by Anne Holt
“Where does that door lead?” he asked, pointing to a narrow door on the side wall.
“That’s the staff bedroom. We sometimes use it as an office as well. That’s where I was sitting speaking on the phone when you arrived.”
“Is it eight children who live here?”
“Yes, we’ve actually got room for nine; we have a spare bed at present.”
“Are all the bedrooms here on the first floor?”
She nodded. “They’re situated along the corridor here. On both sides. I can show you them.”
“Yes. Shortly,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said. “Has anything been reported stolen?”
“No, not as far as we can see. We don’t know, of course, what might have been in the drawers, but . . . the drawers are locked. They haven’t been broken open.”
“Where’s the key?”
When she posed the question, Hanne Wilhelmsen was standing half turned away from Maren Kalsvik but nevertheless thought she noticed a hint of confusion cross the woman’s face as she turned and made eye contact. Just a touch. Perhaps it was simply a figment of her imagination.
“It’s under the plant pot,” Maren Kalsvik answered. “On the bookshelf over there.”
“Aha,” Billy T. said as he lifted the decorative pot.
No key.
Maren Kalsvik seemed genuinely surprised.
“It’s usually there. Perhaps the police have taken it?”
“Maybe.”
The police officers exchanged a look, and Hanne Wilhelmsen jotted something in a spiral notebook before stuffing the papers back in her bag and indicating that they wanted to see the bedrooms.
Olav and Raymond shared a room. So did Glenn and Kenneth, while Anita and Jeanette had the room farthest away at the other end of the corridor. The twins stayed on the opposite side of the corridor. Two rooms were unoccupied.
“Why do some have to share when there are two empty bedrooms?”
“For social reasons. Kenneth is scared to be on his own. The twins want to be together. Olav . . .”
She stopped abruptly and repeated her continual hand movement across her fringe. “Olav is the one who disappeared. Agnes thought . . .”
Now she was clearly on the verge of tears. She took a couple of convulsive breaths before pulling herself together.
“Agnes thought Raymond would be a good influence on Olav. He’s tough and big and actually quite good with the younger ones. Although he protested about having a new roommate. From purely social, or educational reasons, if you will. The empty rooms are used for doing homework and that kind of thing.”
“Have you still not heard from the runaway?”
“No. We’re dreadfully worried. He hasn’t gone home, but that’s not particularly odd. He had no money, as far as we know, and it’s a terrible distance to walk.”
Billy T. strode along the corridor, counting out the meters under his breath. Back at the director’s office, he had to raise his voice so the others could hear him.
“This window here, it doesn’t usually remain open?”
He could see from the faint lilac-colored dust along the ledges that the technicians had been searching for prints.
“No,” Maren called back. “It’s always closed at this time of year. But we had a fire drill yesterday. The youngsters were flying up and down the ropes and ladders for an hour.”
He could see that. The window had become warped and opened only very stiffly, but he banged it open with brute force. Below, he saw the same jumble of footprints that he had spotted underneath the windows on the other wall of the house. The emergency ladder could slide along the wall so that it could not be accessed from the ground. It was broad and sturdy, with rough, scuffed rungs. He tentatively released the lock on either side, and the lower part tumbled to the ground on well-greased runners. A solid piece of machinery. He pulled on a wire that looped over a smaller runner at the side of the window, and the lower part of the ladder returned obediently. When it was all the way up, it clicked decisively, and Billy T. folded the locking mechanism back into place before closing the window, quickly ascertaining that the rooms opposite the director’s office were two bathrooms, one large and one small, and approached the two women again without uttering a word.
“We must interview all of you,” Hanne Wilhelmsen was saying, almost apologetically. “You’ll be called in turn. It would be a fantastic help if you could take the trouble to compile a list of everyone who lives here, and even more important, everyone who works here. Their names and dates of birth, of course, but also their background, residence, family situation, how long they have worked here, and so on. As speedily as possible.”
The woman nodded.
The two police officers returned to the ground floor with Maren Kalsvik at their heels. They inspected the remainder of the house in silence, making a few notes. The woman with the French braid closed the door behind them around an hour after their arrival.
Without further instructions, Billy T. jumped over a low-growing hedge dividing the gravel path from the grassy lawn. Turning up his jacket lapels, he buttoned up in front with the two remaining buttons that had not yet been torn off and thrust his hands into his pockets. Then he scurried around the corner, stopping below the only gable window on the first floor, around six meters above the ground. Understanding what he was up to, Hanne Wilhelmsen followed close behind.
A week of mild weather had soaked the terrain to such an extent that numerous footprints, small and large, were outlined on the brown earth. Frost had set in that morning, and the area now looked like a miniature lunar landscape, with shallow valleys and sharp little mountains crisscrossing, lacking any structure and utterly lacking any significance.
“That fire drill happened at a helluva convenient time,” Billy T. commented glumly. “Even the most finicky crime scene technician would be at a loss here.”
“But they have made an effort all the same,” Hanne said, waving her finger toward tiny particles of plaster that almost merged into the patches of frost, and the red contrast spray in several of the prints. “If anyone walked here after the fire drill—and they would of course have had to do that if they were using this route into the house—then those footprints would be on top. Do we know when the frost set in?”
“Not until the early hours of the morning. In fact, it was still soft underfoot here when the police arrived at half past one.”
The chief inspector picked her way carefully around the well-trodden area in the private hope that it still harbored a secret or two they might be able to wrest from it. She subsequently took up position immediately beside the wall and stretched up to reach the folded fire ladder. There was a gap of more than half a meter from her fingertips to the foot of the ladder.
“Can you manage it?”
Tentatively they exchanged places, but even Billy T., six foot seven in his stocking feet and with arms like a gorilla, had some distance to go to reach the bottom rung of the ladder.
“An umbrella or something with a hook at the end would be enough,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, blowing on her right hand.
“No, the catch prevents it from being pulled down from here. I checked it from the top. Solid machinery. This ladder here can only be operated from inside. Exactly as it should be. And it can also only be put back in place again from inside. If you pushed it up from here, you’d have to be fairly strong to replace it on its catch up there. And you haven’t a chance of locking it.”
“But then,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, “we’ve the following choice: either this isn’t the way the murderer entered the building, or else we have a very limited list of suspects.”
Although Billy T.’s expression revealed he was fully aware of her reasoning, she added quietly, “Because if the ladder was used, then it was used by someone who had access in order to lower it earlier in the evening, so it was standing ready for use, and had the opportunity to lock it again afterward. From inside. Realistically, that means one of the staff.”
&nbs
p; “Or one of the youngsters,” Billy T. muttered, shivering.
The temperature continued to drop.
• • •
The hunger was worse, even though he was freezing as well. Really he should have put on more clothes. Long underpants, for example, would have been useful. Luckily he had kept an outdoor jacket in his room, though his leather jacket that was hanging downstairs on a hook in the porch with his name in cheerful flowery lettering above it would have been better. But he hadn’t thought. Or he hadn’t taken the chance. Anyway, his sneakers weren’t particularly suitable for this time of year. And his tongue was stinging like fuck.
The fire rope had been bloody easy. Glenn and Terje had said he didn’t dare, but it was just that he couldn’t be bothered. Not then. He couldn’t be bothered with anything when someone was dishing out orders. But it had gone really well when there was a point to it. Even with the rucksack on his back.
How far he had walked since he had left the foster home was impossible to calculate, but it felt like many kilometers.
“I’m probably still in Oslo,” he said under his breath in an attempt to convince himself, as he peered from the garage at the million twinkling lights of the city underneath a pink haze down the hillside below him.
It was stupid that he didn’t have any money. He hadn’t thought about that either. Inside a sock, tucked deep in the third shelf of the closet in the room he shared with Raymond, he had stashed a hundred and fifty kroner. Mum had given it to him. A hundred and fifty kroner was a lot of money, maybe even enough money for a taxi all the way home. He had a feeling, somewhere deep down inside, that this was exactly the reason he had been given precisely that sum of money. A hundred kroner or two hundred kroner would have been more logical.
“Logical means that something is easy to understand.”
His teeth were chattering, and he pressed his hands against his stomach as it emitted a long, low growl for food.
“I’m starving to death,” he continued quietly as his teeth set off on an uncontrollable merry dance. “Either I’ll freeze to death, or I’ll starve to death.”
The house to which the garage he was sitting in belonged lay in darkness, although his Swatch showed it was ten past nine in the evening. At five o’clock he had expected that someone would arrive home, but no one came. There was no car there either, despite the colossal size of the garage. Perhaps they were away, the people who lived here. It was probably a family. Outside the entrance steps there was a handsome sledge, the kind with skis underneath and a steering wheel. At Christmas he had been so sure he would receive one like that, but then he was given a paint box instead. Mum had looked sorry. But he knew she was hard up. He had been given a Power Ranger as well, and at least that was something he had wanted. But Mum didn’t remember it was the red one he had yearned for. The red one was the boss. He had got the green one. Just like the time two years ago when he’d got the Michelangelo turtle when he had wanted only Raphael.
Maybe he had slept for a while. At least he was surprised to see the time was now past midnight. The middle of the night. It was a long time since he had been awake so late. The house was still deserted. His hunger was so great that he felt dizzy when he stood up. Without really making a decision about it, he approached the outer door. Of course it was locked. With an ordinary lock and padlock.
He stood on the concrete stair, his hand resting indecisively on the wrought-iron railing. For ages. Then he peered over the edge, down at a fairly large basement window reaching all the way to the ground. He trudged down the four steps, and before thinking about it any further, had used the sledge as a battering ram to smash the window. It dawned on him there might not be enough room for him to slide through the window frame, but it went smoothly. He threw his rucksack down first. On the inside, there was a long counter only a meter from the window, so it wasn’t even creepy making his way inside. Because he was quite afraid of the dark, he managed to locate a light switch, and a considerable number of seconds went by before it struck him it was obviously pretty stupid to have the light on. Holding the door handle tightly, he darkened the room and stepped out into a little corridor where a staircase leading to the ground floor was visible in the very faint light entering from outside, through the broken window. Fortunately, the door to the ground floor was not fitted with a lock.
There wasn’t much food in the refrigerator. There was no milk, for example. He also couldn’t find any bread, although he looked high and low. But there were a few eggs in a drawer in the fridge door, and Olav knew how to cook eggs. First you had to boil the water, and then wait for seven minutes. Although he hadn’t eaten eggs with fish cakes before, it tasted delicious now. He was so hungry. It was slightly difficult to eat without touching the wound on his tongue, and the stitches constantly grated on everything, but it was okay. And the entire pantry was full of canned food.
It was two o’clock before he fell asleep, in a darkened kitchen with no cover other than a long lady’s coat he found in the hallway. Totally exhausted, he didn’t even have the energy to think about what he would do the next day. That didn’t matter. Now he just wanted to sleep.
• • •
He was only three years old the first time he injured me. Really it wasn’t his fault. He was just a burly three-year-old. Although he picked up such a horrendous amount, and the kindergarten boasted that he was so smart (maybe they were just trying to comfort me), he still had only about ten words to say. Mummy was not one of them. He must have been the only child in the history of the world who couldn’t say Mummy. His kindergarten teacher reassured me by saying that all children were different. She had a brother who was a professor, she said, and he hadn’t spoken a single word until he was four. As though that would be any concern of mine.
I had made the dinner. He was sitting in his Tripp Trapp chair that I’d been given money by social services to buy. There was only just enough room for him behind the safety rail, but I couldn’t really take that off, as he wasn’t old enough yet. He was extra grumpy. I had accidentally burned his fish fingers; I had suddenly suffered from an upset stomach and spent ages in the toilet. The charred pieces were inedible, but fortunately I had more in the freezer. He began to get impatient. I was becoming dreadfully nervous because of all his screaming. Noisy, tearless, and disruptive screaming. The neighbors gave me meaningful looks if I fumbled slightly too long with the lock on the garbage chute and was unlucky enough to encounter one of them, so they must have heard him.
I didn’t have anything other than a packet of licorice boats to give him to pacify his impatience. It disappeared fast. When I was finally able to shovel five fish fingers over from the frying pan to his plate decorated with Karius and Baktus, I thought he was satisfied. After putting the frying pan back on the cooker to cool down, I sat myself directly across from him and peeled two potatoes. He looked contented, with his mouth full of fish. I smiled at him, he was so sweet and angelic as he sat there, so quiet and happy. I reached out for his hand.
Without any kind of warning, he stabbed his fork into the back of my hand. It was only a child’s fork, luckily, the kind with only three tines, almost like a cake fork. But it broke through my skin with a strength that no one would believe came from a three-year-old child, and blood spurted out. I was so gobsmacked that I couldn’t do anything. He tore the fork loose and put all his strength behind another lunge. The pain was indescribable. But the worst thing of all was that I was so scared. I sat with a three-year-old facing me, and I was more afraid of him than I had ever been of his drunken father.
My God, I was scared of my three-year-old son!
• • •
Terje Welby had been lying awake for three hours, the adrenaline coursing suddenly and undesirably through him every time he was anywhere near the verge of sleep. The sheet was already damp from his exertions. He hauled himself around, moaning; his back was bothering him. Placing the pillow over his head, he muttered to himself, “I must sleep. I simply must sleep.”
The telephone rang.
He battered his hand on the bedside light and the glass shade scudded to the floor, smashing into a thousand pieces. He sat up, sucking the blood from his fingers and staring in dismay at the telephone.
It did not give up, and it seemed as though the noise jangled more and more. All of a sudden he grabbed the receiver.
“Hello!”
“Hi, Terje, it’s Maren here. Sorry for phoning in the middle of the night.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he rushed to say, noticing on the bedside clock that the day was only three hours old.
“Terje, I need to know. ”
“Know what?”
“You know what I mean.”
He sat up against the headboard, pulling at his clammy T-shirt.
“No, honestly, I don’t!”
Silence fell.
“Had Agnes found out about it?” she asked at last.
He swallowed so loudly she could hear it over the phone.
“No. She hadn’t found out.”
If nothing else, he was pleased she could not see him.
“Terje, don’t be angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Was it you who killed her?”
“No, Maren, it wasn’t me. I did not kill her. ” His back was more painful than ever.
4
Look at them out there. Look at them!”
Charging into the sparsely equipped chief inspector’s office without knocking, Billy T. gesticulated out toward Åkebergveien, where two men in coats were scuffling wildly. A Volvo was sitting there with its snout impertinently far up the backside of the latest model Toyota Corolla.