Death Deserved

by Thomas Enger

  Emma appeared on the far edge of the screen. She stood chatting to a man with round glasses and short, curly hair. The sight of her made him slide his hand into his pocket and curl it around his phone.

  His gaze moved back to the middle of the room where the phone was found. Men and women, large and small, were milling around. Soon all the seats were occupied.

  ‘I can’t see anyone leaving a phone on the floor,’ Wibe said.

  ‘Me neither,’ Kovic added.

  ‘Try another angle,’ Blix told Krohn.

  A few clicks and keystrokes later, the images from another camera in the room appeared on the screen. It was a bird’s eye view, looking from the ceiling on to people’s heads, but there were so many bodies in the room it was impossible to see what was going on at their feet.

  The recording was now nearing the start of the press conference. Blix scanned the centre rows, hoping he might recognise some of the faces. Pia Nøkleby launched into her introductory remarks and then handed over to Gard Fosse. Blix followed every movement as Fosse spoke. The audience seemed to be giving him their full attention, but it was impossible to get a clear view of every single face.

  Then the tune began to play. At first, everyone was silent. Then, eyes darting, they were looking around in bafflement, until one woman bent down and picked up the ringing phone. She pressed something and the music stopped. Fosse thanked her. The woman scanned the room in confusion, holding the phone aloft, before putting the phone back down again.

  ‘Someone sitting close by must have put it there,’ Blix said. ‘Move closer in on each one of them.’

  Krohn paused the recording and zoomed in. First on the woman who had picked up the phone, and then on the man beside her, a tall burly guy.

  ‘Lars Rovell,’ Blix said. ‘Works for the Stavanger Aftenblad, in their Oslo office. Take the next one.’

  Krohn marked out another square area just behind Rovell. A slim woman with a high ponytail: Blix did not know her.

  ‘Just go on,’ he said to Krohn. ‘And the rest of you: if you wanted to leave a mobile phone on the floor in a room full of people, without anyone noticing it – what would you have done?’

  ‘Crouched down and pretended to tie my shoelaces,’ Kovic suggested.

  ‘Just held it in my hand and then dropped it on the floor,’ Wibe proposed. ‘Coughed at the same time, maybe, to muffle the sound; the floor’s carpeted after all.’

  ‘But we don’t see anyone bending down,’ Blix said. ‘And nobody coughing either. At least not in the few minutes just before it starts.’

  Krohn continued to zoom in on the people around Rovell and the woman who had switched off the mobile phone.

  Blix himself had a suggestion. He thought it through one more time before sharing his idea with the others. ‘I would have put the phone down as soon as I took my seat,’ he began. ‘Long before the press conference began. Once the press conference was in full swing, while people were engrossed in what was being said, I would have shoved or kicked the phone either to the side or forwards.’

  ‘One more time?’ Krohn offered, ready to rewind again.

  ‘No, let it run,’ Blix told him.

  The recording played on. Fosse explained that they were cooperating with the Danish police force and had sent an investigator to Copenhagen. The audience were all sitting and standing in the same places, apart from a few photographers who were moving about to find other angles and better pictures.

  Blix glanced at Emma again. She was standing at the back of the room, near the door, jotting something down.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Freeze.’

  Immediately behind Emma, someone had appeared, a hood pulled up over his head. Blix pointed at the screen.

  ‘Isn’t that outfit a bit unusual for a journalist?’ he asked.

  Krohn zoomed in, marked off the area and trained in on the face partly covered by the hood. The image was grainy at first, but then it came into focus.

  Blix’s mouth dropped open.

  The man’s eyes were not directed at what was happening on stage, so it was not easy to make out his features.

  But Blix knew them all the same.

  He had seen them before.

  ‘God Almighty,’ he said under his breath.

  ‘What?’ Wibe asked. ‘Who is it?’

  Blix did not answer.

  ‘Get hold of Gard Fosse,’ he said instead. ‘Get hold of everyone. We need to meet right now.’

  34

  Emma had drunk one glass more than she’d intended, but she felt far from intoxicated as Kasper settled the bill and simultaneously asked where she lived.

  ‘It’s quite a way from here,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll take a taxi.’

  A group of smokers stood outside the restaurant. It had started to rain a little. Cold, drizzly drops.

  Emma turned to face him. ‘Thanks for a lovely meal,’ she said.

  ‘My pleasure.’

  He stood looking at her, as if weighing up his next words with great care. ‘Thanks for everything,’ he said in the end, and took a step closer to give her a hug.

  Emma let it happen. Kasper held her close and for a bit longer than the usual clinch, his grip telling her this was what he wanted. She noticed it too, in the way his cheek slid slowly away from hers, but remained close, in the way his beard discreetly rasped on her skin, en route to her mouth.

  She took a determined stride away from him. Her thoughts strayed to the brief message she had received from Blix. There was a connection linking Nordstrøm, Sørensen and Flatebø. She longed to go home and find out more.

  That’s what she told herself at least.

  ‘Shall I see you home?’ Kasper suggested. ‘Or maybe you could come home with me?’ He gave a sheepish smile. ‘I could do with the company,’ he added.

  Insistent – yet another characteristic Emma valued.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, however. ‘I need to work.’

  Kasper eyed her for a few moments, before saying: ‘OK … we can maybe meet up tomorrow?’

  Not insistent – a personal trait Emma sometimes really disliked.

  ‘I guess we will,’ she finally answered.

  And so they parted.

  Emma decided to walk. After a few hundred metres or so she took out her phone and wrote a text to Blix: How does it all link together?

  She ambled onwards with the phone in her hand, but Blix didn’t reply. Eventually she put her phone back in her bag and took the road up Telthusbakken – a long, steep slope that set her thigh muscles on fire.

  On her way on to Bjerregaards gate she had the distinct feeling that someone had been walking the same route as her for some time. She turned to take a look and glimpsed a dark hooded figure on the other side of the street. It was impossible to make out his face, though.

  Emma picked up speed. The lighting in Bjerregaards gate was barely adequate, but the closer she came to Ullevålsveien, the more shops and eateries there were, and there was more traffic too. Once on Ullevålsveien itself, she dashed between a night bus and a cyclist, across the two lanes, and increased her pace on the other side. She turned around again at the Underwater Pub. This time she saw nothing of the shadowy figure in the hoodie.

  It had happened before, men following her. Once her gut feeling had been so strong that she had dived into a late-night convenience store in Seilduksgata and waited until the person behind her had walked past. Only a few days later, she had read in the newspaper that a girl with blonde hair, around her own age, had been raped somewhere close by.

  Five minutes later she was home in Falbes gate, where she hastily let herself in and could breathe more easily. She soaked up the stillness in her flat before allowing her thoughts to return to Kasper and what he might think about her. She wished she had handled the evening better.

  She checked her phone. Still no response from Blix. It was now nearly eleven o’clock. She probably wouldn’t hear anything from him tonight.

  In the
bathroom she spotted long, brown strands of hair in the basin. Emma’s mind turned to her niece, and to what lay ahead of her – if Emma’s assumptions proved correct.

  She stripped off all her clothes. Ran her fingers slowly through her own hair as she gazed at herself in the mirror. It never ceased to surprise her how real it felt.

  Casually, she began to loosen the hair from her scalp. Centimetre by centimetre, with one hand, as she opened the cabinet beneath the basin with the other.

  This was where she kept all her wigs.

  They were all approximately the same length, but in slightly different shades.

  Taking her time, she lifted that day’s wig off her completely bald head and placed it on the stand before raising her eyes to the mirror again. She ran her hand over her smooth scalp, thinking of Martine. She didn’t know whether her own mother had suffered from the same condition. It was not directly hereditary, the doctors had explained, even though it was not unusual for several members of the same family to be affected.

  She lingered for a while, and then puffed out her cheeks and gave a heavy sigh at her own reflection, before resolutely removing her make-up and then creeping under her quilt.

  35

  ‘Thanks for turning out so late at night. We may well have made a breakthrough.’

  Blix was holding a long pointer in his hand. He tapped the photomontage projected on the board in front of him.

  ‘This is Walter Georg Dahlmann.’

  The onscreen image divided in two. On the left, a head-and-shoulders shot of a man in his mid-twenties who looked tired and angry. On the right, the same man, only fifteen years older and even more unkempt.

  Gard Fosse appeared in the doorway. With arms folded, he leaned against the frame.

  ‘He’s forty-three years old now,’ Blix went on, ‘and he’s originally from Dalen in Telemark. He had two tours to Afghanistan and after the last one he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2004, Dahlmann was’ – Blix rapped the stick on the left-hand side of the picture – ‘sentenced to sixteen years imprisonment for killing his ex-girlfriend, Maria Lenth, and her new boyfriend, Simen Veum. Some of you might remember Simen well; he worked here, on the fourth floor. He was twenty-seven. A nice guy; I worked with him a few times.’

  Several heads nodded in the room.

  ‘Dahlmann finished his sentence three months ago. We don’t know what he’s been up to since then, but we do know he was here during today’s press conference.’

  Blix picked up a remote control and clicked it rapidly a few times, making Dahlmann’s movements through the press conference venue earlier that day appear on the board.

  ‘Nicolai Wibe has also gone through all the videos from the area around the Eventyrbrua bridge on the day Geir Abrahamsen – Geia – received ten thousand kroner for activating Sonja Nordstrøm’s mobile phone and tossing it into an open grave. This guy’ – Blix clicked on a grainy CCTV image, taken from a distance – ‘is not a hundred per cent match for Walter Georg Dahlmann, but it’s the same type of hoodie. Same colour. He’s also got the same build, and looks around the same height. Krohn and his team are working on obtaining a positive ID for us. This guy walks down under the bridge where Geia was loitering, and comes out again barely seven minutes later – something that agrees with the timescale Geia has given us.’

  Blix gazed out over his assembled troops; his reasoning seemed to have been received well. ‘We don’t know if it definitely was Dahlmann who planted the phone at the press conference, but it’s natural to draw that conclusion. He doesn’t have press credentials, and he doesn’t work for any media outlet.’

  ‘So bring him in, then,’ Fosse’s voice boomed from the back of the room. ‘Find out what he was doing there. And see what he has to say for himself.’

  ‘That’s our next step, obviously,’ Blix said, raising his eyes to Fosse. ‘As soon as we find out where he is.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ the superintendent continued – his words sounded like a complaint.

  ‘When he was released, he gave his grandmother’s address,’ Kovic explained. ‘But he hasn’t been there. I’ve spoken to his mother, and she has no idea where he is, and she doesn’t have a phone number for him either. But she thought he might be in Oslo or Drammen. Possibly Kongsberg; he had some friends there, apparently.’

  ‘Does he have a car at his disposal?’

  ‘Not as far as we know.’

  Fosse had no further questions, but to Blix it looked as if his boss was deep in thought.

  ‘Before she was killed, Maria Lenth had made quite a name for herself: she had written two books that had received a good deal of attention, and was on the way up. She’d been on TV a couple of times too. Had a lot of press coverage.’

  Blix clicked on a picture of Lenth – a beautiful woman with long brown hair.

  ‘She’d been with Dahlmann for three years before she dumped him, apparently because she had become scared of him; he’d shown violent tendencies on a number of occasions. Just over six weeks later, she and Veum were killed.’ Blix used his hand to smother a cough. ‘Dahlmann tried to do a runner but was arrested following a two-day hunt in the Østland region. He pleaded self-defence: he claimed that Simen Veum and Maria Lenth had tried to kill him.’

  ‘What was his story?’ asked Wibe, seated near the centre of the room.

  Blix nodded to Kovic, who stepped forwards and faced the group.

  ‘Dahlmann alleged that Lenth had emptied a joint bank account they held. He said he paid her a visit and demanded his money back.’

  Blix navigated to one of the current photos of Dahlmann.

  ‘But Lenth refused,’ Kovic went on. ‘And in the ensuing argument, in which Dahlmann apparently behaved in an extremely threatening manner, Veum drew a gun. Dahlmann managed to disarm him, but in the turmoil Maria Lenth attacked him with a kitchen knife. It ended with her getting her throat cut. And Veum died four days later from his stab wounds.’

  Kovic gave Blix a fleeting glance and he responded with an encouraging nod.

  ‘After the killings, Dahlmann panicked. Maria Lenth was a well-known person and in a relationship with a police officer. Dahlmann thought no one would believe his side of the story. And he was right,’ Kovic added. ‘He said that was why he tried to flee.’

  Kovic took a gulp of water from a glass on the table before her.

  ‘That’s good,’ Fosse commented. The others turned towards him. ‘We have a suspect. But what on earth does Walter Georg Dahlmann have to do with Sonja Nordstrøm, Jeppe Sørensen and Jessica Flatebø?’

  ‘That’s what we have to try to find out,’ Blix replied.

  ‘And why go into the press conference and show us his face?’ asked Abelvik. ‘He must have known we’d check the surveillance cameras?’

  ‘Good question,’ Blix said. ‘So far everything suggests he doesn’t behave recklessly. Maybe he wants us to see him.’

  Gard Fosse moved forwards.

  ‘So now he’s completely freaked out,’ Wibe suggested. ‘This stress condition from Afghanistan – the screws are all loose, is that it?’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Blix said. ‘This seems planned to me.’

  Fosse was now at the front, standing beside Blix and Kovic. ‘Let’s not give a damn about the psychology until we actually know for certain that this is the right man,’ he said. ‘The first priority is to find him. Get him into an interview room. Then we’ll need something to build on. This Geia guy has spoken to him, hasn’t he? Get him in for a photo line-up.’

  ‘There are people out there looking for him as we speak,’ Blix said.

  ‘Excellent,’ Fosse said. ‘Then we’ll implement an all-out search first thing tomorrow.’

  He pivoted round and was on his way out when he came to a sudden halt. ‘And we’ll keep the fact that we have a specific suspect within these four walls. Understood?’ He scanned the room with a frown and then left.

  36

  Ragnar Ole Theod
orsen was, as always, running late. There was always something stealing his time, whether it was a delayed taxi, a neighbour who ‘just wanted a word’, or a phone call arriving at an inconvenient moment.

  Today, though, it had been a song, which was suddenly at his fingertips. He’d been listening to the radio, and then one of the melodies they played, a chord change, had put him on the track. He hadn’t copied anything – just let it inspire him; and once he had just over eight bars that sounded good, he’d felt he definitely had something. It wouldn’t necessarily be The Big Tune that would act as his pension, but it always brought him a childish pleasure to believe that it might, for a few seconds at least. He hadn’t managed to record it, time had run away from him, but he would do that as soon as he got back.

  Theodorsen didn’t have a mobile number for the journalist he was supposed to meet; otherwise he would have texted to say he’d been delayed. Well, he said to himself. It’s part of being a star, isn’t it? You were allowed to be late.

  He repeated the word ‘star’ to himself and shook his head with a smile. There wasn’t much glamour about what he did these days. Twenty years ago they’d played to packed houses everywhere they went. Now they were lucky if a hundred punters forked out for tickets. But who was he to complain? It was miles better than a nine-to-five. It beat any other job too, being able to travel the length and breadth of the country, playing your own music to audiences, and selling an album or two. He had enough to get by.

  It wasn’t so often these days that the press showed any interest in what they were doing, so their management had given strict instructions to him and the other members of the Fabulous Five: they had to say yes to all requests. This was why Ragnar Ole Theodorsen alighted from the tram at Stortorvet, in a downpour, twelve minutes late. As a rule all five of them were interviewed together, but this journalist had insisted that he was the only one of interest on this occasion. ‘You’re the brains of the Fabulous Five. You’re the one who writes all the songs.’ It hadn’t been easy to argue against that.