by Jon Michelet
‘As far as I know the writing says – I’m no great shakes at German – that no human is illegal. That must mean that whoever made the T-shirts thinks illegal immigrants are not actually illegal.’
‘I suppose it does, theoretically,’ Rønningen answers hesitantly.
‘Could you imagine smuggling an illegal immigrant into Norway?’
Rønningen takes off her glasses, blows on the lenses and wipes them with a handkerchief. Puts her glasses back on and eyes Stribolt sternly.
‘Why do you ask me that? Am I suspected of people smuggling?’
‘Not at all,’ Stribolt replies, offering her a cigarette from the packet of Prince he remembered to buy at the station kiosk. ‘It was just a random thought. Forget it.’
‘I have lots of T-shirts with all sorts of slogans,’ Rønningen says, accepting a cigarette and a light. ‘I collect them. Wearing them doesn’t necessarily mean I fully support the slogan.’
‘Of course, of course. If everyone who wore a Che Guavara T-shirt really was a revolutionary, a world revolution would be right round the corner.’
‘For example, I have one that says Golfers do it with clubs. But I’m no fan of golf or a high swing.’
Rønningen blushes. Stribolt can feel that he is blushing too.
‘I think we’ve covered the theme of refugees and T-shirts now,’ Stribolt says, making a note on a pad. He decides not to use the computer, where he has the internet on the screen, in order to make the interview feel less formal. ‘You mentioned a fire.’
Rønningen coughs and blows a cloud of smoke.
‘I don’t mean to keep anything back from the police,’ she says. ‘On the other hand, I find myself in a moral dilemma. How far does being a witness actually go? I’ve thought about it half the night. I’ve given you my statement about the woman on the train. I think I’ve done my duty. What do you call it? My civic duty. But what more can and should I say without bringing innocent parties into the case or creating problems for friends?’
‘You have not only a duty,’ Stribolt says. ‘You also have a right, no, two rights. First of all, the right to stay silent. Secondly, the right to unburden yourself of whatever pains you.’
‘Sorry, but that sounds a bit saccharine and pseudo-philosophical.’
Rønningen asks if she can draw the curtains. She has the sun in her eyes. Stribolt nods, and she walks over.
He presses a few keys on the computer to get up the word-processing program. In some mysterious way the holed cranium of Karl XII flickers across the screen and he gives an involuntary gasp.
Rønningen, by the window, looks at the image.
‘Jeez, what a creepy skull,’ she exclaims.
‘Evidence in another case I’m busy with,’ Stribolt says, removing the Swedish king with a click, and asks Rønningen to tell him what she would like to say about the fire.
‘The house that burned down was haunted. The empty house, that is, the one that burned down first. In the town there were rumours that a gang of boys was holding parties there with a steady supply of booze and dope. I think that was an exaggeration, the kind of thing that boys say to show off. Because I do a bit of roller-skating I know some of the boys…’
‘Carry on, Dotti,’ Stribolt says, blushing.
‘For a woman in my position,’ Rønningen says with a quick smile, the first in this session, ‘most of these boys are uncouth snot-nosed kids, way beneath my dignity. But business is business, and I try to flog them the cheap skates I import.’
‘From Latvia,’ Stribolt lets slip.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Perhaps we can come back to that.’
‘One of the boys I connect with the house in Aspedammen – I won’t mention any names, at least not for now – came to see me in Remmen. In the block where I live, that is. Well, he didn’t come to see me but a girl he knows who lives with me. We, she and I, were having a cuba libre together. He burst in and showed me something I’d seen before.’
‘Something?’
‘A bag. A ladies handbag. You see what I mean?’
‘Not quite,’ Stribolt says.
‘I’m positive it was the bag that belonged to the woman on the train. The one you called Picea.’
‘This could be a vital piece of information. Where did the boy say he found it?’
‘He said he’d found it in a bin by the station. The railway station. I didn’t believe him for a second, it was just lies. Because he didn’t say that until I’d told him I’d seen that same bag on the train not so long ago. And then I said he should watch out he isn’t arrested for theft.’
‘How did he react?’
‘He just grinned, in a kind of stupid, sheepish way, and then he left.’
Stribolt decides to shoot from the hip: ‘Did that boy have a Christian name starting with Ø?’
Not a flicker on Rønningen’s face.
‘A nickname beginning with B?’
She opens her mouth, closes it again, opens it and says:
‘Now you’re pushing me further than I find acceptable.’
‘I apologise,’ Stribolt says, ‘but in fact I am leading a murder inquiry.’
‘Can I have some coffee and a break?’
‘No.’
Stribolt opens his briefcase and removes a pile of documents. He flicks through them and finds the one he is looking for, a note from the police department in Våler. ‘If the boy was Øystein Strand, alias Beach Boy or Banzai Boy, reporting him won’t affect you in the slightest.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s dead,’ Stribolt says.
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No, he is dead.’
‘If you’re bluffing I find that totally unacceptable.’
Stribolt tells her about Strand’s motorbike accident.
‘We suspect murder,’ he says finally. ‘Premeditated murder.’
‘Good God, who would want to murder him? He was just a boy. A messed-up boy, but nevertheless.’
‘I can’t reveal the name of the suspect at this moment,’ Stribolt says. ‘However, we have established that you knew Øystein Strand.’
‘Not so much knew as knew about. Halden’s a tiny little dump. Everyone knows everyone. If you’ve been to a rock concert, you’re on nodding terms with half the town the day after.’
‘I conclude it was Strand who showed you the bag?’
Rønningen nods.
‘You thought he was lying when he said he’d found it in an NSB bin. Did you have any idea how or where he could have got hold of it?’
‘Basically, no. But Anita did.’
‘Anita?’
‘The girl I was having a drink with when he came.’
‘I need her full name.’
‘Is that absolutely necessary?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Anita Jæger Johannesen.’
‘Is she a student too?’
‘She was then, last winter. She has more imagination than me and conjured up this scene of sexual slavery in the deserted house in the forest. She followed the boy, Øystein Strand, when he left our block. He’d tried to check her out before, but she was less than medium-interested. When she came back she said she’d seen another guy outside in a car she was sure wasn’t his. A guy who in some way was related to the house in Aspedammen. Don’t ask me who he was because I have no idea. I told Anita about the woman on the train. Anita began to fantasise that she’d been kidnapped and held as a sex slave in the isolated house. She’s got a thing about sex. I wonder how she’ll get on in Ayia Napa. The following day…’
‘Hang on a moment. I have to take notes. Coffee?’
Stribolt walks off whistling to get coffee from the machine in the corridor. It must be Halden’s answer to the widow of Zarephath’s jug, as it
always seems to be full.
Two uniformed officers are in front of him in the queue. They tell him they have a suspect for the arson in Aspedammen. Stribolt asks if he is local and is informed he is a young man from Halden and they will soon make an arrest.
‘Let me know as soon as you’ve got him,’ Stribolt says.
Rønningen then says that she, albeit reluctantly, drove her friend Anita up to the house in Aspedammen the day after the bag incident.
‘Even though it was the middle of the day the place still seemed sinister. Fortunately the house was locked so we didn’t have to go in. By the way, it looked as if there had been a break-in because the door frame was splintered. Anita found a bit of wood and ran around banging on the walls and the cellar door and listening for responses. We managed to peer in through the kitchen window and what we saw was enough to make you spew up.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘The gang of boys had made a dreadful mess in the kitchen. We thought they must have been throwing ketchup at each other because it was all over the walls. Unless they were playing paintball.’
Stribolt decides not to comment.
‘When we were about to go, up came this cross-eyed old pig… well, I suppose it must have been the unfortunate man who died in the fire last night because he came from the shit-heap next door. He asked Anita and me if we’d like to join him in a Bermuda Triangle. I said the Bermuda Triangle was a disaster area and Anita said he looked like a wandering disaster area, and so on. Perhaps we were a bit tough on him. He said we should watch out because he reckoned a woman had been killed in the house we’d been snooping round. A gypsy woman, he drivelled on, a lot better-looking than us. Than Anita and me, I mean. We put our arses in gear, if you’ll pardon the expression, and left as quickly as we could. The following week Anita was offered a job as a tour guide in Cyprus and that was when she dropped out of her studies. I didn’t think any more about what we’d been talking about until I saw the picture of Picea and contacted you at Kripos.’
Stribolt winds up the interview with Hege Dorothy Rønningen. ‘Your statement has been of enormous value,’ he says. ‘The case has moved along nicely. I’ll probably need to talk to you again when we have further information.’
‘I feel I’ve been put under unreasonable stress,’ Rønningen says on her way out of the door.
‘You have not. Hey, you forgot your jacket.’
Stribolt helps her on with her denim jacket, in cavalier fashion. He has the perfume of a woman in his nostrils, but it is drowned by the scent of a solution to a murder case that has stymied him from the beginning of February to the middle of May.
‘Where can you get a good lunch in this town?’ he asks.
‘If you like pasta there’s a new place that’s popular with students. It’s called 25 September Plassen and is in Repslagergata. Cross the bridge over the Tista, follow Storgata and take the third turning on the left.’
*
Gunvald Larsson provided Vilhelm Thygesen with a walkie-talkie. Then the squat oddball from Kripos ordered Thygesen to stay indoors ‘while I wait in the surveillance car for my prey’.
Thygesen refused point-blank to obey. He explained to Larsson that he had important things to do outdoors, it was life or death.
When Larsson heard that the lives he was going to save were those of some pine trees he burst into laughter. Thygesen tried to get the man to understand that trees might be more important for the future of the planet than the human race and gave him a little lecture about the winter’s death-bringing fungal attacks on the pines in Bestum and the rest of Østland. He placed the aluminium ladder against a fungus-affected tree and motioned that he was going to climb to the top.
Thygesen calmed Larsson down by telling him that he would have a good vantage point from the top of the tree. Larsson responded by giving him a brief review of yesterday’s news from the interview front in Halden. Thygesen sensed that the forensics officer was straying beyond his remit when he told him about the train pest, but he was grateful for the information.
A walkie-talkie is a nuisance when you are working at the top of a ladder placed against the round, slippery upper trunk of a pine tree. Thygesen has managed to attach the device to his belt. He has also ordered Larsson not to blather unnecessarily.
In total radio silence Thygesen, sweating profusely, manages to cut off two branches with brown needles by the gate. There are two branches left. One is so high that he can barely reach it with the long-handled pruner. The other is at the back of the tree in an awkward position.
During the night the wind had strengthened. It shook the treetops, which is what made Thygesen aware that the fungal plague had also affected one of his big trees. The wind is picking up again and makes the whole tree sway. Thygesen embraces the trunk as if it were a woman.
The walkie-talkie crackles. Thygesen steps down two rungs on the ladder before answering.
‘Is this our man?’ Larsson asks.
‘I can’t see anyone.’
‘By the gate, a bit further up the street than yours. He’s got a hand in the post box.’
‘For Christ’s sake, that’s Svendsby, my neighbour. You can’t nab him. He’s perfectly harmless.’
‘OK.’
Larsson has taken up a position in a plumbing contractor’s van, which he claims belongs to his brother-in-law. And there he waits, with an immense pipe wrench at the ready.
*
Stribolt doesn’t make it to 25 September Plassen. A skinny, fair-haired officer, who according to his name plate is called Håkenby, stops him on the way out.
‘The arson suspect has been arrested and is in the interview room,’ Håkenby announces, not without some pride.
‘Wow, that was efficient.’
‘He made it very easy for us. He cycled home to the house where his parents live. In Kjærlighetsstien.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He’s trying to stay silent and tough it out. He’s threatened to sue us because he’s got a cheap ticket to Ibiza which runs out today.’
‘ID?’ Stribolt asks.
‘Name’s Bård Isachsen. Twenty-three years old. Unemployed school dropout. Known locally as a good skateboarder. Known to us as a small-time crook on the lowest rung. Has a couple of conditional convictions and a fistful of fines. Car theft, drunk in a public place, possession of hash. The usual. We think the bike he came on was stolen, by the way. Boys like him don’t normally use a DBS Alivio with thin tyres.’
‘Have we got enough proof to keep him in custody?’
‘We have a strong witness statement. Woman saw him steal a petrol can, which he probably used to set light to the house. We found the can at the scene. Trouble is the plastic has partly melted due to the heat. But we don’t need to tell him that. We can say we’re checking the can for prints, and in principle that’s true, even if we don’t expect to find any.’
‘Does he know a man died in the fire?’
‘Unlikely. He says he has an alibi. He spent the evening and night in a cabin with a woman, and early in the morning he cycled straight to town from the cabin near Lake Mørte. We assume he legged it after the fire and hid in the forest.’
‘What do you think could be his motive for setting fire to the house?’
‘We haven’t got that far yet. We thought, having you from Kripos, we could use you to break the wall of silence. You would be present at the interview. I’m the nice local guy and you’re the menacing stranger who can quote the letter of the law.’
‘Fine by me.’ Stribolt answers. ‘Where is he?’
‘In with me.’
Håkenby opens the door to his office. Inside is a young female officer with a boy dressed in a grey track suit with the hood of his jacket up. His eyes are blueberry-blue and meet Stribolt’s searching gaze straight-on.
‘You can go now, Rita,’ H
åkenby says.
The young officer leaves the room.
Stribolt takes the chair where she had been sitting and places it by the wall furthest from the boy. He decides to remain standing. Places his briefcase on the chair and opens it so that the pile of papers can be seen.
‘This is Chief Inspector Stribolt from the Kriminal-politisentral in Oslo,’ Håkenby says. ‘He’s come here because of you. So perhaps you can understand how important this is?’
The boy licks his lips, but doesn’t lower his eyes.
‘We have a very reliable witness who says she saw you steal a petrol can from an outhouse in Tistedal,’ Håkenby says. ‘Green plastic can, made in Sweden. Identical to the one we found at the crime scene in Aspedammen. Remarkable, don’t you think?’
Bård Isachsen doesn’t answer.
‘Indeed. The witness is Maybritt Strand, mother of the deceased Øystein Strand. He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’
‘I knew him.’
‘Fru Strand told us that on mature reflection it struck her as strange that you should drop by to offer your condolences before the police had gone public with the name of the motorbike accident victim. Any comment?’
‘I’d heard about it.’
‘From whom?’
‘Don’t remember. In town. When one of the boys snuffs it like that it’s not long before all Halden knows.’
Stribolt raises an open palm to stop the interview. He takes his time and makes careful notes. Because the information is interesting and because he wants to keep young Isachsen on tenterhooks.
Håkenby continues: ‘You won’t say who you were with on this alleged cabin trip and who could give you an alibi. Give me a reason for the secrecy.’
‘She lives with another guy who’s put her up the duff,’ Isachsen says, suddenly lowering his hood. ‘There are traces of me all over the cabin. My semen is everywhere and you can do one of those DNA tests if you want.’
Stribolt coughs, and asks a question: ‘Håkenby, what was the name of the man who died?’