by Anne Holt
On the other hand he had never set foot inside a boudoir, so what did he know?
He caught himself staring at Maria.
The settee she sat on was so deep and low that her legs, when stretched out, were almost parallel with the floor. She was clutching a cushion to her stomach, holding on to it as if for grim death. It could not possibly be to hide her paunch. Despite her age, she was slim, healthy and relatively fit. She seemed neither tear-stained nor devastated, at least not the way he would imagine his own wife to be if he had been the one to die.
“The most important thing is to pour oil on troubled waters,” he said. “It’s been an unpleasant time for all of us these past few weeks. It’s not particularly advantageous for the company, all this …”
His hand waved uncertainly in the air, as if he was bothered by an insect.
“… media interest.”
Finally Maria glanced up. They had never enjoyed a close relationship; they were far too different for that. He did not understand her. To him, BrassCure was a business idea. An exceptionally lucrative one, but he had never felt tempted to swallow a single one of the pills they sold at such an extortionate price. Iselin was the one who had belief in the product. She was the one who could mesmerize a whole room full of agents and sellers with explanations about BrassCure’s active ingredients and effects on the human body. The theories would not have taken her very far in a medical institute, but they had laid the foundations of a small fortune for her as well as several others.
It was less clear where Maria fitted in to all this.
She had always appeared loyal to Iselin, sometimes bordering on self-effacing. Whereas Iselin could fill a room with her mere presence, Maria was a wide-eyed admirer who seldom spoke a word in her spouse’s company. He had warned her before she had brought her lover into the firm. And handing over half of Maria’s shares to Iselin as a wedding present, with no conditions stipulated, had been sheer madness. Halvor Stenskar spoke up, both indirectly and eventually more bluntly and boorishly, but it had been to no avail. A matter of months after they met, the two turtledoves were registered partners. And Halvor Stenskar had to admit that it had been upon Iselin’s introduction to the company that VitaeBrass had really taken off.
Maria had seemed totally enthralled by Iselin. Endlessly.
“Media interest,” he repeated, mainly to break the painful silence.
“You’re always claiming that all PR is good PR.”
“But by that I mean relevant PR.”
He placed exaggerated emphasis on “relevant”.
“Such as articles stating that we promise more than we deliver?” she asked. “That we have no scientific proof that BrassCure has any effect whatsoever? About the Consumer Council having slaughtered our adverts time after time?”
“Whenever someone writes something along those lines, we can cite umpteen patients who claim the opposite. And the right of reply, Maria, is not to be sneezed at. The right of reply has given us a lot of free publicity over the years, both for VitaeBrass as a company and BrassCure as a product. Iselin being unmasked as …”
He was not quite sure about his choice of word. After all, this was a brand-new widow seated in front of him.
“Extremist,” she offered helpfully. “That’s what they call it. But I can’t recall you ever expressing disagreement with what Iselin stood for.”
“Socially, no! We’re all agreed that these immigrants are getting out of hand, aren’t we, and that something drastic has to be done to prevent …”
He used his fingers to comb his thick, gray hair and discreetly brushed away flakes of dandruff from his jacket shoulders before sitting down on the arm of the only chair in the room.
“Healthy skepticism about this flood of dysfunctional illiterates and prospective benefit claimants is one thing. It’s another thing entirely to preach that pure …”
“Racism,” she helped him again when he hesitated.
He blinked hurriedly, but did not answer.
“Iselin, or more correctly Tyrfing, was not racist in the tabloid sense of the word. She was more of a modern nationalist. She wanted to free her country from its multicultural yoke. Racism builds on certain people being inferior to others. Iselin’s ideas were not based on any ranking of races. She simply meant that our ethnicity, identity and culture are important, so important that we must protect them from the completely unwarranted influence that Islam has had. You said before that you agreed with all this.”
“No. What she wrote in that damned blog of hers is something very different from what she voiced in social settings. As I said, it’s some way from–”
“You’ve never expressed reservations about anything Iselin said on this subject. Neither have I, for that matter, but that’s because I quite simply wasn’t too bothered. About politics, I mean.”
“Not too bothered?”
He stared at her in disbelief.
“You picked Iselin up out of nothing,” he said, far too loudly. “You’ve financed this entire …”
He flapped his hands distractedly. Now it seemed as if he had been attacked by a whole swarm of insects.
“… blog business of hers. You’ve made this crusade possible. You’re the one who gave her half your shares, and you’re the one who–”
“You seem to have forgotten that the company doubled its turnover in ten months once Iselin joined the management team. Anyway, Iselin could have been Tyrfing without me. A blog costs two kroner and fifty øre to set up. But forget it. I can’t stand all this.”
Maria Kvam got to her feet. With more difficulty than usual, he thought, as if she was weighed down by something almost intolerable. The angry, almost aggressive expression in her eyes was gone. Maybe it was her way of grieving.
“Despite everything, this is also a gift,” Halvor Stenskar said, lifting his backside from the soft chair-arm. “As I said. With all due respect, Maria. Now that the worst has happened, with Iselin given a thrashing and deprived of every last shred of dignity as she was, despite it all this is best for …”
He hesitated, just long enough for her to give him a smile he had never seen before.
“For the company,” she declared. “It’s good for the company that the storm around Iselin is calming down. And of course that is the most important thing. The most important thing of all.”
“Your company,” he said sharply. “Very much yours. Especially now. After this, I mean …”
His hand swept over the room in an imprecise gesture, as if Iselin’s suicide lay hidden somewhere between the velvet cushions and knick-knacks.
“Mine,” she said, with a nod. “Now it’s almost all mine.”
He saw that she was crying. Absolutely silently, and almost unnoticeably, with only the tears running down her cheeks giving him to understand that it was high time he left.
Henrik Holme had been greatly in doubt about whether he should dare to visit Hanne at all. His dismissal yesterday had been just as peremptory and imperious as ever, and strictly speaking this was not a new case he had tucked under his arm.
It was not a case at all.
The papers inside the worn, blue ring binder did not contain a mystery. No unknown perpetrator lurked there, no blind alleys as in the cases they had previously investigated and in some instances solved. Quite the opposite. Henrik had spent the past night and morning skimming through most of the documents, and Jonas Abrahamsen’s conviction seemed far from unreasonable. Into the bargain, the poor man had accepted the judgment on the spot when it had been pronounced. Admittedly with one conspicuous and somewhat uncommon reservation: when the convicted prisoner had been permitted to speak, he had repeated his assertion of innocence despite accepting his severe punishment. It happened now and again that people expressed such reservations when it was a matter of a measly writ, but to agree to twelve years imprisonment without admitting guilt seemed remarkable. His lawyer had immediately intervened and advised his client to take some time for reflection.
“Obviously the correct judgment,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, slamming the ring binder closed after leafing through it in silence for less than quarter of an hour. “This Superintendent Bonsaksen has obviously just had an attack of pension blues. It’s never easy for these old guys when their time in the police force is up.”
Henrik felt a certain inclination to remind her that she was only two or three years younger than the Superintendent. He resisted the temptation.
“Bonsaksen seemed pretty convinced,” he said.
“No doubt.”
“And he is immensely experienced.”
“No doubt.”
“He said it was the only case in nearly forty years that has plagued him with doubts.”
“Then he’s an idiot. As for me, I had doubts in every other investigation. Why have you adopted that high-necked style? And do I see the suggestion of a beard, Henrik? Have you become a hipster, or what?”
Touching his neck, and hesitating slightly, he said: “Haven’t you noticed?”
“Yes, of course. Your Adam’s apple is much smaller. You can see that even through your sweater. Congratulations. Is it still sore?”
“No, just a bit tender.”
“That will pass, I’m sure. And it was about time you did something about that monstrous lump. And since the scar …”
She angled her head to squint at his neck.
“… is placed so neatly and tidily in the fold right beside your chin, I don’t understand the point of that sweater.”
Henrik did not answer. He took hold of the table edge to deter his intense compulsion to touch the side of his nose.
“It’s twelve o’clock,” Hanne said. “Time for lunch. If you’re not hungry, you can go.”
Henrik still sat in total silence. His gaze was fixed on the ring binder between them, and he still clutched the edge of the table. But his left leg, which until a few seconds ago had been vibrating so violently that his heel had beat a muffled tattoo on the parquet floor, stiffened.
“Henrik?”
There was something he had spotted last night. Something he had not quite caught, perhaps because it was already past two o’clock and the collection of documents was so extensive. So convincing. So full of damning evidence.
“There’s something about this case,” he said suddenly in a loud voice. “Something that doesn’t quite add up.”
“What’s that?”
Hanne’s tone was a touch more forceful than usual, as always happened when she was impatient. Henrik raised his eyes and peered out the picture windows into the bleak day outside, where the streetscape was distorted by raindrops clinging to the windowpane, and the light from a standard lamp adjacent to the settee was reflected in the dark glass.
This was exactly what he required.
He remembered one peculiarity. A detail. Of course, it did not have to mean anything.
But it could, in fact, be significant.
“Nothing,” he said with a defensive smile after pondering for a fraction of a second. He wedged the ring binder under his arm and departed.
When anyone occasionally asked him how he was, he always gave the same answer: “Can’t complain.”
Jonas Abrahamsen could not complain.
He had lost his only child because he had not taken good enough care of her.
Their marriage was already on the rocks when Anna died two years later, and he had served eight years in prison for something he had not done. His job in Statoil went up in smoke when sentence was passed. Since Anna had sole ownership and her application for a legal separation had been approved, he had lost the house and most other things with it.
He no longer had any friends.
It was true that a surprising number had been supportive during the trial, but the majority melted away when he was found guilty. A cousin, a colleague and a couple of childhood pals had visited him in prison during the first year. All except his cousin had abandoned him after a while. He hardly encouraged them to come back, sitting there in clothes that grew increasingly baggy, and eventually giving up all efforts at personal hygiene.
But he could not complain.
He was the one who should have taken care of Dina. He was the one who had allowed himself to be distracted by the junk mail in the mailbox, and it was his fault that Dina was gone and his whole life had been shattered.
He did not complain.
It was chilly in the spartanly furnished living room. Jonas tossed a couple of logs into the cast iron stove in the corner before it crossed his mind that he had not eaten since breakfast. It was years since his body had stopped telling him it was hungry. It had stopped telling him most things. The only thing he could not do without was coffee: it was rare for more than half an hour to elapse between each cup. All through the day and the evening too. Sometimes he woke about three o’clock at night and had to brew himself a cup or two. If he was lucky, he could have a nap afterward for an hour or so.
As a rule he was not lucky.
But he was never tired either.
That was just as well, given that he was a long distance driver. Normally only to Sweden, but now and again he had also driven to Germany. It was his cousin who had found him the job, six months after he had been released from prison. Guttorm had even paid for his HGV license. As a loan, Jonas had insisted, and it was now repaid in full.
He earned reasonable wages and his needs were few.
The house he rented in Maridalen was tiny. The total floor area was barely forty square meters, and the basement was so damp that it could not be used for anything. He had insulated the door with polystyrene on the inside and sealed it off. The ceiling of the attic was so low that he had decided to close it off as well, and the narrow staircase was nailed up to save heat. The ground floor included an old dining room he had transformed by simple means into a kind of bathroom, a bedroom measuring almost ten square meters that used up an unnecessary amount of space, and an open-plan kitchen-cum-living room. It was a furnished let, and the majority of the furnishings harked back to the fifties. The most flamboyant exception was a colossal TV screen for which he had needed to shut off one window to make sufficient space. The house in the woods was not connected to broadband, but he had splashed out on a subscription for RiksTV. At any rate, that gave him six channels through a roof antenna.
Jonas Abrahamsen watched a lot of TV.
Drank coffee and watched TV. Used the Internet for one hour each day, but never more than that. He had to connect via 3G, and that was expensive.
Most of all he thought about Dina. She would have just turned seventeen now. In his mind’s eye, he pictured what she would have looked like, and wondered whether her hair – that beautiful fair hair shot through with electricity from her winter clothes – would still have been so blond. At nights he dreamed of her, and he found himself increasingly often talking out loud to her during the day. She would have been almost grown up and graduating from high school next year. Of course it was impossible to say what a youngster who had not even reached the age of three would have chosen to study, but Jonas had decided on agricultural economics. She would have attended agricultural college and maybe even married a farmer.
Dina was so fond of flowers.
Sometimes, but increasingly infrequently, he also thought about when Anna died. On his arrest, the shock had been so great that he had been unable to speak for two days. Quite literally: his vocal cords went on strike. Even when the investigator who called himself Bonsaksen had explained to him in a fairly friendly tone how difficult he was making things for himself by not answering any questions, it was barely possible for him to open his mouth. His jaws were locked, his hands and feet numb, and he had not slept for more than forty-eight hours. In the end he received medication and was able to cope, but by then it was too late.
Apparently those two days of silence had cost him eight years in prison.
It seemed as if they had made up their minds. Bonsa
ksen had made good use of the time while Jonas was curled up in a fetal position in a bare cell at Police Headquarters, Grønlandsleiret 44. He had realized that only half an hour into his interview, when one compromising snippet of information after another was presented to him.
Nothing he said could change anything.
Anyway, the first words he had uttered were a lie.
He was certain of being convicted, and so he gave up. This had brought him a peculiar sense of peace. He would never admit anything he had not done, but denying his guilt was about the only thing he had the stamina to do. Days and weeks on remand eventually felt quite comfortable: predictable and completely lacking in responsibility for anything whatsoever. He could dream about Dina every night and talk to her under his breath during the day, at that time still with a slightly affected, childish voice that Dina’s grandmother had considered detrimental to the little girl’s speech development.
Nowadays he spoke to her as an adult.
He could have had a grown-up daughter, and the sorrow and sense of loss over her death had never been assuaged. A psychiatrist they had fobbed off on him at the approach of his release date was of the opinion that that his grief reaction was pathological. Not that the doctor had said so directly to him. Far from it. On the contrary – the guy had mostly fixed him with a resolute stare, holding a pen in his hand that he never used on the blank sheet of paper in front of him. A couple of years later, however, and most definitely without him having requested it, Jonas had received a copy of the entire file in the post. It stated in black and white that Jonas was not really healthy, that he was tormented by “uncontrolled, intrusive memories about the deceased even almost ten years after the accident”. It said that he displayed “a conspicuous lack of interest in anything other than his sorrow”, and a whole pile of other guff that Jonas had put straight on the fire.