by Anne Holt
Hanne’s thoughts turned to Jonas Abrahamsen and she sent up a silent prayer that they would be able to prove what she and Henrik were already convinced of.
Without a doubt, Jonas was a modern Job.
“They were all found guilty,” the Police Chief finally announced. “Six jailed for life, among them Kirsten Ranvik and her son Peder. Congratulations. To you both. They’ll all appeal, of course, but congratulations all the same. Good work.”
She made no move to show them the document.
“Don’t mention this to anyone until the verdict has been formally announced,” she said, resuming her seat behind the desk.
Taking two sheets of blue paper from a drawer, she picked up a pen and filled out both documents at top speed. When the final full stop was banged down, she handed the papers to Henrik, who stood up uncertainly to accept them.
“There are still a few of us who write things out by hand,” the Police Chief said with a faint smile. “Now and again. And don’t think I’m finished with you. But it’ll have to wait. Go. Liaise with Amanda on a house search and arrest. And off you go.”
Hanne moved to the door. Henrik stood hesitantly by the Police Chief’s desk. He had rolled up the blue forms and was twisting them round and round in his hand.
“Can I continue working on the Jonas case?” he pleaded falteringly. “Please?”
Silje gazed at him with resigned look, shaking her head gently and leaning back into her chair, holding both armrests with grim determination.
“A bit late to ask, Henrik. But yes. Find out if this poor man was wrongly convicted.”
“I’ll do that,” Henrik said, flashing a broad smile before abruptly turning deadly serious again. “Thanks a million. And … apologies.”
“This is all I’ve found that’s of interest,” the young detective said, slightly embarrassed, as he put a half-filled, brown carton on the floor between Amanda Foss and Hanne Wilhelmsen.
Hanne leaned down from her wheelchair and peered into it. She could see a Mac Mini, two iPads, one cellphone and a few card readers. A big stack of papers and documents. Three blister packs of seemingly innocuous medicines. And a book she lifted out and examined more closely: Beauty and the Beast – Poisonous Plants in the City Garden.
“She certainly didn’t use foxgloves and laburnum to kill anyone,” she murmured, recklessly flinging the book back before removing her latex gloves and staring at the young police officer. “Give it one more sweep. Minimum.”
Maria Kvam had been led away some time ago. Even though it was a very long time since Hanne had been present at an ordinary arrest, she recognized the ashen woman’s reactions. First she went two shades paler. Then came the protests, which grew increasingly vociferous. After a few minutes these changed to demands for a lawyer, combined with veiled and eventually pretty direct threats of outrageous consequences for the six police representatives if they did not leave her apartment at once.
That had been over an hour ago, and now Maria Kvam was ensconced in the backyard at Police Headquarters in an incredibly uncomfortable remand cell.
“Money,” Hanne said softly. “Money, sex or revenge. Or a combination of all three. That’s usually how it goes.”
“What?”
Amanda stared at her nervously – she had seemed jittery ever since they had left Grønlandsleiret 44 together and made their way to a stripped luxury apartment in Tjuvholm.
“I should have realized,” Hanne said. “Prejudices are dangerous. You’re not alone in drawing hasty conclusions, Amanda.”
The blond woman gave a perplexed smile.
“I was so sure that Iselin was killed because of her opinions,” Hanne explained. “Probably because I find her opinions so objectionable that I could have murdered her myself.”
Amanda Foss’s smile morphed into a stiff grimace.
“Figuratively speaking, of course,” Hanne added dolefully. “But actually it was only about money, jealousy and revenge and all the good old sins. Maria was furious that Iselin had found someone else. Terrified that she would bugger off with half of VitaeBrass. In addition, I assume, Henrik tells me that Maria did not have sole ownership of anything.”
She held the cellphone display up to Amanda, but pulled it back again so quickly that it was impossible for her to read the message.
“The house in Stugguveien. The cottage. The money and this apartment. Everything would have to be split down the middle if Iselin left her for the sake of another woman. On Iselin’s death, everything reverted to Maria. Wow.”
She smacked her lips and shook her head. “We humans are so banal. Hello! Hello there!”
She waved the young officer over: he was busy opening pots of paint to check if there was anything of relevance to the murder case hidden in thirty liters of white emulsion.
“The safe,” Hanne said as he approached. “Was there anything of value inside it?”
“Not particularly. A photograph album. That just held old childhood photos, so I didn’t take it. A lot of jewelry. Papers. They’re in here.” He nodded at the carton on the floor.
“Is the safe empty now?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see,” Hanne said, rolling in the direction of the apartment’s bedroom.
Although most of the rooms were virtually stripped of contents, the vast wardrobe was well filled, on one side at least. Hanne immediately assumed that Maria had found it difficult to remove what remained of Iselin. In the middle, between the empty and the chockfull sections of the capacious wardrobe, she could see a pale-gray safe about a meter and a half in height. Despite noisy protests, Maria had agreed to open it before she was escorted off the premises, once Hanne had delivered threats she could only hope none of the other police officers present had recorded.
The door was open and the safe empty. On the floor beside it, the detective had placed everything he had not considered of sufficient interest to seize as evidence.
Hanne gazed at the safe. Amanda was trailing behind her.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she ventured to ask.
“No. But that safe is quite unusual in itself.”
“Oh … is it?”
“Fairly hefty, don’t you think?”
“Yes, maybe. We don’t need a safe, so I don’t really know what–”
“Spot on. You don’t need a safe. At least not one as big and bulky as that one. Was your name Finnerud?”
She raised her voice for the final sentence.
“Yes,” called the young man from the living room.
“Come here!”
He took only two seconds.
“Check that safe for me,” Hanne said, pointing. “Feel along all the sides and edges. Top and bottom. Press and push and scratch. Just with your hands to start with, but use gloves.”
Finnerud held his hands up to show that he was already wearing gloves, but discovered they were both stained with paint. Blushing furiously, he tore them off and put on a new pair he produced from his pocket. Crouching on all fours, he put his head under the safe’s lower shelf.
“What am I looking for?” he asked through his contortions.
“Irregularities. Depressions. Something that gives. Clicks. Anything at all that’s not smooth, regular and silent.”
He groaned, moved his hand and swore when he hit his head off the metal shelf.
Amanda Foss said nothing. She had started to perspire, Hanne noticed, and a fine film of moisture had appeared on her forehead and upper lip.
“There’s something here,” the young lad on the floor panted. “It’s just as if …”
A little click, almost inaudible.
“A … it’s a …”
He backed out of the safe, straightened his spine and remained kneeling on the floor. His fringe was damp.
“A little platform,” he said, using the thumb and forefinger of both hands to describe a narrow rectangle. “It slid open when I rubbed along the edges. There are eight tiny keys underneat
h. Black, I think: it’s difficult to see in there.”
Hanne smiled.
“Well done, Finnerud. Your next task is to find out who sells these safes. Get one of their men here as fast as you can, and tell him what we want him to do. And if that takes more than …”
She glanced at her wristwatch.
“… an hour, then get hold of one of our people with a blowtorch instead.”
Finnerud nodded and gave the safe a skeptical look.
“It’d have to be a big blowtorch,” he said, standing upright. “A damned big, powerful blowtorch!”
*
“I once killed a child.”
Nearly four days and nights had passed since Hedda Bengtson had been abducted while she slept in a red buggy in the kindergarten close by her home.
Ninety-six hours and seven minutes, to be exact, as Bengt was well aware; he kept count minute by minute. It couldn’t be about the money. No one had made any demands, and no one had contacted him to request 763 million bloody kroner in exchange for a three-year-old with long, blond eyelashes and soft, downy hair.
“You have not killed anyone,” Christel said listlessly; she had finally accepted the offer of something to help her sleep.
In the past few hours she had slipped in and out of a kind of doze, but had just been woken by thirst. She drained her glass and held it out to her father for a refill.
“Yes I did,” Bengt Bengtson said quietly without taking it. “I once killed a child.”
Christel heaved herself up into a sitting position.
“What’s that you’re saying?” she mumbled. “I need some water.”
He gave her his own bottle.
“You have to believe me,” he said. “It’s important that you listen to me and believe what I’m telling you. I should have mentioned this to you before now.”
“What are you talking about?” she yelled, drawing back from him. “Dad! Don’t talk like that!”
“I killed a three-year-old,” Bengt said. “She was called Dina.”
He thought he had forgotten her name. He had forced himself to forget her, to forget all about her and that poor father of hers. It was impossible to forget the little girl whose name was Dina Abrahamsen, but until now he had thought he had succeeded. Made up his mind that it was all in the past and forgotten.
“What are you talking about?” Christel shrieked.
“You were so little yourself. Eight years old. Mum had left only a couple of years earlier. There were just the two of us, Christel. You were too young to know anything about it. It was an accident. A sheer accident. The police said I couldn’t be blamed, I hadn’t …”
He suddenly held back as she got out of bed and retreated to a corner of the room where a white wall met pastel-colored wallpaper decorated with huge flowers. She held her hands up as if to fend him off.
“Stop!” she snarled. “Dad, stop. Hedda’s not dead.”
He put his face in his hands. “No, she’s not dead.”
“So why are you tormenting me with this, then? Why are you telling me about dead children and that you’ve killed somebody and …”
Bengt rose stiffly from the bed. The room was spinning: he had to find his sea legs. Once he regained his balance, he opened out his arms and closed his eyes, fearing that Christel would not come to embrace him.
But she did.
He had to hold them both up. He could only just manage to stand himself, but Christel was so small in his arms, so fragile and exhausted that he lifted her up and laid her on the bed. He tucked a blanket around her, straight and tight; she crept into a fetal position and would soon have no more tears left to cry.
“You should never have won that money, Dad. We have to tell the police about this. Maybe it’s the little girl’s family that want it.”
Her voice was so weak that he had to lower his face all the way down to hers.
“They’re probably after the money,” she whimpered. “But why haven’t they been in touch? Dad, why don’t they tell us anything?”
She was terrifyingly pale. She folded her hands and sank her teeth into them, so hard that they made red indentations on her skin.
“Don’t do that,” he whispered, trying to hold her hands in his.
Eventually she looked up.
Pleading, incredulity and desperation: something seemed to be falling apart in Christel’s eyes. Bengt had seen this before, only once, more than fourteen years earlier. He had knocked down a child. A three-year-old, and he remembered only too vividly that her name was Dina.
The police had come. And an ambulance, driving full tilt with all sirens blaring. When it left, it had set off in somber silence, and on the stretcher inside the vehicle lay a tiny little body now beyond all help.
He remembered he had wept.
He remembered the schoolchildren, shocked and curious, held back by the police whose numbers had swelled, and who took the driving license that was returned to him only a fortnight later. Bengt remembered the biting wind. The weather had been dismal and rainy, and his body grew so frozen to the bone that it took a long time to thaw out. A solitary streetlamp cast a nauseous, yellow light over the chalk-white child with half-open eyes and a thin trickle of blood running from her nose.
That was all. A tiny trickle of blood from the left nostril, but the little girl was dead.
It was not Bengt’s fault. He was aware of that there and then, and in the weeks that followed – that was how he had managed to live with what had happened. It had been an accident. The sort of thing that now and again just happens. A chance incident with a catastrophic result.
The police arrived at the same conclusion. He had been driving well under the speed limit. The reconstruction had also shown that it had been impossible for him to catch sight of the child before she suddenly ran out in front of his car. Her father blocked his view: he was standing with his back to the road, poking around in a mailbox.
It was quite simply no one’s fault.
That had been a difficult Christmas, but he had kept up appearances out of consideration for Christel. He had visited the child’s parents a few weeks later, but the father refused to meet him. The mother seemed upset and tear-stained, but had thanked him nicely for the white roses he had sent to the funeral.
In time the circumstances surrounding Dina’s death were reduced to a tender spot in Bengt Bengtson’s personal history. Something he would really prefer to be without, but something that did not bother him unduly. In recent years he had hardly spared the victim a moment’s thought.
But he had not forgotten. None of it was completely erased. And the most difficult detail to banish was the look in the eyes of the man in the green quilted jacket. He had just stood there with his dying daughter in his arms while he screamed at the lowering, blue-gray skies until he suddenly stopped and stared at Bengt and said: It wasn’t your fault.
Jonas Abrahamsen was his name, and now Christel reminded him of that man.
Their eyes were distressingly similar, and it was unbearable.
“Yes,” Bengt whispered to his daughter. “I’ll tell the police that there is one man who probably harbors ill will against me. Who has probably wished me ill for fifteen years, in fact. I’ll go to the living room and tell them right now.”
Maria Kvam sat in a cell trying to shut out the harsh light.
It was no use closing her eyes. Then everything went white, with gray specks dancing over her retinas, making her headache even worse. She was sitting on a hard bunk. They had not given her a mattress. No blankets either, but that didn’t matter. It was far too warm in here anyway. The toilet in the corner stank of urine. The contraption for defecating in was a molded unit and had no lid. Maria tugged at her sweater with her eyes squeezed tightly shut: this light was driving her mad.
She did not think of Iselin.
She certainly did not want to spare a single thought for Iselin, who had betrayed her despite Maria having given her everything. Maria had even renounced her own ori
ginal first name because that’s what Iselin had wanted. When they met, Iselin Havørn was barely more than a bad blog and a heap of colorful clothes. She was on long-term sick leave and flat broke. It was true that she was highly regarded on the alternative scene and its related splendors, but essentially she was only a bloody fortune hunter.
As things turned out.
Maria was not thinking about Iselin, because it had been just as easy to start hating someone as it had once been to fall head over heels in love and let her have everything she possessed. Iselin had to die because she deserved it, and she no longer warranted as much as a passing thought.
It was Anna who forced her way into her thoughts.
The little sister who had always been best at everything.
The prettiest. The sweetest. The cleverest, of course, and Daddy’s little sweetheart. When they were children, Maria had not given it too much thought. After all, the age difference was so great. Even Maria had to admit that Anna was beautiful as a three-year-old in her inherited regional costume for the National Day celebrations on May 17 when she still couldn’t pronounce either “h” or “r”.
“Ullah, ullah, ullah!” Anna had cheered as she marched around the garden, looking good enough to eat. “Ipp, ipp ulaaah!”
In time, it grew far worse.
Maria tried to stretch out on the bunk. The light only grew even more insistent, and it hurt her shoulder blades. She hauled herself up again and began to pace the floor.
There were so many noises in here. Loud shouts. Ferocious swearing from some man or other with a rough voice and increasingly obscene requests for attention from the custody officers. She could hear some people crying, followed by keys rattling, and for a moment she stood to attention, listening intently: it seemed as if someone was about to open her door.
And let her out, perhaps.
Tell her that it had all been a misunderstanding, and let her go home.
Anna forced her way into her head. When Maria sat down on the bunk again with her eyes closed, she saw her sister in her mind’s eye, lying on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood, with half her face blown away. She had raised her right hand to her, the hand that had held the pistol when she shot herself; it could not have been anything else, since her last will and testament was lying open on the kitchen worktop.
