by Anne Holt
The policeman paid no attention to the former Kripos investigator. He walked forward with no expression and did not stop until he was a yard from Billy T.
“You have to come with us,” he said softly. “Now, right away. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Billy T.”
“Apologies for taking so long,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, once she had opened the door. “Your insignia are on the wrong way.”
“What?”
Henrik Holme’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, as if in the process of coming loose. In confusion, he tried to peer at his shoulders, but gave himself a pain in his eyes and neck.
“Wrong way?”
“Forget it. I take it you’re Henrik Holme.”
“Yes.”
He lifted a pale, perspiring hand, but grew perplexed when she quickly whipped the wheelchair back.
“Come in,” she said, wheeling toward the living room. “Close the door behind you.”
Henrik Holme did not quite know what he was supposed to do. He gazed down at his own feet. In uniform, you should never walk about in your stocking soles. However, a large shelf for shoes was sitting rather insistently in front of him, and the vast expanse of flooring looked bright and new.
“Are you coming?”
Her voice seemed so far away.
“Yes,” he shouted. “I’m just—”
“Take off your shoes, even though you’re in uniform. The floor’s new. I won’t tell tales.”
Henrik Holme exhaled in relief and loosened his laces earnestly before liberating his feet. He used his thumb to rub away a mark on his left heel and placed both shoes neatly on the shoe shelf, before pulling the laces forward in four parallel lines, all exactly equal in length. He hung his uniform jacket on a hanger in the closet. Then he picked up the bulky document case he had brought with him from police headquarters and stepped into the living room as confidently as he could without shoes on.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said formally.
“Just a minute, please.”
Henrik had never seen such an enormous TV except in stores. This one must be at least seventy inches wide. Even the soundboard was bigger than the old analogue set he had inherited from his grandmother, which was so colossal and cumbersome there was scarcely room for anything else in his studio apartment.
“News broadcast?” he asked, blushing again—the two news anchors speaking to the camera and the NRK logo made the question somewhat redundant.
The skinny woman in the wheelchair did not answer.
On-screen, the focus changed to a press conference. Henrik immediately recognized the three main participants seated behind a narrow table in a room chock full of journalists and photographers.
Chief of Police Silje Sørensen seemed so tiny. It struck Henrik that she seemed to disappear, placed as she was between the head of the Security Service, a hefty guy with red hair and beard, and the female Police Commissioner, Caroline Bae. Commissioner Bae must weigh more than 220 pounds, but since she was almost six foot two in height and moreover had what Henrik’s mother called a pretty face, she appeared more like a fairly elegant Amazon rather than actually overweight.
The Oslo Police Chief was small and slender.
Until she opened her mouth.
“We are going to be relatively brief this time,” she said in such a loud, mature voice that a sound technician’s hand shot out in a trice to pull the microphone farther away from her. “However, we are planning a considerably longer session this afternoon. Our main intention for the moment is to provide a short summary covering three points. At present I’d like to bring your attention to the following: the police are aware of the identity of the man who sent a video to TV2 last night in which he—on behalf of the up-until-now-unknown organization the Prophet’s True Ummah—accepted responsibility for yesterday’s terrorist attack. Nevertheless, we are not going to publicize his name as yet. I assure . . .”
The document case was heavy. Henrik studied the newly laid floor once again. The case might be dirty after sitting in the luggage compartment of the patrol car that had sped him from police headquarters to Frogner. Instead of putting it down, he shifted it from his right hand to his left.
“. . . also make it clear that we have established a comprehensive investigation, in which . . .”
Hanne Wilhelmsen still hadn’t invited him to sit down.
It annoyed Henrik that her wheelchair had knocked him off his perch. He had known that she was disabled. The shooting incident that had almost cost her life, and caused her to withdraw completely, was part of the mythology that everyone in the Oslo Police Force knew. Her chair was small and light, with big, slanting wheels. It crossed his mind that it was almost like the ones he was familiar with from parasports. The rumors insisted that she almost never ventured outside, but this living room was spacious enough for a game of basketball. At least.
She was actually quite attractive, even though she was old. Fifty, anyway. Just as old as his mother. Maybe older, even though her hair was not completely gray yet.
Her shoulders were so narrow.
She sat so still.
Henrik tried to force all the air he could manage down into his lungs: he had started to hiccup. Maybe he could go to the bathroom. Drink something.
Silje Sørensen was still holding forth at the press conference: “. . . anything other than an amateurish explosive charge. On the contrary. So we are not talking about a large bomb that had to be conveyed to the site—for example, in a vehicle. The investigation so far suggests a compact bomb of professional type, installed in the building itself in advance of the explosion. Out of consideration for the ongoing police work, we cannot comment any further on that at present.”
A huge commotion ensued. Despite the Police Chief’s clear orders for silence until all three of the panelists had concluded, she was immediately bombarded with questions in all the languages of the world.
Hanne Wilhelmsen switched off the TV.
“Would you like some water?” she asked, without looking at him.
“Yes, please.”
“The glasses are in the cabinet above the sink. There’s a water and ice dispenser out there.”
She pointed a long, thin finger right past him.
“Do you know what I think is strange?” he said as he once again changed his grip on the document case.
“No. Could you bring a glass for me too?”
“That this gang here . . . hic . . . has the competence to build a professional bomb.”
“What gang?”
“The Prophet’s True Ummah—them.”
Hanne Wilhelmsen shrugged and trundled across to the dining table.
“We know far too little to be able to say anything whatsoever about their possible competence,” she said indifferently. “Are you going to get that water?”
Henrik could feel himself blushing again. With his free hand, he quickly and lightly rubbed his nose three times. Since he didn’t know where he could put down the case, he carried it with him in the direction she had pointed.
“I can get the water,” she said. “Put your case here, won’t you? And take a seat.”
He turned around and was sure that she cracked a smile when she put her hand on a massive dining table by the window, still without looking at him.
“Uh . . . yes. Of course.”
Only now did he notice that the windowpane was cracked in a diagonal line. The explosion, undoubtedly: it couldn’t have been many hundred yards away as the crow flies. He warily placed the document case at the far edge of the table. When she did not protest, he sat down.
“You see,” he ventured when she returned immediately afterward with two glasses of water held between her thighs. “If we’re talking about a compact bomb, then we can really only be talking about one of two types. You can have scattered charges with high-speed high explosives, or you can use thermobaric—”
“Here,” she interrupted, setting one of the glasses on the table in front of h
im.
“A lid,” he muttered, fumbling to remove it. “So . . . practical. When you’re in a wheelchair, at least. Hic.”
“I don’t just sit in this chair all the time. And I can’t entirely understand why these papers couldn’t simply be sent by courier.”
“Uh . . . I’m supposed to brief you as well, in a sense. And maybe assist you if—”
“Feel free. Brief away.”
Nudging a chair aside, she rolled her own wheelchair into place directly opposite him.
“How come you know so much about explosives?”
“I know a bit of everything about quite a lot of stuff.”
Yet again Henrik felt a blush rise from his neck. Patchy, he knew, and pretty deep. He opened the document case and swiftly withdrew a thick bundle of papers in a green cover.
“A missing persons case,” he said. “From 1996.”
He swallowed a hiccup.
Hanne Wilhelmsen sat for a moment or two gazing at the extensive folder. After a while, she pulled it closer and lifted it with both hands. Toward her nose.
“Are you smelling it?” he blurted out.
She did not reply. Her eyes were closed. She was damn well sniffing an old case. Since it was a fresh copy and not the original papers for the investigation, there couldn’t be much to smell. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, she slapped the gigantic bundle on the tabletop. The loud bang made him jump out of his skin. He jerked back in his chair so violently that it narrowly avoided toppling over.
“What . . . what are you doing?” he stammered once he had regained his balance.
“Shh.”
“But—”
“Shh.”
He kept his mouth shut. His ears were ringing, an unpleasant tinnitus that always afflicted him when he was under stress.
“You see,” she said eventually. “Your hiccups have stopped.”
She had conjured up a laptop. Henrik caught himself running his fingers under the table surface to see if there was a drawer. They found nothing. He could not see what she was logging into, but after a few seconds she pushed the machine to one side, open to her, but with the screen concealed from him.
“A missing persons inquiry,” she said in a monotone, and began to leaf through the papers.
“Yes. A young girl. Karina Knoph. Seventeen years old when she vanished on her way home from school.”
“In the afternoon, then.”
“Yes. She was in her first year at Foss High School. That’s located in Grünerløkka.”
She peered at him over her glasses.
The look may not have been disdainful, but it was at least sufficiently reproving to make the damned Adam’s apple go berserk again. Quick as a wink, Henrik touched the side of his nose three times, before thrusting both hands down between his thighs.
“You know that, of course. She was sort of . . .”
He licked his lips.
“A sort of slightly artistic type, I think.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Eh . . . there are pictures in there. She had blue hair.”
Hanne Wilhelmsen immersed herself in the papers. She sat for a long time with some of the documents; others she leafed quickly through. Individual sheets were marked with yellow sticky notes that had also appeared as if from nowhere. Maybe she had some kind of shelf underneath her chair, he thought, and had to steel himself to avoid bending down to take a look.
Now and then she lifted her eyes from the papers and checked the laptop. Only a few seconds each time. He would have liked to be able to see the screen.
“Do you know,” she said all of a sudden, taking off her glasses before leaning back in her chair, “I remember this case.”
“Yes, is that so?”
“I was never involved in it myself. But it aroused some considerable fuss, as I recall. The way young girls who disappear always do.”
“At least if they are of Norwegian extraction,” he let slip, before rapidly adding an apology.
“Nothing to apologize for. It’s a pretty accurate observation. Have you acquainted yourself with this case?”
He nodded, swallowing.
“What’s your opinion, then?”
Now she had folded her arms across her chest, squinting skeptically at him, like an examiner in front of a nervous exam candidate.
“My opinion? Well . . . no.”
“Yes.”
Henrik freed his hands from their captivity between his thighs and began to drum on the table with all ten fingers.
“It failed miserably from day one,” he said quickly. “For some reason or other, the police got it into their heads that her father was involved in her disappearance.”
She nodded, only just. No longer squinting at him, now merely looking at him. Right at him: it was impossible for him to avert his gaze. Only now did he notice her eyes. They were an intense pale blue—two marbles filled with glacial water. A circle, black as coal, around the outside edge of the iris held the water in place and made her look as if she had been Photoshopped.
“They didn’t get along very well,” he continued. “The father was a football coach in the top divisions. They had moved around a lot in connection with that. When Karina had started at Foss, they were actually supposed to move again, because her father had secured the job as coach at Sandefjord. She refused to go. She had joined a band, and they had actually succeeded in obtaining the occasional gig. Besides . . .”
He leaned partially forward and froze as he made a move toward the documents.
“May I?”
“Be my guest.”
“Here,” he said, more eager now, browsing through the papers to find a photograph. “She doesn’t exactly look like an athlete, does she?”
Hanne glanced at the photo of a young woman with blue hair in bunches high on her head, a piercing in her left nostril, and slightly too much makeup.
“She looks like the cartoon character Cyan,” she said.
Henrik smiled for the first time since he had arrived.
“Yes, she does look like her. But Nemi didn’t become a comic strip character until 1997. Cyan appeared even later, I think.”
His fingers began to drum again.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “What else have you thought?”
“The conflict with her father was the focus from the very first hour. In fact the police didn’t do anything much. At the beginning, I mean. Her mother had started to get worried that very afternoon, but bearing in mind that Karina and her father had had a massive quarrel that morning, she wasn’t reported missing until around nine o’clock that night.”
He slipped his hands under his thighs and gulped.
“Since the girl was seventeen, it actually took a couple of days before the investigation took off. And this coach dad of hers must have made a pretty awful impression on our colleagues, because it seems to me that they had their eye trained on him and kept it there.”
“Stupid.”
“Yes.”
“That sort of thing happens too often.”
“Yes.”
He nodded enthusiastically and reached out for other documents.
“Oh, shit,” she said, suddenly leaning over to the laptop.
“What is it?” he asked, but received no answer.
For more than a minute, she sat reading. Scrolling from time to time, then reading on. Henrik was tempted to stand up and skirt around to her side to see what was on the screen but did not dare. Instead he remained seated and let his eyes scan the immense living room while he forced himself not to take out his hands again and start to drum his fingers.
“You’ll have to go,” she said abruptly.
“But we haven’t finished with—”
“Sorry. This is more important.”
“But we haven’t even—”
His eyes shifted from the document case, where the other cold cases sat untouched, to the open folder that lay between them.
“A policeman has been arre
sted in connection with yesterday’s bomb,” she said.
“A . . . a policeman?”
“Yes. Or, more correctly, a former policeman. A former policeman I once knew.”
“Have they made his name public already? That would be—”
“No. But they describe him. What he did in the police and what he’s doing now. Several years in the Drug Squad and later a detective in the Violent Crime Section. What’s more, they mention how old he is. There’s not a soul who worked in the Oslo Police in the nineties who wouldn’t immediately recognize whom that description fits.”
She took a deep breath and let it slip out slowly once again.
“And now you have to go.”
She closed the laptop with a little click and wheeled herself away from the table.
“Leave the folders there,” she mumbled so softly that Henrik almost did not hear her, until she raised her voice and added, “You can find your own way out.”
Billy T. imagined himself trapped in one of those endless nightmares in which he wandered around in an ever-narrowing maze without ever finding the exit. The Chief Inspector who sat opposite him must be relatively new in Oslo. She was well over forty, but Billy T. had never seen her before. Now and then he squeezed his eyes shut, only to open them again quickly in the hope of discovering that it was all in fact just a dream. Red dots flickered behind his eyelids. His mouth felt dry, no matter how much he helped himself from the generous pitcher of water that Chief Inspector Havenes had placed in front of him.
“Darth Vader,” she repeated for what must be the fifth time in the course of the past half hour. “So the dead man had a toy under his jacket.”
Billy T. shook his head in consternation.
“It wasn’t a toy. It was a collector’s figure, I’ve told you.”
“It’s just the same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Okay then.”
The woman who now inclined her head and gazed at him from beneath heavy eyelids let the tip of her tongue slide slowly over lips that would soon have no red pigment left.
“Could that be why you stole it? Because a collector’s figure might have far greater value than a toy?”