In Dust and Ashes

by Anne Holt

  The thought was almost intolerable.

  Henrik searched for something that might tell him how quickly it had all gone, but found nothing. However, what emerged clearly was that both Anna’s hands had distinct traces of gunshot residue. Since she had shot five rounds at the firing range on the morning of New Year’s Eve, the pathologist’s findings had not been queried elsewhere in Bonsaksen’s papers.

  Henrik logged out of the digital folder he had created and placed the laptop on the bedside table. It was only half past five. He knew he could forget the idea of going back to sleep and instead padded out to the bathroom, where he had a pee, washed his face in icecold water and stood looking at his reflection in the mirror.

  The harsh bathroom lighting made him look even paler than usual.

  He tried to hunch his shoulders, but paradoxically enough, this made them look even narrower. He lifted his chin and studied the scar that ran so precisely along the fold of skin where his chin met his neck. It was fading. By summer it would have almost disappeared. This year he would make a serious effort to acquire a suntan, something he had never done before. He never stripped off; his ribcage had always reminded him of a scrawny bird. Until now his legs had been like sticks, and since the age of eleven he had greeted every summer fully dressed from top to toe.

  Henrik Holme had barely been able to swim when, as an eighteen-year-old, he had launched himself into rigorous training to gain admittance to Police College.

  But it dawned on him that he looked better now. His weight training was beginning to show results. He ran his fingers over his ribcage and felt that he could flex his muscles. It was as if the reddish-blond hairs that etched the outline of a letter “T” across his chest had become thicker. It must be his imagination, but Henrik tensed and jutted his chin forward. His mother had always insisted he use factor fifty sun cream, but now that would stop. This summer he would find himself a girlfriend. Tinder, he had thought. Or Bumble, where only females could initiate a conversation. Henrik had read that this was a precaution to restrict sleaziness, and he certainly had no wish to appear suspect.

  This summer, when the scar was completely gone and he had turned brown.

  He brushed his teeth.

  Anna Abrahamsen had been attractive. She could certainly have had any man she wanted. A sporty type, tall and athletic, and an excellent markswoman. Jonas had once been a lucky man. There must be an Anna Abrahamsen for Henrik too, somewhere out there, and soon he would find her.

  He spat and rinsed his mouth, staring once again into his own eyes.

  Jonas could well have been telling the truth.

  After the first lie when he claimed he had not been to Stugguveien since December 28, he had asserted that no one had opened the door on New Year’s Eve, one hour before midnight, when he had visited her to ask for forgiveness. To beg Anna for a fresh start. To try to live together without Dina, instead of separate lives. The door was locked, and he had considered using his own key, it said in the interview transcripts. He had decided not to. He hadn’t wanted to be provocative: after all he was looking for a second chance.

  No one had believed Jonas. Except perhaps Kjell Bonsaksen. And Henrik Holme.

  He wanted to believe Jonas. He really wanted to try to believe that Jonas had never stepped inside Anna’s house that night. If he had done so, could he have saved her? Was she lying there bleeding to death at that very moment, while the neighbors partied and Jonas stood at a loss outside the door? Was there another killer inside, someone no one had seen any sign of, neither during the intensive, painstaking investigation in the early months of 2004 or now, when both he and Hanne had gone through the entire set of papers one more time?

  In that case it must be a perpetrator who had moved completely under the radar, hidden from the police and all Anna’s acquaintances, with no motive, someone who had not stolen anything and not raped her either. Someone who had entered and exited the locked house unseen, without leaving behind as much as a microscopic speck.

  A ghost, in other words. But ghosts don’t exist.

  If Jonas was telling the truth, as Bonsaksen had always suspected, there could not possibly be another perpetrator. It must be suicide. The only thing that could unravel the puzzle.

  Dina’s death, the marriage on the rocks, Anna’s depression that was gradually worsening. The pristine house, purged of every personal belonging, clinically cleaned as if for a house viewing, and in addition Dina’s dismantled room. The clothes Dina had been wearing when she died and thrown out last of all, so that Anna could finally choose to die.

  It would solve the mystery, if it hadn’t been for the confounded unknown variable.

  The gun.

  Henrik wondered whether to have a shower, but decided on a cat’s lick instead. While the basin was filling with hot water, it struck him that Jonas was the only theoretically conceivable candidate to have removed the Glock after the suicide. However, it would have been completely illogical. No matter how hard Henrik tried, he could not find a single plausible reason for Jonas to have let himself in, found his estranged wife either dead or dying, picked up the gun, taken it with him and then gone home.

  Henrik attacked his armpits with two soapy hands and rubbed energetically.

  It would have been senseless for Jonas to remove the gun. Anyway, Henrik believed him. He had made up his mind to trust Bonsaksen’s gut feeling, and that meant Jonas had not let himself in.

  He used a towel to rub himself dry and headed into the bedroom for clean clothes. He opened the wardrobe and ran his eyes over his shirts, all freshly ironed and hung in order of color, the white ones on the left and then all the way through red, green and blue to the two black ones on the extreme right. Underpants, also ironed and neatly folded, were stored in a wire basket.

  Guns did not disappear by themselves. If it were a case of suicide, then someone must have removed the gun.

  Someone must have been in the house when it was clear that no one had been there. A recently fired Glock 17 had vanished without trace from an empty house that was closed and locked.

  Henrik snatched at a green flannel shirt and froze. For several minutes he stood thinking with one hand on the clothes hanger and the other loosely holding the wardrobe door. A thought had struck him, only just and almost imperceptibly, and he concentrated hard on not letting it slip away. It felt as if, in a sudden flash, he had glimpsed the value of the unknown variable, the piece of the jigsaw that could solve the puzzle and make everything fall neatly into place.

  “Of course,” he said aloud all of a sudden – he had seized hold of the fleeting thought and held it firmly in his grasp. “If Mohammad won’t come to the mountain, then the mountain must go to Mohammad – of course!”

  There was something wrong with the timing, and he knew the very person he needed to speak to about that.

  The shopping expedition had gone well.

  Since Jonas did not dare use the car and also lacked the energy to clear away the thick, soaking wet snow that covered the track leading to the road, he had taken the bus to Storo. It did not run very often, and he had to walk a kilometer to the bus stop, but transport had not been the greatest challenge.

  Somehow he had needed to get Hedda to sleep during his absence.

  The solution was Cosylan, a prescription cough medicine.

  He had a bottle in the fridge from a bad chest infection he had suffered in November. He had been reluctant to sign off sick, and the cough medicine contained morphine, so the bottle was almost full. It had been tricky to work out how much to administer to the little girl, and the liquid must taste horrible too. He had wheedled and coaxed to no avail, and in the end had mixed four tablespoons into a cherry yogurt that Hedda readily gobbled up with a hearty appetite.

  It took only quarter of an hour for her to fall asleep. He had laid her in the double bed, tucked her cozily into the quilt, and wound steel wire around the window catches. Then he barricaded the bedroom door with a heavy chest of drawers that a
three-yearold would have no chance of budging.

  Jonas’s shopping trip to the Storo center had taken two hours and fifteen minutes.

  When he returned with his rucksack crammed with food, diapers, children’s clothing and a brand-new Barbie doll, Hedda was still sleeping heavily. She had wet the bed without noticing and didn’t even wake when he carried her into the living room to change the bed sheets.

  Clothes had presented the biggest problem.

  The whole of Norway was preoccupied with Hedda Bengtson’s disappearance. The advertising on the digital displays at the Storo center had been replaced by pictures of the three-year-old, four different ones shown in continuous rotation. Even though there was nothing intrinsically criminal about buying children’s clothes, he was so afraid of anyone raising the alarm that he had bought boy’s clothing. The woman behind the counter had asked with a smile if the numerous garments were a gift. He had nodded and let her wrap them in dark green paper decorated with blue teddy bears. Because he feared that Hedda would refuse point blank to put on underpants with a fly front, he had risked throwing two packs of pink Pierre Robert knickers into his shopping basket at the ICA supermarket, where he had filled his bag with fresh groceries.

  He had not been scared to buy a Barbie doll. Three-year-olds shouldn’t really like Barbie. Dina had been given one by her aunt when she was two, and it had gone straight into the bin on Anna’s instructions.

  Hedda had slept all through the night. Jonas had hardly closed an eye.

  She seemed so peaceful as she lay there. Her breath was nice and regular and she smelled so sweet. She lay facing him, halfway over on her side, and she had kicked off the quilt. If he put his own pillow over her face and held it tight, it would all be over. It would not take more than a few minutes. It would be so easy. Merciful, even, because she would barely be aware of what was happening before she was no longer alive.

  “Hungry,” Hedda said in a sleepy voice, opening her eyes. “Jonas!”

  She crept close to him, boring her head into the crook of his neck and putting her stubby, warm hand on his cheek.

  “Fuzzy beard,” she mumbled. “I’m hungry, Jonas.”

  “I’ll make pancakes for breakfast,” he whispered and kissed her hair. “And then I’ve got a present for you.”

  He pushed her away discreetly and got up from the bed.

  He would have to do it today, and he could not for the life of him work out why he had not got rid of Hedda as early as Thursday. It was madness to keep the toddler here. Absolutely crazy. He could not fathom why he had jeopardized his whole plan by doping her up to the eyeballs in order to buy a Barbie doll and new clothes when she was soon to die.

  Today.

  Today he would have to pull himself together and complete the undertaking he had embarked upon. But first he would make the best pancakes in the world.

  Dina’s favorite dish.

  “Here,” Hanne said, pointing at an apartment block on Trondheimsveien. “Drop me off as close as possible to that door over there.”

  Nefis was a hopeless driver. Like most hopeless drivers, at least female ones, she could not really bear driving. Hanne had frequently wondered why they had a car at all, since it was only used on a handful of occasions a year. Nefis had become expert at arranging lifts from other parents for Ida’s many riding events and school activities, and besides, she herself preferred to take a taxi.

  However, taxis were one of the worst things Hanne had ever experienced.

  Taxi drivers with foreign backgrounds – and they were in the majority – insisted as if their lives depended on it on helping her with everything. As soon as they spotted her waiting on the sidewalk, they leapt from their vehicles to lift her on to the back seat, fold up her wheelchair and fasten her seatbelt. These moves involved being touched so many times by total strangers that Hanne felt exhausted for days afterward.

  Almost worse were the Norwegian drivers, who wanted to quiz her and delve into what it was like to be confined to a wheelchair. About what had happened to her, what problems she had experienced with disability benefits, and how politicians were driving the welfare state to rack and ruin by peering through their fingers at the tricks and fakery of worthless bums and workshy scroungers.

  Especially of “our new countrymen”, as they normally expressed it, in the ironic and forlorn hope of not offending their passenger.

  When Hanne had decided there was no possibility of avoiding a conversation with Kari Thue, she had asked Nefis to drive her. Now the six-year-old Audi was parked diagonally across the tramlines in Trondheimsveien. Hanne wisely kept her own counsel as Nefis swore loudly at the tram honking angrily behind them, while she craned over the steering wheel in an effort to see whether it was legal to drive into Conradis gate.

  “I think this’ll be okay, Hanna!”

  She stalled the engine. How it was possible to stall a car with automatic gears was beyond Hanne’s comprehension. The tram was making an infernal racket. A truck approached, blinking its headlights before the driver let loose on the horn. Nefis reeled off a string of Turkish words Hanne had heard many times before without ever finding out what they meant. She shut her eyes.

  “No one died,” she mouthed silently.

  Now Nefis was cursing in Norwegian, but fortunately she managed to start the car. It lurched off the tramlines and into Conradis gate, where it came to a sudden halt again.

  Halfway across the sidewalk this time.

  Hanne sat in silence waiting until Nefis had heaved the wheelchair out of the trunk and set it down just outside the passenger seat. It took her only seconds to transfer into the chair, and when Nefis closed the car door, she mumbled a few words of thanks as she surveyed the grayish-yellow apartment block where Kari Thue lived.

  “How long will this take?” Nefis asked.

  “Maybe only a minute,” Hanne said. “I have my doubts whether she’ll want to talk to me at all. At best it might take some time. Can I call you when I want to be picked up?”

  “Of course!”

  Nefis gave her a fleeting kiss on the mouth and quickly stroked her hair. Hanne reacted by mussing it up again, using the fingers of both hands.

  “Just phone,” Nefis said. “I can do some shopping in the meantime.”

  “It’s Sunday, don’t forget.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Just take whatever time you need. Shall I help you in?”

  “No thanks. Henrik said there was an elevator here. But wait for five minutes before you drive off. It’s far from certain that she’ll be at home.”

  Hanne approached the entrance, where a panel mounted with doorbells confirmed that Kari Thue lived on the third floor. Ringing the bell would probably be a bad idea. If Hanne were to have the tiniest chance of at least initiating a conversation, she would have to depend on confronting Kari Thue face to face. So she fished out her cellphone and immersed herself in Wordfeud just long enough to spot an elderly man closing in at the corner of her eye. He had already taken out his keys. When, as expected, he turned on to the slushy path leading to the double entrance doors, Hanne began to maneuver her wheelchair in the same direction.

  She did not even need to say anything. The wheelchair worked its magic.

  “Let me help you,” the old man offered cheerfully and held the heavy door open, obviously pleased he was not the one with mobility problems. “Are you using the elevator?”

  Hanne nodded.

  “Third,” she said tersely when the man had summoned the elevator and stepped politely aside to let her in first. “Thanks very much.”

  The man alighted on the second floor, and when the doors opened again one story higher, Hanne trundled out into the center of a deserted stairwell. She glanced to the right, where a large hand-painted porcelain plaque decorated with meadow flowers announced that the apartment belonged to A. and B. Strømstad. Hanne moved to the left. Kari Thue had chosen a more modern variation, a transparent acrylic sign giving her full name in black letters.


  She had become more courageous in the end, Hanne thought. She would grant Kari Thue that, if nothing else. While at Finse 1222 she had sneaked around in the dark like Gollum with vile whispers and innuendo, but over the years she had become both more visible and considerably more vociferous. Hanne knew that revealing her address must have brought about a great deal of unpleasantness, as the paintwork on the door also indicated. It had obviously been scrubbed down a number of times. Perhaps Kari Thue had finally grown tired of repainting every time someone attacked her apartment with marker pens, spray paint and abuse. Hanne thought she could just make out the pale shadow of Racist cunt!!! diagonally across the upper part of the door.

  She rang the doorbell. The silence continued.

  Fortunately the door was not fitted with a peephole. Kari Thue would have to open the door if she wanted to find out what this was about. At last Hanne could hear footsteps. The door opened a crack, with the security chain still fastened.

  “Hello,” Hanne said.

  “Hanne Wilhelmsen,” Kari Thue replied tonelessly with her face pressed to the gap.

  “Yes. I’d appreciate a chance to talk to you. It won’t take long.”

  “Sorry, but I’ve no interest in talking to you.”

  “It’s not about Iselin. It’s about Maria. Benedicte.”

  Kari Thue did not respond, but at least she did not shut the door.

  “I don’t believe that Iselin committed suicide,” Hanne added, staking everything on one card.

  The door was still only slightly opened.

  “What do you mean?” Kari Thue asked after such a lengthy pause that Hanne began to think something was seriously amiss.

  “If you’d let me come in, I can explain.”

  “But surely she took her own life?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because … Could I just come in for a minute?”

  “No. Why do you think she didn’t take her own life?”

  Her wan face looked almost greenish in the light given off by the fluorescent tubes in the ancient fixture in the stairwell. Her mouth was broad, with thin lips bombarded from above by an arrow shower of fine wrinkles.