In Dust and Ashes

by Anne Holt

  This was where it had happened, exactly here. A green mailbox with three names written in both Cyrillic and Latin letters was attached to the fence just in front of an enormous spruce tree. It was here that Dina Abrahamsen had been killed by a convergence of tragic coincidences for which no one had later been held accountable.

  Henrik regretted the mislaying of the police file with details of the accident.

  Dragging himself away, he walked farther along the fence, in through the gate and on to the front door. A sign beside the doorbell confirmed that he had arrived at Heikki Pettersen’s house. Henrik knew the man had just turned fifty – that certainly tallied with the figure who opened the door only seconds after Henrik had rung the bell.

  “Hello there,” the man said in a hesitant voice.

  “Hello,” Henrik replied, holding up his police ID. “My name’s Henrik Holme. Could I come in for a moment?”

  The man looked doubtful, verging on worried. “What’s it about?”

  “An old case. A very old case in which a couple of questions have cropped up.”

  Heikki Pettersen’s eyes narrowed before he gave a broad smile and opened the door wide.

  “But it’s you!” he exclaimed. “You’re the one who led the investigation into those terrible May 17 terrorists!”

  “Sort of,” Henrik mumbled.

  At Kari Thue’s apartment, being recognized had been a disadvantage but here it was obviously an asset.

  “Come in, come on in.”

  Henrik stepped inside the hallway and closed the door before taking off his shoes. The house was totally silent, and he took time to arrange his boots to perfection.

  Mathematically precise, side-by-side on the almost empty shoe shelf, and with the laces pulled forward in parallel lines.

  “I live on my own,” Heikki Pettersen called out from the living room – Henrik followed the sound. “So you’re not disturbing me. Can I offer you anything?”

  “Just water, please. That would be great.”

  Henrik moved into the small living room, which struck him as pleasant, though he could not quite explain why. The furnishings were old-fashioned, more or less antiques, and they didn’t really match the owner. Heikki Pettersen was a good-looking man who had kept all his hair. Admittedly, it was graying at the temples, and his complexion looked as if it had been exposed to too much sun for too many years. His forehead was marked with deep furrows, and when he smiled, what had once been dimples became two deep gashes on his cheeks. Nevertheless he carried himself like a young man, with flexibility in his movements that suggested a lot of exercise.

  Heikki Pettersen looked like a guy who liked steel and concrete and leather furniture, not rococo chairs and dark oak. The view across the city was stupendous, though that was of no interest to Henrik. He stood at the window, studying the house farther down the sloping terrain, where Anna Abrahamsen had once both lived and died.

  “Here you are,” Heikki Pettersen said, placing a bottle of Imsdal mineral water on the heavy, varnished oak coffee table. “Drink it from the bottle, and then you can take it with you when you leave. How can I help you?”

  He sat down on the settee and pointed out the solitary armchair to Henrik.

  “Russians,” he said when he saw that Henrik could not tear himself away from the view of Anna’s house. “From the embassy. They come and go, but they’re good enough neighbors. Don’t see much of them, normally. Except in summer, when they hold the occasional barbecue party. Very good at keeping the driveway clear of snow; I hardly ever manage to get it done before some caretaker from the embassy turns up and gets the snow-blower going.”

  Henrik moved away and sat down. “I’ve come because of Anna Abrahamsen,” he said.

  “Thought it might be that,” Heikki Pettersen answered; he sat with his feet wide apart, both arms resting on the back of the settee. “The only time I’ve had anything to do with the police was when Anna was murdered. Apart from a couple of speeding fines, that is. But I expect that would be too insignificant for a big guy like you.”

  The chair Henrik sat on was so narrow and the arm rests so high that he could not get his hands under his thighs. As he became increasingly stressed, he pushed them between his thighs, like a little girl.

  “It’s about the last conversation you had with her,” he said.

  The man nodded his head. “New Year’s Eve. In the morning. The day she was killed.”

  “Yes. Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

  “It’s a whole lifetime ago.”

  “Twelve years. And it must have been a day that made a deep impression on you. Try.”

  Several seconds passed. Heikki Pettersen shifted uncomfortably on the settee.

  “I was having a party,” he began somewhat tentatively. “My wife and I had separated that summer, and it was the first time I’d held a party on my own. I was pretty stressed out. I’d forgotten to warn the neighbors. Here in the street …”

  A lock of hair fell over his forehead, and he used his fingers to comb it back in place.

  “It’s a very good, friendly area. We have summer parties and share ownership of power saws. Take on voluntary work at the playground. That sort of thing. We have an unwritten rule that the nearest neighbors should be alerted if there’s going to be a party. At least in summer when socializing takes place outdoors. New Year’s Eve is really an exception to the rule. Everybody up here has parties then, in fact.”

  He nodded at the huge window with the outdoor terrace. “Because of the view. Fireworks. They make a bloody brilliant show from up here. But since Anna lives so close by … lived, I mean …”

  He abruptly got to his feet and crossed to the window.

  “She was so alone,” he said in a hushed voice. “After the little one died, things went from bad to worse down there. I’d had my own troubles that year, my divorce was far from an enjoyable experience, but all the same I noticed it wasn’t exactly a happy household down there either. Jonas had moved out. I damn well think …”

  He puffed out his cheeks and let the air slowly trickle out again.

  “She was alone at Christmas. At Christmas! Even my ex-wife and I managed to have some sort of family Christmas, since both our children were still living at home at that time. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other, but at Christmas you have to pull yourself together. Anna, on the other hand, was completely on her own. We should have invited her in.”

  “I think she would have turned you down.”

  Heikki looked at him. “Did you know her?”

  “No. But I know a bit about her now. What did you talk about?”

  “I saw her come driving up while I was stacking cases of beer in the basement.”

  He pointed at the decking on the terrace outside the window.

  “There’s a carport underneath that, with a door into the house. Anna had opened her gate and came driving up to the road. I thought I should at least give her some notice, since the terrace is so close to her property. I waved, and she stopped in the middle of the slope.”

  His eyes narrowed, as if trying to picture the scene. “She rolled the window halfway down. I told her about the party and asked her to let me know if we were making too much noise. And wished her Happy New Year.”

  He returned to the settee and sat down again. He picked up a cushion, punched it gently and put it back in place.

  “I should have invited her, of course,” he murmured.

  “She would probably have turned that down too. Did she say anything?”

  ‘Say anything? Well. She probably said something or other. Not much. She never said much. Not after Dina died. From a purely technical point of view, that damn accident took place on my property. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “My plot of land extends two meters out into the street. She fucking died on my land.”

  “What did Anna say?”

  “I really don’t remember,” Heikki said, and now a touch of irritation had
crept into his voice. “It happened an eternity ago. She probably said Happy New Year. Thanked me for telling her about the party. Something along those lines. I don’t honestly remember.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “Fed up. As usual. Very … off, in a sense. She’d been like that for a long time. Flat. Uninterested.”

  Now, running both hands through his hair, he scratched the back of his head in exasperation.

  “I honestly don’t really know whether I remember this or am just assuming something on the basis of how she’d been behaving for a long time.”

  “In your police interview you said that Anna drove further up to the top of the hill, where she stopped and disposed of some rubbish.”

  For the first time a shadow of uncertainty crossed the face of the self-assured man with straddled legs. He blinked repeatedly and used his tongue to moisten his lips.

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Do you know what she threw out?”

  Henrik could feel his pulse racing. The urge to tap his forehead was almost irresistible. He squeezed his legs together as hard as he could. Heikki Pettersen seemed at least as uncomfortable. He stood up unexpectedly and walked halfway around the settee. Leaning forward, he supported himself with the settee back and all of a sudden dashed to fetch something from the kitchen. Halfway across the room, he stopped.

  “Well,” he began, with his back turned. “There’s one thing I have to explain as far as Anna Abrahamsen and rubbish are concerned.”

  “Please do.”

  A faint, piping sound whistled in his ears.

  “It’s just that it was so fucking annoying,” Heikki said, sounding dismayed, and he turned round slowly. “All that garbage of hers. You should really take it all to the tip, you know? Clothes and shoes and toys and God knows what, all stuffed into those containers that autumn: they should have been taken to the recycling station! The council only empties those containers once a week, and if they’re over-filled, they refuse to touch them. Only household waste should go in those containers up there. There must have been …”

  His hair had fallen across his forehead again. This time he left it dangling there.

  “We hadn’t yet started to sort out our waste at that time,” he said, mulling it over yet again. “There was no system of green and blue bags, at least. Only paper and cardboard had a separate container. But Anna sometimes put pieces of furniture in there.” “Furniture?” What kind of furniture can a garbage container hold?’

  “Well, I once found a child’s chair in it. In fact I didn’t say anything about that at the time, it was so …”

  Looking down at the floor, he shrugged his broad shoulders.

  “… sad, really. I tossed it in my car and took it down to the dump the next time I was going there myself. But all the other stuff! She crammed all sorts of things into black bin bags that filled up the containers as soon as they’d been emptied. I had to mention it, in the end. On more than one occasion, actually, even though I felt really fucking sorry for that family.”

  “And?”

  “Can you blame me? I mean, we share garbage containers, and it got totally chaotic when she just ignored the rules and …”

  He broke off to rub the underside of his nose with the back of his hand.

  “So I just wanted to check,” he added, in a mumble.

  “You wanted to check,” Henrik repeated in a louder voice: the ringing in his ears had worsened. “You wanted to check what Anna Abrahamsen had thrown out on the day she died?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t mention this to the police earlier.”

  “They never asked. It seemed completely irrelevant. Besides, it was … it was a bit embarrassing to admit to rummaging around in your neighbor’s trash. Especially when she’d been killed and all that. So I was pleased that nobody asked. Bloody hell, there was total chaos in the street here at that time. People talked of nothing but that murder, and when Jonas was arrested a short time later, the atmosphere in the street wasn’t exactly euphoric either, if I can put it that way. Who knows what effect that kind of thing might have on house prices? A year or more passed before anyone here dared to put their house on the market. Number 13.”

  He pointed vaguely to the west.

  “What did you find in the garbage?”

  Heikki Pettersen finally sat down again. “A black bin bag, as usual. With clothes inside.”

  He opened out his arms and hunched his shoulders up to his ears.

  “Anna had a car and a driving license at that time! Bloody beautiful, huge Volvos, a new one every six months! Why couldn’t she drive to the recycling station like all the rest of us? I got damned annoyed. Until I saw what it was. Then I actually felt a bit …”

  He dragged it out. Adjusted a couple of cushions and opened his own bottle of water.

  “… embarrassed,” he completed his sentence at last. “Sorry for Anna and Jonas.”

  “Why?”

  “They were Dina’s clothes,” Heikki said softly. “I’d found lots of her things in the rubbish that autumn, both clothes and toys. And as I said, a lot of small items of furniture. But these were …”

  He took a gulp of water, set the bottle down on a coaster and put his face in his hands with his elbows on his thighs.

  “They were the clothes she was wearing when she died,” Henrik was sure he heard the man say.

  “What?”

  Heikki removed his hands and stared straight at him.

  “They were Dina’s clothes,” he repeated slowly. “The ones she was wearing when she died. A pink hat, a blue snowsuit and a few indoor clothes. A pair of Cherrox boots. And a kindergarten bag.”

  Henrik’s fingers found the tabletop of their own volition and beat a lightning-fast drum roll. Heikki stared at them with an expression of surprise that changed to something reminiscent of disgust.

  “Sorry,” Henrik rushed to say. “It’s a compulsive action. Just ignore it. How did you know they were the clothes she was wearing at the time of the accident? Were they covered in blood?”

  “No, not at all. They looked freshly laundered. Not that it would have been really necessary, I think. Dina died of internal injuries. From the pictures you couldn’t see that she had bled at all. Just a little trickle from her nose, I seem to recall.”

  “Pictures? What pictures?”

  His fingers took on a life of their own. They drummed on the table and tapped the sides of his nose at top speed, with the occasional rap on his forehead in between. His heels knocked so fast against each other underneath the table that he counted himself lucky he had taken off his boots. At least it was quiet down there on the floor.

  “My daughter took photographs,” Heikki said in an undertone. “From her room. Her window looks out on to Stugguveien. She was …”

  He did a rapid calculation.

  “… twelve at the time. Fortunately she didn’t see the actual accident. She was ill and had to stay off school that day. She’d been given a new camera for her birthday in November. This was long before smartphones. Cameras were still popular.”

  “Fortunately it was before social media too. Twelve-year-olds can show relatively poor judgment when it comes to posting on Instagram.”

  Heikki turned distinctly pale at the thought.

  “Good God,” he exclaimed, and gulped. “As soon as she showed me the photos, I deleted them. They were absolutely … they were absolutely …”

  He grabbed the bottle, unscrewed the lid and drank half the contents.

  “The worst thing was that the pictures were so good,” he said. “Technically speaking, that is. Crystal clear, despite the council having already come up with the idiotic idea of putting yellow light bulbs in the street lamps. And despite the foul weather on that particular day. Gray, rainy and dark.”

  “What did the photos show?”

  Heikki’s shoulders sank. He put his slack hands in his lap, opened out, as if waiting to be given something. He stared at them for
a long time before he said anything.

  Henrik now had his hands and feet under control.

  “They showed such terrible anguish that even my daughter understood it,” Heikki finally said. “Astri, that’s her name. She cried when she showed them to me. Jonas had picked Dina up. Her bag was lying on the ground. Whether Dina was dead or dying, I can’t really say, but she was lying completely limp in her Dad’s arms. And his face …”

  He shook his head vigorously and clasped his hands. Tightly, Henrik noticed: his knuckles were white.

  “I remember thinking: what if it had been me! Imagine if I was the one standing there with Astri or Bendik in my arms! They really affected me, those photographs. They were fucking horrendous. Jonas’s face … My God.”

  He used his forefinger to wipe his eyes as he forced out a rueful smile.

  “It’s such a long time ago. All the same, I can still see those pictures as crystal clear as ever. Of course, we went to the funeral. It was totally … totally–”

  “Fucking ghastly,” Henrik suggested to his own great surprise.

  “Yes. Fucking ghastly. Anna just sat there. Like a zombie. Chalk white and silent, with tears running down her face even though she didn’t make a sound. Jonas broke down completely. He was taken away in an ambulance, in fact, but was brought home that same evening. That casket …”

  He measured out one meter with his hands. “It was not much bigger than that.”

  Silence ensued. Henrik could hear the monotonous barking of a dog in a garden somewhere in the vicinity. He became aware of a sudden vibration from the basement, as if a washing machine had reached its spin cycle. The ringing in his ears had stopped.

  “Do you know who the driver was?” he asked.

  Heikki glanced up, clearly taken aback by the sudden change of subject.

  “Oh … no. He wasn’t in the picture, and I’ve never heard anything about that here in the street. Just some guy. In a BMW, I think. He was never charged or anything, as far as I know. It was obviously just an accident. The sort of thing that sometimes happens.”