by Anne Holt
She was not the one who didn’t deserve to live. He was.
Now she had reached her own apartment. Hesitating for a moment at the entrance door, she let herself in.
The apartment looked just as before. It surprised her that it appeared so inviting, so comfortable. She ambled around, touching her possessions, stroking them and noticing that a light layer of dust had settled everywhere. In the dazzling light of the day outside, she saw the particles of dust dancing, as though in delight at seeing her again now that she had returned. She gingerly opened the refrigerator. It smelled slightly rank, and she emptied out the perishable foodstuffs, already starting to turn moldy. A cheese, two tomatoes, and a cucumber that squished when she grasped it. She placed the garbage bag beside the front door so she would not forget it when she left.
The bedroom door was ajar. She nervously approached the passageway, where the door, which opened out toward her, shielded her view. After a second’s pause for thought, she strode resolutely into the room.
She wondered who had replaced the quilts on the bed. They were lying neatly folded with the pillows at the bottom of the mattress, beside the footboard. The bedcovers she had ripped off were gone. Of course, they would had been taken for analysis.
Almost against her will, her gaze was drawn to the two pine knobs adorning the top of each corner at the foot of the bed. Even from the door she could see the dark jagged indentations left by the steel wires that had been fastened there. They were not there now. There was nothing at all in the attractive little apartment to say what had happened there on Saturday, May 29. Except for herself.
Hesitantly, she sat on the bed. Then she leaped up, throwing the quilts on the floor and staring at the center of the mattress. But there was nothing there either other than what she recognized from before: a few familiar stains. She sat down again.
She hated that man with all her heart. A good liberating and all-consuming hatred ran like a rod of steel along her entire spine. She had not felt it until today. Seeing the man strolling about large as life, as though nothing had happened, as though her life were something trivial he had ruined by chance one Saturday night—it was a blessing. Now she had someone to hate.
He was no longer simply an abstract monster difficult to attach a face to. Until now he hadn’t been a person, just a dimension, a phenomenon. Something that had swept into her life and left it desolate, like a hurricane on the west coast or a cancerous tumor, something you could never guard against, something that visited itself on people only now and again, lamentable but completely unavoidable and out of all control.
It was no longer like that. He was a man. A person who had chosen to come. Who had chosen her life. He could have left her alone. He could have chosen not to do it, he could have decided on someone else. But she was the one he had taken. With eyes open, deliberately, on purpose.
The telephone was sitting there as usual, on a pine bedside table, beside an alarm clock and a crime novel. On a shelf just above floor height there was a phone book. She found the number rapidly and keyed in the eight digits. When she was finally connected to the place she sought, she spoke to a friendly woman.
“Hello, my name is . . . I’m Sunniva Kristoffersen,” she began. “I was at East Station, no, Central Station, I mean, today. A little problem cropped up, and I was helped really well by one of your staff. He was there at half past ten. Tall, good-looking guy, very broad shoulders, blond hair, thinning slightly. I’d really like to say thank you, but I forgot to ask his name. Have you any idea who it could be?”
The woman was able to do that quite spontaneously. She gave her a name and asked if she should take a message.
“No thanks,” Kristine Håverstad said quickly. “I was thinking of sending some flowers.”
* * *
A few years earlier, Finn Håverstad had been at a party where he had met a reporter from Dagsrevyen, a well-known figure, honored with the Narvesen Prize for his pursuit of a shipowner guilty of scams using guarantee funds from the state. The man had been pleasant, and the dentist found chatting with him interesting. Before that, he had a rather hazy impression that investigative journalism consisted of secret meetings with suspect sources at odd times of the day and night. The hefty reporter had grinned when he had asked inquisitively if that were the case.
“The telephone! Ninety percent of my work comprises phone calls!”
Now he was beginning to understand that. It was amazing how much could be ascertained with the help of Bell’s ingenious invention. On the notepad in front of him he now had the names of six owners of cars parked in the short little street in Homansbyen on the night between May 29 and 30.
Four of them were women. That did not need to mean anything. A husband, son or, for that matter, car thief could have been using the vehicle. But in the meantime he laid these aside. There was only one car left. He dialed the number for Romerike police station and introduced himself.
“What do you think—I was at the receiving end of some major injustice,” he said indignantly to an unsympathetic policeman at the other end. “I’d parked my car beside the railroad station, and when I got back the paint work was dented and scratched. Luckily a young lady had made a note of the registration number. The scoundrel hadn’t left any kind of message, of course. Could you help me?”
Finally understanding the problem, the policeman jotted down the number, saying, “One moment, please,” and two minutes later was able to offer him the make of car as well as the name and address of the owner. Finn Håverstad thanked him effusively.
Now he had them all. First he had tried Brønnøysund, but it was totally impossible to get through there. Apparently the easiest method was the story about being bumped. He had phoned seven police stations, thus avoiding any suspicion. It would be extremely unlikely that seven different cars had bumped him.
The only hurdle was that the vehicle color evidently was not listed in the police register. Moreover, it was probably necessary to double-check the addresses, as they could have changed since the cars were registered. To be on the safe side, he therefore phoned the National Population Register. That took an awfully long time.
But now everything was taken care of. At the Population Register he had obtained, on top of everything else, the dates of birth, something he hadn’t even thought about in advance.
So four of them were women. He put them aside for the moment. One of the men was born in 1926. Far too old. Of course he might have a son the right age, but he put him to one side as well. He was then left with two. Both lived in the Oslo area, one in Bærum and one at Lambertseter.
Not even then did he actually feel any joy. On the contrary. The gnawing and the terrible pain were there beneath his heart as they had been the entire time. His skin was numb; it was as if all the feelings in his whole body had gathered in the area of his stomach. He was dreadfully exhausted. He was existing on minimal sleep. The difference was that he now had something to work on. He would find somebody to hate.
Finn Håverstad packed up his notes, stuffed them into his back pocket, and left to take a closer look at these two men.
* * *
Cecilie had accepted yet another evening at work for her partner without complaint. She was in excellent spirits. Hanne Wilhelmsen was not, however. It was almost seven o’clock, and she was sitting in the operations room with Håkon Sand and Chief Inspector Kaldbakken. The others had gone home. Although they were working on a case of the highest urgency, there was no need to keep people there all night.
Hanne Wilhelmsen, as was her wont, had sketched out the entire case. A flip chart was spread out in the middle of the floor. The detective inspector had drawn a time line, beginning on May 8 and ending today.
Four Saturday night massacres in five weeks. None on May 29.
“It’s entirely possible, of course, we simply haven’t found it,” Håkon Sand declared. “It might have happened all the same.”
Kaldbakken looked as though he concurred, perhaps just to i
n order to go home. He was weary, and in addition had caught a summer cold that was not exactly making his airways any easier to cope with.
“There’s also another possibility,” Hanne said, rubbing her face vigorously. Approaching the narrow window, she stood watching the summer evening drift over the capital city. No one said anything for quite some time.
“Now I’m fairly certain,” she announced suddenly, wheeling round. “Something did happen on May twenty-ninth. But it wasn’t a Saturday night massacre.”
As she spoke, she became more animated, as though she were persuading herself rather than aiming to enlighten the others.
“Kristine Håverstad,” she blurted out. “Kristine Håverstad was raped on May twenty-ninth.”
No one attempted to dispute the fact, but neither did they understand what it had to do with this case.
“We must go,” she said loudly, practically shouting. “Meet me at Kristine’s address!”
* * *
It obviously could not be him, the first one, the man at Lambertseter. The car was not red. On the other hand, the old man on the first floor might have made a mistake. Although he had noticed a red car, E’s notes made it clear there had been several unknown cars parked at various times that night in the same area.
No, the most decisive aspect was the man’s appearance. At half past five he had arrived, driving. Finn Håverstad had seen the car immediately, coming around a bend on a narrow road without asphalt in the quiet residential district. The car was newly washed, and the number plate could be read easily. Obviously busy, the man did not go to the bother of putting his car in the garage. When he emerged from the Volvo, Finn Håverstad was able to see him very clearly from where he stood, fifteen meters away with an unrestricted line of sight to the recently built house.
The man was the right height, around six foot one. But he was virtually bald, with only a dark circlet of hair around a large bald crown showing he had probably not been blond since boyhood. Furthermore, he was overweight.
One left. The man in Bærum. Finn Håverstad feared it would take time, and at worst, he would not be able to take a squint at the man that day. It was already past seven o’clock in the evening, and the likelihood was the man had long since come home from work. Håverstad had placed his own car in line with the others parked along the road, which had an average amount of traffic. The address was in a terrace, with a driveway from the street into a garage at every house on the row. When he arrived, he couldn’t decide where he should position himself. On foot he would probably draw attention to himself after a while, as the area was overlooked and most people were obviously heading somewhere. There was nowhere in the neighborhood where it would seem natural to spend time, no bench where he could sit with his newspaper, no playground where he could stand casually watching the children. Not that such a pastime would be such a good idea either, these days, he thought.
The problem resolved itself when a boy appeared and sat behind the wheel of a Golf parked with an excellent view of the driveway Finn Håverstad was interested in. As soon as the Golf departed, he sneaked his car into the empty space, and turning on the radio at low volume, he settled down to wait.
He had already started to hatch an alternative plan. He could ring the doorbell and ask about something. Or offer something for sale. Then he looked down at his attire and realized that by no means did he look like a salesman. Besides, he had nothing to sell.
At twenty to eight, the car arrived. A bright red Opel Astra. It had tinted glass, so Håverstad could not see the driver. The garage door had to be automatic, because as the Opel swung into the driveway, the door started to rise slowly. Slightly too slowly for the driver, who impatiently revved the motor in expectation of the aperture expanding sufficiently to enter.
Directly after the car disappeared into the garage, the man emerged, turning immediately to the opening. Håverstad saw he was holding a little gizmo in front of him, probably the remote control. The garage door slid down, and the man scurried across a little paved path toward the actual entrance of the terraced house.
It was him. It was the rapist. There wasn’t a shred of doubt. For one thing, he matched Kristine’s description, down to the minutest detail. Second, and far more important, Finn Håverstad could feel it in his bones. He knew the moment the man left the garage and turned around. He couldn’t have had more than a glimpse of his face, but it was enough.
The father of Kristine Håverstad, brutally raped in her own residence on May 29, knew who his daughter’s assailant was. He knew his name, address, and date of birth. He knew what kind of car he drove and what kind of curtains he had. He even knew he had recently cut his grass.
* * *
“Didn’t you go?” he asked, incredulous, when she arrived home just as the sun was taking its leave. “I thought you were going to the cottage?”
When she turned to reply, he was pained harder than ever. She looked like a tiny bird, despite her height. Shoulders slumped and eyes disappeared somewhere inside her skull. Her mouth had an expression that reminded him more and more of his dead wife.
It was unbearable.
“Sit down for a while, then,” he suggested, without waiting for her to explain the change of plan. “Sit down here for a while.”
He patted the sofa beside him, but she chose the chair directly opposite. He tried desperately to make eye contact, but it was impossible.
“Where have you been?” he asked, to no avail. He went to fetch her something to drink. Surprisingly enough, she turned down the glass of red wine he offered her.
“Have we any beer?”
Have we any beer. She was referring to them as belonging together. That was at least something. A second later he returned, having exchanged the stemmed glass for a foaming tankard. His daughter drank half the contents in one gulp.
She had patrolled the streets for hours, but she did not mention that. She had been in her own apartment but said nothing about that either. Moreover, she had found out who had done it. But she would not tell him that.
“Out,” she said softly instead. “I’ve been out.”
Throwing out her arms expressively, she stood with her arms extended and remained frozen in a despairing pose.
“What will I do, Dad? What on earth will I do?”
Suddenly she had a powerful urge to tell him what she had seen earlier in the day. She wanted to pour it all out over him, let her father take control, responsibility, put her life in his hands. She was preparing to speak when she noticed him bend forward suddenly, head between his knees.
Kristine Håverstad had seen her father cry twice before in her life. The first time was a distant, blurred memory from her mother’s funeral. The other time was only three years before, when her grandfather died unexpectedly, out of the blue, only seventy years old, after a minor prostate operation.
When she realized he was sobbing, she knew she could not tell him any of it. Instead she sat facing him and lifted his large head on to her lap.
It didn’t last very long. He sat up abruptly, wiping away his tears, and cupped his hands carefully around her narrow face.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said slowly.
Many times had he threatened to kill her, and other people too, when he was really annoyed. It struck her how pointless it was to say such a thing when you didn’t mean it. For a dark, breathless moment she saw it plainly. This time was deadly serious. She felt terror stricken.
* * *
Agitated, Hanne Wilhelmsen had waited more than ten minutes for them, glancing at her watch every other minute while leaning against her parked motorcycle. When the others finally arrived at the newly renovated gray apartment building, the sky had a dark-blue, almost indigo hue, indicating that the following day would be equally radiant.
“Look at this,” she said when Kaldbakken and Håkon Sand, having managed at last to install the unmarked police car in a tiny space, approached the spot where she stood waiting fretfully beside the entrance.
“Look at that name there.”
She pointed at the doorbell with its name tag untidily attached, just a scrap of paper taped on the glass.
“Asylum seeker. All on her lonesome.”
She rang the doorbell, but there was no response. She rang again. Still no answer. Kaldbakken cleared his throat impatiently, unable to fathom why he was required to travel here so late in the evening. If Hanne Wilhelmsen had something important to impart concerning the case, she could have come out with it at the station.
They heard the echo of the doorbell one more time, without any movement inside. Hanne Wilhelmsen stepped onto the small patch of grass separating the wall of the building from the sidewalk, standing on tiptoe and stretching up to the shaded window. Nothing stirred inside. She gave up and made a sign that the two others should return to their car. Once seated, Kaldbakken lit a cigarette while waiting restlessly for an explanation. Slipping into the rear seat, Hanne Wilhelmsen leaned forward to her two colleagues, supporting her elbows on the front seats and resting her head on her folded hands.
“What’s this all about, Wilhelmsen?” Kaldbakken asked in an indescribably weary voice from the front.
It suddenly dawned on her she needed more time.
“I’ll explain it all later,” she said. “Tomorrow, maybe. Yes, definitely. Tomorrow.”