by Anne Holt
She cleared her throat quietly with a clenched fist in front of her mouth.
“… abduction. And that the person in question walked east along Geitmyrsveien. We don’t know whether anyone was waiting to help at the bottom of the road. Whether someone drove along there in a vehicle, we don’t know that either.”
“Is there anything at all you do know?” Bengt hammered his fists on the settee cushions. “Other than that Anna is gone, I mean! DNA? Don’t you have any ideas, or what? It’s surely possible to find DNA in the snow, bloody hell!”
“Yes, we do,” Eva Grindheim said, nodding. “It’s entirely possible. But I should remind you that it’s only been just over twenty-four hours since Hedda disappeared. We do of course have a large number of samples to analyze, but …”
She tried to find a more comfortable sitting position, but eventually gave up. Her skirt kept sliding above her knees, and she sat holding the edge of the hem. Bengt could not remember the last time he had seen a uniformed police officer in a skirt, and he felt an absurd impulse to laugh. To cry. To do something that didn’t drive him absolutely crazy, such as sitting in the apartment waiting for something that never happened. He snatched up his cellphone, glanced at it, raised his arm and was on the point of hurling it across the room when it suddenly dawned on him that it would be difficult for anyone to call him if he was no longer in possession of a phone. His arm dropped into his lap, and his head fell forward.
“I do really understand that this is a terribly difficult situation for both you and your daughter,” Eva Grindheim said softly. “And of course we’re working on the possibility that there’s some connection between your Lotto win and–”
“EuroJackpot!” Bengt barked at her. “What is it you lot get up to in the police? Don’t you know anything? How can we depend on …”
He tossed the cellphone aside on the settee cushions and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
“Help us,” he said, and broke into sobs.
“That’s what we’re trying to do. But we must also explore other possibilities. That’s why it’s important to know if there could be anyone who … wishes you harm.”
“Why would anyone wish me harm?” Bengt said in a muffled voice; he had grabbed a cushion and was holding it in front of his face. “I’m a former bank employee who worked on house purchase and mortgages. Of course I’ve turned down one or two loans in my time, but you don’t steal a child from a bank clerk for that reason!”
Now he was clutching the cushion to his chest. “I don’t have any enemies.”
“I see.”
Bengt stared at the policewoman, who got to her feet and brutally pulled the tight skirt down before resuming her seat.
“No one who wishes you any harm,” she declared, nodding.
An abrupt thought caused Bengt’s grip on the cushion to stiffen.
There was one person he had harmed. Really seriously. Not with a scathing comment, of which there had necessarily been a few over the years, both at work and in his personal life. Not by refusing a house loan, even though some people could get furious and be on the verge of tears at having their deficient credit score shoved in their faces. Not by a rejection, though he had turned his back on more than one woman, and not always with great gallantry.
There was one person he had robbed of a child. Bengt could not remember what he was called. He had deliberately forgotten it. He couldn’t even remember the name of the child. It was so many years ago.
The girl wore a pink hat.
The man was wearing a green quilted jacket.
It was more than fifteen years ago.
Inconceivable, he decided.
No one would have waited fifteen years to inflict this atrocity on him. At least not the grief-stricken father of a young child in the neighborhood. The idea was absurd. The little girl’s death had been a catastrophic accident, for which no one was to blame. Neither he nor the poor father. The police had said that when they returned his driving license with a comforting pat on his shoulder: Bengt Bengtson had not killed anyone.
Even the father had said so. He had yelled it through his tears: It wasn’t your fault.
The child’s dad had shouted it out, over and over again, and that was more than fourteen years ago.
Bengt had not even been given a fine. There couldn’t possibly be any record of the episode anywhere in the police’s computer files. The accident had been horrific, but it had never been a real police case, Bengt thought.
If he told this plump woman about the incident that he normally managed to forget, the police would waste a lot of time on it. Hedda’s abduction had been effected in such haste, leaving no traces, that it must have been executed by a gang. Russians, for example. Former Yugoslavs. A mafia-like organization like the ones he had often read about: they put the authorities to shame and were a threat to everyone and everything. It was increasingly obvious that the police had minimal evidence to go on, and a blind alley such as the poor man in the green quilted jacket from an almost wiped out, ancient memory would be seized with enthusiasm.
Someone out there wanted Bengt’s winnings. That was the truth of it. Stealing Hedda was not a matter of outdated, twisted revenge, but of money. He would soon hear from the kidnappers. He was going to pay them whatever they asked; they could have all of it. They could have all the money if only his world could return to the way things had been before Turid from Hamar had phoned and forced on him a sum of money so huge that no good could possibly come of winning it.
The police had to concentrate on the money – on gangsters who wanted 763 million kroner in exchange for Hedda.
Those were the ones they had to find. He let his perpetual aversion to being reminded of that dreadful December morning in 2001 slide back to where it belonged. It had not been his fault, and the father of the little girl had been in complete agreement.
“No,” he said hoarsely, clearing his throat before he went on: “I can’t think of anyone who would wish me any harm.”
*
“Did she slap you?” Hanne made big eyes.
“Yes. And really hard too. Look!”
Henrik leaned across Hanne’s office desk and turned his left cheek to her. She thought she could make out a reddish shadow on the pale, boyish skin.
“Good grief,” she exclaimed. “Did you hit her back?”
“Of course not. Anyway, she went straight back into the apartment and slammed the door behind her. But I didn’t leave emptyhanded!”
In an unfamiliar, almost childish gesture, he put two thumbs up in the air.
“You were right,” he said, lifting a glass of red wine, then looking at it and putting it down again without tasting it. “These cases somehow fit together. In their own, bizarre way.”
Hanne let the red wine swirl around her glass. Sniffed it and tasted.
“This means that Maria Kvam too has experienced an overdose of suffering,” she said pensively. “First her sister was killed, and fifteen years later her wife commits suicide.”
“Quite apart from us thinking it’s the other way round, though.”
“What?” She gazed at him absentmindedly, as if she had been lost in thought about something else.
“You believe her wife was murdered,” Henrik said. “And I believe her sister committed suicide. The other way round, you see.”
“The Book of Job,” Hanne said, staring into the distance.
“What about it?”
“Have you read it since the last time we talked about it?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think it means?”
Henrik’s fingers drummed on the pale wood of Hanne’s writing desk.
“Please stop doing that,” she said in an undertone.
He quickly thrust his hands under his thighs after tapping both sides of his nose.
“About God,” he said in a loud voice. “Job’s book is about how God moves in mysterious ways. And that He doesn’t necessarily reward the good with go
od things and penalize the bad with bad things, as we humans tend to see it. It’s beyond Job’s comprehension why he’s being punished so hard, since he has always done the right thing. His friends claim he must have done something wrong, because God only strikes the unjust. They beg him to confess his sins, but–”
“You don’t need to repeat the whole story,” she interrupted him. “I’ve read it many times. Most recently last night.”
“The Book of Job is about the difference between God and human beings,” Henrik said hurriedly. “When God delivers his thundering speech to Job and his friends after hearing them out for a while, he makes clear that they comprehend none of it. That the universe is so complicated and God himself so mighty that they have no possibility of understanding. Only he, God, fathoms the great mystery of the world. We humans can complain all we like, as Job also did, but we can never place ourselves in judgment over God’s actions. We have no competence to make sense of them.”
Hanne smiled, with an almost imperceptible nod.
“Job suffered so dreadfully, entirely without having done anything wrong,” Henrik went on, more eagerly now. “I interpret this as meaning that there isn’t always a reason for good and evil. That suffering sometimes just … comes about, so to speak. That we humans simply have to endure it.”
“Shit happens.”
“What?”
“That’s how I interpret the Book of Job. God tells Job and his friends quite bluntly that shit happens. And he’s absolutely right in that. Just look at me.”
Lethargically, she opened out her hands and looked herself up and down.
“And when Job submitted himself to this great truth and expressed regret for having tried to understand God’s ways in any shape or form, he was given back everything he had lost. It’s at that point the writer of the Book of Job and I part company. I don’t believe in that sort of thing. But it’s a beautiful piece of writing all the same, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Henrik sat with his mouth half open. His back was slightly curved, as it always was when he sat on his hands like this. Hanne had grown used to all these strange tics of his, the twitches and bad habits and occasional somewhat noisy rituals. They seldom embarrassed her, and with time she had learned to regard them as part of his whole personality. She thought she had found a kind of pattern in the involuntary movements. Some came about through excitement, others through attacks of worry or anxiety. The knocking on the door frame on his way into a room was of relatively recent origin and grew more marked with stress.
The drum rolls were the only aspect she really could not stand.
Probably none of his bad habits would disappear, because from time to time new ones appeared. It was a shame, she had often thought. They got in his way. As for herself, she had come to terms with her antisocial predisposition years before. Life had become so much easier after she had crept into hibernation. The first few years had been boring, but necessary. She had also found a sense of peace, and that came from staying away from other people. After the demanding affair at Finse nearly ten years ago she had nevertheless realized that police work comprised a greater part of her than she had previously wanted to admit. When the Oslo Police Chief had contacted her with a request to look at cold cases, if she wished from her inner exile and without an office at Police Headquarters, she had accepted by phone and opened a bottle of champagne that evening. The past two years had been the best of Hanne’s life. Many days had passed since she had realized that her eagerness to investigate Iselin Havørn’s death was due just as much to the lack of new cases allocated by officialdom as the desire to prove that she was right. It mattered not a jot. She was back doing what she did best: investigating.
Finding answers where others had not even caught sight of the question.
Now she had everything in the world she wanted.
Henrik also deserved to be like this.
Henrik Holme was something rare: a person who was good through and through. He would be a fantastic boyfriend for someone who could see past the lad’s clumsy tics. All the same Hanne was fairly sure that he had never been in any real relationship. On a couple of occasions she had started to broach the subject, but he blushed so fiercely that she always stopped in time.
“The Book of Job,” she said softly. “The Book of Job teaches us that we should not curse our fate. Life comes with neither instructions nor guarantees. When we strive to behave well, it should not be in hope of reward. We should be good because it is the right thing to do. Because it’s good, regardless. Whether chance punishes or rewards us is random. We have to play the cards we’ve been dealt. That’s how I read the Book of Job.”
“I like listening to you,” Henrik said just as softly, with a smile. “Every single night, I thank God that I met you. In my prayers.”
There was an awkward silence.
For once, Hanne felt she was the one who was blushing. She’d had no idea that Henrik was on speaking terms with God. In fact, there was still a great deal she did not know about the slim, insecure, fantastic man on the opposite side of the desk.
“Kari Thue,” she finally said, tucking her hair behind her ears. “So it was her medication that Iselin Havørn ingested?”
“We don’t know that for sure, of course. But Amanda Foss has clarified that Kari Thue is the only one of the Kvam-Havørn couple’s friends and acquaintances who actually takes antidepressants. The medication’s called Anafranil. Which may well match the preliminary analyses of what Iselin took.”
Hanne’s fingers raced over her laptop keyboard. “Medical dictionary,” she mumbled, reading for a few seconds. “Tastes bloody disgusting, it says here.”
“What?”
“Anafranil is sugar-coated, and it says here that the tablets should be swallowed whole because of the horrible taste. It also looks as if …”
She read on in silence for almost a minute.
“Shit scary medication,” she said in the end. “Reading the medical dictionary can terrify the sickest person into getting well again on the spot. Listen to this: considerable danger of intoxication. Side effects are everything from tinnitus through impotence problems to irregular heartbeat and increased danger of suicide. Heavens above. You’d have to be really down in the dumps to dare take this pill. I think I’d give it a miss.”
“If you were struggling with severe depression, I think you’d be willing to take a chance,” Henrik said. “And those side effects are probably rare.”
Hanne glanced at him over her glasses. “Why did she crush the tablets, do you think?”
“Who?”
“Iselin, if we’re to believe the police. She died of cardiac arrest following an overdose of Anafranil, but she apparently chose to pulverize them, despite them tasting like shit. Why?”
“Er … that vegetable smoothie was pretty grotesque,” Henrik said, pulling a face. “Maybe the taste was camouflaged by the spinach, broccoli and cabbage.”
“But why? Why not just swallow the pills and avoid the taste altogether?”
“Some people can’t manage to swallow pills.”
“Or someone knew they tasted foul, and so concocted an extra yucky smoothie to make sure that Iselin wouldn’t notice that she was taking medication.”
“Or maybe a slightly horrible taste doesn’t matter too much when you’re intent on dying in a few minutes.”
“Touché. But you see that I have a point? A tiny one?”
Henrik nodded, apparently with reluctance.
“Yes of course. If we begin with the assumption that Iselin didn’t commit suicide, then it would be a good idea to camouflage the pills in an obnoxious drink. On the other hand, if something like that happened, then the circle of possible suspects suddenly grows quite large. There are a fair number of people who could have done something like that. And then we’re faced with a mega problem with both our cases.”
He put one hand on Iselin’s slim folder and the other on Bonsaksen’s ring bin
der, which he had gone home to collect before paying Hanne a visit.
“They’re not ours. As I’ve said several times before. And the more suspects we have, the more active our investigation has to be. And we can’t do that. Investigate anything much, I mean.”
“Yes we can. Accept a challenge, Henrik.”
“Do you know what they say about you at Police Headquarters?”
“I can guess.”
“They say quite a lot, even though the people who worked with you are getting thin on the ground. But one of the rumors is that you were someone who always went by the book. That what was most impressive about you was that you cleared up so many cases despite never taking shortcuts. Never did anything at all borderline.”
“That’s a long time ago,” she said, smiling. “I’ve become more pragmatic with age.”
With a sigh, Henrik used both hands to rap his forehead.
“That double rapping is new,” Hanne said, lifting her wine glass. “Do you think Kari Thue and Iselin had a relationship?”
“Impossible to say. As I said, she flew off the handle when I asked, and slapped my face. It’s difficult to put any definite interpretation on that. She might have been affronted because it wasn’t true, or angry because I’d unmasked them. Who knows? But Hanne …”
Henrik slid the two folders closer until they lay in the middle of the desk.
“What if we start all over again? These cases turn out to have a common denominator. Maria Kvam.”
“Or Benedicte Hansen.”
“Let’s stick with the name she uses today. It’s a bit odd that she has a completely different name now than when she was younger, as a matter of fact.”
“Not really,” Hanne said, taking a mouthful of wine. “Double forenames are extremely common. Oddly enough, it’s become a tradition again for Norwegian women to take their husband’s surname. That she chose to drop Hansen in favor of Kvam is understandable, anyway. The only striking thing here is that she gave in to Iselin’s wishes when it came to deciding which of her forenames she should use. My own name is Hanne Dorthe, and if Nefis had asked me to–”
