by Jo Nesbo
‘It means I don’t need to deny it.’
‘What the h—’
‘It starts with an “a” and finishes in an “i”.’
Short pause.
‘How can you tell me off the top of your head that you’ve definitely got an alibi for that night, Valentin? It’s quite a long time ago.’
‘Because I was thinking about it when he told me. What I was doing at that very moment.’
‘Who told you what?’
‘The guy who raped the girl.’
Long pause.
‘Are you messing us about, Valentin?’
‘What do you think, Officer Zachrisson?’
‘What makes you think that’s my name?’
‘Snarliveien 41. Am I right?’
Another pause. More laughter and Valentin’s voice. ‘In your porridge, that’s what it is. You look like someone’s pissed in your porridge.’
‘Where did you find out about the rape?’
‘This is a prison for pervs, Officer. What do you think we talk about? Thank you for sharing that with me, as we say. He didn’t think he was giving that much away, but I read the papers, and I remember the case well.’
‘So who was it, Valentin?’
‘So when will it be, Zachrisson?’
‘When?’
‘When can I count on being let out if I grass?’
Katrine felt an urge to fast-forward, past the repeated pauses.
‘I’ll be back in a while.’
A chair scraped. A door was closed gently.
Katrine waited. She heard the man inhaling and exhaling. And felt something strange. She was having difficulty breathing. It was as if his breathing in the speakers was sucking the life out of her sitting room.
The policeman could hardly have been away for more than a couple of minutes, but it felt like half an hour.
‘OK,’ he said with a scrape of the chair again.
‘That was quick. And my sentence will be commuted as well?’
‘You know we’re not responsible for sentencing, Valentin. But we’ll talk to a judge, all right? So who’s your alibi and who raped the girl?’
‘I was at home all night. I was with my landlady and unless she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s she’ll confirm that.’
‘How come you can remember just like that?’
‘I have a thing about noting dates of rapes. If you don’t find the lucky man at once I know that sooner or later you’ll come asking me where I was.’
‘I see. And now for the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Who did it?’
The answer was articulated slowly and with overly precise diction. ‘Ju-das Jo-hansen. An old acquaintance of the police, as they say.’
‘Judas Johansen?’
‘You work in Vice and you don’t recognise the name of a notorious rapist, Zachrisson?’
The sound of shuffling feet. ‘What makes you think I don’t recognise the name?’
‘Your expression is as blank as outer space, Zachrisson. Johansen is the greatest rapist talent since . . . well, since me. And there’s a murderer inside him. He doesn’t know that yet himself, but it’s just a question of time before the murderer wakes up, believe me.’
Katrine imagined she heard the clunk of the salivating policeman’s jaw as it fell. She listened to the crackling silence. She thought she could hear the officer’s pulse racing, the sweat springing from his brow as he tried to rein in the excitement and the nerves now that he knew he was close to the moment, the great breakthrough, the feather in the detective’s cap.
‘How, how—’ Zachrisson stammered, but was interrupted by a howl which was distorted in the speakers and which Katrine eventually realised was laughter. Valentin’s laughter. The shrill howls mutated gradually into long, gasping sobs.
‘I’m pulling your leg, Zachrisson. Judas Johansen is a homo. He’s in the cell next to me.’
‘What?’
‘Do you want to hear a story that’s much more interesting than the one you came up with? Judas fucked a young lad and they were caught red-handed, so to speak, by the mother. Unfortunately for Judas the boy was still in the closet and the family was of the rich, conservative variety. So they reported Judas for rape. Judas! Who’d never hurt a fly. Or is it a flea? Fly, flea. Fly. Flea. Anyway, what do you think about taking up that case if you get a tip-off? I can tell you a thing or two about what the lad’s been up to since then. I take it the offer of time off is still on the table?’
Chair legs scraped on the floor. The bang of a chair falling backwards. A click and silence. The tape recorder had been switched off.
Katrine sat staring at the computer screen. Noticed that darkness had fallen outside. The cod heads had gone cold.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Anton Mittet said. ‘He spoke!’
Anton Mittet was standing in the corridor with the phone to his ear while checking the ID cards of two doctors who had arrived. Their faces showed a mixture of surprise and annoyance. Surely he could remember them?
Anton waved them through and they hurried in to the patient.
‘But what did he say?’ Gunnar Hagen asked on the phone.
‘She only heard him mumble something, not what he said.’
‘Is he awake now?’
‘No, there was just some mumbling and then he was gone again. But the doctors say he could wake up at any moment.’
‘I see,’ Hagen said. ‘Keep me posted, OK? Ring any time. Whenever.’
‘OK.’
‘Good. Good. The hospital has standing orders to contact me as well, as far as that goes, but . . . yes, well, they have their own things to think about.’
‘Of course.’
‘Yes, they do, don’t they?’
‘Yes, they do.’
‘Yes.’
Anton listened to the silence. Was there something Gunnar Hagen wanted to say?
The head of Crime Squad rang off.
9
KATRINE LANDED AT gardermoen at half past nine, got on the airport express, let it take her right through Oslo. Or, to be precise, beneath Oslo. She had lived here, but the few glimpses she caught of the town didn’t evoke any sentimentality. A half-hearted skyline. Low, good-natured, soft, snowy ridges, tamed countryside. Inside the train, closed, expressionless faces, none of the spontaneous, casual communication between strangers she was used to in Bergen. Then there was a signal failure on one of the world’s most expensive lines and the train came to a standstill in the pitch-black tunnel.
She had justified her application for a trip to Oslo with the fact that there were three unsolved rape cases in their own police district – Hordaland – which bore some resemblance to the cases that Valentin could conceivably have been behind. She had argued that if they could nab Valentin for these cases that might indirectly help Kripos and Oslo Police District with the murders of their officers.
‘And why can’t we leave it to Oslo Police to do this themselves?’ the head of the Crime Squad in Bergen, Knut Müller-Nilsen, asked her.
‘Because they have a crime clearance rate of twenty point eight per cent and we have one of forty point one.’
Müller-Nilsen had laughed out loud, and Katrine knew the plane ticket was hers.
The train started with a jolt and the carriage resounded with sighs: of relief, irritation and desperation. She got out at Sandvika and caught a taxi to Eiksmarka.
It stopped outside Jøssingveien 33. She stepped into the grey slush. Apart from the high fence around the red-brick building there was little about Ila Prison and Detention Centre to betray the fact that it housed some of the country’s worst killers, drug profiteers and sex offenders. Among others. The prison statutes said it was a national institution for male prisoners who . . . ‘needed special help’.
Help, so that they wouldn’t escape. Help, so that they wouldn’t mutilate others. Help with what sociologists and criminologists for some reason believe is a wish the species as a whole shares: to be good human beings, to make a co
ntribution in the flock, to function in society.
Katrine had spent enough time in the psychiatric ward in Bergen to know that as a rule even non-criminal deviants had no interest in society’s welfare, and no experience of any company other than their own and their demons, they just wanted to be left in peace. Which did not necessarily imply they wanted to leave others in peace.
She went through the security channels, showed her ID card and the permit she had received by email and was ushered into the reception room.
A prison officer waiting for her stood with legs apart, arms crossed and keys rattling. More swagger and feigned self-assurance because the visitor was police, the Brahmin caste in law and order, who receive special treatment from prison officers, security guards and even parking wardens.
Katrine behaved as she always did in such cases: she was politer and friendlier than her true nature craved.
‘Welcome to the sewer,’ the prison warder said, a phrase Katrine was fairly sure he didn’t use with his standard clientele, but which he had prepared carefully in advance, one that signalled the right mixture of black humour and realistic cynicism towards his job.
But the image was in a sense not inappropriate, Katrine thought, as they walked through the prison corridors. Or perhaps they ought to be called the bowels of the system. The place where the law’s digestive tracts broke down individuals found guilty into a stinking brown mass, which at some point would have to be released. All the doors were closed, the corridors empty.
‘Pervs unit,’ the warder said, unlocking an iron door at the end of the corridor.
‘So they have their own unit?’
‘Yes. If all the sex offenders are in one section there’s less chance of their neighbours doing them in.’
‘Doing them in?’ Katrine said, shamming surprise.
‘Yes, sex offenders are hated as much here as in the rest of society. If not more. And we have killers here with less self-control than you or me. So on a bad day . . .’ He drew a key across his throat in a dramatic gesture.
‘They’re killed?’ Katrine exclaimed with horror in her voice, wondering for a moment if she had gone too far. But the warden didn’t appear to notice.
‘Well, maybe not killed. But they pay. There’s a constant stream of pervs with broken arms and legs. Saying they fell down the stairs or slipped in the shower. Can’t blow the whistle, can they?’ He locked the door behind them and breathed in. ‘Can you smell that? It’s sperm on hot radiators. Dries at once. The smell seems to eat into the metal and it’s impossible to get rid of. Reeks like burnt flesh, doesn’t it?’
‘Homunculus,’ Katrine said, inhaling. All she could smell was fresh paint on the walls.
‘Eh?’
‘In the 1600s people believed sperm contained tiny people, homunculi,’ she said. Seeing the officer’s glower, she guessed that had been a blunder, she should have pretended to be shocked.
‘So,’ she hastened to add, ‘Valentin was safely banged up here with others of his ilk?’
The warder shook his head. ‘Someone started a rumour that he’d raped the girls in Maridalen and Tryvann. And it’s different for inmates who’ve molested underage kids. Even a notorious rapist hates a child-fucker.’
Katrine recoiled, and this time it wasn’t put on. It was mainly because of the casual way in which he pronounced the word.
‘So Valentin got a going-over?’
‘You could certainly say that.’
‘And this rumour. Any idea who started it?’
‘Yes,’ the warder said, unlocking the next door. ‘You did.’
‘We did? The police?’
‘A policeman came here purporting to question cons about the two cases. But I was told he leaked more info than he got.’
Katrine nodded. She had heard about it, cases where the police were certain that an inmate was guilty of child abuse, but they couldn’t prove it and so they made sure he got his punishment in other ways. You just had to inform the right prisoner. The one with the most power. Or the least control.
‘And you accepted that?’
The warder shrugged. ‘What can we prison guards do?’ And added in a lower voice: ‘And perhaps in this particular case we weren’t so averse . . .’
They passed a recreation room.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Valentin Gjertsen was a sick bastard. Evil through and through. The sort of person you wonder what our Lord put him on this earth for. We had a female officer here he—’
‘Oh, hello, there you are.’
The voice was soft, and Katrine turned automatically to the left. Two men were standing by a dartboard. She met the smiling gaze of the man who had spoken, a thin man probably in his late thirties. The last remaining strands of blond hair were combed back across a red scalp. Skin disease, Katrine thought. Or maybe there was a solarium here since they needed special help.
‘Thought you’d never get here.’ The man slowly pulled the darts from the board while holding her gaze. Took a dart, threw it into the flesh-red centre of the board, bullseye. Grinned as he wriggled the dart up and down, pushing it in deeper. Pulled it out. Made sucking noises with his lips. The other man didn’t laugh as Katrine had expected. Instead he watched his partner with a concerned expression.
The warder caught Katrine gently under the arm to pull her away, but she raised her arm to free herself, her brain whirring at full speed searching for a retort. It rejected the obvious one about darts and organ size.
‘Less Cillit Bang in your hair gel maybe?’
She strolled on, but was aware that if she hadn’t hit bullseye, she had been close. A red tinge spread across the man’s face; then he mounted an even broader smile and made a kind of salute.
‘Did Valentin have anyone he could talk to?’ Katrine asked as the warder opened the cell door.
‘Jonas Johansen.’
‘Is he the one they call Judas?’
‘Yep. Did time for raping a man. Not many of them around.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He hopped it.’
‘How?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Listen, there are a lot of bad people here, but we’re not a high-security unit. In this unit we have people with reduced sentences. There were lots of mitigating circumstances about Judas’s verdict. And Valentin was only in for attempted rape. Serial offenders are kept elsewhere. So we don’t waste resources guarding the ones we’ve got. We have a roll call every morning, and on the odd occasion there’s someone missing, everyone has to go back to their cells so that we can find out who it is. But if the number tallies, things rumble along in the usual groove. So that was how we found out that Johansen was gone, and we reported it to the police. I didn’t think much about it until afterwards when our hands were full with the other case.’
‘You mean . . .?’
‘Yes, the murder of Valentin.’
‘So Judas wasn’t here when that happened?’
‘Right.’
‘Who could have killed him, do you think?’
‘I don’t know.’
Katrine nodded. The answer was a bit too pat, a bit too quick.
‘I promise this won’t go any further. I’m asking you who do you think killed Valentin?’
The warder sucked his teeth, scrutinising Katrine carefully. As though checking whether he had missed anything on first inspection.
‘There were lots of people here who hated and feared Valentin. Some might have realised it was him or them – he had a thirst for revenge. The man who killed him definitely had some thirst in him, too. Valentin was . . . what shall I say?’ Katrine watched the officer’s Adam’s apple go up and down above his collar. ‘The body was smashed to jelly. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Hit with a blunt instrument perhaps?’
‘I don’t know anything about that, but he was definitely beaten until he was unrecognisable. The face was mincemeat. Ha
d it not been for the terrible tattoo on his chest I don’t know that we would have been able to identify him. I’m not overly sensitive, but I had hellish nightmares about it afterwards.’
‘What sort of tattoo was it?’
‘What sort?’
‘Yes, wh . . .’ Katrine noticed she was slipping out of the friendly police officer role and pulled herself together, so as not to reveal her irritation. ‘What was the tattoo of?’
‘Well, who knows? There was a face. Gruesome. Sort of drawn out at the sides. As if it was stuck and was struggling to break away.’
Katrine nodded slowly. ‘Couldn’t get away from the body it was trapped in?’
‘Yes, that’s it, yes. Do you know—?’
‘No,’ Katrine said. But I know the feeling, she thought. ‘And you didn’t ever find this Judas again?’
‘You didn’t ever find Judas again.’
‘No. Why didn’t we, do you think?’
The warder shrugged. ‘How would I know? I do know, however, that Judas isn’t top priority for you. As I said, there were mitigating circumstances, and the risk of any repetition was minimal. He would soon have done his time, but the idiot must have got the fever.’
Katrine nodded. Demob fever. The date approaches, the prisoner starts thinking about freedom and suddenly being locked up for another day is intolerable.
‘Is there anyone else here who can tell me about Valentin?’
The warder shook his head. ‘Apart from Judas, no one wanted anything to do with him. Shit, he intimidated people. Something seemed to happen to the air when he came into a room.’
Katrine stood asking more questions until she realised she was trying to justify the time and her plane ticket.
‘You started to tell me about what Valentin had done,’ she said.
‘Did I?’ he said quickly, looking at his watch. ‘Oops, I’ve got to . . .’
On the way back through the recreation room Katrine saw only the thin man with the red scalp. He was standing straight, his arms at his side, staring at the empty dartboard. No darts anyway. He turned slowly, and Katrine couldn’t help but return his gaze. The grin was gone, and his eyes were matt and as grey as jellyfish.