by Thomas Enger
‘What?’
‘Putting the blame on Bjelland. It could have backfired.’
‘Exactly. And that’s what Charlie’s so scared of now. He doesn’t want the truth to come out about the scam in Brazil, because then a lot of people would come after him. Thugs who got arrested in 2007.’
‘And yet…’
It was obvious she was thinking about something.
‘What?’
Henning kept an eye on the night manager, who didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the conversation.
‘And yet, it would be pretty smart too, if you think about it. Charlie had a clear playing field again in Natal as a result. If Bjelland was killed as well, as was obviously the plan, then all their problems would be solved. The scapegoat – the man they’d said had informed on those involved in the scam – would be gone.’
Henning nodded. It was fair point.
‘The question is how to prove it,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Henning replied. ‘Charlie would never admit anything, and no one knows where Bjelland is.’
But, Henning thought, Iver must have found something. The people who’d killed him were looking for something, and had taken something with them, not just his mobile and PC. It had to be something concrete that he could find too.
There was a short pause, but it wasn’t awkward or embarrassing. Henning liked talking to Veronica. Her voice, and the silences they allowed to grow between them, had a calming effect on him.
‘If it really was a matter of revenge on Bjelland’s part,’ she said, ‘why didn’t he just tell you that? Why didn’t he say: “It wasn’t me who was the informer, it was Tore”?’
‘Maybe he didn’t have enough hard evidence,’ Henning suggested. ‘But if he knew, and was 100 per cent certain that Tore had been involved in the murder of Bodil Svenkerud in 1996, then he might at least try to get him done for that. Perhaps not blood revenge, but a kind of justice, all the same – if only I managed to do my part.’
Henning could tell she was thinking about his answer.
At the same time, it was strange, Henning thought, that Tore and Charlie should go to such drastic measures to make him stop digging into an old murder case, when, at the time, he didn’t even know it was a murder case, let alone who the victim was. All he’d known at that time was that Bjelland wanted him to dig about to find out more. Even though he did suffer from memory loss from his fall from the second-floor balcony on the evening that Jonas died, it seemed unlikely that he’d come across any sensitive information about Tore or Charlie so soon after the interview with Bjelland. Poking around in old property sales and acquisitions took forever, and he would have to have worked on other things at 123News as well. At the point he’d still been a long way from putting two and two together…
So, the measures Tore and Charlie took before 11 September 2007 must have been about something other than the murder of Bodil Svenkerud.
Henning stood up.
Of course.
If Tore and Charlie had arranged for all the competition in Natal to disappear, if they had been informers and then laid the blame on Bjelland – if the truth were to ever get out, who would be the target of any revenge?
The thoughts were coming fast and hard and got him so worked up that he started to pace back and forth. He told Veronica what he was thinking.
‘This isn’t about an old murder case,’ he said. ‘Certainly not in the first instance. It’s about now, about the fear of revenge from some of the hardcore gangs that were targeted in the 2007 police operation.’
It was a case of fire-fighting.
Tore and Charlie were scared of getting caught out, Henning thought. They were afraid that Bjelland had put two and two together and that he’d told Henning about his suspicions. So they got nervous when Henning started to ask questions. Which was why Tore had been keeping an eye on him, and why Charlie took a more physical approach … the fire.
And who was left, now that Tore was dead?
Henning had long suspected Charlie, but for the wrong reasons.
This made sense.
Charlie was still in Brazil, and he was trying to make all his problems vanish. In the course of the fifteen years that he’d been there, he’d worked on one residential development after another; he’d managed projects worth hundreds of millions, so Henning had no reason to doubt Charlie’s financial clout. He could easily have paid for people to fix things for him in Norway – cover up what needed covering. Stop Henning’s investigations. After all the arrests, he was as good as alone in Natal, and business appeared to be booming.
‘But there’s a lot of people who might feel the need for revenge if the truth got out,’ Henning said. ‘And that’s why Charlie was so keen to hide it, which must also be why Iver was killed.’
It was all theory and speculation; he somehow had to verify or disqualify it all, and the only way to do that was to find Bjelland. If he was still alive.
‘I think it sounds like you’re onto something,’ Veronica said.
‘So do I,’ was Henning’s response.
‘Just be careful, whatever you do.’
Henning smiled.
‘I’ll do my best.’
They finished the conversation and he turned back to Iver’s desk. The police would definitely have gone through the call log on his mobile phone, but Iver wasn’t exactly known for making phone calls; he preferred to talk to people face to face and to ask them things they didn’t expect; to catch them unawares.
He must have spoken to someone who knew what he was onto. Maybe he’d even uncovered it all.
I have to get hold of Nora, Henning thought, whether she likes it or not. Iver might have told her, or she might know something without realising its relevance. But it was late. It could wait until morning to call. The police would also want to talk to her, which made Henning think about the grilling he’d have to go through the next day as well.
He had to delay it for as long as possible.
Henning went back to his desk and sat down, thought about what he could do to expose Charlie, if his line of thought was right. It wasn’t just a matter of going to Brazil, even though that might be necessary at some point.
One step at a time, he told himself.
The following morning he was going to meet Andreas Kjær and hopefully he would then know what kind of information had been removed from the Indicia report about Tore, the evening Jonas died. It might prove to be important.
Henning looked over at the candle that was still burning down on the desk beside him. It reminded him that his time was steadily running out.
22
When he eventually got out of bed, far too early, Roger Blystad wasn’t sure that he’d slept at all. But the light was forcing its way into the bedroom and it sounded like a family of birds had built a nest right outside his window.
He’d been lying there for a while thinking.
About Iver Gundersen.
About what he should do.
He’d come to the conclusion that the best thing would be to leave and start anew elsewhere. Lie as low as possible. But it was quite an effort to move and he couldn’t face starting right away. And he should at least have a cup of coffee before making such momentous decisions.
When he got out into the kitchen he discovered that meeting Alfred had in fact made him forget why he’d gone to the shop in the first place. He had to have a cup of coffee, so he got dressed, and looked out of the kitchen window. There was no one outside. He looked around again when he got out onto the front step before hurrying over to the car.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
The big building on the other side of the road – a former adult education college – was still empty. As was the house beside it, which was why he had chosen to live right here. Brandbu was the perfect place to lie low. It was somewhere you drove past, rather than visited, and it wasn’t on one of the main roads. Blystad was renting the house, fully furnished, from an old man who couldn’t
look after it anymore, but who didn’t want to sell it yet as he still hoped that one of his children or grandchildren might want to live there.
It was perfect for Blystad; the old man was still the registered owner, and his name didn’t appear in any register, as the contract was only between the two of them.
Blystad drove down to the shop, bought some coffee and picked up that day’s edition of Aftenposten. While he waited for the coffee to brew, he sat at the kitchen table reading the paper.
As expected, the murder of Iver Gundersen was given a lot of attention. He flicked quickly to page three, but couldn’t see anything there or on the next couple of pages that he hadn’t read in the online papers the night before.
When the coffee was ready, he poured himself a large cup. He then read the paper from cover to cover, largely because he wanted to think about something else and to put off, for as long as possible, all that he had to do if he was going to move. But a name in the obituaries made him freeze, the cup halfway to his mouth.
Our beloved, wonderful sister
Our dearest sister-in-law and aunt
VANJA KVALHEIM
Born 31 December 1951
Passed away suddenly today
Oslo, 9 October 2009
You were deeply loved,
Our loss will be great.
Anne-Marit
Helmer
Brith
Lars
Beate
Olav
The rest of the family
The funeral will be held at Grorud Church
16 October
There will be no reception after the service.
Blystad sat there staring at the words, the names.
Put down his cup.
No, he said to himself. This isn’t happening. This isn’t fucking happening. Not her.
But there was no doubt that it was her. There they all were: Anne-Marit, Lars, Helmer and Beate. Brith and Olav.
What the hell had happened?
He went to the 180.no directory enquiries website and typed in his uncle Lars’s name. While he waited for an answer, he wondered briefly if he should perhaps not use his own phone, but then he looked at the notice again and told himself he didn’t have time to go out and look for a phone box. It can’t be true, he thought over and over again. That she’s dead.
‘Hello, Lars speaking.’
Blystad hesitated before saying hello. It occurred to him that it was quite early in the morning.
‘It’s…’ He couldn’t say his name; his throat was dry. He tried again, but the same thing happened.
Blystad heard a sigh at the other end.
‘And now you call.’
Blystad still couldn’t speak. He could only think of his mother, his dead mother, that he hadn’t been there when it happened. The last time they’d emailed each other she hadn’t said anything about being ill, she’d just told him about the journalist who had wanted to get in touch, and who had now been killed.
‘Yes,’ he finally managed to pull himself together. ‘I just saw the notice about Mum in the paper.’
It hurt even more to say it out loud. It took all he had to stop himself from crying.
‘How … did she die?’ he asked.
Uncle Lars sighed.
‘We’re not quite sure yet,’ he replied. ‘But it seems most likely that it was a heart attack. She died very suddenly in the afternoon, just after she got home from work.’
Blystad swallowed a sob.
‘So there’s nothing suspicious about it?’ he said, once he’d regained control of his voice.
‘Suspicious? Why do you ask? Why on earth would there be?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Blystad said. ‘I just thought…’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. ‘Forget it,’ he said, and sniffed.
They sat there listening to each other breathing for a few moments.
‘Where are you?’ Uncle Lars asked. ‘Will you be coming to the funeral?’
He thought about it. He should, but he shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’
Uncle Lars snorted.
Then he hung up.
Blystad sat with the receiver in his hand. ‘Heart attack.’ ‘Died very suddenly in the afternoon, just after she got home from work.’
His mother was only fifty-seven years old. She had at least another twenty or twenty-five to go, that was certainly what he’d assumed. And he would definitely have sorted out his life by then. It had never occurred to him that she might die before.
But now she was gone.
Blystad put the phone back down on the kitchen table and buried his head in his hands.
23
Henning woke with a start and quickly sat up. It took a few moments before he realised that he was still in the 123News office and that it was morning. A TV was on by the main desk, but only the night manager and Henning were there.
He couldn’t remember lying down, and it felt like he’d spent the night with his head in a vice. He blinked hard in an attempt to shock-start his eyes, and moved his head from side to side to stretch his neck. Looked over at Iver’s desk. The candle had burned right down. All that was left was an empty workplace.
Henning looked around, spotted a box of candles on a table further in. He stood up, went to get another candle, which he then put in the candlestick and lit with his zippo lighter. He stood there for a few minutes, before going to the coffee machine and pressing a button. While he waited the thirty seconds or so that it took to get a cup of coffee, he glanced bleary-eyed over at the front desk, where the night manager looked just as beat as he did.
‘Morning,’ Henning said, blowing on his coffee as he went back to his desk. ‘Has anything happened overnight?’
The man – Henning didn’t know what he was called – looked up from the screen.
‘The police have just announced that they’re looking for two men who were seen in the area close to Iver’s flat yesterday morning,’ he said.
Henning immediately felt more awake.
‘Have they given any descriptions?’
‘Yes.’
The man clicked on the screen a few times before starting to read what was written there. The screen reflected like a shiny skin on his glasses.
‘Both are around 1.7 metres tall, they were dressed in dark clothes and looked like they might be of Eastern European descent. One of them was wearing a hoodie. The police have asked that they contact them as soon as possible.’
The man continued to read, but Henning’s concentration drifted. He remembered what Durim Redzepi looked like, and the description fitted him to a tee. It seemed reasonable enough that he’d had someone with him, as no one would have managed to hang Iver from the hook and winch him up alone.
Henning remembered the first attempt on his own life, when Iver had managed to push him out of the path of the white car that was driving straight at him.
There had been two people in the car then too.
Mapping Iver’s final movements had become a priority, Henning thought. He had to find out who Iver had been in touch with.
Henning thanked the manager for the update and wondered if he should go and get Iver’s car – if he could find it. There was a chance that the police had discovered that Iver had a car and perhaps already managed to locate it and bring it in for examination.
The clock on the wall showed that it was just before seven. According to Pia Nøkleby, Andreas Kjær was going to be out running around ten. That meant that Henning would have to leave soon, before the office started to fill up – he didn’t feel like chatting to anyone, and anyway, he wanted to get to Iver’s car before the police found it and towed it away.
He finished his coffee, went out onto the street where he hailed a cab and gave Gørbitz gate 3 as the address. The police cordons had been removed, but there was still a police car outside Iver’s block.
Iver had had a special relationship with his car, an old wreck that he’d owned for about fiftee
n years. It was a Toyota, but Henning wasn’t sure of the model, only that it was red and rusty. However, it was easy to spot down one of the side streets.
He opened the door and got in, but before he put the key in the ignition, he sat there and sniffed the air. It smelt mostly of cigarettes, but also a trace of something sweet.
It smelled like Iver.
Suddenly it felt wrong to be sitting in his car. This was where Iver had sat while searching for the same answers Henning was looking for now. Too many people had been hurt because of all this. Because of him.
He turned the key and started the engine. It was still a few hours until ten o’clock. He decided to go to a café for some breakfast. It was going to be a long day.
Maridalen was a long, thin valley, with lots of trees and forest, so the colours were beautiful on an autumn Monday. Henning had, on a few occasions, taken Nora and Jonas out there for a walk; he’d made sandwiches and juice, in an attempt to continue a tradition that he’d experienced as a boy – long walks in the country, Trine and him on the path, asking lots of questions.
But Jonas was a child who quickly lost heart, and felt imaginary pains in an arm or a leg, so it was seldom enjoyable. That, Henning thought, was the main reason they hadn’t done it more often. If he was to be perfectly honest, however, he had to admit that, all too often, he’d used work as an excuse to leave Nora alone with Jonas at the weekend.
Henning drove as far as he could into Maridalen on asphalt, and stopped at the big, open parking place by Skar. He stepped out into the autumn day; the clouds were wispy grey with the odd patch of white, and were starting to gather ominously above the trees. Henning did up the zip on his jacket and looked at his watch. It was just before ten.
There were four other cars in the car park, but Henning had no idea if one of them belonged to Andreas Kjær, so he started to walk.
To begin with, he followed the wide cycle track that went up to the river, and soon the fast-flowing, burbling water appeared to his right. Henning had expected to meet someone running or on a bike, or perhaps see a tent on the shores of the lake, but he saw no one, and his only companion was the river.
