by Anne Holt
Now Anna held out a blood-soaked cellphone: a text message had summoned Maria to Stugguveien 2B. She could still recall the bizarre message.
Come comenow Soon. Warfare.
If the text had conveyed a more run-of-the-mill message, Maria probably wouldn’t have gone to the bother of turning up at Stugguveien.
Anna had been increasingly depressed after Dina’s tragic death. The first year, her sister had drawn closer to Maria. Anna wanted to surround herself with people all the time, and it felt good to have her make persistent contact. Maria was in Australia when her niece had died, but Anna sent a fully paid return ticket and earnestly entreated her to come home for the funeral.
Her sister had needed her for the very first time.
As weeks and months passed, she no longer needed anyone at all.
Anna buried herself more and more in what Maria realized was an extremely serious depression. It was tiresome, in Maria’s opinion. A real drag, to be honest. Although at first Anna had hugged her every time she came, and usually sobbed in her arms after loads of food and wine they had delivered to the door, she eventually became completely sober. And more aloof. Maria in the meantime had married Roar, and they had gone back to Australia in the summer of 2003. The only reason she had returned to Norway just before Christmas was that her money had run out.
Roar stayed behind down under, and they didn’t get around to divorcing until 2006.
He had at least given her a more attractive surname than the one her sister had acquired through marriage. Hansen, the name they had both been born with, was one neither of them could bear.
She had called on Anna in the hope of getting some help at the end of November. It was only fair that she should. When their parents had died within only six weeks of each other in 1993, it was clear to everyone how the old dears had felt about their offspring. The sale of Hansen White Goods AS had raised a tidy sum of money. Their father had run the family business as his own private savings bank, more miserly than Scrooge McDuck. So a lucrative estate had been wound up after their mother’s funeral, and Maria had thought that the sisters would receive equal shares.
But Anna was the one their parents had favored. She inherited their childhood home, the cottage and the share in the family farm belonging to their father’s relatives near Arendal. Plus six million kroner. Maria received four million kroner, and nothing more. In a state of shock, she had visited a lawyer, an arrogant bastard. Strictly speaking, Maria was not entitled to any more than her basic legal entitlement, he had curtly explained, and challenging her parents’ wills through the courts would be a waste of both time and money. The next lawyer said exactly the same.
Four million had lasted for a few years. She had eked it out with the occasional casual job, but Maria Kvam did not much enjoy working. She had other fish to fry. Travelling. Meeting new people, experiencing new countries. While Anna was a prudish slave to bourgeois conventions, Maria was a free spirit.
It had all been so unfair, and four million did not last very long. It would be advantageous to get married, but that too had been like wetting your pants to keep warm.
In November, Anna had seemed indifferent to Maria’s pleas. She wrote a check for ten thousand kroner and then went to bed. As if a sum like that would help in the least. Anna had inherited her father’s miserliness, and Maria had avoided her for three weeks after that.
The text message had been very odd. When it arrived, Maria was sitting in the car en route to Årvoll to help set things up for a New Year party at her friend’s house. It would take only a few minutes to reach Stugguveien and she was, to tell the truth, slightly curious about why her sister had sent her a message that contained the word warfare.
Not until many years later, and then by sheer accident, had she discovered that the spell checker on the Nokia phone was the culprit: I’m dying in Norwegian turned into warfare if you forgot the space between the two short words.
I’m dying was what Anna had typed in.
And she was.
Maria had first rung the doorbell, more from sheer laziness rather than good manners. She had left her keys in the car. When no one opened the door, she had decided she would not give a damn, but her curiosity had gained the upper hand. She fetched her keys and let herself in.
It seemed so quiet inside that she caught herself creeping around like a little mouse. She kicked off her winter shoes and hung up her outdoor clothes in the hallway before sneaking into the vast kitchen where she usually liked to sit. It was deserted. And unusually clean and tidy.
Anna always kept things tidy. Even when they were little, she was always the one who was praised to the skies for keeping her room in order, even though she was seven years younger. This past year her tidiness had become an obsession. Everything was always in place, and you couldn’t even put down an empty water glass before Anna was on the spot, rinsing it out and stacking it in the dishwasher.
But this was absurd. It must be the result of some obsessivecompulsive disorder.
Maria stood surveying the room with her mouth open. The kitchen was approximately square, fitted out in a horseshoe shape along three of the walls. In the center of the spacious room, a kitchen island had been installed with a sink and two bar stools on the opposite side.
All the surfaces were bare. Not even the kettle was on view. The dishcloth that usually hung neatly folded over the mixer taps was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the washing-up brush, which always sat in a metal soap dish beside the sink.
A faint smell of bleach hung in the air. The room was in semidarkness, and Maria switched on all the lights. In the glass cabinet on one wall she could now see that even the glasses were arranged in very straight lines, and recently sorted according to size. Beer glasses at the bottom, through assorted wine glasses, and little liqueur glasses on the top shelf.
To be honest, it looked as if no one lived there. It would have looked like a catalog photograph if it weren’t for the fact that the obligatory basket laden with fruit was missing.
Maria grew slightly worried.
She opened the fridge, which was virtually empty. The stench of chlorine was stronger now, and not even in the vegetable drawer was there the slightest trace of grime. Three bottles of Farris mineral water were lined up on a shelf in the door, and that was all.
It was not until she closed the fridge door that she caught sight of the letters.
“No,” Maria said, opening her eyes.
The light was an assault. It could not be legal to torment people in prison in this way. What’s more, she was thirsty, and her headache was worsening by the minute. She crossed to the door. The bellowing man had finally kept his mouth shut, but the sobbing of whoever was in the adjacent cell had not yet been stilled.
“I need water!” Maria Kvam shouted, hammering on the metal door.
She refused to entertain any more thoughts about Anna.
The man with the blowtorch arrived at Maria Kvam’s apartment at exactly the same moment as the representative from SafeGuard, the importer and seller of home and office security equipment. The policeman seemed disappointed that the woman in her forties with a tight skirt and high heels was to open the safe, and that he would have to leave the business unfinished when it turned out that SafeGuard had complete control of their products. And their employees. It took the red-haired woman six minutes flat to override Maria Kvam’s combination lock, all while hunkered down smartly with her feet together in their Jimmy Choo shoes.
Hanne was impressed.
The woman carefully lifted the metal plate concealing the secret compartment in the base of the safe. She laid it on the floor and stood up in one single elegant movement.
“I’ll take a back seat now,” she said, with a brief nod in Hanne’s direction. “I’ll wait in the living room, in case you have any further need of me.”
She left the room. “What the hell?”
Ove Finnerud stared in disbelief at the small compartment that now lay open.
&nb
sp; “That there,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, bending down and picking up a piece of paper, “is what I’d call an interesting find. An extremely interesting find.”
No one brought Maria Kvam any water. She hammered on the door until her hands were throbbing, and gave up.
When she got home, she would send a complaint to Amnesty.
At the time of Iselin’s death, Maria had been in Bergen, and no one could prove anything at all. The police had probably left her apartment ages ago. There was nothing there for them to find. There was nothing of interest in the safe.
Except for the secret compartment.
The secret compartment was impossible to discover, however, and soon someone would come and let her out. Maria lay down again on the bunk to concentrate on not thinking about either Iselin or Anna.
Two letters had been left lying on Anna’s gleaming kitchen worktop.
One was a folded copy of the separation agreement. Jonas and Anna had now legally parted.
The other was a sealed white envelope. Anna had written “Jonas” by hand on the front. Nothing else. Maria was tempted to open it, but resisted. Anna would be annoyed. More sulky and sullen than ever.
“Anna?”
Maria left the kitchen. She still could not hear anything other than the occasional shout from the neighboring property: they seemed to be preparing for a party. When she switched on the living room lights, she saw that Anna’s compulsive cleaning had left its mark here too. The room seemed absolutely dead. Not as much as a coffee cup or a newspaper to be seen. No sign of a flower or a potted plant, no knitting or unfinished crossword. The books on the bookshelves stood erect as soldiers on parade, sorted according to color and size and at precisely the same distance from the edges of the shelves.
By this point Maria was growing terribly anxious, mainly because she had no idea what this was all about.
“Anna?”
A sound, she definitely thought. She tiptoed hesitantly upstairs. The bathroom door was open and a cone of light illuminated the gloom of the hallway.
“Anna,” Maria said yet again, daring to move step by step closer to the open door.
Anna’s eyes were the most difficult to forget.
Her left hand was pressed to her face, which looked as if it had collapsed inward. Or else was gone. Blood oozed out through her fingers. Anna was holding her cellphone in her right hand and she held it out to Maria as she struggled to say something.
There was no mouth left to say anything with, Maria could see that. No mouth to phone for an ambulance. No voice to call 112 or any other place, and she had sent Maria a message instead.
Anna was trying to sit up without success.
A pistol lay on the floor.
Anna dropped the cellphone and reached out for the gun. Was she going to shoot herself again?
Maybe she was going to shoot Maria.
Quick as a flash, she crouched down and grabbed the pistol. She stared at it in fright and dropped it on the floor as if she had burned herself. Now at least it was beyond Anna’s reach.
Anna gurgled something incomprehensible and tried to wriggle closer to the door. Maria jerked two steps back, but it was unnecessary. Anna was no longer able to move.
It might be possible to save her sister.
If Anna died, though, Maria would inherit everything. The separation formalities had been completed, and Maria knew someone who had been through something similar. His wife had died only four weeks after authorization had come through, and he was left with nothing at all.
Maria had nothing either.
She could call 112. It looked as if Anna had managed to stanch the worst of the bleeding by holding her hand pressed against the wound. Check it, at least.
She withdrew slowly, out of Anna’s sight. She went downstairs, through the living room, out into the hallway and then into the kitchen. With hands that trembled only ever so slightly, she ripped open the envelope that Anna had left for Jonas.
A suicide letter, she quickly ascertained.
And a last will and testament.
Jonas was to inherit everything from Anna.
Maria was raging. She swore loudly and tore the will into as many tiny pieces as she could. She put them in her mouth, chewed them and spat them out again, she threw them about, cursing and screaming, finally pulling herself together so abruptly that she stopped breathing.
She had to find every single scrap of paper.
She was methodical. Took plenty of time. In the end the kitchen was immaculate again.
Maria stuffed the suicide letter into her back pocket, put the separation agreement in a kitchen drawer, and scanned the room. Everything was exactly as it had been when she arrived.
Apart from two letters that had now vanished.
She had to return to the bathroom again, no matter how much she wanted to do a runner. She could just leave. Anna was going to die anyway. If she left the suicide letter behind, then everything would go smoothly.
Or would it, really?
She could not leave Anna’s letter to Jonas. Not without also leaving the will, which the letter mentioned at one point. And that had now been reduced to minuscule, wet scraps in her trouser pocket.
It struck her as she climbed the stairs that not everyone who committed suicide left a letter. She could run out to the car and phone for an ambulance; maybe it would still be possible to save Anna’s life. But if she died, Maria would be rich. She would be the one to inherit this house. The cottage. All of Anna’s money.
She slowed down as she approached the bathroom.
The problem was that she had been there so long. She glanced at her wristwatch. It was twenty minutes since she had arrived. Someone in the neighbor’s house might have spotted her. They could have done what she did when she parked up on the street: glanced at the time.
She had no good explanation for not having phoned ages ago. She would not have the chance to get rid of the chewed-up will and the letter to Jonas if she called now.
Maria began to cry. Quietly, and not over Anna, who extended her hand to her again and gurgled something unintelligible. Her eyes were dying. Probably it was too late. Everything was too late. She could not be saved, Maria decided, shedding bitter tears at her own fate.
No one must ever see the weird message she had received. The police would find out through Telenor that the cellphone had been used, but not the contents of the message. Not if they didn’t have the phone. She leaned into the bathroom and picked it up.
The pistol too, she thought, as panic set in. She had already touched it. While fingerprints elsewhere in the house could be explained by saying she was here often, a print on a bloody gun would be far more difficult to get away with.
Impossible.
She had no idea what she should do, and so she took it with her. She wrapped both the pistol and the cellphone in toilet paper before she put both inside her trouser waistband. For a second, because she had to step aside to avoid losing her balance when she stood up, she touched Anna’s hand. It was still warm.
Warm, Maria thought. Heat delayed the death process. Anna was bleeding to death, but it mustn’t happen around six o’clock. Death must take place later than that. Maria had no idea how much later the result would have to be, but she turned the thermostat to the maximum setting. On both the heated floor and the towel rail, which she could reach easily without stepping in all the blood.
Maria closed the door and left her sister to die.
She already knew what she would have to do the next morning, and it would be easy, given the weather outside. The windows could be reached without coming into contact with as much as a drop of blood.
And so Maria was the one who inherited everything from Anna. “It was only fair,” Maria said to herself as she screwed up her eyes against the light on the ceiling.
“It was the only fair thing to do, and Anna’s life probably couldn’t have been saved.”
She had never regretted it. In fact she had not done anything w
rong. If Anna, contrary to expectation, had survived, she would have looked dreadful. She had wanted to die, but not managed to do it cleanly. Maria had simply helped her along, and as for getting back her childhood home and everything that was hers by right – no one could gainsay any of that.
Maria could not be reproached because it had entered Jonas’s head to pay a visit to Anna in the middle of the night and then become enmeshed in a net of idiotic lies. Far from it. He only had himself to blame. As far as Maria was concerned, Jonas’s visit to Stugguveien 2B was a stroke of luck. Or maybe a sign that fate wished her well.
She regretted none of it and sat up quickly to resume hammering on the cell door again. Her tongue felt like sandpaper.
She had smashed Anna’s cellphone to smithereens on New Year’s Day before returning to Stugguveien, and thrown it into a random garbage bin. She had considered tossing the pistol in the sea, but it was a long time before the opportunity arose. She had been terrified for the first few days of 2004 when she had spent hours on end with the police. The gun was still lying under the seat in her car, and she almost had a heart attack every time someone knocked on the interview room door. Fortunately she was treated as a deeply sorrowing sister: any interruptions were normally due to offers of more coffee and Farris mineral water. When Jonas was arrested, she breathed considerably more easily, and later that spring she took a trip on the Danish ferry.
The pistol had disappeared into the Skaggerak.
On the other hand, she had needed the suicide letter.
It was impossible to burn that.
She had read it probably a hundred times during that first year.
It gave her such comfort, that letter. Anna had wanted to die, more than anything else, and Maria had helped her to depart from life. Leaving Anna on the bathroom floor had been an act of compassion. The only right thing to do, and the letter brought her peace and reassurance that she had done the correct thing.
It was a beautiful letter, and she kept it so that she could have regular confirmation that she had not done anything wrong that evening when her sister had made up her mind to die.
