by Geir Tangen
Thirty years old was young for a position as chief inspector and investigator with the police. She had all the right courses. Nonetheless, it had seemed like an eternity before an opportunity opened up.
The constable stopped the car in the parking lot in front of the high-rises. The woman should be on the front side of the north block. As Lotte opened the car door, she heard voices from the crowd that had gathered. She silently hoped that the first patrol had sense enough to cordon off the area around the dead woman’s body, and she bet that they had a bit more professionalism than her teammate of a constable. She was greatly relieved when she saw the officer with seniority at the police station round the corner there to meet her. Lars Stople had a whole lifetime behind him as a policeman, and he could no doubt have risen in the ranks if he’d had any interest in that worth mentioning. A wise, deliberate, and balanced guy who never behaved provocatively. His main area of responsibility was preventive work among the youth of the city, but by his own wish he also kept patrolling as part of his duties. He stroked back his smoothly combed gray hair and addressed Lotte.
“Hi, Lotte. We’ve cordoned off and started talking with witnesses over in that corner.”
Lars Stople nodded toward a small plateau by the parking garage and a small white transformer station. A handful of people had gathered and were rubbernecking, like a clump of curious giraffes.
“The majority came after the rumors started to fly, but there are a few we need to question more closely,” he said.
She could see that Stolpe’s partner, Knut Veldetun, was talking with one of them.
“Tech?” Lotte looked inquisitively at Lars.
“Don’t know. Assume they’re on their way. I asked for that anyway. Besides myself and the two EMTs that checked her, I don’t think anyone has been inside the barricades.”
“Do we know who she is?”
Lars Stople looked down at his notes, shook his head slightly, and cleared his throat. “Not for sure. A resident, potentially renting 7B, and in that case we’re talking about a fifty-seven-year-old woman by the name of Rita Lothe, but we haven’t been able to check that out yet. We’ve prioritized keeping people away from the body.”
“Okay. Nicely done, Lars. Will you lead us over there?”
Stople showed her the way under the police barricades and around the corner to the front of the block.
“The woman was discovered by a resident in one of the apartments on the first floor when he was going out on the terrace to have a smoke,” Stople explained. “That was a little over half an hour ago. Knut and I were on the scene ten minutes later.”
Lotte peeked at her cell phone and could see that Stople’s information tallied. They had received the emergency call at 08:05 hours. Now it was almost 08:45.
It wasn’t so strange that the woman hadn’t been found earlier. The combination of autumn darkness and morning fog has a tendency to conceal most things. She took the red notepad out of her uniform jacket. In neat handwriting she noted the time and events in separate headings, before she turned the pad over and wrote questions for the CSIs on the form she had prepared in the back. Facts on the first page, loose threads on the last. That was how it had to be. A single question found its way down onto the paper.
Time of death?
The woman was in a twisted position, and even at a distance, Lotte could see that there were major injuries to the body. The dead woman was dressed in a mint green skirt, thin skin-tone pantyhose, and black stiletto boots. The face was crushed to the point of being unrecognizable. In an area around the head, there was a sticky brownish gray mass, and red bone splinters stuck out from the jaw. Teeth that had been knocked out in the collision with the asphalt were lying around the smashed mouth. Lotte felt the nausea as a surge in her abdomen.
“Well … What do you say? Homicide or suicide?” Lotte addressed the young police constable.
Christian Hauge squirmed. “Uh … Didn’t you say in the car that it was suicide?” She noted with contentment that he was blushing.
“No, I didn’t say that. I said that it was ‘suspected.’ You managed to work out the theory about suicide fine all by yourself. Now let’s pretend you’re the only policeman on the scene. Homicide or suicide?”
The constable looked over at Lars Stople, but got only a shoulder shrug in response from the old fox.
“It’s either an accident or a homicide,” he said, looking up at Lotte with a self-confident expression.
“I see, why is that?”
“She has a crushed skull, so she must have landed flat or headfirst. People who jump out of a window or from a balcony to commit suicide land on their feet ninety-nine percent of the time. If she’d jumped, she would have had major injuries to the legs, hip sockets, and pelvis. Here it’s the head and shoulders that are crushed.”
Lotte looked at her police constable and was unable to conceal her surprise. “Jesus … You’re impressive. Now, probably what you’re saying is a modified truth, and bones are broken regardless from such heights, but here the injuries to the upper body are so extensive that I’m leaning toward the same conclusion as you.”
She cast an irritated glance at Lars Stople, who was clearly suppressing a laugh.
Lotte knew that she deserved to be led by the nose. The young man actually had a point. She looked up toward the balcony on the seventh floor. The fog meant that she could sense only the outlines that high up, but she saw that the railing was high enough that it would take a lot to fall over it by accident.
Lotte found her way to a vacuum deep inside her awareness. An imaginary space emptied of all feelings. Only ice-cold cynicism. Bare blue walls. Full daylight, but no windows. This was a technique she had learned from her mentor at the police academy. To move into a space where nothing could affect her emotionally. In that space, she could work without taking notice of anything other than the details. Inside there, seeing crushed faces, sticky brain mass, or maltreated body parts had little effect on her. In that space, she could observe mistreated children, worm-eaten corpses, and fat maggots creeping in and out of body openings.
She leaned down toward the crushed face of the dead woman. It was so damaged that she could not be identified solely on the basis of that. One eyeball was knocked out of its socket and hanging in shreds, while the other was closed. It was a woman approaching sixty, so fifty-seven could be right. She had short-cut mahogany-dyed hair. Lotte could see remnants of hair dye by the hairline. She had makeup on, and the clothes suggested some kind of festivity.
Some dress up to be a beautiful corpse, but very few choose to jump from tall buildings, she thought dryly.
Lotte was a bit taken aback when she noticed an acrid smell from the bloody face. She put her nose all the way down by one cheek. “It’s ether.”
Lars Stople mumbled, but the words reached Lotte nonetheless. She frowned and looked skeptically at the old policeman. “Yes, a damp cloth with ether puts a person out of the running in a few seconds. The odor is very recognizable, and it stays behind a little while post-mortem. The ether fluid itself vaporizes in seconds, but the air particles always attach to the skin and persist longer.”
Lotte nodded thoughtfully. So the woman must have been anesthetized when she was helped over the railing.
She looked up the apartment block once again. Who does such a thing? she thought sadly. The killer evidently didn’t care to camouflage it as a suicide. Then you don’t use ether. Lars kept his eyes to one side of the woman. Unlike Lotte, he was unable to look right at her.
“Yes, that was why I called in the death to you. I recognized the odor from when I had an appendectomy. Ether was used as an anesthetic in the past.”
Lotte straightened up, turned toward the other police who were standing around her, and began giving orders. “No one gets past these barricades, except the crime scene investigators when they arrive. From now on, this is their scene. Set up outer barricades too from the main road and around the block. Start questioning witnesses
immediately. Knut, you’ll take responsibility for that, since you’ve already started. Take my constable with you.”
Then she addressed Lars.
“Find out whether this is the woman who lives in 7B. Locate the super, and get ahold of extra keys if her place is locked.” Lotte took out the phone that was vibrating in her pocket. Looked at the display and knew she had to take it, even if she was at the scene of a probable homicide.
She walked away from the others and answered curtly. “Yes, what is it, Anne? I’m in the middle of something extremely important here.”
Lotte could hear her sister, five years younger than she, breathing heavily on the other end. Her voice was sluggish, as if there were delays in the communication between her brain and vocal cords. The usual.
“Seriously? You never have time for me, damn it. Isn’t what I’m dealing with, like, serious enough? Your fucking cop buddies have brought me in, again!”
Lotte noticed how heavy wisps of fog were slipping in under the jacket of her uniform. She shivered. She also felt how irritation was building up inside her, but she was able to control herself. Her sister had no one else since they lost their parents in that frightful railway accident at Åsta. She called every single day. Every single day with new problems, or simply to tell Lotte off. Today it was probably a little of both, judging by the introduction.
Lotte had asked the others at police headquarters again and again to be a little tactful when they had to bring Anne in, but it didn’t seem like they cared about that anymore. Anne was a drug addict, and she wasn’t handled with kid gloves despite her family background.
“What did they get you for?” Lotte asked, even if she knew exactly what the answer would be.
“Nothing! They don’t have a damned thing on me. I haven’t done anything, and what I had on me was for my own use. That cocksucking cop cunt can’t even weigh a gram right.”
“How much, Anne?”
“Forget about that! You don’t believe me either. Forget it!” she roared, and hung up.
Direct hit. Lotte remained standing with a pounding heart. Knew she shouldn’t care, that it was the high and the abstinence that were talking, but it was Anne who said it. It was her mouth that pronounced the words. Her little sister she was so incredibly fond of. The words lingered inside her, making her feel that she’d failed. Then her gaze fell on the woman lying in front of the building, and she closed the door to her guilty conscience.
She would have to see what she could do for Anne when she got back to the police station. For the time being, there was another woman who demanded her attention. A dead one.
Media House Haugesund News
Tuesday morning, October 14, 2014
Ranveig Børve had just ended a conversation with Viljar over by his workstation and was on her way back to her own, when she felt someone tugging on her skirt.
“So, how are things with the Dragon?” Henrik Thomsen asked sarcastically when Ranveig turned around. Thomsen, who himself had the nickname “the Butcher,” sniffed his way to any chance to take people down a notch. As usual, he was gossiping with one of the sows from the marketing department, which had been moved up into the editorial offices. Now he stretched his two-meter-long body and moved unpleasantly close to Ranveig, who quickly took a step back.
“The Dragon?”
“Yes, you know … The Icelander over there. Irritable, dangerous, smoke coming out of his jaws, all that.” Thomsen showed a disrespectful smile toward the office. No one seemed to notice his witticism.
Ranveig met his gaze. “Oh … Is that because you have so many nicknames that you’ve starting giving your colleagues the same treatment?”
Ranveig didn’t wait for an answer. Just turned on her heels and walked toward her workstation.
“You’re so disagreeable today,” Henrik called. “PMS or what?”
Ranveig stopped, turned around, and showed him her middle finger before she sailed into the Ingress conference room, which was like an island in the office landscape. A small, encapsulated space, which despite the floor-to-ceiling windows north and south seemed claustrophobic. The room was sparsely furnished with a spindly, tall plastic table and wobbly light-green barstools. Not designed for comfort, but for lightning-quick meetings that everyone hoped would be over as soon as possible.
* * *
The episode between Thomsen and Ranveig had not escaped Viljar. He hummed contentedly to himself, but felt cold. Each day was like a viscous substance where he was forced to tread constantly to keep his head above it. It was always like that. No variation, no inspiration, no unexpected high points.
His psychologist, Vigdis Nygård, was ready to put him on sick leave that day, but he wouldn’t let her. His job was the only thing that kept him on his feet.
“You show no joy in what you do,” she said the last time they met at Café Espresso on Haraldsgata. “You’re uninspired, burned out, and you don’t like the people you work with. Your boss is no fan of yours, and your articles are so dry and boring that no one can bear to read them anymore. Are you sure this is the right niche for you?”
Viljar sat there for a whole hour, looking out at the stream of people on the pedestrian street after she left the café in favor of Saturday shopping with her husband and children. Getting a piece of her mind like that was not something he handled particularly well. Yet he knew she was right.
The workday moved along at a snail’s pace, and Viljar transformed one news item after another into small blocks of text. Outside the window there was still no inspiration to be had.
Yesterday’s drizzle was replaced by thick, dirty fog. He straightened up and forced himself to focus on the text. A few seconds later came the rescue. Editor Johan Øveraas was standing in the middle of the office landscape with his phone in one hand, gesturing. He ended the call and pointed at Viljar.
“You have to go out on a story, Gudmundsson. We’ve received a tip.”
“I see, what’s it about?” He was relieved to get out of the futile task he was occupied with.
“Get yourself up to the high-rises. The police are already there. Apparently there’s a lady who has fallen out of one of the apartments.” Øveraas was eager now. His flab jiggled as he shifted back and forth on his feet.
“The hell I will, Øveraas. You know I hate fatal accidents. We talked about that at the employee review. I don’t write such things.” He challenged the boss with his gaze.
The editor was no longer shifting his balance. Now he took a wide stance and braced himself. “You have to move that arrogant, self-righteous ass of yours up to the high-rises right now. You will write what I say you’re going to write. It’s been years since you could dictate what you wanted here in the building. Your job is dangling like the dingleberries in your ass hairs! Believe me, Gudmundsson. You don’t want to challenge me on this one!”
He lowered his voice and adopted a threatening undertone. “I am longing for something I can get you on! The next board meeting has redundancy on the agenda, just so that’s said.”
Øveraas struck his hand against the wall of one of the vacant cubicles and roared at curious heads that were sticking out from their workstations.
“Pull your heads back in and work!”
The heads ducked back into the cubicles as quickly as they had come out. Only Thomsen had stood up and continued to follow the scene.
Viljar knew that he was not particularly popular with Øveraas. The feeling was mutual, but he had never thought it could actually cost him his job. He pulled on the gray topcoat that was hanging over the chair, took his notepad and phone, and shuffled out of the office with bowed head. Right now the fog outside was preferable.
Henrik Thomsen came to meet him in the corridor. “Was that you Sauron was screaming at?”
Thomsen was smiling under the bushy handlebar mustache. The cultural journalist’s comparison of the editor and the evil ruler in The Lord of the Rings was well known in the building. Viljar stopped short, stretched, and
stood on tiptoe, sticking his head as far as he could up into the face of his tall colleague without giving him a French kiss.
“Why don’t you go over to your corner and beat off to the websites that always disappear like dew in the sun when anyone passes your screen!”
Henrik Thomsen stepped back. Without any more wisecracks, he let Viljar past.
Four years earlier …
Ådland Meetinghouse, Karmøy
Monday, August 16, 2010
ABRAHAM was printed in shiny gold letters on a blue background on the banner in the very front of the hall in Ådland Meetinghouse. Jonas Ferkingstad looked up at his father, who was busy hanging up the banner for the congregation. It was put up and taken down again before and after the weekly prayer meetings.
The name of the congregation was not coincidental. They wanted to go back to the source. A direct connection between God himself and man. The members promised fidelity to the text as it was written, and they shared the view that the other congregations were becoming secularized by a sinful global society. The word of God was adapted to the world outside. That was not the way it should be.
Jonas had a desire to spit on the crucifix on the wall, but didn’t dare. Not when his father was in the room. He felt imprisoned. Books had vanished from their house. Only the Bible remained. Bare walls with an occasional crucifix or relief were all there was to see in his childhood home. His parents disappeared into the silence.
He stopped playing soccer and put his marching band uniform on the shelf. Not because he had to, but because it always involved discussions. Quiet, low-pitched discussions he was doomed to lose. For what could be more meaningful and noble than dedicating your life to the Lord? His father underscored the point every time by referring to the fact that he himself had cut back to a 70 percent position as senior executive officer at the courthouse, simply to be able to serve the Lord and the Holy Scripture.
