The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  Shortly afterwards Kykkelsrud was found in a ditch near Lake Vansjø where he had been asleep with the heavy Kawasaki over him like a blanket. His blood test showed he was several times over the limit. Herføll interviewed the man when he awoke from his drunken stupor. His bitterness towards Thygesen was tangible. Jens Petter Sundin had arranged the club’s contact with Thygesen, and Herføll said Kykkelsrud would crack every one of Sundin’s fingers. Apparently a relative of Sundin’s had once gone around with Thygesen.

  Originally, the Seven Samurai must have noticed that Thygesen was willing to offer his legal services to bikers, whereas most lawyers wouldn’t have touched them with a barge pole. When he helped the Hells Angels over the freedom of expression question there was quite a furore.

  But Thygesen had to leave Våler with his ponytail between his legs, mission unaccomplished and negative PR in the local papers.

  The forest-owners relaxed when the forests were downgraded to conservation areas in which the owners would still have full commercial use and rights. The fire in Rosefjorden’s camp was extinguished.

  Discussion at the provincial police station centred on whether the mayor’s measures to fight possible crime in and around a biker’s club would have the diametrically opposite effect to what she had intended. And on whether blocking the bikers’ application to use and run the workshop would force the Samurai into more illicit activities. Would this stoke glowing embers?

  Because chasing them out of The Middle of Nowhere was not so easy. They quite simply moved into the old German garage and attracted the young like flies. Kykkelsrud strengthened his links with the Social Democrats and the Socialists, talked the leader of the council’s culture committee round and managed to market himself in idealistic circles as the most ardent patron of youth. Borkenhagen wrangled and wheedled himself deals with the local council and power plant to have water and electricity supplied. There were rumours that Lipinski had developed an amorous relationship with a forest-owner called Elisabeth Spetalen and thereby maintained relations between the bikers’ club and one of the strong economic forces in the municipality.

  Herføll writes: ‘Could Strand have committed suicide? Had his stay in prison cracked him – did he leave the road deliberately? But why tamper with the brakes? So as not to give himself an opportunity to change his mind and brake at the last moment?’

  From the bowels of the computer he elicits a list with the names and nicknames of the triumvirate in the Seven Samurai.

  He pours himself a coffee from the flask. Clears his throat with a camphor drop and rings Kripos.

  From the central switchboard he is put through to the duty officer. He gives a start when he hears the strident female voice and the name of Vaage. In police circles it is said of Vanja Vaage that she grew up in a sulphur mine on the Helgeland coast.

  Vaage’s reputation as remorselessly caustic is perhaps somewhat exaggerated?

  Because she listens to what the officer from the outback has to say about the boy who crashes, the brakes and the bikers’ club. Afterwards Herføll keeps Thygesen up his sleeve and allows Vaage to ask questions.

  ‘Are the Seven Samurai in some way associated with the Hells Angels?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘More the opposite. They ride Japanese bikes, Kawasaki, and consider the Hells Angels their enemy.’

  ‘Have the two clubs been at war?’

  ‘No, but the club in our region has had a couple of clashes with a competing Østfold club called the Kamikaze.’

  ‘Violent clashes?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘Once there was a fist fight outside By The Way, a pub off the E6 through Rygge. Recently the Kamikaze reported our Samurai for sabotaging their clubhouse in Kleberget, Moss. Apparently it was nonsense. School leavers had thrown a beer bottle full of petrol. A Molotov cocktail that never exploded.’

  Vaage asks, with a certain levity of tone, if there was a bikers’ club called Hara-kiri in Østfold. Herføll answers that most of the hara-kiri committed in his county occurred in cars on the E6 and E18.

  ‘Are the Seven Samurai involved in much crime?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘Very little as far as we know,’ Herføll replies, flicking through his papers. ‘One member, Terje Kykkelsrud, has been convicted a couple of times for drink-driving, and once he got a conditional sentence for receiving stolen goods, selling on a stolen machine tool, a lathe I think it was. He was also accused of selling stolen motorcycle parts, but the charge was dropped through lack of evidence.’

  ‘Just petty crime then?’

  ‘We have suspicions of something bigger. We had an informant in the club, a young hanger-on, who reported that the Seven Samurai were planning to import drugs. Not heroin but amphetamines.’

  ‘The informant wouldn’t by any chance be the boy who killed himself?’

  ‘No,’ Herføll answers. ‘But the two of them were childhood friends.’

  ‘What’s the name of the informant?’

  ‘Jens Petter Sundin. Twenty-one. Lives in Kroer.’

  ‘Kroer?’

  ‘Yes, Kroer. Pubs in English.’

  ‘Go on. What happened to the informant?’

  ‘He was frozen out. The club leaders saw him as tainted. Which is also my opinion. He’s unusually bad news.’

  ‘Could it be that the club leaders saw Øystein Strand as a police informant?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘Possible,’ Herføll answers. ‘But there’s nothing to support that view. We’ve had very little trouble from the Samurai since last winter and we have no one on the inside any more. Strand was generally seen as a blabbermouth, a fantasist and a schemer. Got excellent grades from Kirkeparken, the upper secondary school in Moss. But loads of trouble at home.’

  ‘The usual – dope, booze and violence?’

  ‘No drugs, no violence. Booze and pills at his parents’ house. We top the pill list in the county.’

  ‘And I know why,’ Vaage says. ‘You’ve got no bloody mountains.’

  ‘If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed has to go to the mountains.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘It’s a proverb we have at our skiing club in winters when there’s no snow. But Strand a copper’s nark? I don’t know. I simply can’t imagine anyone in the club wanting to kill him. He was selflessly loyal to the Seven Samurai.’

  ‘Who’s at the head of the club?’

  ‘I’ve mentioned Kykke.’

  ‘Kykke?’

  ‘Terje Kykkelsrud. He’s known as Kykke. The name suits a guy who looks like a Cyclops from Greek mythology.’

  Vaage says she had no idea ordinary Østfolders knew anything about Greek mythology.

  Herføll continues his presentation undeterred.

  ‘Kykkelsrud is the real motorbike fiend among the Samurai. Forty-nine years old. Divorced. No children. Officially lives in Krapfoss in Moss, but apparently he has a cabin in Finnskogen. He’s more often there than at home. Mechanic by trade. Long time offshore, in the North Sea. He told me during an interview after a drink-driving offence that he was one of the first roughnecks on the oil rigs, but he was blacklisted after a strike and so came ashore to try and build up a fully authorised motorbike workshop. If anyone in the Seven Samurai had fiddled with the brakes of the bike Strand rode to his death, it would be tinkerman Kykkelsrud, I would imagine.’

  Herføll hears Vaage tapping in the information on the computer. He feels he has a listener.

  ‘Noted,’ Vaage says. ‘Any more?’

  ‘Kykkelsrud brought someone with him from the North Sea, called Lips. Richard Lipinski, originally a Polish American from Chicago, now a Norwegian national. He worked in catering on the rigs. Has two convictions, spent some time in a British prison for cheque fraud. In the days when cheques existed. Nothing illegal registered in Norway. Forty-seven years old. Lives in Skredderåsen, Kambo, Moss. Partner, two children. Ac
ts as the club treasurer and has the reputation of being such a good bike rider he could have taken part in the world road-racing championship if he’d been younger.’

  ‘The club has a leader, does it?’

  ‘Yes, Borken. Leif André Borkenhagen. Thirty-eight years old. Single. Lives in Rakkestad where his family runs a farm. More of a car than a bike man, but rides a heavy Kawasaki like the others. No convictions, but he’s disqualified from running a business after bankruptcy.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Car body shop in Skiptvedt. Another company that imported paint. Video shop. Plus a great many more.’

  ‘Any more names?’

  ‘Not really. They were never seven Samurai, only a basic troika with young satellites floating round. The only one worth noting down is Sundin, whom I mentioned before. He was the one who provided the contact with Thygesen for the club,’ Herføll says as casually as possible.

  ‘Thygesen? Do you mean Vilhelm Thygesen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, brother. Give me more.’

  Herføll tells her about Thygesen’s role as a legal adviser for a club in The Middle of Nowhere, somewhere in Våler. To his great satisfaction, it seems that the information has hit home. He can hear the keyboard in Oslo clattering away.

  ‘I can’t see a direct link,’ Vaage says after Herføll has finished reporting back on Thygesen. ‘Especially the role of the dead boy is unclear to me.’

  ‘Something might have happened to Strand in prison,’ Herføll says.

  ‘Did you say prison? Trøgstad by any chance?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t say Trøgstad. But that was where Strand served his sentence until yesterday.’

  ‘Yes!’ Vaage exclaims. ‘I think we’ve got something that is beginning to look like a case now. I’ll have to check a number of recordings. It’d be good if you could be on hand so that we can reach you quickly, should we need to get back to you.’

  8

  ‘The great thing about you, Borken, is that you never trust anyone,’ says Lipinski, taking a gulp of coffee. He grimaces to demonstrate the coffee is cold. He probably acquired the nickname Lips through his surname, not because his lips are particularly fleshy. The most pronounced feature of his face is his dark, bushy eyebrows which stand out even more now that he has shaved his head.

  ‘I don’t even trust myself,’ Borkenhagen answers. ‘Nothing is sure or reliable in our tiny human lives. Kykke’s smart, but just as doomed to making fatal, childish mistakes.’

  They are sitting in a room in the Sjöfartshotell on Katarinavägen in Stockholm. On the table is a gun, a Walther, type PP Super, along with its magazine. It is loaded with 9mm bullets of the kind known as ‘Police’. On the table there are also more everyday items: a tray with a steel coffee flask and cups marked Scandic Hotels, a half-full ashtray, a six-pack of unopened Pripps Blå cans, three mobile phones and a couple of chargers. On the made double bed there is a map of Sweden spread out, the southern half. By the wall are two leather motorbike panniers with a helmet and gloves placed on top.

  ‘In the worst-case scenario…,’ Borkenhagen says. With his left hand he grips the ribbed metal of the pistol, raises the weapon, aims at the window where bright sunlight is falling between a gap in the curtains and pulls the trigger. The click of the hammer hitting the air in the empty chamber is surprisingly loud. He turns his upper body and arm and aims at a framed colour photograph on the wall. The subject is a passenger ship with a chimney on which there is a blue J inside a yellow star. He aims at the star and clicks the hammer again.

  Borkenhagen puts the gun down on the arm of the chair he is sitting in.

  He grabs a serviette from the coffee tray and wipes the oil off the pistol grip and dries his hands. They are small and brown, as though he has been in the south of Europe or a solarium. His face is not as tanned. There the brown is scattered between freckles, which redheads often tend to have. His wavy hair is short by his ears and neck and he has tried to flatten the hair on top by using gel. Unlike many redheads in the north he doesn’t have blue eyes but brown. His glasses are tinted a soft brown, perhaps to match his eyes.

  Both of the two men are lightly dressed because the summer heat has arrived in Stockholm too. Lipinski in a T-shirt and jeans; Borkenhagen in a light blue shirt and khaki Levi Dockers. Lipinski has a dragon tattoo curved round his left bicep. On his right he has the same tattoo as Kykkelsrud, an object that looks like a diamond, but which the Chinese tattooist in Aberdeen had designed especially for oil workers: a drill bit.

  Borkenhagen has no visible tattoos. He adorns himself with gold chains round his neck and left hand, and he has a gleaming gold wrist watch round his right wrist.

  ‘I can’t work out how it can take our little friend so long to find a telephone box that hasn’t been vandalised,’ he says. ‘Fuck Kykke for ringing from an unsafe mobile phone.’

  Lipinski stifles a yawn, gets up and goes into the bathroom for water, comes back with a plastic glass. He sits down on the floor in a lotus position, blows bubbles in the water and studies them.

  ‘We can take him out on board the ferry, get him loaded and give him a little nudge over the side,’ he says.

  ‘And then we come ashore in Tallinn, Lips. You and I minus the third name on the passenger list. On the car deck they find a large, antiquated Kawasaki by the name of Brontes. Who’s going to ask any questions, eh?’

  ‘We could get forged papers for Kykke. Bribe the customs officials in Tallinn. Everything’s possible in Estonia with German dough.’

  ‘Much too risky,’ Borkenhagen says. ‘And who’s going to give the ugly bugger the nudge? We aren’t built like him. If he’s got rid of the grass, Strand, by putting him on a bike with no brakes, which is what we think, we’ll have to use this.’

  He pats the Walther.

  ‘That’s a bloody sight more decent than letting an old pal drown in the Baltic.’

  ‘Poor bastard. He hates salt water,’ Lipinski says. ‘Well, that would be an unpleasant way to die. All the bubbles you release until you have no air left.’

  He closes his eyes.

  ‘How do you see your friend’s face when he knows you’re gonna shoot him?’ Lipinski asks in a low, intoning voice.

  ‘None of that psycho-babble, Lips.’

  One of the phones rings. Borkenhagen grabs it. Lipinski is sitting with his eyes closed.

  ‘Took your time, Bård,’ Borkenhagen says. ‘Where are you calling from? The kiosk in Sarpsborg. That’s good.’

  Borkenhagen listens carefully. Removes his glasses and massages the small, tense muscles in the corners of his eyes.

  ‘Red van and red overalls? Right. Idiotic disguise if you ask me. But if it helped and no one saw you well enough to identify you, then maybe it was all right.’

  He squeezes the phone between his shoulder and chin, grabs one of the beer cans and opens it. Blows away the froth. Listens and rolls his eyes.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘What a bloody fool!’

  Lipinski opens his eyes. He too takes a can from the packet.

  ‘Here’s what you do, Bård,’ Borkenhagen says. ‘Get rid of the Transit. Hire or steal another car. Find a five-litre can of petrol. Go to Aspedammen and burn down your uncle’s old shack. Do it at night and do it properly. Then you follow the plan. Take the ten thou, you know where it is, go to Ibiza and stay there for as long as you can. We’ll send you more corn from Riga when we get set up there. Don’t do any more of this school leaver bollocks. You did a good job, Bård. Have a nice trip.’

  Borkenhagen presses off.

  ‘Riga?’ Lipinski says.

  ‘He doesn’t need to know precisely where we are. Fucking Kykke stole a Ninja, fixed the brakes and tricked Strand into ploughing through the forest and flying through the air like a rag doll. Five hundred metres from The Middle of Nowhere! That’s so b
loody stupid that even the muppets at the police station will know what’s gone on. Bård the Board has done a great undercover job for us – in a clapped-out Transit – but what he had to say was really sad. Sad for Kykke. Kykke can take his bloody code of honour and stick it right up that big jacksie of his. Last winter he didn’t even do one single decent run for us. And now this, sabotaging the brakes! The cops’ll need about this long to get the picture, I reckon.’

  He holds up the index finger and thumb of his left hand with the distance between them like the electrodes on a spark plug.

  ‘We’ve got no choice, Lips. After that report from Bård we’ve got absolutely no choice.’

  ‘The cops have no proof.’

  Borkenhagen asks if the police nowadays need a pile of proof if there is enough circumstantial evidence. He asks Lipinski if he wants to be locked up until long after retirement age.

  ‘If only Kykke’d had the nous to burn the bike after the boy’d crashed,’ he says with a deep sigh. ‘I bet Kykke’s prints are all over the Ninja. They’ll put out a search for him. Unlikely to be today though because the cops don’t do anything serious until Kripos have carried out a forensic examination. But it’ll be tomorrow.’

  Borkenhagen throws a mobile to Lipinski, tells him to do something useful and ring a garage and hire a car with a trailer for heavy motorbikes.

  9

  Terje Kykkelsrud has turned off the E18 in Karlstad, heading south through the town to the island of Hammerö. On the far side, where a sign says it is a nature reserve, he parks his bike and finds a pine to lean back against while the sun scorches down and makes Lake Vänern glitter as far as the misty horizon in the distant south.