by Anne Holt
“I just thought—” Silje said, before she broke off. “Would this be an inconvenient time?”
“Not at all. Come in.”
Hanne’s smile was still stiff, and Silje hesitated.
“I can come back another time, you know.”
“Sit down, won’t you?”
“You see …”
Silje did not take a seat. Instead she placed a well-used, stained, burgundy-red leather wallet on the desk before Hanne.
“What’s this?” the Chief Inspector asked.
“A wallet,” Silje said, almost apologetically.
“I see that. But who’s the owner?”
“Knut Sidensvans.”
“I see. Where did it turn up?”
“At Lost Property. Someone had found it. In Thomas Heftyes gate. Not far from the crime scene, in other words. Half buried in the snow. With money in it, Hanne.”
Again her voice took on that trace of apology. Even though it wasn’t entirely clear to her what Hanne had in mind, with that talk about the missing keys and wallet, Silje more than suspected that any theory would now be almost totally torpedoed.
“With money in it,” Hanne repeated. “Presumably he had dropped it, then.”
“Probably.”
“But you still haven’t seen anything of his keys?”
“No.”
Neither of them spoke. Snow was falling steadily outside the window. The whirling flakes took on a glimmer of blue as an emergency vehicle screeched its way up Åkebergveien. In the corridor no footsteps could be heard, no din of shouting voices. No one was laughing out there. No detainees were proving difficult. It seemed as if the entire police headquarters had closed for the night.
“Okay,” Hanne said at last. “So he had dropped his wallet. But we don’t know if his keys were in the same pocket. Actually …”
She got to her feet and checked her own duffel bag, which hung on a peg behind the door.
“Wallet here,” she said, patting her left thigh. “And keys here.”
She pulled a bulky bunch of keys from her right pocket.
“So there’s not too much in each,” she explained. “Each has its own pocket.”
“Where are you going with this, Hanne? Do you mean that the murderer might have taken the keys? Do you mean that the murders took place because of the keys? What use would anyone have for them? We’ve been there, Hanne. In Sidensvans’s apartment. There was nothing there. Nothing of value. Apart from the computer system. No one kills for a computer system. Besides, it hadn’t been stolen. We saw that for ourselves, didn’t we?”
“But there could have been something on the computer,” Hanne said, suddenly flashing a broad smile. “And there could have been something lying there, amidst all that chaos, something that’s been removed now. Enough of that, though. I’ll have another think about it. Thanks for the information. You should really go home.”
It was five past seven. Silje shrugged and followed her instructions. Hanne remained sitting there, doing little more than thinking, until Mary phoned in a fury and ordered her to come home.
She had lost control.
Hermine Stahlberg was used to stimulants. Even though her family frequently – and mostly behind closed doors – had turned up their noses at her slightly too liberal relationship with alcohol, nobody knew about her use of pills and stronger stuff. Hermine moved in two spheres. She was rich, beautiful, and spoiled. Feckless and yet greatly loved. At the same time she inhabited another world, on the underside of her own reality. Sometimes in Oslo, but more often abroad. For several years she had assumed control over her life, and a balance prevailed in her double existence.
Now that was gone.
The room spun, with her as its axis. She tried to lie down, but missed the bed. Vomit welled up in her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Sick blocked her gullet. In a daze, she managed to turn over on to her side.
Her brother was towering over her. She thought he was the one who stood there. She couldn’t be sure. It could just as easily have been Uncle Alfred.
“Bloody hell,” she slurred, grinning submissively.
She could still speak. She was not dead. Her brother’s face was green and distorted. Maybe it was Uncle Alfred after all. It didn’t matter. The figure hovered over her. The face changed color; it was yellow now, with red specks that floated out and flew to the ceiling, like bloody soap bubbles. Hermine laughed.
“Alfred,” she groaned, yawning.
The man said something. Hermine focused on his mouth, which was moving in strange meaningless shapes, because the sound was missing. She heard nothing. She had gone deaf.
“Deaf,” she said, and roared with laughter.
Carl-Christian Stahlberg lifted his sister on to the bed. He laid her on her side and flexed her left leg to prevent her from rolling over. He hesitated for a moment before pushing his finger into her mouth. Her tongue seemed too big, but he managed to straighten it, and cleaned her mouth of mucus and vomit. He ended up in floods of tears, almost unable to explain his whereabouts, when he finally contacted the emergency doctor. When the paramedics arrived, he had succeeded in pulling himself together and had washed off the stench of his sister’s degeneracy.
He had even tightened the knot on his tie.
The old man in the forest felt indisposed. Since it was Saturday, he had tried to relax with good coffee and a store-bought cake while he watched TV. A great stillness had fallen over Nordmarka. He had ventured out for his evening stroll in the light snowfall. The smoldering logs on the fire now cast a warm glow over the log cabin, and he felt snug and cozy. Nevertheless, he was troubled.
It was all because of that ice fisherman.
He couldn’t have been fishing. The snow around the hole in the ice showed barely any sign of footprints, and there were no marks left by any kind of seat. It looked as if the stranger had simply shown up, bored a hole in the ice, and then left.
The old man had returned earlier that day. The prints were gone; wind and snow had rendered the stranger’s visit invisible. But the old man had found the hole. He had cleared a small area where he thought it should be, and the fine, refrozen rings in the ice had been easy to locate.
He was surprised at his own curiosity. As it now bubbled to the surface again – that blasted tendency of his to stick his nose in other people’s business – it dawned on him that this had something to do with that murder case down in the city.
Today he had taken a trip down to the village and bought all the newspapers. The police said they were working on a number of clues. That told him nothing. But of course he could read between the lines. He understood where it was heading. It was that boy, the son of the family.
No weapon had been found, according to the police.
Perhaps he ought to report what he had seen.
On the other hand, that would cause a lot of fuss.
Finally he yawned and threw the coffee grounds on the fire. Having padded off to bed, accompanied by the smell of burnt coffee and old bitter tobacco, he fell fast asleep.
SUNDAY DECEMBER 22
Mabelle Stahlberg usually spent an hour in the bath every morning. Only a few minutes had now passed since she had risen from bed, and she was already sitting fully dressed at the enormous round glass table in the center of the kitchen. Without make-up, her face looked transparent and her features indistinct.
“My goodness,” Carl-Christian said, taking stock of her. “What has become of you?”
Her hand was shaking as she raised her coffee cup to her lips.
“When did you get home?”
“A couple of hours ago. I didn’t want to wake you. Caught some sleep in the guest bedroom. She’ll survive.”
Mabelle did not react.
“Did you hear me?” he said, irritated. “She’ll survive.”
“Good for her. We do have other things to worry about, you know.”
Carl-Christian sat down opposite her at the kitchen table, holding his face in his
hands.
“She was a hairsbreadth from destruction, Mabelle. If I hadn’t called round, things would have gone badly.”
His wife continued to sit expressionless with the cup at her mouth. Steam clung to her pale face. Only now did he see that her eyes were bloodshot and realized that she had not slept. Stretching across the table, he tried to catch hold of her hand.
“What’s going to happen?” she whispered. “I’m so scared.”
Now he grabbed her cup and put it down with a thump. Brown liquid sloshed over the table. He seized her chin and forced her to make eye contact. The gaze that met his was apathetic, and for a moment he wondered whether Mabelle too had taken something. Then she broke into a sudden joyless smile.
“I’m pleased that Hermine will pull through, CC. Honestly. It was a godsend that you went there in time.”
A chill draft gusted through a half-open window, and he stood up to close it. The gray midwinter morning light had begun to creep into the room through the massive panes of east-facing glass, but it seemed not quite able to reach all the way inside. The gloom in the corners made him nervous, and he switched on all the lights.
“When are they coming?” she asked.
“I don’t really know. I think they’ll wait until after the funeral. After all, I expect we are important witnesses. Since we’re the only surviving family members. Hermine and I. And you, too, in a way. Jennifer and the children are there as well, of course, but they … They don’t exactly benefit from what has happened. The police will very likely give us a hard time. After the funeral.”
“They’ll have us under surveillance.”
“Definitely. That’s why I can’t go there.”
“You must.”
“Not yet.”
“You must!”
She shouted. Her arms gestured aimlessly, wildly. The coffee cup fell off the glass table and crashed to the floor. Mabelle burst into hysterical tears, and refused to be quiet until Carl-Christian had clapped his hand over her mouth and pressed hard. He wrested her arms down to her sides, by seizing her forcefully from behind.
“I’ll let go once you calm down,” he whispered in her ear. “Take it easy, sweetheart. Sh-sh-sh … Relax.”
In the end, detecting that the convulsive spasms in her body had abated, he loosened his grip with extreme caution. Mabelle was still crying, but more hushed now. Eventually she turned to face him and let him put his arms around her. They sat like that for a long time, she with her face in the crook of her husband’s neck.
“The most important thing now is that we both tell the same story,” he said softly. “And that each of us knows what the other is saying.”
“The most important thing now is that we don’t talk at all,” she said, with her mouth buried in his sweater.
“We must. It will only seem suspicious if we refuse to give an account of ourselves. But we must take some time over it, darling. We have to sit down and come to an agreement.”
“But why can’t you go there and check? And put things straight.”
“If there’s anything we don’t need right now, it’s for the police to discover that place. Of course they will, sooner or later. But preferably later. For all I know, they’re watching us at this very moment. I’ll get … I’ll sort this all out, Mabelle. I promise.”
He twined his fingers through her thick hair. Her scent always made him feel giddy. They had been secret lovers for three years, living in fear of his father’s reprisals. A crazy, impulsive wedding in Las Vegas, with no witnesses other than a fat woman at a Hammond organ, had been the start of five years of escalating conflict with his family. But Mabelle had never let him down. As far as he knew, she had never cheated on him. Even though she sometimes went through periods of being distant and indifferent to him, it seemed as if she had made a choice, forever and always; after a while she was tender and vivacious again, almost slavishly in love.
Before Mabelle, there had been no one. An occasional chance bed companion, of course; he did after all have money, and learned early that that sort of thing could make up for lack of charm. All the same, nothing more ever came of it. In his twenties he began to appreciate why. He was a coward. He possessed an evasive personality, something physically expressed in an almost non-existent chin. His eyes were not attractive, either: too large, slightly protruding, as if he suffered from a touch of goiter.
His father had caused him to regress. Eventually, as his dependency on the shipping company and everything comprising his father’s life and dominion increased, the scraps of independence and strength that Carl-Christian had acquired in his youth, through a career of sorts as a skier, had diminished. He came third in the Norwegian National Junior Skiing Championships, before his father put a stop to that kind of frivolity. Skiing was to be confined to Sundays. For the rest of the week, it was work from eight till seven. Carl-Christian had endured it. Year after year.
Then Mabelle came along: a knockout, a daredevil. She was purposeful where Carl-Christian was ineffectual, courageous where he acquiesced to his father’s will.
“It shouldn’t happen that way,” she whispered through her sobs into his neck.
“It shouldn’t happen like that,” he agreed.
Mabelle must not break down. If Mabelle were unable to cope with this, then everything would unravel. He was not strong enough; for far too long his strength had lain in her, and only her.
“What about Hermine?” Mabelle asked in desperation. “It’s impossible to rely on that girl. At least now, when everything’s screwed up. What will we do?”
Carl-Christian could not bring himself to answer. Hermine was a loose cannon on board.
“It’ll turn out fine,” he reassured her, without answering her question. “Everything will turn out fine, Mabelle.”
But he didn’t believe a word of what he said.
When Hanne Wilhelmsen woke, Christmas had arrived with a bang.
At ten o’clock she was rudely awoken from sleep by a mandarin orange smacking her in the eye. Mary was attempting to hang a stocking filled with goodies on her headboard.
“It’s not Christmas Eve yet,” Hanne said, drugged with sleep. “What are you up to?”
“I’ve waited long enough. It’s the last Sunday in Advent. The decorations are going up now.”
Drawing on her dressing gown, Hanne shuffled out into the living room. The minimalist furnishings were drowned in glitter and trimmings. Red and green snakes crisscrossed the ceiling, with twinkling bulbs inside.
“Photocells,” Mary said in delight. “Every time someone walks through here, then—”
“Dashing through the snow,” a children’s choir bellowed.
In the corner beside the balcony door, a sturdy elf sat eating porridge.
“Ho, ho, ho,” he laughed as he raised his arm in mechanical greeting.
“Good Lord,” Hanne whispered.
Plaited red and green baskets festooned the walls, together with spray-painted spruce branches, brass stars, and golden vine tendrils. Like a monument to bad taste, the tree loomed overhead, culminating in the biggest star-topper Hanne had ever seen. Excited, Mary pressed a button on the wall. “Merry Christmas,” the star tinkled in two-part harmony, rotating slowly all the while.
Hanne burst out laughing.
“Don’t you like it?” Mary yelled. “I’ve been busy since midnight!”
Nefis was up now. She looked all around her, entranced.
“Brilliant,” she whispered in the midst of the melee. “So wonderfully Norwegian!”
“No,” Hanne hiccupped. “It’s … It’s—”
Suddenly everything went silent. Mary had pressed some sort of master switch and stood staring in accusation at Hanne.
“What did you say it was?”
“It’s—”
Hanne threw out her arms and beamed with pleasure.
“Damn it, they’re the most fantastic Christmas decorations I’ve ever seen! Mary, you’re a marvel! I’ve really never se
en anything like it.”
“Do you mean that? Nefis gave me permission to order whatever I wanted. Got everything delivered to the door, you know. I’ve worked my bloody socks off!”
“I can see that,” Hanne said, more serious now. “Thanks a million.”
“Thank you, too,” Mary sniffled. “I’m so happy now, you know.”
Pulling a voluminous handkerchief from her sweater sleeve, she dried her eyes, before handing Hanne a yellow note.
“A guy phoned here this morning – at some ungodly hour – though I refused to wake you. I was actually thinking of not telling you, but now I’m so happy, Hanne. Now you’ve made an old soul happy.”
She limped out into the kitchen. Fortunately she had forgotten to flick the switch on the noisy decorations.
“I promise …” Hanne said, stealing a march on Nefis while quickly reading the note. “It’s my turn to make dinner today, in fact. I’ll be back in plenty of time. Promise.”
She plucked a halo from the floor and used it to crown the head of a baby angel.
“That’s quite sweet, too,” she said, still smiling.
The festive season must have put a damper on even the journalists’ spirit of self-sacrifice. In any case, there was no sign of any of them in the bitter wind scudding along the walls of the apartment buildings in Eckersbergs gate. Only a cat could be seen ambling along the desolate sidewalk, shaking its paw with every step it took and meowing pathetically.
“I’ve often wondered,” Erik Henriksen said, as they opened the sealed front door, “what these hacks say to their children when they come home and get asked what they’ve done at work today. Well, maybe they can say: Today I’ve hounded a guy who’s just lost his whole family. Or: Today I’ve shadowed a crown princess who only wanted to be left in peace while she bought a gift for a friend. Today I’ve definitely made life really unpleasant for quite a number of people. What a damn job!”
“I don’t think they say anything much,” Hanne replied. “When they get home, I mean. Good of you to turn out, by the way.”
“No problem,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “But I don’t really understand what good this visit will do.”