In Dust and Ashes

by Anne Holt

  “Before and after her death.”

  “Yes. Or when she died, and the following day. To report to the police that her sister was dead. Something she’d been aware of all night long. Could be.”

  Henrik launched into a series of tics that continued for so long that in the end Hanne had to tell him to stop. He rounded them off with a muffled drumroll on the soft armrest.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Do you really mean that Maria killed Anna?”

  She did not answer. Once again she had withdrawn into herself. Henrik waited for her to share her thoughts, but knew he was waiting in vain. In a few seconds she would ask him to go. With a sigh, he tapped his forehead.

  “Would you like to stay the night?” she asked quietly. “The bed’s made in the guestroom and Nefis has a store of toiletry bags from her trips on business class.”

  “Er … yes please. But shouldn’t we let Amanda Foss know? About the Iselin palaver, I mean?”

  “No. That airhead isn’t going to root around in this investigation any more than she already has done. When I hand it over, which is going to happen tomorrow, it’s going to be so crystal clear that nothing can be screwed up. To be on the safe side, I’ll give it to Silje.”

  She pulled up the sleeve of her sweater.

  “It’s nearly midnight,” she said. “I’m going to sit in my office and draw up a synopsis of everything we know. You can take my copies of the crime scene in Stugguveien to bed with you and see if there’s anything we’ve missed. Something we didn’t notice before because until now we hadn’t considered how manipulation of the bathroom temperature could result in an inaccurate time of death.”

  She pulled the wheelchair toward her and hoisted herself across.

  “It could be quite a long night. If you want to use the bathroom first, you’ll find Nefis’s toiletry bags in the tall cabinet on the right. The ones from Qatar Airways are the best.”

  “Thanks. I need … I need an iPad or something.”

  “Take mine. It’s lying in the kitchen. You’ll find the pictures from the crime scene in my office: I need to use the toilet first. If you don’t find anything of interest, then try to have a good sleep anyway. Otherwise, I’ll be in my office for at least a couple of hours. We’ll go together to Police Headquarters tomorrow morning. Night night.”

  “Goodnight, Hanne.”

  He had a sudden, strong impulse to give her a hug. Fortunately he swiftly came to his senses and padded out to fetch the bundle of photographs he had already studied in so much detail that he knew them by heart.

  A three-year-old woke and was afraid. From where she lay, she could no longer see the lovely, gentle moon at the window. The man’s back was so high, and she sat up in bed. The moon was gone. Everything was dark out there, and she began to cry.

  “Jonas,” she said in a loud whisper. “I want Mummy now.”

  He did not answer. He pushed her carefully down again without turning around. She didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to go home.

  “I want to go home,” she sobbed. “I want picked up now. Take Barbie with me and Pictotto and go home.”

  Jonas did not lose his temper. He never got angry, and he played with her. There were sharks in that weird bathtub, but Jonas looked out for them.

  “You have to sleep,” he said, and all of a sudden his voice was a bit scary. “Lie down again.”

  “Home,” Hedda whimpered. “I want Mummy.”

  Finally Jonas turned around.

  “I don’t want to stay here any more,” the toddler said.

  “And you’re not going to.”

  “Home. I want to sleep in my own bed.”

  “You won’t have to stay here any longer than tomorrow, Hedda. I promise. Lie down, pet.”

  Tomorrow meant after the man had slept. Tomorrow was brushing teeth and putting on pajamas, listening to stories and two songs and then falling asleep. When you woke up, it was tomorrow.

  “Tomorrow,” she repeated and lay down. “Going home tomorrow. Home to Mummy and Grampa.”

  Without saying a word, Jonas tucked the quilt comfortably around her. He sang a lullaby twice over and kissed her on the forehead.

  The three-year-old was no longer scared. Tomorrow she wouldn’t be here any more, Jonas had said so, and soon she was sleeping soundly again.

  MONDAY JANUARY 25, 2016

  It was half past two at night.

  A short time ago, Henrik had heard Hanne leave her office. She had nipped into the kitchen before disappearing into the inner recesses of the apartment where the bedrooms were situated. As for him, he didn’t feel tired in the slightest. He was worn out, and his knee was throbbing with pain, but he was wideawake inside his head. He regretted not having asked for a couple of Paracet tablets and wondered whether it would be brazen of him to creep into the bathroom and look for a packet.

  Very impolite, he heard his mother’s voice in his ear.

  He decided not to bother and instead placed a pillow under his knee to see if that would help.

  He had not found anything at all.

  The pictures from the house where Anna Abrahamsen died told him nothing he did not already know. It was still just as clean and tidy everywhere. Photos from Dina’s old room were still missing, a room that according to Bonsaksen had been so bare and insignificant that there had been no reason to take any pictures in there. The bathroom was still covered in bloodstains, both in the photographs with Anna’s body lying prone on the floor, as well as the ones taken when she had been removed and you could make out the outline of her head in the pervasive, red pool of blood. Close-ups of the blood spatter on the shower wall were the same as before. There was nothing whatsoever to tell him whether the temperature in the bathroom had originally been higher than the police calculations.

  When he discovered that the heated towel rail had a separate thermostat, he grew fleetingly enthusiastic. The technical quality of the image was good, but he had to use the app that transformed his iPhone into a magnifying glass to see the thermostat setting.

  Twenty degrees, he saw, feeling disappointed again.

  He felt glum.

  He leafed through the pictures one last time.

  The towel rail was attached to the wall beneath a high, rectangular wall recess. Two glass candlesticks were displayed there, each with a slim, amber-yellow candle inserted. They had never been lit, he noticed. The wicks were white and would need to be trimmed before use.

  The candlesticks were also included in two of the other photographs, snapped from different angles. When he looked more closely at the third photograph, he found exactly what he was searching for.

  The candles were bent.

  Not by very much, but beyond doubt all the same. One in particular was obviously bowed from top to bottom. Henrik sat up in bed and, without giving a damn about his sore knee, he stuffed all the pillows behind his back. He swiftly Googled “melting point stearin wax” and came up with seven hundred and eighty-eight hits. He went straight to the most reliable Norwegian encyclopedia, the Store Norske Leksikon.

  Stearin is a triglyceride derived from stearic acid with the formula (C17H35COO)3C3H5, and a melting point of 72 degrees C.

  “Good grief,” he mumbled, and went on typing.

  It crossed his mind that some tall candles were made of paraffin wax.

  The encyclopedia told him that the melting point lay between fifty and sixty degrees.

  “Good heavens,” he muttered.

  But the candles had not melted. They were bent. Had just lost their shape, something that might possibly occur at lower temperatures. Although he eagerly continued with Google, it did not make him much wiser. Some manufacturers warned against high temperatures and strong sunlight, as both of these could affect the shape and color of the candles.

  None of them stated what they meant by high temperatures.

  Again he scrutinized the best of the images.

  The candles were amber-yellow. Or perhaps honey-yellow. Honey. Beeswax.
>
  Henrik almost dropped the iPad on the floor as he recalled his mother’s annual Christmas workshop when he had lived at home. They had sat at the kitchen table, Henrik and his mother and nobody else, and rolled honeycomb beeswax around wicks she had made herself. Some of the honeycombs were melted in a bain-marie and made into tea-lights and tall candles he wasn’t allowed to touch. He might burn himself, his mother said, even once he was well into his teenage years.

  He wrote “beeswax melting point” in the search field.

  Beeswax has a melting point of 62–65 degrees C and softens at 32–35 degrees C.

  He punched the quilt with his fists and smothered a roar of triumph. Leaning his head back, he closed his eyes and let his hand run over his blessedly normal Adam’s apple. He made soundless grimaces of pleasure and felt an uncontrollable impulse to wake everybody in the amazing little family in Kruses gate that had almost become his own.

  At least to some extent.

  Two drooping beeswax candles in a twelve-year-old photo would not acquit Jonas Abrahamsen of his wife’s murder. Nevertheless, the candles were the first palpable sign that there could be something in Henrik’s theory. No candle became deformed at a temperature of twenty degrees. But few people would feel comfortable in a temperature of more than thirty degrees in their bathroom.

  No one, in fact, unless with a deliberate intention to wreck a police investigation.

  Henrik must have been mistaken. Anna had not killed herself. Someone had taken her life earlier that evening, turned all the heating sources to max in the bathroom and closed the door. At eleven o’clock the next day it would only take a matter of minutes to bring the temperature down again. It was the middle of winter, and the bathroom contained two windows.

  One person had been at Anna’s both late in the afternoon and at eleven o’clock the next day. Only one person could have killed Anna.

  Maria.

  But it was still impossible to prove.

  “So you reckon this woman has committed two murders? First her sister and then her wife twelve years later?”

  Chief of Police Silje Sørensen looked from Hanne to Henrik and back again. Amanda Foss sat beside them, tugging nervously at her uniform shirt every other minute. Until now she had not uttered a word. She had been summoned into the Police Chief’s office at five minutes notice without forewarning of what it was about, and had thought it best to turn up in uniform. Now she appeared to regret that.

  The Police Chief herself was dressed in jeans and a traditional Marius sweater. She had come straight from her cottage at Hafjell and had given up on the idea of taking a detour home to change when Hanne had called her at half past six to request a meeting.

  “Well,” Hanne Wilhelmsen commented, with a shrug. “Henrik’s case isn’t quite ready for firm conclusions to be drawn. A hundred signs point in one single direction, but there’s not a scrap of firm evidence. Yet. As far as Iselin Havørn’s killing is concerned, on the other hand, there can be no doubt of at least grounds for arrest and a search of her apartment. What kind …”

  She turned to the fair-haired Chief Inspector in the freshly ironed uniform and asked: “What on earth did you give the handwriting analyst to use for comparison?”

  “Er … a condolence card from last year, a shopping list and a letter to a friend in Sandefjord. It was only four weeks old. Signed and everything.”

  “And it never entered your head to investigate whether Iselin Havørn was in the habit of sending letters to friends in Sandefjord? Or anywhere else for that matter? Do people even send letters to one another any longer? Didn’t it cross your mind at all–”

  Henrik cleared his throat noisily.

  “The signature was really only a squiggle,” he said, with an apologetic smile at Amanda Foss. “A squiggle and a dash and a dot over the last ‘i’. Easy to forge.”

  Hanne gave a histrionic sigh.

  “Has this force not learned anything at all from other cases, even recent ones? Before we dismiss a death as a suicide, in the name of heaven we need to …”

  With two speedy wheel movements she turned her chair so that she now sat with her back half-turned to an increasingly redcheeked Amanda Foss.

  “Get a grip, Hanne. Put a lid on it.”

  Silje Sørensen emphasized her authority by rising from her chair. She was only five foot three and dressed for hiking outdoors, and her hair was tied up in bunches.

  It helped, all the same.

  “Sorry,” Hanne said, far more meekly. “But it’s a pretty serious business that none of the investigators asked the most obvious question of them all: did Iselin Havørn have any reason at all to want to die? I think my daughter who’ll soon be thirteen would have the brains to answer that in the negative.”

  Silje raised both hands in a pacifying gesture.

  “Naturally, the handling of the case will be subject to internal investigation later. The important thing now is to get it on the right track. So, we have …”

  Swallowing, she started again.

  “So, you have uncovered that the suicide letter is a forgery. And that Iselin was extremely reluctant to write anything whatsoever by hand. You believe that Maria Kvam had a motive for murder …”

  She let her sentence hang like a question in the air and fixed her eye on Henrik.

  “Stupid, stupid,” he said, slapping himself on the back of the head. “Money. Jealousy. For some reason, love, perhaps …”

  He blushed at the very mention of the word.

  “… Maria transferred half her shares to Iselin when they married. Unconditionally. On divorce she had a lot to lose. She must have discovered Iselin’s infidelity quite a while ago. We have little reason to believe that Iselin had told her about it. The letter to this friend in Sandefjord …”

  He smiled as encouragingly as he could at Amanda Foss.

  “… must of necessity have been written by Maria. It’s one thing that she helped Iselin on the rare occasions when it was considered most appropriate to use handwriting. It seems totally unnecessary that she should have sent an ordinary letter when she could have used email. That suggests Maria had planned the murder for some time. And planned it well, I must add.”

  “You can say that again,” Hanne said tartly. “So well planned that she was about to get away with it.”

  “And then we have the tip-off,” Henrik said, shooting another smile in Amanda Foss’s direction. “It was Maria who tipped VG off about Tyrfing. By doing that, she created a media storm that would persuade the police to draw rather … hasty conclusions, you might say.”

  “How do you know that? That the tip-off came from Maria?”

  Silje Sørensen was still on her feet. She had moved in front of the desk and was leaning against it with her arms crossed.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Hanne said. “Not yet, at least. You’ll have to trust me for the moment. And by the way …”

  She lifted the coffee cup she had taken from a fancy machine at the door when she arrived, and drained it dry.

  “… it’s absolutely clear she had ample opportunity to get hold of the tablets she needed to kill Iselin. She crushed them and prepared a horrible vegetable smoothie that perhaps Iselin drank every evening. And then headed off to Bergen to secure an alibi. Something of that sort. What do I know? Only that all this is enough for a blue form, anyway. Two, for that matter, both a search warrant and an arrest warrant. Then time will tell what we can prove.”

  Silje Sørensen gazed at her for several seconds.

  “Amanda, you may go now.”

  Amanda Foss looked baffled for a moment before she got to her feet, dashed to the door and disappeared.

  “She’ll get her just deserts,” the Police Chief said as soon as the door was closed. “But to tell the truth, so will both of you. How dare you poke around in cases you haven’t been allocated by me? As if I didn’t have enough on my plate with this dreadful Hedda investigation, the two of you …”

  Clutching her hands
to her head, she groaned. The fury had come upon her so suddenly – as if a switch had been flicked the minute the door closed behind Amanda Foss. Angry roses were etched on her cheeks, and now she hovered almost threateningly above Hanne Wilhelmsen.

  “This will have consequences. I guarantee that this will have consequences. For you both.”

  “I haven’t done anything other than read the newspaper and think for myself,” Hanne said, shrugging her shoulders nonchalantly. “And as far as Henrik’s case is concerned, Ulf Sandvik gave him the green light to take a closer look at it.”

  “Well,” Henrik said, forcing yet another smile. He noticed they had soon lost their impact. “I might not exactly call it a green light, it was more of a–”

  There was a peremptory knock at the door. Silje Sørensen rolled her eyes and shouted, “Come in.”

  “The verdict will be delivered shortly,” her secretary said in almost reverential tones. “The verdict in the May 17 terrorism trial. It is to be read out in court at ten o’clock, but Oslo District Court has sent us a copy already. In confidence. Highly confidential! I haven’t seen it, though. Not even a tiny peek. This is really extremely irregular. Highly irregular!”

  He approached the Police Chief carrying a thick document that he held outstretched, eyes averted, as if it was a well-filled baby’s diaper.

  “My God,” Hanne said.

  “Heavens above,” said Henrik.

  “Let me see!” Hanne said.

  But the room fell silent. For what seemed an eternity. Silje Sørensen read a bit here and a bit there, without batting an eyelid. Hanne, frantically yearning for a chance to flick through to the conclusion, wisely kept her own counsel. Until now she had not divulged that she had only had four hours sleep before her alarm clock had gone off. The silence in the spacious office and the barely audible hum of the computer on the desk made her eyes slide shut. She thought of Maria Kvam and Iselin Havørn. And of Kari Thue, who despite seeming so exhausted and pathetic was still impossible to like.