Lion's Mouth, The

by Holt, Anne

  Turning back to the typewriter, he let his fingers hammer out three or four sentences before he inserted a fresh sheet of paper. Then he faced Benjamin Grinde again, and seemed to hesitate before he raised his extremely long legs and size forty-seven boots onto the edge of the table.

  “Why were you there?”

  “At the office, at Birgitte’s?”

  “Birgitte? Did you know her? Personally, I mean?”

  Billy T.’s feet slammed onto the floor as he leaned across the desk.

  “Birgitte Volter and I have known each other since childhood,” Benjamin Grinde said, staring at the Chief Inspector. “She’s one year older than me, and during one’s teens that creates a certain distance. But in Nesodden, the community wasn’t very large. We knew each other at that time.”

  “At that time. What about now, are you still friends?”

  Benjamin Grinde shifted in his seat, placing his left leg over his right.

  “No, I wouldn’t claim that at all. We’ve had only sporadic contact over the years. Inadvertent contact, you might say, since our parents continued to live next door to each other for many years after we had left home. No. We can’t be said to be friends. Have been, would be more correct.”

  “But you’re on first-name terms?”

  Grinde smiled faintly.

  “When you’ve been friends in your childhood and youth, it would seem pretty unnatural to use surnames. Even if you’ve lost contact. Isn’t it the same for you?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, I expect you know why I was there. You can certainly check in her appointments diary. Or perhaps her secretary can confirm it. I wanted to discuss an increased allocation of resources for a commission I’m chairing. A commission appointed by the government.”

  “The Grinde Commission, of course,” Billy T. commented, putting his feet up on the desk again.

  Benjamin Grinde stared at the tips of the boots belonging to the enormous figure on the opposite side of the table. He wondered if his behavior was intended as a police officer’s demonstration of power now that he finally had one of the country’s most senior judges under his heel.

  Billy T. smiled. His eyes were intense, as icy blue as a husky’s, and the Supreme Court judge dropped his gaze onto his lap.

  “Don’t take these feet as a sign of lack of respect,” Billy T. remarked, wiggling his steel-capped toes. “It’s just so cumbersome having such long legs. Look! There’s quite simply not enough room for them underneath the desk!”

  He gave a comical demonstration before putting his feet back into position.

  “But you. If you were talking about this kind of … increased allocation of resources …”

  Grinde nodded imperceptibly.

  “… why didn’t you speak to the Minister of Health? Wouldn’t that have been more normal?”

  The judge lifted his gaze again.

  “To some extent. But I knew that Birgitte was particularly interested in the case. What’s more … it was an opportunity to meet her. In fact, we hadn’t spoken for many years. I wanted to congratulate her. On her new post, I mean.”

  “Why do you need more money?”

  “Money?”

  “Yes, why did you have to speak to Volter about obtaining more money for this committee of yours?”

  “Commission.”

  “The same thing. Why?”

  “The work is turning out to be far more comprehensive than we anticipated when the commission was appointed. We have found it necessary to conduct in-depth interviews with five hundred parents who lost their babies in 1965. It’s quite a task. And we have to … some investigations have to be conducted abroad.”

  He looked around, and let his eyes rest on the window, where the blue light from a squad car in the back yard was pulsating on the glass. Suddenly it stopped.

  “How long were you there?”

  The judge considered carefully; he remained seated and stared at his wristwatch, as though he could not recall the answer.

  “Difficult to say. I would assume about half an hour. I arrived at quarter to five, in any case. Actually, I was there for almost exactly three quarters of an hour. Half past five. That was when I left. I know that for certain, because I wondered whether I would catch a certain tram or take a taxi. Three quarters of an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  Billy T. stood up abruptly, towering over the far smaller judge.

  “Coffee? Tea? Cola? Do you smoke?”

  “I’d really like a cup of coffee, thanks. No, I don’t smoke.”

  Billy T. crossed the room and opened the door. He spoke softly to someone standing outside, then closed the door and sat down again, this time on the window ledge.

  The judge felt the stirrings of irritation.

  It was acceptable that the man’s head was shaved smooth and that he was wearing old denim jeans that had seen better days. Even his studded boots were acceptable at a pinch; his feet were so large that it must be difficult to find suitable footwear. The inverted cross, however, was a downright provocation, especially these days, when right-wing extremists and Satanists were committing serious, offensive crimes almost every day. And it must surely be possible to sit still during an interview.

  “Apologies if you think I look like a Nazi bastard,” Billy T. said.

  Could the man read his thoughts?

  “I spent years in the drug squad surveillance team,” the Chief Inspector added. “Haven’t quite managed to rid myself of the habit of looking like a lout. In fact it’s often quite effective. The boys get a bit matey, you see. The criminals, I mean. Don’t read anything into it.”

  There was a knock at the door, and a young woman wearing a threadbare red corduroy dress and sensible shoes entered without waiting for an answer, carrying two cups of coffee.

  “You’re an angel.” Billy T. grinned. “Thanks a lot!”

  The coffee, piping hot and strong as dynamite, was impossible to drink without slurping. The wax on the paper cups was melting, and as the cups softened, they became difficult to hold.

  “Did anything special happen at the meeting?” Billy T. enquired.

  The judge seemed to hesitate, spilling some coffee on his trousers and then wiping his thigh with firm, angry movements.

  “No,” he said, without making eye contact with the Chief Inspector. “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “Her secretary says she’d seemed out of sorts recently. Did you notice anything of that kind?”

  “I don’t really know Birgitte Volter any longer. She seemed very competent to me. No, I can’t say there was anything that struck me.”

  Benjamin Grinde lived both from and for the pursuit of justice and truth. He was used to telling the truth. He was particularly unused to lying. It made him tense, and he felt nauseous. He put down his coffee cup carefully, at the far edge of the desk, before looking the Chief Inspector straight in the eye.

  “There was nothing about her behavior that made me wonder if anything was wrong,” he said in a steady voice.

  The worst thing was that it seemed as if the Chief Inspector saw right through him, focusing directly on the lie that had coiled up like a poisonous snake somewhere behind his breast bone.

  “Nothing seemed abnormal,” he repeated, again looking out the window.

  The blue light had returned now, hammering repeatedly against the dark, dull windowpane.

  02.23 NORWEGIAN TIME, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

  Dear Billy T.,

  It’s unbelievable. I was in the middle of making dinner when the fax arrived. It’s just incredible! I phoned Cecilie right away, and she’s never rushed home from university so quickly. The murder has had quite a lot of coverage here as well, and we’re sitting glued to the television screen. But they don’t seem to be saying anything, just the same stuff over and over again. I’m missing home more than ever!

  Be careful not to lock yourselves into any theories. We have to learn something from the Swedes, who obviously got totally bogged
down in one definite “obvious” lead after another. What theories are you working on in the meantime? Terrorism? Right-wing extremists? As far as I’ve understood it, there’s a certain amount of activity noticeable in those circles at present. Remember for heaven’s sake the most obvious suspects: lunatics, family, rejected lovers (which you know more about than most …). How are you organizing yourselves? I have a thousand questions that you probably don’t have time to answer. But PLEASE: send me a message, and I promise to write more later.

  This is just an initial reaction, and I’m sending it in the hope that you manage to read it before you go to bed. Though you won’t be getting much sleep in the days ahead. I’m going to send this to your home fax machine as maybe the guys will be annoyed at a Chief Inspector in exile getting mixed up in matters that she doesn’t strictly have anything to do with any longer.

  Cecilie sends her very fondest regards. Typically, she’s most concerned about you! I’m thinking more about Norway, my Norway. It’s all completely crazy.

  Write soon!

  Your Hanne

  02.49, KVELDSAVISEN EDITORIAL OFFICE

  “Out of the question, Little. We simply can’t do that.”

  The editor was leaning over his desk looking at a draft front page, radically altered since the first special edition that had hit the streets before midnight. He was now faced with a front page emblazoned with an enormous photo of Benjamin Grinde, accompanied by a colossal, dramatic headline: “Supreme Court Judge Arrested”, and a subtitle: “Last person to see Volter alive”.

  “We just don’t have any proof of this,” the man said, pinching his nose and adjusting his glasses. “It won’t do. We’ll be sued. For millions.”

  Little Lettvik had no problem playing the martyr. She stood with her legs apart and flung out her arms over and over again, shaking her head and rolling her eyes in a grotesque fashion.

  “Honestly!”

  The roar was so loud that the constant buzz of the editorial offices was momentarily silenced. When they realized where the outburst originated, everybody continued what they were doing. Little Lettvik was no stranger to amateur dramatics, not even when they were inappropriate.

  “I have two sources,” she snarled through clenched teeth. “TWO SOURCES!”

  “Come with me,” the editor said, moving his hand up and down in a motion that was probably intended to be reassuring, but that Little Lettvik perceived as patronizing. Once well inside his impressive office, they plumped down in their respective chairs.

  “What sources do you have?” he asked, looking at her.

  “I’m not saying.”

  “Okay. Then there won’t be any headline.”

  He grabbed his phone and indicated with his eyes darting toward the door that she should leave. Little Lettvik hesitated briefly, but then stomped out and along the corridor until she burst into her own little shoebox. The tiny office was in blissful chaos, with books, newspapers, official documents, food wrappers and old apple cores everywhere. Rummaging around on the overcrowded desk, she located a folder she knew exactly where to find, amazingly enough, hidden between a pizza carton containing two dead pepperoni slices and an edition of the Arbeiderbladet newspaper.

  “Bloody hell, it’s hard work trying to sell newspapers,” she muttered as she pulled out a cigarillo.

  The folder on Benjamin Grinde was relatively comprehensive, as she had worked on it for several weeks. It contained everything that had been printed about his commission, from the very first interview with Frode Fredriksen, the lawyer who had initiated the whole enterprise. She located the newspaper cutting from Aftenposten.

  NOTHING ABOUT HUMANITY IS FOREIGN TO ME!

  Advocate Fredriksen celebrates 25th anniversary with acquittal in Brevik case

  By Tone Øvrebø and Anders Kurén (photo)

  Frode Fredriksen has certainly not stinted on his personal effects. His office contains many items that his far worse-off clients would kill for, literally speaking. A gigantic painting by the acclaimed contemporary artist Frans Widerberg covers one wall of his office, sending reddish-orange rays across a highly polished mahogany desk. On the desk, a family smiles from a silver frame: two adults and their fortunate offspring, one of each, and a wife who could easily be mistaken for a model. Which she is not: Frode Fredriksen is married to the well-known psychologist and social commentator Beate Frivoll. Yesterday, Fredriksen’s client Karsten Brevik was acquitted of triple murder, a serious setback for the prosecuting authorities. Today Frode Fredriksen celebrates twenty-five years as an advocate.

  “How does it feel to have made a successful career from dedicating your life to losers?”

  “First and foremost, it’s really exciting. What’s more, I wouldn’t call them losers. I don’t like the word. No human being is a loser. Some are simply more unfortunate than others, and the prize they have won in the lottery of life is not as substantial as what has come the way of the rest of us. Secondly, it is rewarding. Extremely rewarding, I would say. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t learn something new. In twenty-five years I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a large number of people in the most dreadful situations. Nothing about humanity is foreign to me any longer.”

  “Does it not take a heavy toll, working with violent criminals and killers?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. There’s a definite challenge with such clients: acquittal, or a reduced sentence. Where injustice has occurred, but no blame can be allocated, then it is much harder. For example, I am currently helping a couple who lost a baby thirty years ago. In fact it happened in 1965, the same year that my wife and I had our first child. The death seemed both meaningless and unnecessary, and it has tortured this family for all these years. Now I am seeking an ex gratia payment on behalf of the parents. Such matters are difficult. Extremely difficult!”

  The interview went on much longer, but she could not find the second page of the clipping. It did not matter. The date added in slovenly handwriting in the top left-hand corner was September 21, 1996. The article had given rise to an avalanche of requests to the elegant lawyer behind the mahogany desk. An amazingly short time after the interview, he had applied to Parliament for ex gratia payments on behalf of 119 parents. All of them felt that the death of their particular little poppet had been unexpected and totally unnecessary. What all the cases had in common was that there was nothing to indicate malpractice. Most of the death certificates cited “sudden cardiac arrest”.

  The hullabaloo went on and on. The opposition parties in Parliament – apparently paralyzed by their battle against Prime Minister Gro, whom no one yet knew had decided to resign her premiership – had forced the government to set up an investigative commission and this was finally appointed on November 10, 1996. It had become unavoidable, since just a few strokes of the keyboard at Statistics Norway could establish that many more children under the age of one had died in 1965 than in any year before or since.

  Benjamin Grinde was the perfect choice to chair the commission, given his position as a Supreme Court judge, embellished with a bachelor’s degree in medicine like the top tier of a most unusual career wedding cake. The opposition parties in Parliament were still savoring the taste of success after another Supreme Court judge had presented an investigative report concerning the secret services barely six months earlier. Since Grinde’s dissertation had been entitled “Silence and suppression: the patient’s legal protection in health examinations”, he was an obvious candidate, and the integrity associated with his office underlined this.

  Little Lettvik was worn out.

  If she really were to think about it, she wouldn’t be able to explain why, only a few hours after the murder of the country’s Prime Minister, she was sitting reading old newspaper cuttings about a health issue no one discussed any longer and whose outcome was uncertain. Perhaps it was because she had worked on it for too long. These past weeks she had not unearthed anything new, and only her position as undisputed senior journalist ensured
that she got away with it. The case concerning the infant deaths interested her. Maybe it was blinding her. But there was no time for that now. She needed to concentrate on the homicide.

  Benjamin Grinde. It was Benjamin Grinde who had grabbed her attention. The mere thought of the man caused jabs of pain in her knee. It was impossible not to be intrigued by the coincidence. For weeks she had been digging to find out what the Grinde Commission was up to, without discovering anything but the most mundane and fairly obvious facts. Then the chair of the commission pops up as perhaps the last person in the country to have seen the Prime Minister alive.

  “Now you’d damn well better set to work, Little.”

  It was the editor. As usual he shot a look filled with loathing across the tiny room, before turning on his heel and repeating, “Now you’d better get to it. There should be more than enough to be going on with.”

  07.00, GOVERNMENT CONFERENCE ROOM IN THE TOWER BLOCK

  They all felt the same insistent revulsion as they passed the entrance to the Prime Minister’s office on the floor below. Although there was no longer a police presence in the vicinity – at least not a visible one – and although the only obvious abnormality was a closed door that was usually kept open, they were aware that, behind the wall they all tried to avoid staring at, Birgitte Volter had been shot and killed twelve hours previously.

  The government ministers were extraordinarily quiet; only the Minister of Trade’s singsong voice was just about audible.

  “It’s just so awful. I simply can’t find the words.”

  She was sitting at the massive oval table on which stood several slim, modern microphones. One of them was audaciously pointing directly at her; she held her hand over it as she leaned forward to gain the ear of the Minister of Defense. It was no use. They were both sitting near the top of the table, as their age and seniority in Cabinet required, and the sound carried right across the room.

  The Foreign Minister was last to enter. The others were already seated. He was unusually pale, and the Minister of Culture could swear that his hair had turned grayer overnight. She tried to send him an encouraging smile, but he did not make eye contact with any of them. Standing momentarily beside the Prime Minister’s seat at the head of the oval table, he made up his mind quickly and drew out the large leather chair, left it vacant, and sat down on the chair to its left. The Foreign Minister’s seat.