Dead Joker

by Anne Holt

  “Sorry,” she said, placing her hand on his arm when he stopped like a sulky toddler, waiting for her to open the door.

  The sincerity in her voice obviously had an effect. He gave her a smile and shrugged.

  “You scared me,” he said curtly and quite superfluously.

  “Sorry,” she said again, tilting her head. “You promised me a summary. What if we …”

  Hanne surveyed the scene. It had stopped raining, and although the air was bitter and the sea white with froth, there was a freshness about the landscape she found attractive; it made her want to linger. On the lee side of Staure Bridge, directly north of the bridgehead they had just left behind, a beach of coarse sand curved into a grove of trees.

  “What if we …”

  Hanne hesitated for a second before continuing. “Do you think we could light a bonfire and … stay here for a while?”

  “No. It’s too cold and damp. We won’t find enough dry wood.”

  Billy T. shivered as he opened the car door. Hanne skirted the vehicle and opened the trunk. When she slammed it shut again, she was clutching a black five-liter can of gasoline in her hands.

  “Here you are,” she said, holding the can with her arms outstretched. “Now we can set fire to whatever we want.”

  Billy T. pulled a disapproving face but sloped along after her. Down on the beach, he stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, watching as Hanne wandered this way and that. She bent down every so often, picking up a broken branch here and a piece of driftwood there. Eventually she collected everything into a hollow surrounded by large-ish stones; the place had obviously been used for the same purpose before. Finally she poured a couple of liters of gasoline over the whole caboodle.

  “Are you going to blow the place up, or what?”

  Billy T. took a step back.

  The bonfire flared up vigorously when Hanne lobbed four matches between the pieces of wood. Puffs of acrid, black smoke formed low clouds, choking Hanne and making her cough; tears began to run down her cheeks.

  “It worked really well,” she mumbled softly, making room for Billy T. on a log conveniently situated just two meters away from the raging fire.

  It was a lot more pleasant there in the cove than up at the parking spot. A side wind blew across the fire, wafting the smoke away from the two police officers.

  “Let me hear it,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, wiping soot off her face.

  “The most important thing is probably the computer disks,” Billy T. said. “The ones that were in the medicine cabinet in the basement. It turns out they contained information about cases that were dropped.”

  “By Halvorsrud personally?” Hanne asked dispassionately.

  “Yes.”

  “Have they been closely scrutinized?”

  “To some extent.”

  Billy T. wriggled his bottom to find a more comfortable position.

  “In two of the cases it was fairly obvious there weren’t sufficient grounds for prosecution. From an evidential point of view. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the villains …”

  “… weren’t guilty,” they chorused.

  “Exactly,” Billy T. commented. “But it was reasonable. Whereas the other two …”

  “… are more dubious,” Hanne said.

  Billy T. nodded.

  “We’ve been allocated someone else from the Økokrim financial crimes section to go through the cases. A woman, as it happens. She doesn’t think either case should have been dropped. That in itself is not particularly noteworthy. We know how it goes. What’s more important is that Halvorsrud had a ding-dong of an argument with the others over there about one of them. Used all his authority in order to—”

  “—make sure the case was dropped,” Hanne interjected.

  “That’s quite annoying, you know,” Billy T. said angrily, flinging a twig on the fire.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Finishing my sentences for me.”

  “Sorry.”

  She got to her feet to pour more gasoline on the flames. Restraining her, Billy T. took the can from her and put it behind the log they were sitting on.

  “You’re in the suicidal corner today, I have to say. How often do you say ‘sorry’ these days too?”

  Not often enough, Hanne thought, though she said nothing.

  “Erik Henriksen has spoken to the four people whose cases were on the disks. All of them flatly deny having had anything to do with Halvorsrud. We’ve run some checks on each of them. Looking for large sums of money taken out of their bank accounts that they can’t fully explain. That sort of thing. Of course, we’ve also checked the Halvorsrud family’s finances. Nothing to report so far. But we’re doing more searches. There’s also that story from the maybe-Turkish guy of Karianne’s. That doesn’t sound too good for Halvorsrud.”

  “And to think that a talented lawyer would have been so stupid as to introduce himself when offering to do something corrupt.”

  “That’s a point,” Billy T. said with a nod. “A good point.”

  The wind suddenly changed direction and smoke swirled into their eyes. Billy T. stood up and tried to waft it away. Hanne let out a burst of laughter and coughed as the wind turned again.

  “The computer belonged to his wife,” Billy T. said, sitting down again. “At least that’s what we’ve ascertained. I got the aunt to ask the children. None of them could explain why there was nothing on it. Their mother was always sitting at it, writing, according to the children.”

  “Why didn’t you ask them yourself?”

  “I sort of promised the eldest that I wouldn’t bother his siblings. Thea has apparently broken down completely, poor girl. And the flashlight did belong to Marius. The aunt checked that as well. He claims he lost it a while ago. Recognized it from a nick on the battery cover.”

  The fire had started to die down. When Hanne threw on another piece of driftwood, the last of the flames crackled noisily before drowning in smoke.

  “I’ve been wondering about the door,” she said, flailing her arms to keep warm. “How could this alleged Ståle Salvesen – or someone dressed to look like him – get inside Halvorsrud’s house at all? As far as I’m aware, there was no sign of forced entry. Yet Sigurd Halvorsrud claims that the door was always locked in the evening.”

  “That’s bloody stupid of him as well,” Billy T. murmured. “His story would have made more sense if he’d claimed that the door was open.”

  “They have children,” Hanne said. “Shall we go?”

  “What about the children?”

  Billy T. remained seated, watching Hanne, who had stood up and was dancing a jig in the increasingly biting wind.

  “Children lose keys at the drop of a hat. Come on.”

  Without waiting for him, she made a dash for the car.

  “I don’t really know what we’re waiting for,” Billy T. said once he had plumped down into the broken passenger seat. “The case seems completely cut and dried to me. It’s actually very seldom that we have such a strong chain of circumstantial evidence as we do in this case. Halvorsrud is guilty. It’s obvious.”

  “So what is making us hesitate, then?” Hanne said softly. She sat with her hands on her lap, toying distractedly with the car keys. “Why are we so fixated on this Ståle Salvesen?”

  “You are,” Billy T. corrected her. “You are fixated on Ståle Salvesen. I have to admit that for a while I doubted Halvorsrud’s guilt. But now I’m inclined to—”

  “It’s all far too clean-cut,” Hanne interrupted, inserting the key into the ignition. “Can’t you see that? The case is absurd, but at the same time obvious. It’s unthinkable that Halvorsrud would behead his wife, but at the same time everything points to him being the culprit. Don’t you see what sort of picture this paints?”

  Billy T., struggling with his seatbelt, did not respond.

  “A set-up,” Hanne Wilhelmsen whispered. “A perfect set-up.”

  “Or more simply a fucking clumsy murder
trying to look like a set-up,” Billy T. said tartly as he searched for the NRK P2 channel on the radio.

  “Until I see Ståle Salvesen’s dead body with my own eyes, I’m keeping my mind open to the possibility that Halvorsrud might in fact be telling the truth,” Hanne said.

  She shot a final look in the direction of Staure Bridge before turning out of the parking spot and setting off on the return journey. They drove for twenty minutes without saying anything at all. When they passed Høvik Church on the E18, Hanne said, “There was something about Ståle Salvesen’s apartment. I noticed something that bothered me. But I can’t for the life of me think what it was.”

  She scratched her nose and squinted at the gasoline dial. There was probably enough fuel to see them home.

  “If it’s important, it’ll come back to you. You’ve a lot of other things on your mind at present.”

  Billy T. smiled and looked at Hanne. He wanted to put his hand on her thigh, as he definitely would have done under other circumstances. If everything had been the way it was before.

  But nothing was the way it had been. Admittedly, on this outing Hanne had shown something of her former self. She had been physically close to him several times, and the atmosphere between them had had something of the old familiarity he so valued and was so afraid of losing. All the same, something was different. Hanne was always focused. She was always consumed by her cases. Always reflective, testing out the opinions of others. But now there was an intensity to her single-mindedness that bordered on fanaticism. Her maneuver on Staure Bridge had been risky and totally unnecessary. They could have investigated Hanne’s theory without her risking her life. And he’d noticed that she had started to speak more slowly than before, and that she often seemed to be talking to herself rather than other people.

  “That’s where you’re all mistaken,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said suddenly as they drove away from the Bjørvika interchange.

  “What?”

  Billy T. had forgotten what he had said a few minutes earlier.

  “You all think I’ve so much else to think about,” Hanne said. “The fact is that this case is the only thing I’m thinking about. I don’t think about anything else at all. At least not while I’m at work. Say hi to Tone-Marit from me.”

  She drew up outside the main entrance of the police headquarters. Billy T. hesitated. Then he unfastened his seatbelt and opened the door.

  “Just one thing, Hanne,” he said slowly. “You stink to bloody high heaven. Go home and take a shower. Phew, how you stink!”

  When he slammed the door behind him, the automatic toll-recording chip fell down from the windscreen, and Hanne’s ears were ringing for the rest of the evening.

  36

  It was Friday March 12 and the threatening clouds that hung over the Swedish capital were making it difficult to see very far. Lars Erik Larsson produced a plastic bag from the tattered folder. He slid it out and placed it on a wooden bench. There were few people at Skansen’s zoo that day. Larsson had just walked through the new Bear Mountain without so much as glimpsing a bear. Maybe they were still hibernating.

  He had intended to spend longer at Djurgården, the wonderful cultural and recreational island haven in the middle of Stockholm. Perhaps going all the way out to the western tip of the island, to Plommonbacken, from where he could take the bus back to the city center if he lacked the energy to walk any farther. But there was rain in the air. When he passed Djurgården’s Nordic Museum, the dark-gray clouds over Södermalm had made him change his mind. So he paid the sixty kronor to get into Skansen, the open-air museum and zoo, and took a walk around that instead.

  Feeling content, he sat down and took out a neatly wrapped cheese-and-red-pepper sandwich. The coffee in his thermos flask was piping hot and the steam felt pleasant on his face. He gazed pensively across the bay. He could just make out the Kaknäs Tower; its topmast struggled bravely to hold the clouds aloft.

  Lars Erik Larsson was a contented man. Admittedly, he lived a quiet life, and he had not had a woman since his wife left him in 1985. But he would soon be sixty-five, and had enough on his hands with his work and his two grandchildren. When he retired in the not too distant future, he would move out to the little smallholding in Östhammar, where he would cultivate his flower garden and entertain a few old friends now and again.

  He ate his picnic in seclusion. Only a foreign couple – if he wasn’t mistaken, they were American – disturbed him as they walked past with three adolescent children, all talking vociferously. When he was finished, he wiped his mouth with a napkin he had brought, then produced that morning’s copy of the Expressen newspaper.

  Lars Erik Larsson worked at the SE Bank in Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s Old Town. His career had been at a standstill for the past twenty years, but that did not bother him much. He was a man with no ambition other than to do useful work in return for his hard-earned wages. He lived simply in a two-room apartment in Södermalm. He had inherited the smallholding, located one hundred and forty kilometers north of Stockholm and five minutes’ walk from the sea. His car was ten years old and fully paid off. Lars Erik Larsson needed no more than he possessed. Moreover, through his job he had seen so much money come and go, seen how easily financial good fortune changed to tragedy, that he had never yearned for riches.

  A Norwegian woman had been beheaded, possibly by her husband. His eyes ran down the page. The report described a “public prosecutor” who had killed his wife with a samurai sword. Typical Expressen. Why in the world would they write about a case like this? It had happened in Norway and would hardly be of interest to anyone outside that country. It was probably the spicy detail about the murder weapon that had induced the tabloid newspaper to jump on the bandwagon.

  Sigurd Halvorsrud.

  Lars Erik Larsson looked up from his newspaper. It had started to rain over Östermalm and he began to pack up his belongings. There was something familiar about that name.

  Sigurd Halvorsrud.

  Suddenly it came to him. It must have been several months ago, but the incident had been so extraordinary that he still remembered it. A man had come into the bank with a suitcase containing two hundred thousand Swedish kronor in cash. He had opened an account and paid in all the money in the name of Sigurd Halvorsrud. The man had spoken Norwegian.

  Two hundred thousand kronor in cash was unusual, even nowadays. Perhaps especially nowadays. Money these days mainly comprised figures on a computer screen.

  He headed for the Bergmann funicular railway.

  He glanced at his watch.

  Perhaps he should report it. To whom? The newspaper? Out of the question. The police?

  He thought about Lena, his nine-year-old granddaughter, who was coming to spend the whole weekend with him. They would have a lovely time, and tomorrow they were going to the opera. He was so pleased that the little girl had started to take an interest in real music.

  It was best not to make a fuss. He stuffed the newspaper into a trashcan as he left Skansen and decided to walk all the way home despite the threatening rain clouds. It would take just over an hour, but he had an umbrella anyway.

  37

  The hospital never completely settled down, it seemed. Even though a buxom nurse had completed the night rounds some considerable time ago, and all unnecessary lights had been switched off, the old buildings at Ullevål still reverberated with distant noises and movements that could be picked up all the way inside the room where Hanne Wilhelmsen sat silently in a chair trying to read.

  Cecilie whimpered and attempted to turn over in her sleep.

  Hanne placed her hand carefully on her arm to prevent her from moving.

  The busty nurse was standing in the doorway again. Hanne was startled as she had not heard anyone approach.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to wheel a bed in here for you?” the woman whispered. “You need to get some sleep.”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen shook her head.

  The nurse came all the way over to the chair
where Hanne was sitting. She laid her hand diffidently on her shoulder.

  “There may be many long nights here ahead for you. I do think you should get some sleep. It’s really no bother to bring in a bed.”

  Hanne still did not reply, but shook her head again.

  “Have you taken sick leave?” the nurse whispered. “Dr. Flåbakk can certainly help you with that, in this transition period, if we can call it that.”

  Hanne laughed softly in resignation.

  “That’s not really on,” she said, trying not to yawn. “I’ve far too much to do at work.”

  “What work do you do?” the nurse asked quietly in a friendly tone, still with her hand on Hanne’s shoulder. “No, let me guess!”

  She cocked her head and studied Hanne Wilhelmsen.

  “Lawyer,” she said finally. “You’re probably an attorney or something of that kind.”

  Hanne smiled and rubbed her left eye with her knuckle.

  “Close enough. Police. I’m a chief inspector.”

  “How interesting!”

  The woman actually sounded as if she meant it. Her hand patted Hanne’s arm a couple of times. Then she checked the tubes and the IV stand and padded over to the door.

  “Let me know if you change your mind about that bed,” she whispered. “You can just pull that cord there, and I’ll be here in a flash. Good night!”

  “Good night,” Hanne murmured.

  She heard footsteps coming and going in the corridor. Some hurrying, others shuffling as if there was all the time in the world. Now and again muffled calls were heard between the porters, and in the far distance the faint echo of a police siren sounded.

  “Hanne,” Cecilie whispered, trying to move her head from side to side.

  “I’m here,” she answered, leaning forward. “Here.”

  “I’m so pleased about that.”