Hanne Wilhelmsen - 01 - The Blind Goddess

by Anne Holt

“It’s crazy to do a stakeout with only one patrol car,” Billy T. muttered. “These guys are paranoid. We ought to have at least two.”

  “Money,” Hanne replied. “Luckily this one’s not used to the game; he’s not looking over his shoulder at all.”

  They drove down to the main crossroads at Storo. The traffic signals were vacuously flashing amber like simpleminded Cyclopes, luring motorists to their doom. Two cars were slewed across the main ring road, one with its front severely damaged. The police officers couldn’t get involved, and continued towards Sandaker.

  “He’s stopped,” Hanne suddenly shouted.

  The Volvo, its engine still running, was parked by a telephone booth in Torshov. Lavik was having problems getting into the booth; the hinges must be stiff after all the frost and snow. But he managed to make a gap just wide enough to squeeze through. Billy T. drove calmly on round the next corner and made a U-turn with a skilful slide on the snow. He came back to the junction and parked fifty yards or so from the man in the phone booth. The light was apparently causing him discomfort: he was bending forward to shield his eyes. He had his back towards the unmarked police car.

  “Phone call from a box. Well, well. Friday night. Our suspicions were correct,” said Billy T. with unconcealed delight.

  “He might simply be having an affair,” said Hanne, trying unsuccessfully to dampen his enthusiasm.

  “And rings her from a phone box at two in the morning? Get real, Hanne!” he scoffed, with a conviction born of professional experience.

  They were silent for a while. The street was almost deserted, just the occasional drunken night owl staggering home through the snow that now lay everywhere and gave the October night a Christmassy atmosphere.

  All at once the man banged down the receiver and was off again. He was obviously in a hurry to get somewhere. He leapt into his car and the wheels spun as it pulled away and raced off down Vogts Gata.

  The police car glided out of the junction and accelerated after it. The next stop came equally unexpectedly. In a side street in Grünerløkka the Volvo was almost thrown into an empty parking space. They parked the police car further along the street. Jørgen Lavik vanished round a corner. Hanne and Billy T. looked at one another, and got out of the car in tacit accord. Billy T. put his arm round his colleague, suggesting in a whisper that they pretend to be lovers, and they strolled off firmly entwined towards the little street where they’d seen the lawyer disappear. It was slippery, and several times Hanne had to hold on tight to Billy T. to prevent herself falling. Her boots had leather soles.

  They turned the corner and spotted them straight away. Lavik was standing in muted conversation with another man, but their gesticulations revealed something of its content. It didn’t look too amicable. There was a distance of a hundred metres between the police officers and the two men. One hundred long metres.

  “We’ll take them now,” Billy T. murmured, as eager as a red setter with a scent of grouse.

  “No, no,” Hanne hissed. “Are you mad? On what grounds? There’s no law against conversing at night!”

  “Grounds? What the hell’s that? We stop people every day just on a hunch!”

  She felt her companion brace himself, and clutched at his coat. The other two had seen them. They were near enough now to hear the men’s voices, without being able to distinguish the words. Lavik reacted to the spectators by raising his collar and making his way slowly but determinedly back to his car. Hanne and Billy T. camouflaged themselves in a passionate clinch, and heard the footsteps fading away behind them, towards the dark-blue Volvo. The unknown man still stood where he was. Suddenly Billy T. tore himself loose from Hanne’s arms and charged after him. Lavik was already round the corner on the other side of the street and out of sight. The stranger ran off, and Hanne was left standing there, not knowing what to do.

  Billy T. was in tip-top condition, and was catching up with his prey by a metre a second. After fifty metres the stranger dived into a doorway, and Billy T. was only ten metres behind. He got to the door a second before it closed. It couldn’t possibly have been shut before, the man must have slammed it behind him. It was big and heavy, and slowed Billy T. down. By the time he was through the man was nowhere to be seen.

  He rushed along the passageway, which issued on to an enclosed yard. It was fairly big, maybe ten metres square, and surrounded by three-metre-high walls. One wall looked like the rear of a garage or a shed; a sloping roof extended from the top of it. A flower bed had been built up in one corner, and the stringy remains of some flowers poked sadly up through the snow. There was a homemade trellis behind it, bare, the plants having only succeeded in reaching the bottom crosspiece. At the top was a man just about to scramble over the wall.

  Billy T. took the diagonal across the yard in ten paces. He grabbed a boot. The fleeing man kicked out and his heel caught the officer on the forehead with a crack. But Billy T. didn’t entirely let go—with his spare hand he tried to get a proper grip on the trousers higher up. But he was unlucky: the man gave a violent jerk and freed himself. He stood holding one boot, feeling rather foolish even before he heard the second boot hitting the ground on the far side of the wall. It took him only three seconds to follow, but his quarry had made good use of his advantage. He was already well on his way to another gate, this time giving onto the street. As he reached the archway in the house wall he turned to face Billy T. He had a gun in his right hand and was aiming it directly at him.

  “Police!” yelled Billy T. “It’s the police!”

  He lurched to a halt. But his leather soles didn’t. They kept going. His huge figure danced five or six steps to regain its balance, his arms flailing like a broken windmill. In vain. He fell backwards onto the ground with a crash, and only the fresh snow saved him from injury. His pride, on the other hand, had taken a considerable battering, and he cursed inwardly when he heard the outer gate slam shut behind the fugitive.

  He rose to his feet, and had just brushed the snow off himself when Hanne landed on the ground from the wall behind him.

  “Idiot,” she said, at once reproachful and admiring. “What would you have charged the guy with if you’d caught him?”

  “Unlawful possession of firearms,” the bruised policeman muttered, knocking the snow off his trophy, a man’s leather boot, size ten. He ordered a retreat. With rather ill grace.

  MONDAY 26 OCTOBER

  There was a whole pile of yellow message slips on the post shelf in her office. Hanne Wilhelmsen hated telephone messages. She was far too conscientious to throw them out, but knew that at least half of the eleven who had rung had nothing significant to say. The most enervating part of the job was having to respond to questions from the public, impatient victims who couldn’t see why it should take more than six months to investigate a rape by a known assailant, irascible defence lawyers enquiring about prosecution decisions, witnesses who considered themselves of greater importance than the police gave them credit for.

  Two of the messages were from the same person. “Ring Askhaug, Ullevål Hospital,” they said, with a phone number. Hanne thought anxiously about all the scans they’d taken of her skull, and rang the number. Askhaug was there, even if Hanne did have to be transferred to three other numbers before she eventually got the woman on the line. Hanne introduced herself.

  “I’m glad you phoned,” chirped the woman at the other end. “I’m a nurse in the psychiatric department.”

  Hanne breathed a sigh of relief. At least her own head wasn’t the problem.

  “We had a patient here, a prisoner on remand,” the nurse continued. “A Dutchman, I think he was. I was told you were in charge of the case. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was in a psychotic state when he was admitted, and went to Neurology for several days before we saw any improvement,” the nurse explained. “We got his mental condition into some sort of order eventually, even if we don’t know how long it will last. We put incontinence pads on him at firs
t; it would have been too labour-intensive otherwise, you see.”

  The soft southern voice sounded apologetic, as if it was she alone who was responsible for the lamentable state of resources in the health service.

  “It’s normally the nursing auxiliaries who change the pads, you know. But he was thoroughly constipated until I happened to be on night duty. We take a turn too, with the patients, I mean. So I changed this man’s pads. It’s really the auxiliaries’ job, you know.”

  Hanne knew.

  “Well, I noticed a white, undigested lump in his stool. I wondered what it was, so I picked it out. We wear plastic gloves, you see.”

  A slight giggle came down the line.

  “And?”

  Hanne was getting impatient. She ran her finger rapidly to and fro over the stubble at her temple. Her hair was growing back, and it itched.

  “It was a piece of paper. The size of a postcard, folded up, but the writing was still legible. Even after a little wash. I thought it might be of interest, you see, so I rang you. To be on the safe side.”

  Hanne praised her profusely and hoped she would soon get to the point.

  At long last she learnt what the message on the paper had been.

  “I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes,” was Hanne’s immediate response.

  * * *

  They had finally set up an incident room. That sounded pretentious, until you entered it. Twenty square metres had been left over at the furthest end of the northwest corridor after A.2.11 had been partitioned into rooms. It was impersonal and almost unusable. For bigger cases they called it the incident room, gathering both documents and personnel together in the one place. Quite functional, in a way. Two telephones, one on each of a pair of desks placed back to back beneath the window, with the same thin metal legs as in the rest of the building; the desktops sloping in opposite directions like a pitched roof. On the ridge was balanced a narrow board full of nibbled pencils, rubbers, and cheap pens. Behind each desk the walls were covered in shelves. They were empty, a reminder to everyone of how little they had on the case. A constant tiring hum emanated from an old photocopier in a small adjoining room.

  Chief Inspector Kaldbakken was chairing the meeting. He was a slim man whose dialect contrived to make half his words stick in his throat in an indecipherable mumble. It could have been worse: at least they were all used to him, and could guess at what he was saying. Which wasn’t much.

  Detective Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen was reporting. She was going over everything they had, separating fact from speculation, solid information from hearsay. Unfortunately most of it was speculation and hearsay. But it made an impact of sorts. There was little physical evidence, scarcely enough to convince anybody.

  “Let’s arrest Lavik,” exhorted a young constable with a snub nose and freckles. “Stake everything on a single card. He’ll crack!”

  You could have heard a pin drop, and in the embarrassing silence the redheaded officer realised he’d made a fool of himself. He began to bite his nails in shame.

  “What do you say, Håkon? What have we actually got to go on?”

  It was Hanne who was asking. She looked better now, and had bowed to the inevitable and cut her hair short. It was a distinct improvement: the lopsided style of the past week had been rather comical. Håkon seemed somewhat distracted, but refocused his attention.

  “If we could get Lavik to make a voluntary statement, it might possibly give us a lead. The problem is that from a tactical point of view we have to be certain the interrogation will be effective. We know…”

  He broke off, and started the sentence again.

  “We believe the man to be guilty: there are too many coincidences. The meeting in the middle of the night with the armed fugitive, the initials on the banknote, the visit to the cells the day the warning note scared the shit out of Han van der Kerch. And another fact: he was visiting Jacob Frøstrup only a few hours before the poor chap did himself in.”

  “That doesn’t actually prove anything,” said Hanne. “We all know that prisons are full of drugs. The warders, for instance, can go in and out quite freely without any check whatsoever, directly from outside to an individual cell if they want to.

  “Quite unbelievable,” she added, after a moment’s thought. “It’s absurd that the staff of a department store like Steen and Strøm have to subject themselves to searches to prevent shoplifting, while prison staff have no inspection for drug-smuggling into prisons!”

  “Unions, trade unions,” muttered Kaldbakken.

  “And Han van der Kerch’s dread of the prison may have something to do with that. Perhaps he suspects people within the prison system,” Hanne went on, not rising to the chief inspector’s political views. “It seems unlikely to me that Lavik would take the risk of being stopped with a case full of drugs. Frøstrup’s death is more an indication that Van der Kerch’s fear of prison was justified.

  “But this note here is Lavik’s work. That much I’m certain of,” she said, holding up a plastic envelope containing the undigested warning.

  The writing was faint and half-obliterated, but no one had any difficulty reading the message.

  “It looks like a poor joke,” the redheaded man ventured again. “Bits of paper like that belong in crime novels, not in real life.” He laughed. He was the only one who did.

  “Could a person really be driven into a psychotic state by such a note?” asked Kaldbakken sceptically. In thirty years he’d never come across anything like it.

  “Yes, it literally frightened him out of his wits,” said Hanne. “He wasn’t in very good condition before, of course; a note like this could have been the last straw. He’s better now, anyway, and back in a cell. Well, better doesn’t mean much, he’s sitting in a corner and refusing to say anything at all. Karen Borg can’t get anything out of him either, as far as I know. He ought to be in hospital, if you ask me. But they’ll throw him back at the prison service as soon as he can remember his name.”

  They were all very well aware of that. Prison psychiatry was a perpetuum mobile, to and fro, to and fro. The prisoners never really got any better. Only worse.

  “How about asking Lavik in for a chat?” Håkon proposed. “We could take a chance on his not refusing, and see how it holds up. It might be the most stupid thing we could do; but on the other hand, does anyone have a more feasible suggestion?”

  “What about Peter Strup?” It was the superintendent’s first contribution to the discussion.

  Hanne replied, “We’ve got nothing on him at the moment; in my notes he’s just a big question mark.”

  “Don’t leave him aside forever,” the superintendent advised, closing the meeting. “Bring Lavik in, but don’t push him too far. We don’t want the whole legal profession on our backs. At least not yet. In the meantime, you”—he pointed at the young lad with the snub nose, and moved his finger along—“and you… and you… can do all the dirty work. Come with me and get your duties. There’s a lot to be checked. I want to know everything about our two lawyers. Eating habits and deodorants. Political affiliations and women. Look out especially for common factors.”

  The superintendent departed, accompanied by the red-haired lad and the other two, roughly the same age, who’d had the sense to keep quiet during the meeting. It hadn’t made any difference—the youngest always got the routine chores.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen and Håkon Sand were the last to leave the room. She noticed that he seemed very satisfied, despite the situation.

  “Yes, I do feel good,” he responded to her friendly and surprised enquiry.

  “In fact, I feel bloody good!”

  * * *

  Håkon Sand was begging to be allowed to attend. Detective Inspector Wilhelmsen was far from positively inclined. She hadn’t forgotten the blunder with Han van der Kerch.

  “I know the man,” he argued. “My presence may put him more at ease. You’ve no idea what power competent lawyers think they have over inept ones. He may well get over-c
onfident.”

  She finally conceded, in exchange for an explicit promise from Håkon to keep his mouth shut. He could speak if she gave him a sign, but even then should restrict himself to empty phrases or insignificant comments, nothing about the actual substance of the case.

  “Let’s do the good guy–bad guy routine,” she said in the end with a grin.

  She would be the surly one, he could contribute encouraging slaps on the back.

  “But don’t be too aggressive,” Håkon warned her. “There’s a risk he’ll just get up and walk out, and we’ve got no adequate reason for holding him.”

  He came to the meeting with them voluntarily. No briefcase, but otherwise smartly and professionally dressed, in a suit and stylish shoes, too stylish for the slushy streets of Oslo. His trouser legs were wet, and the light brown leather of his shoes had a dark band along the sides, which would probably mean a troublesome autumn cold in store for him. The shoulders of his tweed coat were also wet, and Håkon glimpsed the exclusive label on the lining as Lavik took it off and gave it a shake before turning in search of a hook or coat hanger. He found neither, so draped it over the back of his chair. He was relaxed and cooperative, showing no sign of apprehension.

  “I must say, I’m rather intrigued,” he said with a smile, sweeping his hair back from his brow. It flopped forward again immediately. “Am I suspected of something?” he asked, smiling even more broadly.

  Hanne reassured him: “Not at the moment.”

  Håkon thought she was taking a risk. But with the lesson of experience fresh in his mind, he said nothing. Neither he nor Hanne had anything to write with or on. They both knew that the flow of speech could easily dry up at the sight of a tape recorder or writing implements.

  “We’re pursuing various lines of enquiry concerning one or two cases we’re having trouble with,” she admitted. “We have a feeling that you might have something to contribute. Just a few questions. You’re free to leave whenever you like.”

  It was scarcely necessary to tell him.