The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  Once outside he stands squinting into the sharp sunlight for a while to get used to it.

  He adjusts the bag straps. Mounts Brontes, pulls down his visor, swings on to the road to Sweden, to Stockholm. Borken will be waiting on the quay with the tickets for Tallinn. It is supposed to be a great town according to Lips, who has been motoring around the Baltic since the snows receded and bought a strip bar on behalf of the Seven Samurai management troika in the capital of Estonia.

  But Kykke isn’t sure he will ever go to Tallinn. Perhaps he will go to Lapland instead. Not to fuck wolves, but to go into hiding and dig for gold.

  6

  Ulrikke Enholm Johnsen is on her way along the R120 from Ringvoll to Moss Hospital in her own, personal, somewhat dented Citroën Xsara. She drives with the window rolled down. Her youngest is asleep in the child seat. In her imagination the young driver with the hennaed hair pretends her child is named after the car, Xanthippe Sara.

  Fru Enholm, which she occasionally calls herself, is not in the best frame of mind. She has been ordered to do an extra shift at reception in Moss Hospital. On such a wonderful day, the first of the summer, she could have tried on her bikini and let the little one swim in their new inflatable pool instead of going to work.

  She has a strong suspicion that some of her colleagues are not as allergic to pollen as they let on. Why, for example, do allergies have a greater impact in sunshine than rain?

  This is what is on Enholm’s mind as she scratches her newly pierced left ear, with a suitably punky, suitably discreet, stud – quite un-Christian, her partner said when she came home from the salon – as she passes the seventy-kilometre sign between Hobøl and Våler municipalities. She comes into the first bends in Våler and drives slowly to see the violets at the edge of the forest. This is a good place for violets. On the way home she can pick a bunch for her other half.

  She sees something glinting in the scrub, possibly the spokes of a wheel. She sees cracked branches shining white, and she moves as far as she can on to the hard shoulder on the right. Activates the emergency lights. Checks her child hasn’t woken up. No danger of that. Xanthippe sleeps like every parent’s dream.

  Enholm finds it strange there are no brake marks on the dry tarmac. Perhaps a mountain biker has skidded?

  She crosses the road and sees several cracked branches. Stands on her tiptoes and sees a wheel which is too big for any normal bike. Someone has hurled themselves against a tree, thirty to forty metres off the road, in the middle of a spruce forest, as though he wanted to embrace the shaggy trunk.

  Enholm swallows, and ploughs her way through the bushes and saplings, stumbles over fern roots and almost falls over the motorbike, which is red, like a toy. She pulls herself along by the branches as she covers the last metres to where the man, or the boy, because he is a boy, has smacked into the tree.

  God almighty, there can hardly be a bone left intact, she cries, without any sense of a sound crossing her lips.

  His head can’t be whole either. There is a lot of blood on the outside, but his skin is as white as snow, as though all the blood has run out through the boy’s nose and ears.

  With a dry mouth, she gulps.

  Come on now! You’re not a surgeon, you’re an office assistant. But you work at the hospital. And you’ve seen worse than this when the injured come in after head-on crashes on the E6. Take his pulse.

  She touches his neck. The boy’s head moves, as though perched loosely on his body, and she jumps back. Touches his neck again, even though it seems futile.

  Zero pulse. Eyes stiff, pointing at eternity. Impossible to be deader than that. Considering what happened, the boy has been lucky and it was over within an instant.

  He is wearing only a T-shirt. With some stupid film star on. No motorbike gear. And no helmet. Idiot. He could have saved himself the trouble with his yellow spiky hair.

  What a wally. What a blinking wally.

  But there is no helmet in the world that could have saved him.

  She thinks she knows who the boy is. The strange hair confused her. Now she is sure. It has to be the Strand boy, son of Strand the flier, Strand the boozer.

  Enholm leaps back through the scrub, to get away from the sudden death, to get to her phone. By the motorbike, which looks undamaged apart from the front headlamp, she smells the strong stench of petrol. Is she wearing any clothes that could produce static electricity and ignite the petrol vapours? No, she is wearing cotton trousers and a sweater and leather shoes. There is oil on her trousers, and blood, hers or the dead boy’s.

  She looks carefully before running across the road. It is precisely in situations like this you can lose concentration and do silly things, rush out into the road and get knocked down by someone speeding.

  Her phone is where it should be, in the holder on the dashboard. Xanthippe is sleeping like a log.

  Enholm taps in 113 for the ambulance service. Immediate response. She says she is reporting a fatal accident, a biker, just off the road, killed outright, very nasty accident. She is asked if she is sure it is fatal, she answers yes, she took his pulse and the result was negative. She adds she works at the hospital in Moss. Gives her name and location, the make of her car by the scene. On the first bend when you come into Våler from the north, in the trees, not so far from the turn-off for Kasper’s land and a bit closer to the Bikers’ Club…

  ‘Something in English. On the tip of my tongue, something like Middle of Nowhere. Yes, I’ll wait until you get here. No, I haven’t rung the police. Will you do that? Best if I do it from the scene of the accident, OK.’

  She rings 112 and has a woman on the line who calls herself the duty officer, probably it is the police station in Moss. The officer notes down the information Enholm tries to give as concisely as possible, asks her to wait and says an officer from Våler will be along soon.

  She takes the warning triangle from the boot and walks a hundred paces along the road and sets it up. Walks stiffly back to the car, her heart hammering away and her pulse racing. Locates her partner’s tobacco pouch in the glove compartment and rolls a cigar Fidel Castro would have envied her. Sniffs for petrol, can’t smell any and lights up, drops hot ash on her light-coloured sweater and burns holes.

  ‘Shit,’ Ulrikke Enholm Johnsen thinks she has every reason to say, the whole situation taken into account, even though she represents the Christian Democrats on Hobøl council.

  While she is calling the childminder to say she is going to be late a police car rolls up behind her. Out steps a constable in a short-sleeved, light blue shirt. His colleague remains in the car brandishing a pair of handcuffs.

  ‘I thought you’d be coming from Våler,’ Enholm says.

  ‘We picked up a report of the accident on police radio,’ the officer answers. ‘We’re on our way from Askim to a court session in Moss, with that dumb animal there.’

  He points to an unfortunate on the back seat of the police car, who now has handcuffs clicked around his wrists.

  The officer waves on a slow, inquisitive motorist.

  ‘Was it you who phoned in?’ he asks Enholm. She nods. He asks her to wait by her car, then makes his way through the undergrowth.

  An unmarked police vehicle stops. Out steps a man in a uniform. He introduces himself as the Våler Police Chief, Harald Herføll. Before he makes a move towards the bushes, Enholm says: ‘I know who the boy is. I can identify him.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Øystein Strand. Twenty odd. Actually from Ringvoll, but lives with his mother in Halden.’

  Herføll says he knows of the boy. He thanks Enholm for her concise on-the-scene reporting.

  ‘We modern women never stop surprising you chaps, do we, eh?’ she answers, picking a handful of violets, and drives to Moss, where there is always a need for violets. This thought fills her with an insane joy, as if she has been drinking champa
gne.

  Enholm knows the jollity will disappear, the way it always does, and she will have to live with the image of a dead boy embracing a spruce tree. She has never liked spruces much. If only it had been a pine, erect and magnificent, whose bark is illuminated by God’s shafts of sunlight. Spruces always swallow all the light while pine reflects it and makes it even more golden, heavenly.

  A red Transit stops at the accident spot, with a sign stolen from the Highways Authority mounted over the windscreen. The driver gawps as if he had paid to see a spectacle and is quickly waved on, after his breath has been smelt by police officer number two from Askim.

  The ambulance arrives, all sirens blaring.

  The rest should have been a simple matter of procedure for the police and paramedics who work with victims of biker accidents from the moment snow disappears to the moment it settles.

  Had it not been for Herføll and his colleague from Askim finding there were several suspicious circumstances to this case. First of all, there is Øystein Strand riding such a powerful bike as a 1000cc Kawasaki Ninja without a helmet or leathers. Secondly, there were no brake marks. Thirdly, the bike must have been going at an incredible speed to have crashed through the undergrowth for such a distance. God knows it is speed that kills most motorbike riders, but what the Ninja must have been doing doesn’t tally with even the most fanatical biker.

  Herføll rings the duty officer in Moss and says he wants the crashed motorbike transported to the Moss Department of Transport branch, to undergo a thorough technical examination.

  A thought, a wild idea, strikes him. The accident happened on the same day that the press printed an identikit picture of the woman who was murdered in Thygesen’s garden in Oslo. The boy was in the Seven Samurai, as a kind of apprentice to the troll Terje Kykkelsrud. Thygesen, for a short period, was the legal adviser for the Samurai. Could there be a connection?

  What that connection might be is extremely unclear to Herføll. But the wild idea won’t let go of him.

  The breakdown truck from Viking arrives. After dragging the bike out of the forest and lifting it up on to the truck Herføll asks the guy to have a quick look at the bike to see if there is anything unusual.

  It takes a couple of minutes.

  The Viking guy’s response is clear: ‘There are no damn brakes. Some bastard has tampered with them.’

  On the way back to the office Herføll remembers Øystein Strand when he was first brought in as a fifteen-year-old under suspicion of having broken into the arms store by the Nike battery. Both he and his pal, Jens Petter Sundin, denied everything point-blank. Since no fingerprints were found at the site and none of the hand grenades that were stolen came to light the police initially had a poor case. It wasn’t improved by the only witness withdrawing his statement. He, a mechanic friend of Øystein’s father, said at first he had been out picking cowberries in the forest by Kasper’s land and had seen and heard the boys setting off the grenades, but then he changed his mind and said he hadn’t seen or heard anything.

  Øystein had been a bright teenager, even though there was something shifty about him. He was full of wild stories and grandiose plans, and a bit of a blabbermouth. But when it came to the crunch, to the break-in, he was immovable and sat there with his turned-up nose stuck in the air.

  Was it on the cards that Øystein Strand would end up on the wrong side of the law, regularly breaking into record and computer shops? Perhaps so. Nature and nurture. But the combination of nature and nurture had given him talents that, if realised, could have taken him anywhere, perhaps even to Mars, which was his ambition at that time. He wanted to be one of the first astronauts to land on the ‘Red Planet’.

  Instead he landed at a fearsome speed in the forest, covered in blood. It was enough to make you weep. Herføll doesn’t weep. He has seen too many drunken killings and misery and drownings in Lake Vansjø for tears to flow because of a death. Nevertheless, when the young die in accidents something also dies in the adults who find them.

  7

  Back in his Våler office, Harald Herføll switches on the computer to write up a report about the fatal accident. He has phoned through the most important information of the case to Moss Police District and asked if there is any indication the Ninja could have been stolen. According to the way work is distributed in the district, the Våler station is responsible for further investigation, if necessary, with assistance from forensics officers in Moss or Kripos.

  Herføll starts flicking through the documents he has on Øystein Strand. It is dismal reading for a law enforcer.

  Trøgstad Prison was the boy’s first taste of punishment. After two conditional sentences for petty larceny and car theft he received a stinging unconditional. Herføll rings Trøgstad and asks when Strand was released. Thursday 10 May is the response. To questions about his behaviour in prison, the answer is good, but his commitment to work was poor, otherwise he was co-operative and clean, according to his urine samples.

  Herføll wonders if Strand had any enemies during his stretch. Not to the knowledge of the officer he talks to. Although inmates try to keep that sort of thing hidden, until eventually tempers fray and knives appear.

  Strand enjoyed freedom for only a day before he careered off the road and collided with a tree. The poor fool. Fell straight into the trap.

  On a hot rod. With tampered brakes?

  Herføll notes on his pad: ‘If the brakes on the Ninja had been tampered with, causing Strand to ride to his death, we’re talking premeditated murder.’

  He receives a call from the Moss police to tell him that the plates on the Ninja were reported stolen from a bike parked by the council building in Ørje on the night of Friday 11 May. No Ninja bikes have been reported missing in the Moss Police District, but the officer says he will check all the other districts and with his Swedish colleagues.

  Herføll notes: ‘Plates stolen in Ørje. Bike stolen in Sweden? Must remember to ask the DoT people to examine the lock on the bike. If it has been forced professionally – hardly likely Strand stole the Ninja. Strand no good with locks and never steals vehicles alone.’

  He leans back and looks up at Finken, who is smiling as he always does. Can that man never be serious? The picture of Finn Christian Jagge in the framed glass, taken on the victory rostrum after nicking the slalom gold from Alberto Tomba at the Albertville Olympic Games, is the only personal touch in the otherwise regulation sparse office. He has been teased a lot about the poster. Evil tongues claim he has hung up Finken because in 1993 a lady slightly the worse for wear after the Christmas dinner at Parketten in Moss told him he looked a bit like Jagge. Such tittle-tattle is water off a duck’s back to Herføll. He knows Finken is hanging there because his slalom gold in the opinion of all true alpinists is among the great golds in the history of Norwegian winter sports. And Herføll is a fan. He doesn’t often pray to the Lord. The times it has happened, with all due respect, it has been to remind the Lord that Østfold can’t take any more mild winters if the extinction-threatened alpine sport in the county is not to be killed off for good. Last winter his prayer was heard and he had the pleasure of driving the snow-blower on Middagskollen and seeing the snow actually settle for one wonderful week after another.

  Harald Herføll finds a Justice Department circular sent to police districts all over the country, in which they are requested to intensify their vigilance with regard to crime in biker circles. He calls the duty officer in Moss again. They agree that the best option for the Våler station is to contact Kripos directly.

  It is rare for a provincial police officer to have anything to report that might capture the attention of Oslo. The fear of being treated unsympathetically and making a fool of himself weighs heavily on Herføll. He has to psych himself up before ringing Kripos.

  Kripos mustn’t get the feeling he has tied his colours to a particular hypothesis. In their eyes, there is nothing worse. If he
is going to venture to suggest a possible connection with Thygesen he has to prepare what he is going to say and present it logically.

  How did Thygesen come into the picture? How did he suddenly appear as a true rara avis in the council corridors of Våler? A lean man with grey hair tied in a ponytail, trembling hands and red eyes, but on the ball legally speaking.

  When the Seven Samurai established themselves in the old garage from the war days the club reckoned on taking over the agreement the Chopper Freaks had had with Våler Council. Herføll had himself been involved with pushing through the agreement, as at that time he was on the building committee. Then the mayor, Wenche Rosefjorden, Conservatives, got it into her head that criminal bacteria accompanied biker circles and the bunker was a macho monument that should be razed to the ground. Rosefjorden couldn’t say this aloud. Instead she decided the forest north of the R120 should be earmarked as a future conservation area. The mayor got the chief administrative officer on her side and later the executive committee and the local council’s majority.

  Of course there was uproar. The Samurai protested vehemently. They had a competent spokesperson in their leader, the businessman Borkenhagen, and they were able to wheel out the one-eyed Kykkelsrud. Despite his awful appearance Kykkelsrud had working-class charm and authenticity, which impressed the Labour Party and the Socialist Left. Behind the scenes slippery Lipinski was able to twist every communication, and very probably also forge documents.

  However, what really created so much trouble for Rosefjorden that the events were commonly referred to as ‘the fire in Rosefjorden’s camp’ was that she unwittingly stepped on the forest-owners’ sensitive toes. Conservative mayors on forest councils who fall out with forest-owners have to expect to be thoroughly de-branched and de-barked.

  Chainsaws met motorbikes in a strange alliance. In the midst of all this landed the highly dubious lawyer Vilhelm Thygesen from the capital to defend the Seven Samurai. His conduct of the case to ensure the bikers kept the clubhouse as their headquarters was in itself irreproachable. Thygesen’s problem was alcohol. In his confusion he missed an appeal deadline for the court of enforcement. Rosefjorden and the chief administrative officer were on them like hawks and the battle to establish Kykkelsrud’s authorised workshop was lost.