by Anne Holt
Hanne closed her eyes. Something tightened in her chest. Her lungs would not do their task.
“Don’t put that name on your lips,” she squeezed the words out. “You’ve no right to talk about Cecilie.”
It was not certain that he heard it. It was really impossible to breathe. She had to use the wall for support. He came closer, his steps were distinct, and she wanted to go, but could not breathe.
“At least I was at her funeral,” he said. “That’s more than can be said for you. You had gone off, as you always do when things are tough.”
His voice was right behind her now, low, close to her ear, she could feel his breath on her cheek.
“Yes, I was there. I wanted to talk to you. Wanted to show you that I was sorry on your behalf. But you weren’t there. Exactly as you weren’t there when it was Mum’s fiftieth birthday. You were nine years old, Hanne, and quite clear about how much you hurt her. You’re never there when anyone needs you. So don’t come here and say that I’m not there for my son. I love Alexander, I want to help him, and I want him to come home.”
Breathe, she thought. Breathe out. Breathe in.
“You didn’t fit into our family, Hanne.”
His voice was gentler now, less strained. His hand settled on her shoulder, burning through the fabric of her jacket, through her woolen sweater; she felt his fingers on her skin and wanted to brush them away. All her strength went into breathing, to forcing her lungs in and out, and Kåre’s hand remained where it was.
“Of course it’s mainly Mum and Dad’s responsibility. They were adults. But it became so much, Hanne. Of you. Of your bloody-mindedness, your oddness. You just absolutely didn’t want to. You always wanted to think, do, and say something different from all the others. Always. Exactly like …”
A heavy downpour began. They both peered up, unconsciously, as if they did not believe it possible for the weather to turn so suddenly, from light drizzle and silence to torrential rain in a matter of seconds. Hanne felt her breathing ease.
“Alexander,” she called out in the racket made by the rain drumming on the ground, the rooftops, on the shoulders of Kåre’s coat in tiny muffled beats. “Exactly like Alexander. He’s like me. You’re going to destroy him.”
She began to cry. She did not register it at first, did not realize that she was crying until the raindrops tasted salty on her tongue.
“We won’t destroy him,” Kåre said. “We’ll help him. These homo … This homosexuality he uses as an excuse—”
“He uses as an excuse?”
She was whispering now. Gasping out the words, again.
“Uses as an excuse. So that’s what you think. That he has fallen in love with a boy in order to be difficult and moody.”
“It’s not just like that. I didn’t mean to say … ‘uses as an excuse’. Apologies. That was expressed stupidly. But Alexander’s too young to make such decisions yet. We have to help him on to the right path, to … He’ll find it so difficult if he takes the wrong steps as far as this is concerned. You know that yourself, Hanne. You know that. Really. Everything will be so much easier if he understands that this is just an episode. A phase in his life.”
Hanne managed to turn away from him, managed to walk backward. She was in floods of tears and the full force of the rain was hitting her in the face. Her clothes were sodden now, water running everywhere, ice-cold winter rain down her back, underneath her clothes, her shoes gurgling with every leaden step she took, away from her brother.
“And what if it’s not a phase?” she sobbed. “What happens if Alexander really is gay, and what have you already done to him? With his differentness? With his bloody-mindedness, his stubbornness – all of what you feel is so God-awful? With everything that’s like me? What?”
“Hanne … Hanne!”
Her feet slapped against the rainwater as she sprinted across the courtyard. Her pocket was pasted to her jacket with the moisture, the keys icy cold: she fumbled, sobbing, and finally managed to pull them out. The right key slid into the lock.
“Hanne! But you must—”
Her brother’s shout was abruptly truncated as the door slammed shut. It took her a quarter of an hour to stop crying. Then she mounted the stairs, home at last.
FRIDAY DECEMBER 27
“Well done, Annmari.”
Erik Henriksen gave her an encouraging prod in the side and began to pack up the ring binders and loose documents, without turning it all into too much of a mess. The judge had already left the court following a meeting that had been shorter than anyone could have anticipated. The ruling had been that Carl-Christian and Mabelle Stahlberg should be remanded in custody for four weeks, two of these including a ban on letters and visits. The decision was in accordance with Annmari’s plea. They had all prepared themselves for an extremely lengthy court session. The married couple’s newly appointed defense lawyers, two heavyweights from the top rung of Oslo’s celebrity circuit, had obviously hit upon a different strategy. They had given a brief account of their clients’ viewpoint: neither wanted to appear in court, but both accepted imprisonment in order to provide the police with an opportunity to clear up this obvious, hair-raising misunderstanding. Of course, neither was guilty, and the defense counsel emphasized several times that four weeks was the limit of what the accused would tolerate.
“The cat-and-dog fight postponed until the next round,” Erik whispered. “They must have tortured CC and Mabelle to get them to go along with this. At least Mabelle!”
“If only we could find Hermine now,” Annmari murmured in return as she helped him fill the flight bags. “We must find her soon.”
The journalists swarmed around in the courtroom. Their initial targets were the defense lawyers, but four or five of them were already waiting impatiently for Annmari, only held in check by one of the court ushers who wanted to afford her the chance to get her documents packed away. She gave a loud sigh and glanced at her cellphone for text messages.
“I have to call Silje,” she said, sotto voce, turning her back on the reporters. “It’s urgent, it says. You take care of them over there, please.”
“Me? I can’t very well—”
“Yes, you can,” she said, tapping in the number, before putting the phone to her ear and taking a few steps across to the judge’s desk.
“Did it go well?” Silje asked at the other end.
“Yes. Four weeks. What do you want?”
“You have to come here. To Hermine’s apartment.”
“Have you found her?”
Annmari was whispering now, with her hand over her mouth to hide the sound.
“No. But you must come.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t want to say over the phone. Come, please.”
“Okay. It might take some time.”
“I’ll wait. Come as fast as you can.”
Annmari clicked the connection off and tucked the phone into her handbag.
“You can all speak to Inspector Henriksen here,” she said, clearing a path for herself through the photographers and journalists. “But really there’s nothing more to add.”
When she finally reached the door leading to the hall, she heard Erik’s voice: “You heard what Police Prosecutor Skar said. There’s nothing more to add. Nothing. Can’t you hear? There’s nothing to add.”
Smiling faintly, she hurried on. In C. J. Hambros plass she tried to hail one of the taxis continually cruising by. It crossed her mind that she should have helped him with the cases. Eventually a silver Mercedes stopped. As she sat inside, she spotted Erik rushing down the courthouse steps with one case under each arm and one in each hand, like a porter with a group of dissatisfied hotel guests trailing after him. He looked wildly in every direction. A patrol car rolled up beside him.
So he’ll have some help after all, Annmari thought, with a prick of guilty conscience.
Hermine Stahlberg’s apartment appeared to be a peculiar mixture of good taste and sloppiness. The furniture was modern
and boxy. The walls, floor, and furnishings were light, almost washed-out. Color was only to be found in rugs, paintings, and cushions. The pictures were well spaced on the walls, without ostentation, without clashing with one another. The stuffy atmosphere made Annmari Skar screw up her nose. The place couldn’t have been cleaned for a long time. The floors were dirty and the table in the living room dull with dust, and covered in rings left by glasses. Four bananas, almost black, lay in a bowl.
“It looks like something set up for an interior-design magazine and then forgotten about,” Annmari remarked.
Silje nodded absent-mindedly.
“And something tells me that someone’s been searching for something here,” she said. “When we arrived, a few of the paintings were hanging crookedly. Lots of the drawers weren’t properly closed. Inside was nothing but mess. It could be that the woman’s a notorious scatterbrain. There’s a great deal here to suggest that.”
She ran her finger over the TV set, lifted it to her eyes, and pulled a grimace.
“But women like Hermine Stahlberg usually manage at the very least to keep their own toiletries in order. The cupboards in the bathroom were fairly chaotic as well. I mean … there was no system that I could make out, anyway. The mascara was lying at the very back, for example. But you use that all the time, don’t you?”
Annmari cracked a smile.
“I don’t know much about that.”
“But, you see, this is really why I asked you to come. It was stuck between two books about mummies and hieroglyphs. In all honesty, a strange woman, this Hermine. Loads of books here, but they’re almost all brand-new. They creak when you open them! It looks as if they’re just for show, to be honest with you. Look here.”
Annmari took the document Silje handed her. She had already pulled on plastic gloves and tried to be as careful as possible with the paper.
“Yet another will,” she said in a monotone, leafing through to the last of the three numbered pages. “Dated three weeks ago.”
“Dated and signed by Hermann and Turid Stahlberg, and what’s more …”
Silje pointed at the final paragraph in the document.
“ ‘This sets aside all earlier wills,’ ” Annmari read. “But …”
She browsed through the document, from the first page to the last.
“This hasn’t been witnessed.”
“What?”
“Look! No witnesses. Therefore it’s invalid.”
Silje took the will and leafed through it again. She studied each page thoroughly, held it up to her face, and turned the paper to one side to catch the light from the windows, as if the witnesses might have signed using microscopic handwriting.
“Now I don’t understand any of it,” she said, flabbergasted. “But the contents are pretty sensational, though.”
“What does it tell us?” Annmari asked, keen to take a closer look.
Silje was reluctant to relinquish the document. Instead she took a seat on the window ledge and beckoned her colleague. They both leaned toward the window, where the fading daylight was intensified by a lamp directly outside on the terrace.
“Look here,” Silje said, pointing. “It decrees that the shipping company should be divided in three. Or … if I understand this correctly, Hermine, Preben, and Carl-Christian are to have thirty percent of the shares each. Then there would be ten percent left over, isn’t that right?”
“I can manage to calculate that, yes.”
“That is to go to Preben’s oldest son.”
“That means, then, that Preben actually gets forty percent,” Annmari said. “Not a particularly favorable share arrangement, really. No one holds a majority. But whichever two of the siblings can come to an agreement can overrule the third. What on earth …”
Both of them fell silent. Annmari raised her head to study the dust motes dancing in the light from outside: minuscule particles whirling about in an invisible draft.
“Hermann Stahlberg was well aware of how a will should be formulated,” she said slowly, as if thinking aloud. “After all, he had written the previous one by hand. All the formal requirements were attended to there. With witnesses and all that. Why would he hand over—”
“Hand over?”
“Yes!”
Annmari gestured with her hand.
“He must have handed it over, mustn’t he? He doesn’t live here, after all. And why would he hand over a will – the contents of which are totally different from the last one, which must mean that he had changed his mind about Carl-Christian only three weeks ago – and then not make sure that it’s legally binding? I mean … it does look fancy, of course, on personal notepaper and all that …”
She bent over the will, on thick creamy-yellow paper.
“And then he forgets something as essential as witnesses—”
“It might be that it wasn’t finished yet,” Silje suggested.
“But it’s signed! That’s supposed to happen in the presence of witnesses!”
“Maybe he changed his mind.”
“In this family, there’s no longer anything that surprises me, but if he changed his mind, then he wouldn’t have signed it. No …” Suddenly Annmari walked across the floor. She scanned the room. Her gaze settled on the profusion of bookshelves and, without turning to face Silje, she added: “You found this on a bookshelf, was that it?”
“Yes.”
“I want this place turned upside-down. I mean really turned on its head. All the books out and checked. All cupboards emptied. The pictures will have to be taken down. Look for a safe. Pull out drawers, rummage through clothes, make—”
“I understand, Annmari. What do you think we’ll find?”
Annmari, sucking on a strand of hair, did not answer. She stood motionless in the middle of the room. Her cellphone rang, but she did not answer.
“I don’t know,” she said in the end. “But I can’t think of anything other than that Hermann was threatened or forced to write this will. If it’s genuine, that is. We must have it checked. But let us say that these really are Turid and Hermann’s signatures … then he made sure that it wasn’t valid. He could only do that to a person who isn’t well acquainted with the legal world. And then I’m talking about someone who really doesn’t keep up with much, Silje. There’s only one person in the Stahlberg family who might not know that a will requires witnesses.”
“Hermine,” Silje said softly. “She seems pretty well all at sea.”
“Exactly. And we’re here now, aren’t we? At Hermine’s. But what has become of her?”
They looked around and let their eyes linger on the same picture. A color photograph in a simple frame of polished wood was displayed on a sideboard. Hermann and Tutta Stahlberg were surrounded by their three offspring. Hermine must have been about five years old, a pretty girl with blond hair and tiny, pearl-white teeth. Her brothers stood solemnly on either side of their parents, while Turid Stahlberg looked out from behind her husband’s right shoulder. She was smiling too, more warily than her daughter, a nervous, almost apologetic smile.
Hermann sat enthroned in the center of the picture, with only little Hermine allowed to stand in front of him when the photo was taken. He was the only one who stared directly at the camera. The little girl looked obliquely up at him, admiringly, laughingly.
“They were once a family,” Annmari said.
“Well, an interior-decor magazine certainly wouldn’t come here,” Silje said, peering into the bathroom where Billy T. was ransacking shelves and a little cabinet above the hand basin.
“Eh?” he mumbled as he squinted into a jar of pills.
“Hermine’s apartment was really beautiful, you see. Filthy, but stylish. In here looks more like a hostel for junkies.”
“That’s where these pills belong as well,” Billy T. said, pouring several different types of tablets out into his hand. “It says Vitamin C on the label, but these don’t look particularly damned healthy …”
The apartment Ma
belle Stahlberg owned in Kampen in the name of May Anita Olsen was soberly furnished. A couple of chairs from IKEA sat beside a veneer coffee table. It had started to split at both ends. The settee was lopsided and a big stain was outlined, dark and distinct, in the middle of one of the seating pads. The walls were bare, apart from a lurid painting in the living room and an old dresser beside the kitchen door. It was empty. Mabelle had herself, rather reluctantly, explained that she had lived there earlier, before she met Carl-Christian. They had never found any reason to sell it. She persistently claimed that the apartment was hardly ever used. Admittedly, Hermine had stayed there on a couple of occasions, she had confessed, but apart from that, the apartment was empty. The fact that it was registered in Mabelle’s former name was quite simply down to them never having bothered to change the title deeds. She could not understand why the place would be of any interest to the police.
“It almost looks as if the woman’s right,” Billy T. said. “There’s nothing here. Unless we’re going to make a fuss about these pills. We probably won’t bother. Four Rohypnol, some Valium, and some stuff I can’t quite identify. They were probably left behind by Hermine.”
He entered the small bedroom. A pine double bed took up most of the space. A narrow closet in the corner was empty. The curtains were closed. Billy T. drew them apart carefully. The windows could not have been washed in years, and the ledge was sticky with asphalt dust.
“I don’t understand what Hermine used this place for,” Silje said. “Why would she sit in such an unsavory place, when she has a sumptuous apartment on the other side of the city?”
“There could be many reasons for that,” Billy T. muttered as he began to knock on the walls. “She might have acquaintances she doesn’t particularly want to drag along to where the posh folk live, for example. Hey, listen to this!”
His clenched fist suddenly created a different, heavier sound on the wall. He struck a number of blows from the floor in an upward direction, one more time.
“There’s something here. It’s hollow.”
A gap could be seen in the plaster and a safe door was visible through it. Billy T. reached in and extricated a graphic magazine; on the front cover there was a woman bathing with a dark-blue night sky in the background.