by Jo Nesbo
‘Why’s that?’
There was a brusqueness to Filip Becker’s question that made Harry think he was a man who was used to being in control. To being kept informed. And that argued against his wife having left without a word. Which, for that matter, Harry had already excluded in his mind. Well-adjusted, healthy mothers do not abandon ten-year-old sons in the middle of the night. And then there was all the rest. Usually they used minimal resources at such an early stage of a missing persons case, unless there were indications which suggested something criminal or dramatic. It was ‘all the rest’ that had made him drive up to Hoff himself.
‘Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it,’ Harry answered. ‘It’s a methodology.’
He caught Becker’s eyes behind the glasses now. They were, unlike his son’s, light blue and shone with an intense, clear gleam.
‘By all means,’ Becker said. ‘Go ahead.’
The bedroom was chilly, aroma-free and tidy. On the double bed was a crocheted quilt. On one bedside table a photograph of an elderly woman. The similarity led Harry to assume this side of the bed was Filip Becker’s. On the other bedside table was a photograph of Jonas. There was a faint scent of perfume in the wardrobe containing ladies’ clothing. Harry checked that the corners of the clothes hangers hung with equal distance from each other, as they would if they had been allowed to hang undisturbed for a while. Black dresses with slits, short jumpers with pink motifs and glitter. At the bottom of the wardrobe there was a drawer section. He pulled out the top drawer. Underwear. Black and red. Next drawer. Suspender belts and stockings. Third drawer. Jewellery placed in holes in bright red felt. He noticed a large gaudy ring with precious stones that glittered and sparkled. Everything here was a bit Vegas. There were no empty gaps in the felt.
The bedroom had a door leading into a newly decorated bathroom with a steam shower and two steel washstands.
In Jonas’s room, Harry sat down on a small chair by a small desk. On the desk there was a calculator with a series of advanced mathematical functions. It looked new and unused. Above the desk there was a poster with a picture of seven dolphins inside a wave and a calendar for the whole year. Several of the dates were ringed and had tiny reminders added. Harry noted birthdays for Mummy and Grandpa, holiday in Denmark, dentist at 10 a.m. and two July dates with ‘Doctor’ above. But Harry couldn’t see any football matches, cinema trips or birthday parties. He caught sight of a pink scarf lying on the bed. A colour no boy of Jonas’s age would be seen dead wearing. Harry lifted the scarf. It was damp, but he could still smell the distinctive fragrance of skin, hair and feminine perfume. The same perfume as in the wardrobe.
He went back downstairs. Stopped outside the kitchen and listened to Skarre holding forth on procedures regarding missing persons cases. There was a clink of coffee cups inside. The sofa in the living room seemed enormous, perhaps because of the slight figure sitting there reading a book. Harry went closer and saw a photo of Charlie Chaplin in full regalia. Harry sat down beside Jonas.
‘Did you know that Chaplin was a sir?’ Harry asked. ‘Sir Charlie Chaplin.’
Jonas nodded. ‘But they chucked him out of the USA.’
Jonas flicked through the book.
‘Were you ill this summer, Jonas?’
‘No.’
‘But you went to the doctor’s. Twice.’
‘Mum wanted to have me examined. Mum …’ His voice suddenly failed him.
‘She’ll be back soon, you’ll see,’ Harry said, putting a hand on his narrow shoulders. She didn’t take her scarf with her, did she. The pink one on your bed.’
‘Someone hung it round the snowman’s neck,’ Jonas said. ‘I brought it in.’
‘Your mother didn’t want the snowman to freeze then.’
‘She would never have given her favourite scarf to the snowman.’
‘Then it must have been your dad.’
‘No, someone did it after he’d left. Last night. The person who took Mum.’
Harry nodded slowly. ‘Who made the snowman, Jonas?’
‘I don’t know.’
Harry looked through the window to the garden. This was the reason he had come. An ice-cold draught seemed to run through the wall and the room.
Harry and Katrine drove down Sørkedalsveien towards Majorstuen.
‘What was the first thing that struck you when we went in?’ Harry asked.
‘That the couple living there were not exactly soulmates,’ Katrine said, steering through the toll booth without braking. ‘It may have been an unhappy marriage, and if so, she was the one who suffered more.’
‘Mm. What made you think that?’
‘It’s obvious,’ Katrine smiled, glancing in the mirror. ‘Clash of taste.’
‘Explain.’
‘Didn’t you see the dreadful sofa and the coffee table? Typical eighties style bought by men in the nineties. While she chose a dining table in white oiled oak with aluminium legs. And Vitra.’
‘Vitra?’
‘Dining-room chairs. Swiss. Expensive. So expensive that with what she could have saved by buying slightly more reasonably priced copies, she could have changed all the bloody furniture.’
Harry noticed that ‘bloody’ didn’t sound like a regular swear word in Katrine Bratt’s mouth; it was a linguistic counterpoint that merely underlined her class affiliation.
‘Meaning?’
‘That big house, at that Oslo address, means it’s not money that’s the problem. She isn’t allowed to change his sofa and table. And when a man with no taste, or no apparent interest in interior design, does that kind of thing, it tells me something about who dominates whom.’
Harry nodded, mostly as a marker for himself. Her first impression had not been mistaken. Katrine Bratt was good.
‘Tell me what you think,’ she said. ‘It’s me who should be learning here.’
Harry looked out of the window, at the old, traditional, though never particularly venerable, licensed café, Lepsvik.
‘I don’t think Birte Becker left the house of her own free will,’ he said.
‘Why not? There were no signs of violence.’
‘Because it was well planned.’
‘And who’s the guilty party? The husband? It’s always the husband, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Harry, aware his mind was wandering. ‘It’s always the husband.’
‘Except that this one had gone to Bergen.’
‘Looks like it, yes.’
‘On the last plane, so he couldn’t have come back and still managed to catch the first lecture.’ Katrine accelerated and raced across the Majorstuen crossroads on amber. ‘Had Filip Becker been guilty he would have taken the bait you set for him anyway.’
‘Bait?’
‘Yes. The bit about her mood swings. You suggested to Becker that you suspected suicide.’
‘And so?’
She laughed. ‘Come on, Harry. Everyone, including Becker, knows that the police don’t commit resources to a case resembling suicide. In a nutshell, you gave him the chance to espouse a theory which, if he’d been guilty, would have solved most of his problems. However, he replied that she was as happy as a lark.’
‘Mm. So you think the question was a test?’
‘You test people all the time, Harry. Including me.’
Harry didn’t answer until they were well down Bogstadveien.
‘People are often smarter than you think,’ he said, and then said nothing until they were in the Police HQ car park.
‘I have to work on my own for the rest of the day.’
And he said that because he had been thinking about the pink scarf and come to a conclusion. That he urgently needed to go through Skarre’s missing persons report and he urgently needed to have his nagging suspicion confirmed. And if it was what he feared, he would have to go to POB Gunnar Hagen with the letter. That sodding letter.
5
4 NOVEMBER 1992.
The
Totem Pole.
WHEN WILLIAM JEFFERSON BLYTHE III CAME INTO THE world on 19 August 1946 in the little town of Hope, Arkansas, exactly three months had passed since the death of his father in a traffic accident. Four years later William’s mother remarried and William took his the new father’s surname. And on a November night forty-six years later, in 1992, white confetti fell like snow onto the streets of Hope in celebration of their own hope and home-town boy, William – or just Bill – Clinton, after he had been elected the USA’s forty-second President. The snow falling on Bergen that same night did not reach the streets but melted in the air, as usual, and turned to rain over the town, which had been happening since mid-September. But as the following morning unfolded there was a nice sprinkling of sugar on the top of the seven peaks guarding this beautiful town. And Inspector Gert Rafto had already arrived on the highest of them, Ulriken. He was breathing in the mountain air with a shiver, hunching up his shoulders around his broad head, his face so covered with folds of skin that it seemed to have been punctured.
The yellow cable car that had brought him and three crime scene officers from Bergen Police HQ up the 642 metres above the town was swaying gently from the solid steel wires, waiting. The service had been discontinued as soon as the first tourists who had dismounted onto the popular mountain top that morning had sounded the alarm.
‘Out and about,’ one of the crime scene officers let slip.
The town’s tourism slogan had become such a parody of Bergen Norwegian that Bergensians had almost stopped using it. But in situations where fear prevails, your innermost lexicon takes over.
‘Yes, out and about,’ Rafto repeated sarcastically, his eyes shining from behind the pancake batter of skin folds.
The body lying in the snow had been cut into so many pieces that it was only thanks to a naked breast that they had been able to determine the gender. The rest reminded Rafto of a traffic accident in Eidsvågneset the year before, when a lorry coming round a bend too fast had lost its load of aluminium sheeting and had literally sliced up an oncoming car.
‘The killer has murdered her and carved her up right here,’ one of the officers said.
The information seemed somewhat superfluous to Rafto since the snow around the body was bespattered with blood and the thick streaks to the side suggested that at least one artery had been cut while the heart was still beating. He made a mental note to find out when it had stopped snowing last night. The last cable car had left at five in the afternoon. Of course, the victim and the killer may have taken the path that wound up beneath the cable cars, though. Or they could have taken the Fløyen funicular up to Fjelltoppen beside it and walked from there. But they were demanding walks and his gut instinct told him: cable car.
There were two sets of footprints in the snow. The small prints were undoubtedly the woman’s, even though there was no sign of her shoes. And the others had to be the killer’s. They led to the path.
‘Big boots,’ said the young technician, a hollow-cheeked coastal man from Sotra. ‘At least size 48. Guy must have been pretty beefy.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Rafto said, sniffing the air. ‘The print is uneven and yet the ground here is flat. That suggests the man’s foot is smaller than his boot. Perhaps he was trying to fool us.’
Rafto felt everyone’s eyes on him. He knew what they were thinking. There he went again, trying to dazzle, the star of bygone times, the man the media had adored: big gob, hard face and driving energy to match. In short, a man made for headlines. But at some point he had become too grand for them, for all of them, the press and his colleagues. Indirect jibes had begun to circulate that Gert Rafto was only thinking about himself and his place in the limelight, that in his egotism he was treading on a few too many toes and over a few too many dead bodies. But he hadn’t taken any notice. They didn’t have anything on him. Not much anyway. The odd trinket had disappeared from the crime scenes. A piece of jewellery or a watch belonging to the deceased, things you assumed no one would miss. But one day one of Rafto’s colleagues had been searching for a pen and had opened a drawer in his desk. At least that was what he said. And found three rings. Rafto had been summoned to the POB and had explained himself, and had been told to keep his mouth shut and his fingers to himself. That was all. But the rumours had started. Even the media had picked up on it. So perhaps it was not so surprising that when charges of police brutality were levelled against the station, there was one man against whom concrete evidence was soon found. The man who was made for headlines.
Gert Rafto was guilty of the accusations; no one was in any doubt about that. But everyone knew that the inspector had been made a scapegoat for a culture that had permeated Bergen police for many years. Just because he had signed a number of reports on prisoners – most of them child molesters and dope dealers – who had fallen down the ancient iron stairs to the remand cells and bruised themselves here and there.
The newspapers had been remorseless. The nickname they had given him, Iron instead of Gert, was not exactly original, but nonetheless appropriate. A journalist had interviewed several of his long-standing enemies on both sides of the law and of course they had taken the opportunity to settle old scores. So when Rafto’s daughter came home crying from school, saying she was being teased, his wife had said enough was enough, he couldn’t expect her to sit and watch while he dragged the whole family through the mud. As so often before, he had lost his temper. Afterwards she had taken their daughter with her, and this time she didn’t return.
It had been a tough time, but he had never forgotten who he was. He was Iron Rafto. And when the quarantine period was over, he had gone for broke, worked day and night to regain lost ground. But no one was in forgiving mood, the wounds were too deep, and he noticed the internal resistance to letting him succeed. Of course they didn’t want him to shine again and remind them and the media of what they were so desperately trying to put behind them. Photographs of battered bodies in handcuffs. But he would show them. Show them that Gert Rafto was not a man to let himself be buried before his time. That the town below belonged to him, not to the social workers, to the cream puffs, to the smooth talkers sitting in their offices with tongues so long they could lick the limp arseholes of both the local politicians and the pinko journalists.
‘Take a few snaps and get me an ID,’ Rafto said to the technician with the camera.
‘And who’ll be able to identify this?’ The young man pointed.
Rafto didn’t care for his tone. ‘Someone has reported or will soon report this woman missing. Just get on with it, junior.’
Rafto went up to the peak and looked back across what Bergensians call vidden – the plateau. His gaze swept the countryside and stopped at a hill and what seemed to be a person on the summit. But, if so, they weren’t moving. Perhaps it was a cairn? Rafto pinched his eyes. He must have been there hundreds of times, walking with his wife and daughter, but he couldn’t recall seeing a cairn. He went down to the cable car, spoke to the operator and borrowed his binoculars. Fifteen seconds later he established that it wasn’t a cairn, just three large balls of snow that someone must have piled one on top of the other.
Rafto didn’t like the sloping district of Bergen known as Fjellsiden with its oh-so-picturesque, crooked, uninsulated timber houses with stairs and cellars, situated in narrow alleys where the sun never shone. Trendy children of rich parents frequently paid millions to own an authentic Bergen house, then did them up until there wasn’t an original splinter left. Here, you no longer heard the sound of children’s running feet on the cobbled stones; the prices had driven young Bergensian families into the suburbs on the other side of the mountains a long time ago. Yet here it was as quiet and deserted as a barren row of shops. Nonetheless he had the feeling he was being observed as he stood on the stone steps ringing the bell.
After a while the door opened and a pale, anxious woman’s face looked out at him with a startled expression.
‘Onny Hetland?’ Rafto queried, holding
up his ID. ‘It’s about your friend, Laila Aasen.’
The apartment was tiny, and the layout baffling; the bathroom was located behind the kitchen and between the bedroom and living room. Amid the patterned burgundy wallpaper in the living room Onny Hetland had just managed to squeeze a sofa and a green-and-orange armchair, and on the little floor space that remained there was a pile of weekly magazines and heaps of books and CDs. Rafto stepped over an upturned dish of water and a cat to reach the sofa. Onny Hetland sat on the armchair fidgeting with her necklace. There was a black crack in the green stone in the pendant. Maybe a flaw. Or perhaps it was meant to be like that.
Onny Hetland had learned about her friend’s death early that morning, from Laila’s husband, Bastian. But still her face displayed several dramatic changes as Rafto mercilessly spelt out the details.
‘Dreadful,’ whispered Onny Hetland. ‘Bastian didn’t say anything about that.’
‘That’s because we didn’t want to publicise it,’ Rafto said. ‘Bastian told me you were Laila’s best friend.’
Onny nodded.
‘Do you know what Laila was doing up on Ulriken? Her husband had no idea, you see. He and the children were with his mother in Florø yesterday.’
Onny shook her head. It was a firm shake. One that should not have left any doubt. It wasn’t the shake that was the problem. It was the hundredth of a second’s hesitation before it started. And this hundredth of a second was all Gert Rafto needed.
‘This is a murder case, frøken Hetland. I hope you appreciate the gravity and the risk you run by not telling me everything you know.’
She shot the policeman with the bulldog face a perplexed look. He smelt prey.
‘If you think you’re being considerate to her family, you have misunderstood. These things will come out whatever.’
She swallowed. She looked frightened, had already looked frightened when she opened the door. So he gave her the final nudge, this actually quite trifling threat that still worked so amazingly well on the innocent as well as the guilty.