The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  The pine is in a grove that reminds him of the clump of trees in Vilhelm Thygesen’s garden. They sat there once in better times, Thygesen, Borken and he, round a garden table with wine glasses on. They were three losers sipping the gnat’s piss that Thygesen called redcurrant wine.

  Thygesen had been kicked out of the legal profession, Borken had gone bankrupt and been disqualified from running a company again and he himself had been sent ashore from a North Sea rig for agitator activities.

  Thygesen moaned about how old he had become and how hard he had lived.

  To which Borken said: ‘You’re the same age as Jack Nicholson and I doubt you’ve had more bloody women and booze than him.’

  The three of them didn’t talk about anything criminal. The conversation round the table focused on surviving in a hard world, by honest means. For Thygesen it was a question of getting himself into gear, away from the void created by useless alcoholic inactivity. For Borken the aim was to return as a trader of motorbikes and parts. Borken was right that the market would pick up again in the nineties. The trouble was he never had a share of the boom.

  Kykkelsrud wanted to start up a state-authorised motorbike workshop. He viewed the little hiccough the Seven Samurai had had with the council as a temporary obstacle they would overcome. And the middle-class biddy of a mayor as a poseur, swollen with a self-importance it would be easy to deflate.

  He had felt he could trust Thygesen when he rang him during the strike on the North Sea Star and asked what they could do about the company’s bugging of cabins and meeting rooms. The strikers had found the listening equipment and had technical evidence. Thygesen was in charge when the strike committee brought the case to court in Stavanger. He got hold of a more recognised lawyer, someone called Hydle, to run the case. But Thygesen did a masterful job initially. Losing the bugging case and the strike itself was a different matter – a taste of capitalism’s bitter chalice.

  When the fight for The Middle of Nowhere began Kykkelsrud let Jens Petter Sundin establish contact with Thygesen because Sundin had a relative, someone who had been a friend of Thygesen’s and had been killed. He wanted to test the young hanger-on to see if he was up to anything except giving lip.

  He was. For a short while. When the club went down the tube Sundin started to show another side of himself. He emerged as a little rat, an informer. Shame it hadn’t been necessary to do away with him rather than Strand the dreamer.

  A single sailing boat crosses the lake’s immense surface slowly in the light breeze that barely ripples the sea.

  If he were in that boat the world would appear different to him.

  We’re all in the same boat, that is what people say, and they are talking rubbish.

  We are all in separate boats. Only in dreams do we sail on Lake Vänern with someone, in a boat with white sails, in the sun and summer wind.

  Kykke takes out the Dictaphone, rewinds to the beginning of the tape, turns up the volume and hears himself say: ‘What kind of society, Beach Boy?’

  His voice is higher than he thought, and clearer, not so much of the growl that he hears when he speaks.

  The boy he has killed answers: ‘The society for a fair distribution of goods.’

  Kykke looks across the biggest inland lake in Scandinavia while the dead boy talks to him from the Dictaphone.

  He answers Beach Boy with a salvo of questions: ‘But for God’s sake, where have you got that from? Is it the social welfare officer at Trøgstad? It sounds like that Socialist Kristin Halvorsen on TV. What did Ryland say to the prison shrink’s waffle? That he would immediately fork out a million in the name of social justice and socialism?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything at all,’ the boy says in an offended voice. ‘I thought Ryland would feel very threatened by my letter. Regardless of who the dead woman was, whether she was a drugs mule, prostitute or just a normal secretary, it wouldn’t be healthy for a director in charge of millions of petrol kroner to be connected with a murdered woman.’

  ‘All right, you’ve got a point. What about the cops?’

  ‘I’m getting to that, Kykke. As this Ryland bastard didn’t answer my first letter, I wrote a second and sharpened the tone. I said if he didn’t contact me so that we could agree on how the demands would be met I’d get the police to put a picture of the woman in the papers. If he didn’t contact me then I would go to the tabloids. The rag that paid best for the story. I wrote that even if he wasn’t the normal type of millionaire who appeared in the papers – buying a palace in Holmenkollen and a Ferrari or going to balls with the starlets from Hotel Cæsar, things the rich like to do – he would be splashed over the front page anyway as the MD who knew the dead woman.’

  ‘There’s a certain sick logic to your plan.’

  A bumble bee buzzes between the sea thrift in front of the pine trees. It is a real giant of a bee.

  Kykkelsrud follows its flight. He imagines he is the bee. It is a pleasant thought.

  Poor bloody bee if it had to think it was him, a confused murdering bee which didn’t dare rely on its friends.

  ‘What made a little shit like you think the cops would really print a picture of the murdered woman?’

  ‘It started as something we joked about in clink. Of course all of Trøgstad was following the Orderud triple murder case when it came to court over Easter. It’s the kind of case that makes a small-time crook feel like an innocent lamb. An old boy who was in for only some minor offence, but who had done time in Botsen for safe-cracking, laughed so much about the sock business that he almost cut off his arm with a crosscut saw. He said “The good old Murder Commission would have known”. The Murder Commission was the forerunner of Kripos. The old boy thought the Murder Commission would never have tolerated being told to go out and search for the Orderud sock for the umpteenth time.’

  ‘Here’s to clever safe-crackers,’ Kykkelsrud hears himself say.

  He swallows a mouthful of Farris water from a bottle. It tastes of chlorine. He took it from the tap at a petrol station. When he checked his account in an ATM in Karlstad it was in the red. The money Borken promised he would pay in was overdue.

  The boy drones the way people on speed do: ‘The old man started talking about the woman who’d been found dead at Thygesen’s. He said he was absolutely sure Thygesen was involved. He really hated Thygesen because, when he was a cop in Notodden, he’d arrested him after a break-in at Hydro. “The Murder Commission would never have stopped until they had Thygesen nailed for the murder,” he said. “But nowadays the idle Kripos lot allow themselves to be sidetracked and controlled by the papers in Akersgata. They have nothing else on their minds but the Orderud case and have completely forgotten the murdered woman at Thygesen’s. It’s a scandal.” Everything he said gave me an idea, so I rang Kripos.’

  ‘You rang Kripos from Trøgstad Prison?’

  ‘Yep. It’s not difficult. You just have to scrape together some coins, queue by the welfare-building phone and dial the number when it’s your turn. You’re thinking Kripos will want to know who’s calling them. How will they actually find out it was me? There are eighty men locked up. Finding the one individual who rang requires a lot of filtering and sorting. I spoke English to confuse Kripos, to make them think I was black. I got an A in my English oral at Kirkeparken. No problem. I got through to Kripos and said I had some info about the Thygesen woman, asked for Stribolt, the detective whose name was in the paper. But I got a crabby bitch, someone called Vaage. She said she was dealing with the case and I had to talk to her. So I did.’

  ‘You’re a weird’un, Beach Boy. And what tales did you tell Kripos?’

  A small blue tanker sets a course south-west across Lake Vänern. Even though it is sailing in fresh water the little boat floats like a cork. Probably in ballast from Kristinhamn. Oil is transported right to the heart of Sweden from the reserves in the North Sea.

&nb
sp; ‘I didn’t tell any tales,’ says the boy’s voice on the tape. ‘Can I have a little swig of your beer before I die of thirst?’

  ‘If you don’t touch the metal with your lips. I’m not sure we have the same bacteria.’

  The boy drinks, burps out loud and, encouraged by his oratory talents, continues: ‘First, I repeated to this Vaage all the safecracker had said about the Murder Commission. Then I said that the whole case of the forgotten murdered woman would open – I said open like a lotus flower the way you do when you’re pissed – if a picture appeared in the press. And I said I had specific information that could tie the murder to one of Norway’s most powerful men, and to a bikers’ club in Østfold.’

  ‘You said that? A bikers’ club in Østfold?’

  ‘Yes, I did. A bikers’ club in Eastfold.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Resounding silence on the tape.

  Then the boy speaks, out of breath: ‘Don’t look at me like that. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone. That was the whole point. To flush the rich guy out and at the same time create panic in the Kamikaze gang. That was my big plan. Getting a million for the club by grabbing Ryland by the balls and breaking the back of the Kamikazes so that they never show their gibbon faces again.’

  On the machine there is the sound of beer squirting out of a can as it is crushed.

  ‘You’ve destroyed the Carlsberg can, Kykke,’ the boy’s voice says.

  ‘Oh, yes? So I have. Have you considered how your words might sound if I tell you the Kamikazes didn’t operate from the shack in Aspedammen – we did?’

  ‘But Bård said the Kamikazes did…’

  ‘Bård’s a creep, and you’ve behaved like a third-rate half-wit. I’m sweating like a pig. I’ll have to cool down in the stream.’

  There is a click as the Dictaphone is switched off.

  Kykkelsrud hears his own footsteps in the gravel and a voice from afar, which is his own, shouts: ‘Don’t mess about with the machine. If you’ve turned it on, turn it off.’

  Silence. Suddenly there is Beach Boy’s voice, loud and shrill. He is singing, it must be a song by Aretha Franklin: ‘Let’s kick the ballistics. Let’s kick the ballistics. Let’s kick the ballistics.’ Then there are a few hiccoughs, unclear words, and loud and clear: ‘Borken. Hello, Borken! When you hear this and some shit has happened to me, you should know that… There was a song my father loved, but the priest refused to play it at the funeral. Writing love letters in the sand. Sung by Pat Boone. Can you hear me? Love letters in the sand. I’ve written a letter in the sand, you might say. Perhaps it isn’t a love letter. Do you know what I mean? A letter telling the truth. Now I have to switch off and pretend I’ve been whittling some bits of wood. Kykke’s coming out of the forest washed and clean. He looks like Old Nick himself.’

  10

  ‘Do you know this voice?’ asks Vanja Vaage, the duty officer at Kripos.

  Local Police Chief Harald Herføll is sitting in his office listening on the phone to Vaage playing the tape. What he hears is the voice of someone ringing in; all calls are routinely recorded at the Kriminalpolitisentral in Oslo.

  He is fairly sure he knows the voice. But he doesn’t want to appear too sure. Over-confident sheriffs out here in the bush are not popular in the capital.

  So he hesitates and answers in the negative.

  ‘Have you heard this voice before?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘He’s speaking English.’

  ‘Yes sir, he’s speaking English.’

  ‘Let me hear a little more.’

  ‘Here we go.’

  ‘… that the woman was killed because of a drug operation that went wrong,’ the boy says on the Kripos tape. ‘And that if you publish her picture, things will explode and some motorbikers in Eastfold will be very sorry, and a bigshot, the name of which I have, will come out in the open… and sorry, no more coins for the telephone machine. My name is Banzai Boy, and I call you from a wood factory in the forest, and will call you again. Do you at the Crime Police Centre accept collect calls, noteringsoverføring in Norwegian?’

  In Herføll’s estimation, this is pretty good school English, the kind someone like Øystein Strand would speak.

  Is he sure?

  ‘Banzai Boy was a nickname Øystein Strand used,’ Herføll says. ‘Apparently in Japanese banzai means “Charge, attack”.’

  ‘I see,’ Vaage says. ‘Can you identify the voice?’

  Herføll lights what is for him a very rare cigarette, a Petterøes from the packet of twenty in his drawer. He immediately has the taste of death in his mouth. But also the taste of life. The life he dreamed about when he became a policeman, an action-filled life hanging around in more exciting bars than The Bait and The Summer House in Moss and arresting gangsters.

  ‘I’m not a hundred per cent sure,’ he says while a little cheapskate in his brain calculated how much he could claim in petrol allowance if he drove to Oslo to listen to the Kripos recording. To many recordings, if he has understood Strand the chatterbox correctly.

  ‘Do I hear a provincial taximeter ticking?’ Vaage asks.

  Can the witch read my thoughts?

  ‘I’m ninety-nine per cent sure the voice you’ve played me belongs to the deceased, Øystein Strand,’ Herføll says.

  ‘Ninety-nine is good enough for us. For your information, this is one of many recordings of a hitherto anonymous caller from a line we’ve traced back to the coin-operated machines inmates use in Trøgstad Prison. We haven’t had the resources to investigate who the caller was. You’ve been a great help, Herføll,’ Vaage says.

  ‘Pleasure.’

  ‘You’ve given us a case. And it’ll be even stronger if you can tell us where herr Kykkelsrud, herr Borkenhagen and herr Lipinski are at present.’

  Herføll doesn’t want to throw in his hand now. He would like to bid three hearts. The problem is he doesn’t know. From early February the activity of the Seven Samurai at The Middle of Nowhere has been zero. Kykkelsrud has been to the site and removed all the tools and equipment, which he sold using an ex-club member at Værven, in Moss, as a middleman. These deals were done by two fallen working-class heroes, in broad daylight, with no chance for the little undercover network they have in Moss to prove so much as a hint of fencing.

  Borkenhagen has been sunning himself in Crete. Herføll knows that because a cousin of his was on the same package tour and said so when she came home. Lipinski has been at home in Skredderåsen and actually stood as a prosecution witness in a trial about some unpleasant cat murders in his suburb of Moss.

  Selling tools on the quayside, a trip to the Med, witness in a cat murder case – are these small-town activities of any interest to Kripos?

  ‘You’re holding back information,’ says the mind reader from the sulphur mine in Helgeland who has become a super-cop in Oslo.

  ‘Not at all,’ Herføll replies. ‘I’ve just got so very little to give you. I know almost nothing about the movements of the three Samurai since early February.’

  ‘Glad you’re being honest. Tell me what you know.’

  Herføll tells her the little he knows.

  ‘Any idea who Mr Bigshot could be?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘If he’s a local the only bigshot we have in the Moss region is Ari Behn,’ Herføll says.

  ‘I think we can leave him to Princess Märtha to worry about,’ Vaage says. ‘We have some info from Follo Police District. A person called Lips has been named by a pusher in Drøbak as an amphetamine dealer. Does that tally with what you know of him in Våler?’

  ‘It tallies with rumours we’ve heard from Sundin, our insider. Borkenhagen wanted to turn the Samurai into a drugs outfit,’ Herføll answers.

  ‘Our pusher says he thought the drugs he got from this Lips came via the Baltic, to be precise Tallinn. Does that ring a bell?’


  Herføll says no. Vaage tells him not to hesitate to call her if he hears about anything else. She informs him that a forensics officer is on his way to Moss to examine the motorbike that Øystein Strand was riding. Herføll makes a note of the officer’s name: Gunvald Larsson.

  *

  Terje Kykkelsrud removes the little cassette from the Dictaphone, places it on a pine root and smashes it with a rock. Then he sets fire to it. The smoke from the burning plastic makes him feel sick. He has to move away. The pine needles at the foot of the tree catch fire. Cursing, he stamps out the fire.

  Was it necessary to destroy the tape? Of course it was. There was evidence on it that could have had him behind bars for life. That possibility still existed. Borken would have to survive without the tape.

  Kykkelsrud visualises being stopped at a checkpoint and the police finding the cassette with Strand’s voice on.

  He has to face the facts.

  Because it was murder, regardless of whether Strand realised the brakes were fixed and chose to go hell for leather into the forest.

  He cannot allow himself to regret not withdrawing from the Seven Samurai a long time ago when it was obvious he would not get permission to build a garage in The Middle of Nowhere. He cannot allow himself to become sentimental. Even if he is not attracted by the prospect of becoming a brothel director in Tallinn, he is attracted by the big bucks Borken and Lips say they can earn there. What they have earned from a couple of successful amphetamine ops is peanuts in reality. They will earn, according to Lips, this money multiplied by a hundred in Tallinn. As the mafia in Estonia has spread into Finland and Sweden and the rich pastures there, a vacuum has been created in their homeland. Finnish bandits have begun to migrate across the Gulf of Finland and establish themselves in Estonia. There should be opportunities for Norwegians too, with a bit of start-up capital and efficient organisation.

  The blue tanker on Lake Vänern disappears into the mist on the horizon.

  Kykkelsrud mounts his bike.

  His sole satisfaction is that he gave Beach Boy a sermon about eternity before he was despatched there.