It was probably extremely simple. When Jonas had decided what he had to do, in a hospital bed only five days before, he had deliberately avoided thinking it all through. His energy had dissipated once he had secured the youngster. Taken her from the kindergarten without any immediate alarm being raised. Getting a slight head start, returning to the little house on the edge of the forest. Locking the doors. The plan’s critical phase was the actual kidnapping: there were any number of methods of ensuring that a three-year-old girl weighing less than fifteen kilos would never see her family again. As he had not bothered considering what happened next, he had largely reached his goal. If only he could succeed in taking the final, unavoidable step.
It ought to be simple.
Hedda had eaten her dinner.
Fish fingers and mashed potato from a Toro packet, Dina’s favorite meal. The three-year-old on the other side of the table wolfed it all down. Last night, while Hedda was drawing pictures, he had not noticed that she was a southpaw too. Like Dina. Now she was sitting with the spoon in her left hand, about to attack fish finger number five. He had sliced them up into suitable pieces, mixed them into the mashed potato, and offered her ketchup.
She wanted that as well.
He smiled when she looked up from her food. Hedda smiled back. She smacked the spoon into the ketchup to make it splash.
“You mustn’t do that,” Jonas said. “You’re making a mess of my kitchen.”
The spoon slapped into the ketchup again.
Holding out both hands, Jonas took a firm grip of Hedda’s left wrist and wrested the spoon from her.
“Now I think you must be full up,” he said, getting to his feet. “Do you want to draw?”
“Watch kids’ TV.”
“That hasn’t started yet. In an hour or so you can watch it.”
When Dina was little, children’s TV had started at six o’clock. He had no idea whether that was still the case.
“Netfix?” Hedda asked, canting her head.
“I don’t have Netflix. But we can play picture lotto.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s fun.”
When he had moved in, he had found a box of books, toys and board games left behind by the previous tenant. It was still inside the store cupboard beside the bedroom. He stood up and cleared the plates and cutlery from the table.
Even though the curtains were closed at the window overlooking the yard, Jonas detected a movement at the corner of his eye as he approached the kitchen sink. Quick as a flash, he put down the plates and crept up to the window. He used his finger to open a chink between the window frame and the curtain.
Someone was approaching through the trees, on the path stretching from the house for a couple of hundred meters to the road, where Guttorm had lost his way.
It was his neighbor. The one who, according to the nurse, had found him last Saturday. She was barely a hundred meters away now, and she was carrying something. A gray dog with a curly tail scampered around her feet in the deep snow.
Jonas scanned the room. He opened the kitchen drawer, where everything lay ready. Hedda was still sitting on the kitchen chair, an expectant look on her ketchup-splattered face.
“Pictotto,” she said, with a watchful smile.
Kari Thue looked as if she had not eaten for quite a long time.
For years, in fact.
She had barely opened the door more than thirty centimeters. Nevertheless Henrik could see all of her. Middling height, with shoulders so angular they looked as if they could cut right through the gray cotton sweater at any moment. She was flat chested and slightly stooped, and her huge eyes dominated a face that could have belonged to a woman at least ten years older. Henrik had seen Kari Thue frequently on TV, but it was obvious she spent a long time in make-up prior to broadcast.
She was not very bonny, as his mother would have said.
But her hair was lovely. Chestnut brown and in all likelihood professionally colored, with thick, soft locks that reached far down her back.
Struggling with severe pangs of guilt, Henrik had identified himself as a police officer. However, Kari Thue was a woman who knew her rights. With bells on.
“No,” she said for the third time. “You can’t come in, and I’ve no interest whatsoever in talking to you. As far as I’ve understood, Iselin’s death was not a crime of any kind.”
She made to close the door. Henrik resisted the temptation to shove his foot into the gap.
“What if it was, though?”
The door stopped with a ten-centimeter opening left. “What did you say?”
Henrik did not answer. Simply waited. The door slid open.
“Did someone help Iselin to commit suicide, is that what you mean?”
Her big eyes grew even larger. She reminded him increasingly of a Japanese manga drawing – if it hadn’t been for all the wrinkles.
Henrik shrugged.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” he told her, trying to seem disconcerted. That was easy in his case.
“But listen,” he said, turning up his palms in a gesture of resignation and surrender, “I’m just a young, inexperienced policeman–”
“You solved the May 17 case in 2014,” she broke in. “Along with Hanne Wilhelmsen. Not exactly inexperienced.”
“I’m a young policeman,” he began over again. “I’ve been given an assignment by a senior officer. And that was, to speak to you. If you could just let me ask you a couple of questions, then I’ll avoid getting a bucket-load of abuse when I go back to … back.”
“I’ve nothing to contribute,” she said bluntly, but at least the door was open farther than it had been. “What sort … what sort of questions are we talking about?”
Henrik’s eyes darted to both sides of the staircase. The elevator pinged on the floor below. Scratching the back of his head, he pulled a face.
“Could I come inside?”
“No.”
“How did you get to know Iselin Havørn?” he rushed to ask when he saw she was about to close the door again; it felt like fighting a duel with a door.
“Through Benedicte. She’s a childhood friend of my older brother.”
“Benedicte?”
Henrik was so dumbfounded that he forgot to activate the recorder on his iPhone.
“Yes. Or Maria, you know. Maria Kvam. She was christened Benedicte Maria, but Iselin couldn’t stand the name she went under when they first met. So it became Maria. I’ve never become entirely used to it.”
For the first time the suggestion of a smile crossed her face.
“I knew her as Benedicte Hansen until 2002. Then she married Roar and became Benedicte Kvam. Now she’s called Maria Kvam.”
The smile vanished just as quickly as it had come. “A psychiatrist would probably have something to say about that name-changing quest of hers.”
It was as if a complicated clock movement began to tick inside Henrik’s head, creaking and sluggish. He was so confused that he forgot to breathe, and he stood on tiptoe, knocking his heels together.
“But now you’ll have to
leave,” Kari Thue said.
“Were you lovers? You and Iselin?”
She stiffened. Stared at him. He stared back. Refusing to relinquish contact with those eyes of hers, those extraordinarily immense orifices that now looked as if you could go for a swim in their blue pools. They stood like that, eyes locked together, hers increasingly moist, until all of a sudden she opened the door and slapped him hard across the face.
“Scumbag,” she hissed, slamming the door shut with a bang that reverberated off the gray concrete walls of the stairwell.
Maria Kvam had at one time been called Benedicte Hansen.
His cheek smarted as if stung by an enormous wasp. He rubbed it gingerly as he stared at the shabby front door with its peeling brown paint.
Anna Abrahamsen’s sister, who had visited her six hours before she died, and found her dead body twelve hours later, was also called Benedicte Hansen.
They were both born in 1961, he recalled, and the clock inside his brain stopped dead.
“Why is this case so important to you, Hammo?”
Ida Wilhelmsen, thirteen this summer, sat on the window ledge in the kitchen eating bean salad from a bowl on her lap.
“Because I’m conceited,” Hanne said.
Laughing, Ida cocked her head and peered at her mother while chewing chickpeas and red lentils. Hanne looked back at her above the lid of her laptop. The girl was growing more and more like her Mum. Hanne had seen pictures of Nefis taken at the same age, and it was almost spooky. The same almondshaped eyes. The same meandering eyetooth that would escape any effort to straighten it because it looked so charming. Even her hair fell in the same way, in a soft side parting from which the hair kept falling across her face, making her one-eyed. Ida was her mother all over again, except that her hair and complexion were a shade lighter.
“What do you mean by that?” Ida asked.
“Just what I said. I’m conceited. I’ve got a good opinion of myself. I think it’s important to demonstrate that I’m fair, and can ignore the fact that the murder victim had views I don’t only distance myself from, but also believe to be harmful. To us all, and not least to people like your Mum.”
“Mum isn’t bothered. I’m not either.”
“Good. You have to turn your back on nasty people and walk away from them.”
“Why don’t you do that, then?”
Hanne closed the laptop and rolled forward to the window.
“Because I can’t take it any longer,” she said. “I’ve decided to do more, to become involved. I just don’t really know how. It’s a bit difficult when I,” she hesitated, letting her eyes slide around the room, “actually like best of all being here at home.”
Ida smiled and chewed more slowly. “You’re not conceited,” she said.
“Yes I am. In areas such as this I certainly am. Or maybe snobbish is a bit more accurate. I don’t just think that I’m a better person than Iselin Havørn was. I actually look down on people like her. Sometimes, to be honest, I feel …”
She was going to say “contempt”. She let it drop and smiled at her daughter instead.
“I don’t really know. But I think somehow … just as Anders Behring Breivik was given a fair trial after being so horrendously evil, I believe that no one had the right to kill Iselin Havørn. Getting to the bottom of it has become somehow …”
Again she searched for words that would not be too difficult for a twelve-year-old.
“A way of showing that you’re the best,” Ida suggested. “By being kind to someone who is nasty, you show that you are better than them. A bit like Jesus, Hammo.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” Hanne said curtly, taking the empty salad bowl to convey it to the dishwasher. “Anyway, Jesus probably didn’t mean that he was better than everybody else just because he turned the other cheek. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a way of showing that our system functions.”
“I like it when you tell me what you’re working on,” Ida said. “It’s quite exciting, really.”
“Earlier, you just got scared.”
“Why can’t you tell me about all your cases, Hammo?”
‘Because I’m usually bound by confidentiality. The cases I receive from the Chief of Police are my official police investigations, and then I can’t say anything. Not even to Mum. What I’m working on now is something I’m doing in my spare time. I take it for granted that I can trust you, and you won’t talk to anyone else about what I’m telling you.”
Ida looked slightly peeved and got up from the window ledge. “As if I would,” she said.
It had started to snow again, and she stood with her hands on her hips, looking out.
“I really like summer best.”
“I agree. And spring. It won’t be long now.”
“I’m so awful at skiing. We’re having a winter activity day on Wednesday, and all my friends are going to Grefsenkleiva to do slalom. I don’t even have the gear.”
“I’ve offered you both equipment and classes, Ida. Lots of times. You’ve nothing to complain about. Mum hasn’t ever had skis on her feet, and I can’t teach you for obvious reasons. Anyway, skiing’s not the most important thing in the world. I saw on the form that you could choose sledging as well.”
Ida made no answer. She still stood there gazing out of the picture window. It was growing dark even though it was not yet four o’clock. The sound of police sirens penetrated the silence of the kitchen.
“Do you think those patrol cars are searching for the little girl?”
“They might be,” Hanne answered.
“She was just stolen. My goodness. Just imagine being stolen, Hammo.”
“Don’t think about it, sweetheart.”
“It’s a bit difficult not to. Everybody’s talking about it.”
“But we don’t need to. I’m nipping into my office for a while. If you need anything, just come in. Mum won’t be late today, so she’ll probably be back any minute.”
Hanne tucked a bottle of Farris mineral water between her legs and rolled toward the living room.
“Hammo?”
“Yes?”
“When this handwriting analysis is done–”
“Yes?” Hanne stopped and turned the wheelchair around.
“What sort of thing do they compare it with?”
“What do you mean?” Hanne asked.
“You said that there were handwriting experts. Who can compare and discover if it was really the person who committed suicide who wrote the letter. What do they compare it with?”
Hanne, taken aback, gazed at her daughter.
“Another letter, of course! One they’re absolutely certain was written by the person in question. They examine how the pen was held against the paper, how the pressure is distributed, and what the individual letters look like. Handwriting is extremely personal.”
“But …” Ida had the same crooked furrow between her brows as Nefis had when she was doubtful.
“We don’t write much by hand any more. Not once we’ve finished fourth year, anyway. At school everything’s on computers. The only thing I’ve written by hand in absolutely ages is a birthday card. And then I usually use big, colored letters. Mum doesn’t even write shopping lists by hand. Just uses her cellphone. And then she texts them to me if she wants me to go to the shops.”
“They probably found something,” Hanne said distractedly: her cellphone was telling her she had received a text message. “We sign our passports, for instance. I’m sure Iselin Havørn would have had a passport.”
“Isn’t that too little to use for comparison purposes? And those signatures are often just squiggles, aren’t they?”
Hanne did not reply – she was engrossed in her message.
I’ve visited Kari Thue. With really surprising results. Also, the message below has just come from A Foss.
Hi Henrik. Preliminary inquiries show that at least one of IH’s social circle used antidepressants. Phone me. Amanda
I called her. This
is quite astonishing. Can I come to see you? Henrik
Hanne wrote one word.
Yes.
When she looked up again, Ida had left the room.
“Enemies?” Bengt Bengtson asked, his eyes widening in an attempt to force moisture into his dry eyes that had no tears left. “No. I don’t have any enemies.”
The policewoman had put her notebook aside a long time ago. She was tall and well built and her uniform jacket bulged open between the buttons on her chest. Her hair was gathered into a tight topknot that made her face look even rounder. Her face was bare of makeup. A delicate layer of perspiration reflected the ceiling light and made her cheeks shine.
“Why haven’t the kidnappers made contact?” Bengt Bengtson demanded, slumping even further into the settee. “What is it they want?”
Chief Inspector Eva Grindheim gave an almost inaudible sigh.
“As I said, there could be lots of reasons for that. Anyway, we need to think along alternative lines.”
“Alternative lines? I’ve just won nearly a billion kroner and six days later the dearest thing I have is stolen from me in broad daylight! From a purely professional point of view, it looks as if you don’t have a clue what happened! In broad daylight!”
He slammed his fist down on the table. The policewoman glanced at the window, where the January gloom was forcing its way through, despite the working day being far from over.
“There really must be some connection,” Bengt groaned, putting his face in his hands. “And they can have everything I’ve got. But, bloody hell, they have to get in touch!”
A low, deep sound, almost a growl, grew louder and louder and changed into a monotonous, wailing howl that made the far younger woman who was looking after Christel pop her head out of the bedroom to see what was going on.
“What do you know, then?” he virtually screamed before subsiding into the cushions.
“We can go through it one more time if you like,” the Chief Inspector said patiently, adjusting her skirt. “Unfortunately, it took nearly twenty minutes for anyone to discover that Hedda’s pushchair was no longer parked where it should be. At that time it had been snowing heavily, but the footprints were still visible, out of the kindergarten grounds and through the broken gate. It’s also clear that there was only one person who carried out the actual …”
