The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  In Swedish there is an expression ‘a cat among ermine’ and Ryland is the cat.

  That suits him fine, a shaggy, grey street cat, a decent Social Democrat among all the smarty pants who think money creates money and don’t understand it is work that creates capital, productive work.

  The Hermelins have, in the hearing of SNO employees, called him ‘an anachronistic fool’, a man from the past, a man who doesn’t understand that industrial capital must lose to financial capital, these are new times and the Labour Party’s narrative as the industry party is on the wane.

  Ryland lets the four men get out first. They disappear in a cloud of exorbitant aftershave. He goes out into Tordenskiolds gate, which is now in shade from the Town Hall. The carillon in the eastern tower plays a folk melody. He can never remember which one it is; he doesn’t have an ear for it. But the fragile sound of the bells high above the town makes him think of the poet Rudolf Nilsen’s poem ‘In the Middle of the Town’, even if the bells that made Nilsen’s heart swing with joy were not the Town Hall’s but the Post Office’s.

  Long, too long, my heart was without song.

  But now I live in the middle of the city where I used to belong,

  and my heart leaps with joy to hear the Post House gong!

  The city, ah always the city, until I should pass away.

  Like an electric lamp when its filament has had its day.

  Can I lighten the town to make the mood less grey?

  You’ve got to have ice in your guts, you have to bide your time, Ryland thinks as he hums the verses walking through the sweaty crowd on the pavement and crossing the street called after another naval hero, one who saw more ice than most Norwegians, the great Arctic explorer, Otto Sverdrup.

  Ryland buys an ice cream at the kiosk on the corner of the Town Hall square. People call it a krone ice cream, but of course it doesn’t cost a krone any more, it costs fifteen. However, the fact that it doesn’t cost more is a sign that the mixed economy model is still keeping inflation in check. Which shows that it is possible to steer an economy despite globalisation. He is a central piece in the game to ensure that kind of control. He cannot let covert threats sweep such a piece off the table.

  He walks into the burning sun in the finest square in Oslo, which now really is magnificent. In his time on the city council he fought to convert the magnificent Town Hall square from being a motorway into becoming a living, traffic-free market place. The project was ratified. Where ten thousand cars a day used to whizz past there is now a single tram. Ingratitude being the reward in this world, as soon as the Town Hall project was complete, the Labour Party was voted out of office.

  Fountains cool the square. The fjord glitters like rippling filigree silver outside Honnør wharf.

  Ernst Filtvedt is sitting as arranged on a bench in the shadow of ‘the ladies with the biggest tits in town’ – sculptor Emil Lie’s colossal bronze women. If you hadn’t known Filtvedt was one of the country’s most experienced journalists, you wouldn’t think he was a gentleman of the press but a tramp. A tousle-haired man who always reminds Ryland of the old radio tune ‘There’s Nothing Up Top, It’s All Round About’, wearing a navy blue blazer which looks as if it was washed in salt water, and shiny Terylene trousers. In the sixties when Filtvedt came ashore for good and began to write about the launching of ships in Sjøfarten he was well dressed, like a chief officer on shore leave. When Sjøfarten became Dagens Næringsliv, a business newspaper, and the house gradually filled with Bolsheviks in corduroy suits and leather ties, Filtvedt thought he had to show it was he who, despite his liberal opinions, came from the genuine working class; Tofte in Hurum, to be precise. He adopted the vagrant look that deceived many a finance director into thinking he was a half-wit.

  It is claimed about Filtvedt that when Dagens Næringsliv editor Kåre Valebrokk made his famous remark that a journalist should smell of beer after lunch, Filtvedt said at a morning meeting that all journalists who don’t smell of beer before breakfast are wimps, unworthy of such a noble profession.

  Ryland thinks he has seen through Filtvedt’s masquerade. He knows that the shabby outfit is a façade and the man never touches a drop – except perhaps for an extremely light wine – until the working day is over.

  He sits down on the bench beside Filtvedt and is immediately enveloped in a cloud of beer vapour. He bolts down the ice cream. They are both surprised when he accepts the cigarette that Filtvedt offers him.

  ‘You have to be in deep shit if you accept a Camel,’ Filtvedt says. ‘It’s not like you to eat ice cream or land in personal trouble. Tell me more.’

  ‘I’ve been receiving blackmail letters and death threats.’

  ‘Not bad. And now you think Kingo really wants to destroy you with any means at his disposal?’

  ‘The few antennae I have tell me Kingo’s not behind this. Not even Kingo would involve a lady in this to discredit me.’

  ‘Lady? You’re not running about with women, are you?’

  ‘On top of which she’s dead.’

  ‘This just gets better and better,’ Filtvedt says, scratching the hair on his neck. ‘News to me that you were a necrophiliac, Gerry Ryland.’

  ‘It’s the woman who was found murdered in Bestum last winter. In Thygesen’s garden. The ne’er-do-well, you know, who used to be a lawyer.’

  ‘Now this is beginning to look like a story.’

  Filtvedt hauls a bedraggled notebook from his jacket pocket and, after a great deal of effort, also a biro that works.

  His effort is in vain.

  ‘No notes, thank you,’ Ryland says in a brusque MD-voice. ‘Everything said here stays between us. Deal?’

  ‘Rotten deal, but OK. If anything has to leak, I want to be the channel. Who dropped the dead woman in your lap?’

  ‘You’ll find out the little I know and understand. First, flick through these.’

  Ryland opens his briefcase and gives Filtvedt copies of the two blackmail letters.

  A negress – at least that was what they were called when Ryland was a student in London and saw dark-skinned women from every corner of the empire – walks past, straight-backed. Although she is swathed in textiles even he, who normally doesn’t care about such matters, can sense the rotation of her hips.

  ‘Right, you have started looking at women, haven’t you?’ Filtvedt says without glancing up from the letters.

  Ryland doesn’t answer.

  ‘She’s from Somalia. They’re all as tall and crabby as Naomi Campbell. And a bodyguard comes hard on their heels.’

  A crowd of unusually loud, chattering Africans walks past the bench. Filtvedt says he thinks the Somalis shriek and shout in such an annoying way because they are used to the desert wind drowning out their voices.

  Ryland makes no comment.

  Filtvedt passes him the letters and says: ‘This blackmailer must be a cross between a left-wing politico on the make and the Karate Kid. Nothing to take seriously, Gerry, my son.’

  Ryland gives Filtvedt this morning’s Verdens Gang and tells him to open it at page five. Filtvedt studies the sketch of the murdered woman and the short text. He asks a few questions, which Ryland answers in the negative.

  ‘All right, Mr Clean,’ Filtvedt says. ‘If you’re not absolutely sure who she is, but you’re absolutely sure you haven’t laid a finger on her, how did your name end up in her possession?’

  Ryland presents his hypothesis.

  ‘If it hadn’t been you,’ Filtvedt says, ‘I’d say you were feeding me pure, unmitigated bullshit. But as it is you, the man who is more decent than any bishop, and I know about Natasha’s passion for the world’s persecuted, I’ll endeavour to believe you. How does Thygesen come into the picture, by the way? As she was dumped on him, he couldn’t possibly be without taint. Thygesen not being involved is as likely as Deutsche Bank selling Morgan Gren
fell for a dime.’

  ‘No idea about Thygesen,’ Ryland says. ‘He’s never been my concern.’

  ‘Been my concern? I mean to say. You can’t afford to be such a stuffed shirt now, Gerry. Get it out of your system!’

  ‘I know so little. A man sounding very serious rang me today to tell me the blackmailer’s dead and it’ll be my turn next if I breathe a word about the blackmail.’

  ‘Did the caller say who the blackmailer was or when and how he’d been killed? Or, most importantly, why?’

  ‘No. It was a very short conversation, the kind where you feel no desire to confront or question.’

  Ryland lights another rare cigarette and puffs at it remorselessly as Filtvedt asks what the envelopes the letters came in looked like. Had he kept them? So that the police could check for fingerprints and test the stamps for saliva, which can reveal the sender’s DNA profile. He emphasises that Reidar Isachsen is the obvious lead to follow and insists that if the million was to go to this address there must be some connection with the blackmailer or blackmailers.

  His conclusion is clear: ‘You’ve got only one option, Gerry, and that’s to tell the cops. That’s what everyone subjected to blackmail should do.’

  ‘I’m afraid of leaks.’

  ‘You have a point. Nevertheless, I believe the risk of that in a case which has received so little publicity is minimal. It’s the big ones where the police, the prosecution and the defence leak as if on a payroll. The police must have a pecuniary or a prestige reason for leaking. I can’t see any reason for them to do so in this business.’

  ‘Isn’t it good enough to have spoken to you this time round?’

  ‘No,’ replies Filtvedt. ‘I can’t be a substitute for the police.’

  ‘Will you take care of the letters for me?’

  Filtvedt nods.

  ‘I’ve also got a digital log of today’s incoming calls,’ Ryland says, holding up a diskette. ‘We just record the phone numbers, not the conversations themselves. On this diskette there is the number of the threatening call. It came in at about half past twelve.’

  Ryland passes it to Filtvedt, who at first refuses to take it on the basis that he prefers not to hold original evidence. He allows himself to be persuaded when he is reassured again that he will be the first to know if Ryland decides to go public.

  ‘We’re two old-school, honourable pashas,’ Filtvedt says, casting a longing glance up at the bronze breasts behind the bench where the two men are sitting. ‘We’re grateful for small mercies. We’re still alive. School leavers haven’t painted the nipples on Lie’s sculptures red and the bloody taggers have kept away.’

  ‘I regret I’m alive now and not in the thirties,’ Ryland says.

  ‘You would’ve liked to be a planned economist under Stalin?’

  ‘I would’ve liked to be around to create the New Deal under him.’

  Ryland points east to the granite statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt hidden in a clump of trees on the slope up towards the plain north of Akershus Fortress.

  ‘The council has placed a box for used syringes at Roosevelt’s feet,’ Filtvedt says. ‘That’s how far your bloody welfare state has gone. Are you going to be able to stop the biggest merger in Norwegian history, by the way?’

  ‘I’ve got a meeting with Peterson and the Finns this evening, in Bærøe in Hobøl.’

  ‘Give me a buzz when the meeting’s over. And go to the police for Christ’s sake when you’re back in town.’

  ‘I’m sending Natasha to the cabin so that I can spend the weekend going through her stuff to see if I can find a clue there.’

  ‘You’ve heard my advice. Go to the police right away, otherwise you’ll regret it.’

  13

  ‘I’ve explained myself as carefully and truthfully as I can,’ Vilhelm Thygesen says. ‘Yet I still have a sneaking sensation you suspect me of taking this photo.’

  He points to the photo of Picea lying on the blue wax cloth with the windmill motif that covers his kitchen table.

  Vaage drinks the last, lukewarm drop of coffee and studies her notes.

  ‘I’m absolutely fed up with your suspicions,’ Thygesen continues. ‘There’s no logical reason for them. If I’d taken a photo of Picea while she was alive I’d have been the world’s biggest numbskull to give it to Kripos and try to make them think someone else had taken it and planted it on me. Why the hell would I go to that trouble?’

  ‘Fine,’ Vaage answers. ‘Fair enough.’

  Thygesen wipes the sweat off his forehead with kitchen roll. He sits zipping his fleece up and down, gets to his feet, goes into the hall and changes his jacket for a red and black checked flannel shirt.

  ‘Are you going to send an undercover cop here to nab Dr Papaya and Captain Paw-Paw, should the phantom or phantoms materialise?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m going to suggest it,’ Vaage answers. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘I’ve given you lot photographic proof that should be of some use. So perhaps we’ve finished now, have we?’

  ‘Not quite. Are you aware of the recent movements of one Terje Kykkelsrud?’

  ‘The movements of who?’

  ‘Terje Kykkelsrud. One of the leaders of a biker gang in Østfold.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Kykke. The one-eyed giant who rides a Kawasaki named after one of the Cyclops in ancient Greece. Brontosaurus? No, that’s a dinosaur. His machine’s called Brontes. It’s aeons since I’ve had anything to do with his crowd.’

  ‘One man’s aeon,’ Vaage says. ‘We’re talking the first half of the nineties.’

  ‘I’ve repressed any thoughts about them. I screwed up a case I was doing for them because I missed an appeal date to the court of enforcement.’

  ‘When did you last have any contact with Kykkelsrud or any of the other self-dubbed Seven Samurai?’

  ‘None since the case went belly up. That is, Kykke rang me a couple of times when he was pissed and threatened to run me over with studded tyres and flay me alive. Only little civilities like that. I considered him a harmless soul behind an intimidating façade. Any real malice there is in Kykke lies very, very deep. If you know anything about such a working-class hero it’s impossible to believe that he would stoop so low as to use Dr Papaya or Captain Paw-Paw as aliases.’

  ‘I don’t believe anything, I’m just asking. Besides I don’t have the honour of being acquainted with herr Kykkelsrud.’

  ‘But you must have a reason for asking. If you tell me the reason perhaps I can give you a better answer.’

  ‘At the present…’ Vaage says, and pauses.

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t say “at the present juncture in the investigation”. You would’ve fallen five notches in my respect, and probably a couple more in your own.’

  ‘Your wall clock can’t possibly be right, Thygesen, can it?

  ‘Wall clock?’

  ‘Do you have to answer half my questions with questions,’ Vaage says, pointing to a round instrument encased in brass with glass in front of a white face with two hands.

  Thygesen laughs in a way she finds particularly unpleasant. Wolf-like laughter from a mouth with brown, stained teeth.

  ‘That’s not a clock,’ he guffaws. ‘That’s a barometer.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Vaage replies. ‘I left my contact lenses at work.’

  Thygesen gets up and taps the barometer glass. The black pressure hand moves from “change” to “fair”. He adjusts the brass hand until it is over the black one.

  He says with a laugh: ‘You can console yourself with the thought that this isn’t your biggest blunder, Vanja Vaage. Looks like there’ll be high pressure and nice weather tomorrow as well, even if the weather forecast says high winds over the mountains to the east.’

  The laughter is contagious, and Vaage has to laugh too. It is liberating, if not unbr
idled.

  Thygesen, playing the role of cheery, gallant gentleman, looks at his watch, announces that it is ten to six, stands up and puts on a fresh pot of coffee. Vaage says she has to go to the car to get her glasses and her watch, and there is a phone call she has to make.

  She slides into the overheated car, which is her private Escort – not an open-top unfortunately – and casts a glance at another Ford parked in Thygesen’s drive, a rust-heap of a Fiesta. It belongs to Vera Alam, and for a few brief moments she wonders how cancer-afflicted Alam in Sarajevo is progressing, whether the relationship between Alam and Thygesen was really as platonic as he suggests. Surely even a single man of sixty-four must have some kind of sex life? Thygesen calls himself a pensioner, on a disability pension, but he doesn’t seem to have laid anchor to the boat of life and put his erotic years behind him.

  Vaage dismisses these thoughts. She does it physically, by smacking her temples, first on the right, then on the left. She never remembers which half of the brain your sexual thoughts are supposed to be lodged.

  Quickly she taps in Stribolt’s number, rings and receives an immediate answer.

  ‘Have you started the interview?’ Vaage asks.

  ‘No, I’m standing on the platform in Halden. Just got off the train. The Østfold line can’t be as crazy as everyone says. NSB runs a very strict timetable.’

  ‘I’ve got some important info for you before you tackle Dotti. There is material evidence showing Picea while she was still alive. This strengthens Rønningen’s claim that she saw Picea on board a train.’

  ‘What sort of material evidence?’

  ‘A colour photo. The person is unquestionably Picea.’

  ‘How did you get your mitts on that?’

  ‘From Thygesen,’ Vaage answers.

  It all goes quiet in Halden.

  ‘I’m at Thygesen’s now, questioning him,’ Vaage says.

  ‘Well, I’m buggered. Wow. Explain to a sweaty detective what happened.’

  Vaage explains.

  ‘I have only one question,’ Stribolt says. ‘Are you sure Thygesen received the photo and he didn’t take it himself?’