What Dark Clouds Hide

by Anne Holt

  ‘What was that?’ Christopher Robin asked, smiling, as Joachim returned his diamond-studded Vertus mobile phone. ‘Girlfriend stuff?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Joachim said, returning the smile. ‘Just needed to send a short message from a phone that can’t be traced without going to a great deal of trouble. I deleted it after it was sent.’

  ‘Nothing illegal, I trust?’

  Grinning, Christopher Robin stuffed the phone nonchalantly into his jeans back pocket.

  ‘I extricated you from illegalities at one time,’ Joachim said. ‘I’ve absolutely no reason to want to drop you in them again. Cheers!’

  They clinked their glasses and drank.

  *

  Henrik Holme could not grasp that only a week had passed since he had been dispatched to Glads vei in Grefsen with not a clue about what would confront him. Usually time flew by when he had a lot to do, but this week had passed so slowly that it was really incomprehensible. Though now past six in the early evening, he had no plans to go home to the minuscule girly bedroom his great-aunt in Frogner had placed at his disposal nearly four years earlier.

  It had taken him an eternity to write the special reports following his interviews with Sander’s grandmother and schoolteacher. In fact they should have been written out as witness statements. Since he did not have any notes from either of the encounters, that proved impossible, and he would probably get hauled over the coals by the Police Prosecutor. All the more important to do it thoroughly, he reasoned. Tove Byfjord had not asked for him since Tuesday, nor had she kept her promise to hook him up with a more experienced investigator. Perhaps she had forgotten. Perhaps there were simply no colleagues to be found.

  Henrik Holme felt like an insignificant satellite, circling round an enormous planet where everyone was preoccupied by one single case.

  The conclusion he came to was that the situation actually suited him fine.

  He had his own case, and it was growing increasingly important to him.

  He had also started reading. Initially he had searched on the Internet for material about ‘child abuse’ in Norwegian, but despite more than 50,000 hits, there was not very much of relevance. When he Googled instead for results in English, he got more than 300 million hits. Some of the articles looked interesting and he attempted to read them, but his English was not fluent enough to digest research reports. All the same, he had printed out a number of articles, both in Norwegian and in English, and now sat studying them carefully, one by one, highlighting the points he considered most significant with a yellow marker pen.

  The frustrating aspect of these reports and articles was that, when all was said and done, they did not tell him very much more than what he already thought all by himself or knew from what he had been taught at Police College. Child abuse was generally divided into four types, he read: physical mistreatment, psychological cruelty, lack of care and sexual molestation. He did not fully understand the distinctions. Surely these categories must merge and overlap? Sexual molestation involved both physical and psychological cruelty, in his unequivocal opinion. By the term ‘lack of care’ they alluded to ‘neglect of a child’s fundamental physical and psychological needs’, he read, but could not fathom why it was necessary to list it as a category on its own. Shagging young children obviously meant paying no heed to their fundamental needs!

  He scratched his head with both hands and gave a snort of disgust.

  What they all agreed on, nevertheless, was that there were extensive hidden statistics in every category. That was also something he had already known. He was looking for something else.

  Henrik Holme was searching for information about the people who mistreated children. About the kind of children exposed to violence. He was desperate to discover grounds for believing that well-to-do parents with professional jobs, in beautiful homes, and with extensive networks, could also batter their children.

  Because it did not appear so, from the court judgments he had found. These were not many, but the few he tracked down were located in neighbourhoods a long distance from Glads vei. One in particular, the most notorious and recent, involved a boy who had been ill-treated and killed by his stepfather somewhere down in Vestfold. The court had come to the conclusion that the ill-treatment had taken place over a sustained period of time. The case had been shelved by the police several times, apparently due to shoddy investigation. When it first came to court and the stepfather was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, it seemed unbelievable that no one had intervened before the boy died. Although his death had occurred in 2005, the case did not reach court until 2008. Recently it had come to light that the boy’s mother would also face prosecution. She had not lifted a finger to prevent the abuse, according to the judgment against her husband. The case was so tragic that Henrik Holme pushed the pages ever further away as he read.

  The boy had been only eight years old.

  Exactly like Sander.

  He had suffered from ADHD, exactly like Sander.

  Otherwise, there were not so many similarities. In the court judgment, the mother’s family emerged as eminently resourceful, but it was obvious that this stepfather had thoroughly messed up the family idyll. As Henrik interpreted the court statements, the case involved a nuclear family in disintegration. ‘Intellectually impoverished’ was what his mother used to say about such people. He did not know what description he would choose himself, but it was fairly obvious that the family were not in a very good state materially, either.

  Henrik was ravenous. He pulled a Kvikk Lunsj snack bar from his bag and devoured it quickly. Microscopic crumbs drizzled on to the papers. When he tried to wipe them away with the side of his hand, he drew thin brown chocolate lines across the text.

  The Mohr family in Glads vei did not suffer from either intellectual or material poverty, that much was certain. At school, Henrik had learned that the law applied equally to everyone, but he knew better. The law had never been the same for everyone. Not in any sphere. If you had money and resources, contacts and networks, you were far better protected from scrutiny and victimization, both by the police and by other authorities.

  Perhaps especially in such cases, he mused, washing the chocolate biscuit down with lukewarm cola; it was both literally and metaphorically easier to peek inside a caravan than a massive villa surrounded by high fences.

  The papers from Volvat, the private medical centre where the Mohr family were members, had been astonishingly easy to obtain. Before he had gone through the rigmarole of formalities regarding confidentiality and other obstacles, he had quite simply phoned Jon Mohr and requested sight of the documents. A couple of hours later, an envelope containing all the records had awaited him at the medical centre’s reception desk. Henrik had been surprised, and perhaps a tad disappointed, that Jon Mohr was so cooperative. It did not exactly indicate any major anxiety over what Sander’s medical history would reveal.

  Nor was there any real reason for him to, he now realized.

  Sighing, he opened the envelope for the third time.

  Sander Mohr had visited the Volvat Medical Centre a total of eleven times since his birth. The early years were of no interest to Henrik Holme. When the boy had been only a baby, his parents had arrived seeking emergency assistance for marked lack of sleep in both Sander and themselves. The family was referred to a sleep therapist. The next visit took place when Sander was two years old. He had disturbed a wasps’ nest in the garden and been stung a dangerous number of times. An intravenous antidote was administered, and afterwards he had been admitted to Ullevål Hospital for observation for a minimum of twenty-four hours.

  At the age of three, the first injury of possible interest to Henrik occurred. According to the paperwork, Sander had fallen backwards down the patio steps and hit the small of his back against the edge of one of the steps when he landed. Nothing was broken, but the fall had resulted in a broad diagonal bluish-yellow band across his back.

  Henrik hesitated.

&n
bsp; Bruising did not become visible immediately, he thought. He let his finger run over the text as he read everything over again. It stopped suddenly at one short section, and he gnawed at the lid of the marker pen as he coloured the sentence yellow:

  Patient fell down patio steps two days ago. Showed evidence of immediate pain by crying, but was quickly comforted, according to father. Father says patient has been extremely active since. Patient seems rather subdued now, and does not answer my questions.

  The doctor had sent the boy for X-ray and thereafter home with painkilling suppositories, advising the father to keep the boy quiet for a few days. No further questions. Not even why they had waited two days to bring him.

  In addition, the records contained notes about an infection in both ears, two cases of non-specific stomach pains for which the doctors could find no explanation, and chickenpox that the parents had diagnosed themselves, but which required a certificate in order to claim a refund of expenses for a holiday that had gone down the drain.

  And a severe burn.

  Sander had been playing beside the fireplace, it said. He was now about four and a half years old, and somehow a toy train had ended up in the fire. In an unsupervised moment he had reached for the train, and a red-hot log had fallen on his arm. The wound was ten centimetres long and five wide, ragged at the edges and suppurating copiously. The record was exceptionally brief, almost deficient, in Henrik’s opinion. When he noticed the date, he had a better appreciation of why the doctor had been in a rush. The incident took place on Christmas Eve, and the medical centre was about to close when the father appeared with a howling Sander and received medical assistance, despite the inconvenient timing.

  The episode on the sledging hill was also included in the bundle of papers. The course of events was described almost as Haldis Grande had stated, confirming that the boy had sustained minor concussion and his eyebrow was repaired with three stitches.

  The two final entries in the records dealt with the arm fractures. The first happened in September 2009 and, according to the notes, Sander had simply fallen from a tree in the garden at home. The left-arm fracture was straightforward and clean and an operation was not deemed necessary. The arm was set in a plaster that had been removed after six weeks, and that was the end of the matter.

  When Sander also had to attend in April 2011 for treatment for another fracture, this time of the right arm, the ADHD diagnosis was mentioned for the first time in the records. The diagnosis had been confirmed at the Child Psychiatric Clinic more than two years earlier, but only now had the doctor treating Sander at the Volvat Centre apparently asked a couple of questions with respect to Sander’s remarkable accident-proneness. From the brief notes in the records, Henrik thought he could discern that the doctor had been reassured by the detailed explanation given for yet another broken arm. A ladder had been propped up against the house in Glads vei because Jon Mohr was intending to clean the roof gutters. When he had gone inside for lunch, Sander had climbed halfway up the ladder, lost his balance and fallen off. His arm, or perhaps more precisely the sleeve of his sweater, had got caught between two rungs, his father claimed. Sander was screaming hysterically, and the father came running. When he was just two metres away, the sweater ripped. Somehow the arm must still have been held fast. In any case, Sander was yelling loudly in pain before he tumbled to the ground. The bruises on his body might have originated from his collision with his father, who had managed to partly cushion his fall.

  Henrik caught himself wondering whether the doctor had asked to examine Jon Mohr too, to see whether the story about the bruises checked out.

  He attempted to sort the records into some kind of system.

  One pile dealing with illnesses. The parents could hardly be blamed for chickenpox or ear infections. After brief reflection, he also added the episode with the wasps’ nest and the bout of insomnia to the illnesses. The incident on the sledging hill, too. The parents had not even been present then. He placed all these records into a common binder and pushed that folder to the far left of the desk.

  The injuries remained in another bundle. Two broken arms, one burn and a fall from the patio steps. Henrik was left uncertain about where to file the two instances of stomach-ache. When a boy himself, he had often suffered from stomachache whenever he dreaded something. Though as an adult he understood that this must have been a psychological reaction, he remembered the pains as absolutely genuine. On the other hand, children could dread so many odd things – he had been most afraid of dancing classes and English tests at school. He quickly allocated these two records to the pile of illnesses, and stashed the entire folder in the empty top desk drawer.

  Someone knocked at the door. Three heavy thumps.

  It was so unexpected that Henrik froze, as if someone was about to catch him red-handed doing something he shouldn’t.

  ‘Come in,’ he eventually managed to say.

  A man in his fifties opened the door. He took three steps across the floor and held out his hand. Henrik Holme extended his, without remembering to get to his feet.

  ‘Sergeant Freddy Monsen from the Finance Section,’ the man said genially, taking a seat on the visitor’s chair. ‘I understand you’ve been trying to get hold of me!’

  ‘Yes,’ Henrik said, swallowing.

  ‘You left me a message three times,’ Freddy Monsen reminded him, raising his eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch earlier, but to put it simply: it’s pure hell out there.’

  He surveyed the desolate, silent office.

  ‘Yes, it sure is,’ Henrik replied, struggling to breathe calmly and to prevent the flush on his neck from spreading to his face.

  He cursed his own shyness every single day. As a young boy, it had made him virtually friendless for a long time. Not until his teacher in the second year of primary school had discovered that the skinny, quiet boy in the back row was incredibly proficient at model-making had Henrik obtained help to find a place where he could belong. He constructed planes and boats, famous buildings and fantastic motor cars. For years, until the age of eleven, he had stuck to construction sets he had bought, but at the age of twelve he had replicated the White House without any means of help other than balsa wood, birch veneer, Plexiglas, glue and tools. So impressive was the model that it had been displayed in a glass case in the school assembly hall. For all he knew, it was still there. Constructing models did not make him less shy, but it brought him a couple of equally nerdy friends and sufficient respect from the rest of the boys to guarantee that he was left in peace to some extent.

  At school Henrik Holme excelled in everything except languages, and achieved more than enough qualifications to enter Police College. The physical entrance requirements were more demanding. He had ensured he was fit enough for the running, and he passed the strength exercises by the skin of his teeth. It was the water exercises that had brought him down the first time. The actual swimming had gone reasonably well, but it proved impossible for him to dive in to retrieve the damned rubber rings at the bottom of the pool.

  Henrik Holme was plagued by fear of water. Added to that, he was scared of spiders. He did not like heights, and had serious problems when confronted by large animals. Any larger than cats actually, but he had never admitted that to anyone. Throughout his childhood he became skilled at hiding his phobias. He had no idea how many hours he had spent on the Internet trying to identify names for them all, and the worst thing was that he suffered from an ever-so-tiny trace of anthropophobia.

  Henrik was downright nervous in other people’s company. Not a particularly good quality in a police officer, and his mother had warned him about that. She felt that he ought to follow his childhood dream of becoming a palaeontologist. No one was scared of dead dinosaur remains, she thought she had read somewhere. However, Henrik was adamant.

  He wanted to be a policeman. A detective, even. Admittedly he was afraid of many things, but at an early stage the model-building had taught him the worth of patient exact
itude, a talent he believed would make him a proficient investigator. As a child, he had not been taken seriously by anyone except his parents. The uniform made people notice him. He had become someone, and would progress to greater things.

  During his teenage years he got smarter at tackling all his phobias. He worked really hard on this, after watching a TV programme about exposure therapy. He trapped spiders and put them in his bed, and forced himself to keep his head underwater in the bathtub. He visited riding stables, cows in pasture, and would sit in railway stations and cinemas solely to accustom himself to being in a crowd of so many people.

  The strategy had in fact worked.

  At the age of twenty-six he was much improved. He still preferred to keep his distance from both insects and animals, and never went for a dip in the sea. If he wasn’t exactly good with people, in the main he was able to get on well with them. He had friends and could really enjoy a night on the town, but engaging strangers in conversation was still problematic.

  One-to-one situations for which he was prepared often went well, but this encounter with Freddy Monsen had come upon him so suddenly. Henrik struggled not to swallow so noisily. His bloody Adam’s apple was far too large and gave him away the moment he was affected by the merest hint of insecurity.

  ‘Yes, it sure is,’ he repeated, clearing his throat.

  ‘I tried to phone you,’ the Sergeant said. ‘You left your number on my voicemail, but you didn’t answer my call. So I asked around and discovered you were based in here.’

  Again his eyes scanned the room, from the empty bookshelves over the bare walls, to the desk with its single case folder.

  ‘Anyway, as I was saying,’ he said, with a grin, wriggling in the chair to find a more comfortable position. ‘What is it you’re actually working on?’

  ‘A possible...a possible murder case.’

  Freddy Monsen’s grin grew broader. He was missing half of one front tooth, and an enormous wad of snuff had begun to dribble.