In Dust and Ashes

by Anne Holt

  “That’s a very big question.”

  “Yes, and I’d like an answer. At least the beginnings of one.”

  “Suicide is probably best explained as …”

  He mulled it over, as if trying to recollect something he had once read.

  “… an unfortunate interaction between external and internal factors,” he concluded. “Where the internal factors can be anything from serious mental illness at one extreme …”

  His left hand drew a line at the far side of the table.

  “… all the way to low self-esteem at the other.”

  His right hand indicated another line on the opposite side.

  “And fear of loss of reputation,” he continued. “As we’ve also seen before, unfortunately. After the type of media pressure that poor Iselin Havørn was subjected to in the last few weeks of her life, I mean. In 2009, for instance, there was an increase in the number of men who took their own lives. Could that have had something to do with the financial crisis? No one knows, as far as I understand. But you can speculate, of course. The risk for suicide is higher among people who are mentally ill, but you defi-nitely don’t need to be ill to take your own life.”

  Hanne nodded with her mouth full of food.

  “I was right,” she said with satisfaction. “You do know everything.”

  Henrik planked his elbows on the table and leaned closer to her, more enthusiastic now.

  “Physical illness is also a risk factor,” he added. “Terrible, chronic pain. Degenerative illness when you slowly shrink to nothing, though your mind remains clear. Was Iselin Havørn unwell?”

  “No idea.”

  “How did she take her life, do we know that?”

  “Not us,” Hanne answered. “But you’re going to find out.”

  “How?”

  She took another bite of her sandwich and munched steadily, glancing at him over the edge of her glasses and smiling.

  “No,” he said with a note of determination.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t go and take a look at a case that’s got nothing to do with me.”

  Swallowing, Hanne gazed at him for a few seconds before shaking her head gently.

  “You can ask,” she said. “There isn’t a single rule on earth to prevent you from going to the office of the investigator responsible and asking nicely. It’s a suicide case, Henrik. An open-and-shut case, as you said yourself. It’s probably sitting tidily in a folder waiting for the final papers from the pathologist prior to being sent to the archives. Ask. You can surely go and ask.”

  She turned her gaze to the hallway, and he obediently got to his feet.

  “Why are you so interested in this case in particular? The woman was awful, and she chose to take her own life!”

  He threw his arms wide. Hanne pushed her plate away.

  “Do you know anything about sea eagles, Henrik?”

  He stared at her in confusion without giving an answer.

  “Come on,” she insisted. “What do you know about sea eagles?”

  He took a deep breath.

  “The largest bird of prey in Northern Europe,” he said quickly. “The fourth largest in the world. It belongs to the hawk family and was almost eradicated in Norway in the sixties. It became a protected species, and now it is found along extensive areas of the coast, even though there are still few of them. Most commonly in Northern Norway.”

  He gulped. Hanne noted that his Adam’s apple had really become much smaller.

  “Full stop,” Henrik said. “That’s all I know about sea eagles.”

  “A walking encyclopedia,” Hanne said brightly. “Have you ever seen a sea eagle?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a magnificent sight. The females – they’re the ones that become the largest – can sometimes have a wingspan of more than two and a half meters. Fantastic fliers. They can live to be as old as Methuselah. In truth, a glorious bird altogether.”

  Henrik tidied his uniform tie and headed for the hallway.

  “What does that suggest about someone who chooses such a name?” she asked loudly.

  Henrik wheeled around to face her. Now his irritation was obvious.

  “Give over,” he said.

  “Iselin Havørn was strong. Her self-image was of enormous proportions. She was a holy warrior, Henrik, a soldier behind a keyboard fighting for her native country. That was how she saw herself. Being exposed as Tyrfing was probably inconvenient for her, and certainly terribly embarrassing. But it was not earth shattering. She was right, Henrik. She and everyone like her believe they’re right. They don’t doubt any of it. Iselin Havørn was an exceptionally intelligent and far better educated version of Fjordman, and folk like that have no shame. To her, there was no loss of standing involved in being unmasked. It was just damned unpleasant. No one commits suicide because their life is unpleasant for a short time.”

  She could see that he was turning this over in his mind, taking his time to consider it.

  “That,” he said in the end, “that is what you would have called…”

  With a heavy sigh, he approached her and leaned on the table with both palms before starting over again.

  “In the first place, it’s not your case. Secondly, you know nothing about Iselin Havørn apart from what has been printed in the newspapers. She might have been ill, had a broken heart, lost someone, been far more …”

  Hesitating, he straightened his spine and put his hands on his hips.

  “You’re the one who always tells me that we mustn’t form hypotheses. That instead we should examine the facts and build a case stone by stone. That we should never ask ‘what if?’ Questioning a self-evident suicide on the basis of having chosen a curious surname and a somewhat fanatical attitude to immigration policy is …”

  He paused once again.

  “Far-fetched, is what you’d have called it, if I’d been the one coming out with such crazy ideas. Far-fetched!”

  He spat out the words before turning on his heel and marching to the hallway. Hanne’s eyes followed him. She liked him well enough: more and more with the passage of time. He was a wonderful policeman.

  He could become even better than her if he continued in this fashion.

  “Find out how she’s meant to have taken her own life,” she shouted at his retreating back. “As soon as you can, please!”

  She could have sworn that she heard him mutter an “OK”.

  Christel Bengtson could not really remember how long she had felt like this.

  She could not pin down a starting point. This feeling of being watched had been present all her life, she now and again thought, but at the same time she knew that could not be correct. Presumably it had started when she was older and able to move independently out into the world: at primary school, perhaps, or in the second year, when she began to walk the short distance to and from school by herself. She had once told her father about her feeling of unease. About how she sometimes suddenly felt the urge to turn around because she was convinced that someone was following her, even though she did not dare to do so. He had taken her on his knee, so she could not possibly have been more than thirteen or fourteen then, and smoothed her hair. Comforted her and told her that it was far from unusual to feel like that. Not for anyone, and especially not for a woman, as she was growing up to be. It was quite a sensible anxiety, he had declared. Women should always be on the alert. Most people were good, but unfortunately not everyone could be relied upon. She was old enough to hear about that sort of thing now, he felt. The world was not a safe place, and life provided no guarantees, but if she were self-reliant, made good choices and was cautious, there was nothing out there to be scared of.

  Although the conversation actually frightened her a little, it helped too. At junior high school, everything had improved. Sometimes she might turn around all of a sudden without catching sight of anything suspicious whatsoever. Neither in the city nor en route to school, or in the evenings on her way to and
from visiting her friends. She had almost forgotten what it had been like when the feeling returned toward the end of her tenth year at school.

  Over the years, she had grown accustomed to it.

  Nothing ever happened, and maybe her father was right. Feeling under observation could be smart, as it made her attentive and helped her to make the right decisions. Now and again she had to walk on her own after dark, but in the main she was careful to have company. A girlfriend or boyfriend, or her father, who always gave her a lift anywhere she wanted if she asked. As long as he was able. He worked in a bank, and even though he worked a lot and sometimes had to take whatever overtime he could get, ever since the divorce he had put Christel at the top of his list of priorities.

  That list actually contained only her.

  Christel, and later Hedda was added.

  When Christel fell pregnant following a two-year relationship with a classmate, her father was the person she had tearfully approached. The prospective parents had ended their romance a few weeks before the eighteen-year-old stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom with a pregnancy test, convinced that the world would collapse around her ears. It didn’t. Quite the opposite – Bengt Bengtson, after a pause for thought so brief that she had barely noticed it, declared that every child deserved to be welcomed with delight. Even this one. He was approaching the age of sixty-two and would soon be able to take early retirement. It would mean slightly less in his pay packet, but that too was something he could afford. The house in Nordberg that he had always jokingly called his piggy bank could be sold for at least fifteen million kroner. The property needed renovation, but the plot of land was unusually extensive. That same afternoon he had sat down at the computer and found an apartment of one hundred and fifty square meters in St. Hanshaugen with a price tag of eight million.

  Six weeks later, Bengt Bengtson and his pregnant daughter moved in to Geitmyrsveien in the middle of Oslo. Christel had long dreamed of moving into the city center, and her father’s enthusiasm about their new situation soon infected her too. Single-handedly, he redecorated the smallest of the bedrooms in five shades of pink, as soon as Christel had been given confirmation of the baby’s gender. When Hedda arrived in the world, it was Bengt Bengtson who had sat in the corridor at Ullevål Hospital for nearly thirty hours without a wink of sleep. He was the one who got to hold the infant when she was only ten minutes old, and who was totally overwhelmed by the miracle that life had revealed to him. For the past couple of years he had grown increasingly melancholy, almost depressed, at the thought that Christel was making her way out into her life and he was going to be left entirely alone.

  Hedda was Bengt’s grandchild, and he loved her like a daughter.

  The little family in Geitmyrsveien was doing well.

  Christel’s father did not poke his nose into her life, apart from being there for her, and being the Dad for Hedda that her biological father was not much interested in being. Martin might have been the best-looking boy in the school, and pretty good company into the bargain, but becoming a father at a young age formed no part of the plans both he and his parents had made for him. When Hedda was born, Martin was in the USA, where he had been awarded a football scholarship at a reputable university. Every month the minimum contribution was promptly paid into Christel’s bank account, but Martin had not once laid eyes on his own daughter.

  It did not matter.

  Christel was already an established blogger when Hedda came into the world, and in recent years she had earned around one and a half million kroner a year through her activities as a writer. When interest in her blog among the youngest readers waned rapidly throughout 2015 and the more instant forms of social media took over, Christel had already succeeded in attracting women of twenty-five and over. The business was still a roaring success. Her father took care of the accounts and managed her money, without deducting as much as a single krone in payment. As for himself, he got by exceptionally well on his pension, and if he ever needed any extra, he had a substantial sum of money invested in an equity fund following the sale of his childhood home in Nordberg.

  Christel was happy with her lot.

  Now she was at home on her own with Hedda, for once. Her father had allowed himself to be persuaded into going to the cinema with an old colleague who had recently become a widower. Usually Bengt Bengtson turned down the dwindling invitations he received for social occasions. This time too, but Christel had almost forced him out of the house.

  He should have arrived home a quarter of an hour ago, she thought. Ever since her parents had divorced and her mother had travelled back to New Zealand, she had depended on knowing where her father was at all times. The movie finished just before half past nine. She had just checked that on the Internet. It took no more than twenty minutes to walk home from Klingenberg, unless he had gone for a coffee afterward. That would be unlike him. He had difficulty sleeping if he took any caffeine after eight o’clock. He seldom drank alcohol: that was something he had given up when Christel was pregnant and he wanted to be able to pick her up and take her home at any time of the night or day.

  She could phone him.

  It was silly to make a fuss if he was actually having a good time.

  She would call him in half an hour.

  Christel muted the volume on the TV and crossed from the settee to one of the large picture windows overlooking the street. She had closed the curtains earlier in the evening. Using the back of her hand, she pushed one of the curtains aside ever so slightly and peered outside.

  The street was almost deserted.

  A man in a hooded top under a quilted jacket was out walking one of the dogs Christel could not abide. A pit bull, she decided it was, even though that type of dog was forbidden in Norway. Several weeks ago the guy had moved in with his mother on the ground floor, and Christel had phoned the police. They arrived at the pale-gray apartment block at St. Hanshaugen surprisingly quickly, took a closer look at the dog and then attempted to reassure Christel that it was in fact a Staffordshire bull terrier.

  Which was legal.

  Christel could not see the difference, and did not believe it.

  The thought of Hedda living on the same stairway as a pit bull was the only thing that had ever made her want to move from the attractive, practical and now completely renovated apartment she shared with her father.

  The young man and his dog disappeared into the park.

  A delivery van, driving from the east, drew up at the curb. It was light-colored, probably white, with no company logo emblazoned on the side. Christel could see the driver fiddling with something, without making any move to get out of the van.

  She would ring her father soon. She really could not understand what had become of him.

  Hedda was sleeping soundly. There was no reason why Christel shouldn’t go to bed as well. Filming would start again at nine o’clock the next morning, which meant that she would have to be at the little, makeshift film studios in Sørkedalen as early as half past six. In the first scene, she had just been involved in a car accident. The makeup would take ages. Fortunately they would be finished by twelve o’clock at the latest, because the director had to make a flying visit to Sweden, and they would have a welcome day and a half off. She had arranged to meet a girlfriend who also had a child. Christel could not remember the last time she had had time to do nothing other than potter around in Løkka. She had been looking forward to it for days on end, despite the hellish weather.

  From this height Christel could not see whether a man or woman was driving the vehicle. She could only see the person’s thighs, and the hands that looked as if they were assembling something. It crossed her mind that it might be a camera, even though the light was too dim for her to say for certain.

  Once again this familiar unease at feeling she was being gawked at. She tried to shake it off; whoever was down there did not even look up. When she peered to both right and left along the street and then scrutinized the bare trees in the park,
she was keen to reassure herself that, as usual, she was merely imagining things.

  No one was looking at her.

  It turned out to be a man who was driving the van.

  He had stepped out, and now stood gazing up at her window. He had a reflex camera hanging from a strap across his right shoulder. Christel stiffened and dropped the curtain, but remained standing there. She could scarcely be visible from the street. The window was almost entirely covered now, as she peeped out with only one eye at a narrow chink.

  The man below raised his camera.

  This was not a figment of her imagination, anyway. The guy took a step back and stood calmly with his legs apart, letting the camera lens zoom in on her.

  All of a sudden she withdrew into the room, her pulse racing so fast that she felt dizzy. She ran across to the door and flicked off the light switch. All was in darkness now: it was connected to all the light sources in the room. Even the silent TV set went black. She gasped for breath and tried to compose herself.

  “Paparazzi,” she whispered into the gloom. “They’re not dangerous.”

  Despite her ever-increasing popularity she had never experienced being photographed against her will. As early as a number of years ago, her father had advised her to turn up voluntarily whenever she had to. Not to drink too much. Not to make a fool of herself in the public arena, and definitely not to do anything illegal.

  Until now that had kept them away.

  “Paparazzi,” she tried to convince herself yet again.

  What any photographer wanted with a picture of the apartment block where she lived was beyond her comprehension. She could not be entirely certain whether he had directed his lens to the precise window where she had been standing. She struggled to breathe evenly, but her ears were ringing, and her heart was thumping so violently that it made her even more terrified. A key slid into the front door lock and she let out a scream so loud that she quickly put a firm hand over her mouth.

  “Christel?” she heard a voice ask from the hallway. “What on earth is wrong, my princess?”