by Jo Nesbo
‘How you look at it?’
‘He returned from Hong Kong to investigate the murder for which his girlfriend’s son had been arrested. And even though he managed to get Oleg released, and someone else confessed, the murder of Gusto Hanssen was never really solved. Not officially at any rate.’
‘Thank you,’ Silje said with a quick smile.
‘Good luck with your career,’ Gunnar Hagen said.
He watched her as she made her way down the corridor. Not so much because men always like watching attractive, young women, Anton thought, but to defer what was to come for a few seconds. He had noticed the head of Crime Squad’s nerves. Then Hagen turned to the closed door. Buttoned up his jacket. Rocked on the balls of his feet like a tennis player waiting for an opponent’s serve.
‘I’ll go in then.’
‘Do that,’ Anton said. ‘I’ll keep watch here.’
‘Right,’ Hagen said. ‘Right.’
Halfway through lunch Beate asked Katrine if she and Harry had had sex that time.
To start with, Beate had explained how one of the undercover guys had recognised the picture of the woman who had given the false alibis, Irja Jacobsen. He had said that by and large she stayed indoors and lived in a house by Alexander Kiellands plass they had been keeping under surveillance because amphetamines were being sold there. But the police weren’t interested in Irja, she didn’t do any dealing, at worst she was a customer.
Then their conversation had meandered via work and their private lives, to the good old days. Katrine had mildly protested when Beate claimed that Katrine had given half the Crime Squad a crick in the neck as she swept through the corridors. At the same time Katrine reflected that this was the way women put each other in their place, by emphasising how beautiful they had once been. Especially if they weren’t objects of beauty themselves. But even though Beate had never given anyone a crick in the neck she had never been the type to shoot poisoned darts either. She had been quiet, flushed, hard-working, loyal, someone who never resorted to dirty tactics. But something had obviously changed. Perhaps it was the glass of white wine they had allowed themselves. At any rate it was not like Beate to ask such direct, personal questions.
Katrine was glad her mouth was so full of pitta bread that all she could do was shake her head.
‘But OK,’ she said after she had swallowed, ‘I admit it did cross my mind. Did Harry ever say anything?’
‘Harry told me most things,’ Beate said, raising her glass with the last drops. ‘I was wondering if he was lying when he denied that you and he. .’
Katrine waved for the bill. ‘Why did you think we might have been together?’
‘I saw the way you looked at each other. Heard the way you spoke to each other.’
‘Harry and I fought, Beate!’
‘That’s what I mean.’
Katrine laughed. ‘What about you and Harry?’
‘Impossible. Much too good a friend. Then I got together with Halvorsen of course. .’
Katrine nodded. Harry’s partner, a young detective from Steinkjer. Halvorsen was the father of Beate’s child and was later killed in the line of duty.
Pause.
‘What is it?’
Katrine shrugged. Took out her phone and played the last part of the recording.
‘Lots of crazy people at Ila,’ Beate said.
‘I’ve done a bit of psychiatric myself so I know what’s crazy,’ Katrine said. ‘But what I’m wondering is how he knew I was there because of Valentin.’
Anton Mittet was sitting on a chair watching Mona come towards him. Enjoying the sight. Thinking it might be one of the last times.
She was smiling from a long way off. Heading straight for him. He watched her put one foot in front of the other, as if walking in an imaginary straight line. Perhaps that was how she walked. Or she was walking like that for him. Then she was there, automatically looking behind her to make sure no one was coming. Running her hand through his hair. Without getting up, he wrapped his arms around her thighs and looked up at her.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘You’re on this shift too?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We let Altman go. He was ordered back to the cancer ward.’
‘Then we’ll see all the more of you,’ Anton smiled.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ she said. ‘The tests suggest he’s coming round fast.’
‘But we’ll meet anyway.’
He said this in a joking tone. But it wasn’t a joke. And she knew that. Was that why she seemed to stiffen, that her smile became a grimace, that she shoved him away while looking behind her as if to show she did this because someone might see them? Anton let go.
‘The head of Crime Squad’s in there now.’
‘What’s he doing in there?’
‘Talking to him.’
‘What about?’
‘I can’t say,’ he said. Instead of I don’t know. God, he was so pathetic.
At that moment the door opened and Gunnar Hagen came out. He stopped, looked from Mona to Anton and back to Mona again. As though they had coded messages painted on their faces. Mona had, if nothing else, a tinge of red on hers as she darted through the door behind Hagen.
‘Well?’ Anton said, trying to appear unmoved. And realised that Hagen’s look had not been of someone who understood, but of someone who didn’t understand. He stared at Anton as if he were a Martian; it was the mystified look of a man who had just had all his beliefs turned upside down.
‘The man in there. .’ Hagen said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘You keep a damn good eye on him, Anton. D’you hear me? You keep a damn good eye on him.’
Anton heard him excitedly repeating the last words to himself as he launched into rapid strides down the corridor.
10
When Katrine saw the face in the door opening she thought at first they had come to the wrong place and that the old woman with grey hair and a drawn face could not possibly be Irja Jacobsen.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, glaring at them with suspicion.
‘I rang you earlier,’ Beate said. ‘We’d like to talk about Valentin.’
The woman slammed the door.
Beate waited until the sound of shuffling feet inside had faded. Then she pressed the handle and opened the door.
Clothes and plastic bags hung from the hooks along the corridor. Always plastic bags. Why was it that junkies always surrounded themselves with plastic bags? Katrine wondered. Why did they insist on everything they owned being stored, protected, transported in the flimsiest, most unreliable packaging there was? Why did they steal mopeds, hatstands and tea services, anything, and never suitcases and bags?
The flat was filthy, but still not as bad as most crack dens she had seen. Perhaps the woman of the house, Irja, had some standards and decided to do the cleaning herself. Katrine automatically assumed she she would be on her own in this endeavour. She followed Beate into the sitting room. A man was lying on an old divan, sleeping. Undoubtedly drugged. The room reeked of sweat, smoke, wood marinated in beer, and a sweet smell Katrine couldn’t, or didn’t want to, place. Along the wall were the obligatory stolen goods, pile upon pile of children’s surfboards, all packed in transparent plastic, picturing the same snapping jaws of a great white shark and black bite marks on the tip, to suggest the shark had bitten off a chunk. God knows how they were going to convert these into cash.
Beate and Katrine continued into the kitchen, where Irja had taken a seat at the tiny table and was rolling herself a cigarette. The table was covered with a little cloth, and there was a sugar bowl with plastic flowers on the windowsill.
Katrine and Beate sat down opposite her.
‘They never stop,’ Irja said, nodding to the traffic in Uelands gate. Her voice had the rasping huskiness that Katrine expected, having seen the flat and the face of the ancient woman in her thirties. ‘Always on the move. Where do they all go?’
‘Home,’ Beate suggested. ‘Or they’re leaving h
ome.’
Irja shrugged her shoulders.
‘You’ve left home as well,’ Katrine said. ‘The address on the register. .’
‘I sold my house,’ Irja said. ‘I inherited it. It was too big. It was too. .’ She stuck out a dry, white tongue, ran it along a cigarette paper while Katrine mentally completed the sentence: too tempting to sell as her dole money was no longer enough for her dope consumption.
‘There were too many bad memories.’
‘What sort of memories?’ Beate asked, and Katrine shivered. Beate was a forensics expert, not an expert in questioning techniques, and she was casting too wide a net, asking for the whole tragedy of her life. And no one painted it with more detail or more slowly than a self-pitying junkie.
‘Valentin.’
Katrine sat up. Perhaps Beate knew what she was doing after all.
‘What did he do?’
She shrugged her shoulders again. ‘He rented the basement flat. He. . was there.’
‘Was there?’
‘You don’t know Valentin. He’s different. He. .’
She clicked the lighter, in vain. ‘He. .’ She clicked again and again.
‘He was crazy?’ Katrine suggested impatiently.
‘No!’ Irja threw the cigarette and lighter down in a fury.
Katrine cursed herself. Now she was the amateur asking leading questions.
‘Everyone says Valentin was crazy! He isn’t! It’s just that he does something. .’ She looked through the window down onto the street. Lowered her voice. ‘He does something to the air. It frightens people.’
‘Did he hit you?’ Beate asked.
Also a leading question. Katrine tried to get eye contact with Beate.
‘No,’ Irja said. ‘He didn’t hit me. He strangled me. If I contradicted him. He was so strong, he could just put one hand round my throat and squeeze. Hold it there until everything started spinning. It was impossible to remove his hand.’
Katrine presumed the smile that had spread over Irja’s face was a kind of gallows humour. Until she continued:
‘. . and the strange thing was it made me high. And turned me on.’
Katrine involuntarily pulled a face. She had read that a shortage of oxygen in the brain could have that effect on some people, but with a sex offender?
‘And then you had sex?’ Beate asked, bending down and picking the cigarette up from the floor. Lit it and passed it to Irja. Who quickly poked it between her lips, leaned forward and sucked at the unreliable flame. Let out the smoke again, sank back on the chair and seemed to implode, as though her body were a bag the cigarette had just burnt a hole in.
‘He didn’t always want a shag,’ Irja said. ‘Then he would go out. While I sat waiting, hoping he would be back soon.’
Katrine had to pull herself together so as not to snort or show her contempt in some other way.
‘What did he do outside?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t say anything, and I. .’ Again this shrug of the shoulders. A shrug of the shoulders as an attitude to life, Katrine thought. Resignation as an analgesic. ‘. . I probably didn’t want to know, I suppose.’
Beate cleared her throat. ‘You gave him an alibi for the two nights the girls were killed. Maridalen and-’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Irja interrupted.
‘But he wasn’t at home with you as you stated in the interviews, was he?’
‘I can’t bloody remember. I had my orders, didn’t I?’
‘To do what?’
‘Valentin told me the night we got together, sort of. . well, you know, for the first time. The police would ask me these questions whenever anyone was raped, just because he’d been a suspect in a case they hadn’t managed to pin on him. And if he didn’t have an alibi in a new case they’d try and fit him up however innocent he was. He said the police usually do that with people they reckon have got away with other cases. So I had to swear he’d been at home, whatever time they asked about. Said he wanted to save us both loads of trouble and wasted time. Made sense to me.’
‘And you really thought he was innocent of all these rapes?’ Katrine asked. ‘Even though you knew he’d raped before.’
‘Did I hell!’ Irja shouted, and they heard low grunts coming from the sitting room. ‘I didn’t know anything!’
Katrine was about to push her when she felt Beate’s hand squeeze her knee under the table.
‘Irja,’ Beate said gently, ‘if you didn’t know anything, why did you want to talk to us now?’
Irja looked at Beate, picking imaginary threads of tobacco off the tip of her white tongue. Reflected. Made a decision.
‘He was convicted, wasn’t he? For attempted rape. And when I was cleaning the flat before renting it to someone else, I found these. . these. .’ All of a sudden, without any warning her voice seemed to meet a brick wall and could go no further. ‘. . these. .’ Tears were in her large, blood-dappled eyes.
‘These photos.’
‘What kind of photos?’
Irja sniffled. ‘Girls. Young girls, little girls. Their mouths tied with something. .’
‘Gags?’
‘Gagged, yes. They were sitting on chairs or beds. You can see blood on the sheet.’
‘And Valentin,’ Beate said. ‘Is he in the photos?’
Irja shook her head.
‘So it could have been faked,’ Katrine said. ‘There are so-called “rape photos” circulating online made by pros for those interested in that sort of thing.’
Irja shook her head again. ‘They were too frightened. You could see it in their eyes. I. . recognised the fear there when Valentin was going to. . wanted. .’
‘What Katrine is saying is that it doesn’t have to be Valentin who took the pictures.’
‘The shoes,’ Irja sniffled.
‘What?’
‘Valentin had these long, pointed cowboy boots with buckles on the side. In one photo you can see the boots on the floor beside the bed. And then I knew it had to be true. He really could have done those rapes, as they said. But that wasn’t the worst. .’
‘It wasn’t?’
‘You can see the wallpaper behind the bed. And it was that wallpaper, the same pattern. The picture had been taken in the basement flat. In the bed where he and I had. .’ She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing out two tiny drops of water.
‘So what did you do?’ Katrine asked.
‘What do you think?’ Irja hissed, wiping her forearm along her runny nose. ‘I went to you lot! To the people who are supposed to protect us.’
‘And we said?’ Katrine asked, unable to conceal her repugnance.
‘You said you would investigate the matter. So you went to Valentin with the photos, but of course he managed to talk his way out of it. He said it had been a game, there hadn’t been any force, he didn’t remember the names of the girls, he’d never seen them again and asked if anyone had reported him. They hadn’t, so it stopped there. That is, it stopped for you. For me it had just begun. .’
She carefully ran a bony forefinger under each eye, obviously believing she had put on make-up that might have smudged.
‘Oh?’
‘In Ila they’re allowed one phone call a week. I received a message telling me he wanted to talk to me. So I went to visit him.’
Katrine didn’t need to hear the rest.
‘I was sitting in the visitors’ room waiting for him. And when he came in he just looked at me and it was as if he had his hand around my throat again. I couldn’t bloody breathe. He sat down and said that if I ever said one word about the alibis to anyone he would kill me. And if I ever talked to the police, for whatever reason, he would kill me. And that if I thought he was going to be inside for long I was mistaken. Then he got up and left. And I was left in no doubt. As long as I knew what I knew he would kill me whatever happened, at the first opportunity. I went straight home, locked all the doors and wept with terror for three days. On the fourth a so-called friend rang wanting to borrow mo
ney. She used to do that pretty regularly, she was hooked on some heroin that had just come out, which later they dubbed violin. I used to hang up on her, but this time I didn’t. The following night she was at my place helping me with the first shot of something I wished I’d had all my life. Oh God, how it helped. Violin. . it fixed everything. . it. .’
Katrine could see the glint of a former love in the destroyed woman’s eyes.
‘And then you were hooked as well,’ Beate said. ‘You sold the house. .’
‘Not just for money,’ Irja said. ‘I had to escape. Had to hide from him. Everything that could lead back to me had to go.’
‘You stopped using a credit card, you moved without telling the authorities,’ Katrine said. ‘You didn’t even collect your social security any more.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not even after Valentin died.’
Irja didn’t answer. Didn’t blink. Sat unmoving as the smoke curled upwards from the already burned-down stump between her nicotine-yellow fingers. Katrine was reminded of an animal caught in the headlights.
‘You must have been relieved when you heard that?’ Beate probed gently.
Irja nodded her head, mechanically, like a doll.
‘He’s not dead.’
Katrine knew at once she meant it. What was the first thing she had said about Valentin? You don’t know Valentin. He’s different. Not was. Is.
‘Why do you think I’m telling you this?’ Irja stubbed out her cigarette on the table. ‘He’s getting closer. Day by day, I can feel it. Some mornings I wake up, and I can feel his hand round my throat.’
Katrine wanted to say that was called paranoia, the inseparable companion of heroin. But suddenly she wasn’t so sure. And when Irja’s voice sank to a low whisper as her eyes flitted between the dark corners of the room, Katrine could feel it too. The hand on her throat.
‘You’ve got to find him. Please. Before he finds me.’
Anton Mittet looked at his watch. Half past six. He yawned. Mona had been in to see the patient with a doctor a couple of times. Otherwise nothing had happened. You had a lot of time to think sitting there like that. Too much time actually. Because your thoughts had a tendency to become negative after a while. And that would have been fine if the negativity had been something he could have worked on. But he couldn’t change the Drammen case or his decision not to report the baton he had found in the forest below the crime scene. He couldn’t go back and unsay, undo, the times he had hurt Laura. And he couldn’t undo his first night with Mona. Nor the second.