by Geir Tangen
As Viljar left the path, he thought he heard a movement in the bushes right behind him. He stopped short. His gaze flickered frantically back and forth. The dark swallowed everything that was more than five meters beyond him. The adrenaline rush had given his anxiety a jump start, and he had to force himself to think rationally. His heart was pounding. His throat tightened up. He got goose bumps on his upper arms. A faint, monotonous piping sound was vibrating deep inside his ears. Symptoms of anxiety. He knew them all too well.
“There’s no one here,” he said to himself again and again. However, the creeping sensation would not let go of him. He sensed someone there in the bushes. Someone who observed him with increasing interest, but who clearly did not intend to make himself known.
“Hello?”
Viljar whispered toward the invisible someone a few meters away. Nothing happened. He hyperventilated. Put his hands like a bowl around his mouth and tried to breathe more slowly. Ordered himself to calm down. There was no one there. He was alone. The sounds he had heard were either from an animal, or else it was the anxiety once again playing a trick on him.
After getting control of his breathing somewhat, he started to work his way forward in the heather and brush that led toward the back side of the house where the entry door was. The whole time with the same feeling that there was someone three steps behind him. Two steps back … Again and again he turned his head. His gaze flickered. He didn’t see a thing. Just an all-encompassing darkness. Nonetheless … He didn’t want to walk in the main way, because that was visible from the house, and Viljar knew from experience that the two watchdogs who were leashed outside were a breed you couldn’t bring into Norway without someone knowing someone who knows someone. There was a reason that they were always chained with carabiners to a thick ship’s anchor. This anchor was bolted and welded firmly to a beam according to all the rules of the art. Not even the Fenris wolf could tear itself loose if it was chained here. Claussen’s dogs, on the other hand, seemed strong enough.
He tried to be quiet as he approached the area where the dogs kept watch. Even if he didn’t go past them, they would notice the sounds from the forest and create a commotion. At a little opening between two birch trees, he discovered that the dogs were gone. Either the family was away, or else the dogs weren’t chained up. The latter alternative made Viljar look behind him yet again. In the corner of his eye, he seemed to notice a slight movement in the branches; the deciduous trees quivered. Viljar stopped completely and held his breath. There’s no wind.
The thought that there might be two full-grown Argentine mastiffs off leash in the forest made his legs almost buckle under him. Viljar no longer had control of his own body, or his muscles, his breathing, his heart. Everything was out of control. He had to move on. It couldn’t be the dogs. Even Claussen wouldn’t let two such killing machines wander freely on the hiking path around the property.
Viljar knew of a small rise behind the house where he would have a free view into the backside of the villa. He struggled laboriously up to this high point in the terrain. The whole time, he was on guard. Looked behind him. Stopped. Tried to lower his breathing rate and pulse. If there was someone out there, Viljar could just as well have come with an entire Tyrolean band in tow. It wasn’t sound discipline that occupied him most there and then. Anxiety was his worst enemy. It made him see and hear things. He thought he saw outlines of human forms everywhere in the terrain, but there’s really no one there, right? The sounds made him start. Is it possible? Are there imagined sounds? Does hearing have a center for fata morganas? If not, then I am definitely not the only one here in the forest.
Every ten seconds, there was a new sound. Rippling and rustling in brush and heather. The fear paralyzed him and made it hard to focus on anything else.
At last he lay down in the heather on the ridge. Decided to lie there completely still until the chaos he felt inside himself subsided and opened up for the real senses. The true sounds. The ones that were really there. The harmless sounds. For almost ten minutes he lay like that until he dared to raise his upper body and support himself on his elbows. Viljar could note with satisfaction that there were both lights on and people in the house. That this was an extremely irrational thought, inasmuch as the family was in mortal danger, did not occur to Viljar as he lay in the heather looking down toward the house. His own fear was more than enough for him.
He forced himself to dismiss the anxiety. Viljar refused to let these self-inflicted intrusive thoughts take control one more time. If he did, he knew from experience that they would come again and again, stronger each time. At times he had let it go so far that he was unable to go out in public for days. He saw ghosts in broad daylight. It was basically Ranveig who managed to bring him back to life after such episodes. She had a particular ability to say the right things. Life is what happens between the waves, she’d said one time, and in a strange way, those words seemed to help. It was about relaxing and letting the waves come. They always pass, and always come back.
Suddenly he was certain. Something was terribly wrong. There was someone else nearby. Behind him. Very close. A sudden sense of danger, no time to react. The fear and pain struck him like a tsunami. Every single nerve in his body sent frantic alarm signals to his brain, and his breathing reflex stopped. He realized, as he started to black out, that it was all over.
Five years earlier …
Eivindsvatnet, Haugesund
Friday, July 17, 2009
Fredric stroked his hand across Jonas’s naked back. Jonas pushed the hair away from his face and cast a glance up at the friend by his side.
“He’s gay, did you know that?”
Jonas looked up and caught the teasing eyes of Fredric Karjoli. “And so are you, Fredric. So what? Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Yes. It does. There are secrets that everyone knows, but no one tells. The fact that Hermann Eliassen, the Minister of Transport and Communications, is homosexual is that kind of secret. The only one who would be shocked if the minister came out of the closet would be Eliassen himself.”
Jonas couldn’t help smiling. He had unmasked the minister the first time they met at a seminar on new road projects in Rogaland.
Fredric didn’t say anything for a while. He looked out over Eivindsvatnet. Wrapped in darkness, as if the answer were waiting in the depths out there. Nighttime swimming had become a ritual for the two friends this summer. Concealed by the dark of night, they could give themselves to each other.
“Actually, then it means everything, Jonas.” Fredric moved his gaze from the water and down to his friend’s naked body. He let his fingers play with a solitary water drop that was running down Jonas’s back. He noticed that he had goose bumps.
“Everything? How’s that? Is it supposed to help us that we have the same orientation? He’s gotten lost in the closet. He’s rooting around in a Narnia he’s not coming out of, and we’re not exactly open either, are we?”
“I am.”
Jonas sighed and hoisted himself up on his elbows. Took Fredric’s hand and stroked the back of it carefully. “Yes, maybe you are. But we are definitely not open. You know my family. Just thinking the word ‘homo’ is a sin. Thoughts are just as sinful as actions in my world. You know what will happen if they find out. For them, it would be a lesser sin if I were a child murderer. That can be forgiven, Fredric. What we’re doing is not an isolated sin in their minds. It’s a lasting condition of total damnation. Besides, I don’t see why this secret could help us. The party isn’t exactly known for pressing queers to their chest and embracing them.”
“It’s Eliassen who picks candidates for the youth campaign New Voices. If we get in, we’ll have a lot of safe spaces. Weekend trips. Seminars. Courses. We won’t need to hide. Besides that, it’s a brilliant opportunity to rise in the party. Before we know it, they’ll put us in the county leadership in Stavanger, or in Oslo. Think about it, Jonas. We’ll be able to move away from this godforsaken place. Get y
ou away from your crazy family, like your uncle always says.”
Jonas smiled and looked teasingly at his friend. “Godforsaken? Dad should hear you. He would have a heart attack. But seriously … How can this help us be two of the ones chosen?”
Fredric got an introspective expression on his face. It was as if it closed up for a few seconds. The answer was deep inside. He poked in the sand. Let the question hang unanswered in the air, before he shook off the final remnant of uncertainty and let the words fall.
“We can seduce him.”
Bleikemyr, Haugesund
Tuesday night, October 14, 2014
Lotte was wakened from a light slumber by the sound of the phone. Fumbling feverishly on the floor beside the bed, she cursed before she finally found it. As she answered, she realized that another workday was already about to begin. The only thing to do was to get dressed. She could sleep some other time.
Down at the police station fifteen minutes later, she was met by the night-shift desk officer. A strange fellow with an enormous chest and pipe-stem legs. He looked like an aged version of Johnny Bravo.
“When did this happen?” she asked as she walked slowly by the side of the disproportional constable who had wakened her.
“About ten thirty,” he answered curtly.
Evidently not a man with a need for long explanations. She reached over and brushed a little dandruff from his shoulders. He looked at her with surprise, but didn’t say anything.
“What was he doing up in the Norheim forest at that time of night?” Lotte said that mostly to have something to say. At the same time, she looked feverishly around the room for something she could wipe her hands on.
“You’re the one who’s the investigator here in the building. Not me.”
The constable was undoubtedly the moody type, and Lotte gave up on further conversation. She was shown to one of the holding cells, where another man was sitting. Someone who knew a bit more about why she’d been dragged out of bed than the constable did.
Viljar looked up at Lotte like a subdued puppy when she burst into the room, closely followed by the desk officer who had locked him in the cell. Lotte threw out her arms in frustration.
“Thanks a lot,” she said sarcastically.
“Thanks?”
“Yes … Thanks for waking me up when I’d finally managed to close my eyes after a hell of a long day.”
Lotte stood with her back to Viljar as she said that. Didn’t want him to see that the black top she’d pulled over her head as she was leaving was buttoned wrong. Satisfied, Lotte looked up after having corrected the faux pas and became aware of a moping Johnny Bravo who had just gotten an eyeful. She thought he’d left the room as soon as they came in. Viljar was talking behind her, and she turned on her heels.
“Oh … I understand. Sorry.”
She heard Viljar say that, but she suspected that he didn’t mean it. In his mind, it was probably the police who should apologize, she thought. Lotte looked down at the report she’d been handed by the on-duty officer. Viljar was arrested under dramatic circumstances in the Norheim forest. A police guard they had placed in the area had observed a suspicious figure approaching the house of the Claussen family. According to the report, Viljar had the wind knocked out of him when the body of the overzealous policeman landed on top of him, and he’d shouted about miscarriage of justice and police brutality as he was transported back.
Lotte looked at him. For a long time.
“Tell me,” she said suddenly.
In contrast to last time, Viljar evidently understood what it was she wanted to know. He described what he’d been doing and thinking after the interview. The stop at Café MM, the visit to Ranveig, and at last the trip to the Norheim forest.
“So you want me to believe that you took the trouble to tramp around in the forest in pitch darkness simply to see whether the Claussen family was at home?”
“Yes, really. I meant to warn you first, but I didn’t want to bother you.”
The last words from Viljar were hung out to dry and testified to particularly poor judgment.
“Is stupidity a separate subject in journalism school?” she shouted, pounding a clenched fist on the table in front of him.
The sudden outburst made Viljar jump in his chair, and his shoulders sank. He quickly straightened up. “Not stupidity, but vigilance and curiosity,” he answered dryly.
She looked at him in shock, and with modest movements she righted an empty plastic mug that had fallen over during the outburst. She rubbed her eyes. The tiredness made her unprofessional. Made her lose control.
“So you mean, in complete seriousness, that making yourself a suspect in a homicide case isn’t stupidity?”
She stopped and stared at Viljar to see if he showed any form of reaction. He did. He looked nervous, worried. His gaze wandered while he chewed his nicotine gum frantically.
“You do understand, Viljar, that we have a rule of thumb here in the building where investigations are concerned. If a face shows up one time in an investigation, it’s probably a coincidence. If the person in question shows up two times, it’s suspicious. The third time is a pattern.”
“And now I’ve shown up for the second time,” said Viljar.
“Third,” she corrected him.
“Third … What the hell is that you’re saying?” He looked at Lotte in amazement.
“That’s right. You are the recipient of the emails, and you’re crawling around in the woods by the house of someone we think may be the killer’s next victim. In addition, you’ve shown up in Rita Lothe’s calendar. We have actually had a police patrol on the lookout for you all evening.”
Viljar didn’t understand a thing. He just shook his head and looked blankly out into space. Lotte did not change her expression. She tried to wait him out, but after a little while she gave up that technique.
“In Rita Lothe’s apartment we found a good old-fashioned pocket diary. I didn’t think they still existed, but the lady evidently parked her life sometime in the seventies. Your name is in it on three dates. All neatly decorated with a heart around them.”
“It’s not me. There must be another Viljar. Damn it all. I’m not a complete idiot.… She was almost sixty, and I recently turned forty. You realize it wasn’t me, don’t you…”
Viljar was talking like a waterfall now. At last Lotte raised both palms toward him to stop the flow of words.
“Great. As soon as I’ve checked your story with Ranveig, I’ll release you, but tomorrow Kripos will arrive, and then you have to expect more questions. Is that understood?”
She stood up, straightened the wrinkles on her blouse, and gave him a stern look before she took out her phone to call Ranveig Børve. Five minutes later, Viljar was a free man.
* * *
The rain that had been threatening the past few hours pounded against the ground as Viljar stopped to fish the tobacco pouch from his pocket. He had sought refuge under the overhang at Victoriahjørnet on Haraldsgata. The interview was buzzing in the back of his head like mental background noise. He was unable to put his thoughts aside. He must have been placed in this drama on purpose by someone who wanted to hurt him. That he himself made matters worse by tramping around like a drunk festivalgoer in search of an after-party, he had to rack up to stupidity. It was self-inflicted.
He tossed away the cigarette in a manhole cover on the street and took out the box of snus. Suddenly he became aware of a shadow in the corner of his eye. A man who crossed the street, stopped suddenly, and looked with apparent interest at the window display at Norli Bookstore. The distance was too great for him to see who it was in the dark.
How many people stop to study new book titles in a downpour like this? Viljar started to walk. At the corner of the next block, he turned his head again and could quickly determine that the man was following him. Viljar smiled.
“If you’re a suspect, I guess you have to expect that sort of thing,” he told himself. You will have a wet a
nd boring night if you’re going to surveil me, Viljar thought, making his way home to sleep.
Haugesund Airport, Karmøy
Wednesday morning, October 15, 2014
The approach to Haugesund Airport felt like an exercise in air acrobatics. The Norwegian plane with Thor Heyerdahl emblazoned on the fin bumped through the air pockets as Kon-Tiki did on the Pacific Ocean a half century earlier. The Kripos investigator Olav Scheldrup Hansen felt like an explorer facing unforeseen hazards as he clung to the armrest and looked out into an unbroken, seemingly endless layer of white clouds. Finally the cloud cover changed from white to gray. Morning fog was certainly not an uncommon phenomenon in Haugesund in the fall. For that matter not the rest of the year either, he’d been told.
The airplane landed with a heavy thud without any advance warning. After a few seconds of sudden braking, the investigator happily noted that the pilots had found their way to an airstrip in the sea of fog. He let go of the armrest and exhaled.
Olav had received a brief update by email from the police chief in Haugesund, and an introduction to the nature and extent of the assignment from his own department head. The ticket was ordered in his name, and Olav’s objections against flying were met with a shoulder shrug. Haugesund did not have time to wait for him to cross the mountains by bus.
The information about the case was seriously lacking, and he hoped that did not mean poor police work had been done so far in the investigation. Fortunately the Kripos director had assured him that the district’s best detective was leading the investigation. In other words, a practiced old fox with many years behind him in the corps. Olav himself had recently turned fifty, and had spent the last fifteen years in his position at Kripos. He enjoyed great respect as an investigator, was in demand as an instructor and lecturer at the police academy, had written two technical books about investigation tactics, and could basically dictate to his bosses as he wished.
