The Consorts of Death

by Gunnar Staalesen

  ‘What the fuck are you doin’? You’ve driven us straight into a trap!’

  ‘You wanted to go to a nice quiet place, didn’t you,’ I snarled back.

  I looked around, swung the wheel, tried to reverse. Once again the large, black car rammed us, this time from the side, shoving us even further into the corner we were finding ourselves ensnared in. I changed gear and accelerated in an attempt to by-pass them, but they followed us as if stuck to our side and pushed us deeper and deeper into the gap between five or six large containers, with a huge loading ramp in the middle and a barbed wire fence at the end. The bonnet of the Starlet got jammed up against one of the steel supports of the ramp. For an instant all the warning lights on the dashboard flashed, then they went out, the engine died and all we could hear was the faint but insistent hiss of a punctured tyre.

  Jan Egil smashed open the door on his side and ducked his head, still holding the blue-grey pistol in his hand. Then, bent double, he got out, with his eyes on the car behind.

  I peered into the cock-eyed side mirror. The black car had positioned itself like a barrier between us and the rest of the world. Around us lay the district of Groruddalen, dotted with glittering lights, as distant as the stars in the sky above us. White smoke drifted from a tall chimney, giving off an acrid smell, as if from burning waste. The only light to reach us came down from two tall pylons, filtered by the darkness. The two men who got out of the car behind – with the same caution and wariness as Jan Egil – were barely visible, no more than two large, dark silhouettes. But the matt gleam from their hands spoke its own unambiguous language. They were not coming to the party with empty hands, either.

  One of them called out: ‘Out of the car, both of you!’

  Since Jan Egil was already outside I calculated that it must have been me he was referring to. I heaved a heavy sigh and felt a sense of inevitability in my stomach. Then I pushed the battered door to its full extent, swung myself out, placed my feet on the gravel and slowly exited the car, copying Jan Egil’s example by holding the door in front of me like a shield.

  ‘Freeze!’ shouted the man. He turned to the other who already had a mobile phone to his ear and was talking.

  ‘What the hell do you want from us?’ I shouted.

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Who are you phoning?’

  ‘Shut up, I said!’ answered the man, brandishing with menace a considerably larger weapon than Jan Egil’s. From this distance it didn’t look very inviting, a machine gun of the variety that sold like hotcakes in the organised section of the criminal community, in tiger-town Oslo and elsewhere.

  They said something we couldn’t hear. I turned my head to Jan Egil. ‘Any idea who they are?’

  ‘Not the cops, that’s for sure.’

  ‘No, I’d worked that one out, too.’

  He wasn’t letting the two armed men out of his sight. Standing there – with his top-heavy body, weapon in hand, cap down over his forehead, the little hair I could see shaved tight to the skull – he reminded me of a bully boy, a threat to everything in the vicinity, me included. Anger and pent-up violence radiated off him, and it was not difficult to recognise the disproportionately muscle-bound frame and the vacant look as belonging to someone who had overdosed on anabolic steroids for much too long.

  Inside me, I still carried the image of the small, tearful boy on the Rothaugen estate that hot July day of 1970 when Elsa Dragesund and I had gone to pick him up, and it struck me: had we done this to him? Was this the result of twenty-five years of public service commitment, trying to make him a different and better person, or at least trying to secure him a place in society that both he and we could tolerate? Was this the best we could achieve, the sum of our success?

  ‘What the hell are you mixed up in, Johnny boy?’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’

  ‘Sorry, but … is it me or you they’re after?’

  Suddenly one of the men by the black car shouted. ‘Didn’t we tell you to keep your mouths shut over there?’

  I swivelled round. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you feeling left out? You’re warmly invited to take part in the conversation, if you like!’

  He hoisted the gun to his face and pointed it at me. ‘Shut up, I said!’

  ‘Shut your mouth yourself!’ Jan Egil snapped. ‘I’ve got you in my sights! Move one centimetre this way and you’re a dead man!’

  For a moment the whole picture seemed to freeze. I prepared myself for the worst, then the situation suddenly changed. We heard the sound of a car before we saw it. Round the bend from the gate it came, a large black Mercedes which soon slowed down when the driver caught sight of us. As quietly as a panther, it drew up at an angle beside the two armed men and the other black car.

  The door slid open, and in the gleam from the tall pylons I glimpsed a silhouette as he got out. He was a tall, powerful man, and even before the light from the distant headlamp hit his face, I knew who it was. Now I could see the pattern that I should have seen eleven years ago.

  54

  ‘Nice to see you again, Hansie!’ I shouted.

  ‘I think I’m the one who should say that, Varg,’ he replied with a tight-lipped smile. He kept a wary eye on Jan Egil and his gun. He whispered something to the two others.

  ‘So it was you they rang!’

  ‘Who else?’

  I moved to the side, around the open car door and a few steps forward. From the corner of my eye I saw Jan Egil twitch.

  ‘Varg! What are you doin’?’ he said.

  ‘Take it easy, Jan Egil. We’re out in open countryside now.’

  ‘Open countryside! What the hell d’you mean by that?’

  A gun belonging to one of the men twitched, too, but Hans raised an authoritative hand and gave a brief command.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ he shouted to me.

  ‘OK,’ I said and stopped. ‘Does that mean we can talk?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘You know every well. About everything.’

  He eyed me with a stony face, mute.

  ‘I should have known in Førde, eleven years ago, when you were telling me about your childhood with such passion, about poverty and how you never wanted to experience the same again.’

  ‘Should have known what, Varg?’

  ‘How ruthless you’d been to avoid winding up in a similar situation again.’

  ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about! This is a local score we have to settle, between Jan Egil and us.’

  ‘Between …?’

  ‘Between two groups. It was foolish of you to get involved in this. Now we’ll have to –’

  ‘Gang warfare, is that what you’re trying to make me believe? Don’t give me that bollocks! You’re petrified you’re on his blacklist, and you should be higher up on the bloody list than I am.’

  ‘You talk too much, Varg. But you’ve always been like that. Waffling on about all those brainless ideas of yours.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Hans! Do you want me to extract all your lies from you, one by one? I suppose that was what Hammersten threatened to do as well, being the born-again Christian he was. He wanted to do penance and renounce all his sins. Especially with regard to Jan Egil, who had to pay for them. The snag was that it wasn’t only his sins he would have to do penance for. He had an accomplice. No, wrong. Not even an accomplice. You were the Mr Big, Hans, right from the very outset.’

  He took a couple of steps closer. I did the same. Our eyes were locked; we were like two cowboys in the final scene of a western.

  ‘You talk too much, Varg! This is rubbish. You must be able to hear that yourself.’

  ‘Listen to my reasoning then!’

  ‘I don’t have the bloody time to –’

  ‘We can start from a few days ago. Hammersten told you he could no longer keep all he knew to himself. And, worst of all, he wanted to tell Jan Egil. You beat him to death with a baseball bat, and when Jan Egil legged it, you took the opportu
nity to put the bat in his room. Yet again, damning evidence.’

  ‘Yet again?’

  ‘I’m thinking of the rifle in Angedalen.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, I had nothing to do with the murder of Kari and Klaus.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I think the turnip on your shoulders is beginning to go rotten, Varg. You might recall that I was in Bergen when it all happened.’

  ‘We-ell. In theory, on your way to Bergen perhaps, but …’

  ‘Which Terje Hammersten was able to corroborate, unless you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Not any more, and besides … very convenient that was. You and Hammersten giving each other an alibi in a kind of mutual alliance, since you were both in Angedalen that night.’

  ‘You can prove that, can you?’ The sarcasm lay thick on his vocal cords.

  ‘A little detail that has always buzzed around my head is the key to the Libakk farmhouse. The spare key hanging in the hallway cupboard. No one broke in that night the murders took place, and that was part of the circumstantial evidence that pointed to Jan Egil. But you … you’d left the house, according to your statement, a few hours earlier and could have taken the key with you. Later that night you went back, either alone or most probably with Hammersten, you unlocked the door and committed the atrocity.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ he jeered. ‘And what on earth would my motive have been?’

  ‘You would inherit the farm afterwards.’

  ‘Right, and what benefit was that to me?’

  ‘Enough money to establish yourself here in Oslo! But that was not the whole reason. The keyword here is booze – and the much talked about seventies smuggling racket, with Klaus Libakk as one of the central distributors. Klaus owed you money. Big money. And you knew where he kept it, hidden somewhere on the farm. Ultimately, there was only one way to get at it, and it meant killing both of them, Klaus as the main victim, Kari because she was unlucky enough to be married to him.’

  ‘Really? You can see yourself how thin your arguments are, Varg. To be frank, I …’

  I interrupted him. ‘You couldn’t foresee that Jan Egil with his lack of self-control would end up in such a mess, but you certainly knew how to fan the flames with even greater zeal. You had used Hammersten before, to kill Ansgår Tveiten in 1973, and he must have been your and Svein Skarnes’s well-remunerated henchman since the mid sixties, I would guess, when you hatched up the scheme.’

  ‘The scheme?’

  ‘You and Svein Skarnes, one of you desperate never to be poor again, the other desperate to earn quick money. It started with hash. Later it was booze. The only problem you had was that a woman stood between you. Vibecke Størset.’

  ‘Vibecke was never a problem!’

  ‘No? Never? What about that February day in 1974 when you paid a call on Svein Skarnes, got into a fight and pushed him down the stairs, breaking his neck? Wasn’t it Vibecke you were quarrelling about?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t! That was about money, too.’

  With a half-hearted sense of triumph, qualified by the situation we found ourselves in, I left his last statement hanging in the air between us. I could see how much he would have liked to retract the words. Now they were out, though, he was forced to continue: ‘He also owed me money. Everyone owed me money! It was hell.’

  ‘Exactly. Because when it came to the crunch, it was you who had started the whole thing. You were alone when you began. Your old university pal, Svein Skarnes, didn’t pop up until later, and he provided a perfect network with Harald Dale as the agent. It was a perfect cover, too. But when things started going awry in Sogn and Fjordane because Ansgår Tveiten had gone to the police, it was you who sent Hammersten in. Perhaps you had Hammersten with you on that February day in 1974, too? I think I can almost visualise it! Hammersten hanging around outside the gate while you drag Skarnes to the window and point: Look who’s outside waiting, Svein. Shall we invite him in perhaps? But you didn’t get your money after all. Because you acted hastily and pushed your old pal down the stairs.’

  ‘It was an accident, for Christ’s sake! The heat of the moment, just as …’

  ‘Yes, what was that you were about to say? Just as Vibecke said? Vibeke who had to serve a sentence on your account?’

  ‘Is it my fault that she chose to take the blame for this?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. But you know very well why she did it, and you could have given yourself in at any point, if you had had the backbone. And she wasn’t the only one unfortunately. The other scapegoat is here.’ I vaguely indicated behind me.

  His eyes wandered to Jan Egil and back again.

  ‘But I suspect your guilt regarding Jan Egil is of a much higher order, Hans.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘In fact, he can thank you for becoming the person he is. You were the one who ruined his mother’s life, Mette Olsen.’

  He sent me a wan look. ‘Me? Ruined her life! What the hell are you talking about now?’

  ‘It’s no wonder your sense of guilt was so heavy that you were climbing the wall on the last evening in Førde eleven years ago.’

  ‘I still don’t understand …’

  ‘You told me yourself you’d met her in Copenhagen that year. She’d always had a suspicion a rejected suitor had blown the whistle on them. But wasn’t it competition in the hash market that you feared most? Because the telephone call that betrayed them did not come from Copenhagen, but from Bergen in August, 1966. You said yourself you had dabbled with drugs, and the step from dabbling to dealing is not so large. Especially not for someone who was on the lookout for a way to secure his finances.’

  His eyes narrowed, and I didn’t like what I read there. I knew that every word I said was sealing my fate. But it was too late to stop now. I had to see the whole thing through. ‘Mette Olsen got off thanks to her solicitors, but her boyfriend David Pettersen killed himself in prison. The year after, Mette Olsen had a child. And the boy who was born, under an extremely unlucky star, was … Jan Egil. From even before he was born you’d shaped his destiny, Hans. Three times he has paid the price for your actions. The first time while in his crucial first years with an unstable mother. The second time when you deprived him of both the new parents he had been given. And the third time when he was blamed for the double murder that you committed. But now it’s over, Hans! He won’t pay any more.’

  He fixed me with heavy eyes. ‘And how are you going to prevent that?’ He tossed back his head. ‘You can see the guys there. They obey my every order. They get paid well to do that.’

  I looked over at the two armed men who had been standing too far away to catch all of what we had been discussing. ‘Yes, they’re good, I’ll give you that. You put them on my tail from the moment I left your hospice in Eiriks gate. But it wasn’t me you were really after, it was Jan Egil.’

  He suddenly raised his head. I did the same. We could both hear it now. Another car was on its way into the area.

  We looked at the gate where a white car with a taxi sign on the roof came into view. When the driver spotted us, he jumped on the brakes, causing the tyres to squeal. The two armed men instantly turned in that direction.

  Behind me I heard Jan Egil. ‘You bastard! You’re to blame for everythin’. Now I’ll fuckin’ give …’

  And then all hell broke loose.

  55

  One of the rear doors of the taxi opened.

  Hans called out: ‘Guys! Don’t …’

  Jan Egil shot first, but the range was too great. He missed. Hans Haavik threw himself to the side and down, and by that time the two men had managed to turn back in our direction. Two continuous salvos sounded like a sudden crackle of fire in the darkness.

  I heard Jan Egil groan before I could swivel round. He toppled backwards, hit in the chest by one of the shots. Instinctively, I continued in the same direction, as if to reach out for him, when I was hit myself, a sledgehammer blow in one shoulder. I was spun round, I slid down the sid
e of the car and landed on the ground with a thump, where I lay on my back staring into the air. I could see stars, but they were in the sky, high above. For a moment I felt nothing, as if my whole body were numb. Then came the pain, it was like a chainsaw cutting through me from my left shoulder down to my heart. The whole thing could not have taken more than a few seconds.

  From afar I could hear the sound of a car door being slammed shut and then running footsteps.

  ‘Careful,’ I heard Hans shout, but the footsteps just continued. They were coming closer. Now they were by me. Light steps, like on cotton. The stars grew, to become suns, but they were no longer in the sky; now they were in my head.

  I heard her voice. ‘Varg! Oh my God! This was never meant to happen. I never knew … He tricked me too, from beginning to end!’

  I tried to see her through the sun dance, but all I saw was a reflection in her round glasses. ‘Ce-cilie?’

  She turned away, her face a white pallor. ‘Ring for an ambulance! Do you hear me, Hans? You ring! Now!’

  ‘What’s going on? What are you doing here?’ I heard the echo of my own voice.

  ‘It’s all a terrible misunderstanding. I thought Hans was seriously worried about you.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘It wasn’t until this evening that I realised who I … what sort of person I have … You have to believe me, Varg! I had no idea what he was doing on the side!’

  ‘Doing … you don’t mean … you and Hans …’

  She nodded vigorously. ‘Hans and I have been together since we met again in Oslo. He convinced me that Johnny boy was a danger to you and him, and that was why I … but when I overheard the conversation about where he would meet you two …’

  ‘Overheard …’

  ‘And overheard him say that on no account must either of you escape alive … I demanded to go with him, but he refused point blank! He just shoved me away, refused to let me come. It was then I realised how completely he had pulled the wool over my eyes … I’ve rung the police, too …’