by Anne Holt
Rolf would look after him.
Rolf was a better father than he was. Through his actions Marcus had not only committed a crime; he was no longer worthy of being a father. His whole life was being a father, and his life as a father was over.
The tears poured silently down his cheeks as he placed another tablet in his mouth.
And another.
A slight feeling of sleepiness made him lean back in the chair and close his eyes. He moistened the tip of his index finger with saliva and pressed it down on the desk without looking. Another tablet stuck to his finger, and he placed it on the tip of his tongue.
The last thing he did before he fell asleep was to open the desk drawer and sweep the rest of the tablets inside with the back of his hand.
You can’t even manage to kill yourself, he thought listlessly before blessed sleep finally overcame him.
*
Adam Stubo woke up on Friday 16 January at 7.40 feeling as if he hadn’t slept at all. Every time he had been on the point of dropping off, he had seen the picture of the woman from Eva Karin’s bedroom in his mind’s eye. The idea that their theory about a child who had disappeared or been disowned might have been correct, but with the proviso that all the circumstances had to be moved back a generation, had left him wide awake over and over again. The theory seemed more and more credible as the hours went by. The idea that the Bishop wanted to protect the memory of her parents was considerably more likely than the idea that she had wanted to avoid the shame of having a child as an unmarried sixteen-year-old.
Leaving aside the fact that there was no longer any shame attached, and that the photograph couldn’t possibly be of a woman born in the early sixties.
It must be a sister, Adam thought as he swung his leg over the side of the bed. The last time he looked at the clock it had been just after five, so he must have had two and a half hours’ sleep in spite of everything.
Another thing that had kept him awake was the fact that Johanne hadn’t called. They hadn’t spoken for a day and a half. He had tried to ring her three times yesterday evening, but all he got was the mechanical sound of her voicemail asking him to leave a message after the tone. The first time he called he had left a message, but she still hadn’t called back. He felt a mixture of intense irritation and anxiety as he plodded into the bathroom.
He was tired of living in this hotel.
The bed was too soft.
The soap made his hands dry, and he had lost his appetite.
Adam wanted to go home.
Someone was banging on the door. With a stab of annoyance he flushed the toilet, wound a towel around his waist and went to see who it was. The acrid smell of morning urine surrounded him. He opened the door a fraction and put his face to the gap.
‘What the fuck’s wrong with your phone?’ said Sigmund Berli, trying to push the door open and holding up a newspaper in the other hand. ‘Have you seen this? We’re going home, by the way, on the first available plane. Get your clothes on and start packing.’
‘Good morning to you, too,’ Adam said sourly, letting his colleague in. ‘Do you think you could possibly take one thing at a time? Start with the phone.’
‘I’ve called you five times since yesterday evening. You know perfectly well you’re not supposed to make yourself unavailable.’
‘I haven’t,’ said Adam. ‘Try again now.’
He picked up his mobile from the bedside table as Sigmund keyed in his number on his own phone.
‘It’s ringing,’ said Sigmund with the phone to his ear. ‘Have you got it on silent?’
‘No.’
Adam stared at the display. Nothing was happening. So Johanne might have tried after all.
‘Why didn’t you ring me on that?’ said Adam, pointing to the hotel phone on the small desk by the window.
‘Never occurred to me,’ Sigmund said blithely. ‘But forget that. We’re going home. Now. Just take a look at this and you’ll see why!’
Adam took the copy of VG as if the newspaper might suddenly bite him.
HATE GROUP BEHIND SIX MURDERS, screamed the front page. The subheading read: Police horror theory – Bishop Lysgaard one of victims.
‘What the hell?’ said Adam, raising his voice by several decibels. ‘What the fuck is this?’
‘Read it,’ said Sigmund. ‘And you will discover that the Oslo police have found a possible link between the murders of Marianne Kleive and some Kurdish kid who was floating around in the harbour just before Christmas, as dead as a doornail and badly disintegrated.’
‘What? But what’s this got to do with Eva Karin?’
Adam sank down on the bed and turned to pages five and six. He was finding it hard to focus. His eyes flew across the article. After a minute and a half he looked up, flung the newspaper at the wall and bellowed:
‘How the hell did VG get hold of this before me? I mean, I’ve learned to live with the fact that they know way too much way too soon, but this is …’
He got up so quickly that the towel slipped off. He ignored the fact that he was stark bollock-naked and hissed at Sigmund, his fists clenched: ‘Are we supposed to start reading the paper every morning just to find out what’s fucking going on? This is … this is … For fuck’s sake, Sigmund, this is fucking scandalous!’
Sigmund grinned.
‘You’re stark naked, Adam. You’re getting fat, boy!’
‘I couldn’t give a fuck!’
He marched into the bathroom. Sigmund sat down on the chair by the desk and switched on the TV. He turned to TV2 as he listened to Adam banging about behind the closed door. Thirty seconds later Adam emerged, grabbed some clean clothes out of his suitcase and got dressed with surprising speed.
‘The news is on in five minutes,’ Sigmund said. ‘We’ll watch it before we go.’
‘A gang from the US,’ Adam growled as he tried to knot his tie. ‘That’s the most ridiculous fucking thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘Not a gang,’ Sigmund corrected him. ‘A group. A hate group.’
‘That’s even more insane. Who the hell came up with something so utterly … idiotic!’
He picked up a bag of dirty laundry and stuffed it in his suitcase, having given up on his tie.
‘Johanne,’ said Sigmund with a laugh. ‘It’s Johanne’s theory!’
‘What? What are you saying?’
Adam stormed over to the newspaper, which was lying in a crumpled heap on the bed. Once again his eyes flew over the article.
‘It doesn’t say anything about her here,’ he said without looking up from the report, which was illustrated with pictures of Marianne Kleive and Bishop Lysgaard. ‘It doesn’t mention Johanne at all.’
He exhaled and dropped the paper on the floor.
‘I spoke to a … Silje Sørensen,’ said Sigmund. ‘She’s with the Oslo police. She rang me at six o’clock. She’d tried to get hold of you, but with no luck.’
‘Has everybody gone mad or what? I’m staying in a hotel for fuck’s sake! This …’
He reached the white, old-fashioned telephone in three strides. He picked up the receiver in one hand and the body of the phone in the other, and held it five centimetres from Sigmund’s face.
‘This is a telephone!’
‘Calm down, Adam. Take it easy.’
‘Take it easy! I don’t want to fucking take it easy! I want to know what all this crap is about, and why—?’
‘Well, listen to me then! Listen to what I have to say instead of rushing around like a lunatic. We’ll get thrown out in a minute if you don’t calm down.’
Adam took a deep breath, nodded and sat down heavily on the bed.
‘Start talking,’ he mumbled.
Sigmund clapped his hands almost silently.
‘That’s better. I don’t know a great deal. Silje Sørensen was just as furious as you about the fact that VG has got hold of this, and they’ve turned the whole of Grønlandsleiret upside down to try and find the leak. She did tell me that th
is does, in fact, involve six murders. Some artist who died around Christmas, apparently from a heroin overdose, turns out to have minute traces of curacit in his blood. We were lucky. Curacit is broken down incredibly fast, and the guy had already been cremated. However, because it was routinely regarded as a suspicious death, they had some of his frozen blood in the lab, and the curacit—’
‘What?’
‘Curacit. You know, it’s a poison, a muscle relaxant that paralyzes the breathing—’
‘I know perfectly well what curacit is! What I’m wondering is—’
‘Just hang on, Adam. Listen to me. So this artist had been murdered. And he’s also … he was also gay. And then there was a young man who was killed in Sofienberg Park some time in November, and we all know what people get up to in Sofienberg Park at night, don’t we?’
Without giving Adam time to respond, he went on.
‘Then there was a woman everybody thought had died in an RTA, but on closer inspection it turned out that someone had tampered with the brakes of her car. And I’m sure you can guess what her preferences in the bedroom were!’
Adam merely stared at him with a resigned expression.
‘That Silje Sørensen really is paranoid,’ Sigmund continued, unabashed. ‘She called me from home. On her son’s mobile. But whether those journalists have reliable sources or are bugging the police or whatever it is they might be doing, VG has named only three of the victims. The Bishop, Marianne Kleive and the kid in the water. I can never remember those Hottentot names.’
Adam felt so floored by the whole thing that he didn’t even protest at this expression.
‘Anyway, Sørensen told me Johanne had come to see her with some questions and a theory relating to her research. That stuff she’s doing on hate crime. Something that … I don’t know, actually. Anyway, her theory fitted in so well with the material Oslo are sitting on that they’ve now put together a team to work on a major investigation, with the Oslo police and NCIS collaborating. That’s where we’re going. And that’s more or less all I know. Ssh! News!’
‘Ssh?’ Adam repeatedly sourly. ‘I haven’t said a word!’
Sigmund turned up the volume.
TV2 led with the newspaper story.
They had obviously been short of time, because the report was illustrated with archive clips. They hadn’t even managed to find winter pictures; police HQ was bathed in sunshine, with people dressed in summer clothing going in and out of the main entrance. The reporter had nothing more to add to what had been in the newspaper.
‘Ssh!’ Sigmund said again as the camera showed a slim woman in uniform with gold stripes and two stars on her shoulders.
‘We are unable to comment on the case at this stage,’ she said firmly, turning away from the microphone.
It followed her.
‘Can you confirm the information in today’s edition of VG?’ asked the journalist.
‘As I said, I have no further comment on this matter.’
‘When will you be informing the public about this story, which seems to be particularly serious and far-reaching?’
‘As I said, I am unable to comment on—’
Sigmund switched off.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘I’m starting to get really curious about this whole thing. I’ll fetch my bags and see you downstairs in two minutes. What’s that, by the way?’
He nodded in the direction of the bedside table, where Adam had placed the photograph of the unknown woman.
‘That’s the photo I told you about,’ he said.
‘What photo?’
‘The one that was in Eva Karin’s room. We need to call in at the police station with it. I want to know who she is. They’re probably best placed to find out.’
‘How did you find it?’ Sigmund asked.
‘Long story.’
‘Spare me the details. See you downstairs?’
Adam nodded. He remained sitting on the bed. He was finding it hard to digest everything he had heard in the past half-hour, and felt slightly dizzy. He couldn’t remember ever being caught so off-guard. When he did eventually stand up, exhaustion forced him to take a step to one side to keep his balance.
The fact that VG knew significantly more than he did in a case he was investigating was a blow. Far worse was the knowledge that Johanne had gone to the Oslo police with information he didn’t even know about.
Adam picked up his small suitcase and his coat and headed for the door. As it closed behind him he realized that the gnawing pain in his stomach wasn’t due to hunger.
He felt humiliated by his own wife, and he couldn’t even manage to feel angry any longer. He just had a pain in his stomach.
Just like when he was a little boy, ashamed of something he’d done.
*
Kristen Faber’s secretary wasn’t in the least ashamed of the fact that she occasionally made copies of documents to take home. Her husband loved to hear about the cases she came into contact with, and sometimes they had great fun with a police interrogation where the suspect tried to wriggle out of things even when it was obvious he or she was guilty, or with a hopeless performance in court by some poor sod who couldn’t afford a brief. She never kept the documents for very long. They ended up on the fire as soon as the case was no longer exciting.
As far as the will from the big oak cupboard in the archive was concerned, it wasn’t exactly for fun that she made a copy and popped it in her bag. On the contrary, her husband had grown very serious when she told him about the case during dinner the previous evening. He didn’t know anything about poor Niclas Winter, but he had heard of the testator. He was very keen to take a look at the will, so this morning she had made two copies. Only one was placed in Kristen Faber’s archive.
It couldn’t do any harm if her husband took a little look.
She fastened the accompanying letter to the original will and slipped them both in an envelope. It had taken less than two minutes to establish that the inheritance fund was the right destination for such a document, and to make sure nothing went wrong she was going to take it to the post office and send it by registered mail. Best to be on the safe side in such matters. The court had once claimed that Faber had been late lodging an appeal, even though she was 100 per cent certain she had posted the papers in time.
Not that the will was as important as an appeal, but the dressing-down from her boss on that occasion had made an impression. There was going to be no doubt that this letter had been posted. She pulled on her coat, put the envelope in her bag and hummed a little tune as she locked the door and set off in the bright morning sunshine.
Sense and Sensibility
FOLDER FOUND this morning. Had been borrowed by Special Needs teacher and put back in the wrong place. Sorry to have bothered you Live Smith
Johanne read the text twice, not knowing whether to feel relieved or angry. On the one hand it was obviously a good thing that Kristiane’s file had been found. On the other, it frightened her that the school had such inadequate routines when it came to handling sensitive material. As she locked the door of her office behind her it struck her that she ought to be delighted. If Kristiane’s file really had simply been put in the wrong place, it ought to ease her anxiety that someone was watching her daughter.
She pushed her mobile into her bag and crept out of the building without being seen. It was only two o’clock and she couldn’t concentrate on anything but trying to get hold of Adam. She still hadn’t heard a thing, and he wasn’t answering his phone.
She had lost count of how many times she had tried to call him.
*
Kristen Faber’s secretary decided to ring through an order just to be on the safe side. Laksen’s Delicatessen in Bjølsen was the best place for calves’ liver, and her husband set great store by a good liver casserole for Sunday lunch. It had to be calves’ liver, otherwise the flavour was too strong. They might still have dried stockfish, too, even if the season was over. Fish on
Saturday and beef on Sunday, she thought contentedly. The phone rang just as she was about to pick it up. She grabbed it quickly and reeled off the usual formula: ‘Mr Faber’s office, how may I help you?’
‘Hello, sweetheart!’
‘Hello yourself,’ she said amiably. ‘I was just about to ring Laksen’s to order some stockfish and calves’ liver, so we can have a lovely weekend.’
‘Fantastic,’ her husband said on the other end of the phone. ‘I’m looking forward to it. Is Mr Faber there?’
‘Kristen? You want to speak to Kristen?’
She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d suddenly appeared in front of her. Her husband had never set foot in the office, nor had he ever met Kristen Faber. The office was her domain. Since her husband’s sight began to deteriorate and he took early retirement, he had suggested a couple of times that he might take a stroll down to the city centre to see what she got up to during the day. Out of the question, she said. Home was home, work was work. Admittedly, she enjoyed telling him what she’d been doing, and they laughed together at the documents she sometimes took the liberty of showing him, but she didn’t want any link between her husband and her rude, self-righteous boss.
‘What for?’
‘Well, it’s … There’s something not quite right about that will you brought home yesterday.’
‘Not quite right? What do you mean by that?’
She had read it aloud to him last night. He could still read, but the tunnel vision meant that he asked her to read to him more and more often these days. It was quite nice, actually. After the evening news she would read him bits and pieces from the newspaper, with pauses for major and minor discussions on the day’s events.
‘There’s something …’
Kristen Faber burst in through the door leading to the lobby.
‘I need something to eat,’ he puffed. ‘The lunch break will be over in half an hour, and I’ve got to sort out some documents. A baguette or something, OK?’
The secretary nodded, keeping her hand over the mouthpiece.
