The Fifth Element

by Jorgen Brekke

  Singsaker: Only what I’ve already told you. It was a request for assistance.

  Melhus: According to Sheriff Birger Anthonsen on Hitra, a car that was parked in the yard of the bombed-out cabin quickly became part of the investigation. He says that he mentioned the car and its license number in his first conversation with Brattberg. He also claims that he said it was a rental car.

  Attorney Gregersen: As I understand it, he added that he’s not positive about that. He may have mentioned it in a later conversation. What does Brattberg have to say about this?

  Melhus: She also says that she’s not sure. She thinks the information about the rental car came later on. But let’s not get too hung up on who remembers what. This much we know: A rental car was parked outside in the yard at the site of the explosion when the police arrived at 12:05 P.M. It was determined that the car had been rented from Hertz. The license number was quickly checked and linked to Hertz at Gardermoen and to Felicia Stone. Do you understand that I think it’s possible that the Trondheim police may have connected the event in Østerdalen with the explosion before 3:15 P.M., when you and Jensen left the police station and headed for Hitra?

  Singsaker: I follow what you’re saying.

  Melhus: So I’m going to ask you point-blank: When you drove to Hitra with Jensen, did you know that a car, rented in your wife’s name, had been found at the explosion site? Was that why you went there with Jensen?

  Attorney Gregersen: You don’t have to answer that question.

  Singsaker: I went to Hitra because I wanted to talk to Jensen some more. That’s all.

  Melhus: Did you know that Felicia had been linked to one of the sites being investigated by the police?

  Singsaker: The situation was still unclear. No one knew yet what exactly had happened.

  Melhus: I’m going to ask you one last time: Did you know about the rental car that was parked in the yard?

  Singsaker: I got in the car with Jensen because I wanted to talk to him. I was on sick leave and went along as a civilian. There were no plans for me to participate in any active police work out there.

  Melhus: And yet that’s precisely what happened.

  Attorney Gregersen: The prosecution knows full well our view of the matter. Everything that Singsaker did during those dramatic hours on Hitra, he did in his capacity as an off-duty officer, but he had not been suspended or put on leave from his job on the police force. He was merely on sick leave, and did nothing that would not be permitted for any citizen of this country to do. Much of what he did was purely in self-defense.

  Melhus: We will come back to the motive for his actions at a later time.

  12

  Two weeks after it happened …

  Singsaker looked at his watch. It was almost eleven thirty. He put the documents in his bag and got up.

  Then he went over to the counter and did what he had vowed not to do: He ordered a shot of Red Aalborg, which he downed in one gulp. Finally, he left the restaurant and headed off to work.

  On his way there, he was lost in thought. He hardly noticed Trondheim in the sunshine or the almost springlike air, the snow glittering as it slid down the slanted rooftops and hung perilously from the eaves, or the bare pathways in the snow on the sidewalks, the light footsteps of the old women, or the dog shit that had spent the winter hidden in the snowbanks and was now emerging.

  Odd Singsaker was thinking about Kurt Melhus. He was thinking about Horten. That time so many years ago. The Philosopher was not the only nickname that Melhus had been given. After an incident out on Bastøy in Oslo Fjord, he’d also been called Mr. Gray Matter.

  As comical as it sounded, there was something frightening about that name. Singsaker knew that he couldn’t fool Melhus. He needed to stick to the truth as long as he could, but no longer.

  As he walked along Kjøpmannsgata, he thought about the Bastøy affair. It occurred to him that old memories were often more vivid to him than recent ones. Except for the events on Hitra. Those hours were frozen solid in his mind, but otherwise much of what had happened in recent weeks was a blur, as if those events were somehow less important than what had happened in the distant past. He could still recall sounds and smells from long ago, as if his senses had just registered them. Memories of things that happened thirty or forty years ago seemed strangely fresh. That was true of the Bastøy affair and the dinner right before. He remembered that dinner so well. He and Melhus were supposed to be getting to know each other better.

  * * *

  “We should have planned something fancier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we had dinner with Kurt and Anne last weekend, I noticed their china was from Porsgrunn.”

  “What does it matter where the china is from as long as the plates aren’t cracked? They’re just meant to hold the food, not entertain us with a song and dance.”

  “And their forks and knives were Georg Jensen.”

  “Georg Jensen? Who’s that? Some sportscaster I’ve never heard of?”

  “You’re kidding me. Don’t you remember our trip to Copenhagen?”

  Singsaker remembered it well. One of the best things about living in Horten was that it was easy to go abroad. The boat to Denmark went right past. But that was no reason not to take the job in Trondheim. They were moving there soon, but the trip to Copenhagen had been an amazing experience. They’d had a cabin on board. And Anikken practically had to carry him to the hotel after their antics in that cabin, all the Danish beer and aquavit, the herring—and an evening when he couldn’t get enough Red Aalborg.

  “Georg Jensen was that silversmith shop we went into on Strøget.”

  Now he remembered.

  “You went in,” he said. “I sat near the fountain on Højbro Plads and drank a beer, if I recall correctly.”

  “I came out to get you.”

  “Oh, that’s right. But we agreed it was way too expensive.”

  “I’m just saying that we ate with silverware from Georg Jensen when we had dinner with Kurt and Anne. That’s all.”

  “Let them be the snobs. We’ll concentrate on happiness instead,” he teased, giving her a smile.

  “Eternal happiness?”

  “What good would happiness be if it wasn’t eternal?” he said.

  Anikken gave him a quick kiss. Then she put the last stainless steel fork in the silverware drawer. A perfectly fine set of cutlery that his mother had given them.

  The doorbell rang. Singsaker was struggling to get the cork out of a bottle of red wine, so Anikken went to open the door for their guests. When they came into the dining room, he was hacking at the broken cork with one of the knives that Anikken found so embarrassing. Wine squirted onto the linen tablecloth when the cork was finally pushed inside the bottle. He smiled at Kurt Melhus.

  “Yet another good reason to stick with beer, if you ask me.”

  Melhus politely smiled back.

  “I don’t think we’ll ask you,” said Anikken. She took the bottle from him and wiped if off with a napkin. Then she poured a little salt on the stained tablecloth. “We’re having rib eye steak.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  Melhus’s wife, Anne, was an attractive woman. But her beauty was only superficial. The opposite was true of Kurt. He wasn’t much to look at. But his head was screwed on right. He was both intelligent and a good person.

  “Nice china,” said Anne. “Porcelain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Egersund?”

  Anikken nodded and smiled. The game had begun.

  After dinner Singsaker got out the aquavit.

  “I bought cognac,” Anikken whispered. “VS. It’s in the cupboard above the sink.”

  Singsaker was about to object. He didn’t want cognac. But he felt a sense of solidarity with her.

  Then the phone rang. Singsaker went out to the hallway to take the call.

  “Singsaker here.”

  “This is Ambjørnsen. I’m trying to get hold of both you and
Melhus, but he’s not home.”

  “Melhus is here.”

  “We need backup.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was an assault. A crazy man with a knife, and he’s on the run. Possible attempted homicide.”

  “Homicide? Where?”

  “Out at Vernehjemmet.”

  “The prison out on Bastøy?”

  “About time you learned some geography down here.”

  Singsaker didn’t think it was the right time to joke around, considering the situation.

  “Should we come into the station?”

  “Yes, then all of you can go to the ferry dock together. We’ve requisitioned a boat. We need a lot of manpower to secure the area. We don’t know whether he’s still out there on the island.”

  * * *

  How strange, thought Singsaker. That’s what I remember best. The dinner, the awkward mood, the passive-aggressive comments from Melhus’s wife, and the fact that Melhus spoke only when absolutely necessary. But when he did say something, it often turned the whole conversation in a different direction. His comments were so clever it was almost frightening.

  Not until they got out to Bastøy did he actually become talkative.

  Two other detectives went with them. Lier and Horst, if he remembered correctly. Both of them outranked Melhus. But it was Officer Melhus who found a solution for what had happened out there. He was able to turn the whole case on its head.

  Bastøy used to be a notorious home for boys. Plenty of kids had suffered a miserable fate there. Back then, in 1972, it was used as a home for people who were unfit to work, recovering alcoholics, and other homeless people. It reminded Singsaker of a prison.

  The stabbing victim was a man who’d been on guard duty that night. The suspect, an alcoholic inmate, had taken off in a boat. That was the presumed state of things when they arrived, and Lier and Horst decided to proceed accordingly. But Melhus quickly observed that someone had recently been digging in the potato field. He also noted a wet guard’s uniform, a good deal of blood on the floor of the crime scene, and an ax missing from the tool collection. After putting all these facts together with some background information about the suspect that he’d had the presence of mind to look up at police headquarters before leaving, Melhus convinced everyone that the suspect was the real victim, while the victim in the case was the perpetrator.

  And of course Melhus had been right, Singsaker thought as he walked across the canal bridge to Brattøra.

  All the technical evidence on the island supported his theory. The boat was quickly found, with the body of the suspect inside. He turned out to be a former police officer from Oslo by the name of Teodor Olsen. Presumably he’d never touched the knife at all before he was struck down by the guard wielding an ax. The motive behind the murder came to light during the investigation. A rumor had long circulated that Olsen had stashed a large sum of money, taken from some investigation he’d been involved with. And it was discovered that he’d buried the money in the potato field on Bastøy.

  When the guard eventually confessed, he also revealed that Olsen had told him where the money was hidden. The guard had planned to kill the man and make off with the loot.

  This story, which was Singsaker’s very first murder case, had always fascinated him. It taught him something that he’d later had confirmed many times. Brutal crimes are often the result of stupid and sloppy actions. It was almost like the perpetrator is dumber when he kills than at any other time in his life. That was true of crimes that were solved, at any rate. A minimum of thought, planning, and precision was necessary to carry out a successful crime, if such a thing even existed. But a surprising number of crimes were based on erroneous ideas.

  The case had also shown Singsaker that such erroneous ideas were not part of the thought processes of Kurt Melhus. And he was the man who almost forty years later would question Singsaker about possible breach of duty committed on Hitra. The man who, after his performance on Bastøy, was nicknamed Mr. Gray Matter, a name he retained for the rest of his time in Horten. He worked there longer than Singsaker, who got a job in Trondheim a few months later and never looked back. But after a while a man like Melhus was bound to end up in Oslo. There he spent a long time working for Kripo, the Criminal Police, before finally transferring to Internal Affairs and moving to central Norway.

  * * *

  “You smell,” said Jensen.

  Singsaker stared at him in surprise. On his way to the interview, he’d dropped by his colleague’s office to say hello. He thought it would be a sensible thing to do. Jensen might have something to tell him that was important.

  “Booze,” said Jensen. “Aquavit. Don’t pretend you haven’t had a snort.”

  “You can smell it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Singsaker was confused. Jensen had never before said anything about his habit of starting the day with a shot of booze. Even if he’d noticed, it hadn’t bothered him. Singsaker had been convinced the same held for the rest of his colleagues at the station.

  “Have you…” Singsaker didn’t know how to ask the question.

  “Sure,” said Jensen. “I’ve noticed once in a while. I know you never come to work drunk. But did you really need to have a drink today? It’s one thing for me to smell it on you. It’s another story if he does.”

  “Melhus?”

  “Who else?”

  “True enough. That wouldn’t be good.”

  “Have a cough drop.”

  “Fisherman’s Friend? I’m all out.”

  “So go buy some. We’re talking about your job here. And mine.”

  Singsaker looked at his colleague, who was probably also his best friend. He had rarely—no, never—seen him look so tense.

  “I’m not trying to stress you out.” Jensen gave a strained laugh. “But we need to do things right.”

  “Have you seen him today?”

  “Only from a distance, but you know how he is. He never wastes time on small talk. And he’s already talked to me.”

  * * *

  Singsaker had to run over to the train station across the street to get some cough drops. When he got back to police headquarters, he was out of breath and two minutes late for the appointment. He had also begun to sweat. Not a good start for another lengthy session.

  Melhus was already sitting in the interrogation room. Singsaker’s lawyer, Evald Gregersen, a well-dressed and precise man who was an expert on such matters, was waiting for him in the hall. He straightened his tie and gave Singsaker a reassuring look, as if to calm him down.

  “I hope your tardiness is because you’ve been preparing yourself,” the lawyer said with a smile.

  “Just some last-minute things I needed to take care of,” replied Singsaker.

  “Those last-minute details are always the most important,” said Gregersen. “Let’s stay on the same track as yesterday, meaning tell the truth, but only say what is absolutely necessary. Try to steer away from your feelings about what happened to your wife. Facts. Just facts. And as the facts now stand, they’ve got very little on you. Focus on that. It’s only when you reveal your emotions, which they don’t need to see, that things may appear different from what they were. They want to try and show that you acted out of passion. We want to show that everything you did was done out of sheer necessity.”

  Singsaker nodded. He had no intention of lying to Melhus. That man could trace the curvature of the gravitational field around any lies, no matter how well concealed they might be. But at the same time, he had no intention of giving Melhus what he was after. Singsaker knew that it was as much a matter of point of view as it was of the truth. This was going to be a battle between different versions of what happened.

  PART III

  BLOOD

  The human being is warmest during the first days of his life, coldest at the end.

  —HIPPOCRATES

  13

  Approximately a week before it happened …

  “Y
ou’ve always seemed to have more blood in you than other people, Knut,” his mother once said as she was changing the bandage on his knee. He had fallen and skinned his knee on the rocks again, one day during his childhood out at the cabin, during a summer like so many other summers. “But there’s also more life in you.”

  The laugh he uttered was for his mother. He had a different laugh for each family member. This one was for his mother, something he’d created just for the two of them, for times when they were alone, like now, when his siblings were off roaming over the rocks. The blood seeping out of the cut was their only worry in the world, at least for a brief time, until everyone started talking about the twin towers on the radio. There was no electricity out there. His father preferred it that way. “We inherited the place like this, and it’s going to stay just the way it is,” he’d said about the cabin on the island of Tjøme in southeastern Norway. His father had inherited almost everything they owned. Very few changes were ever made at home. Maybe it was his way of showing gratitude. The cabin had no computer or TV, but it did have a gas stove, water in the well, an outdoor toilet, reeds that rustled in the wind at night, grasshoppers, apple trees, phosphorescence in the surf, tar that was tough and silent, a horizon in which the seagulls could disappear, the smell of his father’s cigarettes coming from beyond the silvery islet where he occasionally went to smoke in secret. And in the midst of all that silence: a radio. Knut was twelve years old. His mother had gone back inside the cabin with the box of Band-Aids. A clear voice was speaking to him about destruction. He turned off the radio, and that was the last thing he remembered about that day. The summer days didn’t change. He kept on growing up.

  Now there wasn’t much life left in Knut as he hung from his feet. But there was plenty of blood. It gushed from his face and into his hair. From there it dripped onto the floor beneath him. He squirmed, making a creaking sound come from the lamp hook from which he was hanging. The hook wasn’t intended to hold the weight of a grown man, especially not his weight. Soon he would fall to the ground, like an overripe apple. When that happened, he was hoping to swing himself over toward the table in the room. That would break his fall.