The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

‘Fair enough,’ Thygesen answers, heading for the gate. He has forgotten to change into outdoor shoes.

  He’ll freeze his toes off, Stribolt thinks.

  ‘I’ve put a tail on Thygesen,’ Vaage states.

  Stribolt doesn’t reply. He suspects now that winter and spring could pass before they find a solution – or they are facing the unsolvable. He doesn’t tell Vaage though. She won’t want to hear that.

  2

  Vaage bursts into Stribolt’s office unannounced. He has been daydreaming that he is Michael Douglas and hurriedly clicks on to his screensaver, which is showing Catherine Zeta-Jones in a becoming evening gown.

  But he is too slow, as usual, and Vaage shouts ‘Dirty old bugger!’ – as usual – they have their little rituals. Another screensaver automatically appears, of another actor, Stribolt’s fellow Hammerfestian Bjørn Sundquist, in the role of Hamlet, with the skull held out at arm’s length.

  It is Monday 12 February. More than a week has passed since they found the body of the frozen woman. And the bitter reality is that they have less than nothing to go on. The only thing he has, as the interviewer, is that he trapped Vilhelm Thygesen in a bare-faced lie. Thygesen told him in the interview that on 27 January he had dinner with Bernhard Levin and his partner at Restaurant Arcimboldo. It was physically impossible and Thygesen is trying to cover up something by lying about this restaurant visit. But is what he wants to hide such a sophisticated murder that there isn’t a single clue? Or is it some minor sleaze?

  Thygesen didn’t lie about where his tenant, Vera Alam, is. Norwegian People’s Aid has confirmed that she works for the organisation in Sarajevo and she is living there for the moment.

  ‘I suggest we have another bash at it,’ Vaage says. She is wearing her office outfit: college sweater and wide-fitting training pants. It is the same Yankee get-up she wears when she pumps iron. She has lifted tons in the last week, bitterly frustrated that she, as leader of the forensic section, has nothing substantial to go on. Not the tiniest drop of relevant blood or anything else that contains DNA, no decent tyre tracks, no footprints. Worst of all, no identification of the deceased. The only clue she has is what she in an initial burst of enthusiasm called ‘plaster stripes’, which were the remains of glue on the dead body. These stripes show that the woman wore plasters over something she wanted to hide and they suggest drugs. But all Vaage has to show for her efforts is a couple of desiccated lumps of hash, which are of as much use as last year’s snow, and four morphine ampules from the Second World War.

  Oslo’s telltales have no tales to tell. The general public is unusually quiet. Even the usual crop of mad tip-offs is thin.

  The newspapers are showing a surprising reserve and have lost interest in the whole affair.

  ‘Anything new on your front?’ Stribolt asks. He has left foreign leads to Vaage.

  ‘The Swedish guy from Västerås who claims that his Assyrian – or was it asylum Syrian? – girlfriend has gone missing in Norway is coming over tomorrow to have a look at Picea.’

  They have given the unidentified woman the name Picea after the Latin word for spruce. It had been Stribolt’s spur-of-the-moment suggestion, and he regrets it because its Norwegian pronunciation rhymes with Ikea, and in Ikea he suffers from claustrophobia and an acute refusal to buy.

  The man from Västerås has been convicted of rape and charged with molesting under-age girls. Picea wasn’t sexually abused. They know that with as much certainty as they can know that sort of thing, based on the pathologist’s examination of the body. They are spared the repulsion of having to hunt a sex murderer; however, a motive which often leads to an arrest is lacking in this case.

  ‘Anything from Interpol?’ Stribolt asks.

  ‘Nothing of any use, but wickedness on a grand scale as far as women are concerned. I’m a bit shocked at how many non-European women have been reported missing in Europe. And perhaps even more amazed by how many dark-haired girls and women are found murdered in our part of the world every year, and the percentage of those who are never identified. They have lists kilometres long in the Lyons archives. Three to four hundred women from countries outside the Schengen Area are killed every year in Europe. Interpol never finds out who many of them are and hardly anyone is ever caught for these crimes.’

  Vaage has spoken for an unusually long time and with a melancholic tone to her voice. Her expression wasn’t the usual dogged grimace. A shadow of sadness flitted across her face. For a short while she stepped out of the role she normally plays. They both play roles to keep their routine encounters with death at bay, to keep emergency psychiatrists at a distance.

  Stribolt, who, after working with Vanja Vaage for many years, knows her better than her own father does, waits for her to revert to her role and become the tough female cop she is reputed to be. Vaage, with her arms stiffly down by her sides, sways. She will never be a reed in the wind though; she is too robust for that. But she has shown a certain vulnerability which she knows is in her, even if it is rarely seen.

  ‘Take a seat, Vanja,’ Stribolt says, and clears his throat loudly.

  He has tried to follow Thygesen’s example by slipping a snus pouch inside his lip. Without success. He might just as well have inserted powdered cat shit.

  In front of him on the table is a close-up of Picea’s face. It is there to remind him how depressing the material they are sifting through is. Picea’s ear is deformed as a result of an injury and ought to be able to help them towards identifying her. The pathologist believes it may have been caused by a bite, a dog bite maybe, most probably when she was small. The odontology expert considers the fillings she has – very few of them, bearing in mind her age, thirty to thirty-five – to be typical of the Middle East. There is a fresh tear in the undamaged ear. The perpetrator, or perpetrators, might have torn off an earring.

  ‘Her coat is a cheap brand,’ Vaage says, starting up the laptop she has placed on her knees. ‘The label is Portofino. Produced in Slovenia. Sold all over the EU and in Greenland. Maybe Picea was an Eskimo?’

  ‘They’re called Inuits nowadays,’ Stribolt points out.

  ‘Sorry, poor joke,’ Vaage says. ‘Picea’s boots were so worn down we can’t find a trademark on the soles. The rest of what she wore was clean, unsexy ladies clothing.’

  ‘And Thygesen’s blood-stained knives?’

  ‘Grouse, trout. The man knows something about nutrition anyway. Full freezer. Enough redcurrants to feed a battalion.’

  ‘He makes wine with the berries. Fortified wine, not half bad either. The knife with the so-called ivory handle?’

  ‘Beef, as he said. No question. And the tyre marks which I hoped would reveal something turn out to be no bloody good.’

  She places the photos of the tyre mould on Stribolt’s desk. He moves away a pile of books; on top are two volumes by Frans G Bengtsson about King Charles XII of Sweden.

  ‘It was pure ice at the side of the road,’ Vaage says. ‘We have a bit of a tyre print in the snow close by the fence. The lab folk think it’s a standard Continental. The most common in Norway. Could have been on a little van. The mould doesn’t give us any special features to go on.’

  ‘No other footprints in the garden apart from Thygesen’s?’ Stribolt asks.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing in the lower levels of the snow either.’

  ‘I’m going to break Norwegian law and light up.’

  ‘Then I’ll scream for the Head of Health & Safety,’ Vaage says sweetly, gets up, opens the window and stands next to it. ‘Tell me what you reckon now, equipped as you are with mental radar that can occasionally scan beyond the visible horizon. I don’t want any trifling details or abject facts. Give me a typically full Stribolt panorama.’

  Stribolt puts away his packet of cigarettes and takes out his crystal ball, which has been hidden under loose papers, shakes it, lets the snow flutter down over the Eiffel
Tower; it is a present from his mother after a pensioners’ outing to France, and he chants: ‘The Arctic Wizard sees what is hidden to the eyes of the common man and…’

  ‘Get on with it,’ Vaage says.

  ‘Right, I see a young girl running on the outskirts of a dusty village by the upper reaches of the Euphrates. She’s playing with a dog. It bites her. Fortunately for her the dog doesn’t have rabies. She gets over the ignominy of her deformed ear. But there’s something about her – she doesn’t get married and wear a shawl like the others. Is it a taste for adventure perhaps? A desire to break out of the tedium, poverty? She goes to the city. Beirut, Istanbul, Samarkand. She gets into bad company. They promise her riches if she does just one gig. They stick heroin bags to her skin. Perhaps she’s in a situation where she has nothing to lose. She travels north. In Norway, or Sweden for that matter – she can be transported long after she’s dead – something goes wrong when she is met. Something triggers the drugs gang’s suspicions or fears. Picea may have been noticed by someone who shouldn’t have seen her. The gang isn’t the most professional in the world. If they were, they would have liquidated her with a small-calibre pistol and dropped her in a fjord or a lake. The gang kills her with whatever comes to hand, the customary knife. But the person, or persons, who did it haven’t got the gumption to check that she can’t be traced, at least not easily, and so Picea is dumped in a peaceful district of town one quiet night.’

  ‘Nice scenario,’ Vaage opines. ‘But you’ve forgotten one thing: Thygesen’s role in this mess.’

  ‘I’ll leave that to the satanic Thinker from Træna for further deep analysis.’

  ‘And up yours!’

  Stribolt offers her a Ricola lemon mint sugar-free herb drop. Vaage accepts hesitantly, crunches the sweet in record time and announces: ‘I also have a partiality for the drugs hypothesis. I include Thygesen, and possibly Vera Alam. She operates in the Balkans. She may have a connection with the Kosovo-Albanian mafia. We know she smokes hash.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Stribolt says. ‘The grams we found in her wreck of a car were prehistoric. Green Lebanese, not red. Green with mould.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me. Thygesen’s at the receiver end. He’s a weak point. West End wuss, on his way out of drugs and into stamp paradise. The gang needs him anyway. No reason to give the elbow to Schloss Thygesen. What he wants is a warning. The hoodlum boys think: let’s kill a mule we don’t have any use for. We’ll dump her at Thygesen’s. The message is: next time you try to flap your dishevelled wings, Grey Eagle, the same will happen to you. They assume he’ll find her and bury her in his compost bin. They never imagined that we would find Picea.’

  ‘B+ for the theory,’ Stribolt says. ‘You would’ve got an A if you’d remembered it was Thygesen who gave us the tip-off and we have sweet FA tying him to drugs or any form of organised crime.’

  ‘Tell me what Thygesen said about his fraud cases then,’ Vaage says.

  Stribolt clicks on to his interview report, neatly entered into the forms on the police intranet. What he lacks in organisation on his desk he makes up for on the computer screen.

  ‘One man’s fraud is another man’s… both cases appear to me to be neighbourhood squabbles.’

  ‘Squabbles?’

  ‘Comedies played out in the finer part of town. The first report came from a neighbour who claimed that Thygesen had cheated him over some birch logs. This neighbour had given Thygesen permission to cut down some trees on his property. In the report he asserted it had never been agreed that Thygesen would get the logs free.’

  ‘The cheapskate,’ Vaage says.

  ‘That’s what Thygesen said, and he added – I’m quoting from my notes: “Kyrre Svendsby, my neighbour, is so pathologically mean that he probably used the wood-shavings I left to wipe his arse. I imagine Svendsby reported me because he became envious when he looked over the fence and saw all the wonderful wood that came from the birch.”’

  ‘Next episode in the West End soap opera.’

  ‘This time we’re dealing with a frøken, a breed that will soon be extinct. Frøken Meidell from Sollerud. A rich old dear of the kind we used to call a skinflint. Thygesen had to help her go through her share portfolio and set up a will.’

  ‘And he sold her shares for less than face value and named himself as the main beneficiary?’

  ‘No, he bought two sets of enamel Olympic pins – lapel badges really – off Frøken Meidell. Thygesen says of the transaction: “These were pins made on the occasion of the 1952 Oslo Winter Olympics. All the schoolchildren in town were given a couple of sets which they had to sell. The money was meant for a charitable purpose. This Meidell crone refused to let her nephew sell them for charity. She considered it to be beneath the family’s dignity and confiscated the sets. I found them in her piles of documents. She asked if I wanted them. I thought she would recuperate them by reducing my fee, so I offered to buy the sets for a hundred kroner each. I admit this was a symbolic sum and I knew this was a coup. But business is business, and the old trout agreed. It was only when, sadly, she found out how much they were worth that she reported me.”’

  ‘What did he get for them?’ Vaage demands.

  ‘They’re supposed to be the only two completely intact sets in the world. Thygesen said he got ten thousand for the set of silver enamel badges and eight thousand for the bronze ones. I can understand you won’t be charmed by his wheeling and dealing, but I hardly think this is a matter for the Fraud Squad.’

  ‘If he’s so good at stitching up everyone he deals with, perhaps he doesn’t need to push dope.’

  ‘We’ve got the morphine anyway,’ Stribolt says consolingly.

  ‘Shit morphine!’

  Vaage has nothing further to add about the morphine the Kripos SOC officers found in a discarded medicine cabinet in Thygesen’s cellar, except that Thygesen’s explanation seems likely. He claimed they were ampoules he found in a lifeboat once when he did a stint at sea in his youth, on board a tanker. He was supposed to tidy up the equipment in the lifeboat and throw away any provisions or medicines that were past their sell-by date. The morphine he kept as a souvenir when he signed off was soon forgotten.

  ‘And that’s probably how it is with this case,’ Vaage says.

  Stribolt’s office phone rings. Central switchboard says they have received a call from someone who sounds plausible, but wishes to remain anonymous.

  Stribolt introduces himself. He busily takes notes while Vaage sits in silence.

  ‘I’ve got a real pompous prick on the line,’ Stribolt says, covering the receiver with his hand.

  ‘Give him a mouthful,’ Vaage says.

  Stribolt asks: ‘Where was it she came from, this missing house-help of yours? Some island in the Caribbean is not very useful. We have to know which island, sir. You took her over from a business connection in London and assume she’s Jamaican? But you must have seen her passport when you organised her work permit, didn’t you? No work permit, I see. Saying there’s no visa requirement for Jamaicans in Norway until the Schengen Agreement comes into effect is of no interest. What I need to know most of all is what colour her skin is. No, no, I’m not going to scream racism at you if you say she’s a negress. Darker than Merlene Ottey? Noted. You think I could have been less rude. Fine. If you’re going to help us, sir, we have to know who you are.’

  The bellowing at the other end is so loud that Vaage leans forward to listen.

  ‘You prefer not to?’ Stribolt says and can feel his head getting warm. ‘No name, no shame, you say. The discreet charm of the upper classes, eh?’

  Stribolt slams down the phone, but carries on talking: ‘I have to tell you, sir, that you’re worse than the most contemptible poacher. I hope you get caught in your own trap, you profiteering bastard.’

  ‘Rare for you to say “sir” to anyone,’ Vaage says.

 
‘You can stop your whinnying. This was a troll from the very top of Holmenkollen Ridge.’

  ‘Is that a name you scribbled down while you were ranting and raving?’

  ‘A name?’ Stribolt murmurs absent-mindedly, examining the yellow Post-it. ‘It says ØJ Bones. That can’t be right, can it?’

  ‘No, sounds a bit funny,’ Vaage says.

  ‘Probably one of my stupid anagrams.’

  Stribolt leans back in his chair, puts his hands behind his head, stares at the ceiling and says to himself: ‘If I may say so, our poor Picea is definitely not a negress.’

  ‘Are you going to do a bit of TM?’ Vaage asks. ‘Or shall we go through the results of the door-to-door search again?’

  ‘NTR.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Sort of acronym. Nothing to report. All we’ve got is the two witness statements saying they heard voices, the bang of a car door and the revving of an engine near where the body was found at around four on the morning of 29 January. One witness is Thygesen’s neighbour, Svendsby, who was woken up by the racket. The other’s from two boys who were kissing at the crossroads between Skogveien and Bestumveien. One says he saw a light-coloured van. The other was absolutely certain it was a yellow taxi. I put the squeeze on the latter and he admitted he’d been on ecstasy and was wearing dark glasses, even though it was the middle of the night.’

  ‘What does Thygesen say?’

  ‘He claims he didn’t hear anything. He was sleeping like a log after returning from the restaurant in a taxi. The receipt shows he came home at half past two.’

  ‘You think he was bluffing about where he was though? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why he was bluffing. What I do know is that he can’t possibly have been at Arcimboldo because the restaurant’s in Kunstnernes Hus in Wergelandsveien and that particular building has been closed all winter for renovation.’

  ‘Not somewhere I frequent,’ Vaage says. ‘But I’ve read in the paper that the art gallery was closed. What are we waiting for? Why aren’t we already heading Thygesen’s way to grill him? I’ll join you as far as Bestum if you don’t mind.’