by K. O. Dahl
They ate in silence for a while. Salad, marinated steaks and fresh white bread. They drank cold beer. Frank had in fact never believed that an afternoon with this misery guts could turn out to be so promising.
It was Gunnarstranda who broke the silence. 'In the first place, Henning admitted picking up Katrine outside Annabeth s's house. Raymond Skau might have been there, standing outside the house waiting for Katrine. He turned up at her work earlier in the day, didn't he. He might have followed her and Eidesen to the party - we have no way of knowing. Suppose he stood waiting outside the house. He saw Katrine jump into Henning's car, so he followed them. We know Henning and Katrine drove down to Aker Brygge and bought food at McDonald's. They drove off. According to Henning, a car followed them into the car park by Ingierstrand.'
Gunnarstranda fell silent and ruminated on what he had said.
Frølich filled both their glasses.
A white wagtail landed on the veranda balustrade and wagged its tail. 'We have an audience,' Frølich said. 'A spy.'
'If we focus and think logically,' Gunnarstranda resumed, 'it's clear we are dealing with a casual assailant. Once we have Skau, we'll get the forensics team to run a DNA test on him. That takes two weeks and then we'll know if the skin under Katrine's nails belongs to Skau. Then it's just a question of time before we find her hair on his clothing. By which point this damned business will be an open-and- shut case.'
'But where is Skau?'
'In Sweden, I suppose,' growled Gunnarstranda, buttering a slice of bread. 'That's typical too. I've caught two killers before who thought they could slip into Denmark or Sweden to take the heat off themselves. In a couple of weeks Skau will be back, and then he's ours.'
The two policemen sat gazing into the air. Gunnarstranda was chewing and thinking. Frølich crossed his legs and turned his face to the sun - relaxed.
'I don't remember seeing any scratch marks on Kramer,' Gunnarstranda said at length.
Frølich beamed. His boss still had not dropped the idea of Kramer as the killer. 'We don't know where she scratched him,' he said. 'The pathologist will be able to say whether there are any scars resulting from scratches.'
Gunnarstranda pulled a face, as though suddenly remembering his role as host and Frølich’s as his guest. 'Nice to see you,' he grinned.
'Thank you. And thank you for the spread.'
'Thank you. Do you play chess?'
Frølich’s heart sank. Chess. Just as he was feeling at home. Chess - the game with one piece called a bishop, another a knight. One of them can jump over other pieces in an L shape. He gained time by taking a good swig of beer. Chess, he thought. The game where either the king or the queen has to stand on a square marked Dl.
'I knew it,' Gunnarstranda said, contented. 'A good policeman loves chess.'
Frank thought of how sometimes he hated chess. Always having to make strategic decisions, always thinking three steps ahead before you made a move. 'It's a rare occasion for me to play,' he said with care.
'Come on,' Gunnarstranda said, leading him into the cabin to a low table with a black surface. 'Friday evening, out in the wilds, whisky, beer and chess,' he continued with a smile. 'You've landed in paradise.'
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Pin-up Girl
The next morning Frølich left Gunnarstranda's mountain cabin for Drammen, but instead of branching off to Oslo, he bore left for Kongsberg. He left the motorway, continued for a good half an hour and didn't stop until he reached the turn-off for the road through Nedre Eiker. He sat in the car looking across the small valley. The housing estate must have been built at some time in the seventies. The houses stood in neat lines. An attempt had been made to blend them naturally into the terrain, but it had failed as the area consisted of two large surfaces sloping downwards into a V-shaped hollow where a stream must have flowed at one time. Along these surfaces ran rows of two-storey terraced houses seasoned with the occasional low, single-storey, prefabricated house. Everywhere shingle-covered flat roofs and unsympathetic, square double-glazed windows prevailed. Here and there more ambitious buildings popped up, some with huge verandas and walls with 'prosperity pustules' - bulges in the walls with a small-paned window in the centre; others had more kitschy accessories: imitation Greek pillars at the entrance or multi-coloured leaded windows. In most of the gardens, however, bushes and fruit trees had succeeded in reaching maturity.
Frølich got out of the car and walked into the estate. Somewhere a lawnmower motor droned; a small girl was sitting alone and forlorn on a seesaw. She stuck a finger in her mouth and stared at the passing policeman with big eyes. On a veranda further away a boy sat astride a plastic tractor making brum-brum noises. Frank discovered the Bratterud house long before he saw the number on the wall. A sense of hardship emanated from the fragile construction, from the black holes in the roof, the stains on the flaking paintwork, the crooked postbox, the overturned dustbin, the grass that had grown so long that wispy flower stems dotted the lawn and the delicate front steps that threatened imminent collapse.
The woman who answered the door was plump around the waist and had unusually big bags under her eyes and reddish, curly hair. Frølich remembered her from the funeral. She was the woman with a handbag permanently hanging from her arm, who had shaken Annabeths's hand after the service.
Frølich introduced himself. There was a burning in the woman's eyes, a muted yellow glow, a spirit flame nourished by the bags under both eyes.
'Long way from home here,' she said. 'This is Buskerud.'
Frølich responded with a smile worthy of a TV preacher. 'My main reason for coming is to talk about Katrine on… an informal basis,' he said, patiently placing his hands on his hips.
'Why's that?'
'To get to know her background… upbringing… just to know a little more.'
A big lock of curly, red hair fell across her brow. The woman stroked the hair away with a club of a hand. Her fingers were short and stubby, and inflamed with eczema.
'I would have liked to ask you in, but it's a mess here.'
'We can go for a walk,' Frølich said blithely.
'Stroll round the estate with the police? You've got to be joking!'
She turned her head and looked daggers at his profile. Hers were the eyes of a deranged bird the second before it flies at someone. Frølich looked away and noticed that the grey, damp-damaged wood was coming through the paintwork on the front door. A leak, he thought, and noticed why the steps were crooked. The base was beginning to rot.
The silence lasted for what seemed an eternity. An insect - a bug of some description - with six legs and a three-sided shell lumbered cautiously along the hand rail of the steps. Its two feelers looked like aerials and the creature flourished its antennae in the same way that the blind tap with a stick to detect dangers ahead. Wonder if it knows where it's going, thought Frølich. He looked up again to meet the woman's fierce gaze.
'Well, you'd better come in then,' said the woman at last, turning with difficulty.
'Sit wherever you like, but not in the cat's chair,' she panted, brushing the lock of hair off her brow again. It fell back at once. She pushed forward her lower lip and blew it away. 'That's the cat's chair. If you sit there you'll have to go home and wash your trousers right away!'
Frølich looked around and found the kitchen, where the sun was coming in through the window and making the stains on the floor shine with a dry, matt lustre. He took a wooden chair from the little table under the window and carried it into the sitting room.
'She hadn't been home for a long time… to visit you… before she died, I mean… had she?' he asked, sitting down.
'She never came home.'
Frølich said nothing in the silence that followed this outburst.
'Well, now she's dead, and it's sad, but things were bound to go wrong for her. She was a pathological liar who knocked about with boys and men from the time she was so big.' One club-shaped hand indicated a height of a metre off
the floor.
'What do you mean by a pathological liar?'
'That's what she was. She lied about everything and everyone, and nothing was good enough. I wasn't good enough. When she dropped by a couple of years back I cooked for her. I remembered the food she had always loved as a child. But it wasn't good enough. No, you should have seen the woman with her, the fine lady who wouldn't accept any of my things, walking round the sitting room with her arms crossed as though frightened she would be infected by some disease. These people drove expensive cars and ate more elegant food. I wasn't good enough. No, Katrine had a high opinion of herself. She thought she came from better stock, her, the daughter of someone who couldn't take care of her own children.'
'You adopted her, didn't you?'
'Yes, we did.'
Frølich waited for more. It didn't seem to be forthcoming. In the ensuing silence Frølich considered how to formulate his next question. But to his surprise she spoke up first: 'Katrine was fond of her father. My husband. They were inseparable. And for as long as he was alive she was all right. But then he died, of cancer. When she was eleven, I think. And she was a difficult teenager. We never really got along.'
Frølich cleared his throat.
She interrupted, 'Now they'll be together, at last. I'll put her urn on his grave.'
Frølich tried to read what lay hidden behind the cheerless eyes, but gave up. When the silence had lasted long enough he asked in a light tone: 'Why adoption?'
'I couldn't have any children.'
'I mean… why Katrine?'
'Her real mother was dead. That was all we knew. And then Fredrik died a few years later. Yes, and then it wasn't many more years before I had the task of chasing the men away. That was Katrine's problem. She never got over losing her father.'
'What did she die of, Katrine's biological mother?'
'No one knows. But that fed the girl's imagination of course. She fantasized about everything from here to Monaco.'
Frølich nodded and lowered his eyes. He didn't like to think about children with unattainable dreams.
'You know, she thought about plane crashes and car accidents, reckoned her real origins were the Soria Maria palace.'
Frølich recalled a job he had been on years ago, with two others as muscle for the child welfare authorities - a case of gross neglect as a result of which the child had been placed with the social services. The girl had been around seven. How old was she now? Eighteen? Nineteen?
'But the woman could have been a drug addict or could have died of cancer like my husband for all I knew. We were told nothing and didn't want to ask. We didn't want to know.'
'Does the name Raymond Skau mean anything to you?' Frølich asked.
She pulled a bitter grimace.
'So you do know the name?'
She nodded. 'He was the one who got her into the mess. Much older than her. He was one of the worst good-for-nothings round here. Moved to Oslo as well. He's off the scene now, but they were a couple. She moved in with him as soon as she was old enough.'
'How old was she then?'
'Fifteen maybe… or sixteen? I went there, I did, and dragged her back. He even tried to go for me. Be careful, he shouted. I'm warning you. I've got a black belt in karate! Well, I mean to say. But I gave him a mouthful. Go home and get it then and I'll whip your back with it! I said.'
Frølich proffered a courteous smile.
Beate Bratterud smiled, too. 'Yes, it's easy to laugh now, after the event. But it went wrong of course. For Katrine, I mean. It's a terrible thought. Even though it was good that she managed to get out of the mess. But it was a pity she couldn't do it without bitterness. She needn't have been ashamed of me, or her home. We gave her what she needed and we fought for her. We did. But you have to say that she didn't have it easy.'
Frølich stood up. 'Excuse me for a couple of minutes,' he said, taking his mobile phone from his jacket pocket. He tapped in Gunnarstranda's number and sent a cheery smile to the cheerless face on the other side of the table.
It rang three times.
'Please be brief.'
'It's me,' Frank said.
'Spit it out.'
'Thanks for everything last night,' Frølich said in a crabbed tone. Then he went on: 'I'm at Katrine Bratterud's house, as we arranged. She says Raymond Skau comes from here. She knows Skau, who it seems was Katrine's boyfriend during her teens. I suppose he got her on to the streets.'
'Well, well,' Gunnarstranda said eagerly. 'Go on.'
'That was all for the moment.'
'We'll have to see what significance that has,' the voice on the telephone said. 'Some activity in Skau's flat has been reported. If you jump into your car now you may be able to catch them interviewing him.'
Frølich rang off and sat staring at the mobile in his hand. After a while he put it in his pocket. 'You say Katrine fantasized about her origins,' he said, looking up at Beate Bratterud. 'What do you mean by that?'
'What I said.'
Frølich waited.
'Sometimes her origins were all she had in her head. But she never did find out anything.'
'In practical terms, what did she do?'
'Well, now you're asking. Salvation Army maybe.
Social services couldn't help. I could have told her that. These women at social services can endure the job for about two years and then they're burnt out. Those that aren't just stand there going on about client confidentiality. The only people who could tell her anything about welfare cases twenty years ago are the welfare cases themselves. I told her, but I don't think she was listening. I don't think she had much luck tracing her parents.' Beate Bratterud sat up straight in her chair. 'In the years after my husband died all this stuff took over full-time. They were very close. Katrine and Fredrik But she never liked me. I was never good enough.' The woman with the curly hair rose to her feet with difficulty, lumbered over to a worktable in the corner and pulled out a drawer. She returned with a small box. In the box there were photographs. 'Here,' she said taking out the photos, looking at some, discarding them or passing them to the policeman, who studied them with polite interest. They were younger versions of Beate with long, curly hair. She was slimmer and her face was less lined. In one photo she was smiling; her teeth were straight and pointed inwards, like fish teeth. Frølich examined the smile and wondered whether it would be true to say that she had been good-looking.
Beate passed him the whole box and clumped off to another chest of drawers. He flipped through the photos and found a folded, yellowing newspaper cutting. He gently unfolded it in his lap. It was a page from Verdens Gang. He read the date in the top corner: 11 July 1965. The page was dominated by a girl in a bikini posing on a diving block in a swimming pool. She had curls flowing down to her shoulders and was a bit podgy around the thighs and stomach. Today's VG girl is Beate, the caption ran. Frank subjected the newspaper cutting to closer scrutiny. Yes, that was a younger version of Beate Bratterud. He looked up and met her doleful eyes.
'The years pass,' she said in a sullen tone, turned and began to rummage through another drawer. Frølich had no idea what to say, but felt it would be wrong not to compliment her. He cleared his throat. 'Wow.'
She turned.
He lifted up the cutting.
'Yes, I heard you,' she said.
He could feel the blush warming his cheeks and concentrated on the photos again. They were pictures of strangers in the Constitution Day procession on 17 May - young people wearing flared pants, a young woman with a pram and a group photograph in the park. In a few pictures there was a dark, thin man with brushed back hair and elegant features. And there were a few of Katrine - blonde and very good-looking with a sensual, slightly puffed-up lip. She didn't look much like her foster parents.
'There was a photo I thought I would show you,' Beate mumbled and finally found what she was looking for. 'Look here…'
The picture was of the thin man arm in arm with Katrine - in front of a wooden gate - a woodland tra
ck lined with spruce trees in the background. The father's arm was round the daughter's shoulder while she squeezed his waist. Two people who loved each other.
'We met in the way that people did in the old days,' she said dreamily from the other chair.
Frølich raised his eyebrows. 'You and your husband?'
'Yes, nowadays people advertise in the paper to get to know each other, or through the internet or goodness knows what else. I wouldn't be surprised if you can ring up for a partner, but in the old days… in the old days you went to dances…'
Frølich nodded, thinking about the bitterness the eleven-year-old girl must have felt for the world the day she was deprived of her father. 'Cruel,' he mumbled.
'At a village hall,' she went on. 'Where the girls stood around like wallflowers and the boys asked you on to the dance floor, after drinking Dutch courage on the steps outside first, of course. Real bands with real music. Where men fought for girls. I suppose you've heard of Alf Prшysen - his song about one step here and one step there and the girl who laughs when you miss a step - and about journeyman joiners. Well, Fredrik and I met at the village hall and he chose me and not the other girl. What I say is: If you've never experienced a proper dance at a village hall, you've never lived!'
'That's right,' said Frølich. He cleared his throat. 'Does the name Henning Kramer mean anything to you?'
'Nothing at all.'
'Ole Eidesen?'
'No.'
Frølich put the photographs back on the table. 'You said Katrine was a little ashamed of her family, or at least she didn't think it was good enough. Was that more or less what you said?'
'She was ashamed of me,' Beate said with bitterness in her voice. 'She was ashamed of this house, of my appearance. Katrine could never accept love from me. She became a snob. It's sad, but the truth is that as her treatment progressed she became even more of a snob.'
Frank gave a heavy nod.
'But this is not the first time, you know,' Beate said. 'The first time for what?'
'It's not the first time Katrine has died. The first time was ten years ago. The drugs almost killed her.