Dead Joker

by Anne Holt

  “Yes.” Karianne Holbeck nodded. “The hard disk was new, it turns out.”

  The door crashed open and Billy T. burst in, filling the room with his presence, which made Karianne Holbeck fall silent.

  “Go on,” Hanne Wilhelmsen encouraged, without looking in Billy T.’s direction. Offended, he sat down beside Karl Sommarøy and drew the sensational newspaper headlines toward him.

  “The hard disk had been replaced,” Karianne Holbeck explained. “It was probably done quite recently. We’ve checked the production number. The computer was old, as we thought. Old and well used. But the innards were—”

  “New,” Hanne said pensively, squeezing her eyes shut.

  Ever since one evening before Christmas in 1992, when she had been struck down outside her own office, she had been plagued with recurring headaches. In the past six months, they had worsened.

  “Do we know who used the computer?”

  “Not at the moment,” Karianne said, struggling to adjust the stopper on a thermos flask that was making a complaining, squeaking sound. “But from the surroundings, I’d say it was the wife. Doris Flo Halvorsrud. There were notes and memos around the computer about shopping and furnishings and that sort of thing. And the place was so … I don’t quite know how to describe it. Feminine? Potted plants and a little teddy bear stuck to the top of the computer. Things like that. Someone should ask Halvorsrud. And the children, maybe. They’re coming back tomorrow.”

  “How did the interview go?”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen clasped her hands behind her neck and looked directly at Billy T. He spat on his fingers to moisten them as he riffled testily through the pages of VG.

  “He fainted, for God’s sake.”

  “What?”

  “He fainted. In the middle of the interview. I’d just asked him about the money in the basement and the guy simply passed out. Collapsed, calmly and with barely a sound.”

  “Have you written up the interview?”

  “Yes, but it’s not been signed, of course. Halvorsrud’s at Ullevål Hospital. It’s nothing serious, apparently. He’ll be back here tomorrow.”

  “So long as someone in a white coat doesn’t come to the conclusion that the air in here’s no good for him.” Erik Henriksen jammed a cigarette behind his ear and continued. “Which would be par for the course. Ordinary yobs have to put up with the unpleasantness of our back yard for weeks on end. But when we haul in someone wearing an expensive suit, then it’s detrimental to their health to stay there for more than three hours.”

  “Shall we go for a walk?” Billy T. said out of the blue, looking at Hanne.

  “A walk?” she said incredulously. “Now?”

  “Yes. You and me. A professional stroll. We can talk about the case as we walk. I need a breath of fresh air.”

  Standing up so suddenly that his chair threatened to topple over, he headed for the door as if the matter had already been decided.

  “Come on,” he commanded, slapping her on the shoulder. Hanne twisted round but remained seated.

  “Get in touch with Økokrim, Karianne. Have a look at those cases described on the disks. Find out …” She held up her hands and counted on her fingers. “… if they are under investigation, whether they’ve been prosecuted, whether they’ve been dropped, and …”

  Hanne stopped short.

  “And who might have made the decision to dismiss them,” she said slowly. “If it’s Halvorsrud, then get one of the other public prosecutors to look more closely at the cases. To see if the grounds for dismissal were reasonable. And you, Karl …”

  She stared at Sommarøy. She always found it difficult to meet his eye. Her gaze usually slid down his face: she was fascinated by his near chinlessness. The first time she met him, she thought the strange lower half of his face might have been the result of an accident. The man was well built and athletic, with unruly curly hair. His green eyes were large, with short, masculine lashes. The curvature of his prominent nose would have lent his profile an almost authoritative expression, had it not been for the almost invisible chin beneath his tiny, narrow mouth. It was as if God had played a prank on Karl Sommarøy by giving him the chin of a four-year-old child.

  “… you collect all the witness statements we have at this point, write a summary and have it on my desk by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Together with copies of all the interviews.”

  “We’re already talking about almost twenty interviews,” Karl Sommarøy complained, drumming on the table with his left hand. “And there’s not much of significance in any of them.”

  “That should be simple and straightforward, then. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen got to her feet.

  “I’m going out for a short walk,” she explained, smiling so broadly that the newcomers in the conference room looked at her in amazement.

  She wheeled round abruptly in the doorway and nodded in the direction of Karianne Holbeck.

  “You understand where I’m going with those cases on the disks?”

  “I’ve already been thinking along the same lines myself,” Karianne said, with a heavy sigh. “If we’re right, Halvorsrud will be in a tight spot.”

  “He is already,” Erik Henriksen muttered. “I’m willing to bet a thousand kroner they’ll throw the book at him.”

  No one took the bet.

  13

  Evald Bromo had never used the Internet for that kind of thing. He knew how much existed out there. He had simply never dared.

  Apathetic, he stared at the absurd pattern on the screensaver: a cube dividing into balls that grew larger, transformed into flowers, and then shriveled into triangles composed of four colors. Over and over again. Slowly, he removed his glasses and used his shirttail to polish them thoroughly before putting them on again. The triangle became a cube. The cube turned into balls that grew larger.

  “The Åsgard development,” he said to himself in an undertone, and grasped the computer mouse.

  The screensaver vanished. A blank page appeared before him, untouched for the past two hours.

  It seemed probable that Statoil had suffered a catastrophic budget failure in what was perhaps the most significant prestige project in the state-owned company’s almost thirty-year history. The gigantic Åsgard project – development of the site at Halten Bank, the gas pipeline to Kårstø in Rogaland, the expansion of the processing plant at Kårstø, and the gas pipeline Europipe II – should, as stated in the plans, have cost around twenty-five billion. According to the tip-off Evald Bromo had received, the actual sum could be somewhere in the region of ten to fifteen billion more than the original figure. If correct, it was impossible to predict who would still be standing on the battlefield in a couple of months’ time. The managing director of the group probably wouldn’t survive. Nor the board of directors.

  Evald Bromo had not managed to write a single word.

  He thought of everything out there. A few keystrokes away. The physical tension caused his knees to knock, unconsciously and with increasing force, until the pain brought him to a halt.

  Evald Bromo knew what that tension meant.

  He knew what he had to do, but he did not want to do it. Not this time. Two emails had dropped into his life and made everything impossible. A spell on the Internet might have helped. At least for a short time.

  He could not.

  Electronic traces were stored everywhere.

  Evald Bromo decided to run home. Perhaps he would run all evening. He stood up, stripped off his jacket, shirt and trousers and put on his yellow-and-black Adidas running gear. When he tied the laces on his running shoes, he noticed he was already perspiring. His hands were moist, and he was aware of a pungent odor from his body as he headed for the door.

  He forgot to tell the duty editor that his story was not finished. When it dawned on him – five kilometers of sprinting later – he slowed down momentarily before pushing off again at full speed.

  Evald Bromo could not even be
bothered to phone.

  14

  The raw air stung her cheeks, and Hanne Wilhelmsen stopped. She threw her head back and closed her eyes as she felt the dampness from the ground creep through the flimsy soles of her shoes and up through her legs like a chilly caress. As she breathed deeply through her nose, it struck her that this was the first time in ages that she had felt no compulsion to smoke. The trees, bleak and winter-gray, lined the forest track, with the occasional coltsfoot flower poking its head up through the rotting leaves. Though Hanne was cold, she felt fit.

  “Good idea,” she said, linking her arm through Billy T.’s. “I really needed to get outside for a bit.”

  Billy T. had told her about the interview. About Halvorsrud’s insistence on his story regarding Ståle Salvesen. About his own reluctant belief in the Chief Public Prosecutor. About his growing fascination with this case that, at the outset, had merely repelled him.

  “If Halvorsrud is telling the truth,” he reasoned, “then I can see only two possibilities. Either he is in fact mistaken. He believes the murderer was Salvesen, but it was actually someone else. Someone who looks like him.”

  Hanne wrinkled her nose.

  “Agreed,” Billy T. said bluntly. “It sounds unlikely. Especially since he was there for such a long time, and since Halvorsrud is so adamant that it was him. The alternative, of course, is that Salvesen is actually not dead at all.”

  “It’s possible,” Hanne concurred. “He arranges a suicide on Monday, goes into hiding in order to strike on Thursday, and then does a runner to another part of the world.”

  They exchanged doubtful looks.

  “I’ve read about that kind of thing,” Billy T. said, pausing. “Seen it in films and suchlike, I mean. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve never heard of a case like that in real life.”

  “Which doesn’t mean that it can’t have happened,” Hanne said. “He might have seen those movies too.”

  They turned off the forest track and onto a path that, only a few meters later, brought them to a picnic area beside Skarselva. The river, deep and swollen with rain, flowed toward the lake at Maridalsvannet; a chill, damp cloud hung over the riverbank. Without wiping off the winter dirt from the weathered wooden bench, Hanne and Billy T. sat down facing the water.

  “They ought to make this smell into a perfume,” Hanne commented with a smile, sniffing the air. “We have to find a motive. Within the realms of possibility.”

  “Within the realms of possibility,” Billy T. repeated. “If we just … for fun … Let’s imagine for a moment that Halvorsrud is telling the truth. And is right. Why the fuck would Salvesen kill a public prosecutor’s wife? They haven’t even met!”

  “No. But Ståle Salvesen was almost entirely ruined by that investigation you were talking about. At the start of the nineties. The one Halvorsrud initiated and led.”

  “True enough,” Billy T. said, pivoting round so he was almost facing Hanne. “Obviously Salvesen’s life took a dramatic turn for the worse when Økokrim came after him. That’s indisputable. But why now? If he was so filled with hate for Halvorsrud that he wanted to kill the guy’s wife, why on earth did he put it on the back-burner for seven or eight years?”

  Hanne did not answer.

  The Salvesen story did not hold water. Hanne Wilhelmsen’s guiding principle had always been that the simplest solution represented the truth. What was self-evident was also what was right. Crimes were most often impulsive, seldom complicated and almost never conspiratorial.

  Admittedly, there were exceptions to these rules. Over the years, she had solved a not inconsiderable number of cases exactly because she was aware that all suppositions have their exceptions.

  “Arranges his own, fake suicide …” She snapped a twig off a small birch tree and stuck it in her mouth. It tasted bitter. The sap felt like glue on her lips. “With no motive other than that the man was investigated a number of years ago. And without a prosecution even being brought.”

  Hanne spat out the birch sap, discarded the twig and moved down to the water’s edge. The river’s roar thundered in her eardrums and she laughed out loud without knowing why.

  “Now you’re going to hear a different theory,” she shouted at Billy T.. “What if Halvorsrud sold information from Økokrim to people under investigation?”

  The riverbank was slippery. Hanne stepped carefully from one stone to another. Suddenly her foot slid from under her. The ice-cold water came up to her knee as she struggled to regain her balance.

  “Perhaps his wife had found out,” she continued, shaking her dripping leg vigorously. “Even wrote about it on her computer. Since she wants to be married to a hero rather than a villain, she demands a divorce. We should really make a run for it back to the car. I’ll end up with pneumonia.”

  They raced each other, pushing and shoving and trying to trip each other up as they ran as fast as they could to the car.

  “But Halvorsrud didn’t want a divorce,” Hanne panted as she raised her hand in a victory gesture. “Doris had become a threat. A serious one. He kills her, cooks up a story so fantastic that people are compelled to believe it, and sticks to it, come hell or high water.”

  “But bloody hell, Hanne,” Billy T. said as he struggled to squeeze himself into their little banger of an unmarked police car. “Why doesn’t he arrange an accident instead? A car crash? A house fire? A samurai sword, Hanne. A downright decapitation!”

  The vehicle spluttered its way down Maridalsveien. The traffic was light, despite it being a Saturday afternoon in one of the most popular walking areas in the entire Oslo region. The engine died on the bend beside the ruins of Mariakirken, St Mary’s Church.

  “Fucking shit car!” Billy T. thumped his fist on the steering wheel.

  Hanne laughed. “This car’s like a small child. I know it well. Eager to start with, but then once its legs get tired, it refuses outright. Maybe we need to carry it home?”

  She whooped with laughter when, in an eruption of rage, Billy T. got himself entangled somehow, so that he could neither get in nor out of the cramped driving seat.

  “Call the station,” he snarled. “Phone the fucking fire service, if necessary. Get me out of here!”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen stepped out of the car and tugged her jacket more snugly around herself as she sauntered down toward Maridalsvannet lake, taking her cell phone from her pocket. Two minutes later, she received confirmation that help was on the way.

  The ice had not yet melted. It lay like a dirty gray lid on Oslo’s primary source of drinking water. Hanne paused when she spotted a fully grown elk standing beside the lake, drinking from the surface water. It must have caught her scent; the huge beast jerked its head up vigilantly, then trotted over to a grove of trees and disappeared among the branches.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen immediately felt an inexplicable sense of certainty. Ståle Salvesen was dead. Of course she could not be sure of that. But she knew it all the same.

  “Get a grip,” she told herself crossly.

  Then she shook off the idea and went to help Billy T., who was still completely wedged inside the ancient Ford Fiesta, swearing so loudly his voice must have echoed throughout the surrounding valley.

  15

  Typing the final period was always accompanied by a little ceremony. Eivind Torsvik had opened a bottle of Vigne de L’Enfant Jésus that morning. The red wine had now been breathing for ten hours. Holding his glass up to the light from the computer screen, he let the liquid roll around the sides. He relished the prospect of soon being able to tap the period key for the last time.

  He had never been clever at school. He had hardly attended elementary school. After he had sliced off his ears and his life had at long last improved a little bit during his teenage years, he had quickly realized that he lacked basic knowledge. And so he had more or less given up. He could cope without it.

  Eivind Torsvik knew little about the history of democracy. Of course he had heard of the American Civil War and the Russi
an Revolution, but he had only a vague notion of when they’d happened and what they’d really been about. As far as literature was concerned, he confined himself to three books: Moby Dick; Knut Hamsun’s dark psychological novel Hunger; and Jens Bjørneboe’s fictionalized biography of troubled author Ragnhild Jølsen, The Dream and the Wheel. Never anything else. He’d read them during his first weeks in prison when he could not sleep. Since then, he had read each of them again three times. The sleep deprivation had resulted in a week in hospital. When he decided to start writing, he made the decision never to read what others had written. It only distracted him. When he was given an IQ test as part of his forensic psychiatric assessment, he astonished everyone apart from himself by scoring considerably higher than average. Eivind Torsvik had used his excellent brain to write books that no one could open without reading to the very end. Besides, he was good at English, a language he had learned from watching American B movies on video while all the other children were at school.

  Since he seldom read newspapers, the publishing company had sent him the reviews by post after his first book was released. For the first time in his life, Eivind Torsvik had felt really satisfied. Not because he was flattered by the acclaim – which he was to some degree – but because he felt appreciated and understood. His debut book was a doorstop of more than seven hundred pages about a happy hooker who reigned over the rundown backstreets of Amsterdam. Eivind Torsvik had never set foot in Amsterdam. When, one year later, he learned that the book had nevertheless become a bestseller in the Netherlands, he sent a friendly thank-you note to the warder at Ullersmo Prison; the man had set down a computer that was almost ready for the scrapheap on the desk in his cell, saying, “Here you are, Eivind. Here’s your ticket to the outside world.”