by Anne Holt
He could not hear her, she realized. At least he was not listening. That was okay, she thought with a touch of resignation, and she stood up without making a sound. Then she could avoid telling him any more. For another few hours, Bengt Bengtson would escape knowing that the police were now concentrating on pedophile sex offenders living in the Østland region.
With the main focus on owners of old, dark-colored Golfs.
Fifty-three hours had now elapsed since Hedda’s disappearance, and all their experience suggested that the situation was really urgent now.
Hanne Wilhelmsen had spent Saturday studying Benedicte Maria Kvam, née Hansen, far more exhaustively than she had done before now. It was considerably more excruciatingly boring than taking a close look at Iselin Havørn.
Whereas Iselin had taken the fascinating political round-trip from the far left as an AKP adherent to the nationalist far right in the guise of an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist, Maria seemed to have been a fairly ordinary opportunist. While Iselin had definitely possessed her own highly original style when it came to both hair and clothes, Maria appeared to be a rather dull, blond, Norwegian woman in relatively good shape. At least as far as you could tell from her Facebook profile.
She was born in 1961, seven years before her sister, Anna. Following an apparently idyllic childhood in Nordberg she failed in two subjects in her final high school exams. This was mostly due to wild partying: she was Vice-President of the Oslo High School Student Organization in 1980, and parties and high jinks have always formed an important part of the final year of high school life in Norway. That kind of official position often led to the holder having to repeat the final high school year. From LinkedIn, however, it emerged that she had subsequently attended the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, even though there was much to suggest that she had never passed her final examination to allow her to graduate from high school.
As well as her Facebook profile, which had been regularly updated until Iselin’s exposure, Maria had her own blog. It was very different from Iselin’s. The graphic design was attractive and meticulously executed, but the content was really mundane. Tyrfing’s blog showed signs of the writer having too much on her mind to bother about layout, presentation and grammar. The important thing for Iselin was to reach out with her message without having her identity revealed, not that it should all be wrapped up in trailing roses and painfully correct orthography.
Maria’s blog was all about nothing. More accurately, about health food.
Hanne had never read so much claptrap about the alleged magic of nature. She suspected that the blog was an idea dreamed up by the marketing department of VitaeBrass AS. The company’s website had links to Maria’s blog in three different places, and the graphic layouts were so similar that the same designer was probably behind them both.
Maria wrote about the effects of honey on the female libido, the amazing impact of walnuts on acne, and the unbeatable effect of blueberries on the immune system. It was hinted in several places that the unique tree extract sold by VitaeBrass could have a limiting, and sometimes even arresting, effect on several types of cancer.
Hanne already knew that C-vitamins were beneficial for the body, that honey had a mild antiseptic effect, and that a handful of nuts each day was healthy for most people. Like the rest of the adult population, she assumed. It was something entirely different to drop these ingredients into jars and bottles along with a large dollop of hocus-pocus and sell it all for a fortune. What’s more, it was downright objectionable to entice people with what purported to be a cure for cancer, cunningly formulated and only just within the boundaries designed to exclude quack medicine.
Though that was not the reason Hanne felt so provoked.
She could no longer be bothered. The world was keen to be duped, and if she were to form a picture of Maria Kvam, she would have to read everything available about her on the Internet. After five articles on her blog, one about the company’s indisputable bestseller, BrassCure, she began to suspect that Maria had not written any of this at all. She had merely put her name to it, as the founder of the company and still one of the majority owners. It was true that the blog came across as personal, peppered as it was with minor incidents from everyday life and photographs of Maria, but deep down it was nothing but a marketing ploy all the same.
Hanne read all of it regardless, and when she had spent nearly five hours on locating, printing and reading the material about Maria to be found on the Internet, she read Bonsaksen’s documents on Anna’s sister one last time.
And then put them all together in a neatly stacked bundle. Maria Kvam did not seem especially sympathetic, she concluded. Instead, she was superficial, superstitious and somewhat selfcentered.
But above all, pretty dull. On social media she was one of the characters who never surprised. She was especially wary of flagging controversial opinions. From the material available on the Internet, it was impossible to discern any agreement with Iselin as far as Muslims or any other groups of immigrants were concerned. Only after the events in Cologne, when gangs of alleged asylum seekers had molested a large number of German women on New Year’s Eve, had she let slip a tweet on the subject. Hanne agreed completely with the sentiment.
Taharrush gamea has no place in Europe #cologne
Group sexual harassment had no place anywhere, and of course not here either. The tweet was retweeted twice and had also been marked with a heart by four of Maria’s just over 3,200 followers.
If Maria had agreed with her wife on the topic of immigrants in general and Muslims in particular, she had hidden it well, at least in public. It was beyond Hanne how it might be possible for spouses to disagree on such fundamental questions as the intrinsic value of other human beings. Iselin Havørn was not only skeptical about immigration and critical of Islam. She hated the very idea of both.
Intensely.
In order to live with Iselin, Maria Kvam must either be in agreement, completely ignorant, or perhaps extremely cynical. Hanne guessed at a combination of the first and last. It would be unfortunate for the business to publicize a clear standpoint about such an exceptionally controversial subject. Hazy photographs of Maria with bouquets of St. John’s Wort at her country cottage were far safer to show the public than tart comments about drowning refugees in the Mediterranean. The image of a wellmanicured hand filled with hazelnuts, held out to the camera, was probably far more effective than aggressive overtures about the tyranny of goodness and dysfunctional parasites. Just like the picture taken from the mountain peak of Galdhøpiggen in glorious weather with a bottle of blueberry extract shown to the photographer. That was how Maria Kvam chose to stage her own life, for the benefit of those who went to the trouble of following it.
However, there were a few obvious holes in the lifeline Hanne had pieced together.
First of all, it was unclear what Maria had actually been doing in the period from when she finished at the School of Economics until she set up PureHerb, as VitaeBrass was then known. Somewhere in the papers it was hinted that she had spent time studying in Bali, and elsewhere there was mention of a roundthe-world trip in 1998. At the end of the eighties she had worked in her parents’ firm for three years. Her father, a wholesaler of white goods, had been quite successful financially. That was brought to an end by the introduction of major chain stores, and the business was quietly wound up in 1991. Her father had obviously been a frugal man, and when both he and Maria’s mother died within a short time of each other in 1993, their daughters were left a tidy sum.
It struck Hanne that she might not have been working at all. It could be that she was living on her inherited wealth. That would chime with the stay in Bali and travels around the world, as both had taken place in the wake of the deaths of her parents.
Hanne glanced at the time. It was going on for half past four, and Nefis and Ida would soon be home. Unfortunately they were expecting guests – friends of Nefis, who were nice enough people, but it would mean a late
night. Too much noise. Too many questions and raking over the coals of the May 17 terrorist attack and what it had been like to stand face to face with Kirsten Ranvik in the witness box.
For one fleeting moment Hanne considered fabricating an excuse about a stomachache, and spending the whole evening in her bedroom. Nefis was so kind that she was easily fooled.
But not Ida, as she was only too well aware, and so she dismissed the idea.
She rolled out of the office to put the veal roast in the oven, as she had promised Nefis she would do at three o’clock prompt. It was to be slow-cooked. One and a half hours late meant she had to fiddle a little with the temperature in the hope that the others would be late arriving from the equestrian event on Bygdøy.
Something about the PureHerb startup did not tally. Some sources stated that the company was set up in August 2001. Others, such as the VitaeBrass homepages, gave 2004 as the date of establishment. Between those two dates, a lot of dramatic events had taken place with reference to Maria’s sister and her family, to put it mildly, and a sudden impulse made Hanne trundle back to her home office to log into the company registers at Brønnøysund.
Twenty minutes and several searches later, she understood the connection.
PureHerb was originally Anna Abrahamsen’s company.
It was correct that she had registered the business in August 2001, only four short months before Dina died. As a wholly owned, limited company, with 30,000 kroner in share capital and incidentally no other visible activity. Other than that PureHerb had secured an agency for a range of health food products from the Aloewonder company in Hawaii, as well as sole rights in Scandinavia for BrassCure, the ancient Inca remedy from Peru, at that time totally unknown, but by 2016 the best-selling health food supplement in Northern Europe.
So in its very beginning, Maria’s flourishing business had belonged to her sister. When it had been passed on as part of her inheritance, the value of the company had initially been confined to the amount of share capital deposited, but in time the agencies had proved a goldmine.
Hanne sat deep in thought. It was no sin to inherit something. No crime either.
At the turn of the year between 2003 and 2004, the rights to both Aloewonder and BrassCure were purely hypothetical in value. Maria could not possibly have known that the company would later take off. Nevertheless she had chosen to take a stab at what Anna would in all probability have done had the tragedy not struck. Her colleagues had characterized Anna as a super saleswoman. Whether cars or health food, it all probably depended on the same thing. The establishment of the company might suggest plans to feather her nest rather than using her talents for the benefit of the Volvo Group. When Dina died, the agencies were left dormant for nearly three years, until six months or so after her sister’s death, Maria breathed new life into the company. Later, with help from Iselin Havørn, she won the Gazelle Prize, awarded by the Dagens Næringsliv business newspaper, under the new name VitaeBrass.
On two occasions, the only company in history ever to do so.
There was certainly nothing wrong with inheriting something.
All the same, there could be something very wrong in making sure you inherited it.
But Maria could not have killed Anna, Hanne knew that. When Anna was shot, Maria was at a party along with almost sixty other people. Not only had a whole string of them confirmed that she had never left the house, she had also had ongoing responsibility for topping up the drinks. Abandoning your post behind the bar on New Year’s Eve would have been noticed, without a doubt.
Hanne reached out to the printer and pulled out a sheet of paper. Using a blue marker, she drew a horizontal line across the page.
Maria’s life was unbroken until now.
Prior to Anna’s death she had been unemployed for some time, at least according to the sources Hanne had discovered on the Internet. Perhaps it had been the legacy from her parents that had given her the opportunity to see the world instead of working, and maybe she had been running out of money near the end. However you looked at it, twisting and turning the facts, Maria was the only person who gained from Anna’s death.
She inherited her childhood home at Stugguveien 2B. She inherited a cottage in Hemsedal and a share in an old smallholding near Arendal that she had subsequently sold to distant relatives in the summer of 2004 for a pretty sum, if not exactly a fortune.
And she had inherited PureHerb.
Hanne broke the long line with a vertical stroke in red marker pen several centimeters across the paper.
Anna’s death.
Snatching up the blue marker again, she doubled the thickness of Maria’s lifeline up to another red streak.
Iselin’s death.
Hanne tripled Maria’s lifeline all the way to the edge of the paper.
Maria had not only benefited from her sister’s murder. According to an extensive article in Dagens Næringsliv last week, she had gained even more by Iselin’s passing. When they married, Maria had presented her wife with a half share of her eighty percent holding in VitaeBrass, a transaction the business newspaper described as lovesick idiocy. No conditions were attached to the agreement.
None apart from that they both had mutual inheritance rights.
In other words, eighty percent of VitaeBrass was back in Maria’s hands, and she was now wealthier than ever. On the long road from life as a beachcombing deadbeat in 2001 to becoming a rich and successful businesswoman in 2016, her niece had died, her sister been murdered, her brother-in-law been condemned to prison and eternal suffering, and her wife had died by her own hand after being exposed as one of the Internet’s worst propagandists against the Muslim population of Europe.
It sounded like a novel. A terribly bad novel that no one would want to read.
“Hammo!” she heard Ida call from the hallway. “We’re home!”
“Shit,” Hanne spluttered, logging out of her computer at lightning speed.
It was long past five o’clock, and the veal roast was still on the kitchen worktop.
SUNDAY JANUARY 24, 2016
Henrik Holme woke with a sore ear.
Several seconds passed before he discovered that he had fallen asleep using his laptop as a pillow. He had no idea why he had closed it up in his sleep and pushed it under his head. He had been watching a film on Netflix, he remembered, a sci-fi effort about a gang of teenagers making a zombie movie. The last thing he had taken in was when a train veered off the track in an inferno of flames and explosions.
He wasn’t likely to watch the rest of it.
His body felt stiff and exhausted as he struggled up into a sitting position and stuffed a couple of pillows behind his back. His left knee had started to ache again. Just less than two years ago, soon after the bombs had gone off on May 17, his habitual walking had led to an infection that had persisted for several weeks. The previous day’s lengthy trip to and from Heikki Pettersen’s house in the pouring rain and biting north wind had probably been too much. Henrik carefully massaged both sides of his knee, though it did not help in the least.
But the trip had been well worth it.
Henrik opened the laptop and perched it on his knee. Last night he had scanned the entire contents of Bonsaksen’s ring binder and organized it all on the computer, something he should have done ages ago. Hanne had commandeered his own copy set, and now the original ring binder was finally installed on the bookshelf in the living room.
It had mostly been the autopsy report that had engrossed him after his visit to Heikki Pettersen at Stugguveien 2A. He clicked his way into the document and read it once again.
Anna had bled to death.
She had been shot in the lower part of her face at close range. The bullet had entered beneath her chin, just to the left of the mid point. It had shattered her lower jaw, struck her teeth on the left side of her mouth, leaving behind an exit wound just below the eye that Henrik still could not bear to look at for more than a second or two.
According to the
report, Anna Abrahamsen had been five foot eight and weighed seventy kilos. She had not sustained any other injuries apart from the ones to her face. The report stated that she had an appendectomy scar; something Henrik guessed meant that she had had her appendix removed. There was nothing of note about her lungs and heart, which had both been of normal weight.
Henrik did not like the thought of organs being weighed. It necessarily entailed removing them from the body. Even now, after five years in the police force, he found it difficult to be anywhere near a corpse. In no way did he find them repulsive – instead the problem was that he became so unspeakably sad at the sight of dead human beings. He was overcome by a feeling of tenderness. Of respect. He still couldn’t, even after five years filled to overflowing with dead bodies, stop thinking about who they had been. What kind of life they had led, and who had been fond of them.
Or hadn’t been fond of them. Six months ago he had been forced to break into an apartment in Brobekk. It was located on the seventh floor, and the neighbor below had noticed a strange, rosette-shaped stain spreading across the ceiling. When the door was smashed open, Henrik’s colleagues had initially reacted to the unbearable stench inside, whereas Henrik, on the other hand, had been overwhelmed by a strong sense of sorrow. The man on the living room floor was seventy-six years old, and it turned out that he had lain there for three weeks without anyone raising the alarm. No one had reported him missing. Even though a mountain of copies of Aftenposten had piled up at his door, not a single soul had bothered to check that everything was okay.
Henrik had wept that evening, and still remembered the old man in his nightly prayers.
Which he had not got round to saying last night, it crossed his mind, and he struggled to concentrate on the autopsy report.
None of Anna’s vital organs was damaged. Admittedly, the bullet had virtually destroyed the lower left part of her face, but the brain was untouched. Unless the intense pain had knocked her out, she could have remained conscious as she slowly bled to death.