The Fourth Man

by K. O. Dahl

  He said: ‘Well, I never! Hello and nice to see you again! Long time no see!’

  He grabbed the hand that Narvesen automatically stretched out.

  ‘Do I know you?’ The man’s whole being radiated bewilderment. In his winter coat, with his upper body bent forward and his gloves rolled up in his left hand, he resembled an old photograph of John F. Kennedy. Small granules of snow landed on his hair.

  ‘I’m a policeman. We met after a break-in at your house some years ago. Somebody had stolen a safe.’

  The confused expression on Narvesen’s face changed to one of irritation. ‘The money which never reappeared?’

  ‘Half a million is nothing,’ Frølich said with a smile. ‘Compared with five million in cash.’

  Narvesen’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Nordea registered a withdrawal of five million kroner in small notes in your name less than a week ago.’

  ‘And what has that got to do with you?

  ‘Maybe nothing with me, but with Eco-Crime.’

  Narvesen stood facing him, thinking. The gloves he had held rolled up in one fist changed hands. Then he began to thwack them against individual snowflakes on one arm.

  ‘You’re a policeman,’ he said. ‘What was the name?’

  ‘Frølich.’

  ‘Right, now I remember you. You looked a little different then.’

  ‘I had a beard.’

  ‘Exactly, now it’s coming back to me. Well, then, you know I am a wealthy man?’

  Frølich nodded. He was puzzled. The man sees the cop who investigated a theft of half a million of his money and he says: ‘Right, now it’s coming back to me.’

  Inge Narvesen started edging away. They walked side by side along the pavement. Narvesen said: ‘If I gave you a number – say, one million eight hundred thousand – what would that mean to you?’

  ‘A really nice apartment in one of the satellite districts – where I live now, for example.’

  ‘If I said eight million kroner, what would that mean to you?’

  ‘That would be harder to have any kind of genuine relationship with.’

  Narvesen glanced at Frølich and gave a wry smile. They turned down Roald Amundsens gate towards Klingenberggata and Haakon VIIs gate. ‘I feel the same,’ Narvesen said. ‘Exactly fourteen months ago the value of a small part of my portfolio increased by 150 million kroner. Tomorrow, at this time, the same portfolio will be worth 300 million kroner more. This has nothing to do with me, but with a series of factors: current low interest rates, my own long-term investments, the breadth of my portfolio and, not least, how the general economy is performing in the market place. And it’s not the first time this has happened. On the roller coaster that is the stock market, I have experienced lots of what seemed to be endless boom times. But I’ve always come through the ensuing crises with both feet on the ground and a good base for further business. And I’ll tell you a little secret as far as that is concerned.’ Narvesen stopped. They had come to the corner of Klingenberggata and Haakon VIIs gate.

  ‘Well, tell me,’ Frølich said impatiently.

  ‘A good antidote to eternal optimism with stocks and shares is an occasional trip to the bank. Then I take out a pile of money. I stuff all the notes into a supermarket carrier bag and put it in a cupboard in the office. The last time I did this is less than a week ago. Yes, I withdrew five million in cash. It’s in my office. In a plastic bag. Whenever I make a transaction of such unreal proportions, I go to this cupboard and look into the bag and say to myself: “Inge Narvesen,” I say. “This is what it’s all about, this is real money. With the contents of this bag you can buy a reasonable home, an above-average car and a fair-sized holiday chalet. You can put the rest of the money in the bank and live on the interest.”’

  ‘You’ve got five million in a cupboard?’

  Narvesen nodded. ‘And now I have to go back to my office and earn more money. Nice to meet you, Frølich. Have a great day.’

  Frølich watched him go. Two minutes’ chat about money and ‘What’s that got to do with you?’ turned into ‘Have a great day’. Five million in a cupboard in the office? Don’t make me laugh.

  He did some mental arithmetic: five million kroner, that’s fifty thousand hundred-kroner notes. Is there enough space for them in a carrier bag – or if he had used thousand-kroner notes – five thousand notes? How many bags did he need? OK, Inge Narvesen wanted a genuine relationship with money, so why not confine the sum to a hundred thousand? Or two hundred thousand? That would be much more in accord with the logic behind the act. First of all, make a staggering profit and afterwards check how many notes make up just one hundred thousand. But – five million?

  He thought back to the time six years ago. The atmosphere in Narvesen’s house. Deadly serious. The worry in his mother’s eyes – she had been there to represent him. Yes, that was what had happened: Narvesen had been on holiday, somewhere hot – Bahamas or Pitcairn Island or something like that – and his mother had turned up after the break-in. The crime had been committed in the son’s house. Must have been night time or early morning. Narvesen’s mother had sat like a lonely little bird in the corner of the sofa imagining all sorts of bogeymen while Narvesen sent his telephone instructions from the southern seas.

  Frank Frølich thought about Ilijaz Zupac. So far he had served more than five years of the sentence for a second, more serious crime. Perhaps it was time to have a chat with Ilijaz Zupac.

  24

  It was a freezing cold morning. A narrow margin of cloud resembling red lava presaged daybreak over the mountain peaks. Frank Frølich was heading north on the E6 towards the rush-hour traffic and the sun rising in the east. He pulled out his sunglasses from the glove compartment. As his car sped over the ridge, Karihaugen and Nedre Romerike revealed themselves as a large patchwork quilt of farmland in hibernation. Three lanes, 120 kilometres an hour and only oncoming traffic. The scene seemed almost American. He pushed a Dylan CD into the player – ‘Slow Train Coming’ – and clicked forward to the title song. It was a long track and the driving guitar complemented the scenery. On top of that, there was something fateful and invigorating about the repeated refrain of a train coming. He felt he could be that train. It was moving slowly but it was making progress. When Dylan finished singing, he played the track again, until he arrived outside the high walls of Ullersmo prison.

  After passing the gate in the internal prison wall, he was met by a young man with big, blond, curly hair, who said: ‘Are you the person who wants to meet Ilijaz?’

  Frølich nodded.

  ‘I’m Freddy Ramnes, the prison doctor.’

  The man’s handshake was firm and he looked Frølich steadfastly in the eye. He said: ‘Do you know Ilijaz Zupac from before?’

  Frølich raised both eyebrows and considered the question briefly before deciding to answer honestly: ‘I arrested Zupac in autumn 1998. I questioned him at various times the same day and then gave evidence at the trial. Those are the only times I’ve seen the man.’

  Ramnes hesitated. ‘Are you here on police business?’

  ‘I’m on leave at present.’

  ‘May I ask why you’re here?’

  ‘For personal reasons.’

  They weighed each other up.

  Frølich waited for the unpleasant question: Which particular personal reasons? But it never came.

  Eventually Frank Frølich said: ‘Is there a problem? Doesn’t he want to talk to me?’

  The doctor took his time to answer. ‘This has nothing to do with me,’ he said in the end, sticking his hands in his pockets as if the words he was searching for were down there. ‘It’s more the situation. Ilijaz is sick. He needs, really needs psychiatric treatment, a facility we are unable to offer.’ He went silent, apparently still searching for words.

  ‘Yes?’ Frølich said, expecting more.

  ‘We’re dealing with a very needy person here. I thought I should prepare you for that.’ Paus
e. Ramnes finally added: ‘Hmm. Shall we go?’

  The echo of their footsteps resounded against the concrete walls. This is unusual. The doctor is accompanying me on the visit. But then he’s young, probably an idealist.

  They came to one of the more comfortable visiting rooms where inmates can meet their partners and there are condoms in the cupboard. The room was not very inviting, however. It contained one cheap sofa, one table and one armchair. Bare walls. In front of the radiator, between the wall and the armchair, a man was squatting on the floor. Frank Frølich didn’t recognize him. The previously golden skin was now grey. His hair was a greasy, tangled mess reminiscent of a crow’s nest; his back wretchedly rounded in a T-shirt full of holes. The man was squatting like a Hindu in meditation along the banks of the Ganges, hiding his head in his hands.

  Frølich and Freddy Ramnes exchanged glances.

  ‘Ilijaz,’ Freddy Ramnes said.

  No reaction.

  ‘Ilijaz!’

  The figure stirred: a hand, filthy, with narrow fingers and long nails, began to wind strands of hair.

  ‘Ilijaz, do you want a Coke?’

  The situation was ridiculous. Frølich looked across at the doctor whose expression was serious and empathetic.

  ‘Ilijaz, you have a visitor.’

  A look, hunted, like a frightened cat’s, before his head hid itself again.

  ‘Ilijaz, would you like to come and say hello to Frank?’

  The head didn’t budge.

  Frølich cleared his throat. ‘Ilijaz, do you remember me?’

  No reaction.

  ‘I arrested you that time six years ago, at the petrol station. I’m the policeman who talked to you afterwards.’

  No reaction.

  ‘You had a Norwegian girlfriend called Elisabeth. I wanted to talk to you about …’ He paused when the figure on the floor moved. The crouching body turned away completely, into the corner.

  Frølich and the doctor exchanged glances again. Frølich said: ‘Elisabeth Faremo. Jonny Faremo, Vidar Ballo, Jim Rognstad …’ He stopped. No discernible reaction. He cleared his throat and proceeded: ‘I have a photograph of Elisabeth Faremo. Would you like to see it?’

  No reaction.

  Frølich and the doctor looked at each other. The doctor had his hands in his pockets, waiting.

  ‘Perhaps this isn’t such a good idea,’ Frølich said.

  Freddy Ramnes shook his head. He took a plastic half-litre bottle of Coke out of the pocket in his roomy jacket and put it on the table. ‘Bye, Ilijaz,’ he said, moving towards the door.

  They walked back down the same corridor without speaking. ‘If I were to die while working here,’ Freddy Ramnes said in a voice quivering with anger, ‘I would like my gravestone to say I was killed by the Norwegian penal policy. Those with political responsibility have given me the happy dilemma of either securing him with straps or doping him up every evening so that he doesn’t do away with himself.’

  ‘Was he doped up now?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Does that mean he would have problems remembering names?’

  ‘No. It means he’s calm, but absolutely indifferent to what you or I might say. A lobotomy is much the same, according to those who are au fait with such things.’

  ‘What’s he suffering from?’

  Freddy Ramnes walked on a few metres. Now that he had vented his fury, he was collecting himself and trying to regain the dignity his emotions had blown to pieces a few moments ago. ‘If I were a specialist in psychiatry, I might be able to tell you. The only thing I can do is apply for a place for him in an institution and receive rejections. After all, he is in an institution, isn’t he?’ Ramnes pulled a bitter face.

  Frølich didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Ramnes continued in a gentler vein. ‘They’re just labels anyway. Psychotic personality disorder, bipolar personality disorder, schizophrenia, you name it, he might have it. Cynics might call it prison psychosis.’

  ‘As I said, I had some contact with Ilijaz six years ago and he was a very different person.’

  Ramnes breathed in. ‘The only thing I know is that the illness and the symptoms have developed while he has been serving his sentence. It had already started when I first came here. Intense fear, withdrawal, paranoia. And it’s simply getting worse.’

  ‘Does anyone visit him?’

  Ramnes stopped and gave him a sceptical look.

  ‘You seem like a decent person, Frolich. However, we’re now moving into an area where I’m bound by professional secrecy and you’ll have to direct your enquiries to others.’

  25

  This was the first time in eighteen years that Inspector Gunnarstranda had taken time off work. The evening before he had discovered that Kalfatrus wasn’t swimming straight. Afterwards he sat down with a glass of whisky in front of the goldfish bowl and watched the fringetail swim in and out of the magnifying glass that the curve of the glass created. The fish was lopsided. He fell asleep in the chair and when he awoke he simply neglected to go to bed. Just sat there watching the goldfish, illuminated by the street lamps outside the window. He could feel that something was wrong. For one tiny insane moment he saw himself walking with the fish in a plastic bag; he saw himself sitting with the red fringetail in the vet’s surgery:

  And what’s the matter with this chap?

  Well, you know, it doesn’t swim straight.

  The situation was not the most satisfying. But at the same time he couldn’t rid himself of a sense of unease. He had been sure that the tiny fringetail would outlive him. It was worrying that the contrary appeared to be the case. He attempted to work out what this worry was based on. Was it concern for the fish or concern for himself? Was his worry an expression of his fear of loneliness – a life without Kalfatrus – or was this unease in some specific way more altruistic, in that he was actually concerned about the fish’s general condition? He wondered if a fish could feel pain.

  The previous evening he had tried everything: changing the water, washing the bowl, washing the sand at the bottom, adding prescribed conditioners and food. Despite this, it swam even more askew and the characteristic gaping mouth was less in evidence.

  If it dies now, he thought, it might be from old age. Was that likely? He tried to think back. When had he bought the fish? He couldn’t remember. And he had no idea how many years a fish like this could live. The only thing he could remember was that it cost seventeen kroner. The next moment he imagined himself standing by the telephone, dialling and asking the following question: Um, I was wondering if you could tell me how long a fringetail costing about seventeen kroner could live?

  He lit up a cigarette and reflected as he blew smoke rings in the direction of the goldfish bowl. For the first time in many years he felt a diminishing commitment to work. And what displaced all that was the sight of a red and yellow fish swimming askew. Damn you, damn you, if you die now, before me!

  26

  Frank Frølich regarded himself in the mirror in front of his bed. He reconstructed the sequence of events in his head:

  I had discovered someone was in my flat. Elisabeth had let herself in before I arrived. She had taken a shower. She sat cross-legged in the living room. She was sitting in front of the hi-fi listening to music, dressed only in underwear.

  He stood up and went into the living room. Stared at the stereo. In the TV screen a reflection of himself and the furniture he had bought for the room.

  He went to the doorway and stared at his hi-fi equipment again. She was sitting with her back to me as I came in and said she had let herself in with the key from the key dish. He saw her back in front of him as she stalked over to her clothes on the chair. He remembered the brush of her lips against his. He saw the sway of her hips as she walked across the floor. The clink of the key as it dropped into the bowl in the kitchen. He went to the kitchen door. Stood staring at the bowl of keys, small coins, various steel screws, drawing pins, the odd
krone coin and other bits and bobs. No house key.

  So she hadn’t put the key back.

  Why not? But he had heard the clink of the key in the bowl. If she hadn’t put the house key back, what had she put in it instead? He took hold of the bowl with trembling hands. It was a piece of hollowed-out birch, a so-called wooden nipple with delicate carvings on, a dish he had bought at an art-and-crafts fair when he went fishing on Lake Osen in Trysil. He tipped the contents of the bowl onto the kitchen worktop: coins, some screws, a safety pin, a dud 5-amp fuse, an anti-nuclear-weapons badge, another badge against joining the EU. One of the coins rolled off onto the floor – a euro. A green marble rolled after it. He caught it. Yes, there was a key. He took the key. It’s not mine! It wasn’t a house key. And he had never seen it before. It was a long, narrow key with a strange cut, a key to a special kind of lock. What is going on here? Why had she put back a completely different kind of key? And why had she not put back his house key? Why had she lied to his face? What would this key fit?

  A key. But what was it hiding? Where is the lock?

  Frank Frølich walked stiffly back into the living room and dropped into a chair. She hadn’t put back the key. In a flash he saw bones glowing in the ashes. The key has been burned. No, stick to the facts! The house key is irrelevant. What is relevant is the key she left in the bowl.

  Once again he saw the contours of her body moving away from him – across the floor. The clink in the bowl. Everything had been a bluff, a red herring. Either the bluff was because she wanted to hang onto the house key – or perhaps it was because she wanted to put the other, strange key in his bowl. Third option: she wanted both, to deposit this key and keep his key so that she could collect it later.

  That was the answer. He was sure. She had intentionally hidden this key in his flat so that she could pick it up later.

  But she hadn’t managed to accomplish her plan. She had been killed, burned to death in the chalet where she was hiding.