Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel

by Anne Holt

  She rolled her chair over toward the window to open it. The room was gray and foggy with cigarette smoke. Now it turned chilly instead.

  “Shall I phone for an attorney?”

  “No.”

  She had been sitting motionless for so long her vocal cords were almost paralyzed, and the reply was more of a cough than a word. Hanne cursed Billy T. Still no word from him.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Then I’ll continue. You probably couldn’t fathom what you had done. Murder, you understand, is almost always committed in the heat of the moment. You hadn’t planned anything of the kind. More sustenance for the defense!”

  Hanne took out the Yellow Pages for Oslo, and leafed through it to the list of attorneys. She then threw the open catalog toward Maren.

  “I would really recommend you get hold of one.”

  The woman did not answer, just shook her head faintly.

  “I don’t have the energy to say it again,” Hanne said with a sigh, taking the directory back. She closed it with a smack.

  “It might well be that you decided to report it to us at once. But then you soon thought of other alternatives. You knew where the desk key was, so you fetched it and opened the drawers to look for the compromising papers. I’ve no idea whether you found anything about yourself. But it’s likely that you found some about Terje. You left them there, in the hope that the police would find them.”

  Hanne laughed, a short, hollow laugh.

  “It wasn’t strange that you knew Terje had been there after you! I should have placed more emphasis on your amazement that the key was not lying underneath the plant pot when we were talking the day after the murder. Because you had of course put it back. When Terje was not arrested, you realized we hadn’t found anything. Ergo . . .”

  She tapped her temple meaningfully with her left forefinger.

  Maren Kalsvik was still sitting like a zombie, motionless and with her gaze directed at something Hanne Wilhelmsen could not fathom. Something beyond this world. Her eyes were pale steel gray, almost inhuman, more like a dog or a wolf. Hanne could not recall anything other than that they had seemed much bluer before. On the other hand, the entire office seemed gray now. The footsteps and voices from the corridor, which had broken up the monotony of her monologue, had now disappeared. Most of the Homicide Section had gone to celebrate the solving of the double murder with a beer or four. At home Cecilie was probably standing making coffee, having used up all her excuses for why Hanne had never appeared. What had become of Billy T. was a mystery. Erik and Tone-Marit had been given permission to leave around seven o’clock, after the Lover had tearfully admitted to check fraud. His friend, finally tracked down, had confirmed the coffee-drinking episode until late on the evening of the murder, something the staff of the café had hesitantly, but nevertheless convincingly, also confirmed. He had been allowed to go. He was probably feeling like hell.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen was not feeling so hot herself either.

  But Maren Kalsvik was feeling far, far worse. She sat stock-still, without uttering a word, without looking at anything, without reacting to anything that was said. It was the only method she had of maintaining a hold on life and reality.

  Something inside her was about to collapse. Her innards were churning into a chaotic mixture. Her abdomen was thumping and beating, as though her heart had fallen all the way down. She managed to breathe only with the very top part of her lungs, as though they were squeezed right up into her throat, where there was not enough space. Inside her head there was not a single thought. Instead her emotions were whirling around inside her stomach, desperate to escape. Her arms and legs had disappeared; they were simply there, dead and numb and serving no other purpose than to constrain everything that was aching and exploding inside her torso.

  The only thing she succeeded in clinging on to was determination that she must survive. The only way to survive was to sit totally still and hope it would all pass. There was no one in the entire world who could help her. Apart from herself. By keeping her mouth shut. She must not unravel. Must not believe God had turned his back on her. She clutched a red point somewhere inside her stomach, held tight, and refused to let go.

  The suicide letter had arrived in the post two days after he had killed himself. She tore it open and spilled her coffee on it, a letter addressed to her. “I did not kill Agnes,” it had said. He begged her to believe him. There was something else there too. “Be careful, Maren. Agnes knew about your fraudulent diploma. I knew as well. Be careful. I have done so much that was wrong. But so have you.”

  She had burned the letter. It was not addressed to the police. It belonged to her.

  My God, she thought, as a rumbling sound came from somewhere inside her stomach. Forgive me. Help me.

  Chief Inspector Wilhelmsen had left the suspect to her own thoughts for a lengthy period. She did not know what she was waiting for. She was sinking into a kind of indifference, a defense against the unbearable fact that she knew she was sitting across from a murderer and did not have the foggiest idea how she was going to see to it that the woman received her well-deserved punishment. Prove that she had committed the crime.

  She chased the feeling away but appreciated it would return if something did not happen soon.

  “You didn’t need to fear fingerprints. Other than on the knife, that is, but they were swiftly disposed of. Just a wipe. All other prints belonged there quite naturally. You’d been there hundreds of times. That was how we realized why you’d taken the other knives with you.”

  Maren Kalsvik moved for the first time during the entire interview. Stiff and sore, she leaned forward toward the coffee cup, its contents thick, cold, strong, and bitter. She blinked vigorously a couple of times, squeezing her eyes shut as though there were a speck of dust in them. The smallest tear hung on the eyelashes of her left eye, before falling and running slowly down her cheek. It was so tiny that it was used up before it reached her mouth. Then she sat back, returning to her wooden doll position.

  “For now,” Hanne said, rising from her seat, “I’ll show you what I think. I’ll show you how, quite early on, we realized the murderer had to be someone who spent his or her daily life here, someone who didn’t need to be afraid of fingerprints in the rest of the room.”

  She crossed to the door and opened it. Outside, the corridor was deserted and gloomy.

  “Now I am you, okay?”

  She pointed first to herself and then to the other woman.

  “I’ve just killed someone. I’m incensed, I’m desperate, but the most important thing of all is I don’t want to be caught. I have a hard job getting out of it. But then perhaps I suddenly remember what happened when I grabbed the knife I stabbed into Agnes.”

  Maren Kalsvik made no sign of watching her. She just sat still, with her profile to the door. Hanne sighed, approached her, and took hold of her beneath the chin. Her face was cold as ice, but her head was limp and the chief inspector had no difficulty forcing her to make contact.

  “When a person takes hold of a knife that’s lying in a pile of other knives, it’s extremely difficult not to touch the other ones. It’s well nigh impossible, if you don’t take your time to pick out only one. Look here!”

  She took out four long items from a drawer, a letter opener, a slim leather pencil case, a felt-tip pen, and a ruler, and laid them on top of the desk.

  “If I lift one of them without knowing exactly which one I want to take hold of, this is what happens!”

  As she quickly grabbed the letter opener, her point became clear. She had touched all three other items as well. As she had demonstrated to Billy T. in the bar in Grünerløkka.

  “You didn’t have time to mess about. You were acting on the spur of the moment. A moment’s rage and desperation. The remaining knives were the only place your fingerprints preferably should not be. You could have wiped them. But that would have taken time.”

  She let go her face an
d approached the window.

  “Of course everyone would have been afraid of fingerprints on the knives. But you see . . .”

  The palms of her hands touched the cold glass, and she paused before turning to continue.

  “If it had been an outsider who had done it, he or she would have had to fear fingerprints in other places too. As far as a stranger is concerned, we have two theories. If he was planning to do something illegal, the outsider would have known to wear gloves. No reason to bring any knives. Or else he committed an unplanned murder. In the heat of the moment. Then the knives would have been the least of his problems. He would have had to wipe down the whole place. The door handle. The desktop, perhaps. The armrests on the chair. What do I know? But you always touch somewhere or other when you enter a place. And that was how I knew.”

  Maren Kalsvik still did not move a muscle. It seemed as if she was not even breathing.

  “None of the surfaces in that entire room had been wiped. There were marks and dust and scraps of dirt everywhere. No sign that anyone had taken the time to clean up. The person who killed Agnes and took the knives did not need to bother about anything other than them. The person concerned belonged to the Spring Sunshine Foster Home. The fingerprints belonged in Agnes’s office. Except for on the knives, for no one could have claimed to have touched them.”

  The chief inspector crossed over to the door again, pantomiming her role as a murder suspect.

  “Perhaps I hear someone coming. Perhaps I’m simply terribly afraid. In any case, I have a difficult time getting away. The simplest thing is to take the knives with me. That’s what you did. And then you chose to disappear down the fire escape. The lucky thing was . . .”

  Hanne laughed out loud.

  “Quite resourceful of you to haul it up again when you came back. Before the police arrived. Caused us a good deal of trouble, that did. Well.”

  She walked slowly back to the chair behind the desk, and as she passed the suspect, she let her hand slide lightly over her back.

  “Like that,” she said emphatically and with a demonstratively satisfied smile as she returned to her seat again. “That’s the way it happened. Approximately, at least. Isn’t that so?”

  Some of the blueness had returned to Maren Kalsvik’s eyes. She raised her hand and stared at it as though incredulous that it could still be lifted. Then she ran her fingers through her hair and stared Hanne Wilhelmsen directly in the eye.

  “How have you thought to prove all that?”

  Where the hell was Billy T.?

  • • •

  Billy T.’s little boys had fallen asleep long ago, after a great deal of fuss and three chapters of Mio, My Son. His sister smilingly chased him away before settling down with a pizza and beer and the remote control.

  Instead of traveling directly to Grønlandsleiret 44, he called in at Spring Sunshine Foster Home. The receptionist at the police station had delivered a message from Cathrine Ruge just before he had left to collect the youngsters, informing him she could be contacted at the foster home all afternoon. Since the home was not very far out of his way, he thought he might as well drop in.

  It was quiet and peaceful in the dayroom. Raymond, Anita, and Glenn were out, and Jeanette was staying the night with a classmate. The twins were sitting watching TV, while Kenneth and Cathrine were assembling a jigsaw on the huge worktable. Kenneth was excited and restless and Cathrine was having difficulty persuading him to sit still.

  Billy T. joined them on the puzzle for a few minutes and then had to wait for three-quarters of an hour for Kenneth to fall asleep. Cathrine groaned as she descended the stairs again.

  “That boy’s having a dreadful time just now,” she said. “God only knows how Christian managed to keep them all inside until Olav’s . . . until Olav was taken away.”

  She was unbelievably skinny. Her head was a spectral skull glazed with nothing but skin. Her eyes became enormous in her tiny, narrow face, and Billy T. could discern a kind of beauty if it hadn’t been for the woman not being endowed with a single scrap of fat.

  “I really haven’t a clue whether it has any significance,” she said half apologetically as she removed two sheets of paper from a folder she had brought down from the first floor. “But on the day Agnes was killed . . .”

  Billy T. turned the two sheets to face him.

  “I was up there with her. Immediately after Terje had been there. Maren had been there too, but only for a couple of minutes. We talked about a whole lot of things to do with work. Perhaps it took about half an hour or so. A bit about Olav, a bit about Kenneth. Yes, we’re struggling with Kenneth, you see. He’s been placed with three different families, poor thing. His mother—”

  “Okay, okay,” Billy T. interjected, waving her one. “Get to the point!”

  “I wasn’t really meaning to be nosy, you know. But there was a diploma lying on her desk. From Diakonhjemmet. I recognized it, of course, because I got my qualifications there myself . . . But after a while Agnes lifted the paper and stuffed it quickly into the drawer. It was exactly as if it had suddenly dawned on her that it was lying there, and she didn’t want me to see it. I noticed it was Maren’s before she put it away. It was actually quite bizarre, you see, that it was lying there and that Agnes seemed so abrupt and so on. What’s on it is not exactly a secret, of course. There aren’t any marks or anything like that, it only says ‘pass.’ But I didn’t think much of it. In fact I had completely forgotten about it. But there was something that . . . something that struck me and that I didn’t recall until today . . .”

  Cathrine rose to her feet and stood behind Billy T. She leaned over him and pointed at the certificates.

  “Do you see that they are different?”

  They were indeed. At the top of one it stated DIAKONHJEMMET SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK in broad capital letters. Underneath was printed “Diploma of Social Work Examination.” Whereas the other one had a symbol at the top, a circle with a thick line forming the upper half and the lower formed by the word “Diakonhjemmet.” In the center of the circle stood a kind of cross, reminiscent of a Nazi Iron Cross.

  “Horrible, that Nazi cross,” Cathrine preempted him. “And as you see, they changed the heading to ‘Diploma of Social Work Education,’ not ‘Examination.’ The first one is from 1990; it belongs to a friend of mine. The other one is from 1991. It’s mine.”

  A bony forefinger directed his attention to the date near the foot of each page.

  “And what’s terribly odd, you see,” Cathrine continued once she had returned to her own seat. “It’s that Maren’s diploma had that iron cross at the top! But she has always claimed she took the exam in 1990 . . . I asked Eirik about it to be sure, earlier today. He was in the year before her, and he graduated in 1989. I just can’t understand it, really . . .”

  Now she was staring at her hands, folded on the tabletop.

  “It’s not my intention to make difficulties for anybody, but it is quite strange, isn’t it?”

  Billy T. did not utter a word but nodded faintly. Without taking his eyes from the two diplomas, he asked, “Did you see Maren when she left Agnes’s office? Or later that day?”

  The spectral skull was deep in thought.

  “Yes, I met her as she was coming downstairs. She told me it was my turn.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “She was quite grumpy, and I remember thinking she had probably had an argument with Agnes again. They were good friends, really, I didn’t mean it like that, but they disagreed fairly often. About things to do with the children, you see. Agnes was stricter, more old-fashioned, in a way. Last year Maren wanted to take the children abroad on holiday, but—”

  “Cathrine!”

  A desperate, feeble voice was calling from the top of the staircase. Billy T. did not get to hear what happened about Maren’s plans for a foreign holiday, because Cathrine Ruge stood up and dashed off upstairs. It was twenty minutes before she reappeared.

  So Agnes had confro
nted Maren with her deception. It couldn’t have been accidental that her diploma was lying out. If this lanky skeleton had told them what she knew at her first interview . . . It had damn well been the day after the murder! The day after! Who knows, Terje Welby’s life might have been spared. Maybe even Olav’s too. Billy T. fought his rising rage. Then the scrawny skeleton reappeared.

  “He’s having a dreadful time, you know. Kenneth, I mean. Now he’s got it into his head that there’s a pirate living in the basement. Every night this imaginary pirate comes upstairs to eat all the children. My God . . .”

  Her voice was shrill, and the only reason Billy T. did not interrupt her was he was so furious he simply had to keep his mouth shut.

  Cathrine continued. “This evening he came home with four big knives, to add to the mess. Anita had taken him over to the playground to divert him when things were at their worst here. He had found them among some stones and insisted it was the pirate who had stashed them there so he could cut the children up. God Almighty. He’s just having a terrible time.”

  Billy T. fleetingly shook his head, and his anger disappeared.

  “Knives? Had he found some knives?”

  “Yes, four horrible, huge knives. I threw them away.”

  “Where?”

  “Where?”

  “Where did you throw the knives?”

  “In the garbage, of course!”

  He stood up so fast the chair toppled over.

  “What garbage can? The one in here, or did you take them outside?”

  Cathrine Ruge looked exasperated.

  “No, I wrapped them up well so the refuse collectors wouldn’t injure themselves, and then I threw them out there.” She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb.

  Billy T. stormed out to the kitchen and tore open the door of the cabinet underneath the sink. Almost at the top, among potato peelings and two discarded sausage ends, lay an oblong parcel wrapped in newspaper. He clutched it carefully and held it up to Cathrine, who was standing in the doorway with her hands by her side and a disgruntled expression on her face.