by Thomas Enger
Hagen answers immediately.
“Where are you?” Brogeland barks. His voice is authoritarian. He feels he can speak like this to a junior officer.
“Westerdals School of Communication. No one has seen her. I’m thinking I might hang around, anyway.”
“Is anyone still there this late in the evening?”
“Yes, quite a few people, would you believe it? Last-minute exam cramming. And I think there’s a party later. There are posters on the notice board to that effect.”
“Okay. Stay where you are and see if you can find her.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Brogeland hangs up without saying good-bye. He leans back and starts thinking about Henning Juul. Could I really have been wrong about him? he wonders. Am I the one being used here? Could I really have been that naive?
He doesn’t have time to think about the Nigerian women before his mobile starts to vibrate on his desk. He looks at it. Talk about the devil, Brogeland thinks.
And ignores Juul’s call.
It feels like his feet are nailed to the floor. He has seen dead bodies before and death tends to look peaceful. Not in Stefan’s case. He looks tormented, as if he suffered right up until his final moment. Black rings around his eyes, bags under them, pallid skin; his face looks exhausted. One arm is on top of the duvet, stretching up toward his head. He is curled up against the wall as if he were trying to crawl inside it.
There is a glass on Stefan’s bedside table with a few drops of liquid in it. A pill lies next to it, on top of a book with a black cover. Valium, he thinks. An overdose. He knows he shouldn’t do it, but he goes over to the bedside table, leans forwards and sniffs the glass. It smells sharp. Alcohol. He steps closer to the bed. There is a crunching sound under his foot. He looks at the sole of his shoe and sees the remainder of something white and powdery. He mutters a curse, as he bends down and removes the blanket which overhangs the edge of bed.
He has stepped on a pill. A whole one is lying next to his shoe. Carefully, he picks it up, studies it, and sniffs it. The pill and its smell remind him of something, but he can’t place it. He curses a second time and returns the pill to the exact same spot where he found it, and stands up. The powder on the sole of my shoe will leave a trail, he thinks. And if I don’t boil my shoe, crime scene technicians will be able to place me here.
The room grows stuffy and humid. Henning feels the urge to run, but he doesn’t give in to it. Something on the desk stops him. It’s Henriette and Anette’s script. A Sharia Caste is lying there, open at scene 9, the scene where the Gaarder family is having dinner. And Henning thinks that something is terribly, terribly wrong.
He rings Brogeland’s mobile. While he waits for him to reply, he tries to remember if he touched anything. The last thing he needs is for the police to find his fingerprints in the Foldviks’ home.
The bathroom cabinet. Damn! He opened the bathroom cabinet. He closed it with his right hand.
Damn!
He lets the phone ring, but Brogeland doesn’t reply. He picked a great time to be busy, Henning fumes. You bloody amateur, he berates himself. But how was he to know that there was a dead body in a flat he just happened to visit?
He leaves, making sure the front door is almost closed, like it was when he arrived, and he does the same with the door to the backyard. Back outside, he feels how wonderful it is to be surrounded by fresh air, and he looks up at the windows. No one is looking down. He calls Brogeland again and lets his mobile ring twenty times, at least, before he gives up. Damn, he thinks. Damn, damn, DAMN! What do I do now? I have to get hold of Bjarne. I can’t ring the police like I normally would and report this. If I do that, I’ll have to wait here, tell them what I was doing, and I know it won’t look good. I won’t be able to give a proper explanation, at least not one which puts me in the clear. First Tariq and now Stefan!
No, he says to himself, I have to get hold of Bjarne.
He tries calling him again. The telephone rings and rings. Arrghhh! Henning rings the switchboard and asks to be put to him. A female voice says “just a moment.” Too many long seconds pass, before he is transferred.
The telephone rings again. But only twice. Then Brogeland picks up.
55
Bjarne Brogeland never used to have a problem with dead bodies, but these days he can barely look at them. Especially not teenagers or children. I suppose it’s because I’m a father myself now, he thinks. Every time he arrives at a crime scene or goes to a home where a child has died, or been killed, he always thinks about his daughter, beautiful, lovely Alisha, about what his life would be like without her.
Yngve and Ingvild Foldvik must be devastated.
Brogeland enters the family’s flat. The atmosphere inside is one of professional detachment. The mask the police put on in order to do their job, the subdued voices, the quick glances, conveying the words none of them can bear to utter. No one moves quickly. There is no banter, no smart remarks like in detective series on television.
Brogeland goes into the bedroom. Ella Sandland is bent over the body. He called her on the way because she lives nearby. She turns to him.
“Suicide, most probably,” she says quietly. Brogeland looks around, he can’t bear to look at Stefan.
“Traces of alcohol in the glass, possibly vodka.”
Brogeland goes over to the bedside table and sniffs the glass. He doesn’t nod or shake his head.
“Suicide note?”
“Haven’t seen one yet. So there probably isn’t one.”
“He might have died from natural causes.”
Sandland nods, reluctantly. Brogeland turns around, taking in the whole room. He notices the script which Henning Juul told him about. Scene 9, just like the devious bastard said on the telephone. A poster for the film Seven hangs above Stefan’s bed. An empty CD sleeve for the Danish band Mew lies open on his desk. Brogeland guesses that the CD itself is in the sound system on a stool next to the bed. Speakers have been mounted high up either side of the wall, behind the desk. A battered skateboard is leaning against the wall behind a chair.
“Have we managed to get hold of his parents yet?” he asks.
“Yes. They’re on their way home.”
“Where were they?”
“Don’t know. Fredrik is dealing with that.”
Brogeland nods.
“Poor people, I feel so sorry for them,” Sandland begins.
“Yes, so do I.”
“However, a couple of things strike me as odd,” Sandland whispers. She comes closer.
“What?”
“Look at him.”
Brogeland looks. He sees nothing but a dead teenager, a dead boy.
“What is it?”
“He’s naked.”
“Naked?”
“Yes.”
Sandland goes back to the bed and gently lifts up the blanket and duvet. Brogeland looks at Stefan, as naked as the day he was born.
“I’ve never heard of anyone who took their clothes off before killing themselves.”
“No, You’re right, that’s extremely rare.”
“And he’s lying in a strange position.”
“How do you mean?”
“Look at him. He’s pressed up against the wall.”
“Surely that’s not unusual? Do you sleep in the middle of your bed?”
“No, but it looks like he has tried to crawl into the wall.”
“My daughter sleeps like that. Most children, most grown-ups, in fact, like curling up to something. It’s not necessarily significant. Besides, it might just have been his death throes.”
Sandland studies Stefan’s dead body for a few more seconds, but she doesn’t say anything. They walk around each other, absorbing more details from the room.
“We need to find out if he had a history of depression,” Brogeland continues, “if he was seeing a psychologist or a psychiatrist. At first glance, I think it looks like suicide, but he might have had an aneurysm o
r a congenital heart defect. Nevertheless, we’ll treat it as a suspicious death for the time being. Please would you get a court order? We need to seal the crime scene and get some technicians in here.”
Sandland nods, rips off the plastic gloves, and takes out her mobile.
56
The moment he walks through his front door, he knows someone has been there. He can smell it. Something sharp mixed with a faint trace of sweat. He moves quietly into the kitchen, then into the living room, without turning on the light. He stops, he listens. The tap in the bathroom is dripping. A car hits a puddle outside. Far away, someone shouts something he can’t make out.
No, he thinks. There is no one here now. If there is, they are able to stand completely still and not make a sound. His belief that someone was there is confirmed, when he returns to his living room. He looks at the coffee table where his laptop normally sits.
It’s not there now.
He walks over to the coffee table, as if that would make it reappear. He swiftly reviews whether he had something valuable on his hard disk. No. Nothing but FireCracker 2.0. All essential research and documents have been printed out and filed. He doesn’t have a spreadsheet with a list of his sources.
So why steal his computer? He stands in the middle of the room, shaking his head. A long and eventful day, culminating in a break-in in his own flat. Okay, boys, he says out loud, you’re clever. You got into my flat, you got out again, and you’ve sent me a message: we can get to you any time and we can take anything you care about.
They are only trying to scare him. But it’s working. When there is a hard knock on his door, his knees buckle. He is half expecting it to be the police, that Brogeland has been unable to keep Gjerstad at bay long enough for Henning to clear his head, but it’s not Brogeland or Gjerstad or his recent uninvited guests.
It’s Gunnar Goma.
“The door was open,” Goma says in a loud voice. Henning tries to breathe normally, but his chest tightens and he can feel a warm tingling sensation in his hands. Goma enters without waiting to be asked. He is wearing the red shorts, but he has a white vest on his upper body this time.
“If this is about your nancy-boys, then it’s the last time I’m doing you a favor,” Goma snorts.
“What do you mean?”
“Nancy-boys. The people who came to your flat today. They look like nancy-boys, both of them. If that’s what you’re into, you’re on your own.”
Henning takes a step forward, feeling an urgent need to account for his sexual orientation, but his curiosity gets the better of him.
“You saw them?”
Goma nods.
“How many were there?”
“Two.”
“Can you describe them?”
“Do I have to?”
“No, you don’t have to, but it would be really helpful.”
Goma sighs.
“They were dark, both of them. Dark-skinned, I mean. Muslims, I reckon. Their beards were too well-groomed and fancy. One of them—it didn’t look like he had proper hair. More like it was painted. Or drawn. Very complicated pattern. The other was as thin as a rake, but he walked like a nancy-boy.”
“Anything else?”
“The first guy walked in exactly the same way. Wriggling his bum, like, and swinging one arm slightly.”
Goma grimaces.
“Did you get a look at his face?”
“Same kind of beard. Sparse, but even, and shaved in straight lines. He was a little chubbier than the other immigrant poof. And he had a bandage on one finger. On his left hand, I think it was.”
“When was this?”
“An hour ago. It was a stroke of luck really, because I had just decided to have a nap, when I heard footsteps.”
“How long were they here?”
“At first, I thought you had come home, because it was quiet in the stairwell, but then I heard some more noise, now, when was it, ten minutes later, maybe? And so I had another look at them through the spyhole. But if they’re your nancy-boys—”
“They’re not.”
He doesn’t elaborate. Goma appears to accept his brief denial.
“Thank you so much,” Henning says. “You’ve been a great help.”
Goma grunts, turns around, and makes to leave.
“By the way,” he says, grabbing the door handle. “One of them was wearing a black leather jacket. With flames on the back.”
BBB. Bad Boys Burning. It has to be, Henning thinks. He nods and thanks Goma again. He looks at the clock. It is almost 1:15 AM. He is wide awake. Too much has happened and his mind is buzzing.
Goma closes the door with a bang. The noise makes the flat feel frighteningly empty, as if Henning is in a vacuum. He fetches a mop and places it under the door handle. If anyone tries to come in, he will hear them. The mop will slow them down and give him time to escape.
He finds the escape rope coiled up under the bed and ties it around the TV stand. The television alone weighs forty kilograms, and with various DVDs plus the stand itself, it should be enough to take his weight, he estimates. The last time he checked, he weighed seventy-one kilograms. He probably weighs even less now.
He sits down on the sofa and stares at the ceiling. He still hasn’t switched on the light. If anyone is watching him from the street, he doesn’t want to reveal that he is back.
Stefan’s pale face pops into his head. Please don’t let him haunt me as well, he prays. What on earth causes a seventeen-year-old boy to take his own life? If that is what he did?
The thought makes him sit up. What if he didn’t? What if someone killed him and made it look like suicide?
No. So what about the script? It looked staged, somehow. As if someone wanted it to be noticed, to add the interpretation of the scene? It must have been a suicide, Henning tries to convince himself. Stefan must have got hold of the script and read it. Leaving the script in plain view was a message to his parents or, more likely, his father. Look what you made me do. I hope you can live with yourself.
Yes. That must have been what happened. But all the same. Henning has done this before, reasoned his way to a logical conclusion and yet been unable to shake off a feeling that a vague but ominous hook has anchored itself in his stomach. It yanks him, not constantly, but every now and then it wriggles, making him unpick the jigsaw puzzle and put the pieces back together again differently.
He doesn’t know why. There is nothing to suggest that he is wrong, but his feeling of unease tells him that some of the pieces in Stefan’s puzzle don’t fit. Stefan’s puzzle might not be complete yet.
57
He nods off in the early morning hours and is woken up by a car beeping its horn. He is lying on his sofa, adjusting his eyes to the light. It is 5:30 AM. He shuffles into the kitchen, gets a glass of water, fetches the medicine jars from his bedside table, and swallows two tablets. The matchbox is where it always is, but he hasn’t got the energy to challenge the soldiers from hell today.
He feels like he has been on a weeklong bender. He knows he ought to eat something, but the thought of stale bread with dried-out ham is about as attractive as eating sawdust.
He thinks about the men who came to his flat. What would they have done if he had been there? Were they armed? Would they have tried to kill him?
He pushes the thought away. The point is that he wasn’t there, that there was no confrontation. He decides to forget about breakfast and go straight to work, even though the day is just beginning.
An hour later, he rings Brogeland. A detective never sleeps more than a couple of hours when an investigation intensifies and Henning has questions he is dying to ask. Brogeland’s voice sounds groggy when he finally picks up.
“Hi, Bjarne, it’s me,” Henning says, suitably jovial and matey.
“Hi.”
“Are you awake?”
“No.”
“Well, are you up?”
“Define up.”
“How did it go yesterday?”
> “That’s also up for discussion.”
“What do you mean?”
Brogeland doesn’t reply.
“Are you saying he didn’t kill himself?”
Henning is at the edge of his seat.
“No. No, I didn’t say that. It went well, in the sense that we did what we had to do at the crime scene. What do you want to talk about? Why are you calling me this early?”
Henning is put off by Brogeland’s brusque tone.
“Well, I—”
“I’m about to go to a meeting and I’ve got work to do. So if it’s not anything in particular, then—”
“Yes, it was.”
“Okay, spit it out.”
It takes Henning a moment to gather his thoughts.
“There’s something I need to know.”
“Yes, I imagined as much.”
“Was there any email correspondence between Henriette Hagerup and Yngve Foldvik in the time leading up to her murder?”
“Why do you ask? Why do you need to know?”
“I just do. Okay? I feel I’ve a certain right to know.”
“Right?!”
“Yes. I’ve helped you quite a lot in this investigation.”
“I know.”
Brogeland sighs deeply.
“Emails? I don’t know. Don’t remember. I’m too tired to remember things.”
“For God’s sake, Bjarne, you have to; the son of one of your potential suspects has just died. I don’t know why you’re suddenly being an arsehole after everything I’ve done for you, but that’s fine. I don’t need to talk to you anyway.”
He is about to hang up, when Brogeland yawns.
“Okay, sorry, I’m just so bloody tired. And Gjerstad, he—”
More yawning.
“What about Gjerstad?”
“Oh, forget it. Yes, Hagerup emailed Yngve Foldvik several times and he replied.” Brogeland says and exhales heavily.
“Were any of the emails about the script?”