In Dust and Ashes

by Anne Holt

  “Iselin created VitaeBrass,” she said, gazing out to the terrace, where the outdoor furniture was stowed away in a corner under a tarpaulin. “You just did the preliminary work. PureHerb was a seed that would never have blossomed if Iselin hadn’t come along.”

  Halvor got to his feet again, this time quietly and without knocking over the chair.

  “You’re completely incompetent,” he said slowly. “But you’ve had incredible luck. First you inherited from your parents. Then you inherited from your sister, and then you met me. Or the other way round. Eventually Iselin came along. Through sheer good fortune or other people’s efforts – or death – you’ve grown rich. You haven’t lifted a fucking finger yourself, Maria. Just tagged along. Played along. Spent money. You’re fit for nothing. You can’t even manage to attend to that blog of yours without help. It’s sad that Iselin’s dead, but that’s the way it is. We have to get a grip. And if you won’t let me take charge of VitaeBrass, then I’ll buy myself out. That is an ultimatum.”

  He gave a brief nod and headed out to the hallway. “I must have an answer this week,” he yelled back at her once he had opened the front door. “By Friday at four. Understood?”

  The door slammed with such force that the living room window shook.

  His sore knee forced Henrik to take a taxi. It was all the same to him – he had a lot to do before he could report to Hanne. Now he was sitting in the back seat of a Mercedes with pale-brown leather seats, making lightning-fast notes on his cellphone while he attempted to gather his thoughts.

  It was not easy.

  Suicide? Murder?

  He kept writing.

  Maria, Anna’s sister, originally called Benedicte, had apparently been to Stugguveien 2B at around half past five on New Year’s Eve. The police’s temperature measurement, based on an average temperature of twenty degrees Celsius in the room, had calculated that death would have occurred just prior to midnight. If the bathroom had been ten degrees warmer, Anna could have passed away shortly after her sister’s admitted visit.

  His thumb could not keep up with his stream of thoughts as he keyed in his notes at breakneck speed. Autocorrect went bananas, and he would probably find it difficult later to make out what he had written.

  Had she slipped away peacefully? Did she go to her death screaming, with a shattered jaw and the knowledge that her sister wished her such misfortune?

  His phone rang. Henrik flinched and the taxi made such a sharp turn that his cellphone dropped on the floor. He had to unfasten his seatbelt to retrieve it – it had slid underneath the driver’s seat – and he was afraid the call had already been transferred to voicemail when he was finally able to put the phone to his cheek with a breathless hello.

  “Hello there,” said the voice at the other end. “This is Herdis Brattbakk calling. We spoke the other day, and I–”

  “Hello,” Henrik said, practically euphoric. “It was a very useful conversation. Thank you.”

  “That’s good. It roused a lot of thoughts in me as well. I had an extra good look through my records when you left, and there was one piece of information there I thought you should have.”

  “Yes?”

  “When Anna came back, in September 2003, she was, as I said, pretty down in the mouth. As you’ll recall, I offered her further follow-up, which she accepted.”

  “But she never turned up again,” Henrik said, nodding as he struggled to re-fasten his seatbelt. “You told me.”

  “Exactly. But what I also said to her was that I thought she could benefit from taking anti-depressants. That’s not something I usually recommend to my patients, but–”

  “You’re a psychologist,” Henrik broke in. “Not a psychiatrist.”

  “That’s correct. And I didn’t offer to write out a prescription: I don’t have authority to do that. But her GP does. I earnestly advised her to make an appointment with her. In fact, I sent an email to Dr. Sivesind about it, but I didn’t get a reply from her either.”

  “I see.”

  Henrik could not imagine that the information gave him anything at all. He had already known that Anna was extremely depressed, and whether or not she was taking prescription medicines was of little interest.

  “Thanks,” he said, disappointed. “If you think of anything else, I’d appreciate a call to let me know.”

  “There really was so little. Anna’s fate … I’d almost forgotten her, but after our discussion it’s been on my mind–”

  “By the way,” Henrik said, “just one tiny detail. Wait!”

  The taxi was about to drive the wrong way to Advokat Dehlis plass, and he had to give directions to the driver.

  “Are you there?” he asked a few seconds later.

  “Yes.”

  “You told me Anna had begun to brood. When she was attending regularly from September to March. About religion. She was ‘looking for God’, I think you said.”

  “That’s right. Not unusual, considering her situation.”

  “Was there any particular passage in the Bible that interested her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Er … the Sermon on the Mount, for instance?”

  “Now I’ve no idea where you’re going with this. She was searching in a more general sense, I seem to recall. She was trying to find some sort of meaning in all the pain inflicted on her. Struggling to see God’s will in her life having turned out as it had. I don’t know if she really …”

  She was silent for so long that Henrik worried that the call had been disconnected.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m still here. Now that you mention it, there was actually something she was particularly obsessed about. Not when she was coming here regularly, but when she came back, in September.”

  “What was it?”

  “That story in the Old Testament,” she said. “The one about the rich man who has all the sufferings in the world inflicted on him and yet still doesn’t deny God. Er–”

  “The Book of Job,” Henrik suggested.

  “Yes, the Book of Job. Anna could not fathom how God could let so many terrible things happen to him, a person who …”

  Henrik let the phone sink on to his lap.

  He had been confused enough when he had boarded the cab, but now he understood nothing whatsoever.

  Anna was the one who was obsessed by the Book of Job.

  Not Iselin.

  Yet another day would soon be over. Yet another day with Hedda.

  Jonas Abrahamsen had begun to think stupid thoughts. About fleeing the country. About moving somewhere else, to a completely different life. About taking Hedda with him, travelling far away and becoming a family.

  He and Dina.

  Hedda.

  She was sleeping now: in his bed, where he would soon turn in for the night himself. They had played Picture Lotto and had fun with Barbie. Jonas was given the old, one-armed, almost hairless doll. Hedda had been delighted with the new one, which had come in a pack with a bikini and a surfboard. He had filled the tub in the bathroom with water, and the one-armed doll had to go for a swim while the new one surfed back and forth, sometimes screaming in terror when Jonas threatened her with the fish slice that was really a tiger shark.

  Of course he couldn’t run away. In the first place, the whole of Norway was hunting for him. The Golf was now the right color. He was no longer a foreigner, but a white man wearing a black cap pulled well down on his forehead. With each hour that passed, the descriptions on the Internet grew increasingly precise.

  And secondly, they had no passport, neither one of them.

  It was only a matter of a short time now. Maybe they would come tomorrow. The only thing he could think of that might delay them was that they were now searching for a sex offender.

  It was not stated in black and white, but it was easy to work out that this was what they were looking for. No ransom demand had arrived for any of Bengt’s huge fortune. The kidnappers had not been in touch at all, even though
the desperate grandfather had promised everything he owned to whoever brought his grandchild home again.

  Jonas was no sex offender. He was not a criminal of any kind, even though he had been treated like one for twelve years. A whole lifetime. If anyone, just one person, could have looked him in the eye and said that they believed him, that he was innocent and had never done anything wrong, he would never have stolen Hedda. He would have handed her back. He could go to prison for abducting her, but he had taken good care of the little girl and would at least have known that someone knew. Who he was. What he had done. What he had never done, and that was to kill someone. One single person was all he needed, a fellow human being who would sit down and listen to Jonas’s story about how he had lost everything without having done anything wrong.

  And who believed in him.

  It had never happened and never would. Bengt Bengtson would never see Hedda again.

  Jonas would have to steel himself. He had to keep a tight hold of the pain, of all the years of guilt and sorrow and the microscopic glimmers of hatred that made it possible to go on.

  After brushing his teeth, he stripped off his clothes and pulled on the striped pajamas he had never used before Hedda arrived and became a helicopter in his bed.

  One more night, and then it would be over.

  One more night, and now he knew exactly how he was going to accomplish it.

  “You know I can’t tell you that, Wilhelmsen.”

  Hanne shut her eyes and swore under her breath.

  “Not if I swear on my honor to keep you out of it? And if at the same time I promise you the juiciest story on earth before the week is out? Maybe as early as Tuesday, and I promise you’ll be the very first to know. It’s a story of such dimensions that you’d cut off your right arm to get it.”

  VG journalist Dag Beddington gave a demonstrative sigh at the other end of the line.

  “I thought you’d know better after all these years,” he complained. “Revealing a source would be the same as signing my own resignation. Not only from VG, but also from any future as a journalist. We simply don’t give away our sources, Wilhelmsen. I can’t tell you who tipped us off that Iselin Havørn was behind the Tyrfing alias. I can’t. I won’t. Read my lips?”

  She made no response as she shifted the phone from one hand to the other.

  “But what’s this story about?” he added.

  “Something for something, Beddington. That was what you said to me the last time we spoke.”

  She could hear him grinning broadly as he continued.

  “Well, I must be allowed to try. Can’t you give me a hint at least?”

  “What’s the point of that? After all, you’ve already said it’s downright impossible for you to tell me who exposed Tyrfing’s identity.”

  Neither of them uttered a word. Neither of them hung up.

  “Listen,” Hanne said sotto voce once almost a minute had elapsed. “We can sit here and play chicken all night long with nothing to show for it. For either of us.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time. And I’m absolutely open to listening to you if you’ve got something exciting to tell me. The best thing would be–”

  “Here’s the deal,” she interrupted him. “I promise you first dibs at a juicy story in the course of a few days. The only thing you have to do in return is to act appropriately when I ask you a question.”

  “Act approp–”

  “Shut up. Listen to me. You’ll get a story if you do exactly as I say. I’m going to ask you a question in a few seconds. It will give you a hint about the subject matter of my story. If the answer to the question is no, then you can answer whatever the hell you like. If, on the other hand, the answer is yes, all you have to do is disconnect the call. In that way you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

  He roared with laughter at the other end. Hanne had to hold her phone half a meter from her ear.

  “I certainly can’t do that!” he said. “I think you’ve seen too many movies, Wilhelmsen. My duty of confidentiality is absolute and can’t be compromised by that kind of hocus pocus. But if I could just hear what kind of story you’re talking about, then I can–”

  “Was it Maria Kvam who tipped you off about Tyrfing’s true identity?”

  His laughter was suddenly silenced. Hanne feared for a moment that he had already hung up before she had asked the question. Then she heard his breathing. Heaving breaths, lasting several seconds, before silence fell.

  Dag Beddington had put down the receiver.

  Hanne and Henrik were sitting in the living room, even though Ida and Nefis were at home. Hanne’s family had gone to bed ages ago, and it was now getting on for half past eleven. It had only been an hour or so since Henrik had arrived. He was no longer lugging folders around, and had left his usual bag of case documents and notes in Grünerløkka. The first thing he had done when he arrived in Kruses gate was to enter Hanne’s home office without asking permission. The temptation to rip the whole time line to shreds was pressing, but Hanne had trundled after him and persuaded him to keep it. Reluctantly, he had rolled up the centipede before flinging it into a corner and sauntering back to the living room. It had taken Hanne ten minutes to tell him what she had learned that day, which was a great deal, in fact. Henrik had spent almost an hour and it had only made him even more confused.

  “I don’t understand any of it,” he said, subsiding even further into the armchair in front of the fire. “And I can’t prove anything either. Which isn’t the slightest bit strange, since it’s impossible to prove anything you don’t understand yourself. A vicious circle, really.”

  “Don’t take it so hard,” Hanne said. “We’ve got Maria for Iselin’s murder.”

  Henrik leaned forward and tossed a log on to the flames. A shower of sparks lit up the darkened room, and he threw on another.

  “I was aiming to help Jonas,” he said in an undertone. “All these weeks I’ve been falling asleep to the thought of how he would take it. When I came to tell him that we had got to the bottom of it all. That he’s a victim of a miscarriage of justice. That he would receive redress. Primarily moral, but perhaps also in the form of financial compensation. For sure. Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes he would. But you shouldn’t give up. You’ve still a lot to go on.”

  Henrik tapped the back of his head three times and said, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Hanne looked at him in astonishment.

  “I don’t have shit to go on,” he said so loudly that he immediately blushed and touched his mouth with his hand. “Sorry!”

  Hanne put her forefinger to her lips and smiled.

  “In Iselin’s suicide letter,” he began, in almost a whisper, “which we now believe Maria wrote, it’s clear–”

  “Which we now know Maria wrote.”

  “We don’t know anything, Hanne. Everything has to be scrutinized more closely. But it’s extremely likely. In that letter there are clear references to the Book of Job. Almost a transcription, at the beginning. We also know Anna was obsessed with the Book of Job, something that is by no means strange. But Anna died twelve years ago, and there was no letter found at her house.”

  He pushed forward to the edge of the chair and began to gesticulate.

  “It started with a vague suspicion that Anna had taken her own life. That suspicion has been strengthened on a daily basis. The tidying. The disposal of Dina’s clothes. Her depression and grief that increasingly pulled her down. If she really did take her own life, Hanne, it would quite simply have been the story of a predictable suicide. But then there’s this business of the gun …”

  He sank back into the chair and sat staring into the flames. Hanne gave him time to think. Most of all she wanted to open a bottle of champagne to celebrate her own success. Maria Kvam would languish behind bars, and all credit was due to Hanne.

  And Henrik, it struck her all of a sudden.

  “I thought I could shift the time of death,” Henrik grumbled. “If I could just find some
thing to indicate that the police had made some mistake with their measurements. That they were tricked somehow. If only that bathroom had been ten degrees warmer–”

  “Ten really is a lot, Henrik. If it’s twenty degrees Celsius outside on a summer’s day, then it’s a bit cool in the shade. If it’s thirty degrees, we go about panting and sweating. I honestly do think the crime scene technicians would be able to tell the difference. But …”

  She was suddenly a million miles away. Henrik looked at her. She sat with her mouth half-open and her head canted, as if rooted to the spot. She had sat down in the other armchair and drawn a blanket over her stick legs. The blaze in the open fireplace cast an orange shadow play over her face, and yet she did not blink.

  “Who found Anna?” she finally said without taking her eyes from the flames.

  “You know that. It was Maria. She came to Stugguveien at about eleven o’clock the next day.”

  “Isn’t that strange?”

  “Strange?”

  Hanne used her arms to raise herself and find a more comfortable sitting position. Leaning closer to him across the armrest, she lifted her index finger.

  “Let’s say that her alibi holds water,” she said softly and slowly. “She was at a New Year’s party from six in the evening until five the following morning. For eleven hours, in other words. She had responsibility for the bar. There’s no mention anywhere that Maria was teetotal, so she’s probably had quite a bit to drink herself in the course of the night. The earliest she could have gone to bed would be … do you remember where she was living at that time?”

  “With a female friend in Frogner. She’d been travelling extensively and didn’t have her own place.”

  “And the party was in Årvoll. Even if she was super-lucky and managed to hail a cab on a night when it’s virtually impossible, she couldn’t have gone to sleep before six at the earliest anyway. What was she doing, then, at her sister’s at eleven o’clock, only five hours later? Watching the Vienna New Year Concert with a hangover?”

  Henrik said nothing. The cogs in his brain had started turning again.

  “It doesn’t say anything about it anywhere,” Hanne went on, her voice so low that he had to lean in closer. “No one asked the question – why did a sister who wasn’t especially close to Anna visit her twice in twenty-four hours?”