by Anne Holt
‘That boy,’ the woman said after a pause.
‘Which boy?’ he asked without moving a muscle.
‘The one who came in last night. He’s just been lying there. He doesn’t have anything to do with the terrorist attack. Fell from a ladder, I think. Terrible domestic accident, but it’s been lost in all this...’
Opening his eyes, he canted his head and stared at her from beneath curved brows.
‘In this catastrophe,’ she dared to complete her statement. ‘I’ve done a CT scan of his head. Skull fracture. Intracerebral bleeding, with ventricular hernia. There were also indications of midline shift. In addition, he had a considerable elbow fracture, though that would not have killed him, poor boy.’
‘All this from a single fall?’
‘I don’t really know, but he was unfortunate enough to land quite heavily, so...’
The professor stepped away from the wall and began to rotate his head from side to side.
‘The lad had also broken two front teeth,’ the woman continued. ‘One of them—’
She cleared her throat with her hand loosely clenched in front of her mouth.
‘One was left inside. Inside his mouth, I mean.’
‘Take blood samples,’ he instructed. ‘Go through the usual routines. But do them quickly and simply. Fill out the death report, and if you don’t find anything more than you already have done, put a cross in the usual box for “suspicious death” and send the whole caboodle over to the police. They can take it from there. It’s their job to draw conclusions.’
A grim smile made his lips contract.
‘Today we’ve just had a foretaste from the government quarter,’ he said softly. ‘Tomorrow will be worse. That’s when they’ll empty Utøya. I want to have one hundred per cent focus on the daunting task facing us all. Get the boy processed as fast as you can.’
He turned on his heel and left.
‘OK,’ answered the woman, running her ponytail through her fingers. ‘I’ll get that done now, tonight. Then we’ll be finished with him.’
*
Sleep deserted him just as brutally as it had knocked him unconscious a few hours earlier.
It was only six a.m. on Sunday 24 July when Jon Mohr opened his eyes and felt his pulse race. His ears were buzzing after a dream in which he had been curled up in a tiny room that grew gradually smaller around him. Towering metal walls had drawn increasingly close as he looked up at a square shrinking sky that he was unable to reach. When it was no longer possible for him to breathe and it became obvious that the walls had spikes, he woke up.
He was stretched out on his back with his arms by his sides, his legs spread slightly, with a dreadful headache that made him moan when he sat up abruptly. Ellen was sleeping soundly. She had taken a sleeping tablet. Or two, he suspected; she had seemed surprisingly skittish when he had caught her off-guard in the unlocked bathroom. Now she was lying peacefully on her side, with her hair combed back, dark and greasy, smeared with some kind of overnight-treatment balsam she thought was the reason her hair, at the age of forty-three, was her prime asset. As well as her slim figure, of course; that fit, sinewy body of which she was so proud, although her breasts had been suckled dry and exercised away, and her once so trim rear-end had shrivelled into nothing.
He groaned as he swung his feet to the floor.
Barefoot and naked, he plodded out of the bedroom. In the bathroom he emptied his bladder while scrutinizing himself in the huge inbuilt mirror. The lights were off, and in the dawn haze that became even duller as it filtered through the frosted glass windows, he looked like a ghost. Despite a fortnight’s holiday in Italy only a couple of weeks earlier, his complexion was pale and tinged with blue. His face was haggard, his eyes bloodshot, and he pulled a grimace at his own reflection.
Without stopping to consider it, he raised his fist. He looked at it for a moment in the mirror, gazing obliquely, before punching it with all his might into the enormous two-square-metre sheet of glass. It shattered almost soundlessly. All the shards remained on the wall, firmly attached as they were, but where his hand had made contact, a jagged star spread out, increasing in size as he smashed his fist into the glass one more time.
‘Sander,’ he mouthed silently through clenched teeth. ‘Sander.’
Blood dripped from his hand.
He grabbed the toilet roll and wrapped the paper round his hand. It was now bleeding so profusely that he had to use almost half the roll before he had a chance to wipe away the mess on the basin and the floor.
The worst thing wasn’t really being so scared.
The worst thing of all was being alone.
Naked apart from the toilet roll bandaged round his right hand, he left the bathroom and stepped into the corridor, walking past all the numerous wardrobes with their exorbitantly expensive women’s clothes, out into the hallway and straight into Sander’s room, without a moment’s hesitation.
Someone had forgotten to switch off the bedside lamp. The golden glow it cast made him close the door behind him. Being there, in that half-empty space, with Sander’s effects sorted into boxes, the blue curtains with racing cars wafting gently in the draught from the open gap at the window, convinced him momentarily that everything could be fine. That he had just had a dream. That he could turn back time, a few years or months, a few weeks or maybe even just a few days, and start over again.
Tentatively, he lay down on the bed and unfolded the bare quilt to cover himself.
The blood had seeped through the toilet paper. He yanked it off and covered the wound with his mouth, until the cloying iron taste numbed his tongue. His hand continued to bleed, oozing constantly, and he gave up. He crept underneath the chilly quilt and closed his eyes as the blood continued to drip on to the mattress that would be thrown out anyway.
He could wake Ellen, he thought, haul her carefully out of that medicated sleep with a cup of coffee; he could wake her by making love to her and tell her everything. They could share the secret, the way they shared all secrets, all the time. There was still love between them, at least vestiges of it, of everything that once had been, when he had won her hand in marriage under the very noses of all the guys who thought they deserved her more than he did. He still deserved her. He needed her, and she needed him. That was just the way it was and always had been.
The thought that it was too late flashed through his mind, and he got up.
From below the bed he pulled out a paint pot. The brush was sitting in a cut-off milk carton filled with water, at the foot of one of the empty cupboards. He used his fingers to squeeze out the excess water from the pig bristles and dipped the brush in the white emulsion. It dripped a little, but that was of no consequence. He should really use a roller, but did not possess such a thing. That did not matter. Jon Mohr painted the ceiling with angry brushstrokes, using his left hand, at the same time licking blood from his right hand now and again, and in this way obliterated the last traces of the ceiling pictures that his son had drawn: four beautiful cars with exhaust pouring from the back, speech bubbles with the letters VROOM, followed by three exclamation marks.
It dawned on him that it was never too late, once it was all white and his entire naked torso was speckled with paint. It was never too late, and Jon Mohr would not give up. He was not the sort of person who gave up. He was the sort who kept an eye on things.
That’s the way he had always been.
*
Joachim Boyer had not slept.
When he came home from Jon and Ellen’s at half past midnight, he had felt too wired to sleep. After half an hour on the rowing machine and an hour’s yoga followed by a hot bath, he had finally felt ready for bed. All the same, sleep was still elusive. There were too many thoughts, too much chaos. He spent a long time considering whether or not to get up again, but his head felt too heavy and his body too sluggish.
The bedclothes were clammy, despite his having changed them only a couple of days earlier. But with the quilt covering him, the bed quickly
overheated, yet he felt freezing as soon as he pulled it off.
The alarm clock showed 06.17.
He turned over on his side, regretting that he no longer had any sleeping tablets in the house. In May he had asked his sister, a doctor, for a packet of Zopiclone. Since he was never ill and had not wrestled with insomnia until then, she had been concerned. He blamed his work – a lot on his plate, in addition to his relationship with Anja not going too well. All of that was true, up to a point. He had split up with Anja a couple of weeks later. All the other things grew worse. For four nights on the trot he had taken a pill before bedtime. After that, the subsequent lethargy and feeling of not being quite at home in his own body had made him flush the rest of the medicine down the toilet.
On the bedside table, beside the alarm clock, sat a wooden model that, if you were charitably inclined, could be said to resemble a boat. Joachim sat up, leaning on one elbow, and picked up the vessel. It was probably twenty centimetres long, and the prow was far too rounded. The pilot house, a glued-on block of concrete that Sander had found in the school playground, was crooked and far too large. The boy was amazingly clever at drawing, but as soon as the figures became three-dimensional and had to be crafted together, he reverted to his usual clumsy approach. When he had launched the boat to float in the bathtub, proud and happy, it had bobbed around for a few moments before sinking slowly into the clear water. Sander had burst into tears, inconsolable until Joachim had promised to help him build a new one. This one was so handsome that it should really be kept as an ornament, Joachim had said by way of comfort, and had been presented with the boat as a gift.
The model felt heavy in his hand. The shaft of morning light through the gap between the blackout curtain and the window frame reflected off the numerous nail heads that quite clearly represented cabin portholes, hammered in topsy-turvy fashion along the entire edge of the hull.
Joachim sniffed at the boat.
In a way, it smelled of Sander: sand and paint and all sorts. All of a sudden he put back the boat, snatched off the quilt and got to his feet. His boxer shorts were sticking to his thighs, and he pulled them off before heading for the bathroom to turn on the cold water in the shower.
Sander was dead, but apart from that, everything was going to be fine. Everything would go well now, because he was in control of the situation. If it had been possible to turn back time, Sander would be alive, Joachim was well aware of that; he had seen it and ought to have done something about it, but in real life there were no rewind buttons and things just had to keep going. He let the ice-cold water jolt him awake, clearing his head, shifting his body to where it should always be, in tune with himself.
Everything would be fine. He was in control.
If only he hadn’t been so damn scared.
*
After the Great Catastrophe it was as if Police Constable Henrik Holme no longer really worked at Police Headquarters. When the terrorist was arrested on Friday evening and turned out to be an Oslo resident, Henrik Holme was downgraded to his actual status: an inexperienced summer temp. He did not feature in any line of command other than what had led him to sit here now, with a slim case folder about a death of no interest to a single soul. The prosecutor on duty got landed with the folder. Meantime, it was obvious that the woman knew nothing about the case.
Strictly speaking, it was not even a case.
Even though Jon Mohr had behaved like a madman for the brief half-hour of the previous evening’s interview, Henrik Holme could not entirely hold that against him. If he were honest – just to himself, as he sat behind the desk with its one case folder lying there – the guy was right. Jon Mohr had not touched him. Just scared him, and Henrik had to take some of the blame for that himself. His words had not exactly been well chosen. It must be a terrible strain to lose a child anyway, and when it happened as a result of an accident at home, then the self-reproach must be overwhelming.
This green folder did not really contain a case as such.
However, it belonged to Henrik Holme, and it was the only one he had.
Now he sat in the bleak, anonymous office, wondering why it had entered his head to come to work. It was Sunday morning, and although many others in the vast, curved building in Grønlandsleiret had been called away from holidays and days off, that quite clearly had nothing to do with him. No one had so much as spoken to him since Friday afternoon.
Henrik opened the bottle of Cola Light and wolfed it down. He had popped into the 7-Eleven store and bought a bag of chocolate-chip buns. Two had already been devoured, but the third looked unappetizingly squashed when he removed it from the bag. The chocolate was reminiscent of something unmentionable, having partly melted and stuck to the paper. He peered at the sad excuse for a cake for a moment or two, before folding it all up and disposing of the bag in the empty waste-paper basket.
He poked his forefinger up inside his left nostril.
The folder cover also served as a list of main documents.
It did not seem entirely suitable. He did not have a suspect to fill in. Neither did he have anything to write in the space for reported violation. Perhaps he had made a mistake? There might be special covers for cases like this, such as suspicious deaths really only passed to the police in order to have sand sprinkled on them and then be shelved and labelled Not a criminal matter.
‘Suspicious death’ was simply a collective term, he knew, and they were most frequently not suspicious in the least. Overdoses. Suicides. Drowning. That kind of thing. Perhaps he had picked up the wrong form. In fact he was not even meant to complete it in the first place.
Henrik grew acutely uncertain as he excavated his nose even more thoroughly.
The cover had headings for personal details, prosecutor and investigating officer. In addition there were open fields for numbering and description of individual case documents, with dates and the name of the person doing the reporting.
Document number 00 was the actual folder cover.
Document 01 was an interview with ‘witness Jon Mohr’, written by Henrik Holme.
Then it ended.
Soon, he hoped, he would receive the papers from Forensics. Then there would at least be a document number 02.
Thin stuff.
Related matters was the heading on the form further up the page. The columns were empty.
He could check the Criminal Records Register, if for no other purpose than amusement. Not that it was particularly likely the guy with the enormous villa in Grefsen, and two cars in the garage, would have any other criminal cases on the go. Besides, this splinter of a case was not really about Jon Mohr, but his son.
He rapidly logged on to the computer and keyed in Jon Mohr’s name and personal ID number.
‘Aha,’ he said softly, once the computer display opened up.
Jon Mohr was registered as the accused in a current criminal case, he read, swallowing so loudly that he could hear it himself.
Suspected of infringement of STA § 3–3, cf. §§ 2–2 and 17–3, 1st paragraph, shone out at him from the screen. STA? The Securities Trading Act, of course, and he let his finger run across the screen. The Finance Section.
Henrik memorized the paragraph references and speedily logged out of criminal records and into Lovdata, the database of Norwegian laws. His eyes skimmed through the text until, finding what he was searching for, he leaned back triumphantly.
Insider trading!
Jon Mohr was a crook. A slob under investigation for having obtained money by illegal means. It was true that the records did not say anything about how far the case had progressed, or what it was actually all about, but Henrik Holme knew enough about insider trading to understand that a man in Mohr’s position would constantly have access to information that would enable him to make a fast buck on the stock exchange. There had been a similar case, he recalled, several years ago, concerning a guy in one of these PR companies. The man was convicted of having leaked confidential information from his job to a friend
, who had in turn purchased shares that later brought him a pretty profit and a nice little kickback to the PR man, by way of thanks.
Something like that, Henrik thought he remembered.
However, there was quite some distance between financial crime and child murder, he reluctantly admitted to himself. On the other hand, the insider-trading case could have made Jon Mohr irritable, nervous and impatient. He had shown that emphatically during the previous evening’s interview. Short fuse. Sudden rage. Henrik Holme well knew that eight-year-old boys could be a pain in the neck. He had a cousin of the same age. Sometimes he had been tempted to string the rascal up and nail him to the wall.
The slim bundle of papers on the desk immediately seemed more interesting.
Perhaps there might be a case here after all.
If so, then it would be a real case, a substantial case, a case about death and murder. It belonged to him, Henrik Holme, and he was investigating it on his own.
He drained the cola bottle in a single gulp and swallowed a belch.
First of all he would write a special report. If nothing else, it would pad out the case folder, making it somewhat more substantial, in every meaning of the word. Tomorrow he would chase up the papers from Forensics. Depending on what they said, he would ask the Police Prosecutor for permission to continue. Go deeper. Leave no stone unturned. He would not permit himself to be stopped by a hysterical mother and a father with a flashy suit and a Porsche. He was aware that child murder was an area with a great many hidden statistics and, if he could solve such a case, novice though he undoubtedly was, it would be a major step away from speeding offences and driving without a licence.
‘Sander Mohr,’ he whispered, drumming lightly on the table with the empty plastic bottle.
It seemed as if he grew in stature as he sat there.
III
When Johanne woke on Tuesday 26 July, she felt remarkably refreshed. Adam was long gone, and she lay on in bed for a while, listening to the unaccustomed silence. Her mother had gone home on Sunday, as agreed. The children would stay on in France for almost another fortnight. The neighbours below were on holiday, and the only thing to break the almost complete stillness was Jack’s snoring as he lay beside her on the bed. This was strictly forbidden, as were most of the other things he usually got up to.