‘For the sake of the girl’s reputation – and the parents – I’d rather we kept it between ourselves for the moment.’
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said, suddenly looking official.
I pointed at the picture of the front of the hotel. ‘Doesn’t this ring any other bells?’
‘Should it?’
‘Last Friday at the same hotel.’
She snapped her fingers. ‘Brandt!’ Her eyes flashed. ‘Do you mean …?’
‘It was rumoured that he’d had a female visitor in his room, wasn’t it?’
‘And he did have, Varg, no doubt about it!’
‘Precisely.’
‘A municipal judge – and a man from the Christian People’s Party. It’s starting to add up to something …’
‘And it wasn’t exactly a book club meeting, was it?’
‘But … strictly speaking, this is a police matter, isn’t it?’
‘Sure, but then I haven’t said … I mean I was looking for Torild Skagestøl before she was found. I told the police what little I knew, but now you’ve got a lot more dynamite on Jimmy’s …’
She looked at me doubtfully. ‘But I’m not sure I want to publish all that yet. Besides, I’m sure the police checked out these activities long ago.’
‘Checked them out – and didn’t do anything?’
‘Are any of the girls under age?’
‘Well, no, not any of the ones I’ve spoken to.’
‘Exactly. So evidence has to be found that someone’s making money out of them.’
I thought for a moment. ‘Who knows most about prostitution in this city at the moment? I mean outside the police?’
‘In that case, I’d have a word with one of the people behind the most active Women’s Lib groups.’
‘Can you suggest anybody?’
‘Someone you could talk to and who also knows what she’s talking about professionally is Evy Berge.’
‘And who’s she?’
‘A nurse in A&E at Haukeland Hospital.’
‘Do you have any phone numbers?’
She turned to her computer and clicked the mouse. As the list of phone numbers came up on the screen, she said: ‘Some of these girls have had to go ex-directory … Evy too, actually. That means you have to keep it to yourself.’ She wrote down something on a yellow message pad. ‘Here’s the number of the department as well, in case she’s on duty. Actually …’ She started ferreting through the bundle of papers on the left-hand side of the desk. ‘Didn’t she give me …? Yes, here it is!’
She handed me a circular on which, under the title RECLAIM THE NIGHT!, a demonstration was announced for eleven p.m. the following Monday in C Sundts Street.
‘Will you be there?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m still keeping my distance from that, er – particular matter. But it might do you some good,’ she added with a pointed little smile.
‘Does this mean we’re onto the friendly part now? Is that it?’
She leaned forward and came a little closer, looking into my eyes with a rather ambiguous twinkle and said softly: ‘Still got any friendliness left, Varg? Is that a glimmer of belated love I see deep in there?’
The worst of it was that she almost made me blush. ‘Er – belated?’
‘Yes?’ She leaned a little closer still and took my hands.
We got no further. The door into the corridor flew open, and we heard the sound of hurried footsteps rushing into the room before a loud voice shouted: ‘I’m bloody well not having it! Buggered if I am!’
Through the shouting, I immediately recognised the voice. It was Holger Skagestøl.
Nineteen
LAILA MONGSTAD let go of my hands as though she’d scalded herself, and in unison we stood up and looked over the partition to the source of the racket.
Holger Skagestøl was herding a group of eight or nine colleagues into the room.
A man in his thirties with slightly dishevelled blonde hair, a short leather jacket and a large camera-bag over one shoulder was first, followed by a chap of the same age in a leather waistcoat and blue denim shirt. It was Bjørn Brevik, one of the journalists on the paper, who was doing his best to keep Skagestøl away from the photographer. Close behind Skagestøl followed Trond Furebø and a handful of others, a couple of them intent on pouring oil on troubled waters, the others there out of pure curiosity.
‘I want that film, do you hear?! I want it!’ yelled Holger Skagestøl so the whole editorial office reverberated.
‘Better take it up with the desk, then!’ replied the photographer.
‘Goddamn it, you lot can’t treat me like – like – like any Tom, Dick or Harry! I work on this paper, too, you know.’
‘So is that supposed to give us preferential treatment?’ Bjørn Brevik cut in.
‘Preferential treatment?’ Skagestøl seized Brevik by his lapels and pulled him close to his face. ‘I’m talking about normal protection of personal privacy! The “Be Fair” code for journalists. Ever heard of it, you little upstart? I’m damned if I’m going to have my private family affairs splashed all over the front page!’
Brevik raised his voice a few decibels too. ‘Let go of me!’
Skagestøl looked as though he was actually tightening his grip, if anything.
Trond Furebø seized him by the arm. ‘Holger …’
‘Let go of me! Do you hear? I –’
Brevik pushed his elbows up and released himself from his grip so roughly that a shirt button ricocheted over the desks. ‘There’s no question of splashing any family affairs over the front page. It’s a news item!’
‘News! They’ve already arrested the guilty party! Why don’t you use a picture of him instead?!’
‘It’s a perfectly normal illustration!’ the photographer piped up his voice rising to a falsetto.
‘Illustration! Do you want me to shove that camera down your throat, eh?’
Trond Furebø cut in: ‘Holger! This is no good. Let’s go and see the editor …’
Skagestøl was starting to calm down. There was a sudden change in his face, and when he spoke again he was dose to tears. ‘Surely you can understand … Bjørn. This is about my daughter.’
Bjørn Brevik nodded. ‘Your daughter this time; somebody else’s tomorrow. What would you have done in my shoes?’
‘I’d have made allowances …’
‘Would you?’
Skagestøl had tears in his eyes now. ‘Well?’
‘And what if it didn’t concern you personally?’
Trond Furebø came up beside Holger Skagestøl, stepped around him and stood face-to-face with Bjørn Brevik. ‘We’ll take it up with the boss, OK?’
Brevik gave him a look of contempt. ‘OK by me.’
The group broke up. Those who had merely been curious withdrew, visibly disappointed that the drama was over. The photographer was still trying to keep Brevik between himself and Skagestøl, and all of them headed for the door.
Trond Furebø ran his eyes over the rest of us, standing there like tin soldiers in our boxes in a rather nondescript toyshop sale.
‘What the hell are you lot gawping at?’ he spat out to no one in particular.
When he caught sight of me, he changed his tack slightly and raised his voice. ‘Satisfied now, are you? Bloody nosey parker!’
The door slammed behind him, and those left turned towards me as though only just realising a new specimen had been added to their collection.
I sat down and looked at Laila Mongstad. ‘Any idea what all that was in aid of?’
‘No, but we’ll find out in due course.’
‘But what was that about … have they made an arrest?’
She reached for the phone. ‘If you hang on a second, I’ll ask …’ She dialled a number, asked the same question and sat listening. ‘Oh … I see … No, it was just … Thanks a lot.’
She replaced the receiver and nodded. ‘Apparently it’s that jogger who found her. But so far h
e’s still a witness.’
Exactly. They had seen it then.
She kissed me quickly on the mouth when I went, as if to show what good friends we still were, unless it was just an expression of her overall generosity.
Twenty
ON SATURDAY MORNING I went down to the main door early to collect the paper.
There was no missing the article. The editor had apparently come down on Bjørn Brevik’s side.
The headline read:
PARENTS IN SHOCK –
Friend of victim helping police with enquiries.
There was a large photo showing Holger and Sidsel Skagestøl being led out of the police station by a uniformed policeman. Holger Skagestøl was in the foreground, slightly too close to the flashbulb, and his overexposed face expressed in the clearest possible terms that he did not like being photographed. Sidsel Skagestøl was partly hidden behind him but was looking straight at the photographer, caught off her guard and anxious, like someone suddenly jumped on in a dark back street.
‘We didn’t even know she had a boyfriend,’ said Sidsel and Holger Skagestøl when, at midday yesterday, they were informed that the police had called in a friend of the victim, Torild Skagestøl (16), for further questioning at police headquarters. Detective Inspector Dankert Muus, who is heading the investigation, will not comment other than to say that the young man has been summoned as a witness. From another source, this newspaper has received confirmation that the witness is none other than the young jogger who reported having found the body late Thursday evening. The police are still refusing to comment on whether the victim had been the object of a sexual assault either before or after she was killed. Torild Skagestøl’s friends and family are deeply shocked at the murder. Friends and teachers describe her as a good friend and a positive student. No one has been able to suggest a motive for the murder yet.
That was all there was to the article, which, because of the early hour it had gone to press on Friday evening, was considerably briefer than would normally have been the case on a weekday.
After a similarly brief breakfast I rang Karin and asked whether she was ready.
The weekend was not spent in a suite at the Solstrand Fjord Hotel but in long steady sex on the island of Sotra in a cottage I sometimes borrowed from a second cousin who didn’t have much use for it in February anyway.
As soon as we crossed the Sotra Bridge we noticed that the wind had swung to the north-west, that the thermometer was rising and that the weekend would be best suited to indoor activities.
The cottage faced straight into the maw of the sea, and when the wind strength had increased significantly it felt like being in the middle of a gigantic conch, with the constant sound of the sea in your ears. The chasing clouds took on a leaden hue, and we had hardly lit the fire when the first flash of lightning dashed white stitches across the horizon, where the sky was about to rip apart.
The ensuing clap of thunder sent Karin straight into my arms, and even when the thunderstorm had moved off it was no easy matter to get her to shift. With a pot of tea simmering on the hotplate, we unrolled our sleeping bags, making one into a sheet and the other an eiderdown and, like two bears still drowsy from their long winter slumber and shunning the first cold dip of the year, went back into hibernation.
We made love like a couple of seventeen-year-olds on their first camping trip.
Afterwards we drank some tea, ate rough hunks of bread with thick slices of cheese and chatted. The advantage of being lovers at our time of life was there were so many stones to overturn, so many branches to pull aside, so much distance covered to talk about.
Late that night, with the gentle sound of her regular breathing beside me, I lay on my back, thinking. Was this happiness? Was this how life was supposed to have been the whole time? And, if so, how long would it last? Who the hell had sent me the death notice in the post?
Twenty-one
ON MONDAY EVENING I reported to the police station. I had come of my own free will, and no one threw me out before hearing what I wanted.
The Sunday papers had been much more sensationalistic in their reports, not least because they had more details to go on than the authors of Saturday’s report. ANOTHER SATANIST MURDER? one of them asked. SACRIFICED TO THE DEVIL? asked another. Neither of them had any pictures of Sidsel and Holger Skagestøl on the front page, but both had got hold of a photo of Torild from a class picture and given it a prominent place.
It was the mark cut into her flesh and the fact that the body had been discovered near Lysekloster monastery that formed the main grounds for this speculation. The papers had dug up old rumours about black masses and sacrilegious orgies in the hallowed ruins of the monastery. These were stirred into a somewhat speculative brew with not many ingredients, judging by what I already knew about the case myself.
The Monday papers focused on another angle: CASE SOLVED? said one of the headlines. ‘WITNESS’ BEING QUESTIONED, said Holger Skagestøl’s own paper with prominent quotation marks. SLAIN BY LOVER? asked Paul Finckel in his newspaper. (Had he tried to get in touch with me during the weekend? I wondered) Surprisingly, none of the papers gave the name or age of the much discussed ‘witness’ or any photos of him, merely saying that he was apparently a young man from among the victim’s closest friends.
Muus was not in his office, but when I looked in on Atle Helleve, there he sat with a selection of the same newspapers spread out on his desk.
I knocked on the doorframe. He looked up, recognised me and gestured towards the headlines. ‘Seen these? You’d not find wilder improvisation at the Voss Jazz Festival!’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Take a pew before someone else does.’
‘How much is there to what they’re writing about?’
‘Not a lot, I can promise you that.’ He scratched his beard. ‘Why
do you ask?’
‘It could be I have a bit of – additional information. Something I’ve turned up.’
‘Oh?’ He looked at me with natural scepticism in his eyes.
‘But I can’t see how this so-called jogger fits into the picture.’
‘Can’t you?’
We sat there looking at one another for a few seconds, but he wouldn’t take the bait.
‘You first.’
‘Well … when Judge Brandt died last Friday, was there a post-mortem?’
He sat up in his chair. ‘There’s a padlock on that case, Veum! If a single word gets out to the pre –’
‘The press already know most of what there is to know about this case, Helleve. Since they haven’t given us any descriptions of the judge in black silk underwear yet, they’re hardly going to do so later, are they?’
‘But how in –’
‘Not all bulkheads are watertight in this office either. Rumours about this have been circulating for so long that this case is actually already dead. Unless they’re given something new …’
‘Something new? What do you mean?’
‘Well, was there a post-mortem?’
‘Yes, there was. A massive heart attack, from which he died.’
‘A heart attack caused by …’
‘At the judge’s age, you know, and considering what he seems to have been up to at the time … I’ll say no more, I’ll say no more.’
‘And the writing on the wall, was it investigated?’
‘The writing … The sign or whatever he’d tried to make …’ He shook his head. ‘There was nothing to suggest anything criminal had gone on there, Veum. What people do in their free time –’
‘Wasn’t it in office time though?’
‘– and what clothes they choose to wear is their affair. It’s not a police matter at any rate.’
‘Wasn’t it a large “T”? The letter he’d scrawled with his lipstick?’
‘Could have been.’
‘“T” for Torild, for example.’
He mulled it over for a few seconds. ‘Are you trying to suggest that the g
irl … that she could have been …?’
‘Maybe … I don’t know, Helleve, to be honest, but I’m sorry to say I have a few clues indicating that could have been the case.’
‘That she and Brandt … That he was simply her client?’
‘Could have been.’
‘In that case, we … we need to look into it a bit closer. And it mustn’t get out to that bloody pack of wolves, Veum!’ He pointed, superfluously, at the newspapers spread out in front of him.
‘The bottle of tablets that was found in his room …’
‘Where did you get that from?’
I shrugged. ‘A reliable source. Have you found out what was in it?’
‘I don’t think we’ve got the results of the analysis yet. It wasn’t seen as all that important. I mean we know he had a visit from a prostitute, and we know they often take tablets. Which tablets exactly isn’t all that important.’
I nodded towards the newspapers. ‘This Satanist angle, is there anything in it?’
He threw up his arms. ‘She has a sort of mark, behind here, on one of her thighs, but …’
‘No other marks?’
‘No.’
‘And the cause of death?’
‘She was suffocated. Everything points to the fact that someone held a pillow or something like that against her face. Sure as we are that Judge Brandt died a natural death, if you can speak of “natural” in a get-up like that, we’re just as certain that we’re dealing with a regular murder here.’
‘Any sign of sexual assault?’
Helleve glanced at the door and leaned forward. ‘Muus says you’re a dicey bugger. Other people here say you’re straight up.’
‘So, in other words …’
He sighed. ‘No. There’s no sign of rape. But …’
‘Yes?’
‘Semen was found in her, after recent intercourse.’
‘Enough for a DNA analysis?’
‘More than.’
‘How long will it be before you guys get the results?’
The Writing on the Wall Page 11