by Anne Holt
“Incredibly unoriginal,” Billy T. muttered.
“I said ‘might’. A great deal suggests that Carl-Christian, Hermine, or this Mabelle character has something to do with the murders, either together or individually. It’s not difficult to predict that we’re going to have increasingly strong grounds to focus in that direction as the investigation advances. There’s always a lot of bullshit in those conflicts. And that bullshit suits us very well at present. Everything we find will support our theory.”
“Exactly,” Billy T. said. “Which is a good theory—”
“But also dangerous. It locks us in, and makes us close our eyes to that important piece we prefer not to see.”
“Sidensvans,” Erik said, nodding.
“Precisely. Knut Sidensvans. I can’t rid myself of the thought that his presence was no mere coincidence.”
“We’ve really nothing to go on,” Billy T. said. “It’s bloody impossible to find a single connection between Sidensvans and the Stahlberg family.”
“We haven’t tried very hard, though.”
“No, but what could there be? We’ve already interviewed loads of friends and family of the three victims. No one has ever heard of Sidensvans. There’s nothing to suggest the Stahlbergs might have had plans to publish a book or need any help from a publishing consultant. They probably didn’t require a well-dressed electrician without any tools to change a cable late on a Thursday evening. I just can’t fathom it. All the same, they must have been expecting the guy. There were four glasses set out on the sideboard, and the champers was already opened.”
“Odd that the champagne was opened,” Hanne commented.
“Eh?”
Erik squinted at her.
“You usually open that sort of thing once all the guests have arrived,” she said. “That’s half the fun. Hearing the pop. Drinking while it’s really fizzing. Isn’t that right?”
“You might well know,” Billy T. muttered. “I can never afford that sort of thing.”
Hanne ignored him and ploughed on, “If we go back for a moment to what’s most plausible – namely, that the shootings have something to do with the family conflict – then why did the perpetrator choose to act on this particular evening?”
“One evening’s probably as good as any other,” Erik said.
“No,” Hanne said eagerly, leaning forward. “When four people are liquidated in cold blood in this way, we quickly construct a theory that it was all meticulously planned. I see that the newspapers have already begun to quote anonymous sources in the police about precisely that: the homicides were premeditated. But if someone plans to kill three members of his family, would they not ensure they were at least alone on that evening? Wouldn’t they, for example, make sure that the neighbors were away and—”
“But they were,” Erik interrupted. “All except Backe. He’s senile and dead-drunk most of the time, and it’s pretty certain everyone in the block knows that.”
“Backe isn’t totally with it,” Hanne agreed. “But he has his moments. He does his own shopping and sometimes goes to the theater, in fact.”
“How do you know that?”
“I drove him home, didn’t I? No one else was available, so I did it myself. He’s absolutely prepared to give an account of himself, as long as he has enough alcohol in his bloodstream and is able to collect his thoughts. My point is that taking the lives of three people called Stahlberg last Thursday, in their own home, seems fairly impulsive. A plan – a real murder plan – would probably have been carried out somewhere else entirely. At their summer cottage, for example. As recently as last weekend, Hermann and Turid were in Hemsedal with Preben and his family. The cottage is situated in quite a remote spot, more than one kilometer from the nearest neighbor. I would …”
She leaned back and intertwined her fingers behind her neck. A smile was only just visible at the corners of her mouth as she continued.
“If I intended to take the lives of my parents and my brother, I’d have chosen to do it somewhere I was sure of not being interrupted. At a time when most people are fast asleep. Not in the middle of Oslo on a Thursday evening.”
Erik and Billy T. exchanged glances.
“And then we’re again faced with a whole range of possibilities.”
Hanne looked up at the cupboard containing Mary’s stash of tobacco, but pulled herself together.
“If one or several members of the family are behind this, then it was an impulsive act. A frenzy of rage. A sudden frenzy, which also cost Sidensvans his life because he, by chance, happened to be present at the time.”
Hanne fell silent and closed her eyes. Billy T. tried not to look at her. He felt offended. They were all offended. Not a single soul in the entire police force was unconvinced that the four victims in Eckersbergs gate had been dispatched by one of the Stahlbergs. Even now, the prevailing general opinion was that the killings had been planned in detail, probably over a lengthy period of time. Some even speculated that the ravenous dog had been deliberately planted there. At any rate, the dog had complicated the investigation considerably.
“If the family are not behind it,” she suddenly went on, “then we have a fucking problem. To put it mildly. Then we might be talking about a homicide with intent to rob that got screwed up. Or a random lunatic. Highly unlikely, but all the same.”
She caught Billy T.’s eye.
“We might consider that Sidensvans was actually the target,” she said slowly. “The family was simply sacrificed. Either to camouflage Sidensvans’s murder – that sort of thing has been done before – or because he had to—”
“… be killed because he was delivering something to the Stahlberg family,” Erik broke in. “Or was telling them something. But then we’re probably back to Carl-Christian and Co., are we not? As suspects, I mean?”
Hanne shrugged.
“Possibly. But in any case … you must at least agree with me in my provisional conclusions!”
“Which are what, then?” Billy T. said, genuinely discouraged. “I think you’re jumping all over the place! What are you actually driving at?”
“Two things. If it’s family members who are behind it, then it was an impulsive affair. Not planned. At least not well, or over a period of time. Moreover, it’s not just an obsession of mine to say I believe that we ought to find out far more about this guy Sidensvans. About what on earth he was doing at Hermann and Tutta’s house.”
“Maybe he had brought something with him,” Erik suggested again. “Something that the perpetrator removed when he left?”
“Maybe so,” Hanne said, nodding. “Or maybe he didn’t have anything with him. Maybe that’s why his keys have never been found. Or maybe he never … What if he quite simply didn’t …”
She became absorbed in thought.
“This theory of yours about it being so impulsive—” Billy T. was more enthusiastic now and gesticulated as he said, “it doesn’t wash. You don’t get hold of two guns just like that! The perpetrator or perpetrators, whether family or outsider, must have spent some time acquiring them. Do you really mean someone is supposed to have had that sort of thing lying around, just in case the need to execute a person ever arose?”
Hanne did not reply. She sat with her head tilted, deep in concentration, as if listening to something, or not quite sure about what she had actually heard.
“Hello,” Billy T. said. “Do you agree?”
“What?”
Hanne looked momentarily mystified, before smiling apologetically. “It just struck me that Sidensvans maybe wasn’t … It’s not certain that he should … No. There have to be limits to speculation. Even for me.”
“Is anybody staying for dinner?”
Mary’s hacking cough was heard in the doorway.
“It’s the lady of the house who’s taking care of the cooking today, just to let you know. But it might be edible, for all that. You need to make a start, Hanne. We eat at three o’clock on a Sunday. We’re not like those
dagos that eat at night.”
She slapped an enormous bag of lamb cutlets on the kitchen worktop.
“Who’s staying?”
“I’d love to,” Erik said.
“Okay, then,” Billy T. said. “If Mary insists.”
“She doesn’t, in actual fact,” Hanne said, starting to peel potatoes.
A man was trying to pick up his change and eat a hotdog at the same time. The female cashier felt disgusted. The front of the customer’s hoodie was spattered with stains beneath an open, tattered pilot jacket. His face, pinched and with several open, weeping sores, bore signs of heavy drug misuse. She placed the money on the counter. Angrily, he swore with his mouth full of food: “For fuck’s sake! Put the money in my hand, I said! I’m not a bloody octopus! Can’t you see that I’m eating?”
Shuddering, he had to shift his foot to one side to keep his balance. His elbow hit a child held in its mother’s arms, and a substantial blob of ketchup dropped on to the young woman’s coat. The youngster screamed like crazy. Cursing, the man in the hoodie made an effort to pick up the money. The girl behind the counter was obviously afraid now: she drew back and looked around for help.
“You! You over there!”
A hefty man in his thirties poked a finger into the junkie’s back.
“Calm down, okay?”
The hotdog-eater turned around slowly. It seemed that he was struggling to focus properly. All of a sudden, he thrust what remained of his food into the intruder’s jacket front.
“Butt out,” he slurred, and made to leave.
The answer he received was a punch in the mouth. Two teeth broke. As he fell, he pulled down three boxes of chocolate and a display stand of Se og Hør magazines.
The child yelled more loudly than ever and his mother sobbed in terror.
The assistant had rung the police long before it reached that stage.
Mabelle Stahlberg was in the process of creating a new version of the truth for herself. She lay on the floor of the apartment in Odins gate listening to music as she fashioned an alternative reality, a story she could make both herself and others believe.
She had practiced meditation earlier, before Carl-Christian, before life with the Stahlberg family, at a time when everything and everyone was against her and nothing was going her way. Admittedly, she was pretty, and that sort of thing could go some distance toward helping, in a world that idolized the superficial.
She had been only fourteen when she obtained her first modeling assignment. Not major stuff, a tiny advertising job for a mail-order company, but overwhelming for a young girl who suddenly realized that an attractive appearance could be her ticket away from a poky apartment, where a disabled mother was slowly smoking herself to death and left May Anita and her three small siblings to fend for themselves.
The young girl was barely seventeen when she discovered that she had to lose increasingly more of her clothes to find work. In a sleazy joint in Sagene, with covered windows and a grubby bathtub in the corner, she finally said stop. May Anita was desperate to become Mabelle. She had no idea how. She had nowhere to stay. Her siblings were spread out in three different foster homes by now, but the child welfare service had fortunately not allocated many resources to supporting her, since she would be eighteen in four months’ time. May Anita lacked everything, but understood for the first time in her young life that she had some kind of intelligence. Intuitive and ignorant it may have been but, despite everything, it had kept her away from intoxicating substances and forced her to draw the line at undisguised pornography. For the next six years she lived from hand to mouth. A casual job here, an assignment there, for an old acquaintance perhaps, who might be pressed into generosity by a poor young girl who, despite it all, had beautiful eyes and a very attractive body.
May Anita never quite succeeded in getting it together. But she learned a great deal.
Then one night she met Carl-Christian: he was plastered. She was sober, as always. There was something weak about the man, something sweet and genuinely helpless. He stood with his head in a garbage can outside the 7-Eleven store in Bogstadveien.
May Anita had taken the stranger home and to bed. She found no need to abandon him when he collapsed into the wide divan with silk sheets. On the contrary, she set to work. Seventy-two hours later, she became Carl-Christian’s mistress.
With CC’s help, she transformed herself into Mabelle. She had her nose straightened, as so many photographers had encouraged her to do. Her lips increased in size at the same time, and in the end he had proposed.
Mabelle was fond of him, in her own way. He worshiped her. His fear, his anxiety that she might leave him, made her feel secure. There was a certain satisfaction in the imbalance between them, this lopsidedness in their relationship. She was dependent on what he owned. He, on the other hand, was dependent on her.
Naturally, her life had to be embellished when she met Carl-Christian. Eventually they became true, the stories she had served up so many times, with ever-increasing precision and richness of detail. It was the same as it was with make-up, she had sometimes thought, like a tiny cosmetic operation: if well executed, then no one could discern its original state.
She did not tell lies. She created reality.
As early as her childhood, Mabelle Stahlberg had appreciated that if you simply entered into the deception, kept firm hold of it, and never let it overpower you, then lies could become utterly true. In actual fact, truth was only for people who could afford it, and Mabelle Stahlberg certainly had no intention of reverting to being May Anita Olsen.
Hermann and Tutta deserved to die. They had asked for it. Hermann was wicked, he was egotistical and wicked through and through. He was vindictive. Obstinate and willful. Hermann was a thief who had intended to steal their life from them. From Carl-Christian – Hermann’s own flesh and blood – who had slogged and worked his fingers to the bone for years, entirely at the mercy of his father’s moods and whims. Tutta was nothing more than a foolish hanger-on, a spineless puppet. She had to take responsibility for not speaking up about the unfairness, about the raw deal they’d been given. Hermann and Tutta were responsible for their own deaths.
Preben, too.
Mabelle closed her eyes and tried to relax. She was worn out now, almost prostrate. She did not want to think about Preben.
They had not done anything wrong.
It was almost true already.
“My goodness, if it isn’t Kluten himself, eh? Thought you’d headed off long ago.”
Billy T. slapped the flat of his hand on the prisoner’s back.
“Don’t you realize, I’ve had my teeth knocked out,” the man in the hoodie lisped, baring his gums. “That wasn’t much fun, you know!”
“You didn’t have many left anyway, so it doesn’t make much difference,” Billy T. said, taking a seat opposite him in the interview room. “But it doesn’t look as if you’re getting much to chew on, either. My God, you’ve grown so skinny.”
“Sick,” Kluten mumbled, stroking his swollen top lip. “Really bloody sick. I can smell wine off you.”
“I’m off duty today,” Billy T. said mildly. “I’ve just had dinner with a nice family. Certainly hadn’t intended to come here. But then somebody phoned, you know. And said you insisted on talking to me. And it had better …”
His voice was raised to a roar.
“… be important!”
Kluten jumped so violently that his head cracked off the wall.
“I’m sick, I tell you. And you know fine well my mouth’s bleeding!”
“Keep that filth away from me, I tell you. I hear you kicked up a commotion in a kiosk up in Vogts gate. Spilled blood on other customers, and that sort of stuff. Little children and nice women. What’s all that about, Kluten? Is that the kind of behavior you’ve turned to?”
“It was ketchup,” Kluten complained. “I just wanted my money!”
“And then you didn’t have the common sense to get rid of this, before o
ur guys turned up.”
Billy T. clicked his tongue as he held up a small plastic bag with unmistakable contents.
“Three grams?” Three and a half? Kluten, for heaven’s sake. You’re getting old.”
Billy T. squinted and pretended to examine it thoroughly.
“I have something!”
“Had,” Billy T. said sternly. “You had four grams of heroin. Now they’re mine.”
“I have information, Billy T.! I know something!”
Now he was whispering loudly, whistling through the hole in his upper jaw. Billy T. assumed a dismissive air. He knew Kluten well from his years in the drug intervention unit. The guy was totally unable to speak coherently and truthfully for more than three minutes.
“It’s true! I swear, Billy T. I know something about that there …”
He suddenly stopped speaking and, paranoid, stared all around.
“That there who?” Billy T. asked.
“I want immunity,” Kluten said, his eyes still darting around the room, as if expecting someone to emerge out of the walls. “I’m saying nothing until I get immunity.”
“Kluten, Kluten, Kluten.”
Beaming, Billy T. ran both hands over his head.
“That’s not how it works in this country, you know. Where is it you watch TV? At the Blue Cross center? Seen too many American movies, I think. Spit it out, now. What is it you know?”
“Saying nothing.”
Kluten clammed up, quite literally. He drew his hood over his head, folded his arms, and hunched his shoulders. Then he sank his face on to his chest. He was reminiscent of a fasting monk from the Middle Ages and smelled just as foul.
“Cut that out. Come on, spit it out!”
Kluten sat like a pillar of salt. Billy T. abruptly rose to his feet.
“Fine,” he said brusquely. “Sit there then. This stuff here will give you some time behind bars anyway.”
He tucked the heroin into his breast pocket as he headed for the door.
“Help me a bit, then!”
Kluten was whimpering now. Billy T. thought for a moment that he had started to cry.