by Anne Holt
His voice was flat and expressionless.
“This is one hell of a mess, Peter, a real bugger of a mess.”
“I agree.”
Neither said anything more, and the crackling on the line became intrusive.
Peter Strup wondered if the connection had been broken. “Hello, are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. Quite frankly, I don’t know what’s best—for him to stay there or be released. We’ll have to see. The result of the appeal won’t come much before the end of the day. Or maybe tomorrow. Those chaps aren’t renowned for working overtime.”
Peter Strup bit his lip. He shifted the telephone to his other hand, turned round, and stood with his back to the window.
“Is there any chance at all of stopping this avalanche? In a reasonably respectable way, I mean.”
“Who knows? For the moment I’m preparing myself for anything. If it explodes, it’ll be the biggest bang since the War. I hope I can avoid being nearby when it happens. Right now I sincerely wish you’d kept me out of it.”
“I couldn’t, Christian. The fact that Lavik chose you was a fantastic stroke of luck in the midst of all this misfortune. Someone I could rely on. Absolutely rely on.”
It was not meant as a threat in any way. Nevertheless Christian Bloch-Hansen’s voice sounded sharper.
“Let’s get one thing crystal-clear between us,” he said firmly. “My good nature isn’t inexhaustible. There has to be a limit. I thought I made that clear to you on Sunday. Don’t forget it.”
“I’m hardly likely to,” Peter Strup replied stonily, ending the conversation.
He stayed where he was and leant back against the cold glass of the window. This wasn’t just a sticky mess, it was a bloody swamp. He made the other call, which was over in two or three minutes. Then he went to get himself some breakfast. With no appetite whatsoever.
Karen Borg was sitting at a pine table by a lattice window with red-striped curtains, eating with a very hearty appetite. The third slice of bread was already on its way down, and her boxer dog lay with its head on its paws looking up at its owner with a melancholy pleading expression.
“Stop begging,” she admonished it, turning her attention again to the novel on the table in front of her. The unobtrusive tones of the morning radio programme provided background entertainment from an old-fashioned portable radio on a shelf above the kitchen bench.
The cottage was on a rocky mound, with a view she had imagined as a child stretching all the way to Denmark. When she was eight years old she had conjured up a picture of the flat land down there in the south, and she could actually see it, with its beech trees and gentle people. The image refused to budge, despite her elder brother’s teasing and her father’s more scientific attempts to persuade her that it was all in her own mind. By the age of twelve it had begun to fade, and the summer before she started at secondary school the whole of Denmark sank into the sea. It had been one of the most painful experiences of growing up, the realisation that things weren’t the way she’d always visualised them.
She’d had no particular trouble getting the place up to a comfortable temperature. It was well insulated against the winter cold and connected to the electricity supply; and there was still heat left from Sunday when the entire cottage had been nicely warmed through. She hadn’t dared switch on the water pump, because she wasn’t sure whether the pipes had frozen. But it didn’t matter, since the well was only a few steps from the door.
After two days she was more relaxed than she had been for many weeks. Her mobile phone was on, of course, to make her feel more secure, but it was only the office and Nils who had her number. He had left her in peace. These last weeks had been a strain for both of them. She winced at the thought of his injured enquiring look, his helpless attempts to understand her. Rejection had become a habit. They talked politely enough about their jobs, about the news and all the necessary, everyday things. But with no intimacy, no real communication. Perhaps he even felt relief when she decided to go away, though he’d tried to protest, with tears in his eyes and forlorn appeals. In any event, there had been no word from him since she’d made the obligatory call to assure him of her safe arrival. However glad she was that he had acceded to her wish to be left in peace, it hurt her a little to think he was actually managing it.
She shrugged and slopped some tea into her saucer. The dog raised its head at the abrupt movement, and she threw it a piece of cheese that it caught in midair.
“You don’t need a second invitation!” she said, shooing the dog away but failing to persuade it to give up hope of catching another piece in its slavering jaws.
Suddenly she sprang to her feet and turned up the volume control on the radio. It must be working loose, she thought, judging from the crackling noise as she turned the knob.
Lavik in custody! God, what a triumph for Håkon. Another fifty-two-year-old man had been released, but both rulings were being challenged. That must be Roger. Why had they released one and held the other? She had been so certain that they would either both be put inside or both be freed.
There was little further information given.
Only gradually did her conscience begin to prick. She had promised Håkon that before going away anywhere she would phone him. She hadn’t. Couldn’t face it. Maybe she would phone him this evening. Maybe.
The meal was eaten, and the dog given a couple more scraps. She would wash the dishes before walking the kilometre or so to the shop for the newspapers. She wanted to keep up with what was going on.
“Where the bloody hell is the woman?!”
He threw the receiver down on the desk. It cracked.
“Oh, damn,” he said, staring at it foolishly and a little apprehensively. He put it to his ear to test it: yes, he could still hear the dialling tone. A rubber band would have to do as a temporary repair.
“I don’t get it,” he said, calming down. “At the office they say she won’t be available for a while. At home there’s no reply.”
And I’m definitely not ringing Nils, he thought to himself. Where could Karen be?
“We have to find her,” declared Hanne rather unnecessarily. “We need a new statement urgently. It would have been best to get it done today. If we’re lucky, the result of the appeal won’t be announced till tomorrow, and we could let them have a new statement then, couldn’t we?”
“I suppose so,” Håkon muttered.
He didn’t know what to think. Karen had promised to let him know when she was going to her cottage. With commendable self-restraint he had kept to his side of the bargain. Not phoned, not called on her. It was unusual for her not to reciprocate. If she really had gone away, that is. There were numerous possibilities. For all he knew, she might be having a discreet meeting with a client. Nothing to worry about. However, he’d had an uneasy gnawing suspicion since Sunday. The comforting feeling of at least being in the same city as Karen had vanished completely.
“She’s got a mobile with an ex-directory number. Use all the police pressure you can bring to bear and get hold of it. Telecom, her office, anywhere. Just get me the number. It shouldn’t be all that difficult.”
“And I’ll continue the search for the bootless man, however hopeless it seems,” said Hanne, and went back to her own office.
The silver-haired man was afraid. Fear was an unfamiliar enemy for him, and he resisted it stubbornly. Even though he had scoured all the newspapers, it was impossible to get any real idea of what the police actually knew. The article in the Dagbladet on Sunday had been very alarming. But it couldn’t be right. Jørgen Lavik had protested his innocence—that much was clear at least. Ergo, he couldn’t have squealed. No one else knew his identity. So there couldn’t, there just couldn’t be any danger ahead.
Yet his consuming fear was not so easily assuaged; its bloodied talons had a tight grip around his heart, and the pain was intense. His breathing was reduced momentarily to a series of short gasps, and he struggled to regain control. Grop
ing feverishly for the bottle of pills in his inside pocket, he fumbled with the cap and shook out the contents to put one under his tongue. The relief was immediate. His breathing became more regular again, and he managed to suppress his panic.
“Good Lord, whatever’s the matter?”
His neatly attired secretary stood horrified in the doorway before rushing over to him.
“Are you all right? You look ghastly.”
Her concern seemed genuine, which it was. She idolised her boss, and she also had an innate horror of grey, clammy skin ever since her husband had died in bed beside her five years ago.
“I’m better now,” he assured her, brushing her hand away from his brow. “Truly. Much better.”
She bustled out for a glass of water, and by the time she came back some of the natural colour had returned to his face. He drank it eagerly and with a tremulous smile asked for more. She rushed off to refill the glass, which he downed with equal alacrity.
After further affirmation that all was now well, his secretary withdrew to her adjoining room. Obviously reluctant, and with a worried frown, she left the door ajar, as if assuming he would at least make some kind of noise before expiring. He stood up with difficulty and closed it behind her.
He had to pull himself together. Perhaps he should ask for a couple of days off. But the vital thing was to maintain a completely detached attitude to events. They couldn’t arrest him. It was essential not to allow his mask to slip. For as long as was humanly possible. He must, he really must find out what the police knew.
“How much money is there actually in drugs?”
The question was surprising coming as it did from an investigator who had been working on a drugs case for weeks. But Hanne Wilhelmsen had never been shy of asking obvious questions, and just recently she’d begun to wonder. When eminently respectable men with what she regarded as generous incomes were willing to risk everything for the sake of some extra dough, the sums involved had to be pretty substantial.
Billy T. wasn’t in the least taken aback. Drugs were a vague and imprecise concept for most people, even within the police force. For him, though, it was straightforward enough: money, misery, and death.
“This autumn the various drugs squads in the Scandinavian countries have seized eleven kilos of heroin in the course of six weeks,” he replied. “We arrested thirty couriers in Scandinavia. All the result of Norwegian narcotics intelligence.”
He sounded proud, and had good reason to be.
“One gram provides at least thirty-five individual fixes. One fix costs two hundred and fifty kroner on the street. So you can calculate what sort of money we’re talking about.”
She scribbled the figures down on a napkin, tearing it in the process.
“About eight thousand seven hundred kroner a gram! That’s . . .”
With her eyes closed and her lips in silent motion she gave up on the napkin and worked it out in her head.
“Eight point seven million kroner a kilo,” she said, opening her eyes. “Nearly a hundred million for eleven kilos. Eleven kilos! That’s not much more than a washing machine load! But can there be a market for such vast quantities?”
“If there wasn’t a market for it, it wouldn’t have been brought in,” said Billy T. dryly. “And it’s so damned easy to smuggle it in. Our borders are so vulnerable, with any number of approaches by sea, so many flights, not to speak of the amount of road traffic thundering through the frontier posts. It’s virtually impossible to keep up any effective control procedures. But fortunately it’s the distribution that’s more problematical for them. They have to operate in an environment that’s rotten to the core—which is what plays into our hands. In drugs investigations we’re heavily dependent on informers. And thank God there’s plenty of them.”
“But where does it all come from?”
“Heroin? Mainly from Asia. Pakistan, for instance. Sixty, maybe seventy percent, of Norwegian heroin emanates from there. As a rule it’ll have been on a tour of Africa before it finally reaches Europe.”
“Africa? That’s a roundabout route!”
“Well, geographically, perhaps, but there are plenty of willing runners. Pure exploitation of poverty-stricken Africans who have nothing to lose. In The Gambia they even teach them how to do it! ‘Gambian Swallow School.’ Those boys can swallow huge quantities of the stuff. First they make little balls of about ten grams each, wrap them in clingfilm, and warm them up to seal them. Then they stuff a condom full of them, grease it with something or other, and swallow the whole lot. It’s quite phenomenal what they can get down. And after anything from one to three days it plops out at the other end; they dig it out of the crap, and there you are: riches galore!”
Billy T. spoke with a mixture of passion and disgust. He’d almost finished eating, a great pile of thick slices of dark-brown bread. The only items he’d treated himself to from the canteen counter were two half-litres of milk and a cup of coffee. It was all going down in record time.
“As Galen said: ‘Slow eating is sensible eating.’ ”
Billy T. stopped chewing for a moment and looked at her in amazement.
“The Koran,” said Hanne.
“Huh, the Koran . . .”
He went on chewing obstinately at the same speed.
Hanne hadn’t had time to have breakfast that morning, nor to make herself a packed lunch. A dry open sandwich of peeled prawns on white bread lay unfinished on the plate in front of her. “Not exactly suffering from overload,” Billy T. had remarked with a nod at the sparse topping. The mayonnaise was stale. But the worst of her hunger was appeased. The rest could wait.
“Cocaine, on the other hand, usually comes from South America. There are entire regimes over there thriving on the fact that our society creates a need for drugs in so many people. The worldwide drugs trade is a multi-billion-dollar one. Even in this country the turnover must run into several billion kroner a year. We think. With seven thousand addicts feeding a habit that costs up to two thousand kroner a day, it amounts to quite a hefty sum. Of course we don’t know exactly how much. But big money? You bet it is. If it weren’t illegal, I’d have started up myself. No hesitation!”
She didn’t doubt it; she was well aware of Billy’s burdensome maintenance contributions. But a man of his appearance would be a rather obvious target at border crossings. He would certainly be the first one she would have stopped.
The canteen was beginning to fill up. It was getting on towards the lunch hour. Since a number of people were showing signs of heading in their direction, Hanne decided it was time to get back to work. Before she went, Billy T. solemnly promised to search for the missing boot.
“We’re all keeping our eyes peeled,” he grinned. “I’ve distributed a picture of the item in question to all units. The big boot hunt is on!”
He gave her an even broader grin and a Scout salute with two fingers up to his bald pate.
Hanne smiled in return. There wasn’t really much of a policeman about the guy.
The room was guaranteed bug-free. Needless to say. It was right at the end of a corridor deep inside no. 16 Platou Gata on the second floor. The building looked thoroughly uninteresting and anonymous on the outside, an impression reinforced in the minds of the few who were granted access. It had been the headquarters of the Intelligence Services since 1965. It was small and cramped, but served its purpose. Discreetly enough.
The office itself wasn’t very big either. It was bare, apart from a square laminated table in the centre with four tubular steel chairs along each side. There was also a telephone on the floor in one corner. The walls were unadorned and dirty yellow, adding quite an echo to the voices of the three men around the table.
“Is there even the remotest possibility of you two taking over the case?”
The man asking the question, blond and in his forties, was an employee of the Service. So was the dark-haired man in sweater and jeans. The third, older than the other two and wearing a grey flannel suit
, was attached to the Police Special Branch. He was sitting with his elbows on the table, tapping his fingertips rhythmically together.
“Too late,” he stated tersely. “We could perhaps have done it a month ago, before it took on such wide ramifications. Now it’s definitely too late. It would arouse far too much attention.”
“Is there anything that can be done at all?”
“Hardly. As long as we ourselves aren’t sure of the full extent of the case, I can only recommend that you maintain contact with Peter Strup, keep an eye on our friend, and in general try to stay one step ahead of everybody else. But don’t ask me how.”
There was no more to be said. The chair legs made a screech of protest on the floor as the three men rose simultaneously. Before they headed towards the door, the visitor shook the hands of his two hosts as if they’d all been attending a funeral.
“This isn’t good. Not good at all. I pray to God that you’re wrong. Best of luck.”
Ten minutes later he was back on the inaccessible top floor of police headquarters. His boss listened to him for half an hour; then gazed at his experienced colleague for over a minute without saying a word.
“What a bloody mess,” he said. Vehemently.
The commissioner felt slightly aggrieved that the parliamentary under secretary wouldn’t succumb. On the other hand, perhaps he was actually just using the case as a pretext for contacting her. It was a flattering notion. She looked in the mirror, and turned up her mouth in an unbecoming grimace at what she saw. Disheartening. The slimmer she got, the older she looked. Over recent months she’d been getting steadily more nervous as she approached her next period, each a little less reliable than the last. They were slightly late, unpredictable, and had diminished from a four-day flood to a two-day trickle. The pains had decreased too, and she missed them. She was horrified to notice instead the onset of hot flashes. She saw in the mirror a woman whom nature was mercilessly consigning to the status of grandmother. With a daughter of twenty-three it was far from merely theoretical. She gave an involuntary shiver at the thought. Well, she would just have to keep trying.