The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  3

  ‘We’re a bit unsure about your movements, Thygesen,’ Stribolt says. ‘So we’d like to have another conversation.’

  ‘Is this a formal interview?’ Thygesen asks, planting his elbows on the kitchen table and leaning forward.

  His eyes are bloodshot, as though he hasn’t slept for several days. Or as though he has been crying, it strikes Stribolt. The drained facial expression is reinforced by his apparel, not the suit, as during the previous Kripos visit, but scruffy working clothes. Thygesen is wearing a Nordic sweater with holes in the sleeves, heavy-duty trousers for use when handling a chainsaw and coarse woollen socks inside his clogs. His hair is hanging down loose, no hippie pigtail, under a cap that looks as if it was knitted during the Inca period in the Andes. When they first arrived they found Thygesen in the woodshed where he was yanking at a chainsaw pull cord and cursing that the machine wouldn’t start.

  ‘Yes,’ Vaage says.

  Snowflakes drift across the high kitchen window. On the floor by the zinc basin unit, which has to be as old as the house, there is a paraffin burner on a low flame. Thygesen has offered them a coffee. Stribolt thinks it tastes as if it has been made with the dregs left over from a day or two ago.

  ‘Am I going to be photographed, and is there going to be another house search?’ Thygesen asks.

  Vaage has a Kripos camera hanging around her neck and a headlight around her forehead. They argued about this in the car coming over; Vaage insisted police equipment increased their authority and put the interviewee at a disadvantage. In which case, Stribolt retorted, the simplest thing to do would be to brandish a pistol.

  Vaage doesn’t answer Thygesen’s question.

  Stribolt puts his notepad on the wax cloth with the Delft-blue windmills. He tries to catch Thygesen’s eye, but his eyes are evasive.

  ‘You said you’ve been to the centre of Oslo twice since the New Year,’ Stribolt states. ‘The last time was the first of February, in other words, the day before you found Picea dead in your garden.’

  ‘Picea?’

  ‘Our nickname for the deceased.’

  ‘So you haven’t identified her. You don’t have a clue who she is,’ Thygesen says.

  ‘We have a number of leads,’ Vaage answers, ‘and are confident we’ll have a clear ID as we speak.’

  Thygesen gets up demonstratively, takes the coffee pot and empties the dregs into the sink. With his back to us, he says: ‘You can’t kid me. I’m afflicted by a terrible far-sightedness at the moment.’

  He fills the pot with water and puts it on a hotplate on the stove, the only item in the kitchen which isn’t old-fashioned. He continues to talk to the police with his back to them: ‘I can see from here to Sarajevo. I apologise for not showing more interest in your business, but I’ve received bad news from down there. The worst possible, apart from news of a death.’

  Thygesen says he has received a message about the tumour that Vera Alam had surgically removed.

  ‘We’re sorry to hear that, of course,’ Stribolt says. ‘But we have a job to do. So you went to the demonstration?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Thygesen says, sitting down on the creaky wooden chair. ‘I went to the torchlight procession to pay my respects to the boy who’d been murdered by neo-Nazis.’

  ‘What motivated you to do that?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘I don’t think I have to justify my actions,’ Thygesen says. ‘Let’s say I delved into my inner self, down to a kind of old political bedrock hidden under several layers of sediment. Vera called from Sarajevo to tell me she would’ve gone to the procession to commemorate Benjamin Hermansen if she’d been at home. So I went for her as well.’

  ‘Alone?’ Stribolt asks.

  Thygesen nods.

  ‘Did you meet anyone who can testify to your presence?’

  ‘Did someone recognise me, do you mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stribolt answers.

  ‘Fortunately hardly anyone recognises me in the street any longer. The thirty to forty thousand people in the procession were probably busy keeping an eye out for the Crown Prince and his squeeze.’

  ‘Squeeze. Really!’ Vaage bursts out.

  ‘Fiancée then,’ Thygesen responds, in a mock-submissive voice, with a sudden glint in his eye. ‘Let me add that I also carried a torch because it’s my twenty-five-year celebration this year. It’s twenty-five years now since I was convicted for the wilful murder of an old Nazi with an Iron Cross. The fight against Nazism cost me a few years of my life, maybe half of it. Without a tear of bitterness I think I can say that I’d never have been charged today – it was the hysterical climate of the seventies that sent me to Ullersmo Prison. If you’ve considered the irony of me returning from the procession to commemorate the murder of a young man with an African father to find a young woman, from distant parts, in my garden, who had also been stabbed, in the midst of this Norwegian idyll, I can tell you it wasn’t lost on me either. It may sound like black magic, but I don’t believe in voodoo.’

  Thygesen pours coarsely ground coffee into the pot. He tells them he has something to do while the coffee is brewing.

  Stribolt doodles a magnificent fish on his pad. Vaage shines her headlight on a corner cabinet that serves as a store for coffee and shelving for cookery books. She pulls out one and shows it to Stribolt. It is Slettan and Øie’s Crime and Punishment – Criminal Law Manual.

  ‘Wonder why he’s got a matchstick on page 445, about petty theft,’ Vaage says.

  Stribolt has no answer, nor any questions. He stares out of the window. The snow is getting thicker now.

  ‘If it isn’t drugs, it’s sex,’ Vaage carries on. ‘Thygesen sells stamps over the internet. So he might also be looking for women. Poverty-stricken girls. He lures Picea. She isn’t having any of it. Men’s impotence can be a cause for murder. In blind frustration he kills her. He’s more bloodthirsty than we thought. Imagine him using his knife on her in the woodshed. There won’t be any trace of blood in all the oil, wood-shavings and general gunge covering the ground. And he leaves her there until she is frozen through. Then, after days – or weeks! – he carries Picea down the garden, hides her under the spruce and pretends he found her there. He threw the murder weapon into Bestum Bay ages ago. The other knives he holds on to are just a blind.’

  ‘One snag with your hypothesis is that the bay has been frozen over since before Christmas,’ Stribolt says.

  ‘So there’s a frost-free marina, an open… what the hell was that?’

  The sound of an engine exploding into life is what shocks them into silence. They see Thygesen coming out of the woodshed with the chainsaw on full blast and a grin on his chops. He revs the saw.

  Before Stribolt has a chance to be truly shocked Thygesen presses the stop button. The roar dies like the death rattle of a beheaded dinosaur.

  Vaage marches out. Stribolt stares through the kitchen window. She gives him a good tongue-lashing. In his defence all he has to say is that he went to the outside toilet and as he passed through the woodshed he was tempted to try the Jonsered, which often roars into life when it has cooled down after a few failed pulls.

  Thygesen tries to put on the charm and says that one of the few pleasures he has in life is getting the saw to start.

  ‘Pathetic,’ Vaage snaps.

  In her harpy moods she wouldn’t be charmed if the Angel Gabriel himself came down from the sky, Stribolt thinks, and doodles an angel.

  A barely chastened Thygesen washes his hands with Sunlight under the kitchen tap. The smell of the soap reminds Stribolt of the washroom in the Findus factory where his mother and several aunts earned their crust, and where he had his first kiss, with a fish-gutter from Kuusamo.

  Coffee and a cigarette will help him out of the mental vacuum. You are allowed to smoke in Thygesen’s kitchen. It is a liberal house. On the face of it. Stribolt can
’t bring himself to think that it is the house of a murderer.

  ‘Thygesen, you stated that you went to a restaurant with your friend Levin and his partner on Saturday 27 January,’ Stribolt says in as forceful a tone as he can muster and notices a little uncertainty on Thygesen’s face.

  ‘That’s right,’ Thygesen answers.

  ‘Was there any special reason for choosing this restaurant?’ Stribolt asks.

  ‘None except that Bernie wanted to show that gentlemen prefer blondes or vice versa.’

  ‘Which means?’ Vaage grunts.

  ‘He’d pulled a blonde bimbo in his old age and was childishly proud of it.’

  Stribolt takes a computer printout from his bag on which he has circled Arcimboldo and Kunsternes Hus with a red pen. He puts it on the table so that Thygesen can see.

  ‘You said the dinner was in a restaurant in Kunsternes Hus,’ Stribolt says. ‘Anything about that statement you’d like to change?’

  ‘No,’ Thygesen says, taking off his cap and wiping his forehead with his hand.

  Vaage gets up, heads for the kitchen door, turns suddenly and asks: ‘What if we tell you the restaurant’s been closed since October for building work?’

  ‘Then I’ll say we had our cod dish served on a pile of planks.’

  ‘This will be easier if you cut the crap,’ Vaage says.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Thygesen says. ‘From my point of view I’d say everything would be easier on both sides if you’d cut out the good cop, bad cop routine. If I said Arcimboldo, it was a slip of the tongue.’

  Stribolt lets a silence develop and carefully counts the number of times the restaurant, named after an Italian artist, is mentioned in Thygesen’s statement. Four, he concludes. He tells Thygesen, and adds: ‘You don’t seem like the sort of person who is prone to such lapses.’

  ‘Oh, I am,’ Thygesen answers, tight-faced. ‘Can’t a lot of what we’ve said over a lifetime be characterised as lapses? Chit-chat and rubbish.’

  Now it is Stribolt’s turn to get up and go for a walk, on the pretext of collecting his phone from the car. The snow falls on his head. Perhaps it will clear his brain so that he can find a crack in Thygesen’s mask.

  In all theatres of the world there is one mask on the wall smiling and one crying. The double mask is a valid symbol not only for comedy and tragedy on the stage but all of life’s scenes, that has always been Stribolt’s opinion. One moment his idol Sundquist is gaping at a skull; the next Sundquist is grasping a stupid banana and acting in a Beckett play.

  Stribolt takes a visible position outside the kitchen window and pretends to be talking on the phone.

  Vaage sits inside and seems to be trying to stare Thygesen into the ground. It won’t help. They have nothing on him. If the restaurant faux pas had really been fatal for Thygesen, he would have shown some sign of it, perhaps he would have cracked already.

  Stribolt goes back in, brushes the snow off his clothes and pours himself more coffee. Silence has descended over the kitchen table with the windmill cloth. He breaks it with a question, not directed at Thygesen but Vaage: ‘Perhaps we ought to consider a charge of giving false information? I’ve asked our lawyer for advice.’

  ‘Now you’re taking this business much too far,’ Thygesen says.

  He says he hadn’t realised that the Kunsternes Hus, or Huset, as he calls it, has been closed all winter. It used to be one of his fixed watering holes when he liked to hang out with bohemians, but it is many years since he has been there.

  ‘If Huset really was closed obviously I was wrong when I said we ate there. But if you think this little lie can clear up a murder investigation you’re fooling yourselves. We were at Lorry pub, very close to Kunsternes Hus. If it’s of any interest I’m sure I have hundreds of witnesses there. Bernie had a bit to drink and sang what he thought were Jewish songs from the Warsaw ghetto. I had a drop too much as well. Perhaps that explains why I made the little boo-boo I did, about where we were at closing time.’

  Stribolt steals a glance at Vaage and guesses she is thinking the boo-boo Thygesen wants to talk about is taking home an exotic young stranger, and then everything went wrong, and so he killed her.

  ‘You were on the pull?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘Not at all. Bernie’s blonde’s stupid behaviour had cured me of any desire I might have felt for a woman that night. But I did do something that might be considered a crime.’

  ‘Come on then,’ Vaage says.

  ‘I stole a coat,’ Vilhelm Thygesen says.

  ‘You stole a coat?’

  ‘Yes, I stole a coat. Yes, that’s how deep I sank.’

  ‘A coat,’ Vaage sighs.

  ‘A camel-hair coat, designed by the great Armani. If you report me, I don’t think it will qualify as petty theft. I’ll say it was a mix-up. The coat was similar to mine, which I couldn’t find in the hurry to leave. Under torture I’ll probably confess petty theft, but will plead “extenuating circumstances”, as in clause 391 of the Penal Code, for the mildest possible punishment. I can claim that it was easy to make a mistake with so many drunken, jostling people leaving at the same time and impossible in the scrum to find the coat’s rightful owner.’

  ‘Spare us the legal niceties,’ Vaage says. ‘Can you prove you stole this bloody coat?’

  ‘Well, it’s here. Hanging in the hall, and your colleague was slavering over it the last time you were here.’

  ‘What are you laughing at, Arve?’ Vaage hisses.

  ‘I’m not laughing at all, I’m coughing. I think I’m getting a cold,’ Stribolt answers. ‘Could I ask you for another drop of coffee?’

  Thygesen isn’t gloating, Stribolt observes, as though he had outmanoeuvred us and pulled the wool over our eyes with his coat wheeze. He quickly reverts to grieving over the news from Sarajevo, which probably – the world basically tending to be more of a tragic than a comic place – is that Vera Alam’s tumour turned out to be malignant.

  ‘I have to sort out a loan so that I can fly to Belgrade,’ Thygesen says. ‘I have a meeting with Levin at his place in Bjørnsletta in three-quarters of an hour. So I’ll have to be off very soon. And I have nothing more to say, except about police work, and this I really mean.’

  ‘I suppose we’ve finished here,’ Vaage says and gets up.

  ‘No, we haven’t,’ Stribolt says.

  Surprised by his brusqueness, Vaage slumps back on to her chair.

  ‘I was a cop in the last century,’ Thygesen says. ‘To be frank, I wasn’t much of one, and in that sense have nothing I can teach you. But I’ve been round the block. Many times. In the twenty-first century Kriminalpolitisentral you’re probably all good boys and girls, well used to reform and restructuring and whatever the terms are in bureaucratic language today. Nevertheless, I think you’re not aware of the new reality – such as the case you’re trawling through now. You don’t know the identity of the victim and my guess is you never will know. So you won’t find the murderer either.’

  ‘Don’t get too cocky now, Thygesen,’ Vaage says.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with cockiness. This is about an objective analysis. I’ve been on the open Interpol website in Lyon. You’ll be horrified by the statistics on unidentified women from the Third World who have been murdered here in Europe. You can search the statistics that are not open to us and you probably know much more than I do about this. Perhaps the case of… what do you call her?… Pinea?’

  ‘Picea,’ Stribolt says.

  ‘… gives us a glimpse of the future, also for cops in Norway, in the part of Fortress Europe that we constitute, where the visa-less refugees from poverty in Faroffistan are slipping through the cracks in the wall. Most to find happiness in the form of work and money, some to meet unhappiness in the form of a sudden death. Among the sudden deaths there appear to be more and more women used and abused, by pimps and
drug dealers, by shady employers and cruel husbands who buy themselves a wife and then jettison her down the rubbish chute after they’ve had their use of them. There’ll be many of these victims in the future: rejected women, mutilated. Frozen – like the woman I found. And then there are all the children. They’ll be gone, scattered like chaff before the wind, blown into ditches, swept into landfill dumps, brushed into the gutters of the Boulevarde de Stalingrad in Paris, disfigured in a backyard in Berlin, shot in a shed in Skopje.’

  Thygesen gets up and opens the fridge door, locates a carafe and takes three port glasses from a cabinet.

  ‘Let’s swallow the bitter with the sweet,’ he says. ‘This is a vintage redcurrant wine from the red seventies when we had a dream – insanely foolish, eh? – about humans not being treated as commodities.’

  ‘I’m driving,’ Vaage says.

  ‘We came in the old Nissan jalopy, so I’ll be driving, Vanja,’ Stribolt says. ‘It’s no secret that with snow under the wheels I drive best on a dram.’

  They gently touch glasses and soon take their leave. Thygesen dons a parka that matches the work clothes he is wearing.

  From the Nissan, Stribolt watches Thygesen walk towards Skogveien, bent forwards into the snow, the parka hood over his head. Soon he is out of sight.

  Stribolt puts the 4x4 into gear.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘At least we cleared up the unreported theft of a coat.’

  4

  It is Friday 2 March. Exactly a month has passed since the frozen corpse of the murdered woman was found in Vilhelm Thygesen’s garden.

  Vanja Vaage and Arve Stribolt have sat down on a bench against the sunny wall on the roof terrace outside the canteen of the new Kripos building in Oslo East.

  The low afternoon sun doesn’t warm much, but they are sick of sitting indoors and Stribolt is dying for a cigarette.

  They have spent a couple of hours summarising how much, or how little, progress they have made after a month’s work on the investigation. As from 1 March Vaage has been taken off the Picea case. Stribolt is left to run it on his own.