The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  He rummages for Beach Boy’s CD player with the Laurie Anderson disc he hasn’t heard before. There is a track called ‘Love Among the Sailors’. He puts in the earplugs, dons the helmet and gazes across the lake as the woman sings. There isn’t much of a tune and she hasn’t got much of a voice either. She sings:

  There is a hot wind blowing

  It moves across the oceans and into every port.

  A plague. A black plague.

  There’s danger everywhere.

  And you’ve been sailing.

  And you’re alone on an island now tuning in.

  *

  Vilhelm Thygesen hears a cry, slings his mattock and looks up at the May sky arching over Oslo, as blue as the faded denim shirt he is wearing. Two large birds, they must be crows, fly slowly above the treetops in Bestum, where he has lived for most of his life, where he owns the plot that has become his universe. Where he is planning to hold on tight and live to his dying day, irrespective of any tempting offers Bruun & Spydevold, the estate agents, make him.

  Although the two birds in flight look like crows he doesn’t think they are because they seem to have a much greater wing span. They must be herons, grey herons, and one cries again, a hoarse, harsh kaark kaark. Quickly, a reflex action, Thygesen grabs the birdwatching binoculars he has placed on the garden bench, focuses on the birds and confirms that he is right: it is a pair of herons with their characteristic black outer wing feathers, yellow beaks and yellow feet. They fly as they always do, heavily, with the neck bent back so that only the head protrudes in front of the wings.

  The herons are blown upwards and manage to fly for a while with the wind, towards Bestum Bay where they probably have their nests. They look like two planes against the sky. Another croaked cry. It hits a nerve in Thygesen.

  Ever since he saw the sketch of the murdered woman in the morning edition of the Aftenposten he has been out of sorts. She, the dead, frozen stiff Picea has haunted his conscious mind and dreams. The newspaper picture edged her closer to him again.

  Thygesen takes the spade from the wheelbarrow and shovels away the top layer of the ground he has hacked at in the corner of the garden where he found Picea at the beginning of February. He doesn’t understand why it is only now, almost in the middle of May, that Kripos are publishing a picture of her. He feels no need to understand.

  Ever since the snow disappeared early in April he has been thinking about planting a guelder rose by the spruce tree where Picea lay.

  Last year, in the hawthorn hedge that borders his plot to the west, he discovered an alien presence. A thornless bush had grown there. At first he thought it was an elder, a red-berried elder. The yellowish bark on the thin stem made him doubt his judgement, and when he cut off a branch and found no brown, porous marrow he realised it couldn’t possibly be an elder. It had to be a guelder-rose, an example of Viburnum opulus, which grows wild in Norway and spreads into gardens and hedges. He has a magnificent specimen of the genus in his mixed hedge facing Lütken’s land to the south. The main branches grow at an angle of forty-five degrees on the stem, causing the bush to resemble a cross. Hence the name krossved in Norwegian.

  In Vestre Crematorium Alf Rolfsen has painted a tree that looks like a cross.

  The tree reminds Thygesen of the guelder rose.

  The hole is deep enough now. He picks up the clump of earth with the little bush and places it carefully into the hole, stamps the soil around it and soaks it thoroughly with water from a can. Takes a rollie from the windcheater he hung on the spruce, lights a match, studies his workmanship and has a few sips from a bottle of water. It is still hot. At its peak, on this the first day of summer in Østland, the temperature must have been around twenty-five degrees.

  His shirt is drenched with sweat. A job he has been thinking of doing for ages is done. It feels good that the unknown woman has a botanical memorial erected in the place where he found her.

  Thygesen puts on his jacket and strolls over to the post box on the gate to see if the evening edition of Aftenposten has come. There are no papers in the box. What he sees is a large, unfranked envelope with his name written on the outside. He opens the envelope and takes out a sheet of paper. There are pictures stuck to the sheet. One is the identikit picture of Picea, to which has been added a sketch of her naked body. Another is an old black-and-white newspaper photo of himself, in one of his beardless phases. A body has been sketched underneath, and in his hand he is holding a knife. Which is stuck into Picea’s stomach. From her stomach oozes what might be her intestines, but it looks more like small loaves, baguettes. The third and lowest picture is a grainy colour photo of Picea.

  Thygesen feels a chill run down his sweaty back.

  He closes the post box lid. Saunters down the drive. The shingle crunches under his trainers. In the hall he forgets to kick off his shoes and takes clods of soil in with him.

  It is cool inside the house. He pours himself a mug of tar-like coffee from the jug, sits down at the work table in the sitting room, rolls himself a smoke and puts on his reading glasses. Studies the sheet with the pictures stuck on. Lights the roll-up, which goes out without him noticing.

  The colour photo of Picea was taken while she was still alive. She is with other people, whose faces are blurred. It must have been taken on board a plane or a train, or a bus. Picea was sitting in a dark green seat and leaning forward. She is wearing the same light-coloured blouse she was wearing when he found her dead. Her face is quite sharp, in contrast to her arms which are out of focus, probably because she moved them at the crucial moment. Her eyes are wide open. The flash has made her pupils go red. Her mouth is open too, as though she is saying or shouting something, most likely to the photographer.

  Her facial expression is one of anger. Or it can be interpreted that way, as though she is livid. The people in the row of seats behind her are shadowy figures. Behind Picea’s head there is something white. It is a head cover of the type placed on the top of plane or car seats. In the olden days such cloths were called antimacassars because they were meant to protect furniture against hair pomades made of greasy, aromatic oil from Macassar in the East Indies. There are letters visible on the white material, but they are unreadable.

  Thygesen takes out a magnifying glass from the desk drawer. He examines the letters. It says: www.nsb.no.

  Picea was on a train, a Norwegian train.

  Thygesen grabs the mobile phone on the charger. No doubt about what he has to do. Ring Stribolt at Kripos.

  Between his hands he holds a piece of paper which is evidence in the case Stribolt hasn’t managed to solve. During the conversations Stribolt had with him Thygesen realised that the investigation had hit a brick wall.

  Now he has something to help Stribolt, the Finnmark man with the dolphin smile. The problem is that he has no idea where the pictures came from or who put the anonymous letter in his post box. Anonymous?

  Thygesen turns over the paper. On the back there is a drawing of two paws with claws. Between the paws there is what looks like an American football. Underneath, written in a fine felt-tip pen, it says: Give us Speed and Service, Mr Lawyer! PP Productions is offering you a role in a documentary, Vilhelm Thygesen. They will contact you. But if you want to be a star you’ll have to share the stardust you found inside the dead woman when you sliced her up. See Wilhelmsen Line’s old slogan: ‘For Speed and Service’. You probably haven’t used up all the shit yourself because we’ve been keeping an eye on you, and you’ve looked pretty clean since you finally came home to Norway. If you’ve sold it you’re smarter than we took you for. No one at Ullern VG admits to having bought any. According to our calculations you’re sitting on amphetamine (we think it’s amphetamine and hope it isn’t heroin) worth five million kroner. Respectful greetings, Dr Papaya and Captain Paw-Paw. PS We’re multi-artists armed with live ammo and desperation. DS.’

  Adolescent pranks. T
his was just an adolescent prank. Childish scribbles. School leavers’ jape! Isn’t this the time kids finish their secondary schooling? He hasn’t seen many kids in red overalls this year, and he hasn’t missed them. It is around this time, leading up to 17 May, Independence Day, as always, isn’t it?

  Ullern VG must be Ullern Videregående, a selective school for sixteen to nineteen-year-olds, upper secondary, as it is called in bureaucrat-speak nowadays, all in the name of equality. If it is an Ullern student who posted this envelope they will soon be here in their cars singing the post-pubertal mating song ‘Oggy-oggy-oggy, oi-oi-oi, here comes an Ullern boy.’

  Bloody hell. Where’s the gun?

  If they have live ammo, his ammo is more live.

  Dr Papaya and Captain Paw-Paw! And the old Wilhelmsen slogan. That was right; ‘For Speed and Service’ was the slogan of Wilhelmsen Lines, the proud liners of their day.

  How did they find the slogan? And how on earth did the bloody clowns get the crazy idea that he cut drugs worth five million kroner out of Picea’s stomach? They call themselves multi-artists, but that is not an artistic idea, in his humble opinion. It is an idea that should have the bearer despatched post-haste to Vinderen Psychiatric Clinic for Adolescents.

  Thygesen’s house is full of voices, of old sounds, as all hundred-year-old timber houses are by their very nature. Here people have talked, sung, laughed and cried since before the dissolution of the union with Sweden in 1905, through two world wars and a long post-war period. If science develops a method for monitoring sounds from logs in timber walls his house has a lot to say. It is not unlikely that a method will be developed.

  The sound waves must, as they hit molecules in the woodwork, trigger microscopic changes, which modern computer technology ought to be able to monitor and recode into comprehensible acoustic trails.

  When he moved back to his house he decided to turn a deaf ear to the sounds. He didn’t wish the past to talk to him. He wanted to look to the future. Instead he contemplated his navel and the tips of his shoes. But that is another story. By and large he has succeeded in keeping the history of the house at arm’s length.

  Now a voice is talking to him, a loud and unpleasantly sharp, stressed voice. It is his mother’s. ‘It’s really funny, Steffa,’ she says. Actually she is talking to her sister, Aunt Steffa. Tea cups clink on a silver tray. ‘The English in Kenya are so snobbish that they can’t say papaya – they call the fruit paw-paw.’

  Aunt Steffa had fled back home from her job as a governess in Kenya because of an uprising in a village in the British colony. She gave ‘the little savage’ – he was fifteen in 1952 – a sola topee and a zebra’s tail as a present. He wore the helmet at a fancy dress ball at school. He wondered if he could use the zebra’s tail in sadomasochistic activities he had read about in a magazine his sister Vigdis said he shouldn’t have been reading.

  ‘The English can’t pronounce papaya,’ says his mother, and she follows up this declaration with a laugh that for once sounds free and unrestrained.

  His father, the judge, immediately counters with a gruff retort: ‘If you despise the English so, do you perhaps side with the Mau Mau?’

  Aunt Steffa heaves a sigh. The brutality of the Mau Mau uprising.

  His mother says nothing.

  The voices fall silent.

  As far as he can remember eighty to ninety white farmers were killed in attacks while the British eliminated more than ten thousand rebels.

  This memory of a conversation enables Thygesen to decode a rebus the letter writer, or letter writers, presumably didn’t think he would be able to crack. The two paws, in English, make up paw-paw. What he took to be an American football is in fact not a ball but a papaya fruit.

  So what?

  Have Picea’s murderers contacted him via an anonymous letter? Or is it someone who was robbed of a body they thought contained dope?

  The author of the letter has a colour photo of Picea, of Picea alive and well. Where did they get that from? What does it mean that it exists and has been sent to him in an unfranked envelope?

  What should he do? What action should he respond with to a letter like that?

  Could the letter be a police provocation?

  His contact with Kripos since the discovery of Picea’s body has been limited. Stribolt rang him a couple of times while he was in Sarajevo visiting Vera Alam, and Vaage called him on his mobile. Stribolt rang him again when he stopped off in Paris to do some stamp deals on the way back.

  The ostensible reason for Stribolt’s call was to check Vera’s health. It could have been worse. Cancer had been diagnosed, but it hadn’t spread. She was determined to carry on her work in Bosnia and didn’t want to return home. Vaage rang to ask a great number of far-fetched questions about the possibility of Vera having had contact with the murdered woman. In fact, she also asked whether Bernhard Levin might have known Picea.

  It was only when Thygesen asked if he or Levin were under suspicion of having run a prostitution ring that Vaage shut up.

  He personally had rung Kripos once since he came home at the end of March to enquire whether the cops were spying on him and, if so, why. There was some guy in a leather coat wandering up and down Skogveien peering into his property.

  Could this suspicious leather-coat guy have been Dr Papaya or Captain Paw-Paw? Were the letter writers keeping an eye on him?

  The odds of the letter being police provocation or the police running surveillance from the shrubberies of Bestum are so small they are as good as zero. If there ever were officers in the old Murder Commission who would have done anything to hang Vilhelm Thygesen’s scalp from their belt, they are either dead or they retired ages ago. These old boys bore a special grudge against him as he was a disgraced police officer. But now their boots were hung up, if not placed in boxes with the rest of them. There are new, young brooms sweeping clean at the present Kripos. They have no inherent hatred of old Thygesen; he is not the enemy incarnate.

  If Vaage and Stribolt really suspected him of murder or of being an accessory to murder they would have put him under more duress, tried to squeeze him, expose him to mental torture during the interviews. He rang Kripos about the leather-coat guy, though more to check the state of play and hear if they had found any more leads.

  He looked at the drawing of Picea’s body. Of course they weren’t baguettes coming out of her stomach – they are supposed to be drugs packed in plastic bags which she had swallowed.

  He is convinced Picea was not a drugs courier. The times he has imagined what she was like she hasn’t come across as a mule. She is no Mother Teresa either, but somewhere between a gangster and a saint. Or between a whore and a Madonna? No, neither a whore nor a Madonna.

  He sits with the collage that brands him as a disemboweller. Will it have any further impact on Kripos? What has he got to lose by telling the truth about the letter he has received? Police logic is a special kind of logic: the person who knows something is suspect.

  Naively and innocently, you report a find you assume could be important and immediately you are trapped like a fly in a spider’s web.

  Despite these doubts, there is only one rational solution to the dilemma.

  Thygesen lifts the mobile off the charger, dials 22 07 70 00, presses the blue call button and gets the switchboard at Kripos. He asks to be put through to Chief Inspector Arve Stribolt.

  A few seconds pass. The switchboard voice tells him that Stribolt has recently left town and will not be available until 14 May.

  He should ask to be put through to Vanja Vaage. But his courage deserts him at the thought of the dragon and he presses off. He calls Stribolt’s mobile number and reaches voicemail.

  Thygesen switches off without leaving a message.

  *

  The switchboard message that Stribolt was out of town was a little white lie. He is on his way to Halden to q
uestion a witness, but has got no further than his desk, where he is talking to Vaage. She is reading a printout of an email Stribolt has received from a student in Halden by the name of Hege Dorothy Rønningen.

  Rønningen writes: ‘I hereby volunteer myself as a witness in a murder case. I recognise the woman whose picture was in the newspaper today, 11.05.01. I’m sure I saw this woman on the train between Göteborg and Oslo on Sunday 28 Jan. If you are interested, I can be contacted by email or on 916 202 77.’

  ‘Cool email address,’ Vaage says. Rønningen is a hotmail account holder and her address is d.ronningen, which, without the full stop, is Norwegian for queen. ‘Did she have anything to add when you phoned?’

  ‘A lot,’ Stribolt answers. ‘She seems great. I have no doubt it’d be worth going down to visit her. She noticed one important detail that doesn’t appear on the drawing. Picea had a deformed ear.’

  ‘Good. Looks like she has her own homepage. You’ve checked the net of course, haven’t you?’

  ‘I have,’ Stribolt says with a blush.

  Rønningen’s website is www. dotti-de-la-motti.no.

  ‘You’re a dirty old snuskhummer,’ Vanja Vaage says, lapsing into Swedish with a laugh. She has spent a few frisky weekends in a cabin on the Koster Islands with a hot fireman from Strømstad and has picked up quite a number of Swedish expressions.

  ‘And you’re a wanton hussy,’ Arve Stribolt answers.

  ‘Let’s see about this Miss Dotti de la Motti then,’ Vaage says. ‘You’ll see how fast I am on the net. I’m greased lightning.’

  ‘Rønningen’s not a porn model if that’s what you think,’ Stribolt says.

  ‘I don’t think anything. I’m just checking the evidence in a case and you blushed like a boiled snuskhummer.’

  Vaage clicks. On screen comes a text: INLINES ONLINE. Welcome to the homepage of Dotti de la Motti. SITE FOR GOOD BUYS ONLINE OF CHEAP LATVIAN INLINES.

  Beneath the text a pile of blonde curls appears, and slowly but surely a light-skinned forehead and two black eyebrows.