Death Deserved

by Thomas Enger

  ‘Those figures are not correct,’ Hansteen replied, shaking his head.

  ‘Oh yes they are.’

  He gazed at the man in front of him. Agreeing to this meeting was obviously a mistake. He felt cold. He was about to get to his feet when the man laid a hand on his arm to hold him back. His grip was firm.

  ‘It’s not yet three o’clock,’ the man insisted.

  ‘Yes, you said that already,’ Hansteen replied, aware he was starting to get annoyed. ‘What in God’s holy name does the time of day have to do with this?’

  He received no answer.

  ‘And why did you want to meet me if you only wanted to—’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ the man broke in as he stood up himself. ‘It takes a bit of time to get everything ready, so maybe we’re as well to begin after all.’

  Perplexed, Hansteen sat watching the man as he picked up his briefcase and opened it with two sharp clicks. A shudder ran through Hansteen’s body when the man took out a length of rope and handed it to him.

  Hansteen automatically accepted it. ‘What … is this?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been lying to you,’ the man said, taking out a square device – a little like a mobile phone. ‘You’re not going to receive half a million from me.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘How does that feel?’ he asked. ‘Being lied to? It’s not good, is it?’

  Hansteen sat there staring at the man, struggling to gather his thoughts.

  ‘Are you angry? Disappointed? Sorry?’

  Hansteen looked at the rope. Felt the fibres on his fingers, dry and cold.

  ‘I’m going back inside,’ he said, standing up. ‘This…’

  But the man was in front of him, blocking his path. Hansteen tried to edge past, but the man moved across.

  ‘Do you want to shout for help?’ His voice was chilled and controlled.

  Hansteen met his cold gaze.

  ‘Where’s your God now, when you need him most?’

  Hansteen swallowed hard and felt how dry his throat was. How cold he was, all over. He struggled to say something, but no sound emerged. He wanted to pray, but none of the words was distinct. He felt a strong desire to phone Ulla Marie, an indescribable longing to hear her voice one more time.

  The next moment, the man took a step closer. Hansteen didn’t have time to react before he heard a buzzing sound, as if something was giving off sparks. Just as he was about to ask what in heaven’s name was going on, it was as if his entire body were shaking and closing down. He couldn’t utter a word. He fell to one side, towards the bench. And when he struck it, it felt as if the sky, bright blue today, tore asunder above him.

  55

  Blix ended up in a traffic jam near Røa, and even using the blue light it was a slow business weaving his way through.

  Hansteen was not answering his phone, but a secretary answered at his office. She informed him that the pastor had a private meeting at his home at quarter to three. There was a name in the appointments book: Dahlmann.

  Blix glanced at the dashboard. It was already 15.04.

  Swearing with frustration, he pummelled the steering wheel.

  Killing someone took time, though. It took time to make an escape too. Blix kept his eyes peeled as he drove up past the grand houses and gardens in one of Oslo’s most fashionable residential areas. He passed a woman with a pram as well as a jogger. A man in a tight-fitting suit carrying a briefcase with a placard from an estate agency chain tucked under his arm, turned and gazed after him.

  His phone rang. It was Kovic.

  ‘Haven’t you been removed from the case?’ she said.

  ‘That’s not important right now. Where are you all?’

  ‘Just beside Ullevål stadium. What about you?’

  ‘I’m almost there. Are there any patrol cars ahead of me?’

  ‘Yes, there should be.’

  Then there may still be hope, Blix thought, as he disconnected the call. Several hundred metres further along, he spotted the rear of a police patrol car. Swinging his car up on to the pavement, he jumped out. Found Hansteen’s number in his phone log and tried again.

  Outside the entrance to the pastor’s huge house, he met a uniformed officer.

  ‘Should we go in?’ he asked.

  Blix strode past him without responding. Pushed at the door and found it open. He heard a phone ringing inside and rushed towards the sound. It was on the kitchen worktop. But there was no Hansteen.

  Blix dismissed the call and shouted Hansteen’s name. No answer. He walked into the living room and called out again, but still no sign of life.

  ‘Blix,’ said the officer who’d followed him inside. He stood at the living-room window, pointing outside.

  At the foot of the garden, they saw Pastor Hansteen hanging from a tree.

  ‘Fuck,’ Blix swore, and they rushed outside.

  With the aid of the young officer, he managed to bring Hansteen down from the tree. They laid him out and began to try to resuscitate him, but they soon realised that it was futile. He’d been dead for several minutes.

  Kovic, Wibe and Abelvik arrived just as they stopped.

  ‘It takes a strong man to lift such a heavy body up into a tree,’ Wibe commented. ‘How much did he weigh – a hundred and twenty kilos?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Blix said, as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘He’s still warm. Dahlmann can’t have got far. We need to spread out. Call in as many officers as we can. He could be anywhere at all. In a neighbour’s house, a kennel…’

  ‘Nordmarka forest is right on the doorstep,’ Abelvik said. ‘There are footpaths leading to Sognsvann lake.’

  ‘We have to get someone out there, have them move towards us from that side,’ Blix said. ‘Look out for someone who appears strong. And look for someone who…’

  Blix stopped himself. His journey to Ris was running through his head.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said to himself. There had been something about that man in a suit he’d encountered along the road. Something he’d subconsciously latched on to. There had been something about his bearing or the way he walked. He could easily have been Dahlmann.

  ‘What is it?’ Kovic queried.

  ‘I spotted a guy as I drove here. An estate agent. There was something familiar about him. The timing fits really well. He was walking on his own. Looked pretty stocky and strong; his suit was too small for him.’

  ‘Is Dahlmann strong and stocky?’ Wibe asked.

  Blix pondered this for a few seconds. ‘Difficult to say from the recent photos we have, but I don’t really think so.’

  ‘And he’s not an estate agent either?’

  ‘No, but he could have been in disguise. He looked as if he was on his way to the subway station. I’ll go there.’

  Blix turned towards the street.

  ‘There’s only one line at that stop,’ he yelled as he set off. ‘Call Ruter’s head office and get them to stop all their trains to and from Ris. And make a start on door-to-door inquiries.’

  Behind the steering wheel again, he focused his mind on the man he had spotted. It couldn’t have been Dahlmann, could it? He could have disappeared in any direction, not only via the subway. But whether or not he was right, he didn’t have a single second to lose.

  56

  The clocks on the wall in the news.no editorial office showed the time in Tokyo, New York, London and Oslo. Beside the row of clocks were TV screens showing live footage from CNN and other international news channels, as well as the web pages of the major newspapers.

  The Oslo clock showed twelve minutes to four. Emma shifted her gaze to the wide door leading into the corridor. Anita had locked it at ten to three. And soon an hour would have passed since Dahlmann’s appointed time. But nothing had happened. The police Twitter account had not been updated, and none of the major media outlets had reported anything of significance.

  Emma tried to concentrate on the interview she’d conducted with a psychology
professor, and managed to write the final paragraphs. She’d laid out to him her whole hypothesis, explaining that everything seemed painstakingly directed by a man with a plan. The aim of the interview had been to encourage the psychologist to come up with something about what the subsequent plan might involve. The most useable quote Emma had gleaned was that the perpetrator might have a yearning to become a celebrity himself. ‘This reminds me a little of Gary Gilmore,’ the psychologist had said, ‘who in a sense acquired the status he craved once he’d become a double murderer. He appeared to get a kick out of knowing that people would remember his name forever.’

  The professor thought the police were pursuing an obvious psychopath, that the person concerned in all probability harboured delusions, either about himself or about the world he inhabited.

  She’d also spoken to a retired police investigator, someone who was often approached for comment on current cases, but all he could contribute was a ‘deep anxiety about the outcome’.

  Nevertheless, there was enough to run a story, and Emma used the fresh quotes to regurgitate much of what she’d written the previous day, bringing her countdown theory into focus once again. She uploaded the article and brought it to Anita Grønvold’s attention.

  Then she concentrated again on her lists.

  She had searched the newspaper text archives and come up with a list of well-known people who could somehow be linked with the number three, and a similar list for the number two. The list for two was far longer and contained many high-profile programme presenters on TV 2.

  The list had grown unmanageably long, so she’d begun to look at eight, nine and ten instead. People who, according to the countdown theory, must already be dead. Timewise, she had restricted her searches to the weeks prior to the disappearance of the Danish footballer. Jeppe Sørensen was number seven, and with the exception of Sonja Nordstrøm, everything pointed to the killer operating in chronological order. This had given her one possible hit for the number nine.

  Mona Kleven.

  Only Aftenposten had written about her death. It emerged that the forty-five-year-old union leader had died in a subway accident at Sinsen the previous Friday. Reading between the lines of the brief report, it was regarded as a suicide.

  Kleven had initially come to attention as ‘the Miracle Baby’, when she was the only survivor of a plane accident in the seventies. As a teenager, she had found the spotlight again after being involved in a dramatic train crash that also claimed a number of fatalities. Later she became a familiar face as the chief employee representative of a major trade union, but then she had contracted a serious form of cancer. A national newspaper ran an in-depth interview with her once she had recovered. It described how, throughout her life, she’d been haunted by accidents. She’d broken two bones in a riding accident in her twenties, and she’d also survived a diving accident. They portrayed her as a woman with nine lives – an epithet that had stuck to her during her very public battle to regain leadership of the trade union.

  A sudden noise made Emma raise her head. Someone was yanking hard at the door. The door handle waggled up and down several times, followed by furious knocking, before the door was opened from the inside.

  ‘Have we started locking the door or what?’ an irritated Henrik Wollan demanded when he entered, wrenching off his jacket. Emma had no chance to say anything before Anita emerged from her cubicle.

  ‘Ruter has just announced that the police have stopped all traffic on line one, and there’s police activity at Ris subway station,’ she said, phone in hand.

  ‘What kind of activity?’ Wollan asked.

  Anita did not reply, her eyes glued to her phone.

  ‘Several messages on Twitter about major police mobilisation in Trosterudveien,’ she went on.

  Emma glanced at the newspaper websites on the big screens. The front page of VG had just been updated: ‘LATEST: Suspicious Death in Ris’.

  ‘Get into a taxi,’ Anita said, pointing at Wollan.

  ‘But I just arrived,’ he protested.

  ‘And now you’re going out again,’ Anita ordered, making a get-out gesture with her hand, before turning to Emma: ‘You post a short version.’

  Wollan gave a loud sigh as he shrugged on his jacket again. Emma bent over her keyboard to see what the other media sources were saying. VG Nett had two lines: the police confirmed that they had been called out to a suspicious death in Ris, and that the operation was ongoing.

  Emma called Ruter’s customer service centre, and while she was on hold, she began to hammer out the story. A young man answered almost immediately and Emma introduced herself.

  ‘Why is line one at a standstill?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ll have to ask the police about that,’ he replied. ‘All I know is that they’ve stopped four trains and no one is allowed to get off until the police have searched them all.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Emma said, and hung up.

  This was all she needed to add an edge to her story. She published it with a promise that news.no would be back with more details.

  She considered contacting some of the people who were tweeting about the police operation, but instead headed to the phone directory and looked up Trosterudveien.

  The list of residents was lengthy. She scanned through them, on the lookout for famous names. On the third page, one turned up, and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

  Hans Fredrik Hansteen, the celebrity pastor.

  The Trinity Church.

  Three.

  57

  All the coaches that had left Ris station between 3.05 and 3.40 p.m. were halted and all the passengers held up until the police had scoured every carriage. On line one this involved two trains in both directions. One of them had been stopped between Stortinget and Jernbanetorget, and had already been searched. The others were several hundred metres ahead of Blix, between Steinerud and Frøen stations, while the final two had come to a halt at Vettakollen and Lillevann. Patrol cars were on their way.

  The train driver opened the doors once Blix had shown his police badge. Just as he was about to start searching through the carriages, his phone rang.

  ‘No trace of Dahlmann yet,’ Kovic reported breathlessly. ‘We’ll soon have covered half of Trosterudveien. A lot of cars have been coming and going in the area. We’re trying to check them all.’

  ‘Look at the toll stations in the vicinity as well,’ Blix said, scanning the occupants of the carriage, who were staring wide-eyed at him. ‘With a bit of luck we’ll get a match with one of the cars we’ve identified near the other crime scenes.’

  ‘We’ll be lucky if he’s used the same vehicle for everything he’s done,’ Kovic replied.

  ‘Check it out all the same,’ Blix told her and rang off, then prodded a young man in a suit, sitting half-asleep. He wasn’t either Dahlmann or the man Blix had spotted.

  A passenger asked what was going on. Another wanted to know if there was a terrorist threat.

  ‘No,’ Blix answered. ‘We’re just looking for someone.’

  Six men in suits were on board. None of them resembled the man Blix had passed in his car.

  At the end of the train he jumped down on to the track again and phoned Hans Fredrik Hansteen’s secretary.

  At first she refused to believe what had happened, and then she burst into tears.

  ‘The man Hansteen was supposed to meet at his house,’ Blix continued after a pause. ‘Dahlmann. Do you know who he is?’

  The secretary sniffed, struggling to compose herself. ‘No,’ she replied tearfully. ‘He just called and said he wanted to meet Hans Fredrik face to face. Today.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  She sniffed again and took some time to reflect.

  ‘I think it could have been Monday.’

  ‘Can you find out exactly when? It would help us a great deal if we could have the precise time and a phone number.’

  Blix heard her leafing through a book or a sheaf of notes.


  ‘I don’t think I can be any more specific. But I’m pretty sure he phoned on Monday.’

  Blix tried to get more details from her, but the call was one of many. He made a mental note to ask for the Trinity Church’s phone lists, and drew the conversation to a close.

  His next phone call was to Gard Fosse. The tone at the other end was cold and dismissive.

  Blix made no comment about his outburst the previous day, instead getting straight to the point. He gave an account of what had taken place and the progress made in the investigation before explaining how he had realised Hansteen would be Dahlmann’s next victim.

  ‘I was maybe only ten minutes too late,’ he concluded.

  When Fosse gave no immediate response, Blix went on: ‘You can’t keep me out of this case, Gard. Not now. You need me, and you know that.’

  ‘What about Emma Ramm?’

  ‘What about her?’ Blix retorted. ‘None of what I’ve given her has harmed the investigation. And if I hadn’t spoken to her, we wouldn’t have come as close as we did today.’

  Before Fosse managed to get a word in, Blix continued: ‘You need as many people as possible right now. What if he kills again before you’re able to catch him? The chances of us doing that are far greater if I’m involved.’

  Once again Fosse took time to think.

  Blix exhaled loudly. ‘You can suspend me once all this is over,’ he said. ‘God knows you and I haven’t always agreed on … things, but set that aside, for once, and let me get on with my job.’

  Fosse finally responded with a sigh: ‘OK. Finish up at Ris when you think you can, and we’ll have a run-through here at the station afterwards.’

  ‘Thanks,’ was Blix’s terse response.

  58

  Anita had Wollan on loudspeaker. She came out to Emma with the phone in her hand.

  ‘Nobody here is willing to say much right now,’ Wollan reported. ‘But it is the pastor who is dead.’

  Emma was longing to ask if Wollan was sure this time, but managed to hold back.