by Jon Michelet
Vaage says: ‘The mathematical odds of a woman being found in the garden of a man convicted of murder who has not been murdered by said man are the same as me winning ten million kroner on the Lotto.’
‘I don’t believe that’s a very accurate calculation, Vanja.’
‘Watch it or I’ll send you out to find the murderer’s missing sock in the Orderud case,’ Vaage answers. ‘Or I’ll make you question one of the knit-wits who keep ringing to tell us the sock was knitted from a Serbian pattern or a Kosovo-Albanian one.’
Vaage is now in a position from which she can torment her colleague with sock investigations or at least have calls referred to him from women she calls the ‘knit-wits’. She has been appointed Duty Officer on the Kripos desk. The desk is the nerve centre for the processing and dissemination of information received.
In front of them on the brown wooden table are the new business cards that Kripos staff have just been issued.
‘Have we actually deserved these gaudy cards?’ Vaage asks.
She lifts the cup of coffee she has placed on her card so that it doesn’t blow away and reads the English text aloud: National Bureau of Crime Investigation (Kripos), Communications and Service Section, Desk. Vanja Vaage, Detective Chief Inspector, Duty Officer.
‘Yeah, well,’ says Stribolt, fiddling with his own card. ‘Detective Chief Inspector sounds more impressive than førstebetjent.’
He is enormously irritated by the way his home province of Finnmark has been drawn inside the Kripos logo on the card.
The Kripos logo is also mounted on the brick wall of the towering new building in Brynsalleen and on a flag flying from the mast in the lawn outside, the way the Merkantildata company flag flies in front of the neighbouring edifice.
It, the Kripos logo, consists of a map of Norway, drawn in blue lines, with KRIPOS printed across central Trøndelag. Around the map there is a yellow circle, and around that a wreath of stylised yellow oak leaves. Against a background of two crossed poles with spiked heads.
Whenever he walks to work from the Metro to the new Kripos palace and the wind unfurls the flag Stribolt cannot avoid seeing Finnmark. Once, in the middle of February, he said the following to Forensics Officer Gunvald Larsson, whom he met emerging from the underground car park: ‘Shit, Larsson, on the Kripos logo Finnmark looks like it’s just come out of the washing machine. There’s not a single fjord in the right place.’
Larsson, for his part, was more annoyed by a little granite fountain that had been erected outside the main entrance. At the top a narrow channel for water had been carved out. When the two of them walked past, the water had been turned off for winter.
‘I don’t know what the bloody point of it is,’ Larsson said. ‘Only the crows drink the water. And watching it trickle down the narrow channel, I fear for my prostate.’
‘Perhaps the fountain is meant to illustrate how much of our activity runs away into the Great Void,’ Stribolt said.
‘We have the highest clear-up rate in the western world for murder,’ Larsson said, no doubt to console a colleague whom he knew was getting nowhere in an investigation for which he bore total responsibility.
‘For as long as it lasts. We score high in the clear-up statistics because we’re still a small, remote and sparsely populated other-land where everyone knows everyone,’ Stribolt replied. ‘The Picea case will be an example for me of what happens when the foreign pressure on our borders increases. Then we’re going to find ourselves powerless time after time because there are no friends or acquaintances to report to us.’
Picea is still – now March is upon us and there is a touch of spring in the air – an unidentified murder victim.
‘Picture?’ Stribolt asks, stubbing out the cigarette on the upside-down flower pot doubling as an ashtray on the roof terrace.
‘Nothing,’ Vaage replies. ‘I cannot fathom why we were told not to publish a picture of Picea in the papers.’
‘Snafu,’ Stribolt says.
Vaage stares at him in puzzlement.
‘American acronym from World War Two,’ Stribolt explains. ‘Situation normal, all fucked up.’
Vaage laughs a short, throaty laugh.
‘You know my hypothesis for why it’s fucked up, don’t you?’ she says.
Stribolt knows her hypothesis about administrative cock-ups, concedes she might be right and elaborates. Norway has recently acquired another directorate: the Police Directorate. Such a senior organ has of necessity to busy itself with questions of principle to define the rules of the police’s various activities. The question of whether to publish photos to identify victims in criminal cases is tricky for the Police Directorate. Here there are two conflicting considerations to bear in mind. One is clearing up the case through identification. The other is the general public.
The general public is often called ‘the great detective’. But they are a collection of amateurs who don’t have the training in the world of murder that the police have.
Stribolt imagines an executive officer, a calm legal bureaucrat who has a photo of Picea’s face placed before him, with a request from Kripos for permission to publish immediately.
Picea was found in a frozen state and kept in a coldroom at the Institute of Pathology where the body was transported after the autopsy. So she wasn’t swollen, as bodies are after drowning. And, having been found in Thygesen’s garden, she was far from being so disfigured, like Ole Johan, the horse which was found ‘far, far away in Håstein’s garden’ in Jakob Sande’s naturalistic poem ‘The Corpse’. Once Stribolt got into hot water for reading it aloud at a Kripos Christmas dinner, where mutton ribs were being served, and one of the more seemly lines described the fleshless skull.
The executive officer, however, perhaps thinks the public might take offence at seeing a photo of a dead Picea. He determines to examine earlier practice and concludes that, as regards the publication of photos of murder victims it is, so to speak, non-existent. A lack of precedence makes legal practitioners quake at the knees.
On top of which there is another consideration: privacy protection. Here any bureaucrat in any Norwegian administration risks having the ever-alert Georg Apenes from the Data Directorate down on them after the slightest misdemeanour.
This is a legal nut the executive officer has to crack. Is a person unknown to the Norwegian public entitled to protection of her identity? She is not only dead and thereby unable to attend to her interests personally but also unidentified so there is no one else who might be expected to represent her.
‘We should hear the Police Directorate’s decision today,’ Vaage says and rings a number on her phone. ‘I’ll check to see if it’s in.’
Stribolt gets up to stretch his stiff legs. From Ringveien, which goes behind the Kripos building, there is the regular drone of cars leaving Oslo. The weekend rush has started. He himself isn’t going anywhere even though he could have used a break from the town and the office. He has decided to spend the weekend trying to make some headway in the Kurdish, Iranian and Iraqi areas of the capital, to see if anyone can identify Picea from the photo of her he carries in his wallet.
‘Latest news,’ Vaage says, putting her phone into her pocket and pulling an ironic grimace. ‘The Police Directorate say they’re considering giving us permission to publish an identikit sketch.’
‘Identikit? When we have a perfectly good photo?’
‘The boss says they’ll complain again. So there’ll be another angry exchange of notes between the desk and the Directorate.’
‘In the worst-case scenario, a waste of ink. A clatter of sabres and the publication of a photo comes to naught.’
‘If the Justice Department gets involved it’ll be hawk on hawk,’ Vaage says, flapping her arms. ‘Ingelin Killengreen versus Hanne Harlem. Going at each other beak and claw in the upper stratosphere. Feathers flying. Time passing.’
‘I can hear Killengreen from here,’ Vaage says. ‘Do you Kripos folk really think we’d agree to have pictures of a body splattered across the newspapers?’
‘Did our dear Police Commissioner say that?’
‘I don’t know. The point is that she could’ve said something like that. All the intrigue makes me so depressed that I think I’ll take the weekend off.’
‘Have a good weekend then,’ Stribolt says.
‘And you?’
‘I’m going to sit down and go through my notes.’
‘We’ve hit a wall in the Picea case,’ Vaage says. ‘You’ll have to console yourself with the fact that almost all walls have cracks.’
‘There wasn’t one in the Geiranger case. We were banging our heads against solid concrete.’
‘You have to see the Geiranger murder as the exception that proves the rule.’
Stribolt goes to his office. Clicks Zeta-Jones off the screen. Stares in a melancholy frame of mind from his window on the second floor down at a little spruce tree growing in the lawn between Kripos and Merkantildata. Some girls in the company are sitting at the tables by the main entrance smoking. One is wearing a coat like Picea’s.
In Hoffsveien, where he lives, one rainy evening he met a woman he thought was Picea for a few giddy seconds. The woman was startled by the look he sent her, took refuge behind her umbrella and ran down the pavement of Smestaddammen.
Stribolt pulls out the top drawer of his desk. Under the glass plate he has, among other memorabilia, a photo of one of his police idols: Rolf Harry Jahrmann, the Head of the Murder Commission in his time, the predecessor of Kripos. Neatly folded under the glass is a newly written version of the letter in which Inspector Arve Stribolt resigns from Kripos.
He unfolds the letter and reads: ‘I find it hard to work in an institution where the media are continually trying to set the agenda for what cases we take, and to some degree they succeed, the result of which is that our concentration fails us in cases where the media are less interested. The triple murders at Orderud Farm and the double murders in Baneheia are, by Norwegian standards, very big, important cases. However, I have been entrusted with the responsibility for a murder case which, although it hasn’t captured the media’s interest, is in principle at least as significant as those of Orderud and Baneheia. I think it is lamentable that so few resources are being invested in this case. One reason for my resignation is that my suggestion – to send a detective to Sarajevo to question Vilhelm Thygesen’s tenant, Vera Alam – was turned down on 7 February 2001, with the justification that it was not financially viable.’
Thygesen went to Sarajevo. They were in telephone contact a couple of times while he was there visiting the cancer patient.
Stribolt brings up a Word document entitled ‘Thygesen’s Travels’ on screen. From Sarajevo Thygesen went to Paris, in his words because he had a plane ticket via Paris and he wanted to do some business with stamps and coins in the French capital. He stayed there for ten days and claimed in a telephone conversation that he had made such good deals he reckoned he could pay back the loan he had received from his friend Levin for the journey down to visit Vera.
The customs officials who examined Thygesen’s luggage at Gardemoen Airport found nothing out of the ordinary. They considered it perfectly normal to have one bottle of wine too many.
Thygesen is in no way eliminated from the Picea case. A shadow of suspicion will hang over him until a murderer is found who is not Thygesen. But it is a flickering shadow, in the process of dissolving.
In Stribolt’s opinion, it was right not to focus the investigation on Thygesen and his circle, even though it is scandalous that someone wasn’t sent to Sarajevo to interview Vera Alam. The phone interview with her was doomed to failure because she was so ill and could barely talk after her throat operation.
Stribolt clicks on his self-critical list of areas where he might have failed: 1. Too much focus on drugs? There are so many other reasons for having tape stuck to your body when arriving in Norway legally or illegally, such as travel documents (genuine/false), names of contacts, personal letters, personal photos, etc. 2. Did I accept far too quickly that Picea had just arrived in the country? Could have been here for a long time, held as a slave by some bastard or other? 3. Could we have been deluded into thinking Picea hadn’t been sexually abused? The perp might have used a condom so as not to leave DNA. If she was a prostitute a client might have used a condom during the act and then run amok and drawn a knife. 4. Have I got too hung up on the idea of a Kurdish trail, like some latter-day Swedish Hans Holmér, in the intuitive belief that Picea could be a Kurdish refugee? Have I spent too much time questioning Kurds? All the interviews were negative. The Kurds have a solid network. If she really was Kurdish, someone would have known about her. But no Kurds recognise her or admit they do.
The list has a dozen more points, which he can’t be bothered to go through for the nth time.
Stribolt holds his head in his hands, studies his reflection in the glass.
What was it Thygesen, clearly well-oiled, said to him on the phone from Paris?
‘You know, Stribolt, when I picture your face I see you with a smile and you remind me of a dolphin.’
Right. Better than grinning like a shark.
Stribolt clicks on the computer’s media player and chooses a CD on which Lotte Lenya sings songs by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht.
Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne
Und die trägt er im Gesicht
Und Macheath, der hat ein Messer
Doch das Messer sieht man nicht
Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white
Just a jack-knife has old Macheath, babe
And he keeps it, ah, out of sight.
Winters have gone, he thinks, and perhaps springs will go too. But my Mack the Knife is somewhere, and the wall will crack and I will see him.
5
‘Banzai, Samurai, banzai!’ screams the young man sitting on the pillion of the motorbike. The rider turns the bike into a clearing by the road through Våler Forest where there was once a gravel pit. He comes to a halt in front of a damaged building with rusty reinforced steel protruding from the concrete. The man, twenty years old, slides off the seat, raises his arms in the air and does a jig on the gravel.
‘Tell me, Kykke, that it’s not shit cool to be out again,’ the young man says, pinching himself on the upper arms. He removes his helmet and reveals a head of hair that is dyed bright yellow, combed and gelled into tufts.
‘You look like something the cat brought in, Beach Boy,’ says the man called Kykke.
‘My sis said the same at the funeral, and if my mother’d been able to say anything she would’ve probably had a go at me as well. But no one bothered to ask me whose hair was like this. I modelled myself on the drummer in Marilyn Manson to celebrate my freedom,’ Beach Boy says and switches on the Walkman attached to his belt.
It isn’t a Manson song that reaches his ears via the earplugs. It is a song by a singer called Laurie Anderson, whom he had never heard of before he was given the CD by his sister after the funeral.
He spins the helmet round on the index finger of his right hand and is all smiles and summer happiness. Then he listens to what the American lady sings and he repeats the verse with his face creased in grief: When my father died we put him in the ground, when my father died it was like a whole library had burned down.
Beach Boy switches off the music and takes out the earplugs.
‘I’ll tell you one thing, Kykke,’ he says. ‘If my father really had been a library it would’ve been one crammed with instructions on how to assemble nuclear rockets.’
Kykke isn’t listening. He is lost in his own thoughts and polishing the
speedometer on his bike with a cloth.
‘You certainly came out with the summer, Beach Boy,’ Kykke says at length, dismounting with an effort because he is so big; he flicks the heavy bike on to the stand, takes off his helmet and places it on the seat. ‘Brontes’ is written on the petrol tank in ornate golden letters, and underneath, in smaller letters, ‘Son of Uranus and Gaia’. The bike is a standard black Kawasaki, the largest model, KZ 1100, which is so old that, as Kykke often says, ‘if Brontes had been a trotting horse it would’ve been taken behind the stable and shot’.
Kykke leans against the bike and stretches his legs. Massages his elbows and knees.
‘Think I’m starting to get rheumatism in my joints,’ Kykke says. ‘I s’pose that’s the sort of shite you have to expect when you’ve been sitting on a four-stroke pot-boiler since you were fourteen.’
‘You’ve been riding a bike for half an eternity then,’ Beach Boy says with reverence.
‘It’s thirty-five years since I burned rubber through the school playground in fuckin’ Arnes on my first Kawasaki Samurai,’ Kykke says, looking at his watch, which is a Rolex Oyster. The superb timepiece doesn’t match the style of the man, who looks like a labourer, someone who has done heavy manual work. ‘It’s only ten. It’s going to be boiling hot today. You still like being called Beach Boy, boy?’
‘Beach Boy, Banzai Boy or Nike Boy. The name I use depends on my mood. The psychologist at Trøgstad said I’ve got a split personality, but my personality as a whole is a fountain of talent. Does it matter if the water in it isn’t as pure and clear as in the psalm at the funeral?’ Beach Boy says, not caring that Kykke isn’t listening with even half an ear.
‘Am I in a good mood now or what?’ the boy shouts, dancing a jig and causing the dust to lift in a cloud towards the concrete wall. ‘God, how I’ve yearned to be back here at the clubhouse. You picking me up and bringing me here to The Middle of Nowhere is almost too good to be true.’
