by Anne Holt
There were no painkillers in the locked medicine cabinet. She searched in despair among Asterix plasters and Flux, bottles of Pyrisept and Vademecum. Not a painkiller in sight, apart from suppositories for children.
It was as if not being able to find any tablets had made the headache worse.
Lukas’s migraine tablets, she thought.
They would help.
The problem was that they weren’t in the medicine cabinet. Lukas thought the lock was too easy to force, and strong medication could be dangerous for a curious eight-year-old. Instead, he kept the box locked in the drawer of the big desk in his study. Astrid knew where the key was: behind a first edition of Around the World in Eighty Days, which his parents had given him on his twenty-first birthday.
She had never opened the drawer, and hesitated before inserting the key in the lock.
They had no secrets from one another, she and Lukas.
Perhaps she ought to ring and ask him first.
He was her husband, she thought wearily, and she only wanted one tablet. Lukas had never told her not to look in the drawer. The very idea of telling each other not to do something was completely alien to them.
The lock opened with an almost inaudible click. She pulled out the drawer and found herself staring down at a photograph. A woman, and the photograph must be quite old. For a while she just stood there looking down at it, then eventually she picked it up, cautiously, and held it under the brighter light of the desk lamp.
There was something familiar about the face, but Astrid couldn’t quite place it. In a way the shape of the face and the straight nose reminded her of Lukas, but that had to be a coincidence. The woman in the photograph also had the same funny teeth, one front tooth lying slightly on top of the other, but after all lots of people had teeth like that. The singer Lill Lindfors, for example, as Astrid had often pointed out when they were young and she was besotted with everything about Lukas.
Despite the fact that she had no idea who the woman was, it struck her in some odd way that she had seen this photograph before. She just couldn’t remember where. As she stared at the woman she realized her headache had disappeared. Quickly, she put the photograph back, closed and locked the drawer and returned the key to its hiding place.
When she left Lukas’s study she closed the door carefully behind her, as if she really had done something forbidden.
*
The depressing piles of unsolved crimes in Silje Sørensen’s office were getting her down. There was barely room for a coffee cup on her crowded desk, even though everything was in neatly sorted files. She sat down on her chair, pushed aside a bundle of newspaper cuttings and put down the cup, before starting to go through the whole lot.
She had to reprioritize.
Her list of things to do was growing.
The Police Officers’ Association’s more or less legal actions and protests against terrible working conditions, low pay, inadequate staffing and the threat to pension entitlement had led to a somewhat acerbic tone in any dealings between the government and the police. Officers were no longer so willing to work overtime. Things didn’t get done as quickly nowadays. The organization’s 11,000-plus members were gradually beginning to take a fresh look at their priorities. Although the statistics hadn’t yet been processed, it looked as if the clear-up rate for 2008 had fallen dramatically in comparison with previous years – and it was only January. Employees were demanding their right to free time, and were off sick more frequently. Sometimes this coincided noticeably with public holidays and weekends, when major challenges awaited those who were charged with maintaining law and order.
The criminals were having an easier time all round.
People felt less and less safe. The police had always scored highly when it came to credibility and trustworthiness, but now they were losing the sympathy of the public. More and more frequently the papers were running stories about victims of violent crime who had been unable to report the offence because their local police station wasn’t manned, rural stations that were closed at weekends, and victims of crime who had to wait several days for the police to turn up and look for any clues. If they turned up at all, that is.
Silje Sørensen was a member of the union, but she had long since abandoned any attempt to keep a record of her overtime. The only yardstick she used was the reaction at home. When her sons became too much of a handful and her husband became more and more taciturn, she tried to spend more time at home. Otherwise, she sneaked off to work outside normal working hours as often as she could.
As the only child of a shipping owner, her decision to train as a police officer hadn’t exactly been expected. Her mother had gone into a state of shock and hysteria when she learned of her daughter’s career choice. This lasted throughout Silje’s first year in college. We’ve wasted a fortune on boarding schools in Switzerland and England, her mother wailed, and now my daughter is going to throw away her future working in the public sector! If she must get her hands dirty dealing with violent criminals and the like, then why on earth couldn’t she become a solicitor instead? Or a legal advisor within the police service, if the worst came to the worst?
That was exactly the reaction Silje had wanted.
Her father had beamed and kissed her on the forehead when she told him she had got into the Police Training Academy. That wasn’t exactly the idea.
Silje Sørensen had never rebelled as a child or a teenager. Never protested. Not when she was forced to move abroad at the age of ten, only seeing her parents during the holidays. Not when she had to spend two months at a French language school in Switzerland at the age of fifteen, where the working day began at 6.30 in the morning and the Catholic nuns had no qualms about using punishments that were probably forbidden under the Geneva Convention. Silje didn’t even argue with her father when he decided that she should squeeze five school years into two and a half; she gained a degree in English by the time she was nineteen. By then she had come of age, and as a reward for her silent patience and remarkable hard work, her father had transferred more than half of his fortune to his only daughter.
Training as a police officer was Silje Sørensen’s first deliberate act of rebellion.
When she was allocated to work with the legendary Hanne Wilhelmsen during her first year, she quickly realized that this stubborn, rebellious choice of career was going to make her happy. She loved it. The majority of what she knew about police work she had learned from her reluctant, uncommunicative mentor. Although Hanne Wilhelmsen had made herself more and more unpopular through her own headstrong approach, Silje had never ceased to admire her. When Inspector Wilhelmsen was shot during a dramatic incident in Nordmarka and paralysed from the waist down, Silje had grieved as if it had happened to a sister. She never really got over the fact that Hanne had then turned her back on the few remaining friends she had in the big shabby police headquarters on Grønlandsleiret.
Silje Sørensen was proud of her profession, but accepted with resignation the parameters within which she was forced to operate.
She decided to sort the cases in order of seriousness. Minor knife crimes and pub brawls with no life-threatening injuries she placed in a separate pile.
You’ll probably get away with it, she thought wearily, and tried to forget that several of the cases involved known perpetrators. Their victims would regard any attempt to abandon these investigations as highly provocative. However, that was the way it was, and according to every directive from both the public prosecutor and the National Police Board, she was perfectly justified in prioritizing more serious cases. The public might have some difficulty in understanding the police definition of serious, but that couldn’t be helped.
After about an hour the files had been sorted into five piles.
Silje finished off the dregs of her tepid coffee, then picked up three of the piles and placed them in the cupboard behind her.
Two left.
The smallest contained murders. Three files. The first very thin
, the second almost as slim. The third was so fat that she had put two rubber bands around it to keep everything together.
Suddenly, she got up and went over to the noticeboard on the wall opposite her desk. She quickly scanned every piece of paper before placing one on the desk and dropping the rest into the large waste-paper basket beside it. She took three sheets of A4 out of the cupboard. They fitted next to each other perfectly at the top of the noticeboard.
Runar Hansen, she wrote with a red felt-tip on the first sheet.
19/11/08.
On the next sheet she wrote Hawre Ghani.
24/11/08.
She chewed the cap of the pen and thought for a moment before adding a question mark.
24/11/08?
It wasn’t possible at this stage to say exactly when Hawre Ghani had been murdered, but at least they had confirmation that he had, in fact, been murdered. The pathologist had found clear signs of garrotting. It was hardly likely that the boy had hanged himself with a steel wire until his head almost came away from his body, then thrown himself in the sea. They were only able to hint at the time of death, but so far the investigation had found no evidence to suggest that the boy had been alive after he went off with a client outside Oslo’s central station on Monday 24 November. All the CCTV cameras had, of course, been checked. No joy. This matched Martin Setre’s story: the man had approached them just outside the entrance.
Clever bastard, thought Silje with a sigh.
Marianne Kleive, she wrote on the last sheet of paper.
19/12/08.
She put the cap back on the pen and took two steps back. She felt the edge of the desk behind her legs and sat down.
Three murders. All unsolved.
Runar Hansen was her guilty conscience. She couldn’t even bring herself to look through the thin file. Instead, she stared at the name, the anonymous name of a drug addict who had been beaten and abused in Sofienberg Park, apparently without anyone taking much notice. All Runar Hansen had merited was a quick examination of the crime scene some hours after his body had been found, a post-mortem report, and a brief mention in the evening paper. Plus two interviews with witnesses, whose only contribution was that Runar Hansen had no fixed abode and was unemployed, and that he had a sister called Trude.
At least something was happening in the investigation into the murder of Hawre Ghani. The sketch by the police artist had been distributed internally. It had been decided not to make it public yet, because experience indicated this would lead to a flood of calls. The man’s appearance was so ordinary that there would be a deluge of callers insisting that they recognized him. Instead, Knut Bork was still working on the prostitution angle. Silje had ordered a new and extensive investigation into the boy’s life since he came to Norway. If possible, she was hoping to obtain a clearer picture of Hawre Ghani’s tragic fate.
Work on the Marianne Kleive case was proceeding at full throttle.
The murder of the 42-year-old nursery school teacher had all the ingredients of a juicy media story. The private pictures obtained by Verdens Gang just two hours after the murder was made public showed an unusually attractive woman. Thick, wavy blonde hair, a slim figure with long legs and an athletic appearance. Exactly the kind of lesbian the media loved. There was something of Gro Hammerseng about her, Silje thought, as she pinned up the front page she had torn out of VG a few days earlier. And even if her wife, Synnøve Hessel, wasn’t exactly a celebrity, she occupied such a central position in the Norwegian film world that the papers were able to use their favourite phrase ‘the noted and award-winning’ when writing about the victim’s grieving widow – who also looked pretty good, incidentally, even wearing a padded jacket with her hair blowing all over the place at a height of 5,208 metres at North Base Camp in Nepal.
The fact that the murder had taken place in the respectable Hotel Continental also helped. Two days after the body had been found, VG dedicated an entire page to an ‘at home with’ report on a man named Fritiof Hansen, an insignificant individual who was some kind of caretaker at the hotel. He had found the body, and thanks to his passion for the TV series CSI he had managed to keep everyone away from the scene until the police arrived to secure any evidence. In the picture he was sitting in his best armchair with a glass of beer and a small packet of crisps, looking as if all the cares of the world were resting on his shoulders.
Sometimes Silje Sørensen wished the mass media didn’t exist. Sometimes she would have liked to abolish the freedom of the press.
She reached for her coffee cup.
It was empty.
She frowned and looked from one name to the other. She groped for the felt-tip without taking her eyes off the noticeboard. Quickly, she pulled the cap off with her teeth, went over and wrote SOFIENBERG PARK beneath Runar Hansen’s name and the date of his death. Under Hawre’s name she wrote UNDERAGE MALE PROSTITUTION, and finally – across the top of the photo of Marianne Kleive on Gaustatoppen Mountain in the sunshine, wearing a bikini top, cut-off jeans and sturdy walking boots – she wrote CIVIL PARTNERSHIP.
As she was settling back on her desk, there was a knock on the door. She took the cap of the pen out of her mouth and shouted: ‘Come in!’
Knut Bork did as he was told.
‘Hi,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I thought I’d just—’
‘Stand here,’ said Silje Sørensen. ‘Come and stand next to me.’
DC Bork shrugged his shoulders and obliged.
‘What are you up to? What’s that?’ He nodded in the direction of the noticeboard.
‘Those are the three murders I’m dealing with at the moment,’ said Silje.
‘Three is too many.’
‘I had four. I turned one down. Does anything strike you about those three?’
‘Does anything strike me? Well, I’d need to look through the files and—’
‘No. You’re familiar with the cases, Knut. Just look at what’s up on the board.’
He frowned without saying anything.
‘Look at what I’ve written underneath the names!’
‘Sofienberg Park,’ he read. ‘Underage male prostitution. Civil partnership.’
He still couldn’t see any connection.
‘What’s Sofienberg Park famous for?’ she asked.
‘Well … I know! Those ambulance drivers who—’
‘No. Well, that too, but what else? I’m not thinking about the area to the west of Sofienberg Church, but the part behind it. On the eastern side.’
‘Gay sex,’ he said immediately. ‘Buying and selling and mutual exchanges. Not a place I’d want to go in the dark.’
‘Exactly,’ said Silje with a wan smile. ‘That’s where Runar Hansen was found. He was murdered on a raw, wet November night at some point between midnight and half past. That’s about all we’ve managed to accomplish in his case. Establishing when he was killed, I mean.’
‘Was he gay?’
‘No idea. But for the time being, just focus on the reputation of the place. Do you see where I’m going with this?’
She looked at him. A shadow of surprise passed over his eyes as he suddenly got the point.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said, running a hand over his fair stubble. ‘It’s strange that LHH haven’t started shouting the odds!’
For a long time, LHH – the gay and lesbian movement – had been trying to get the justice department to take violence against homosexuals seriously. The problem, Silje Sørensen had always thought, was that attacks on homosexuals rarely differed significantly from all the other attacks that happened when people had been drinking. Attacks on women. On men. On heterosexuals and homosexuals. People drank. Became aggressive. Fought, stabbed, raped and murdered. For every homosexual victim, Silje could come up with a hundred heterosexuals. She couldn’t understand why they made such a fuss about it.
But this was striking.
‘Runar Hansen is in a park where it’s well known that homosexual services are bought, sold and exchanged,’ she s
aid slowly. ‘Hawre Ghani disappears with a male punter. Marianne Kleive is married to a woman. They were all murdered in different ways, in different places, and none of them had any connection with each other while they were alive. As far as we know, that is. But …’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘I’m responsible for three completely independent murder investigations, and each one has a possible link to homosexuality. What are the odds on that?’
‘Bloody long,’ said Knut Bork, starting to chew on a thumbnail. ‘What the fuck is going on? And seriously, Silje, why hasn’t anybody noticed a possible link before?’
She didn’t reply. They stood in silence gazing at the noticeboard. For a long time.
‘Nobody cares about the first case,’ she said suddenly. ‘Nobody knows anything about the second case. People might have read in the paper about a body being found in the harbour, and there might have been a few lines saying that the dead man turned out to be a young asylum seeker. But that’s all. As far as Marianne Kleive is concerned, that case is …’
She hesitated for such a long time that he carried on for her: ‘That case is so unusual and absurd that nobody has actually made a connection with the fact that the victim is a lesbian.’
Silje went over to the board, took down the sheets of paper and the newspaper article, screwed them up and threw them in the waste-paper basket. Knut Bork remained standing there with his arms folded as she walked around the desk and sat down.
‘You and I,’ she said firmly, ‘are going to keep this to ourselves. For the time being. It could all be a coincidence, just as every connection can be pure chance; on the other hand it could be …’
