In Dust and Ashes

by Anne Holt

  Anyway, hot chocolate didn’t help with anything whatsoever.

  Henrik gulped.

  He could not consider having children. The mere thought of having to protect a youngster scared him to death. Since he was now thirty and had never slept with anyone, the dilemma was extremely hypothetical anyway.

  With a sigh, he forced all thought of the most painful aspect of his life out of his head.

  They had grieved so differently, Jonas and Anna. Not strange that their marriage had fallen apart, Henrik thought, before once again acknowledging that he knew next to nothing about how a relationship worked.

  Think like a policeman, he snarled through gritted teeth. Don’t think of yourself.

  Hanne always said that a case should be investigated without any biased theories. Instead you should discover the facts, indisputable facts, and use them to construct reality. Brick by brick. In this case there were more than enough facts to build upon. What was problematic was that someone else had already fixed them in place. All the information surrounding Anna Abrahamsen’s death had been pieced together into a structure that made Jonas into the killer. When Henrik had drawn this time line, it was in an effort to deconstruct Bonsaksen’s ring binder. Everything had to be broken down, every tiniest detail.

  But it was extremely tempting to start at the opposite end. With a theory: Anna committed suicide.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen was not here, so he cut off yet another meter of gray paper and hung it on the bathroom door. He used a red marker pen to divide the paper vertically.

  Psyche, he wrote at the top of one column.

  Even though he had never ever lost a child, he had at least read a great deal about human reactions. As Herdis Brattbakk had emphasized, Anna’s reaction was far from atypical, Henrik thought as he wrote. In the initial phase she had been in denial, and filled her life with people, drink and religion. She must have had a certain control over her drinking, since she had been at work throughout this period. In fact she had only spent one week at home after Dina’s death, something Henrik found less strange now that he had spoken to Herdis Brattbakk. Returning to work quickly could also tally with a kind of denial phase: Dina’s death did not really sink in completely for her until much later.

  That must have been in autumn of 2002, he reasoned. Nearly a year after the accident, when she finally sought professional help.

  Anna’s first year of grief matched how she had been described prior to Dina’s death. She was a distinctly sociable person, and it seemed natural that in catastrophe mode she also turned to other people.

  It was almost as obvious that this could not last.

  In the first place, people have an unfortunate tendency to grow tired of other people’s suffering. It must have been hard work for her friends to mix with Anna during this period, something that also emerged from some of the interviews. At least if you read between the lines.

  He bit the pen so hard that the metal cracked.

  Anne had been in despair for almost a year, Henrik thought. Then she grew depressed.

  Anna Abrahamsen became so distraught that she had changed completely. Admittedly she had continued to go to work, had done what she had to do, and more. Her colleagues said that she could still be the same old Anna in meetings with customers. Cheerful and light-hearted. Charming. Once a contract was signed, however, she somehow went to pieces. She dropped out completely from the social side of work, but performed her work duties as before, and with great success.

  Jonas, on the other hand, struggled greatly at work.

  He was on sick leave for an entire year. Then the benefit authorities began to make demands, and he chose to take the path of least resistance. He returned to his middle management post in Statoil’s Oslo office, but things did not go particularly well. Whereas Anna obviously still had the energy to make some kind of effort, Jonas was completely drained. From Henrik’s reading of the police statements, it was exclusively thanks to his manager’s leniency that no case for dismissal was initiated. His absences were frequent, and if Jonas was first to arrive in the office, he sat behind closed doors and accomplished very little. If Jonas had not been arrested one year later, he would have been sacked anyway.

  Henrik took a step back and peered at what he had written in the right-hand column.

  Even though Herdis Brattbakk had been reluctant to use the expression, it seemed clear to Henrik that Anna Abrahamsen could have been suicidal as early as the autumn before she died. She had experienced a great tragedy and seemed to be caught in a downward spiral.

  The marriage was ailing. No new baby was on the way. Friends had disappeared, partly because she had pushed them away. The more he thought about the last two years of Anna’s life, the more he could discern the contours of an impending danger of suicide. She had even spent her last Christmas entirely on her own. Nor had she any plans for New Year’s Eve.

  Apart from taking her own life.

  Perhaps.

  Henrik embarked on the left-hand column.

  House immaculate, he wrote at the top.

  Followed by: Obviously deeply depressed.

  He could not think of anything further.

  He replaced the lid on the pen and turned one of the armchairs to face the time line before he sat down.

  At 17.30, Anna’s sister Benedicte had visited her. For no more than twenty minutes, she had stated. That corresponded with her turning up for a party half an hour away at 18.20, as had been verified; she was to help with preparing the food.

  Henrik had used a bracket to join the period between 22.30 and 23.30. Above the bracket he had hung a picture of Anna when alive, with a black cross in the corner.

  The pathologists had confirmed that she had died around that time.

  In the middle of the bracket, Henrik had attached a copy of the photograph taken from the neighbor’s party. He had enlarged the part where Jonas Abrahamsen could be seen behind the woman with the sparkler, a stooped figure jogging up the steep driveway.

  22.58, Henrik noted beneath the picture.

  It was a deathly coincidence.

  Discouraged, Henrik tossed the marker pen aside.

  He still had a strong feeling that there was something here. It was just so difficult to know where exactly. Henrik’s idea about suicide had cropped up when he noticed the extreme tidiness of the house. After his conversation with the psychologist, Herdis Brattbakk, much of the basis for his argument had caved in; Anna had already shown signs of a compulsive mania for cleaning several months prior to Christmas. The elation he had felt when he had confirmed that Anna might indeed have been suicidal was fading fast. Moreover, no matter how he twisted and turned things, he was faced with a problem so enormous and obvious that he had not even started to give it any thought.

  If this was a suicide, where on earth was the gun?

  If only he could have discussed this with Hanne, he thought as he rapped his forehead three times in succession.

  This time so hard it was actually painful.

  THURSDAY JANUARY 21, 2016

  He knew her routines better than most.

  That certainly wasn’t the reason Jonas Abrahamsen had followed Christel Bengtson from a distance for all these years. In the beginning, from the first glimpse of an eight-year-old on her way home from school, he had failed to understand why he continued to keep an eye on her. It was simply an emotional hiatus, a brief moment when the sight of the little girl gave him a feeling different from his everlasting, guilt-ridden grief.

  In prison he had missed her. Speculated how she had changed and grown older without him being able to watch the process. During his very first period of parole, he had spied on her for one entire day, fascinated by how quickly teenagers develop. In a way watching her brought Dina closer, and for a long time he had dwelt on whether Christel had become a substitute over the years.

  No. No one could replace Dina.

  He had no affection for Christel. She was merely an instrument, like a knife used by a self-harm
er, cutting in order to make the pain inside easier to cope with. He could sometimes feel it physically: the dull, cramping pain in his gut that dissolved at the sight of the unknown child, later the teenager and eventually the grown woman. The effect never lasted long, so he continued.

  He had never been tempted to do anything to her.

  Never.

  Over the years he had collected a number of her belongings. Worthless trash, such as an ice cream wrapper she had discarded, or a shopping receipt left in the supermarket basket. A scarf she left behind on a bench in St. Hanshaugen last year. Once she had left her wallet in a city center coffee bar, but Jonas had handed it to an assistant in the hope that Christel would get it back.

  He kept her driving license, though – it lay in a shoebox together with the other items, looking the worse for wear.

  When Christel established her blog, it was a real boon for Jonas. By collating the information she posted in her blog, on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, he had charted her life for years, down to the smallest detail. The advantage with celebrities was that they usually accepted friend requests from strangers, and he had several false, plausible accounts. As a rule he knew where she was, what she was doing, and what she was thinking. And not least, who she was with.

  Jonas knew Christel’s routines, and on Thursdays she dropped off and picked up Hedda at the kindergarten. That meant earlier drop-offs and later pick-ups than usual, and the toddler had to have her midday nap at kindergarten, rather than at home as was the case when her grandfather collected her. So today too Jonas had been here at quarter to eight to watch Hedda being dropped off.

  It was now getting on for half past twelve and snow was in the air. Jonas had felt intense, unanticipated relief that morning when he noticed it was only five degrees below zero Celsius outside. On really cold days, the children had to take their midday nap indoors. In this weather they were sleeping outside as usual, well wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags, all in their respective prams. To avoid the older children disturbing them unnecessarily with highspirited games and yells, the prams were parked at the lower end of the kindergarten. Someone had cleared a narrow path from the main entrance on the other side of the building up there, just wide enough to accommodate a pram. Now there were four of them parked beside the fence facing Geitmyrsveien, behind a gate that was not in use and secured with a chain and padlock.

  The chain was not especially strong.

  It took Jonas seconds to cut through it with wire cutters. He carefully placed both cutters and chain remnants in the snow and stepped inside the kindergarten grounds. Without as much as a glance at the children playing farther up the hill, he took hold of Hedda’s new, red sport buggy. It was difficult to haul it across the snowdrifts between fence and road, where he also had to negotiate a bank of snow.

  But he succeeded.

  The child was still asleep, and he had remembered to shut the gate and retrieve the wire cutters. He had pushed them between the edge of the pushchair and the thick blankets tucked around the little girl.

  He turned left from Geitmyrsveien. It would be best to avoid the area around the synagogue across the road on the right, because it was probably well supplied with CCTV cameras. He walked at a rapid pace, but avoided breaking into a run.

  When he crossed Colletts gate, he still heard no sirens. He soon swung down past Lovisenberg Hospital. Since here too there was a danger of surveillance cameras usual for a healthcare facility, he had parked his car farther along the road. He had visited the pushchair manufacturer’s Internet site in advance, and it took him only thirty seconds to fold the buggy. He lifted and pushed the detached bag with the upturned footplate on the rear seat and stowed the undercarriage in the trunk.

  Hedda woke and began to cry, but by then Jonas had already started the engine and driven off. Bengt Bengtson would never see his beloved grandchild again.

  It felt liberating – a gratifying void.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen was in a bad mood.

  She was banging her head against a brick wall. Even now that she had read all the newspaper articles written about Iselin Havørn in the past few weeks, she was not much wiser about the dead woman.

  But she had learned a little.

  For example, that Iselin Havørn was a close friend of Kari Thue.

  Ever since the beginning of the noughties, the by-now-nearlyfifty-year-old journalist Kari Thue had conducted a crusade against immigration from the Muslim world. Her involvement had begun commendably enough in the nineties, with a couple of prize-winning documentaries highlighting honor killings in the Norwegian-Pakistani community. This was followed by a book project about female genital mutilation that was less well received. The research she referenced was doubtful and the numbers she quoted were never documented.

  Hanne had always thought that somewhere along the line something must have gone wrong. From being passionately concerned about the circumstances of immigrant women both in the family and in working life, Kari Thue eventually became a home front soldier. Like Iselin Havørn, she saw her entire world threatened and in the past year she had spoken up for state censorship of the Koran, the demolition of mosques, and the abolition of asylum provision for all Muslims. During the major refugee crisis in the summer and autumn of 2015, in a double-page feature in VG, she had seriously demanded that the army be employed against the flood of asylum-seekers making their way across the Storskog border station in Finnmark. They should shoot with live ammunition, she insisted, effectively putting a stopper in the vulnerable Norwegian border.

  Despite the Defense Chief pointing out with a touch of irony that it was out of the question for Norway to declare war on Russia, Kari Thue was still taken seriously.

  She received all the column space she wanted and avidly seized the opportunity.

  All the same, it was not self-evident that she would be a friend of Iselin Havørn. Whereas Kari Thue fought fairly, under her full name and preferably on TV, Iselin Havørn had hidden away in cyberspace for a long time. And concealed herself well.

  Hanne sat in the kitchen with a bowl of cornflakes.

  She pushed it away, half eaten. The milk had become too sweet, and she was not really hungry. Her appetite was dreadful at the moment, though she did not fully understand why. They always had good food in the house. Increasingly often now, she halfheartedly crammed something simple and not particularly tasty into her mouth, and then picked at her food at regular mealtimes.

  Deep immersion in extremist waters during the past two years had definitely done something to her. When Henrik had dropped a hint about that last Wednesday, she had bitten his head off. In the week or so that had gone by since then, she had constantly returned to his comments. It felt equally uncomfortable every time.

  It terrified her, the way the anti-immigrant brigade joined forces.

  At times she was gripped by the same conspiracy theories as they espoused. She really hated the feeling, but there seemed to be so many of them. As if their numbers were constantly increasing. As if they were organized somehow, rather than only forging alliances through Facebook and Twitter and God knew what else. People who had been poles apart politically seemed to be united in this single, relatively new refrain: we don’t want to have them here. They are harming us. They are destroying what is ours.

  The political landscape could no longer be described as linear, as an axis from the farthest right to the farthest left. It struck Hanne that politics had become a horseshoe, with the outer edges terrifyingly close to each other.

  As Hanne scraped what was left of the unappetizing breakfast cereal into the sink, it sprang to mind that she had grown anxious. She put the bowl in the dishwasher and sat staring out of the kitchen window, so huge and with such deep ledges that Ida was in the habit of sitting there to do her homework. Outside, it was snowing lightly, and so calm that the winter-bare chestnut trees in the back yard seemed frozen stiff.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen was afraid of what was happening.

  To Norway, no
t to put too fine a point on it, the country where her daughter, half-Turkish, mostly Norwegian, would grow up and live her life.

  It was through an article in VG that Hanne had discovered the connection between Kari Thue and Iselin Havørn. A journalist had been given the rather thankless task of phoning round Iselin’s fellow partisans to gauge reactions to her death. Kari Thue had rejected the opportunity to comment. Probably for the first and last time in her life, Hanne assumed. It nevertheless emerged from the article that the two had been friends.

  Close friends, was what was actually implied.

  Hanne was not sure of the innuendo behind such a description.

  Years ago, after an accident on the Bergen-Oslo railway line during the storm of the century, she had been extremely unwillingly stranded in the mountains with the rest of the passengers, among them Kari Thue. When the storm was over, Hanne had promised herself never, ever, again to go anywhere near her scrawny frame: she had spent those days at the hotel, Finse 1222, spreading mistrust and doubt about Muslims.

  Now, getting on for ten years later, she preached hate and agitated for their expulsion.

  And Hanne suddenly had a strong desire to talk to her.

  It was out of the question, really. She would not be able to do it. It would turn into an unholy mess.

  She could phone the journalist of course. The next best thing.

  Dag Beddington was his name, and before she could lay herself open to misgivings, she had located his number. And keyed it in. Dag Beddington could not be very old, because he greeted her with a brisk, “Hi there!”

  “Hello,” Hanne answered, considerably more subdued. “My name is Hanne Wilhelmsen. I’m a special advisor with Oslo Police, and I–”

  “Wilhelmsen! You’re the one who broke the whole May 17 terrorist attack, of course!”

  “Well, yes.”

  “You and that wimp … Henrik Holme, wasn’t that his name?”

  “Yes. I’m dealing with an entirely different case here, and in connection with that I’ve come across an article you wrote ten days ago. About Iselin Havørn. You had interviewed … you tried to obtain comments on the death from Iselin’s fellow travellers. From Kari Thue, among others.”