by Anne Holt
Silje Sørensen turned to the final page in the file. It was a copy of a handwritten document addressed to Harald Bull.
Hi Harald!
Due to the Christmas holiday I ran a quick and highly unscientific check today, Christmas Eve, based on the tip from the immigration squad. Dag Brå agreed to meet me at his surgery this morning. I showed him some pictures of the deceased’s teeth which I took myself (I took a few shots on Aker Brygge on Sunday morning, not brilliant quality but worth a try). He compared these with his own notes and X-rays, and we can assume until further notice that the deceased probably is the underage Kurdish asylum seeker as indicated. All documents have been copied to forensics. I presume that a formal identification will take place immediately after New Year – or perhaps between Christmas and New Year if the gods are on our side. I’ll write a report as soon as I’m back in the office. But now I need a HOLIDAY!
Merry Christmas!
Bengt
P.S. I spoke to forensics yesterday. There are indications that the deceased was killed using something resembling a garrotte. The guy I spoke to said it was a miracle the head was still attached. Perhaps we should consider sending the case over to the violent crimes squad straight away.
B
Silje Sørensen closed the file and leaned back in her chair. She was sweating. The good mood she had been in on her way to work had been swept away, and she wished she had left the damned file alone.
Now she felt a strong urge to open it again, just to look at the young man: this rootless, homeless Kurdish boy without any parents, with his silver tooth and smooth cheeks. Regardless of how many times she came across these children – and God knows it happened all too often – she just couldn’t distance herself. Sometimes in the evenings, when she looked in on her own two sons who had now decided they were too old for goodnight kisses, but who still couldn’t get to sleep until she had tucked them in, she experienced something that resembled guilt.
Perhaps even shame.
The sound of a car horn shattered the silence, making her heart miss a beat. She opened the window and looked down at the turning area in front of the entrance and the main desk.
‘Mum! Mum, will you be much longer?’
Her youngest son was hanging out of the car window, yelling. Silje immediately felt cross. Quickly she placed Hawre Ghani’s file on top of her in tray, pulled off the Post-it note with Harald Bull’s number and tucked it in her pocket.
As she locked the door behind her and ran towards the foyer in the hope of reaching the car in time to stop her son sounding the horn again, she had completely forgotten why she had gone to the office early on the afternoon of Christmas Day on the way to dinner with her in-laws.
The skis.
They were still behind the door of her office. By the time she eventually remembered them, it was too late.
*
It wasn’t too late yet, the duty editor established. The bulletin was going out in two minutes, but since this was anything but a lead story, they could easily put together a short item from the studio with a picture of the Bishop towards the end of the broadcast. He quickly rattled off a message to the producer.
‘Get something written for Christian right away,’ he ordered the young temp. ‘Just a short piece. And double check with NTB that it’s correct, of course. We can do without announcing someone has died when they haven’t, even on a slow news day.’
‘What’s going on here?’ said Mark Holden, one of NRK’s heavyweights on home affairs. ‘Who’s died?’
He grabbed the piece of paper from the temp, read it in one and a half seconds and shoved it back in the young woman’s hand. She didn’t really have time to realize he’d taken it.
‘Tragic,’ said Mark Holden, without a scrap of empathy. ‘She can’t have been all that old. Sixty? Sixty-two? What did she die of ?’
‘It doesn’t say,’ the news editor replied absently. ‘I hadn’t heard she was ill. But right now I need to concentrate on this broadcast. If you could …’
He waved away the much older reporter, his gaze fixed on one of the many monitors in the large room. The brief news headlines were shown, with all the captions as agreed. The presenters were more smartly dressed than usual, in honour of Christmas.
The editor leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk.
‘Are you still here?’ he said to the young woman. ‘The idea is to put out the item today, not next week.’
Only now did he notice that her eyes were about to brim over with tears. Her hand was shaking. She took a quick breath and forced a smile.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it right away.’
‘Did you know her?’ There was still no warmth in Mark Holden’s voice, just a deeply rooted curiosity and almost automatic desire to ask everybody questions about everything.
‘Yes. She and her husband are friends of my parents. But it’s also the fact that she …’
Her voice broke.
‘She’s … she was very popular after all,’ said the news editor gently. He chewed on his pencil and lowered his feet to the floor. ‘Give that to me,’ he said, holding out his hand for the small piece of paper. ‘I’ll write the piece, and you can start putting together an item with archive pictures for the nine o’clock bulletin. A minute, something like that. OK?’
The young woman nodded.
‘The Bishop of Bjørgvin, Eva Karin Lysgaard, passed away suddenly on Christmas Eve, at the age of sixty-two.’ The editor spoke the words out loud as his fingers flew over the keys. ‘Bishop Lysgaard was born in Bergen and was a student priest in the town before later becoming a prison chaplain. For many years she was the pastor of Tjenvoll parish in Stavanger. In 2001 she was anointed bishop, and has become well known as …’
He hesitated, smacked his lips then suddenly continued.
‘… a mediator within the church, particularly between the two sides in the controversial debate on homosexuality. Eva Karin Lysgaard was a popular figure in her home town, something that was particularly evident when she held a service at Brann Stadium after Brann won their first league title in forty-four years in 2007. Bishop Lysgaard is survived by her husband, one son and three grandchildren.’
‘Is it absolutely necessary to mention that business with the football match?’ asked Mark Holden. ‘Not entirely appropriate in the circumstances, is it?’
‘I think it is,’ said the editor, sending the text to the producer with one click. ‘It’s fine. But listen …’
Mark Holden was scrabbling around in a huge bowl of sweets.
‘Mmm?’
‘What does a person die of at that age?’
‘You’ve got to be joking. Anything, of course. I haven’t a clue. It’s odd that it doesn’t say anything about it. No “after a long illness” or something like that. A stroke, I suppose. A heart attack. Something.’
‘She was only sixty-two …’
‘So what? People die much younger than that. Personally, I give thanks for every single day on earth. As long as I can have some chocolate now and again.’
Mark Holden couldn’t find anything he liked. Next to the bowl lay three rejected liquorice sweets and two coconut chocolates.
‘You’ve taken all the best ones,’ he mumbled sourly.
The editor didn’t reply. He was deep in thought, and bit on his pencil so hard that it broke. His eyes were fixed on the monitor in front of him, although he didn’t really seem to be following what was going on.
‘Beate!’ he suddenly shouted to the young temp. ‘Beate, come over here!’
She hesitated for a moment, then got up from her desk and did as he said.
‘When you’ve finished your little piece,’ he said, pointing the broken pencil at her, ‘I want you to make a few phone calls, OK? Find out what she died of. I can smell …’
His nose twitched like a rabbit’s.
‘… a story. Maybe.’
‘Phone people after the programme? That late on Chris
tmas Day?’
The editor sighed loudly. ‘Do you want to be a journalist or not? Come on. Get going.’
Beate Krohn’s face was expressionless.
‘You said your parents knew her,’ the editor insisted. ‘So give them a call! Ring whoever you damn well like, but find out what the bishop died of, OK?’
‘OK,’ mumbled the young woman, dreading it already.
*
Johanne never really dreaded doing anything. It was just so difficult to get going. Since she took her doctorate in criminology in the spring of 2000, she had completed two new projects. After submitting her thesis on ‘Sexualized violence, a comparative study of conditions during childhood and early experience among sexual and financial offenders’ she was awarded a grant which enabled her to write an almost equally comprehensive study of miscarriages of justice in Norway. Ragnhild came along towards the end of this project. She and Adam agreed that Johanne would stay at home with their daughter for two years, but before her maternity leave was over she had made a start on her latest project: a study of underage prostitutes, their background, circumstances and chances of rehabilitation.
Last summer she had been given a piece of work to do for the National Police Directorate.
Ingelin Killengreen herself had contacted Johanne. The Commissioner had obviously been given clear political directives on the issue of putting hate crime on the agenda.
The problem was that this particular type of criminal activity hardly existed at all.
Well, of course it did.
But not when it came to figures. Not statistically speaking. Working in tandem with the Oslo police force, the National Police Directorate had already started mapping all reports made during 2007 where the motive for the crime could be linked to race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The final report was just around the corner and Johanne had already seen most of the material.
The number of crimes was small, and dwindling.
During 2007 in the whole of Norway 399 cases of hate-motivated crime were registered. Of this number more than 35 per cent were simply the result of an incorrect code being entered in the police register. In other words, just over 250 cases could be classified as hate crime.
For an entire year, in a country with a population of almost five million. Compared with the total number of reported crimes, 256 cases was too small a number to be of any interest.
But it was, at least to politicians. Since just one hate crime was one too many; since the hidden statistics for hate crime must be significant; and since the Red-Green coalition government wanted to enter the election in autumn 2009 with a trump card up its sleeve when it came to minority groups that sounded off whenever a homosexual was assaulted in the street or a synagogue was sprayed with graffiti. That’s why Johanne had been asked to undertake a closer study of the phenomenon.
The task was formulated so vaguely that she had spent the entire autumn defining her parameters and limiting the work that lay ahead. She had also started collecting the relatively comprehensive quantities of data available from other countries. Mainly the United States, but also several European countries had been cataloguing and to some extent working on this particular form of law breaking for quite some time. The material was growing, and she still didn’t really have a proper grasp of what she was going to do and where she wanted to go.
Then came the financial crisis.
And all those billions in public money.
Certain branches of Norwegian research were drowned in funds. Since the police were included in the many initiatives aimed at keeping the wheels moving and preventing economic collapse, Johanne found herself with four times as much money at her disposal as a few weeks before. This opened up new opportunities, including the possibility of hiring younger researchers and scientific assistants. At the same time, this extra money created fresh problems. She had been on the point of finalizing a framework for her project, and now she had to start all over again.
It was hard work, and it was always difficult to get going. But she was looking forward to it.
It was evening. Kristiane had been unusually co-operative while they were visiting Isak’s parents, and Ragnhild had cheered up as soon as the children each received a big bag of Christmas sweets. As Kristiane was staying with her paternal grandparents so that she could spend the next three days with her father, Ragnhild had also insisted on staying. As usual, Isak had smiled broadly and said that was fine. Presumably he had realized the same thing as Adam and Johanne quite some time ago: Kristiane was calmer, slept better and was more cheerful when Ragnhild was around.
The building was quiet. The neighbours downstairs must have gone away. When Johanne got home at about eight o’clock, the ground floor was in darkness. In her own apartment she went from room to room, switching on all the lights. She left all the doors open; the dog liked to wander around if he wasn’t shut in Kristiane’s room at night. The soft pattering of his paws and the cheerful thud every time Jack settled down on the floor always made her feel slightly less lonely on the rare occasions when she actually was alone. Eventually she took her laptop into the living room, sat down on the sofa and sipped a glass of wine as she surfed the net, without concentrating on anything in particular. She was looking for some kind of Scrabble game when the phone rang.
‘Hi, it’s me.’
It was a long time since she had been so pleased to hear his voice.
‘Hi darling. How’s it going up there?’
Adam laughed.
‘Well, basically I’ve trodden on the toes of the Bergen police; I called to see the widower just a few hours after he’d been told that his wife was dead. I’ve already fallen out with his son, I think, and on top of all that I’ve eaten so much for dinner that I feel ill.’
Johanne laughed too.
‘That doesn’t sound good. Where are you staying?’
‘At the SAS Hotel on Bryggen. Nice room. They moved me to a suite when they found out where I was from. It’s not exactly packed out here at Christmas.’
‘So did they know why you were there?’
‘No. It’s a miracle. It’s almost exactly twenty-four hours since Bishop Lysgaard was murdered, and so far not a single bloody journalist has got wind of it. All that Christmas food must have finished them off.’
‘Or the schnapps. Or maybe it’s just that the Bergen police are better at keeping quiet than their colleagues in Oslo. By the way, I’ve just been watching the evening news. They had a little piece about the case, but they more or less just said she was dead.’
On the other end of the line she could hear noises that indicated Adam was taking off his tie. She suddenly felt quite emotional. She knew him so well she could hear something like that on the phone.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to take off my shoes and this damned noose around my neck. That’s better. What kind of a day have you had? Was it horrible having to do all that clearing up with the kids around? You must be worn out. I’m sorry I—’
‘It was fine. As you know I can get by perfectly well without one night’s sleep. The kids played in the garden for a couple of hours and I just …’
She had managed to push away the thought of the strange man for the entire afternoon and evening. Now a feeling of unease stabbed through her, and she fell silent.
‘Hello? Johanne?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘Is something wrong? Johanne?’
Adam would simply dismiss it. He would sigh his weary sigh and tell her not to be so worried about the children all the time. Adam would have very little understanding of the fact that Johanne had discovered that a complete stranger knew the name of her elder daughter. Besides which, the man had been so well wrapped up in his overcoat, hat and scarf that Adam would maintain it could have been a neighbour if she told him about the incident; and that horrible little coldness would come between them and make it more difficult for her to get to sleep later, alone, with no other sounds around her apart from
Jack’s snuffling and constant farting.
‘No, no,’ she said, trying to make her voice smile. ‘Except that you’re not here, of course. Ragnhild wanted to stay over with Isak’s parents.’
‘That’s good. Isak really is generous. He puts—’
‘As if you weren’t every bit as kind to his daughter! As if—’
‘Calm down, Johanne! That wasn’t what I meant. I’m glad you all had a nice evening, and that you’ve got some time for yourself. That certainly doesn’t happen very often.’
She moved the laptop on to the coffee table and drew the blanket more tightly around her.
‘You’re right,’ she said, this time with a genuine smile. ‘It’s actually really nice to be all on my own. Apart from Jack, of course. By the way, there must be something wrong with his food. He’s farting like mad.’
Adam laughed. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Doing a little bit of work. Surfing the net a little bit. Drinking a little drop of wine. Missing you.’
‘That all sounds good. Apart from the work – it’s Christmas Day! I’m just about to go to bed. I’m worn out. Tomorrow I’m hoping to interview the Bishop’s son. God knows how that will go – he’s already taken a dislike to me.’
‘I’m sure he hasn’t. Everybody likes you. And because you are the very best detective in the whole wide world, I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
Adam laughed again.
‘You mustn’t keep saying that to the kids! Just before Christmas when we were queuing at the checkout in Maxi, Ragnhild suddenly stood up in the shopping trolley and announced at the top of her voice that her daddy was the very, very, very best – I think she must have said “very” ten times – detective in the world. Embarrassing. People laughed.’