by Anne Holt
Marcus Koll was now buying properties at a time when everything was cheap. When he sold them in a few years, the profit would be formidable.
He had to protect himself and his family. He had a right to do so. It was his duty.
Georg Koll had reached out from beyond the grave to try to destroy Marcus’s life once again, and he simply could not be allowed to do that.
*
‘May I?’
Adam Stubo nodded in the direction of a yellow armchair in front of the television. Erik Lysgaard showed no sign of reacting. He just sat there in a matching chair in a darker colour, staring straight ahead, his hands resting in his lap.
Only then did Adam notice the knitting and the long, almost invisible grey hairs stuck to the antimacassar on the back of the armchair. He pulled out a dining chair and sat on that instead.
He was breathing heavily. A slight hangover had been plaguing him since he got up at half past five, and he was thirsty. The flight from Gardermoen to Bergen had been anything but pleasant. True, the plane was almost empty, since there weren’t many people desperate to get from Oslo to Bergen at 7.25 on Christmas morning, but the turbulence had been a problem and he had had far too little sleep.
‘This is not a formal interview,’ he said, unable to come up with anything better. ‘We can do that later, down at the police station. When you’re …’
When you’re feeling better, he was about to say before he stopped himself.
The room was light and pleasant. It was neither modern nor old-fashioned. Some of the furniture was clearly well used, like the two wing-backed armchairs in front of the TV. The dining room also looked as if it had been furnished with items that had been inherited. The sofa, however, around the corner in the L-shaped living room, was deep and cream-coloured, with bright cushions. Adam had seen exactly the same one in a Bohus brochure that Kristiane absolutely insisted on reading in bed. Along one wall were bookshelves built around the window, full of titles indicating that the Lysgaards had a wide range of interests and a good knowledge of languages. A large volume with Cyrillic letters on the cover lay on the small table between the armchairs. The pictures hanging on the walls were so close together that it was difficult to get an impression of each individual work. The only one that immediately caught his attention was a copy of Henrik Sørensen’s Kristus, a blonde Messiah figure with his arms open wide. Actually, perhaps it wasn’t a copy. It looked genuine, and could be one of the artist’s many sketches for the original, which was in Lillestrøm Church.
The most striking item was a large Nativity crib on the sideboard. It had to be more than a metre wide and perhaps half a metre deep and tall. It was contained in a box with a glass front, like a tableau. The baby Jesus lay on a bed of straw among angels and little shepherds, sheep and the three wise men. A bulb shone inside the simple stable, so cleverly hidden that it looked as if Jesus had a halo.
‘It’s from Salzburg,’ said Erik Lysgaard, so unexpectedly that Adam jumped.
Then he fell silent again.
‘I didn’t mean to stare,’ said Adam, venturing a smile. ‘But it really is quite … enchanting.’
The widower looked up for the first time.
‘That’s what Eva Karin says. Enchanting, that’s what she always says about that crib.’
He made a small snorting sound as if he were trying to stop himself from crying. Adam edged his chair a little closer.
‘During the next few days,’ he said quietly, pausing to think for a moment. ‘During the next few days many people will tell you they know how you’re feeling. But very few actually do. Even if most people of our age …’
Adam had to be ten years younger than Erik Lysgaard.
‘… have experienced the loss of someone close, it’s completely different when a crime is involved. Not only has the person been snatched away all of a sudden, but you’re left with so many questions. A crime of this kind …’
I have no idea what kind of crime this is, he thought as he kept talking. Strictly speaking, nothing had been established so far.
‘… is a violation of far more people than the victim. It can squeeze the strength out of anyone. It’s—’
‘Excuse me.’
Erik’s son Lukas Lysgaard opened his mouth for the first time since he had shown Adam into the living room. He seemed tired and looked as if he had been crying, but was quite composed. So far he had stood in silence by the far window looking out over the garden. Now he frowned and moved a little closer.
‘I don’t really think my father needs consolation. Not from you, anyway, with respect. We would prefer to be alone. When we agreed to this interview …’
He quickly corrected himself.
‘… to this conversation, which is not an interview, it was, of course, because we would like to help the police as much as we can. Given the circumstances. As you know I am willing to be interviewed by the police as soon as you wish, but when it comes to my father …’
Erik Lysgaard straightened up noticeably in his armchair. He stretched his back, blinked hard and raised his chin.
‘What is it you want to know?’ he asked, looking Adam straight in the eye.
Idiot, Adam thought about himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Of course I should have left you both in peace. It’s just that … For once we haven’t got the media hot on our heels. For once it’s possible to get a little ahead of the pack out there.’
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder as if there were already a horde of journalists on the front step.
‘But I should have known better. I’ll leave you alone today. Of course.’
He stood up and took his coat from the back of one of the dining chairs. Erik Lysgaard looked at him in surprise, his mouth half-open and a furrow in his forehead, just above the thick glasses with their heavy, black frames.
‘Haven’t you got any questions?’ he asked, his tone gentle.
‘Yes. Countless questions. But as I said, they can wait. Could I possibly use your bathroom before I leave?’
He directed this request to Lukas.
‘Along the hallway. Second on the left,’ he mumbled.
Adam nodded briefly to Erik Lysgaard and headed for the door. Halfway across the room he turned back.
Hesitated.
‘Just one thing,’ he said, scratching his cheek. ‘Could I ask why Bishop Lysgaard was out on her own at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve?’
An odd silence filled the room.
Lukas looked at his father, but there wasn’t really any kind of enquiry in his eyes. Just a wary, expressionless look, as if he either knew the answer or thought the question was of no interest. Erik Lysgaard, however, placed his hands on the arms of the chair, leaned back and took a deep breath before looking Adam in the eye once more.
‘That’s nothing to do with you.’
‘What?’ Somewhat inappropriately, Adam started to laugh. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said that’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Right. Well, I think we’ll have to …’
Silence fell once more.
‘We can talk about this later,’ he added eventually, raising a hand in Erik’s direction as he left the room.
The surprising and absurd answer had made him forget for a moment how much he needed the bathroom. As he closed the door behind him he could feel that it was urgent.
Along the hallway, second on the right.
He mumbled to himself, placed his hand on the knob and opened the door.
A bedroom. Not large, maybe ten square metres. Rectangular, with the window on the short wall facing the door. Under the window stood a neatly made single bed with lilac bed linen. On the pillow lay a folded item of clothing. A nightdress, Adam assumed, inhaling deeply through his nose.
Definitely not a guest room.
The sweet smell of sleep mingled with a faint, almost imperceptible perfume.
It wasn’t possible to open the door fully, it bumped agains
t a cupboard on the other side.
He ought to close the door and find the toilet.
There was no desk in the little room, just a fairly large bedside table with a pile of books and a lamp beneath a shelf containing four framed family portraits. He recognized Erik and Lukas straight away, plus an old black-and-white photograph which presumably showed the little family many years ago, when Lukas was small, on a boat in the summer.
On the wall between the cupboard and the bed there was a painting in strong shades of red, and a number of clothes hung on the back of a wooden chair at the foot of the bed. The curtains were thick, dark, and closed.
That was it.
‘Excuse me! Not in there!’
Adam stepped back into the hallway. Lukas Lysgaard came quickly towards him, hands spread wide. ‘What are you doing? Snooping around the house? Who gave you permission to … ?’
‘Along the hallway, second on the right, you said! I just wanted to—’
‘Second on the left. Here!’
Lukas pointed crossly at the door opposite.
‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to—’
‘Could you get a move on, please? I’d like to be alone with my father.’
Lukas Lysgaard must be around thirty-five. A man with an ordinary appearance and unusually broad shoulders. His hair was dark with deep waves, and his eyes were presumably blue. It was difficult to tell; they were narrow and hidden behind glasses reflecting the glow of the ceiling light.
‘My mother had problems sleeping sometimes,’ he said as Adam opened the correct door. ‘When that happened she liked to read. She didn’t want to disturb my father, so …’ He nodded towards the small bedroom.
‘I understand,’ said Adam, smiling before he went into the toilet. He took his time.
He would give a great deal to have another look in that bedroom. It annoyed him that he hadn’t been more alert. Noticed more. For example, he couldn’t remember what kind of clothes had been hanging over the chair: dressy clothes for Christmas Eve, or ordinary everyday clothes. Nor had he noticed the titles of the books on the bedside table. There was no reason to assume that anyone in this family had anything whatsoever to do with the murder of a wife and mother who was obviously loved. But Adam Stubo knew better than most that the solution to a murder was usually to be found with the victim. It could be something the family knew nothing about. Or it could be a detail, something neither the victim nor anyone else had picked up.
But it could be important all the same.
At any rate, one thing was certain, he thought as he zipped up his trousers and flushed the toilet. Eva Karin Lysgaard must have had serious problems when it came to sleeping if she sought refuge in that little bedroom every time she had a bad night. A better explanation was that husband and wife slept in separate rooms.
He washed his hands, dried them thoroughly and went back into the hallway.
Lukas Lysgaard was waiting for him. Without a word he opened the front door.
‘No doubt you’ll be in touch,’ he said, without offering his hand.
‘Of course.’
Adam pulled on his coat and stepped into the small porch. He was about to say Merry Christmas, but stopped himself just in time.
The Stranger
‘All the best!’
Detective Inspector Silje Sørensen ran up the steps, waving goodbye to a colleague who had stopped for a chat after leaving the police headquarters, which was now virtually empty. All the public departments were closed apart from the main desk, where a yawning officer had nodded to her through the glass wall as she dashed in through the entrance to Grønlandsleiret 44.
‘I’ve got the kids in the car!’ she shouted by way of explanation. ‘Just going to fetch my skis, I left them in the office and …’
Silje Sørensen ran up to her floor. She was out of breath as she rounded the corner and set off along the corridor, then slowed down as she approached the door of her office. She fumbled with her keys. They were ice cold after lying in the car for a whole day. Besides which she had far too many keys on the bunch; she had no idea what half of them were for. Eventually, she found the right one and unlocked the door.
Once upon a time the architect had won an award for this building. It was hard to understand why. Once you were inside the narrow entrance, you were fooled into thinking that light and space were key. The vast foyer extended several floors up, surrounded by galleries in an angular horseshoe formation. The offices, however, were little cubes linked to long, claustrophobic corridors. Silje always felt it was cramped and stuffy, however much she opened the windows.
From the outside, police headquarters looked as if it had not withstood the changing seasons well, but simply clung on at an odd angle to the hill between Oslo’s main prison and Grønland Church. During her fifteen years with the police service, Silje Sørensen had seen the community, the state and optimistic city enthusiasts slowly attempt to upgrade the area. But the beautiful Middelalder Park lay much too far away to cast its glow over the battered building housing police headquarters. The Opera House was no more than a slanting white roof, just visible from her office beyond seedy areas beneath a lid of exhaust fumes.
She would have liked to open the window, but she didn’t have much time.
Her eyes swept over the desk. She was pedantically tidy when it came to her office, unlike every other area of her life. The overfilled in-tray at the edge of the desk had pricked her conscience when she left on the Friday before Christmas. Her out-tray was empty, and she shuddered at the thought of the stress that was waiting for her on the first day back after the holiday.
In the middle of the desk lay a file she didn’t recognize. She leaned over and read the yellow Post-it note stuck to the front.
DI Sørensen
Enclosed please find documentation relating to Hawre Ghani, presumed date of birth 16.12.1991. Please contact me asap.
DCI Harald Bull tel. 937***** / 231*****
The kids would be bad-tempered and impossible if she was away too long. On the other hand, they were sitting quietly, each with their Nintendo DS when she left them in the back of the car, illegally parked and with the engine running. They had received the games yesterday and were still fascinated by something new, so she thought she might be OK for a while.
She sat down, still wearing her coat, and opened the file.
The first thing she saw was a photograph. It was black and white and grainy, with pronounced shadows. It looked like an enlargement of a picture from some kind of ID document, but didn’t exactly fulfil the new criteria for passport photographs. The boy – because this was definitely a boy rather than a grown man – had his eyes half-closed. His mouth was open. Sometimes people who had been taken into custody pulled faces when they had their photo taken in order to make themselves unrecognizable. For some reason she didn’t think this boy had been playing up. It struck her that the picture had been taken in a rush, and that the photographer simply couldn’t be bothered to take another one.
Hawre Ghani was of no significance.
He hadn’t been important enough.
The photograph moved her.
The boy’s lips were shining, as if he had licked them. There was something childish and vulnerable about the full upper lip with its pronounced Cupid’s bow. The skin around his eyes was smooth, and there was no sign of stubble on his cheeks. The shadow of a moustache beneath a nose that was so large it almost obscured the rest of his face was the only indication that this was a boy well on his way through puberty. In general there was something youthfully disproportionate about the face. Something puppyish. A quick calculation told her that Hawre Ghani had just turned seventeen.
As she looked through the papers she realized he hadn’t, in fact, lived long enough to do so.
Despite the fact that Silje Sørensen had worked in the violent crime and sexual offences unit for many years, and had seen more than she could have ever imagined when she was a young police cadet, the next picture came as
a shock. Something that must be a face lay inside a hood made of dark fabric. All the features had been smoothed out, the skin was discoloured and badly swollen. One eye socket was distended and empty, the other barely visible. The corpse’s upper lip was partially missing in a ragged tear, revealing four white teeth and one made of silver. At least she assumed it was silver; in the photograph it was more like a black, illogical contrast to the rest of the chalk-white teeth.
She moved on quickly.
The penultimate sheet in the thin file was a report written by an officer from the immigration squad. She had never heard of him. The report was dated 23 December 2008.
Two days ago.
I was at police headquarters this morning in order to transfer two illegal immigrants to the detention centre in Trandum. During the arrest I happened to hear two colleagues discussing an unidentified body which had been found in the harbour early on Sunday 20 December. One of them mentioned that the corpse, which had partially disintegrated, had a silver tooth in the upper jaw. I reacted immediately, because for the past six weeks I have been trying without success to track down Hawre Ghani, a Kurdish asylum seeker below the age of consent, in connection with his application to remain in Norway. During a fight between gangs in Oslo City in September (see my report number 98*****37/08), the right front tooth in Hawre Ghani’s upper jaw was knocked out. He was brought in after this incident, and I accompanied him to the dentist’s the following day. He requested a silver tooth instead of a porcelain crown, and as far as I am aware this was arranged in collaboration with social services, the asylum seekers’ council and the aforementioned dentist.
Since no registered enquiries have come to light regarding a missing person who might correspond to the body found in the harbour, I would suggest that the officer leading the investigation should contact the dentist, Dag Brå, Tåsensenteret, tel. 2229****, in order to compare the dead man’s teeth with his X-rays / records.