Death By Water

by Damhaug, Torkil

  She parked in the drive outside Oslo police station and called Flatland. A few minutes later his silver-grey Audi emerged from the gates. She sat beside him in a front seat that was draped in thick plastic. The man seemed to worry more about dirtying his car than anything else.

  – Good job it’s you that’s on duty, he said, and she didn’t doubt that he meant it. He was in his fifties, hardly more than ten years older than her, but greying and as scrawny as an old dingo.

  – What’s the news? she asked as he swung down Grønlandsleiret.

  – We may have found the woman who’s been missing for over a week.

  – The psychologist?

  – We’re pretty sure it is.

  – And since you want me along, I assume she’s in no condition to give an account of herself.

  He glanced across at her without answering.

  – Where are we going?

  – Down to Hurum. A disused factory.

  Jennifer sighed.

  – Not more than an hour’s drive, Flatland added in his usual monotone.

  – Who found her?

  – A patrol from the sheriff’s office down there.

  – And what were they doing in a disused factory on Christmas Eve?

  The technician looked over his shoulder before gliding on to the E18.

  – We got a tip-off. The woman’s partner and her sister turned up at the crime response unit with her mobile phone. Claimed it arrived in the post. There was a video on it.

  He changed lanes and accelerated down into Festning Tunnel. – Someone videoed the missing woman. A factory tower was shown in the film. From the postmark on the package, we were able to locate the place within an hour.

  – Videoed her and sent it to her partner? Jennifer exclaimed. – So we’re talking about premeditated murder?

  – I’m not prepared to commit myself on that.

  Jennifer had worked with Flatland many times before. He was the type who never said more than was strictly necessary. She glanced round the inside of the car. It wasn’t just her seat; the others were covered in the same thick protective plastic. The man is more than a touch compulsive, she thought. Definitely an advantage in a job like his.

  On the roof of the factory there was still a large sign bearing the name Icosand. At the gate was another: Stop at red signal. It had to be years since that broken light had given any signal at all. A tall woman in uniform waved them in.

  Two quick-response vehicles and an unmarked car were parked by the factory tower. The policewoman approached them when they stopped. Clearly she knew who they were and identified herself by name, rank and where she was stationed.

  – We’ve cordoned off the whole area, she told them. – And we’re using the lower entrance. She pointed to the largest of the buildings, a concrete block four storeys tall. – That’s the one least likely to have been used by the perpetrators.

  Each carrying their own case, they headed off towards the furthest end of the building, a rusty door that was stuck open and refused to be closed behind them. Inside, it was dark. Flatland took a long-handled torch out of his case. They found a staircase, followed it up to the second floor, as the constable had told them, and turned into a corridor. Several of the windows were broken, the glass lay in piles along one of the walls.

  They emerged on to a gallery in a hall illuminated by two powerful lights. In the middle of the pool of light lay a naked body, propped against a concrete pillar. Two figures in white moved about down there, and a third was bent over a camera pointed at the floor.

  Flatland pulled out protective overalls, hoods and shoe covers. Jennifer was still wearing her high-heeled antelope leather boots, and the shoe covers didn’t fit very well. She found a couple of unused hair bands in her pocket, and that helped them stay on.

  They clambered down a rusting metal conduit, Flatland went first, making sure it was safe for her.

  – We’ve made our entry point there, the technician with the camera said, pointing.

  Jennifer stood a couple of metres away from the unclothed body. The head was held up by a strap around the neck, fastened to a hook in the concrete pillar. A line of blood ran from the hairline and down over one cheek, but otherwise she looked unharmed. The eyes were half open.

  – When was she found?

  – According to the sheriff, they entered the building at about one thirty; that’s to say almost two hours ago.

  The technician’s breath misted as he spoke. The temperature inside the hall was no higher than it was outside.

  – Has a local doctor been here to verify death? Jennifer asked.

  – The people who found her didn’t think it was necessary. There’s no doubt that what we have here is a death.

  Jennifer frowned. The body lying there was probably suffering from severe exposure; great care must be taken to ensure that death really had occurred. She approached the body directly. Only then did she notice the pool of dried blood the woman was partially lying in. It was mixed with something of a lighter consistency. She leaned forward and shone her torch on the back of the head. Beneath the caked and bloody hair there was a gaping half-moon-shaped hole. A greyish substance had seeped out of it and down the neck.

  – Agreed, she commented between gritted teeth. – Not much room for doubt there.

  All the same, she pulled her stethoscope out of her case. Listened to the heart and lungs, careful not to touch the strands of hair that lay between two accretions of blood around the navel and obviously did not come from the woman herself. Having ascertained that there was no sign of a pulse or respiratory sounds, she dug out a penlight to take a closer look at the pupils. Squatted there for a long time studying the woman’s eyes. They were badly damaged, the membranes covered in blood, as though jabbed with a pointed object. One eye was almost completely ripped to pieces.

  Having completed her examination, she withdrew to a corner of the hall to dictate her notes. Flatland came ambling over. Stood waiting until she was finished.

  – Well? he said, offering her a liquorice pastille.

  – The woman is dead, Jennifer confirmed.

  Flatland grinned mirthlessly. – You’re usually a little more forthcoming than that.

  – I know. She grinned back at him. – And since this is Christmas Eve, I’ll give you everything I have, and a bit more too.

  The edge of a pouch of snuff appeared under his lip. She realised that what she had said might be open to misinterpretation and hoped he wouldn’t immediately make a certain kind of joke. Under different circumstances she would have had no objection. Fortunately, Flatland wasn’t the type to get carried away.

  – Not much marbling, she hurriedly added, – nor blistering of the skin. As you know, those are early signs of decay, but at low temperatures the appearance is delayed.

  – What you’re saying is that she’s been here for some time.

  Here or somewhere else equally cold for several days. Maybe as long as a week. The temperature in the rectum and the vagina is two degrees, and the lividity on the stomach and in the groin is lighter than usual.

  – Cause of death?

  – You want a provisional answer? The markings on the neck show that the strap has been pulled tight.

  – Choked?

  – Yes, but not necessarily to death. She may have been alive when the skull was crushed.

  Flatland pushed the snuff bag back into place with the tip of his tongue.

  – On the floor at the back by the wall there’s an area with a lot of bloodstaining.

  Jennifer peered over at the dark corner he was pointing to. – In other words, she was dragged from over there and hung from this pillar by the neck. In addition, her eyes are, as you can see, covered in marks from being jabbed by some sharp object. Didn’t you say they looked to be damaged in the video on her mobile?

  Flatland gave a quick nod of assent.

  – Before she was choked and had her skull crushed, Jennifer concluded, – she could have been sittin
g here in the freezing cold staring blindly out in front of her.

  2

  Thursday 25 December

  THE SKY ABOVE Oslo was filled with orange and gold-grey wrinkles, but over the hills in the north it was still almost black. Jennifer Plåterud glanced at her wristwatch as she let herself in to the Pathological Institute. The time was 8.15. Even before the finding of the body, the case had attracted a lot of media attention, and now things were about to get a hundred times worse. She couldn’t bear lagging behind, had to deliver her results before people began asking for them. And yet there was another reason why she had chosen to go to work even before the Devil had put his boots on.

  She hung her coat up in the cloakroom, found a clean outfit and pulled on the trousers, shirt, coat, hat and mask. Three minutes later, she was opening the door to the autopsy room. Going through that door was a signal: take off one way of thinking and feeling about the world, and put on another.

  But on that particular morning she remained standing in the darkness inside. Images from the factory the afternoon before had pursued her all through Christmas Eve, forcing their way in through the light sleep she fell into now and then. Christmas dinner had been postponed for almost two hours, but no one expressed any annoyance when she took her place at the table without the slightest indication of what she had just been doing, and she didn’t think it showed on her either. For twenty-five years, more than half her life, she had practised medicine, the last fifteen of them mainly on dead bodies; it had become routine a long time ago. But arriving at that crime scene, stopping in the gallery of that factory and seeing the naked young woman lying there in the sharp light …

  At the table, she had managed to look as if she ate with a hearty appetite, and afterwards things took their usual course. The boys pretended that they no longer looked forward to opening their presents, hid their expectations behind slow yawns, punching away on their mobile phones and generally giving the impression that there were a thousand other things more important. As for Ivar, he was a picture of pride as he served out the rib and sausages, and enjoyed himself even more afterwards as he sat down with a glass of cognac and starting handing out the packages arranged under the tree, reading out the tos and froms, usually with some comment about what could possibly be hidden inside that lovely wrapping paper – maybe a collapsible bike, or I’m guessing this is a fire engine – and astonished delight when he unwrapped her present to him, a pullover he had himself tried on in H&M few days earlier. She didn’t begrudge him his childlike joy in Christmas.

  With an almost inaudible sigh, she closed off the stream of thoughts, switched on the light in the autopsy room and went to work.

  After a quick lunch, she hurried over to her office and wrote a preliminary post-mortem report. Reading through it afterwards, she found herself mentally searching for something that was not to be found in the succession of strictly descriptive terminological sentences. She couldn’t shake off the thought that there was something she ought to have seen. Twenty-nine-year-old woman, she summarised. Fair-haired, regular features. She didn’t know much about the dead woman, no more than what she had already read in the newspapers. A psychologist, almost completed her PhD despite her young age. Jennifer struggled to abstract something that wasn’t connected to her appearance or what she already knew about her. Choked, she repeated to herself, and beaten to death; the eyes …

  Suddenly she knew what it was. She picked up her phone and opened the call list.

  To begin with, Jennifer’s characterisation of human types on the Hippocratic model was not seriously meant. Naturally she had never believed that it really was the four bodily fluids that determined a person’s temperament and character, but it amused her to assert that this theory, with its origins several centuries before the birth of Christ, was every bit as scientific as the Freudian waffle that certain psychiatrists continued to promote twenty centuries after that same birth. In time, however, she had come to believe that Hippocrates’ categorisation, as developed by Galen and by doctors of the Renaissance period, accorded strikingly well with the people she had come across in her life. Almost unnoticed, the irony that had accompanied her interest in the theory had faded away, until a time came when she had to confess to herself that she believed in it almost without reservation. People’s inner worlds could be arranged in such a way as to give her the illusion of comprehending the incomprehensible. And over the years, her categorisations grew more and more sophisticated. She came to believe that a person’s temperament and character did not necessarily derive from one of these four categories alone. For example, she regarded herself as first and foremost sanguine, a bon vivant who didn’t easily let things get her down; but she had to admit that she was also much under the sway of the choleric. Mercurial anger could at any moment descend on her like a sly dog, even on days when she couldn’t explain it away as a result of hormonal fluctuations. It was reassuring then to think of it as the accumulation of bile, no matter how metaphorically meant.

  Detective Chief Inspector Hans Magnus Viken from the Department of Violent Crimes was another choleric, she had soon realised. She didn’t yet know whether this was combined with the melancholic, which would be typically Norwegian, or with the phlegmatic, which would actually be equally typically Norwegian. When he telephoned her at about two o’clock, she knew at once what he wanted.

  Viken was not the kind of detective to rely on reports. He had to carry out the investigation himself. In and of itself this was a good quality, but she wasn’t altogether sure she liked him looking over her shoulder in the autopsy room. She had to admit he had a certain talent, even if the so-called ‘bear murders’ the year before had done fairly serious damage to his reputation. But he wasn’t the only one to have to give an account of himself in the wake of that investigation. The section head involved had to find something else to do, and several others had handed in their resignations. Viken, however, wasn’t the type to let something like that get to him. He’d hung on and survived, and would probably stay with the department until they had to carry him out, thought Jennifer. He even had the guts to apply for the post of section leader that fell vacant as a result of that infamous case. She liked that kind of obstinacy, every bit as much as she disliked his know-all attitude.

  He arrived at 3.10, opened wide the door of the room and strode in, a disposable cap balanced on his head. He probably wants it to look like a mitre, she had time to think before she noticed who he had brought along with him. She swore silently. Viken was one thing. She knew more or less where she had him. And for a choleric he kept his temper under good control. On top of that he was susceptible to flattery, which made it easy to disarm him. As for the man who appeared in the doorway behind him, she did not want him there under any circumstances. He was much younger than the detective chief inspector. Younger than her, too. Much too young. Not much past thirty-five. She felt herself blushing. She hadn’t seen him since the Christmas party. Not since the night after the Christmas party, to be more precise. He’d sent her a couple of text messages, even including one on Christmas Eve. Mostly she wanted to forget the whole thing. And not forget the whole thing. But she had to avoid letting Roar Horvath get too close to her. At least at work.

  – I saw your preliminary report, Jenny, said Viken jovially.

  When in the world did he start calling me that? she wondered as she returned his smile, and gave Roar Horvath a quick nod. He responded with a wink. That was okay; it showed that he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. Evidently he wanted to carry on in the same vein that she had found so charming at the Christmas do. Concentration, she said to herself, and then repeated it a couple of times.

  – Cause of death confirmed? Viken wanted to know.

  – We’ve got three, possibly four causes, each of which individually would have been fatal, she began, pointing with her scalpel at the throat, which was open in two places. – The belt that was tied around her throat has occluded both the arteries and veins, since the face is pale an
d not swollen. What’s more, the groove made by the belt is horizontal, which indicates that she was strangled before she was hung up in the position in which she was found. She lifted a flap of the skin on the neck to one side. – Here you can see fractures in both the thyroid cartilage and the lingual bone. That shows how much force was used to tighten the belt.

  The two officers bent to examine the gaping throat. Jennifer picked up a pair of tweezers and indicated the damaged areas she had described.

  – Beneath the skin there are three linear accumulations of blood, which appear to come from the belt, and then this deeper groove.

  – Which means?

  – It might indicate that she was strangled several times. The perpetrator appears to have loosened the belt and then tightened it again, a little harder each time.

  – A macabre form of entertainment, Viken observed. – And yet you say that strangulation was not necessarily the cause of death?

  Jennifer lifted up the dead woman’s head. – She was hit four or five times, laterally, from above.

  – These look like injuries I’ve seen from being hit with a hammer, Roar Horvath volunteered.

  Jennifer shook her head. – This was done with something bigger and heavier.

  – A stone? Viken suggested.

  – Possibly, but in that case one with a flat and finely chiselled surface. Possibly attached to a handle. Jennifer pointed. – Note these linked, rather circular fracture lines in the occipital bone. A fairly large and evenly bowed fragment has been impressed into the surface of the brain, causing severe contusion and massive loss of blood. It means we can say with some degree of certainty that she was alive when these blows were delivered. We’ll be opening the skull later today. What we expect to see then is that the power of these blows has shaken the whole brain backwards and forwards. The victim was obviously lying on the floor with the right temple facing downwards. We can see the scrape marks here on the base of the scalp.