Lion's Mouth, The

by Holt, Anne

  He banged his fists on the table, at the same time snapping his teeth together ferociously. His hands were tender after his outburst half an hour earlier, and a stab of pain jolted through his forearms.

  That helped. The security guard straightened up, literally, sitting bolt upright in his chair as he used his hands to brush his shoulders.

  “I was sitting in the guardroom. Then an alarm sounded in the conference room. They are the silent type of alarms; you don’t hear them in the actual location, only down in our office. They go off all the time, every other day at least, and we don’t usually pay much attention to them.”

  He was speaking to the table edge.

  “But we do have to check, of course. Always. So I went up then … That is to say, it’s always supposed to be two of us who check, but we’d had quite a busy day because of the renovation work, and my partner had fallen asleep. So I went by myself.”

  Now he was trying to communicate with the ill-treated waste-paper basket in the corner.

  “So I took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, because it was the other guy, the one who was asleep, who had the keys for the elevator to go all the way up. I said hello to the guard at the entrance, and went upstairs to the fifteenth floor.”

  “Hold on a minute.”

  Billy T. waved with the flat of his hand.

  “Can you take the elevator directly up to the fifteenth floor? Without passing the man in the glass booth?”

  “Yes, to the sixteenth as well. But you need to have a key. Without the key, the elevator only goes as far as the fourteenth.”

  Billy T. pondered why this had not been mentioned when the Chief of Police had made his speech the previous day. He would let it lie for the moment, though they should all have been alerted to such an obvious method of accessing the Prime Minister’s office. He quickly scribbled down “Elevator” on a yellow Post-it note, and stuck it to the lampshade.

  “Continue,” he demanded.

  “Yes, well, then I went into the conference room, but there was nobody there. A faulty connection, as usual. They’ve never been able to sort out that system.”

  “Was the door to the restroom open?”

  The security guard suddenly stared at him, for the very first time. He hesitated, and Billy T. could have sworn that a minuscule tremor crossed the man’s cheek.

  “No. It was closed. I opened it and peeped inside the restroom, I had to do that, because someone could have hidden in there, but it was empty too. The door from the restroom to the Prime Minister’s office was closed. I didn’t touch it.”

  “And then?”

  “And then … Yes, well, then I went downstairs again. That was that.”

  “Why didn’t you speak to the secretary in the anteroom?”

  “The secretary? Why should I speak to her?”

  Now the guard looked really surprised, but he had dropped his gaze and was studying something on Billy T.’s shirtfront instead.

  “I don’t usually … Besides, she wasn’t there.”

  “Yes, she was. She was there all afternoon and evening.”

  “No, she was not!”

  The security guard shook his head vigorously.

  “She might have been in the toilet, for all I know, but she definitely wasn’t there. I can see …”

  He leaned across the diagram, pointing.

  “Do you see? I would have seen her from there.”

  Billy T. chewed at his cheek.

  “Mmmm … okay.”

  He removed the yellow note from the Anglepoise lamp, and jotted down “Toilet?” before replacing it.

  “So then you went back down again. To … What was it you called it?”

  “The guardroom.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Turning toward an enameled aluminum shelf at his back, Billy T. grabbed a thermos flask and poured steaming coffee into a cup decorated with a sketch of Puccini. The guard looked quizzically at the coffee cup, but did not receive a response.

  “I see you’re interested in guns,” Billy T. remarked, blowing noisily on the scalding hot drink.

  “Is it that obvious?” the guard said querulously, glancing at the clock.

  “Very funny. You do have a sense of humor, don’t you? From the papers, you know. It’s in there. I know most things about you, you see. I also have your security clearance here.”

  He waved a sheet of paper provocatively before replacing it at the bottom of the pile.

  “You shouldn’t have that,” the guard said angrily. “That’s not in accordance with the regulations!”

  Billy T. grinned broadly, and fixed his eyes on those of the guard: this time the man did not manage to avoid his gaze.

  “Now just you listen to one little thing. Right now we’re not exactly paying too much attention to the regulations, here at the station. If you’ve anything to complain about, just go ahead and try. Then we’ll see if we can spare anyone to look into that kind of thing at the moment. I doubt it, actually. What kind of gun do you own?”

  “I’ve got four guns. All of them registered. They’re all at home, so if you want to come home with me, then—”

  He stopped abruptly.

  “Then what?”

  “I can bring them here, if you want.”

  “Do you know, I think I would like you to do just that,” Billy T. said. “But I emphasize that it’s a voluntary action on your part. I’m not ordering you to bring them in.”

  The man muttered something under his breath that Billy T. could not catch.

  “One more thing,” the Chief Inspector said suddenly. “Do you know Per Volter?”

  “The Prime Minister’s son?”

  “Yes. How did you know that, by the way?”

  “I’ve read the newspapers, haven’t I? Umpteen papers this past couple of days. No, I don’t know him.”

  His entire body became increasingly agitated, and he fleetingly, unnervingly, crossed his left foot over his right.

  “But,” he added all of a sudden, “I know who he is, of course. A good shot. Competition marksman.”

  “Does that mean you’ve met him?”

  The security guard took a conspicuously long time to consider this.

  “No,” he said, and for the second time looked directly into Billy T.’s icy blue eyes. “I’ve never met him. Never in my whole life.”

  14.10, MOTZFELDTS GATE 14

  The loudspeaker on the computer piped its snappy electronic tune before progressing to a long-drawn-out, tense wail. Little Lettvik shuffled into her workroom, a voluminous apron wrapped around her body and a cigarillo in her mouth. The machine took its time to receive the message, and when the tiny envelope appeared at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, she immediately clicked into her inbox.

  The message had no sender. She directed the cursor at the top line, and double-clicked again.

  The warrant.

  Konrad Storskog had kept his promise.

  She was not entirely sure whether she would keep hers.

  16.30, OSLO POLICE STATION

  “I’m starting to get bloody tired of these press conferences,” Assistant Chief of Police Håkon Sand mumbled.

  The public relations manager at the station had come from a well-paid post at Dagbladet newspaper, and had surprised them all by taking on the thankless task of keeping society informed about everything the police were unable to achieve.

  “Press briefing, Håkon. Not press conference,” he said, holding open the door to the Police Chief’s outer office.

  “But four times a day? Is that really necessary?”

  “It’s the best way of avoiding speculation. You made a good job of it, by the way. The uniform suits you! And now there are four hours until the next one. You can look forward to that.”

  “And meanwhile, we’ve still nothing new to report,” Håkon Sand commented, tugging at his infernal collar, whose synthetic material made his neck red and sore.

  There were six men in the Police Chief’s o
ffice: one was setting up a slide projector while another was trying to find out how the venetian blinds worked. They had no success, and in the end the secretary had to be called in. She darkened the room in thirty seconds, and switched on the light before closing the door again behind her.

  “We’ve received a provisional autopsy report,” the Chief of Police announced; by now his bluish shadow was in the process of becoming a full beard. “And it is in fact fairly specific. We were right as far as the time of the murder was concerned. Between half past five and seven. We cannot be more precise than that yet, since there were such extreme fluctuations in the temperature of the room, making it difficult to say.”

  He made a sign to Håkon Sand, who stood up and flicked the light switch.

  An image appeared on the wall. A close-up of Prime Minister Birgitte Volter’s head. In the blonde hair, you could clearly see a hole, quite small, rather round, with black edges and a streak of dried blood in the strands. The Police Chief nodded to the Head of CID, who stepped into the projector beam and produced a folding pointer.

  “As you see, the entrance wound is small. The bullet stopped here …”

  He clicked the remote control, and a new image came into view. Underneath the hair you could clearly perceive a tiny bulge, almost like a painful, nasty pimple.

  “It had entered the temple, passed through the brain and cranium on the other side, and in fact ended up across here, just under the skin. Birgitte Volter died instantly.”

  He clicked yet again.

  “This is the bullet.”

  It looked modest, even though it was greatly enlarged: a black-and-white tape measure beside it indicated that the ammunition was small-caliber.

  “And the strange thing is …” he said, then interrupted himself. “No, let us first of all have the technicians’ conclusions.”

  One more click brought up a drawing. A woman sat in an office chair with her hands on the desk. Behind her stood a faceless man, with a gun in his hand; a revolver directed at the woman’s temple.

  “It must have happened something like this. It’s quite obvious the gun must have touched the temple as the shot was fired. That can be deduced from the burn marks around the entrance wound. Which tells us that the perpetrator must have been standing behind her. There’s certainly no room in front of her.”

  The pointer smacked the office desk in the picture.

  “We won’t speculate, of course, but it might be that—”

  “A blackmail scenario,” Håkon Sand declared.

  The other men looked at him. The Security Service Chief, who was now wearing a charcoal suit and red tie, closed his eyes and took such a deep breath through his nose that it made a whistling noise.

  The Head of CID continued. “Yes. It might well look like that. And in addition …”

  He produced a new image, and now the wound in the Prime Minister’s head was gaping at them, enlarged a thousand times.

  “… we see here fragments of material. Woolen fibers, it seems. We assume that they are from the shawl she was wearing, the one we have still not found. Black and red wool fibers. Which means that—”

  “Was she shot through her own scarf?” Håkon Sand asked. “Was she wearing it on her head?”

  The Head of CID seemed annoyed at the interruptions.

  “I suggest we open this up for discussion afterward,” he said truculently, swinging the pointer around until it suddenly became caught in a picture hook belonging to a painting that had been taken down for the occasion. “No, she was not wearing the shawl on her head, she was wearing it over her shoulder. But she may have had it over her head just then, almost as a—”

  “A hood,” Håkon Sand muttered. “She was blindfolded. By the perpetrator.”

  “Exactly,” the Security Service Chief interjected, adjusting the knot of his tie as he leaned forward. “The man may have placed the shawl over her head to frighten her even more. That’s a well-known tactic, to prevent the victim from seeing anything at all. It makes people feel confused. Darkness, I mean.”

  “And then we come to the thing that strikes me as the most remarkable aspect of this case.”

  The Head of CID had obviously decided not to allow himself to be put off by the ill-timed interruptions.

  “The caliber.”

  Again the photo of the bullet appeared on the wall.

  “It’s too small.”

  The Police Chief was now on his feet, standing at the window, gazing into the room as he rubbed the small of his back.

  “What do you mean by too small?”

  “It’s 7.62 millimeters. Small. By far the most common caliber for a handgun is 9 millimeters. Or .38 as they say in the USA. With small-caliber ammunition like this, it can’t be guaranteed…” Scratching his forehead, he hesitated just a touch too long.

  “Can’t be guaranteed that the lady would die!” Håkon Sand leaned forward eagerly in his seat.

  “Exactly,” the Head of CID mumbled despondently, looking up at the ceiling.

  “I came across that once before,” Håkon Sand continued. “A guy who had shot himself in the head twice. Twice! The first shot had entered his brain without doing much damage, at least not enough to kill him right away. But why …”

  Now he was the one to hesitate, and the Head of CID took over.

  “Yes, just so. Why should a person whose intention was to kill the Prime Minister and who was cunning enough to enter what is probably the most carefully guarded office in all of Norway, bring with him a gun that, strictly speaking, was not suitable for the job? And as if that was not enough …”

  He let the red tip of the pointer outline the bullet.

  “This is an extremely rare caliber. In this country, at least. You can’t buy it over the counter; although they can be specially ordered, of course.”

  “However, if …” the Chief of Police began, crossing over to the wall that served as a screen, “… if you are conducting some kind of extortion … I mean, if he came to blackmail her, and not to kill her … what was it he was after? And why did he kill her, if that was not his intention from the beginning?”

  The room was silent, and the atmosphere stuffy. The Police Chief pressed a button on the telephone.

  “Coffee,” he said tersely, depressing the button again.

  Two minutes later the six men around the Police Chief’s conference table were slurping coffee. Eventually the Security Service Chief put down his white mug and cleared his throat.

  “The King of Jordan was supposed to arrive here next Wednesday. Incognito.”

  The others looked at one another, and the Police Chief stared intently at the Head of the Criminal Intelligence Section, a magnanimous red-haired man who, unusually for him, had not uttered a word during the entire proceedings.

  “An attempt to rescue the last vestiges of the Oslo Agreement,” continued Ole Henrik Hermansen, the Security Service Chief, after a brief pause during which he peered around, obviously searching for something. “Are we allowed to smoke in here?”

  “Not really,” the Chief of Police said, rubbing his head. “But we can make an exception today.”

  He produced a glass ashtray from the desk drawer and placed it in front of Hermansen, who had already lit a cigarette.

  “Because of Prime Minister Volter’s death, the visit will not now take place, of course. That could be a lead. On the other hand, there would be other far less dramatic ways of stopping the King of Jordan’s visit. If details of his trip had been leaked, a telephone threat to us would have been sufficient.”

  Smoke rings formed a chain of haloes above his head.

  “Then there are the right-wing extremists, of course. As you know, they’ve started to stir. The newspapers exaggerate, admittedly, but we know that at least two or three of the groups are committed enough in their beliefs to actually plan an assassination. Until now, we’ve regarded them as insignificant, not fanatical enough. It looks as though that’s no longer the case.”

 
; “But …”

  Håkon Sand waved his forefinger like an over-enthusiastic exam candidate.

  “… if they’re the ones behind it, why haven’t they … claimed responsibility for the murder? Wouldn’t a great deal of the point in committing the murder be lost if none of us got to know that they’re the ones who did it?”

  “You’ve got a point,” Ole Henrik Hermansen conceded, without looking in Håkon Sand’s direction.

  “We had expected a message. There hasn’t been one. But if it’s true that one or several of these groups are responsible for the killing, then we have a huge problem. On Friday.”

  “The funeral,” the Police Chief said, with a note of fatigue in his voice.

  “Exactly. The Prime Minister is at the very top of their so-called death lists. All the others on those lists, and I mean every single one of them, will be at the funeral.”

  “And that’ll be hell on earth,” commented the Head of the Anti-Terror Squad, a thickset, dark-haired giant of a man.

  “You could be right there,” the Security Service Chief responded, stubbing out his cigarette with a crushing, resolute movement. “That may be why they have not yet issued any declaration. They’re waiting. It’s entirely possible, of course. Most definitely, entirely possible.”

  21.39, STOLMAKERGATA 15

  “Non potendo carezzarmi,

  Le manine componesti in croce,

  E tu sei morto senza sapere

  Quanto t’amava questa tua mamma.”

  Billy T. stood in a little bedroom that seemed even smaller because of the bunk beds on either side, with the distance between them only about half a meter. He took a break from making up the beds, and held his head in his hands as he supported himself on the top bunk. The music blasted through the whole apartment: he had loudspeakers in every room. Even in the boys’ room, though his persistent attempts to teach four young lads aged between six and eight to love opera had fallen on stony ground so far.

  Sister Angelica cried over the loss of her dead son in the middle of the second part of Puccini’s Il trittico, The Triptych, and Billy T. lifted the bedclothes up to his face, closing his eyes. There was a smarting sensation behind his eyelids. Since Friday morning, he had slept for only five hours and that had been a restless sleep, during which he’d tossed from side to side and had woken feeling even more exhausted than when he had gone to bed. Soon he would have to capitulate to the Rohypnol tablets lying in the bathroom closet as a second lifebelt; he had not touched them for the past year.