Where Monsters Dwell

by Jorgen Brekke

  “This book must have been quite a find. How did you come across it in a graveyard?” Singsaker asked.

  “We didn’t find it in the graveyard. The couple at the farm had it on their bookshelf, with no idea what it was worth or what it meant. The book had been at the farm since the nineteenth century. I noticed it one evening when they invited us over for coffee. The farmer told me a peculiar story about how the book had come to be owned by his family. It was his great-great-grandfather who acquired it.”

  “Acquired it?”

  “Yes, one day more than a hundred and fifty years ago an elegant gentleman from the city suddenly showed up at his farm. The man introduced himself as a book collector, and he wanted to give the book to the people who lived on the farm. Naturally the farmer’s great-great-grandfather asked him why. He replied that this book belonged there. Apparently he also claimed that there was a curse on the book, and that the only place it could find peace was on that very farm. The book collector intimated that the book had been written by a murderer before he left the farm, never to return. In the farmer’s family this had always been a good story that they told with a gleam in their eye. But they had never noticed any sign of a curse. One of us remarked on the statement that the book was supposed to find peace out there. The farmer reiterated that this was what the book collector had claimed, and he couldn’t vouch for what might happen if anyone took the book away from the farm.

  “That same evening I borrowed the book to read in bed, and by the next morning I understood what a treasure I was holding.”

  “So what happened to the book?”

  “It was handed over to the Gunnerus Library. It’s still in their collection.” Here Dahle stopped, and Singsaker could see by his eyes that he was now back in the present.

  “Does anyone have an idea who this book collector was?” he asked, to keep the conversation going.

  “No, it’s a mystery. Of course, many people have tried to find out. But no one has been successful. Most of the speculation, though, has leaned toward Broder Lysholm Knudtzon.”

  “The one Knudtzon Hall was dedicated to?”

  “Yes, precisely. He was a well-known book collector. But there isn’t much else to connect him to this mysterious person on Fosen. What is certain is that the man who delivered the book didn’t want anyone to know that he’d been there. He came, presented the book with that rather odd explanation, and then vanished from the story.”

  “And do we know that the book was written by a priest and not a murderer?”

  “It’s evident from the content that it was written by a priest. He states as much himself. Some of his ideas, as I mentioned, go beyond commonly held Lutheran teachings. There’s nothing in the text that alludes to the fact that he may have been a murderer. But it is a fact that some of the parchment pages in the book are missing. There are signs that they were torn out. Naturally it’s impossible to say who was responsible. I recall that we joked a bit that the alleged murderous author might have been the same person who had killed the victims whose remains we’d found in the graveyard in the meadow behind the farm.”

  Dahle fell silent once again. Did it feel good for him to get his mind off what had recently happened? Was that why he could go on talking about this book for so long? Singsaker was trying to get a handle on him. Also, he had a hunch that this had something to do with the case, but he didn’t know what.

  “The pages that were torn out of the book—do you have any opinion about who might have done that, or when it was done?”

  “No, nobody knows. But it definitely occurred before the book arrived at the farm where I found it. You have to remember that the pages of the book, which were made of parchment, were valuable in and of themselves. Starting in the twelfth century, paper came into use, and as the centuries passed, parchment became scarcer and scarcer. But parchment has been used all the way to our day, for such things as deluxe editions. A book collector may have torn out the parchment pages in order to sell them individually. They may also have been used as bindings for other books. They simply could have fallen out because the book was not taken care of properly.”

  “I should think this Johannes Book would be worth a lot of money.”

  “It’s probably impossible to put a price on a book like that. It’s absolutely unique. Nothing like it has ever been sold on the open market here in Norway. Or in any other country, for that matter,” said Dahle. “As a stolen object I’d think it would be impossible to sell unless you found the right eccentric millionaire,” he added.

  “And that’s probably true of many of the other books in the vault as well, isn’t it?” Singsaker asked.

  “Absolutely. But you don’t think that theft was the motive, do you?”

  “As of right now, we can’t rule out anything,” he said.

  But when Singsaker pondered the way the murder had been committed, he realized that homicide with intent to steal was not a credible theory. In any case, not if someone was stealing for money. But there might possibly be other and less rational motives for a theft. Then it dawned on him that so far they had only Vatten’s word that nothing had been taken from the book vault. They would have to confirm that as soon as possible.

  After some small talk and some consoling words that sounded hollow, he took his leave of Jens Dahle. But as they got up from the table, he thought of one more thing he wanted to say.

  “I’d like to ask a favor of you. It won’t be easy,” he said, placing his hand on Dahle’s shoulder.

  “What would that be?” said Dahle, looking exhausted.

  “You need to tell your children what happened. The police will have to talk to them. Not that there’s any hurry. But if you could do it sometime today, that would be best. Better that they hear it from you than from somebody else. It’s impossible to keep it from them forever.”

  Jens Dahle nodded, and looked as though he realized Singsaker was right.

  17

  Odd Singsaker headed in the direction of his apartment. But instead of going straight home, he went over to the intersection of Nonnegata and Kirkegata, where Bjørn’s Video was still clinging to the past. He went up Nonnegata toward Rosenborg middle school. On the way he took out his cell phone and punched in the number of the police station. He asked to speak to Mona Gran, but she’d already gone home. It suddenly occurred to him that he should have done that long ago himself. This was his first day back at work. But oddly he didn’t feel worn out.

  He asked to speak with someone else. Whoever was on duty in the violent crimes and vice teams would do. He was patched over to an officer he didn’t know.

  “Could you find me the address of a woman named Siri Holm? She’s a new employee at the Gunnerus Library,” Singsaker said.

  “Is that all you know about her?” the officer asked.

  “At the moment, yes.”

  “Let me call you back.”

  Singsaker ended the call and kept walking toward the recently constructed middle school. From there he went into the neighborhood of Rosenborg Park. It was almost as new as the school and consisted of a park area and apartment buildings with a world-class disparity between price and square footage. Yet the park itself was one of the biggest urban design successes in Trondheim. Festningsparken, the old Rosenborg soccer field, and Kuhaugen had been linked into one large green zone.

  Here he found a bench and sat down to wait for his phone to ring. He sat there gazing at a pond with a group of lanky, Gaudí-inspired metal figures, among them a fish and a ballerina. Common to all the figures was the water running or spouting from them. What bothered him about the whole tableau was that the fish—which was the only sculpture that spouted water in a high, vertical jet—was placed at the very edge of the fountain design. This gave the whole thing an asymmetrical look. He could swear that it had been done on purpose, but as a cop it bothered him. He had a strained relationship with anything that was not symmetrical.

  As he sat there he began to think about the Johannes Book an
d the tale of the collector. It had all the ingredients of a good ghost story: old graveyards, curses, a book filled with mysterious aphorisms. It almost seemed that the book collector had been right about the curse. True enough, the book had been taken from the farm almost twenty years ago, but maybe the curse had just now been activated. He noticed that he was smiling grimly as he thought of these things. A little aquavit would have hit the spot right now.

  He looked at his watch and saw that it was too late to make it to the liquor store. His breakfast had been spoiled this morning, too. This case was really getting to him. There was something irrational about it. Why Gunn Brita Dahle? Why had her body been flayed? And why in the book vault, of all places? He tried to tell himself that murder was murder, and an investigation always started out the same way. They gathered evidence, they analyzed it, they talked to witnesses and possible suspects, they put together all the pieces of the puzzle, and in the end they developed a clear picture. But this time there was an overabundance of pieces. They had a suspect who had previously been suspected of killing both his wife and his young son, and who was present near the scene of this crime, when the murder was presumably committed. But why would a perp, who had previously proven to be a master at covering up his tracks, now leave behind such a messy scene? This time they had organic evidence and fingerprints. In the case of his missing wife and son, Vatten had presented an alibi that the police never managed to crack. But this time he had definitely been present at the scene, even after the murder was committed, and could not come up with anything remotely resembling a good explanation. Objectively speaking, there was little to indicate that the two crimes to which Vatten was linked had been committed by the same perpetrator. The MOs were totally different. And what could be Vatten’s motive?

  Then there was Jens Dahle. They couldn’t rule out the husband, even though his alibi seemed strong. The fact that husbands do murder their wives is well-known, but what husband would feel the need to flay her afterward? No, a book with a curse attached to it almost seemed the more reasonable place to start. His thoughts were interrupted when the young officer called back. He told Singsaker that Siri Holm lived on Asbjørnsens Gate, only a five-minute walk from where he was.

  * * *

  Siri Holm opened the door wrapped in a towel from breasts to the tops of her thighs. Her blond hair was wet, and she had drops of water on her shoulders and legs. Two sharp eyes stared at him, amused.

  “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t know it was the police at the door,” she said, after she noticed the rather surprised expression on his face. “Or I would have gotten dressed first. I was in the shower.”

  “My name is Odd Singsaker. I assume you saw me at the library this morning. Were you expecting someone else?” he asked in embarrassment.

  “Not really. I was on my way to work out.”

  “So you take a shower before you work out?” he asked.

  “Tae kwon do. There’s quite a bit of close contact. Might as well smell good. Don’t worry, I take a shower afterward, too. But do come in. I assume you’re here for some reason other than to check on my personal hygiene.”

  He tried not to laugh. She showed him into an apartment with a fantastic view over the fjord. It was also possibly the messiest apartment he’d ever seen. For a moment he stood there, fascinated by all the things that were strewn about.

  “I see you collect antiques,” he said at last, picking up something from the floor that looked like an old compass.

  “Most of this stuff is from Mamma. She died a year ago. I inherited a bunch of stuff that Pappa didn’t want. Unfortunately, I also inherited an aversion to throwing anything out.”

  He bent down, set the compass on the floor, and picked up a knife. It had a beautiful handle of carved bone depicting a man in a long cloak. The blade was small, sharp, and thin, almost like a modern-day scalpel. The knife looked old, too. The iron was dark with patches where rust had been burnished away.

  “You have good taste,” said Siri Holm. “That’s the jewel in my collection. The only object I could actually sell for plenty of kroner if Pappa ever stopped sending me money. The knife belonged to a famous Italian surgeon who lived in the early 1500s. Alessandro Benedetti.”

  “Never heard of him,” said Singsaker.

  “You should have,” she said sternly. “He was the world’s first plastic surgeon. Benedetti was known for performing the first nose job in history. He took skin from the arm and reconstructed a nose. But above all he was an anatomist. A man who was keenly interested in the structure of the human body.”

  “Do you have a keen interest in the human body?” he asked, as he continued studying the knife.

  “Only when it’s alive,” she replied with a laugh. She was laughing a lot for someone who’d found a corpse earlier in the day. “To be honest, no.”

  “What about knives? Are you interested in them too?” he asked.

  “The bread knife is the only one I use often. But the one you’re holding in your hand, as I said, is a form of life insurance.”

  “How do you know it’s genuine?”

  “Mamma bought it from a reputable antique dealer at San Maurizio in Venice. It came with a certificate. She spent half of her inheritance from my grandfather on that knife—not a small sum. I also had it appraised by an expert in Oslo. If the knife didn’t belong to Benedetti, it did belong to some other anatomist or surgeon in Venice or Padua at around the same time. That doesn’t decrease the value appreciably. I like that the knife may have been used to fix the nose of some Venetian in the 1500s. It reminds me that progress doesn’t proceed as fast as we’d like.”

  As she was talking, she began without embarrassment to dry herself off with the towel. Then she tossed it onto a sofa that was covered with everything from laundry to balls of yarn and an old sewing machine. Stark naked she reached for a tae kwon do uniform that hung on an old mannequin in the middle of the room. Singsaker turned to look at the view over the fjord, studying a sailboat gliding past Munkholmen while she put on the outfit.

  “All right, you can look now,” she said.

  He turned around and watched her tighten a black belt around her waist. For a moment he stood there wondering if he should comment on what he’d just seen, but decided not to.

  “I came to ask you some questions about the murder in the library,” he said.

  “Yes, I gathered that,” she said, removing some dirty dishes from the sofa and sitting down. She also put the sewing machine on the floor so that there was room for him, too. He remained standing.

  “Do you have time to answer them before you go to your workout?”

  “Of course. I’m not in that big a rush.”

  “You were one of the first to discover the body, right?”

  “Yes, Jon and I found her.”

  It was a little odd to hear someone refer to Vatten by his first name.

  “How did that make you feel?” Singsaker asked.

  “It was gruesome. I’d been with Gunn Brita all Saturday morning and had gotten to know her. She was a pleasant woman, a bit stern. Meticulous, the way a librarian should be. I can’t imagine anyone doing something like that to her. Or in that place.”

  “You were with Jon Vatten. How did he react?”

  “I know that you suspect him. But you’re wrong about that,” said Siri Holm, as if confirming a generally accepted truth.

  “And how can you be so sure?” he asked.

  “I just know,” she said. “The same way I know that you’re divorced and that you recently went through a crisis in your life and that you were just pretending you were completely unaffected when I was naked.”

  He tried to hide his astonishment. But was he really surprised? Siri Holm wasn’t the only one in the room who could read people. He’d known that there was something unique about this young woman from the first time he saw her at the library.

  “Knowledge is always based on something,” he said. “Provided it’s not just speculation, or in your ca
se, a lucky guess.”

  “Do you read crime novels?” she asked.

  “Do doctors read doctor novels?”

  “If you read crime novels, you’d know that there are two main types of investigators,” she said. “There’s the rational, methodical kind who collects evidence and finds the solution by putting together all the clues in the case. Then there’s the less systematic type, who follows his intuition and searches for the decisive clue. Most investigators are probably a mixture of both types. The thing is, both the systematic and the unsystematic investigator are really doing the same thing. They evaluate the evidence. It’s just that some investigators think and make associations more rapidly than others. Sherlock Holmes, for instance. What seems like superior intuition is actually only an extremely rapid and systematic processing of data.”

  “And you think this is relevant to reality?”

  “Certainly. Take yourself. Since you came in here, you’ve scratched your head about fifteen times in a particular spot just above your forehead. That could be a bad habit, of course, but people who habitually scratch their heads rarely scratch in exactly the same spot. Which could mean that you actually scratch there because of something other than an old habit. The same is true of the way you scratch. You do it quickly, as you look away. It’s obvious that you don’t want other people to notice that you’re scratching. So what you’re scratching must be something you don’t want to talk about. I think it’s probably a scar from an operation. And I think that most people with a scar on their forehead have been through some form of life crisis.”