The Ice Swimmer

by Kjell Ola Dahl

  ‘In this way we reduce the case to what it actually is: a death in the harbour. We need witnesses. Today’s coverage has blown up the media’s interest in the case. I think we should exploit the media interest instead of fighting it. We now have a unique opportunity to speak to all of Oslo live.’

  Rindal angled his head pensively. ‘It could work … it might indeed. But are you prepared for it? A press conference is like walking into a minefield. Walk far enough and sooner or later you’ll step on a mine and be blown up.’

  Lena didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.

  Rindal got up, tucked the paper under his arm and went to the door.

  They found Gunnarstranda, Emil Yttergjerde and Axel Rise in the conference room.

  Rindal put the paper in front of Gunnarstranda and without wasting time on pleasantries said: ‘I want you to check out this Polisario guy.’

  ‘They’ve got an office in Stockholm,’ Gunnarstranda said.

  ‘Go there. Get the man’s statement. Find out when he came to Oslo, how long he was here, ideally why, and what he discussed with the other two. Make sure you find out where he was when Adeler took a dive into the sea.’

  He nodded to Lena.

  She returned his look, bewildered.

  ‘Your suggestion,’ he said with a smile. ‘Don’t be so modest.’

  Everyone looked at her.

  Lena cleared her throat once and then again. ‘I’m summoning a press conference here at Police HQ this afternoon. The aim is to exploit the current media interest and get in touch with anyone who might’ve seen Adeler during the night or early morning.’

  When she turned to go she looked straight at Rindal.

  ‘After the press conference you and I are going on a trip to the island of Ulvøya,’ he said.

  ‘Ulvøya?’

  He nodded and left.

  Lena glanced at her watch. Suddenly she had a full programme for the day. And therefore very little time. She had an appointment with the doctor in forty minutes.

  6

  The low sun dazzled her as she drove along the narrow roads between the buildings at Ullevål Hospital, looking for a parking space.

  But there wasn’t a single gap in the lines of parked vehicles. In the end she couldn’t afford to search any longer. She chose the emergency option. Drove half onto the pavement. At least her car wasn’t blocking the traffic there.

  When she sat down in the waiting room and flicked through the old magazines she tried to focus on the pictures instead of looking at everyone else waiting.

  Before long she had gone through the whole pile and sat staring at a recipe revealing the secret behind juicy chicken filets. She read the article through for a second time without managing to take in the content. She put the magazine down. And met the look of a pale, grey-haired man sitting on a chair who had just looked up from a newspaper. Beside him sat an even paler woman wearing sunglasses and a blue turban-like hat.

  Lena thought to herself: I’m strong. I haven’t given the lump a thought for a long time. It’s a minor issue. I don’t belong here. Why isn’t anything happening?

  At last a door opened and a plump, uniformed nurse appeared. Several pairs of eyes were directed at her. The secretary nodded at the pale man, who got up and went in.

  Lena looked at her watch, annoyed. She should have been in twenty minutes ago. Were there still people waiting for their turn before her?

  Ten more minutes dragged by. She considered getting up and asking what was going on when the plump nurse reappeared in the doorway and called Lena’s name.

  The doctor was an unshaven man with round glasses and a crew cut. His voice was soft and his mouth radiated a warm sensitivity when he spoke.

  Lena observed the situation from deep inside herself.

  ‘Are you OK?’ the doctor asked. ‘Would you like anything to drink or…?’

  Lena blinked and fought her way back to reality. ‘No, thank you.’

  The plump nurse knelt down beside Lena, who closed both eyes and heard her voice from far away:

  ‘It’s a shock of course. But you have to view being given radiotherapy so quickly as positive. It means there’s a low risk of anything spreading. In your current situation it’s important you focus on the positives and prioritise these more than the negatives. I know that’s easy to say. But, as the doctor said, the prognosis is very promising.’

  A door closed and Lena opened her eyes.

  The doctor had gone out. The bastard had gone out! What kind of doctor was that? Who tells people they have breast cancer and then just goes out?

  Lena stood up. She was giddy, but regained her balance.

  The nurse held her hand. They looked at each other.

  ‘I haven’t got the time,’ Lena said.

  ‘You haven’t got the time for what?’

  ‘This. I have a demanding job.’

  ‘Illness never comes at the right time,’ the woman said with complete understanding. ‘But from now on it’ll pay to rank your job and everything else lower than the illness. What’s most important for you now is to get well.’

  ‘To survive?’

  ‘To get well,’ the nurse said in a gentle tone and handed her a pile of papers. ‘Everything’s new, Lena. There are so many things you’ll wonder and want to ask questions about. They’ll come when you’ve recovered from the shock. You’ll find many of the answers in this material. But of course you can phone or email us too. Anyway, I’d advise you to come to the information meeting. Then you’ll get to know other patients in the same situation, and you can ask as many questions as you want.’

  That’s my Christmas present this year, Lena thought, as she walked to her car like a somnambulist.

  She was a somnambulist. The air was robust and offered resistance. It felt as if she were moving in jelly.

  She unlocked the car door and fell rather than sat down.

  She cursed aloud when she saw a parking fine tucked under the windscreen wiper.

  She opened the door and pulled out the yellow ticket. Tried to tear it into pieces. But it was made of some kind of plastic that you couldn’t tear. She threw the fine into the dirty snow and stamped on it.

  Finally she spat on the ticket in her fury.

  An elderly lady in a dark cape stopped on the pavement and stared at her.

  Lena composed herself and got back into the car.

  The lady in the cape passed.

  Her phone rang. It was on the car seat next to her.

  She took it and put it to her ear. ‘Yes?’ she said hoarsely.

  The voice in Lena’s ear belonged to her mother. ‘Hi, Lena. I’m out buying Christmas presents. You’d better tell me now what you’d like,’ her mother said.

  Lena didn’t have the energy to talk to her. Or with anyone. Not now. ‘I’ll ring you later, Mum. I’ve got a lot on my plate just now.’

  She hung up and switched off her phone.

  She drove slowly out of the hospital complex and turned up to Vestre Aker Church. Her car climbed the hill and Lena registered that there were no other vehicles by the entrance. She stopped and looked at the treetops stretching bare branches up to the sky. Actually, though, she saw nothing. She thought nothing. When the cold began to creep into the car, she opened the door and got out.

  The snow between the graves was an unsullied white. The dirt from the traffic and the exhaust fumes didn’t reach as far as here.

  A narrow path had been ploughed down the hill to the gate at the bottom by Blindernveien. She ambled down. Stepped over a pile of cleared snow and waded up to the middle of her calves in the snow between the gravestones, which protruded from the white blanket like crooked hats. You could almost imagine they had been garnished with cream.

  She knelt down in front of the red-granite gravestone. Closed her eyes and evoked the image of her father – the way she wanted to remember him.

  She knelt down on the snow with her back to the street.

  She waited. What was she
waiting for? A miracle?

  She closed her eyes again and listened to the sounds around her: the laughter of children playing in the nursery outside the fence, the dull drone of traffic, the bang of a window as it was shut. The vague rumble of a plane that passed overhead, high, high in the sky. She heard some people talking in low voices on the snow-free path nearer the church.

  The moisture from the snow was soaking through the knees of her jeans. She was wet, but she didn’t feel it.

  She didn’t have a handkerchief with her, or any tissues. She used her hands, ran her fingers over both cheeks in a vain attempt to wipe away her tears. Took a deep breath and got up.

  At that moment there was a loud bang right behind her. She sank to her knees

  Glass shattered.

  She rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.

  A black Mercedes had wrapped itself around a lamppost in Blindernveien. Smoke was coming from the bonnet of the car.

  Lena reacted as if on autopilot. She was already on her way to the fence. Jumped over it and landed in the snow. She was racing towards the car when the door on the driver’s side of the wreck creaked open.

  Lena came to an abrupt halt, fearing the worst.

  The edge of the door hit the road. The hinges must have gone.

  A shoe and a trouser leg appeared in the doorway.

  Another shoe and another trouser leg.

  A young man manoeuvred his way out of the car – apparently completely unhurt. The man was wearing a blue blazer and light-blue jeans.

  He stood brushing down his jacket and jeans. Then he cast a resigned look at Lena and said: ‘An E-Class Mercedes and the air-cushion fails in a crash. You can’t believe it, can you. I’m going to take this up with the dealer.’

  Lena just looked at him, speechless.

  The man really was unhurt. He smiled sheepishly. ‘Slippery today,’ he mumbled and looked up. ‘The weather’s milder. That’s why.’ He lifted both palms as though he was weighing the air. ‘Think it’s going to snow.’

  This must be a sign, Lena thought, breathing in deeply. It felt like she was inhaling new strength.

  She fumbled in her pocket for her phone. Tapped in the number. ‘It’s me, Lena.’

  ‘Your job,’ her mother said. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand how you can stand it.’

  ‘You were wondering about a Christmas present,’ Lena said, turning in through the gate to the cemetery and starting to walk up the hill to where her car was. ‘I haven’t managed to give it much thought yet. But I was thinking of popping by one evening. We have to plan a little.’

  ‘I quite fancy baking a kransekake,’ Lena’s mother said. ‘I finished the sandkaker yesterday.’

  ‘Krumkaker?’

  ‘Two boxes full.’

  ‘Gorokaker?’

  ‘Done them, too.’

  ‘Serinakaker?’

  ‘I’ve baked them, and Mor Monsen kaker. But I thought I’d hold back on the doughnuts until the twenty-third.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Lena, unlocking the car door. ‘So all that’s missing is in fact a kransekake.’

  7

  Before he left for Stockholm, Gunnarstranda wanted to revisit the Metro crime scene. To avoid the din in the tunnel he rang Torleif Mork to requisition a man to unlock the emergency exit from the outside and switch on the light.

  A youngish guy in padded overalls was waiting at the traffic lights in Grønlandsleiret. Gunnarstranda promised he would close the door after him and went into the bomb shelter alone. Now the electricity was working. The SOC officers had chalked a circle around the blood stain where Nina Stenshagen had been shot.

  He stopped and examined the blood stain.

  The neon tube above his head buzzed. He looked up. The cable shone white where it had been repaired. Someone had definitely torn down the cable and shorted the circuit. The ‘someone’ was very probably the gunman.

  They both had and didn’t have pictures of him. The CCTV footage showed a dark, erect figure walking with his head down and his hands deep inside his jacket pockets. Strolling along, his face hidden under the edge of a hood. What Gunnarstranda knew was that Nina had entered a train at Jernbanetorget Station at 06:20. On the film you could see a figure in red slip in through the door while the man with the hood went through the door behind a second later.

  Gunnarstranda had been to the ops room and fetched the pictures from Karl Johans gate. They had some of Nina, but none of her pursuer.

  What kind of person was this guy who had managed to follow someone while evading all the CCTV cameras?

  The guy must have had some past familiarity with these cameras. He knew where they were and how to avoid them. This person had drowned Sveinung Adeler. This man had killed Adeler with intent and, despite the fact that he was armed, disguised the murder as an accident. He had disguised the murder of Nina as an accident too. But he hadn’t managed to do the same with Stig Eriksen.

  The sharpest pictures were of the platform in Tøyen. An athletic man wearing a short jacket with a hood covering his head. Hands in his pockets. Presumably he was holding a weapon as he walked. He was planning to kill the poor, terrified woman in front of him. When Nina jumps down onto the track he follows without a break in his stride. Single-minded to the nth degree. Then the chase through the tunnel, running on the track, jumping away and squeezing back against the wall as a train whistles through. It is dark in the tunnel. The only sources of light are a few luminous green exit signs. When she flees up the stairs to the emergency exit he is right behind her. They are both out of breath. Nina gropes her way through the darkness. He listens for her breath, sees her floundering shadow along the wall. He shoots. The sound must have been like an explosion in the bomb shelter, a long, resounding echo. He doesn’t hear her fall.

  The man shot Nina before she pushed open the door. He shot Nina with the same weapon that had killed Stig Eriksen. So he was the type who didn’t get rid of the weapon after a murder. Why not? What did that say about him as a person?

  There was something military about a man who kept his own weapon. Killers on the street acted differently. They shot their victim with a stolen weapon and immediately disposed of it.

  Gunnarstranda walked towards the stairs leading down to the tunnel, where a train roared through. He tried to imagine the scene. Nina groping in the darkness, up the stairs and on towards the emergency exit. The man rushing up behind her, raising the gun and firing.

  After Nina falls the man finds himself in a dilemma: should he leave her and head for the door, or…?

  If the body is found here, shot, the police will raise the alarm and study the Metro’s surveillance cameras. So he isn’t sure if the cameras have caught his face or not. For that reason he chooses to hide the body.

  That must have been his intention. Hide the dead body first and then leave the scene. But then the lights are switched on.

  Gunnarstranda visualises it: the man towering over the body and suddenly finding himself and the victim bathed in light.

  This is a new situation. He must realise what is happening. An alarm has gone off and the search team are on the way. Another argument for getting out. But no. The man has a cool head, he sticks to the plan, hides the body under the ventilation pipe, pulls out the light cable and shorts the lights in the bomb shelter. In the darkness he wriggles under the large ventilation pipe and pulls up the ladder to hide.

  He lies still and hears the search team come, sees the beams from their head torches sweep along the walls. He listens to what they say and waits until he is alone again. By now he knows how to solve this dilemma once and for all: by throwing the body in front of the first passing train.

  The perfect murder – almost.

  He didn’t know or perhaps he didn’t think that the emergency exit door would trigger an alarm that would reveal his presence. Nonetheless, the perpetrator was a confident, coldly calculating person with no sympathy for his victim, a person who was not held back by doubt or conscience. A psych
opath.

  Gunnarstranda crouched down and studied the rust-red stain. He wouldn’t get any further in here.

  8

  Lena changed into her uniform with ten minutes to go. By then she had already written three cheat sheets. It was important to know what to say, not to stammer and stutter. Afterwards she found Rindal, who seemed to be in a good mood. His shirt front bulged like a swallow’s chest, he cast an eye down himself with a smile on his lips and threw a few air punches to ensure his cuff links would shoot out from under his jacket sleeves and reveal their presence.

  ‘Where’s your jacket?’ he asked.

  ‘My mother says blue suits me better than black,’ Lena said, brushing a strand of hair off her uniform shirt. ‘It matches my eye-shadow.’

  Rindal smiled again. ‘You do the talking,’ he said. ‘And don’t say anything you can’t back up.’

  They walked side by side down the corridor. Heels click-clacking on the floor.

  Like on a TV programme, it occurred to Lena, casting a glance at herself in the glass pane beside an office door. She ruffled her hair and double-checked until she was happy with what she looked like.

  They took the stairs down. As soon as they turned into the corridor, the flashes started going off.

  Ram full.

  Lena worked her way to the table with the microphones. She scanned the assembled crowd. Steffen was nowhere to be seen.

  She scoured the faces, craned her neck to see the faces of the people standing partially hidden behind others.

  The conclusion was simple: no Steffen.

  Rindal cleared his throat and signalled.

  Lena took the microphone and welcomed everyone.

  An overweight journalist with a mane of wavy blond hair put up his hand. Lena ignored him. She read from her notes:

  ‘On the morning of Thursday, the tenth of December, at 08:11, the police received a message that a person had been seen floating in the harbour between City Hall Quay 1 and City Hall Quay 2. The caller was the captain of a Nesodden ferry. The ambulance service arrived on the scene at 08:16. The man was pronounced dead. The Pathology Institute has since confirmed the cause of death was drowning and death occurred at some point between 05:00 and 06:00 on Thursday morning. The victim was identified by the police as Sveinung Adeler, thirty-one years of age and a resident of Oslo. It was a very cold night, the minimum temperature was twenty-five degrees below zero, and the deceased man was found wearing thin clothes. The temperature of the water was around freezing point. In such conditions the critical body-cooling time will be very short – one to two minutes. As no witnesses to the incident have come forward, we will continue to investigate the case to clarify the circumstances surrounding the death. In this regard the police would be interested to talk to anyone who might have seen anything around the time Adeler fell from the quay, which was at some point between five and six o’clock on the morning of the tenth of December. We would like to talk to anyone who was in the vicinity of City Hall Quay, Aker Brygge or the square outside the City Hall during this time. We would also like to talk to anyone who was with the deceased or observed him earlier in the evening or night.’