by Thomas Enger
‘So you went boozing. You did a runner and took the ferry to Denmark.’
Josefson nodded sheepishly.
Blix had him give a full account of his departure times and ticket purchase. Until now, the man in front of him had been the only common denominator between Sonja Nordstrøm and Jeppe Sørensen, but the ferry trip gave him a cast-iron alibi: he couldn’t have been whoever it was that put Jeppe Sørensen in Sonja Nordstrøm’s boat.
‘Where’s your car?’ Blix asked.
‘My car?’
‘You own a black Volkswagen Tiguan,’ Blix reminded him.
Josefson cleared his throat. ‘It’s parked on the quayside at Hjortneskaia.’
Blix jotted this down.
‘You come to Copenhagen quite frequently, as far as I understand?’ he went on.
‘Yes, I … like it here.’
‘I can appreciate that. I believe you interviewed Jeppe Sørensen some time back?’
Mention of the Dane’s name made Stian Josefson frown, but his reaction was too muted to suggest that he’d heard the news about the discovery of his corpse.
‘Yes?’
‘You’ve also interviewed Sonja Nordstrøm in great depth during the past nine months – do you know whether she had anything to do with Jeppe Sørensen?’
Josefson shook his head.
‘You’re sure?’
‘We never talked about him, at any rate. She wasn’t interested in football. Why do you ask?’
Blix told him what had already been splashed all over the media.
‘That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard,’ Josefson commented. His face had taken on a thoughtful expression.
Blix went on: ‘Of course, a lot of people don’t come out well from this book of yours, but apart from that – do you know if anyone might have had reason to do something to her?’
‘To kill her, you mean?’
Blix gave no response, simply waited while Josefson mulled this over.
‘No,’ was the conclusion he finally reached. ‘I can’t think of a single person.’
30
She lay on her side and tried to relax – as far as that was possible with her hands tied behind her back. They were bleeding from the attempts she had made to free herself.
How long had she been here now?
She had no idea – she had no watch. To begin with, she’d made an effort to count the hours, but she couldn’t concentrate – her thoughts were confused by the fear of what he intended to do to her. Now she was just trying to breathe as evenly and quietly as possible, in and out through her nostrils, while she waited. And waited. And waited.
What was she waiting for, exactly?
How long would she have to stay here?
What was his plan?
These were the same questions she had asked herself time and again. He had not raped or assaulted her. The only thing he had demanded of her was to stand up, lie down, and open her mouth. Put her hands behind her back. Keep quiet. Not to resist. ‘Because that won’t help in the slightest.’
She couldn’t recall the last time she had wept. She had never done so in public, and to be honest rarely in private either, not even classic weepies had any effect on her. But in the past few days the tears had come all the time, unbidden, needing no prompt from her thoughts. The sofa cushion she was lying on was sodden.
It surprised her that, whenever she struggled to get free, she no longer felt any pain. Not in her hands anyway. Maybe her brain wasn’t registering it anymore. Perhaps the cold in this cabin had numbed her senses. Put all her impulses on hold.
She’d started to wonder whether there was someone she’d unwittingly hurt at some point. She was no angel, which was no secret – the newspapers never tired of saying so – but she had never gone in for tormenting people.
She thought about her blanket. The one she usually threw over herself when she stretched out on the sofa at home. She would never have imagined it possible to miss something as trivial as a blanket so much. She longed to wrap it around her. Inhale the scents of the fabric, drink a cup of tea and just watch something innocuous on TV. Something that didn’t matter.
She had no memory of how she had arrived here; all she remembered was the ambush. He had worn black gloves. A hood on his head. Some kind of electrical apparatus in his hand. He’d held it up to her throat and the last thing she had seen were blue sparks reflected in the paintwork of the car beside him.
When she came round, she was in this cabin. He had been standing in front of her, watching her flounder and blink, struggling to understand. She had feverishly tried to loosen her bonds, but had only discovered how hard and tight the knots were.
A noise made her raise her head. Was it a vehicle? Someone coming to save her from this dreadful nightmare? Hope gripped her for the first time in hours. Maybe she would be able to get out of here. Perhaps her nightmare was over.
She could hear the car engine coming closer and closer. She tried to haul herself up; using the muscles in her diaphragm that she had exercised so often she managed to scramble into a sitting position. The exertion made her dizzy for a few seconds. The taut gag over her mouth made it difficult to breathe, and her body couldn’t get enough oxygen however much she tried.
The car was close now and finally stopped outside. She heard a door open. And another. Footsteps on the ground. Keys rattling. Steps coming nearer; she couldn’t hear whether there was one person or several. Her breath grew ragged again.
The door opened.
It felt as if a heavy lump fell from her throat to the pit of her stomach. She began to sob, to cry. She didn’t see his face, but it was definitely him. She recognised the black gloves. The hood. She began to hyperventilate. She had to force herself to blink repeatedly to see clearly through her tears.
A cold blast came in through the open door. Beneath her flimsy clothes she felt goose bumps appear on her skin. He stepped inside the room and paused a moment. He was carrying a loudspeaker, which he set down on the floor. He gave her a long, cold stare, then he wheeled around and exited again, without closing the door. She heard his footsteps growing more distant and then disappearing; then, after a moment, they began to approach again.
Yet another loudspeaker was put down. Once again he stared at her before vanishing again. Not long afterwards, he returned, this time with an amplifier and a remote control. A white extension lead. Two plastic bags, one from a clothes outlet she recognised and the other from a bookshop. He placed everything on the floor, before beginning to join it all together.
She looked on with mounting terror as he linked all the cables.
He shut the door. Switched on the equipment and the various units, then fiddled with a few buttons before producing an iPod from his jacket pocket, attaching it too, and making some intricate thumb movements. Music wafted out of the speakers – a song. There was something familiar about it, but she couldn’t bring to mind what it was. Once the male vocalist had sung one or two verses, the man stopped the music and nodded in satisfaction. The room was silent again.
He turned on his heel and approached her with short, slow steps. ‘Get up,’ he said.
Hesitating, she planted her bare feet gingerly on the ice-cold floor. Discovered that she could still feel pain. He stood right beside her, and stared deep into her eyes. His were blue. Glacial.
Then he took hold of her trousers and began to unbutton them.
No! she screamed internally, as she tried to wriggle away. No. Please, not…
‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘I’ve no intention of raping you.’
His cool, controlled tone made her stop, and he went on removing her trousers. She tried to ask him what he wanted, but the words disappeared into the cloth covering her mouth.
Soon her trousers were off; he had to lift her legs to complete the operation. Then he grabbed hold of her panties. Began to pull them slowly down her hips to her thighs. She smothered a gasp and closed her eyes as fresh tears coursed down her cheeks.
He knelt down, pulling at her underwear, his face only a few centimetres from her crotch. She held her breath, afraid that she might at any moment feel his lips or tongue, but it didn’t happen. Instead he hoisted her feet and unhooked the panties, taking them off and laying them down beside her trousers.
The fine downy hairs on her thighs stood on end. With every second that passed, she expected him to put an icy finger inside her, wrench her around and force himself on her. Instead he picked up the plastic bag from the clothes outlet and took out a bikini.
‘I bought this for you,’ he said. ‘I think it’ll fit.’
He held it up. Leopard print. It resembled one she had worn the last time she went swimming on the sandy beach at Huk.
He bit off the sales tag, bent down and pulled on the bikini bottom, slowly and carefully, lifting it over her hips. The stitched seams of his leather glove scratched her skin. The bottom was a bit too big for her, but the elastic at the waist held it in place. It felt good not to be completely naked.
He stood up and looked at her.
‘Sexy,’ he said. ‘Sex Y.’
She understood what he meant, just not what he wanted.
He smiled again at his own comment. All at once he became serious again. ‘Sit down.’
She did as he said. ‘A bit further over,’ he instructed, nodding his head, closer to the corner and the TV set, which hadn’t been on in all the time she’d spent there.
‘That’s perfect,’ he said once she had obeyed his order. ‘Thanks.’
He was holding the bikini top in his hand. ‘I think I’ll wait and put this on you afterwards.’
Afterwards? she wondered. After what?
‘If I free your arms, you’ll only try to escape. I don’t want to have to fight you.’
He put the bikini top on the sofa beside her. Picked up the other bag and took out a book. He set it aside and approached her with the empty bag. So close to her now that she could feel his moist breath on her flesh; smell it too – fetid, sickening.
He put his hands behind her head and removed the gag. She gasped a breath through her open mouth. Her lips and throat were dry as dust.
‘Do you have any regrets?’ he asked.
She stared at him. Tried to ask what he meant, but her first attempt at speech was futile.
‘Regrets?’ she eventually managed to stammer.
‘About your conduct.’
She had no idea what he was talking about. ‘I haven’t done anything special.’
This was clearly not the answer he was hoping for. His eyes drilled into hers. She was the one who cast her gaze down in the end, struggling to think of something else to say; but all the pleas she had formulated in her head as she waited, all the strategies she had concocted, seemed to evaporate.
‘You’re going to be ever so famous now,’ he said. ‘A real legend.’
She looked up at him again with wide, open eyes, with no inkling of what he meant. Not until he pulled the bag he was holding over her head. And shut out all the air.
31
Blix didn’t like flying, not because he was scared, but because he was no longer contactable. During an ongoing investigation, the forced isolation of a flight was even worse than usual.
Fifty-four minutes after taking off from Kastrup, the captain lowered the wheels on to Norwegian soil at Oslo Gardermoen airport and reversed the engines. The 737 aircraft was still roaring when Blix deactivated flight mode on his mobile phone. Only a few seconds later the text messages began to tick in.
The first was an express message from the operations centre at police headquarters: Woman’s body found in holiday cabin in Nordmarka.
The next one, from Kovic, was worded in much the same way.
Blix called her.
‘I’ve just landed,’ he said. ‘Is it Nordstrøm?’ The latter in a whisper, so that the passenger one seat away couldn’t catch the name.
‘Don’t know,’ Kovic answered. ‘We’re on our way out there now.’
‘What more can you tell me?’
‘It was two mushroom pickers who reported it. The cabin door was wide open with music playing at full blast.’
‘Music?’
‘The same song on repeat. Full volume.’
The plane stopped and the seatbelt light was extinguished. Blix quickly unbuckled his. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way.’
Blue light was sweeping over the spruce trees when, just over an hour later, Blix parked behind a group of four police patrol vehicles and two ambulances. Red-and-white crime-scene tape stretched around the cabin where the body had been found, mainly to keep the press at a distance. So far out in Nordmarka, there was little chance that intruders would encroach, but officers were strategically placed, just in case.
Blix showed his ID to one of them before making his way under the tape. The smell of autumn swirled in the air around him. Wet trees, damp heather. It was already late afternoon, and the air around him glimmered a dull blue.
Wibe approached and immediately announced: ‘It’s not Nordstrøm.’
Blix frowned. ‘Who is it, then?’ he asked – his thoughts racing to the slim bundle of missing-persons cases they had worked on in the past few months.
Wibe opened his mouth to reply, but then closed it. ‘You really have to go in and see for yourself,’ he said at last.
Halting outside the entrance, Blix glanced at the door. The doorframe was splintered around the lock. ‘Have you found a crowbar or something similar nearby?’ he asked as he climbed the steps.
‘Don’t think so,’ Wibe responded from behind him.
Blix snatched a pair of foot protectors from a box on the floor and pulled them over his shoes before heading inside. Squeezing past the large loudspeakers in the hallway, making sure not to touch them, he nodded to Kovic and moved further inside the cabin, where he cleared his throat noisily, so that Ann-Mari Sara, crouched over the cadaver, could stand up and step aside.
A dead woman was seated on the sofa.
She had a plastic bag pulled over her head. Drawn together around her neck with tape. A hole had been torn in the white plastic to expose parts of her face.
She was far younger than Sonja Nordstrøm. The blonde hair protruding from the plastic was tangled. Dull. And she was wearing only a bikini. But what made Blix catch his breath and take another step closer was the book perched on the dead woman’s lap.
Forever Number One.
The questions piled up inside his head.
‘Who is it?’ was the first thing he could say.
‘Jessica Flatebø,’ Kovic replied.
For the next few seconds Blix just stood staring at his colleague. ‘The reality star,’ he then said, mostly to himself. At the same time his mind flashed to Iselin.
‘She’s easily recognisable,’ Kovic added. ‘See – the enormous tattoo on her arm.’
Blix looked: an eagle or a falcon.
‘How long has she been sitting here?’
‘It’s impossible to say for certain,’ Sara answered. ‘But it can’t have been more than a few hours. Rigor mortis has only just started to set in.’
‘But she’s been missing for six days,’ Kovic interjected.
Jessica Flatebø, Blix thought. Who’d been on the receiving end of a social-media smear campaign that had gone on so long, the speculation was she had gone to ground. Either that or she’d quite simply been unable to stand any more – had been bullied into taking her own life.
‘But the book only came out the day before yesterday,’ Blix pointed out, using his hand to indicate the copy on Flatebø’s knee. ‘If she’s been here all that time, she’s been left here on her own for a while at least – so that the perpetrator could buy the book somewhere.’
‘But he killed her only a few hours ago and maybe turned the music up full blast afterwards?’
Wibe appeared in the room. ‘This is just absolutely—’
‘Do we have any clues?’ Blix broke in, addressing Sara.
&
nbsp; ‘Two sets of footprints,’ Sara replied. ‘Sizes thirty-eight and forty-three.’
‘Male and female,’ Kovic added.
‘What about the cause of death?’
‘No obvious external injuries to speak of, so taking that bag around her head into consideration…’
‘Suffocation,’ Kovic concluded.
‘Even though the bag’s been ripped open?’ Wibe was sceptical.
‘She’s hardly done it herself,’ Sara said. ‘Her hands are tied behind her back.’
‘So the killer must have torn it open after she was dead, then,’ Blix said, ‘to expose her face to us or something.’
‘To make it look like she’s reading the book?’ Wibe frowned.
‘Is that what she’s doing?’ Kovic speculated. ‘To me, it looks as if she’s watching TV.’
Blix tilted his head and studied the dead girl’s eyes. Kovic was right: they were directed straight at the TV.
Blix’s gaze flitted to the unnaturally voluptuous breasts, wedged into a bikini top that was slightly too small. In the photos he had seen of Jessica Flatebø, she had always been scantily clad. The focus had been on flesh. And it was always clear how willing she had been to be pictured in the minimum of clothing, especially in front of the TV cameras. It had secured her a career of sorts, for good or ill.
Kovic stood behind Blix, leafing through her notes. ‘She was wearing jeans, a denim jacket and a white top when she went missing,’ she said. ‘And red trainers.’
Kovic surveyed the room as if she expected to see them somewhere.
‘We haven’t found anything like that here,’ Sara told her.
‘We’ll have to go through everything she did that day one more time,’ Wibe said. ‘Talk to everyone she had contact with.’
‘What else do we know about her?’ Blix queried.
Kovic thumbed through her notes again. ‘She’s twenty-one years old,’ she began. ‘Originally from Vestfossen. Lived in Bøler. She was in the last series of Paradise Hotel.’
‘Did she have a regular job?’
Blix took a few steps to one side, got down on his haunches and studied the corpse from a different angle.