by Anne Holt
“There’s not a single common element,” he said somewhat morosely. “Different weapon, different method, different location, completely different characters, and a different time. You’ll have problems convincing anyone!”
“But just listen—don’t get too fixated on the differences. Let’s see what similarities there might be.”
She was very excited, and counted off the points eagerly on her fingers.
“First of all, there was a gap of only five days between the murders.”
She ignored Håkon’s sardonic smirk and raised eyebrows.
“Secondly, we have no explanation at the moment for either of them. Admittedly we’ve identified the man by the River Aker: Ludvig Sandersen, drug addict for years and a conviction record as long as your arm. He was released six weeks ago after his last sentence. But do you know who his lawyer was?”
“Since you ask in that triumphant tone, I’ll guess at our deceased friend Olsen.”
“Bingo! That at any rate is some sort of connection.” Speaking more softly, she went on: “And not only was he Olsen’s client, but he had an appointment with him the day he was killed! Heidi has Olsen’s desk diary, and she spotted it straight away. Ludvig Sandersen had an appointment at two o’clock last Friday, and the next slot was crossed through. A long session, in other words. If it took place at all. We don’t know that it did, of course. But I presume his secretary can tell us that.”
Håkon had eaten most of the chocolate at breakneck speed, and Hanne had only managed to get a couple of pieces. Now she was shaping the gold foil into the form of a little bird while she awaited his response.
Suddenly they both started talking simultaneously, breaking off with a chuckle.
“After you,” said Håkon.
“There’s another thing.” Her voice now was lower still, even though the canteen was almost deserted and their nearest neighbour several tables away. “I’m not going to commit any of this to paper. I’m not going to mention it to anyone at all. Only to you.”
She made a gesture of putting her fingers in her ears, then leant towards him over the table.
“I had a guy in for questioning a short while ago about a rape. We brought him in purely on spec, because he’s got a record that costs him a visit here whenever we have an unsolved sex case. We quickly eliminated him from the enquiry, but he was extremely nervous about something. I didn’t pay much attention to it then—they’re always up to one thing or another. But this bloke was really frightened. Before he’d actually sussed out what we wanted him for, he let out a few thinly veiled hints about a deal. He said he’d heard on the grapevine that there was a lawyer behind some of the large-scale drug dealing, though I can’t remember his exact words anymore. You know what these people are like, they’re ready to tell lies even faster than they commit felonies, and they’ll try anything to get themselves out of a tight spot. So I didn’t attach much importance to it at the time.”
Hanne was really whispering now. Håkon had to lean across the table and put his head on one side to catch what she was saying. To anyone passing by they could have been lovers exchanging intimacies.
“I woke up in the night because I couldn’t get him out of my mind,” she said. “The first thing I did this morning was to dig out the old rape case file and check his name. Guess who his lawyer was.”
“Olsen.”
“Precisely.”
They both sat staring out over the hazy vista of the city. Håkon Sand took some deep breaths and sucked in air reflectively between his front teeth. Though realising it sounded unpleasant, he soon stopped.
“What have we actually got?” he said, and took out a blank sheet of A4 paper. He numbered down the page.
“We have a dead drug addict. The self-confessed murderer under arrest refuses to give motive.”
His pen scratched away on the paper, piercing the surface in his eagerness.
“It was such a thorough job that he wouldn’t have survived even if he’d had nine lives. Then we have a dead lawyer, killed in a rather more sophisticated manner. We know that the two murdered men were acquainted. They had an appointment for a meeting on the very day that one of them bought it. What else do we have?”
He went on without waiting for an answer. “Some vague and highly unreliable rumours about an unknown lawyer’s drug dealing. The rumour-monger’s lawyer was our dear departed Olsen.”
Hanne Wilhelmsen noticed that Håkon’s chin was twitching at the side of his mouth, like a muscle spasm.
“I think you’re onto something, Hanne. I think maybe we’re onto something big. But what’s the next step?”
For the first time in the conversation Hanne leant back in her chair. She drummed her fingers on the table.
“We keep everything under wraps,” she declared. “This is the faintest scent I’ve ever had to base a serious investigation on. I’ll keep you posted. Okay?”
The hit squad were the black sheep and also the great pride of the force. Usually in jeans, and in many cases long-haired or unkempt, these officers never felt bound by any dress code once they joined the squad. Nor did they need to. But at times they flouted other more sacrosanct rules and regulations, and were not infrequently carpeted by the head of personnel or even by the commissioner. They would agree to everything and promise to improve, but held up two fingers as soon as they were out of the door. Over the years some had gone too far and had been transferred to the most excruciatingly boring office duties, if only temporarily. Because actually the police loved their denim-clad brethren. The hit squad were effective, industrious, and were subjected to constant visits by colleagues in Denmark and Sweden, who came to police headquarters with only vague concepts and left prostrate with admiration.
Just the previous week, during a visit by a group from the Stockholm police, a Swedish TV crew came out with them one night. The boys took the TV people to an address they knew they could bank on, a prostitute who always had a few grams of some substance or other lying around. It was easy to break down the door, because there wasn’t much of the frame left after an earlier visit. They stormed into the darkened room with a cameraman in tow. On the floor was a middle-aged man in a bright red low-cut dress with a dog’s collar round his neck. As soon as he saw the uninvited guests he burst into paroxysms of tears. The police tried to console him and assure him that it wasn’t him they were after. But when they discovered four grams of hash and two fixes of heroin on bookshelves full of ornaments but devoid of books, they asked for the identity papers of the man on the floor anyway. Sobbing profusely, he fished out a khaki wallet. The policemen could scarcely suppress their mirth when they saw from the ID card that the man was an army officer. His despair was entirely understandable. Such circumstances, though not offences in themselves, had to be reported to higher authority on the seventh floor, the Special Branch. What happened to him then, no one in the hit squad knew; but the Swedish TV crew derived a lot of amusement from the incident, even though for the sake of decency nothing was ever broadcast.
The hit squad’s role was implicit in its name. Their job was to turn up unexpectedly and create confusion in the drugs world, to prevent and to prosecute drug trafficking, and to discourage new recruits to the business. They weren’t undercover agents in the American sense, so it wasn’t essential for them not to be recognisable as police officers. The slovenly image that the majority of them had adopted was more to do with relating to the drugs environment than with pretending to be something they weren’t. They knew about most of what went on in the Oslo underworld. But even if in that respect they were head and shoulders above other sections of the force, the problem was that all too often they couldn’t prove anything,
Hanne Wilhelmsen could hear loud conversation and boisterous laughter from the squad’s staff room well before she reached the door. She had to knock hard several times before someone finally opened up. The door was held ajar and a freckled man with greasy hair and a huge quid of chewing tobacco behind his upper lip g
ave her a crooked smile, revealing the tobacco trickling between his teeth on the left-hand side.
“Hi, Hanne, what can we do for you?”
He exuded affability, despite his surly body language and the fact that he was holding the door only just ajar.
Hanne smiled back, and nudged the door open wider. He let it go unwillingly.
Half-eaten remains of food, general detritus, and masses of paper, magazines, and soft porn lay scattered around the room. Reclining in a corner was a man with a shaven head, an inverted crucifix adorning one ear, heavy boots on his feet, and a thick Icelandic woollen sweater which looked as if it could stand up by itself. He went by the name of Billy T. He’d been at police training college with Hanne, and was regarded as one of the most effective and intelligent in the whole squad. Billy T. was a kindly soul, as gentle as a lamb, and had to live with an appetite for women which, combined with an enviable fertility, had given him no fewer than four children by an equal number of mothers. He’d never lived with any of them, but he loved his children, all boys, two of them near enough the same age. He coughed up his enforced maintenance contributions with no more than a muted curse every payday.
It was Billy T. who Hanne was in search of. She stepped over the mountains of clothes and papers in her path. He lowered the motorcycle magazine he was reading and looked up at her in mild astonishment.
“Could you spare me a minute in my office?”
An expressive gesture of her arm and head indicated what she thought of the possibility of any confidential conversation in these surroundings.
Billy T. nodded, abandoned his magazine, which was eagerly snapped up by the next reader, and followed her to the second floor.
Hanne Wilhelmsen pulled down a typewritten list from above her desk, letting a drawing pin fall to the floor. She didn’t bother to retrieve it, just placed the list in front of Billy T.
“These are all the full-time defence lawyers here in the city, plus some others who don’t specialise but take on quite a few criminal cases. There are thirty. More or less.”
Billy T. shook his bullet-shaped head and scrutinised the list with interest. He had to squint slightly, because the type was small in order to fit on one sheet.
“What do you think of them?” Hanne asked.
“Think of them? What do you mean?”
He ran his finger down the page.
“He’s all right, he’s okay, he’s a shit, she’s very okay,” he began. “Is that what you want to know?”
“Well, not exactly,” she murmured, hesitating a little.
“Which of them has the most drugs cases?” she asked after a moment or two.
Billy T. took up a pen and put a cross by six of the names. He handed the sheet back to her and she studied it. Then she put it down and gazed out of the window before she spoke again.
“Have you ever heard rumours about any of these lawyers themselves being involved in the drugs trade?”
Billy T. didn’t seem surprised at this. He nibbled his thumb.
“That’s a serious question, I take it. We hear so damned much, and only believe half of it. But what you’re asking is whether I personally have ever had my suspicions, right?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“Put it like this: we’ve had reason to keep people under observation now and again. The last couple of years there’ve been some odd fluctuations in the market. Maybe three years, in fact. Nothing concrete, nothing we can pinpoint. For example, the perennial problem of drugs creeping into the prisons. We don’t know what to do. The checks get more rigorous all the time, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. And things change on the street too. Prices fall. Which means oversupply. Pure free-market economy, that is. Yes, we hear rumours. But vague and conflicting. So if you’re asking whether I have suspicions about any of these lawyers, on the basis of what I know, my answer has to be negative.”
“But if I ask about your innermost thoughts and instincts, and you don’t have to give me any reasons, what would you say then?”
Billy T. from the hit squad rubbed his smooth head, picked up the paper, and placed a dirty index finger under one of the names. Then ran it down the page and stopped at another.
“If I knew something was going on, those two would be the first I would look into,” he said. “Maybe because there’s been talk, or maybe because I don’t like them. Take that for what it is. And don’t quote me on it, okay?”
Hanne Wilhelmsen reassured her colleague.
“You’ve never said it, and we’ve just been chatting about old times.”
Billy T. nodded and grinned, rose to his full height of over six and a half feet, and ambled off back to the staff room on the fourth floor.
FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER
Karen Borg received several telephone calls as a result of her latest and highly unwelcome commission. That morning a journalist rang. He worked for the Oslo Dagbladet, and sounded far too aggressively charming and intrusive.
She was totally unused to journalists, and reacted with uncharacteristic caution, replying by and large in monosyllables. First there was a preliminary skirmish in which he appeared to be trying to impress her with everything he already knew about the case, which did indeed seem quite a lot. Then he started asking questions.
“Has he said anything about why he killed Sandersen?”
“No.”
“Has he said anything about how they knew one another?”
“No.”
“Do the police have any theory about the case?”
“Don’t know.”
“Is it true that the Dutchman refuses to have any lawyer but you?”
“So far.”
“Did you know Hans Olsen, the murdered lawyer?”
She declined to assist him further, thanked him politely for calling, and replaced the receiver.
Hans Olsen? Why that question? She’d read the bloodcurdling details in the daily papers, but had put it to the back of her mind, since it didn’t concern her and she had no idea who the man was. It hadn’t occurred to her that the case might have anything to do with her client. Of course it didn’t mean there was any connection anyway; it might just have been a journalistic shot in the dark. She let it rest at that, though with a slight feeling of annoyance. She saw from the screen in front of her that nine people had tried to get in touch today, and from the names she could tell that she would have to spend the rest of the day on her most important client, Norwegian Oil. She pulled out two of the relevant files, bearing the bright red N.O. logo. Fetching herself a cup of coffee, she started making her calls. If she was finished in time she might manage a trip to the police station in the evening. It was Friday, and she had a bad conscience for not having visited her incarcerated client since that initial meeting. She definitely had to follow it up before the weekend.
Despite nearly a week in custody Han van der Kerch wasn’t any more talkative. He’d been provided with a urine-stained mattress and a blanket. In one corner of the bunk-like platform he’d piled up a number of cheap paperbacks. They were allowing him one shower a day, and he was beginning to get acclimatised to the warmth, stripping off as soon as he came into the cell, and usually just sitting around in his underpants. Only when he was given the occasional opportunity for exercise, or a further attempt was made at questioning him, did he bother to dress. A patrol car had been out to his room in the student residences in Kringsjå to fetch him a change of underpants, some toilet things, and, rather excessively, his small portable CD player.
He was dressed now. Karen Borg was sitting with him in an office on the second floor. They weren’t exactly having a conversation, more a monologue with intermittent mumbles from the other party.
“Peter Strup phoned me at the beginning of the week. He said he knew a friend of yours, and wanted to help you.”
No reaction, just a darker and sulkier look around his eyes.
“Do you know Strup, the lawyer? Do you know what friend he’s talking about?”
“Yes. I want you.”
“Fine.”
Her patience was nearly at an end. After a quarter of an hour of endeavouring to get something more out of him, she was on the point of giving up. Then the Dutchman unexpectedly slumped forward in his chair and in a gesture of despair sank his head in his hands, resting his elbows on his knees. He rubbed his scalp, raised his eyes, and began to talk.
“I can see you’re confused. I’m bloody confused myself. I made the biggest mistake of my life last Friday. It was a cold, premeditated, and cruel murder. I got money for it. Or rather, I was promised money for it. I haven’t seen a penny yet, and will probably have my own creditors on my back for years to come. I’ve been in this overheated cell for a week now thinking about what could have come over me.”
Suddenly he burst into tears. It was so abrupt and unforeseen that Karen Borg was taken completely by surprise. The boy—for now he looked more like a teenager—was leaning over with his head in his lap as if he were bracing himself for a crash landing in an aeroplane, and his back was heaving. After a few moments he straightened up to get more air, and she could see that his face was already blotchy. His nose was running, and, being quite unable to think of anything to say, Karen pulled out a pack of tissues from her briefcase and passed it to him. He dried his nose and eyes, but didn’t stop sobbing. Karen had no idea how to console a remorseful murderer, but nevertheless pulled her chair closer and took his hand.
They stayed sitting in that position for over ten minutes. It felt more like an hour—probably for both of them, Karen thought. At last the young man’s breathing became somewhat less ragged. She let go of his hand and soundlessly pushed back her chair, as if to erase the short period of intimacy and trust.
“Perhaps you could tell me a bit more now,” she said in a quiet voice, offering him a fresh cigarette. He took it with a trembling hand, like a bad actor. She knew it was genuine, and gave him a light.
“I don’t know what to say,” he stammered. “The fact is that I’ve killed a man. But I’ve done a lot of other things too, and I don’t want to talk myself into a life sentence. And I don’t know how to speak about one thing without revealing others.”