The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  ‘Pretty sure. My gut feeling tells me he’s speaking the truth. He must be irrational, bordering on psychotic, if he’s taken photos of Picea and voluntarily told us about it.’

  Stribolt asks Vaage to ring him at once if Thygesen says anything else he ought to know.

  Vaage puts on her glasses and walks back into the house, which for some strange reason reminds her of the house on the prairie, even though it looks like every other tarred Norwegian log house from around the previous turn of the century.

  After all the coffee she has poured down her she needs the toilet again. It is located next to the hall, she remembers from her previous visit in February. She has read somewhere, perhaps it was in Dagbladet’s Saturday magazine, that you can learn about single menfolk by studying the standards of their toilets. If this is correct, Thygesen is normal, indeed, almost disappointingly ordinary. The toilet is well equipped with paper and all sorts: brush, soap, which is where it should be on the small basin with hot and cold taps, old newspapers in a bamboo rack. The door can be closed from the inside with a hook; she puts it through the eye, sits down on the seat, which is wooden and very comfortable for the behind, and flips through the papers. Newsweek, National Geographic. No porn, not even a solitary Vi Menn. Oddly enough, an ancient copy of Tique fashion magazine.

  The only thing of note she finds is a framed photographic portrait of the legendary Apache Chief Geronimo on the toilet wall. Must be one of his heroes.

  What is missing is a mirror. But only effete men have a mirror over the basin.

  In the kitchen she finds Thygesen pulling a cork from a wine bottle.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘this isn’t my home-grown redcurrant plonk.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’m driving,’ Vaage says, turning the glass placed by her seat upside down.

  ‘Not from Bestum but Bordeaux,’ Thygesen says, smelling the cork, filling a glass and putting it next to Vaage. ‘Tax-free from Paris.’

  ‘Are you deaf?’

  ‘In this kind of situation I can be terribly hard of hearing. You mentioned Kykkelsrud. So I assume that he’s involved in some way or other. I know a good deal about him from way back before the Seven Samurai and quite different gangs. You don’t have to screw up your face like that. Would you like to see a photo of Kykke taken exactly twenty-five years ago?’

  Thygesen slides a newspaper cutting across the table. It is a whole page, dominated by a line of men. In the foreground there is a glimpse of shadowy figures which are obviously police officers.

  ‘Found it in my archive,’ Thygesen says. ‘I was a kind of adviser to Kykke during a strike in the North Sea. But this picture is of another, earlier strike. At a rail freight company in 1976. An illegal strike. A wildcat strike, as employers and the Labour Party called it. The man towering up from the others in the line is Terje Kykkelsrud. We had something in common in those days, he and I, although we didn’t know each other. We were part of the atmosphere around the Workers’ Communist Party. Sympathisers, as they used to say.’

  Vaage lifts the yellowing cutting.

  ‘Has to be Klassekampen,’ she says, expelling a puff of air.

  ‘Doesn’t have to be, though in fact it is. All the newspapers devoted huge spreads to the strike. It was thought it presaged the famous armed revolution. If you’d like to hear about male collectives and political collectives that have marked both Kykke and me, be my guest. We can discuss interesting splintering tendencies and the effect they had on individuals like Kykke. If not, you can bugger off back home to the mountain known as the Hamarøy Dick.’

  Vaage pauses for effect before countering: ‘To the mountain known as the Træn Pole then, for my taste. It’s the tallest one beneath the Arctic Circle, in the archipelago of my childhood.’

  ‘You’re not going to spit in the glass if you don’t have shop-bought wine on the table, are you?’

  ‘Idiot,’ Vaage says, grabbing the glass Thygesen shoves over towards her.

  ‘You’re driving,’ Thygesen says, wagging his forefinger.

  ‘As you know, one can leave the car in the drive.’

  14

  From Halden railway station Arve Stribolt wanders along the Tista towards the police department, which is in a red-brick building by the river. He has been there several times before, the last was when Kripos asked him to assist in the investigation of a bank robbery in which two Nazis were involved.

  Although the distance between the two towns is so immense and the topography is so different and the housing stock in Halden doesn’t date from the reconstruction period after the Second World War, it still reminds him of his own town, Hammerfest. It must be the provinciality, the activity in the town; it is a place for normal people, where ostentatious wealth barely exists. Stribolt likes to go to small Norwegian towns and he likes getting away again when his job is done.

  He is met by a friendly soul at the department and is given an office on the first floor, along with kind instructions to help himself to as much coffee as he wants from the machine in the corridor. Plus strict instructions not to smoke in the office, on pain of death, as the Haldeners say.

  As there is an ashtray on the desk he takes the risk and lights up. If he gets a bullet in his carcass he won’t be the first. From the office window he has a view of the scene where the biggest crime mystery in the history of Scandinavia took place.

  Stribolt makes himself comfortable in the chair and is soon lost in reverie. He imagines he is a king waiting for a queen. No one can deny a serving policeman the sweet anticipation of interviewing a young woman with d.ronningen as her email address and Dotti de la Motti as her internet name.

  He has summoned Hege Dorothy Rønningen to appear at 18.30. From what he had been led to believe about the Østfold railway he had genuinely assumed the train wouldn’t be on time and arrive in Halden at 17.52, but it did. So he had half an hour to kill.

  Stribolt stares out of the window at Frederiksten Fortress where the swallowtail flag flutters crisply in a southerly breeze that has picked up over the border town. Up there was where Karl XII was shot and killed one winter’s day in 1718. According to the old calendar, on 30 November; according to the modern one, 11 December, which some consider to be the Devil’s birthday. Straight after the Swedish king was killed a rumour spread like wildfire through Norway and Sweden that he had been assassinated by his own men. The motive for the murder was said to be the Swedish officer class’s war weariness. The hero king after the victory in the battle against the Russians at Narva in 1700 had become a zero king after the defeat to Peter the Great’s forces at Poltava during the Winter War in 1709. Karl XII lost all the Swedes’ foreign possessions and in so doing destroyed Sweden as a great power. To regain his popularity he tried to conquer Norway from the Danes. Not even he could manage that at the first attempt in 1716. Then he did, two years later; another attempt which didn’t look as if it were going to succeed either.

  In one of the trenches the Swedish invaders had dug to attack Gyldenløve Fort, Karl XII fell to a bullet that hit him in the temple and went right through his head.

  Stribolt logs into the office computer with the password he received from the duty officer. He gets into the police’s word-processing software and clicks through to a standard interview form. As the country’s police stations are not yet linked via intranet there is no way of getting into his own files at Kripos and picking up documents from the Picea case. So instead he surfs the web, to a discussion forum on the net called Who killed Karl XII?

  It had gone quiet after the Swedish neo-Nazis got tired of debating. So far in 2001 there hasn’t been much traffic on the site. Stribolt clicks on to one of his own contributions. Under the pseudonym of Thundershield he discusses the motive and draws the conclusion that the Norwegians had the strongest reason to kill the king. In his piece, which he was quite happy with, he writes that the assassination rumour grew because
the Swedish officers were trying, in vain, to keep the king’s death a secret. Thus the rank and file soldiers suspected the officers’ secrecy was because they had shot the king in a cowardly ambush.

  Stribolt clicks back to the first piece he wrote on the forum. It is a lightly edited school essay he wrote in his first year at upper secondary. Entitled ‘The ultimate proof that we Norwegians killed Karl XII’, it is an imaginative account of how an extremely proficient detective by the name of Evar Boltirs finds a hidden letter behind the wallpaper at a manor house by Kongsvinger. In the letter the former owner of the manor confesses that it was he who fired the shot from Gyldenløve and killed the king. Fearing reprisals from the Swedes, the gunman made his colleagues promise to maintain their silence. On the parchment there is a map and a cryptic code. Boltirs cracks the code and finds, first, the bullet hidden in a well in Skåne that he has to dive down into, and second, on a hush-hush journey across Russia, shadowed by the KGB, the gun the farmer from Kongsvinger sold to a Russian count who wanted the murder weapon as a souvenir. Metallurgic tests show that the specially cast bullet is exactly the same kind of brass as that which is used to make buttons for Norwegian uniforms and the pattern on the bullet reveals it was fired by the gun in the Russian count’s possession.

  The text is illustrated with the famous photograph taken in 1917 of the king’s mummified cranium with a fist-size hole in it. The essay opens with a quotation from Volume 7 of Norway’s History in which Professor Knut Mykland writes: ‘Despite thorough analyses of the written material and repeated analyses of Karl XII’s cranium it has not been possible to give a certain answer to whether it was a Norwegian or a Swedish assassin who killed the king, and this question is certain to remain unanswered in the future.’

  The conclusion of the essay is the engraving on the Danish commemorative medal: ‘The Swedish lion fell at the feet of the Norwegian lion. There it lost its life and its last heroic blood.’

  There is a tap on the office door. Stribolt closes the screen showing the skull, takes out his comb and runs it through his hair. He would have liked to have a bit more hair. Soon he will be as old as Karl XII was when he died, thirty-six, and his hair is thinning, as the Swedish king’s was. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the fine curls flowing down his neck that Karl has in all the paintings.

  The Dotti who enters has the same elegant curls in reality that she has on her internet photo. But the girl Stribolt is observing now is only a pale reflection of the dynamic roller-skater on the internet. Perhaps Dotti has two personalities: one she reveals on the net and one which studies ‘commercial German and international trade’ at the college in Østfold. At the police station she definitely looks like a serious student. She is wearing the same round glasses as on the net. But no make-up apart from brownish lipstick smudged in one corner.

  She is a little shorter than he had imagined. Despite the heat she is wearing a thick, woollen, grey polo-neck jumper and trousers with side-pockets on both thighs.

  They shake hands. Her grip is loose and clammy. She doesn’t introduce herself as Dotti but with her Christian name.

  She takes off a tiny rucksack, fishes out a mobile phone and switches it off.

  ‘Are you allowed to smoke here?’ she asks with an eye on the ashtray.

  ‘Not really. But feel free,’ Stribolt answers, thinking he has read something about how many different roles today’s young people play. How they can shift roles faster than a policeman changes his light blue uniform shirt.

  ‘I’m really nervous,’ she says. ‘I’ve never had anything to do with the police before.’

  While Rønningen smokes a Prince cigarette Stribolt fills in the interview form with personal details. The information comes thick and fast. She is twenty-three years old. She has been studying in Halden for a year and is actually from Elverum. The only question that causes her any concern is the one about marital status. She mounts a weak smile and says it is so uncertain she had better say single or whatever it is called.

  Stribolt asks if she would like some coffee and she accepts.

  He pops in to see the duty officer and asks if there are any faxes from Oslo. Vaage was supposed to fax over Picea’s photo as soon as she was back at HQ in Bryn. No faxes have arrived, says the duty officer, who doesn’t seem to have the scepticism Kripos officers often encounter in their provincial colleagues: don’t take our cases, don’t mix in our circles.

  Stribolt brings a coffee from the machine in the corridor.

  He reminds Rønningen, in somewhat stilted terms it seems to him, about a witness’s duty to make a truthful statement. She sips her coffee.

  ‘Let’s begin with when and where you caught the train,’ he says.

  ‘I got on the train in Öxnered. It was the one from Göteborg to Oslo. Or it might’ve even come from Copenhagen. Sunday 28 January, and it was late. Should’ve been in Öxnered at half past six, but it didn’t arrive until seven.’

  ‘Are we talking about the evening train?’

  ‘Yes. It was dark and unpleasant on the deserted station, and bitingly cold.’

  ‘What had you been doing in Öxnered?’

  ‘Nothing. I’d visited my bloke in Uddevalla. He drove me to Öxnered, which is the closest railway station, but couldn’t be bothered to wait until the train came. We’d been arguing a lot all weekend. The train was pretty full when it did finally arrive. And unfortunately I got a seat in a compartment with a bloody pest.’

  ‘A pest?’

  ‘Yes, some crazy guy taking pictures of the other passengers. It was only when I objected to being photographed that I noticed the woman whose picture is in the paper. The one who’s been killed.’

  Stribolt asks if the woman had any special characteristics.

  ‘There was something funny about one ear,’ Rønningen says, holding her right ear with her thumb and first finger. ‘When this guy’s harassment got to her she brushed her hair to one side and I saw there was something strange about her ear, as if it were torn. I thought it was so sad for a woman who was otherwise so beautiful. Beautiful in a kind of Mediterranean way.’

  ‘Did you have an impression of where she might be from? Nationality?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. She spoke English with a very strong accent, a bit like Russians do. But I only heard a few words. She told the guy taking photos to “go away, go away”. And then he sat down beside her and she changed places and sat beside me. Asked me if that was OK. “OK I sit here?” I must have looked pretty sullen. I was boiling with anger about all the mess with Kalle.’

  ‘Kalle?’

  ‘My bloke, who dumped me at the station.’

  ‘You didn’t speak to the foreign woman?’

  ‘Couple of words. She asked when the train would arrive in Oslo. She had a ticket with a timetable attached. The train was due to arrive at 21.45. I told her we were a good thirty minutes late and it might be more the way things were going. She asked if I knew whether it was difficult to find a hotel room in Oslo and whether I could recommend somewhere. I answered that it was easy in the middle of winter, though I didn’t know anywhere cheap. She would have to ask at Oslo station. The idiot taking photos had moved up the train. The woman took a book from her bag and started reading.’

  ‘You’ve got a keen eye and a good memory,’ Stribolt says. ‘Do you remember which book?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I noticed because at first I thought it was some kind of terrorist stuff. The book was in English and entitled Memed, My Hawk, written by someone called Yas¸ar something or other. A hawk’s a military rocket, isn’t it, and I thought the author might be Arafat. But when she moved her fingers off the cover, where the author’s name was, I could see it was Kemal. Then I remembered I’d read the book in Norwegian when I was at school. I come from a family where the kids are fed all kinds of books about poor people who become rebels and heroes. Kind of radical.’

  �
��I do too, in fact,’ Stribolt says. ‘My father was a pool supervisor at Isbjørnhallen in Hammerfest and a hardened communist.’

  Rønningen doesn’t find this information wildly peripheral; she smiles almost like on the net and says: ‘My father’s probably the only major in the army who’s stood for the Socialist Left Party at the elections.’

  ‘Do you remember the Norwegian title of the book?’ Stribolt asks.

  ‘Sultne Memed?’

  ‘Magre Memed, unless I’m much mistaken. Romantic thing about a Turkish village. The hero, Memed, fights the landowners and wins the princess and half the kingdom.’

  ‘Did he rebel because the girl he loved was killed by a nobleman, Aga?’ asks Rønningen, who has a glint in her blue eyes behind the glasses.

  ‘Yes, think that’s how it was,’ Stribolt answers. ‘Have you heard that the writer, Kemal, risks going to prison in Turkey because he supports the Kurds?’

  ‘No, I’ve got more than enough to do with reading the books on the syllabus and I haven’t kept up with international politics.’

  ‘If it’s OK with you, I’d like to adjourn the interview and check something online.’

  Rønningen nods.

  Stribolt uses his favourite search engine, Google, to look for Yas¸er Kemal and immediately finds a plethora of information confirming what he thought, that the Turkish author Yas¸ar – or Yasir as he is called in Norwegian – Kemal has committed himself to the Kurdish cause. Kemal has written books, pamphlets and articles in which he argues for the Kurds’ right to have their own language and their own culture. From being the Turkish candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature he has become a candidate for prison.

  On the interview form Stribolt writes: ‘Draft. Hypothesis: Kurdish trail. Was Picea really a Kurd? Based on statement from Rønningen that she was reading Kemal on the train. Kemal is an active, committed intellectual who is taking risks in his old age. Picea reads a seditious novel written by a writer supporting the fight for Kurdish rights. But why is she reading the Memed novel in English? Perhaps because she, as a Kurd, doesn’t want to read the book in the original Turkish. Or simply because she wants to learn English by reading a story where she knows the context in which the plot is played out.