Wolves in the Dark

by Gunnar Staalesen

  I wound down the window on her side and tried to appear as innocent as a confirmand caught red-handed with a porn mag during high mass.

  She leaned down, studied me and shouted: ‘Who the hell are you? And what the fuck are you doing?’ Hard to fault the eloquence of her vocabulary.

  ‘Super Sleuth they call me,’ I answered in my last attempt to be funny that month.

  18

  In my younger days I used to circle in red the days on the calendar when something nice happened. A first kiss, first sex and so on. At my current stage of life, my instinct was to put a black line through most of them. That Friday in October was a case in point. After the verbal assault by Åsne Clausen – I didn’t offer a single protest or answer one of the questions she asked – I drove back home with my tail between my legs, feeling like Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther.

  At home, I unscrewed the top of the half-full bottle of aquavit I kept in the kitchen cupboard for emergencies; there had been no shortage of them in the last year. Before the evening was over the bottle was empty and I didn’t feel the slightest bit comforted.

  The weekend was a struggle to get through. I managed to get down to the Vinmonopolet before they closed at midday on Saturday and breathed a sigh of relief that there was still enough money in my account to avoid my card being confiscated on the spot. I walked home and stayed there for the rest of the day and the whole of the following one. I had enough cans of food in the cupboard. It took me until Sunday evening to snap out of this mood, put trainers and a tracksuit on and do the Fjellveien trail – the whole way there and back, which was about eight and a half kilometres in total. After a long, hot shower I felt relatively restored, but not exactly ready for the following day.

  I had barely entered the office when the telephone rang. Warily, I lifted the receiver to my ear, extremely nervous about what was awaiting me.

  She hadn’t softened much over the weekend, but I recognised her voice at once. ‘Veum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is Åsne Clausen. Are you free now?’

  ‘Yes, in a sense.’

  ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t move.’

  ‘No, OK,’ I said, but she had already rung off.

  I took a seat at my desk, more or less unable to act. There wasn’t much I could do. I brushed the dust off the desktop, but decided to leave the pile of bills. It functioned as a kind of excuse: I hadn’t cleaned the place for weeks, but there hadn’t been much going on, and no money coming in, so it didn’t really matter.

  She was true to her word. Exactly ten minutes later she knocked on the waiting-room door. When no-one answered, she opened it, passed through and studied me from the doorway.

  She was a little more elegantly dressed this time, as though she were on her way to an important conference: a half-length, black jacket cut in at the waist and beneath it a charcoal-grey skirt. In one hand she held a briefcase, solid enough to act as a weapon if need be. Her face was twitching, she had dark bags under her eyes, so dark that the light make-up couldn’t camouflage them, and her eyes looked moist and angry, such as after a long, sleepless night. I knew all about that. It was like looking at myself in the mirror most mornings of the year. But she was attractive. Much more attractive.

  ‘Come in,’ I said, standing up behind the desk. I nodded to the client chair. ‘Please take a seat.’

  She looked around with the same contempt as her husband had a few days earlier. Before sitting down she examined the seat carefully to make sure there was nothing nasty on it. When she did finally sit down she perched on the edge with her legs at right angles to the floor, graceful yet on her guard.

  Then she met my eye. ‘I have nothing but disdain for people who make their living as you do.’

  ‘How—?’

  She interrupted me. ‘I wrote down your registration number. As easy as pie. And I’m aware it was Nicolai who employed you.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘No, of course you can’t. But I’m not a complete idiot, even though you must have assumed I am from the way you tried to – what’s the word? – tail me on Friday.’

  ‘I admit—’

  ‘Of course you do, but in fact I have something to show you.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  She looked at me with what seemed to be triumph in her eyes, but I suspected she had nowhere near the control she pretended she had. There was a nervous energy inside her that I knew, from experience of similar situations, could explode at any moment.

  Then she opened the briefcase, took out a large brown envelope with foreign stamps on, opened it and produced a handful of A5 photos. For a moment she seemed to hesitate. Then she threw them on the desk in front of me with such force that I had to place a hand on them to prevent them from skidding onto the floor.

  I laid them out across the desk and leaned over them. They were graphic enough, if not outright embarrassing.

  I soon recognised Nicolai Clausen. In all the photos he was accompanied by beautiful young women with elegant hairstyles; a couple of ladies with bare shoulders, a couple with plunging necklines. There seemed to be several of them, and Clausen wasn’t always wearing the same suit, which told me, Sherlock Holmes that I was, that the photos had been taken on several different occasions. The surroundings were, generally speaking, opulent, glitzy bars with a selection of bottles I wouldn’t have refused if someone had asked me to test the quality. In a couple of the pictures Clausen and the woman were in such deep conversation a kiss would have been the next step.

  One photo stood out. It had been taken from a distance, probably from a window on the opposite side of the street. A somewhat grainy shot showed what I assumed was the inside of a hotel room, where Nicolai Clausen was in a hot clinch with a woman, and her dress was sliding off, the way a chrysalis falls away from a butterfly as it emerges in full flower, beautiful and perfectly formed.

  I looked up at her. Her eyes were wet now, and there was a red flush high on her cheeks.

  ‘Who—?’

  She anticipated all my questions before I could articulate them. ‘I employed a … colleague of yours…’ The last phrase she almost spat out. ‘In London, after seeing various signs and with increasing suspicion about … what he got up to in the evenings on these business trips of his. This was the result, as well as a full report.’ Then she added, ‘Professional enough though,’ with an expression that suggested she didn’t believe I was capable of anything similar.

  I sighed aloud. Then I gathered the photos into a pile and pushed them towards her side of the desk. ‘And why are you showing me these?’

  ‘Why? You ask me why?’ An explosion was imminent. ‘So that you can see what sort of man I’m married to and so that you…’ She seemed to implode in front of me. She sobbed, took out a packet of tissues from her briefcase and began to weep. Her shoulders shook, so much so that for a moment I was scared her clothes would fall off too.

  I sat watching her. I didn’t feel I was in a position to go round the desk, put my arms around her and whisper some consoling words in her ear. All I could do was sit tight and wait to see how she would bring this to an end.

  Eventually she pulled herself together. The shaking subsided; she wiped the remaining tears away and took out a mirror, which she used to adjust her eye make-up before turning to me again. With a frosty stare, she said: ‘In short, I’d like you to terminate the job you were given by my husband this minute, Veum. If I see you in my vicinity one more time I’ll call the police.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’ll take care of my husband.’

  I didn’t doubt that. He had something to look forward to.

  She got up, tossed her head, turned without another look in my direction and left. I never saw her again.

  The following day I received confirmation from Clausen himself that the job was over. He phoned this time, and his voice was so full of anger that I was glad he hadn’t appeared in person. If he had, there was a good chance I w
ould have landed on the pavement four floors down, following a swift exit through the office window. The Clausen couple had, in the course of two days, given me a harder time than I had experienced since Dankert Muus retired, and I hoped I would never hear from either of them again.

  However, a shock went through me when three or four weeks later I read her obituary in the newspaper:

  My beloved wife, my loving mother, my dearest daughter, Åsne Clausen, née Kronstad, who died suddenly on 18th November. Nicolai, Severin, Kåre. Funeral at Solheim Chapel, 27th November, 12.00 a.m.

  A remorseless sense of guilt grew in me. Was this in any way connected with the job I bodged in October? And what did it mean, ‘died suddenly’? A sudden illness? An accident in the home? Something else?

  There had been nothing in the news about her. Murder had probably been ruled out, as the funeral was taking place with the normal lapse of time after the death. But an accident at home could be so many things. Falling down the stairs, a variety of everyday mishaps … According to the experts it was probable that most murders were concealed in this way. But so what? If the police hadn’t questioned it, was it appropriate for me to do so?

  For some reason or other, which, later, I could never explain to myself, I went to the chapel for the funeral. I arrived just before the service started and sat right at the back. The chapel was far from full, and when the female priest started the commemoration I understood why. Although she expressed herself in very vague terms, it wasn’t so difficult to understand that Åsne Clausen had chosen to end her own life, which only magnified the bad feeling I’d had about this case from the very first moment. But there was still something I couldn’t make add up. In the two short meetings I’d had with her, Åsne Clausen had not stood out as a suicide candidate. Quite the contrary, she had seemed determined and dynamic, like a woman who would definitely not be pushed around. I found it very difficult to imagine she would have committed suicide. And the blame for it didn’t lie with me. Nicolai Severin Clausen would have to carry that burden.

  When the procession filed out of the chapel, with the family at the front, he saw me, and I noted his face went even greyer than it already was. Outside, I was making my way around the gathering of people paying their condolences when he marched towards me, grabbed my shoulder and spun me round. ‘How dare you!’ he snarled. ‘You, after messing everything up!’

  ‘I didn’t mess anything up. She was already on your trail.’

  He wasn’t listening. ‘But it was you who egged her on. And let’s be clear about one thing, Veum! I’m going to destroy you! Do you hear me? Destroy you!’

  He raised his fist, as if to punch me, but some people came and dragged him away before he could carry out his threat, glaring at me as though I had caused all this.

  Afterwards I wasn’t bothered by the threats he had made. I was used to this. What seared itself on my retina was the sight of his son, Severin, who was staring at me with eyes full of hatred. I had never seen anything like it. And now, almost two years afterwards, that was what occupied my mind. The shock I had felt at that moment.

  19

  Vidar Waagenes came alone the following day as well. But now he was able to tell me that the police had handed over all the material from both hard drives and Siggen was at work.

  ‘What about Svein Olav Kaspersen and Hjalmar Hope? Did you find out how their case went?’

  He nodded and produced a document from his bag. ‘A minor punishment. They were charged with not keeping proper accounts and failing to produce purchase documents. They had to pay a fine of a hundred thousand kroner, which, incidentally, they appealed against and had reduced to seventy-five thousand. But the company was closed down and young Kaspersen has now taken over his uncle’s fish farm and, to my knowledge, lives off that.’

  ‘This Hjalmar Hope. I remembered seeing him six months earlier, in the car park outside a computer firm called SH Data.’

  ‘SH?’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘Elementary, my dear Veum.’

  ‘There are, of course, several firms in that building, so I don’t know for certain if that’s where he works – or worked. It’s quite a while ago now. But it’s a computer firm anyway.’

  He made a note. ‘I’ll see what I can dig up. Have you remembered anything else?’

  I told him about my bodged job for Nicolai S. Clausen, Åsne Clausen’s sudden death and their young son, who, according to reports, was supposed to be a computer whiz.

  ‘You mean Åsne Clausen and Hjalmar Hope could have been colleagues?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s a possibility of course. But … this isn’t a case that gives me particularly good vibes, Vidar. To this day I think back on it with great reluctance. I’ve never really been able to get rid of the sense that I bore some of the blame for the case developing in the way that it did.’

  ‘If so, there’s a clear motive … for someone,’ Waagenes said, making another note. ‘I’ll check that out. I think I might have a colleague who was a legal consultant for Nicolai Clausen for some years. I’ll find out if he can tell me anything about how she died at least.’

  ‘Fine. When do you think your computer man will be able to have some results?’

  ‘Siggen? Perhaps by the weekend.’

  ‘Have you heard anything else from the police?’

  ‘No contact except for the delivery of the hard-drive copies.’

  ‘And the other matters?’

  ‘Those … they’re being fully investigated. I asked when they were intending to call you in for another interview, but they wouldn’t give me an answer.’

  ‘And … the press?’

  ‘Their interest’s on the wane. So long as no more information is leaked they don’t have a lot to say, apart from writing complicated articles about child pornography and international networks in general.’

  I sighed. ‘Well, that’s something anyway.’

  ‘What would be interesting, Varg, is if you, in the course of your investigations, either in recent years or earlier, have come across such cases yourself. If you’ve had any experience of circles who indulge in such matters and you’ve trodden so close they’ve felt a need to protect themselves.’

  ‘Protect themselves?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure it’s not in this network’s interest that this case should explode the way it has done. All such networks flourish in obscurity and within their own digital horizons. Any unintended revelation from outside threatens exposure, which none of these people want. Someone’s making a fortune out of this. The exchange of images is rarely free, and if it is, it won’t be long before there’s a digital debt collector at your door – and perhaps even a physical one if you choose not to pay. We know that this is a part of the activities of organised crime all over the world, and for this sort of person a life is worth no more than what they can earn on it, even if we’re talking about children down to the age of infants.’

  ‘The problem is that I’m struggling with great gaps in my memory, Vidar. Self-induced, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’re sure they were all self-induced? There are enough people whose drinks have been spiked and who wake up the next morning unable to remember anything at all about what happened to them. In nine out of ten cases we’re talking rape here, but…’ He splayed his hands. ‘You don’t remember anything like that?’

  ‘You mean someone didn’t necessarily set this in motion to hit me now. It was stored for potential use at a later time?’

  ‘Yes. I assume you’ve never been exposed to any kind of blackmail?’

  ‘If I had been, I would’ve remembered!’

  Suddenly I felt physically ill. My throat constricted, and I found it hard to breathe. Cold sweat appeared on my forehead, between my shoulder blades and under my arms. Inside, a feeling grew that I was on the edge of something, a big black hole it would be dangerous to enter. Nevertheless that was exactly what I had to do.

  I had problems focussing on Vidar. Instead I rubb
ed my eyes frenetically as if to remove not just a speck of dust but a bloody great beam from my vision.

  After he had left I lay down on the bench, curled into a foetal position and launched myself into the void.

  20

  For many of those who don’t believe in God and the story of creation as presented in the Bible and other religious sources, the universe we live in is supposed to have started with a gigantic explosion in one of the black holes in outer space, unless the black holes are a result of the same explosion, the so-called Big Bang. As I had understood it scientists still weren’t sure what came first, the black hole or the Big Bang, the chicken or the egg. As for me, I had more than enough to get to the bottom of with my own black holes.

  Lying on the bench in Bergen Prison, in Åsane, curled up, concentrating harder than I was sure was good for me, I tumbled around in a nightmare darkness, where distorted faces, bare genitals, empty bottles and loud music churned around, some of the faces large and close-up one second, only to be so far away the next that they were hardly visible. Some of the people had names, others were anonymous, and some had masks, black and made of leather, with imperious eyes above crooked noses, surrounded by music that sounded like whiplashes in the air. Most were adults and white, a few younger ones were dark-skinned; none of them were children. Sometimes the darkness was so immense that it filled my head. At other times the light was so strong I was blinded and woke up the following day snow-blind and with an unpleasant feeling in my body, as though it had been hurled sideways and hadn’t met a padded wall anywhere. This was the inheritance of the insane drinking binges, the result of weeks, months and years as a tormented spirit on earth, a lost soul in the midst of life, damned, cursed and forgotten, unseen by the powers of good, attracted by the powers of evil.