Dead Joker

by Anne Holt

  Hanne did not reply. Her joints were aching, and Billy T.’s voice sounded distant, as if he were sitting in another room. She gently massaged the sole of her foot with her thumbs. Pain shot up her leg from the middle of her heel.

  “What is actually confusing us is this pedophile business,” Billy T. continued. “I still believe that we ought to devote all our resources to following the corruption lead. At least we potentially have a great deal of tangible evidence. The money in Stockholm, for example.”

  He dropped four sugar cubes into his coffee and stirred it with a ballpoint pen.

  “No,” Hanne said. “We have almost nothing to go on. As I’ve said until I’m blue in the face, every single element in this case that could point to Halvorsrud being corrupt is weird and illogical. Amateurish. Incomplete. There’s something about this case that …”

  She grimaced as she attempted to straighten up. Something stabbed her ferociously in the lower back.

  “Like it or not, Ståle Salvesen is the only thing we have. Okay, so he committed suicide. Then he wasn’t the one who killed Doris. But for a corpse, he has a surprising ability to pop up all over the place, no matter how we twist and turn. The murder of Bromo and the murder of Doris have only two features in common. Both victims were decapitated. And then there’s our joker, Ståle Salvesen. If we can discover his role in all of this, we’ll find the solution. I’m actually very confident about that. As for Evald Bromo’s relations with little girls …” Dipping a sugar cube into her cup, she placed it on her tongue. “… that may not have anything to do with the case. But if … Let’s say that Bromo and Halvorsrud are both pedophiles. What do we know about that type of person? That they have a well-known need to make contact with one another. Exchange material. Pictures. Experiences—”

  “So Bromo and Halvorsrud might have been members of some kind of pedophile ring, is that what you’re saying?” Billy T. wrinkled his nose as he crossed to the stereo unit. He rummaged on the CD shelf as he continued. “But how does our man Ståle fit into all this? Was he a pedophile as well, then?”

  “No … Or yes. I don’t know. But let’s look at what we know for certain. This here is Halvorsrud.”

  She set down her coffee cup in the middle of the table and reached for Billy T.’s mug. “And this is Evald Bromo.”

  A silver dish containing the musty remains of old peanuts was placed in front of the two coffee cups to form a triangle.

  “Where’s Doris?”

  “Doris can go to hell,” Hanne said wearily.

  She pointed from the Halvorsrud cup to the Bromo mug.

  “Common denominators? They both worked in finance. Both had pretty successful professional careers. Neither previously found guilty of any crime.”

  “Both are men, and both are middle-aged,” Billy T. muttered. “There’s nothing but bloody middle-of-the-road stuff here, as usual.” He let his fingers run impatiently over the CD spines.

  “Then we’ll look at the links to Salvesen,” Hanne continued. “Don’t put on any music, please. I can’t stand it right now. In contrast to him and him …” Her finger smacked against the cups. “… Salvesen was a fallen man. Up like a lion in the eighties, down like a sheepskin rug a decade later. The only connection we’re aware of between him and the other two is his bankruptcy case and the investigation directed at him. Halvorsrud was responsible for that, and Bromo wrote about it.”

  “Ten years ago,” Billy T. said grumpily. Finally his face brightened and he inserted a CD in the player. “Schubert!”

  “Turn it down, at least. But what if—”

  Billy T. turned the volume even higher. He stood in the center of the room, eyes closed and smiling broadly. “That’s what I call music.”

  Thrusting her fingers into her ears, Hanne stared intently at the three objects on the table in front of her.

  “What if Bromo knew about Halvorsrud’s abuse of his daughter or other children?” she whispered to herself. “What if he actually threatened Halvorsrud? But why … Turn down the music, for fuck’s sake!”

  Billy T. complied at last. Hanne stared up at him as she continued. “If Halvorsrud for some reason wanted to murder Bromo, why choose a place like Vogts gate 14? And why in God’s name would he place his signature on the murder so emphatically by decapitating the guy? He must have realized that we would immediately look in his direction …”

  “Copycat,” Billy T. said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Someone wanted it to look like a Halvorsrud murder.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And it happened at night. The time when most of us have no alibi other than the person sleeping beside us. If we have someone.”

  “For sure.”

  “Can it—”

  “Doris and Bromo may have been killed by two different people,” Hanne said slowly and distinctly. “If neither of them was Halvorsrud … then we have not one but two murderers on the loose out there.”

  “Two,” Billy T. reiterated faintly. “I’m dead on my feet.”

  Hanne lifted the Halvorsrud cup to her mouth. The coffee had gone cold.

  “I think I’ll have to take a pill,” she said. “I’m overtired.”

  Billy T. plumped himself down on the settee beside her. Schubert’s piano concerto had reached a dramatic climax, and he turned the volume up again with the remote control as he put his arm around Hanne’s shoulders.

  “Listen to this,” he whispered. “Listen right now!”

  She relaxed. Billy T. gave off a slight male odor, mixed with boiled cabbage. The woolen fibers in his sweater tickled her cheek. He sat completely still, with his head leaning back and his eyes shut. His arm lay pleasantly heavy on her, and she caressed his hand gently. Big and warm and entirely still, it was resting only centimeters away from Hanne’s right breast. She let two fingers run along the veins outlined coarsely on the back of his hand. When she looked up again, he was smiling. She studied his familiar features: the prominent, straight nose, the pale-blue eyes that at that very moment appeared gray and more deep-set than she had seen them before, the lips he moistened with his tongue before he became totally serious, placing his free hand on her cheek and giving her a long, lingering kiss.

  79

  A man was hammering his fist on a tiled wall.

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  The scalding water streamed over his body.

  He had never imagined anyone would find out about Evald Bromo’s abuse of little girls. Bromo was the most careful abuser the naked man in the shower had ever come across. Only once had Bromo been sloppy. That was many years ago, and the mistake had turned out to be rectifiable.

  “Shit. Bloody hell!”

  There was only one link between him and Evald Bromo. He had been one hundred per cent certain it could never be discovered. One hundred per cent.

  Now he had no idea what he should do.

  “Daddy!” a voice yelled outside the locked door. “You’re using up all the hot water! It’s my turn now! Daddy!”

  If he had been aware that anyone knew, it would all have been done differently.

  80

  When Hanne woke on Thursday morning, at first she did not know where she was. The room was in semi-darkness, and the clammy air smelled unpleasant.

  She was at home, lying in her own bed. The curtains were not fluttering because the window was closed. They always slept with the window open. Cecilie and Hanne.

  Billy T. was lying on his stomach beside her, still in a deep sleep, with his mouth open, snoring softly. His bare arm was crushing her against the mattress. The quilt had slipped off him. Although a long time had elapsed since summer, she could see he still had a suntan stripe where his white backside met the darker skin on his back.

  Hanne felt a sudden stab of anxiety, a physical pain that coursed through her entire body. Billy T. murmured something in his sleep and turned over.

  Hanne made an effort to move. He was no longer holding her down. His face was avert
ed. Unable to breathe, she shifted her back ever so slightly to lie with her arms stiffly by her side, flanking her naked body.

  Cecilie was coming home today.

  81

  Olga Bromo was dying.

  It crossed the mind of the care assistant washing her that this might be the very last time. The old woman had deteriorated very suddenly on Saturday night. Her pulse, which had steadily kept her going through two meaningless years in a virtual coma, had suddenly become irregular and weak. The assistant had read that Olga Bromo’s son had been killed around the same time. During the following days, her heart had stopped beating twice. Life had nevertheless returned, as if in ill-tempered defiance of the care assistant’s relief that the senile, eighty-two-year-old woman was finally to be allowed to slip away.

  “You were so close to each other,” the assistant said, in a friendly, soft voice, as he wrung out the washcloth. “He visited you nearly every day, didn’t he? Not everybody’s so fortunate.”

  Olga Bromo lay in a white flannel nightdress with a pink ribbon around the neck. The care assistant had gone to the trouble of dressing her in one of her own nightdresses, instead of the practical, sexless shift they usually used on the patients.

  He had hardly finished tying a bow in the ribbon at her neck when Olga Bromo died. A faint gurgling in her throat was all that could be heard before she stopped drawing breath. The assistant stood with his finger on the inside of the old woman’s frail wrist for several minutes.

  82

  Hanne Wilhelmsen was struggling to see clearly. A film had formed over her eyes and she blinked repeatedly in an effort to rid herself of what seemed like a sticky, gray mass adhering to the cornea, occluding her vision. Fear pricked her every time she drew breath and she inhaled with short, shallow gasps.

  “Sorry,” she said to Iver Feirand as she fingered the cigarette pack without removing one. “I think I might need glasses.”

  “Exhausted, I reckon. I understand how you’re feeling.”

  “Do we ever feel energetic?”

  “Energetic?”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen pushed her thumb and forefinger into her eye sockets and rubbed her eyes vigorously.

  “I think I’ve felt exhausted for twenty years,” she said under her breath. “The more I work, the more I have to do. The more I work, the less—”

  Abruptly, she sat upright and tossed the half-full pack of Marlboro Lights into the wastepaper basket.

  “In any case, I should give that up.”

  “Wise. I should give up myself.”

  “You look pretty wiped out too.”

  Iver Feirand smiled wanly, lighting a cigarette from his own packet.

  “If you think you’ve a lot to do, you should see what my office looks like. I had to send the family off for Easter by themselves because of work. Everything’s piling up. Everything’s become so much harder. It’s as though the whole system has become more spineless. Judges, doctors, kindergarten staff… The Bjugn kindergarten abuse case was a catastrophe. It’s one thing that the number of reported incidents of abuse dropped substantially after all those acquittals. That was probably to be expected. And they’ve picked up again anyway. Worse was that everybody else chickened out. It’s—”

  He pulled a grimace as he stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette.

  “I must give up too. It’s not even any bloody good. Thea will need careful handling. I’ve started to gather a lot of material. From her school and …”

  Iver Feirand’s voice sounded increasingly distant to Hanne – muffled and more and more monotonous. In the end it was difficult to distinguish one word from another. Feirand’s face became a blur, a shimmering speck against a colorless background. She tried to take deep breaths but felt a jab in her abdomen every time she inhaled. Cecilie, she thought.

  Cecilie. Cecilie.

  Most of all she had wanted to get up from the bed and leave. She’d wanted to let Billy T. lie where he was and simply disappear. For good. Go away. Let everything go. She would forget the job. Sigurd Halvorsrud and Evald Bromo, Billy T. and the persistent Police Chief who understood far more than she wanted him to; the whole of Grønlandsleiret 44 and all the people there would be wiped from her memory, erased entirely. Never again would she think about Cecilie and her illness. She could travel to Rio and live with the street children there. She could forget who and what she was.

  Never before had she experienced this excruciating compulsion to flee.

  As the years had passed and life had become more difficult to deal with, she had retreated inside herself. That was where she got her strength, and had done ever since, one quiet night as an eleven-year-old, she had lain down on the roof of the old villa while everyone else was asleep. She could recall it now: the roof tiles cutting painfully into her shoulder blades, the cold breeze of the September night as it swept through the dense trees, the firmament above her, with its myriad stars that told her how strong she was, but only when she was alone. Only if no one actually knew what she was doing or thinking.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen had coped like that for a long time. In the beginning – the beginning that gave her Cecilie and drove her away from her family and a childhood she subsequently expended a great deal of energy on trying to forget – everything had seemed so simple. They were so young. She had felt so strong. The defenses she constructed to protect herself and keep others away were obvious to everyone. When it dawned on her that people respected her for what she was – introverted and methodical, smart and hard-working at school – she knew she had made the right choice. That was the way she wanted it.

  Cecilie was the first person Hanne had loved, and Hanne’s first lover. She suddenly pictured her in her mind’s eye, behind the bike sheds where they smoked at high school; teasing and almost flirting when she finally spoke to her after Hanne had been casting surreptitious glances in her direction for nearly two years. They did not know each other. Cecilie was popular and boisterous and hung out with people Hanne could not stand. Hanne Wilhelmsen was a serious young woman who disguised her figure beneath Icelandic sweaters and an old military jacket and smoked roll-up cigarettes on her own behind the bike sheds while everyone else huddled inside. Hanne was clever at school, and perhaps that was why Cecilie had sauntered up to her one day when heavy rain made it impossible for her to stand outside.

  “Hi,” she said, cocking her head in a way that made Hanne bury her face deep inside her Palestinian scarf. “I hear you’re bloody great at math. Do you think you could help me, then?”

  Hanne had loved Cecilie from that instant. She still did. Panting for breath as she sat in her office on the third floor of the police headquarters, she tried to listen to her colleague, but could hear nothing but the echo of Cecilie’s voice: “I’m ill. Seriously ill.”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen always fled inward. When she’d woken that morning with Billy T. by her side and a feeling of being completely paralyzed, she’d realized she was at the end of the road. There were no more places to run.

  When she finally managed to get up, she spent fifteen minutes in the shower. Then she dressed and woke him by calling out his name. When he’d grunted and reached out for her, she’d twisted away. All she said was that the bed linen had to be changed. He struggled to make contact, talking and swearing and swinging out with his huge arms, threatening and imploring and hampering her efforts to remove the quilt cover and sheet, stuff them into the washing machine, set the program to ninety degrees Celsius, take out clean bedclothes, make the bed, vacuum the bedroom, blast the room with ventilation, and then take another shower before heading off to work. Not a word had she uttered, except that the bed linen had to be changed. He had left the apartment with her. As they stood outside the door, she had peremptorily held out the palm of her hand to him, looking him in the eye for the first time. When she saw his confusion, she lowered her eyes and commanded, “The key.”

  He had taken out a small key ring and placed it in her hand.

  They had gone their separate
ways to Grønlandsleiret 44. His back had seemed incredibly narrow as he disappeared across the lawn behind the apartment block. Hanne had taken a circuitous route through Tøyen Park.

  “… as considerately as possible.”

  Hanne blinked.

  “Hmm.”

  She did not have the faintest idea what Feirand had said.

  “Excellent,” she mumbled. “You do what you think best. What time frame are you considering?”

  Feirand squinted at her in astonishment.

  “So, as I said … I’ll speak to her on Saturday. As far as I understand, she’s still receiving treatment, and everything will of course be done in consultation with—”

  “Fine.”

  Hanne forced out a smile. She had to go. She had to be alone. Bile was pressing on her larynx and she tried to swallow as her mouth filled with phlegm.

  “We’ll talk later, then?”

  “Okay. I’ll keep you posted.”

  As he was about to leave the room, he stood deep in thought for some time, gazing at her, before shrugging and closing the door quietly behind him.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen was sick as a dog and did not even manage to grab the wastepaper basket before vomiting. Mucus and bile spewed across the desk and case folders.

  “My God, are you ill?” Karl Sommarøy blurted out when he suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Can I be of assistance?”

  “Leave me in peace,” Hanne murmured. “Can’t I just get some peace for once? And isn’t it time people started knocking on doors around here?”

  Karl Sommarøy backed out and let the door slam behind him.

  83

  “You’d better get that pal of yours to pull herself together. She’s gone too bloody far this time.”

  Karl Sommarøy stared at Billy T., who was sitting in the canteen on the sixth floor of the police headquarters with a cola and a newspaper. Sommarøy balanced an iced bun on a cup of coffee in one hand and a bowl of cornflakes on top of a glass of milk in the other.