The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  THE FROZEN WOMAN

  In the depths of a Norwegian winter Vilhelm Thygesen discovers a frozen young woman in his garden. She has been stabbed to death. A well-known left-wing lawyer and no friend of the police, Thygesen is now sixty-three, given to wearing designer clothes and taking life easy. Stribolt and Vaage, the police officers assigned to the case, assume the victim was a drug courier from Eastern Europe.

  Shortly afterwards a young motorcyclist belonging to a biker gang once represented by Thygesen is killed in a motorcycle accident. His bike has been tampered with. The police set out to establish the connection between the frozen woman, the awkward customer who found her body and the bikers who are terrorising the neighbourhood.

  Winner of the Riverton Prize for Norway’s best crime novel, The Frozen Woman is a brilliant novel from one of Scandinavia’s finest crime writers.

  About the author

  © Hans Fredrik Asbjørnsen

  JON MICHELET

  One of the foremost Norwegian writers, Jon Michelet is a prolific writer of fiction, crime novels, plays and political books. He is renowned in Norway for his strong commitment to political and cultural causes. He has worked as a journalist, publisher, sailor and editor.

  Since his debut in 1975 he has published 25 books, a number of which have been translated into several languages. Some of his novels have been adapted both for film and television, most notably Orion’s Belt, which is regarded as Norway’s first modern action film. His popularity is largely due to his ability to meld the format of the detective story to his own literary social criticism.

  Michelet has been awarded the Riverton Prize for best Norwegian crime novel twice, for White As Snow (1980) and The Frozen Woman (2001). More recently, Michelet has experienced tremendous success with his epic sailor series, A Hero of the Sea, which draws attention to the efforts of Norwegian sailors during the Second World War in five volumes of work. Each of the eight hundred page volumes published has topped the bestseller lists from the start of 2012, making Michelet a household name in Norway.

  DON BARTLETT

  Don Bartlett lives with his family in a village in Norfolk. He completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2000 and has since worked with a wide variety of Danish and Norwegian authors, including Jo Nesbø and Karl Ove Knausgård.

  PRAISE FOR THE FROZEN WOMAN AND JON MICHELET

  ‘The best Norwegian crime novel this autumn by far’ – Dagbladet

  ‘Jon Michelet hits back with interest… Yes, this is Jon Michelet in sparkling linguistic and compositional form’ – Aftenposten

  1

  ‘What was your first reaction when you found her, Thygesen?’ Stribolt asks.

  Vilhelm Thygesen doesn’t answer. He has his eyes fixed on a point behind Stribolt, who observes the distracted look on Thygesen’s face and repeats the question in a sharper tone: ‘How did you react when you found the frozen body of the dead woman?’

  ‘There’s a woman trying to get in,’ Thygesen says, pointing with the stem of his pipe to the point he has been staring at. Stribolt wriggles on the leather sofa and catches sight of Vaage. She is standing on the glass veranda and fumbling with the handle of the door to Thygesen’s living room cum office. The low sun in the middle of the day, which is the second in February, a Friday, causes the frost patterns on the veranda window to glitter. Through the windows of the large log-house in Bestum the light angles in, giving the burlap wallpaper a warm glow, and is reflected by the golden letters on the spine of Norway’s Laws and other books on the shelves, causing the wisps of pipe smoke to become visible.

  ‘It’s not locked, but it’s awkward,’ Thygesen says, getting up and walking to the door.

  Stribolt struggles to deal with the unreality of the situation. He is sitting here on official business in the home of a man whose sun he had thought had long since set. A murky legend who, it transpires, is a living legend.

  Thygesen has a slight limp. His ponytail, which makes him look like an old hippie, swings back and forth. It doesn’t go with the Italian-tailored charcoal suit which Thygesen is wearing and definitely not the white shirt and grey-striped silk tie which matches the man’s hair almost too perfectly.

  To Stribolt it is unimaginable that Thygesen should comb his mane into a ponytail and wear a fashionable suit on a daily basis. He had expected a scruffier turnout. Leaving to meet Thygesen, he had assumed he would be confronted by a wreck, a shipwrecked mariner washed ashore on the sea of life.

  Stribolt makes a note on his pad lying on the coffee table: T has tarted himself up for us.

  Thygesen kicks the door as he twists the handle.

  A cold blast of air enters from the veranda. It is freezer temperature outside: minus 18 degrees. Ruddy-faced Vaage has frost on her dark fringe. She looks even more apple-cheeked and attractive than usual, Stribolt muses. Every time he works with Vaage he thinks he will have to have his hair cut as short as hers, take up squash again and get himself into shape. When he was last out on the town a slip of a girl told him he looked like a Buddha with a Beatles wig sliding off the back of his head. Not hard to say something like that when you are in the Buddha Bar, but he took it to heart and the sight of the clientele made him bristle with anger, all those tossers on financial steroids. Now it annoys him that Vaage is wearing an almost identical shiny blue pilot’s jacket to his. They aren’t in uniform. Although they look as if they are, just not a police uniform.

  ‘More like taxi drivers,’ Stribolt mumbles.

  Vaage removes her gloves, shakes Thygesen’s hand and introduces herself.

  ‘I’m also a Kripos detective,’ she says. ‘A chief inspector like my colleague Stribolt here.’

  ‘Coffee?’ Thygesen asks. ‘I’ve put a pot on.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Vaage says.

  Stribolt accepts.

  While Thygesen goes out, Vaage examines the room, clearly with some disapproval. Perhaps she thinks it is repugnant that a couple of logs are crackling away on the fire while a very cold woman is lying under a tarpaulin in a corner of Thygesen’s large, overgrown garden.

  ‘I thought this bugger Thygesen didn’t have two øre to rub together,’ Vaage says under her breath. ‘He’d gone to the dogs. Done for murder in the seventies, petty fraud in the nineties. Alkie and all-round dick. And then here he is, poncing around in this million-dollar pad in the West End of Oslo.’

  ‘It’s just a rambling old house,’ Stribolt says.

  ‘Imagine what he can get for this place, the plot alone. Why’s he trying to trick old dears out of the odd krone when he has all this?’

  ‘It’s dangerous to give credence to rumours,’ Stribolt answers, turning down the volume of the stereo, which is playing a jazz CD, possibly Miles Davis. ‘Our friends at Grønland Police HQ are not always well informed. The two fraud charges against Thygesen were dropped for lack of evidence.’

  ‘What we have in the garden is murder,’ Vaage says. ‘Premeditated murder, I would think. The poor girl has been hacked about in every conceivable way.’

  Vaage roams around restlessly and scrutinises a new, green transparent iMac on a computer desk, a thick book beside it, next to a south-facing window overlooking the garden.

  ‘Is Thygesen a member of some morose sect?’ she asks, lifting up the book.

  Lichtturm is written on the cover in big letters.

  ‘I think it’s a stamp catalogue,’ Stribolt says, trying not to let his voice sound too cutting. He has never got used to the sudden changes in Vaage’s temperament and deals with her forthrightness badly every time. She can be as capricious as the weather on his childhood coast.
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br />   ‘Right, I thought it might be one of those sect books,’ Vaage says. ‘Lighthouse or whatever it’s called. You’ve heard about Watchtower, haven’t you, Smartie Pants?’

  Stribolt has no time to respond. Thygesen makes his entry carrying a jug of espresso coffee and three small, brushed-steel cups on a tray.

  ‘We want permission to carry out a detailed inspection of the site,’ Vaage says.

  ‘Aren’t you doing that already?’ Thygesen answers, nodding towards the windows. Stribolt looks in the same direction. Down in the south-east corner of the snow-covered garden, where the bushes and scrub appear like frost-ridden trolls, the SOC team, wearing white overalls over thermal suits, are inspecting the area around the spruce tree where the woman was found. Three Kripos officers are busy in Skogveien. They are crouched down by the wire fence that borders Thygesen’s property from the road. Presumably they are looking for tyre marks in the snow. Two police cars are parked further up the road behind a cordon. One of them has a rotating blue light. Behind it there is a red Saab which Stribolt thinks he recognises – a press car from Akersgata, the Norwegian Fleet Street. A little crowd of curious onlookers has gathered by the cars, mostly schoolchildren by the look of it.

  ‘I’m referring to an inspection of the house,’ Vaage says.

  Thygesen places the tray on the coffee table. He fills all three cups and sits down in the Stressless, which clearly belongs to the man of the house, rests his right foot on a stool and lifts his cup.

  Stribolt notices Thygesen’s hands trembling. He has small hands, surprisingly brown for the middle of the winter, with a number of conspicuous liver spots.

  ‘The house,’ Thygesen repeats. ‘Is that really necessary?’

  ‘The officers in charge of this investigation have stated we definitely have to search your house,’ Vaage answers.

  ‘I see. I have a couple of legal objections. But I don’t want to be difficult. Odd that you’re both Nordlanders, by the way,’ Thygesen says. He lights his pipe with a match. Picks an imaginary crumb from his beard, which is the same colour as the espresso cups and as well brushed.

  Stribolt and Vaage exchange glances. Stribolt’s Finnmark dialect has faded so much, in his own opinion, that you would have to be a Linguistics Professor to hear that he is from Hammerfest. Even a professor would be deceived by his Oslo-acquired ‘a’ endings. It is easier for a layman to hear that Vaage is from Helgeland, the most southerly district of northern Norway.

  ‘You take the room at the end,’ Stribolt says to Vaage. ‘I’d like to finish this interview without any interruptions.’

  ‘Cool worktop,’ Vaage says, running her hand along the polished surface, which is made of a large piece of shiny black marble, three fingers thick. ‘Must have cost a fortune?’

  ‘It’s home-made,’ Thygesen answers. ‘I used to work with stone once upon a time.’

  Vaage must have forgotten she didn’t want any coffee. She takes a cup, drains it in two or three quick sips, goes out on to the veranda and starts talking on her phone.

  ‘Where were we?’ Stribolt asks.

  ‘You were asking me what my reaction was when I found her.’

  ‘Let me rewind a bit. I need more accurate personal details.’

  Stribolt checks his notes.

  ‘It’s correct that you’re 63 and on disability benefit, is it?’

  ‘Soon 64, and I prefer to call it a disability pension,’ Thygesen says. He pulls a face which Stribolt finds hard to interpret: is he offended or is he acting offended?

  ‘You have standards which do not seem to correspond to the image I have of people living on disability benefit.’

  Thygesen leans forward, knocks the ash out of his pipe and splays his palms.

  ‘The house and furniture are inherited. I have no debts. I have some rental income and I earn a fair bit buying and selling stamps over the internet.’

  ‘Like those on the screen?’ Stribolt asks, pointing to the iMac.

  ‘Yes, they’re African stamps from colonial times. Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Tanganyika.’

  Thygesen reaches over a stamp album and opens it at a page marked with a silk ribbon in Norwegian colours.

  ‘This is the closest I came to a Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav,’ Thygesen says, holding out the ribbon. ‘This is the same page you saw on the screen. I photograph album pages with a digital camera and put them on the net. If I can sell this collection I’ll earn 200 dollars.’

  Stribolt peers at the stamps, which have either the British Queen or an elephant as the motif. Kilimanjaro takes centre stage on one stamp.

  ‘Let’s drop the philately,’ he says. ‘Do you deal in badges and coins as well?’

  ‘On the odd occasion.’

  ‘I have a vague idea you run an unlicensed legal business.’

  ‘Your sources are not mistaken,’ Thygesen says. ‘Why wouldn’t I offer assistance to widows and the fatherless if they ask nicely? Society at large had no further use of me and dropped me like a dead fish. But in the micro-society around me there are deserving poor who may even need such a decrepit pedant as yours truly.’

  ‘Do you take a fee off them?’

  Thygesen shrugs.

  ‘And declare your earnings to the tax authorities?’ Stribolt enquires.

  ‘I thought you were Kripos, not the Fraud Squad.’

  Stribolt notices that Vaage’s irritation with Thygesen has rubbed off on him. It is a risk working as a pair, with one officer acting as the aggressive partner and the other playing the more laidback, reserved part. If the play-acting fails it is easy to slip into the other’s role. At the back of his head Stribolt hears the voices of the veterans there are left at Kripos when reports of the dead woman in Thygesen’s garden came in: Off you go. Catch the bastard now, once and for all. He was one of us in a way. He was a cop in his day, then he became a murderer.

  Now he is king of all he surveys here, Thygesen of all people, in a palace in the West End behaving like a mafioso. Teasing us with his under-the-table cash.

  ‘So it’s black money,’ Stribolt states.

  ‘Blacker than the night,’ Thygesen says, bursting into laughter. He has brown stains on his teeth. ‘But how I make a living should hardly concern a murder investigation. At least not as long as I have the status of a witness and not a suspect. I was skint for many years, scraping the bottom because of the demon drink. Then I managed to pick myself up by my bootstraps from the hell. Do you and your colleagues imagine I have lapsed into crime?’

  Stribolt grips the marble worktop. He would have loved to deflate Thygesen. Stick a sharp point in his skinny carcass – much thinner than on the photos in Kripos’s files – as he sits there shaking with extremely inappropriate laughter. Who gave Thygesen the idea that he was only a witness? He could become a suspect in a flash.

  ‘You said you went down the garden to cut off spruce twigs,’ Stribolt says. ‘So you had a knife on you?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Thygesen says. His laughter had subsided. His eyes had narrowed. ‘For Christ’s sake, you don’t think I stabbed her, whoever she is, do you? That I killed the little lady and left her under a tree in my own garden? Surely you can’t have such a fatuous working hypothesis.’

  ‘We’re keeping all avenues open,’ Stribolt says, annoyed that he lets such a cliché pass his lips. ‘What about the twigs?’

  ‘I’ve already told you.’

  ‘Try again.’

  Thygesen pours himself another cup of coffee and produces a little silver box from his jacket pocket. It contains snus, in pouch-form, to be placed under the top lip.

  Thygesen repeats that he realised no birds had been in the two corn sheaves he hung from the veranda posts for Christmas, despite how cold the weather had been.

  ‘Then it struck me I’d forgotten to add spruce twigs to the sheaves. As a landing p
lace for tits. I went down to lop some twigs off the spruces. When I pushed apart the lower branches I saw a body lying there.’

  Stribolt takes notes.

  ‘That is extremely suspicious,’ Thygesen says. ‘A man tending his Christmas corn sheaf in February.’

  ‘Spare me the sarcasm,’ Stribolt says.

  ‘Apologies. Do you think I’m made of iron or what? All this has been very upsetting.’

  ‘You went out at a quarter past six. That’s early, isn’t it?’

  ‘I usually get up early. I’d slept badly.’

  ‘Any special reason?’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with the case. I may come back to it. Someone close to me is in trouble. Maybe because of uranium. It’s a long story.’

  Stribolt sips at the espresso. It tastes of mafia, ergo Italian, ergo absolutely excellent. He asks whether Thygesen minds if he lights a cigarette, and is told, as he had expected from a smoker, that of course it is fine. He can feel the pressure, which always builds during an interview, lightening.

  ‘We have a time gap here,’ Stribolt says. ‘You found her at around six. But you didn’t alert the police until six forty-two.’

  ‘I needed time to think straight. Get over the shock. I knew I would come under suspicion, because of my criminal record.’

  ‘You said just now that suspecting you was a fatuous working hypothesis.’

  ‘OK. Forget it. I thought time wasn’t important. After all, she must have been there a good while. She was like deep-frozen. And then there were the tracks… they slightly unsettled me.’

  ‘What tracks?’ Stribolt asks, even though he knows the tracks he means: the tiny animals’ tracks around the body, which made him stop and swallow several times before he could continue examining the body.

  ‘You saw them yourself when you were down there doing a recce. Mouse tracks, I would say, in the thin layer of snow beneath the tree. Unless they were from a wild mink. I’m glad she was lying on her stomach. When I plucked up the courage to turn her over I was expecting the animals not only to have attacked her fingers but her face as well. And eyes. Thank God, though, everything was intact. I could see the blood on the light-coloured blouse was her own. I saw the rips in her clothing. After I’d seen enough I had to take a trip to the bathroom, if you know what I mean.’