Fallen Angels

by Gunnar Staalesen

‘You wouldn’t remember his name, would you?’

  ‘Yes, in fact I do. Because I’d met him before. He’d laid the bathroom floor for us a few months before.’

  ‘Laid the floor? So he was a builder?’

  ‘No,’ she said sarcastically. ‘He was a kindergarten teacher. What do you think he was?’ she snapped. Then she calmed down again. ‘Would you like to know his name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what will you pay me?’

  ‘Pay? I can offer you…’ I slipped my hand into my inside pocket.

  ‘I don’t want your filthy Judas money.’ She leaned forward heavily as though she were a bouncer at the Crisis Centre and I didn’t have adequate ID. ‘I want you to promise not to say a word about what you’ve seen here today…’

  ‘I promise. Cross my heart, if that has any value in this house.’

  She smiled wryly. We were almost on the same wavelength now. ‘OK. His name wasn’t exactly unusual … Jan Petter Olsen.’

  ‘Jan Petter!’ For the second time my spine ran cold, but this time it was for quite a different reason.

  ‘Yes.’ She studied my face. ‘Anything the matter?’

  I said bluntly: ‘Nothing, except that he’s dead too.’ After a while I added: ‘I went to his funeral last Friday.’

  She heaved a sigh and splayed her hands. ‘All that other stuff – I’ve forgotten it.’

  I stood up. Heading for the door, I reminded her: ‘As I said, you can expect a visit. And it might be a good idea to lock the door when … you’re busy. In case anyone else should stumble over you as I…’

  I followed the bloodstains out, but they weren’t fresh and red anymore. They were black like pitch.

  Outside, the day had closed the gates. All you could see on the horizon was a thin line of grey mixed with red, like the light that shines under the door before the very last lamps are extinguished and everyone goes to bed. Only the night is awake. For night is the daughter of the sea. She walks quietly on wet, bare feet across a dark, wooden floor while everyone else is asleep or dead.

  32

  I followed the tarmac trail south in the borderland between light and darkness. To the west lay the sea, like a bottomless throat with the dying day a noose around its neck. Light from the strongest stars barely penetrated the night mist, and a long way out a ship was slowly making for warmer climes. Otherwise it was total darkness out there: doomsday at night. To the east I could make out distress signals from the last civilisation. The lights in Olsvik and on Askøy, up Fjellsiden and across to Åsane glittered prettily, like a milky way of pearls cast to swine, in the most northerly parts of a lost world, on the precipice of two kinds of death. One: sudden and violent, in an inferno of exploding bombs; the second: slow suffocation in poisoned nature with a disintegrating ozone layer and infected by an invisible plague.

  Around me lay granite rocks like grey alloys of the night darkness. I regularly met evening drivers, on their way home from work in Ågotnes or Bergen. The odd speeding motorist overtook me with brake lights that became fresh bloodstains along the white central stripe in front of me, before darkness swallowed them up.

  I stopped in Loddefjord and bought a hamburger. I pondered what my next step should be. I wasn’t at all confident that Anita Solheim would give me any more information today. I was very keen to talk to her older daughter, Ruth, though. And perhaps the younger one, Sissel.

  I drove through Fyllingsdalen, via Krohnegården, and parked forty metres from the gate to their house.

  I looked at my watch. It was five minutes past five.

  If Sissel was a normal teenager she would have finished her homework long ago, read a back issue of Romantikk magazine, played a Wham! LP and arranged to meet a girlfriend or perhaps even a…

  She was normal. I hadn’t been waiting for more than twenty minutes before she came dashing down the garden path, at the same speed as this morning, wearing the same puffer jacket and the same jeans.

  I moved forward to the gate, rolled down the window, smiled my teenager smile and said: ‘Can I drive you anywhere?’

  She came to an abrupt halt, her hand on the garden gate and a suspicious expression on her little face. ‘Who are you? I don’t take lifts from…’

  ‘Strangers, I know. You’re quite right to be cautious, but don’t you recognise me? I visited your mother this morning. You were rushing past on your way to school. Did you get there on time?’

  She giggled childishly. ‘Just.’

  ‘My name’s Varg Veum. I knew your father. In the old days. Where are you going?’

  She was still regarding me with suspicion. ‘I … to the church. Confirmation class.’

  I opened the door. ‘Then jump in. I know Berge Brevik well too.’

  That appeared to clinch it. She got into the car, sat close to the door and hesitated for a moment before putting on her seat belt.

  I smiled at her reassuringly. ‘OK? Do you like going to the classes?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Aren’t you a year late?’

  Suddenly her pointed face wore a precocious expression. ‘I wasn’t ready for it last year. You have to want to do it, don’t you.’

  I nodded. ‘That sounds sensible.’

  We waited at the lights by Carl Konows gate. On green I turned left, passed Damsgård Manor and took a right down to the old centre of Laksevåg.

  ‘Don’t go all the way to the church,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anyone to see us.’

  I pulled into the kerb, put the gearstick into neutral, released my seat belt and said: ‘Actually I wanted to talk to your sister.’

  ‘Ruth?’

  ‘Mhm. Do you know where she is? Your mother didn’t know…’

  ‘That’s because she’s ashamed.’

  ‘Of Ruth?’

  She nodded her head vigorously. ‘But Ruth’s always kept in touch with me. I’m in constant contact, even if things are bad.’

  ‘Bad?’

  She was serious now and looked at me with adult eyes. ‘Ruth’s a drug addict. Right now she’s trying to kick the habit. She’s at some kind of rehab centre, a collective, somewhere in Lindås.’

  ‘OK. So she’s been out of work?’

  ‘She started studying, but then…’ She shrugged. ‘Ruth moved from home six or seven years ago, when she was seventeen. She met a guy who was much older than her…’

  ‘What was his name?’

  She shrugged. ‘No idea. I was no more than eight or nine. No one told me anything. It was only afterwards that Ruth has…’

  ‘But she finished her schooling?’

  ‘Oh, yes. And she started at uni. She’s always tried to stand on her own feet, but … I don’t know. Perhaps it’ll work this time.’

  ‘So if I contact this collective in Lindås, I’ll be able to meet her there?’

  ‘She was definitely there last time she rang. Two weeks ago.’

  I tapped the steering wheel lightly. ‘Great. Otherwise … I should’ve said this first, but I was sad to hear about your father. Was it a terrible shock for you?’

  ‘My father?’ She stared straight through me, at neck height. ‘Johnny? I didn’t know him. We never had anything to do with him. Mamma had burned all her bridges and he … He never tried to contact us. Not once. He didn’t care about us. He didn’t give a damn.’

  ‘So…’ I was gripped by a sudden sadness. ‘So you don’t remember any of what led to the divorce between your mother and father?’

  She shook her head energetically and closed her eyes, as if to show me how little she remembered. ‘Nothing. I think I was only four.’

  ‘Four.’ I smiled in sympathy. ‘That’s a long time ago when you’re fifteen.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Me? Ten times four, Sissel, and a few more. But strangely enough it doesn’t seem long since I was four, myself.’

  ‘I think,’ she said pensively, ‘that life’s a circle. In the end, you return to where you started. And when
you’re past the halfway mark you don’t look forward but backward … if you understand what I mean.’

  I nodded. ‘That all sounds very philosophical and wise for a fifteen-year-old. But it’s a good image. So you’ve still got your back turned to being four while I – according to you – am already on my way … home.’

  She nodded firmly as if anxious that I might not have caught the nuances. Then she giggled quietly and sat lost in her own thoughts.

  Some youths walked past the car and Sissel ducked out of view.

  ‘Friends of yours?’ I asked in a low voice.

  She nodded. ‘I have to go now.’ She groped for the door handle. When she was outside she lowered her head and looked in at me, intently, as though keen to fix my face in her mind so that she would recognise me the next time we met.

  ‘Say hello,’ I said.

  ‘To Brevik?’

  I nodded, and then she was gone.

  I watched her. She had thin legs in tight trousers, a down jacket which made her upper body seem immense and unnatural, dark hair that appeared very black against the white, floodlit church she was walking towards, and a gait that seemed light-footed and pensive at the same time.

  ‘No, actually,’ I muttered. ‘To God. If you should meet Him.’

  33

  As for me, I definitely didn’t meet God. I had to make do with Vegard Vadheim.

  The door to his office was open. He was standing by the window with a cup of coffee in his hand and a gaze that went straight through the closed blinds without seeing anything at all. Outside, a few torn-off dog-ears of the law books in the sky were falling. Winter was still in the corridor, waiting to testify. But the judge wasn’t ready yet.

  He turned to the door, about to say something, when he saw who was there and bit his tongue. ‘Ah, so it’s you!’

  ‘Had you expected someone else?’

  He didn’t answer and waved wearily to the free chair. ‘Any more deaths up your sleeves, Veum? Any new close calls, any more bodies in your slipstream?’

  I sat down and he took a seat behind his desk. He looked worn out.

  ‘What about the ones I gave you yesterday? Have you found out anything?’

  His smile was taut. ‘Same old Veum. Same old questions.’

  The door opened behind us. Eva Jensen came in, also holding a cup of coffee. When she saw me she stopped, unsure whether to come in or go out. ‘Am I disturbing?’

  ‘No, no.’ Vadheim beckoned her in and motioned for her to close the door. ‘Veum would like to discuss the case with us, Eva. He considers himself a special envoy from … What should I say, Veum?’

  ‘The Republic of Nordnes. Would that help?’

  ‘The Republic of Nordnes,’ Vadheim said to Eva. ‘The one in the north, you know, with its own independence day on the third of May.’

  ‘Surely you can tell me if you’ve found something out or not?’

  He leaned back in his chair and said: ‘Yes and no, Veum. Let’s get straight to the point. We didn’t find anything about Harry Kløve. It was a traffic accident with a fatal outcome and of course there was a report about it. The bus driver was interviewed and a few bystanders. According to the driver there’d been a huddle of pedestrians waiting by the zebra crossing. The lights changed to green and he set off and then just before he reached the crossing Kløve stepped right into his path. Apparently he’d come from the back of the crowd and had been in too much of a hurry to look. But everything went so fast, of course, that the driver didn’t have a chance to see anything before he heard the thud at the front and saw Kløve rebound across the cobblestones.’

  ‘And the witnesses?’

  ‘Hadn’t heard anything or seen anything. They had enough to do looking after themselves. Apart from this one woman in her fifties…’ he thumbed through a document ‘…who thought Kløve had made an unnatural leap into the street, but that was all she could say.’

  ‘And that was all?’

  He angled his head. ‘The death certificate: cause of death – multiple injuries – fractured skull, broken ribs leading to a punctured lung. He didn’t have much of a chance.’

  Eva Jensen raised her coffee cup to her mouth, put it down again and said: ‘Coffee, Veum?’

  ‘No, thanks, I’ve—’

  ‘Hjellestad, on the other hand,’ Vadheim continued. ‘The night before he died he appeared at the Salvation Army hostel in Bakkegaten, totally sober, washed, spruced up, three-day beard shaved off, clean clothes … Extremely unusual for him, at his stage of life, all of it.’

  I leaned forward, intrigued. ‘Mhm?’

  ‘Someone asked him where he was going, but he wouldn’t say. He was meeting someone, he said, with a sly smile apparently. But everyone knew by the way he’d smartened himself up it could only mean one of two things: he’d got a job or he was meeting a woman. And jobs? … Well, he hadn’t touched a drum kit for four years. He could probably have fudged his way through a couple of numbers, but he wasn’t a great timekeeper anymore. So…’ He indicated his conclusion with an open palm.

  ‘…A woman. But who?’

  ‘And does it even matter?’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Imagine this scenario, Veum: Arild Hjellestad meets one of his old flames – and don’t forget he had quite a few. He arranges to meet her, cleans himself up, is looking forward to an evening of cosy nostalgia … and then she doesn’t turn up.’

  I nodded.

  He carried on: ‘He waits and waits and waits. But she doesn’t appear. So what does he do?’

  ‘Gets drunk. Alone. To dull the shame of it.’

  ‘And it’s cold, bitingly cold. He finds a corner in a garden outside some block of flats where he doesn’t know anyone. Then exits stage left.’

  I looked at him. ‘The only question is this, Vadheim. Did he have a fixed abode and did anyone send him a picture of an angel?’

  He stared at me with the expected disbelief in his eyes. ‘Did I hear you correctly? A picture of an angel?’

  I leaned back in the chair and told them everything about Harry Kløve and his mother and the stickers he had received in the post, about the visit to Bente Solheim and the letter she had shown me.

  ‘She didn’t call you, Vadheim?’

  He shook his head and took frenetic notes.

  ‘She seemed completely doped up. She probably just forgot,’ I said and carried on.

  I kept nothing back. I told them about my visits to Anita Solheim and Halldis Heggøy, about my conversation with Sissel and where we could find Ruth. ‘So in other words,’ I concluded, ‘Arild could’ve met someone who’d had a drink with him and left him in the freezing cold. A kind of seduction. A deadly seduction. In which case we’re looking for a woman.’

  Vadheim shook his head in resignation and turned to Eva. ‘Throw the dog a bone and he moves in with you. But I have to say that this has been useful to hear.’ He turned back to me. ‘Let’s go through this one more time, Veum. Bit by bit.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You think that all the deceased – the members of The Harpers – were sent a warning in the post, in the form of pictures of angels with various marks on?’

  ‘Red crosses above the deaths that had already occurred. Johnny Solheim received a letter with two red crosses – Harry Kløve and Arild Hjellestad – and a circle around one angel – himself – and one untouched: Jakob Aasen. And black crosses above all four.’

  ‘So you think there’ll be another death?’

  ‘I do. I think the angels are an important clue. In fact, it was a death that started the whole business for me. Jan Petter Olsen, a former classmate, a friend of Jakob’s and mine, and who was also the victim of a so-called accident. Take good note. He was a builder and fell from some scaffolding. That happens of course. Even to experienced builders. But someone could’ve given him a helping hand, couldn’t they.’

  ‘But what’s his connection with the band? And did he receive a letter?’

  ‘I don’t
know about the second point. You’ll have to ask his widow when you reopen his case. I daren’t. But the connection’s pretty clear. On a very special date – the sixteenth of October, 1975 – he happened to meet with The Harpers at a party. At Johnny’s place. Something happened that evening; something so serious that it blew the eighteen-year-old band to smithereens, and destroyed one marriage and one couple – maybe even more, for all I know; so serious that several of those involved didn’t speak to one another for many years afterwards. In short…’ I gestured to indicate that he could draw his own conclusions.

  He looked at me with a fox-like expression. Eva Jensen was sitting straight-backed, as if on needles, her cheeks flushed. ‘In short, what, Veum?’ Vadheim asked cautiously.

  I slumped back in my chair. Then I leaned forward, my neck and shoulders aching. I leaned back again, placed my arms on the chair rests and tried to relax my muscles. ‘It’s perhaps not so hard to imagine, Vadheim. Five drunken men. Anita Solheim wasn’t at home – I have no idea why. But her daughters were. Sissel was only four, but Ruth … was thirteen.’

  A repressed sigh, like a sob, burst from Eva Jensen’s mouth. No, she mouthed, without a sound emerging.

  Vegard Vadheim had turned pale. ‘You mean…’

  I nodded.

  ‘But you don’t know anything, Veum, do you.’

  ‘They’ve clammed up like oysters, all of them. The ones still alive, I mean, and who had to know something. Perhaps if I spoke to Ruth…?’

  ‘She’s a drug addict you say and lives in Lindås?’

  I nodded.

  ‘She definitely won’t tell us anything. Drug addicts have learned to keep their mouths shut if any questions come from us.’

  ‘So perhaps I could do you a favour?’

  He leaned forward. ‘The advantage with you, Veum, in this particular case, is that you know them all of old. And you have an unofficial angle. I’m prepared to turn a blind eye to the rather unconventional side of this case on this occasion. Is that alright?’

  I smiled, eyed the adjacent office and said in quite a loud voice: ‘Muus! Can you hear?’

  Irritated, Vadheim continued: ‘That doesn’t mean I’m going to sit on the fence. Now let’s bring them all in. Your good friend, Jakob Aasen, Anita Solheim, Halldis Heggøy … Have you made a note, Eva? Get someone to bring them in for questioning, the whole lot of them.’