Requiem

by Geir Tangen

  “In the email, Åmli hinted that he wanted to kill a woman who committed embezzlement, but who was not punished for that. A search in our registers shows that Rita Lothe was indicted for embezzlement of seventy-four thousand kroner from the till at a shoe store, where she was manager for a one-year period from 2002 to 2003. She was acquitted by the court because it could not be proved that it was her. In theory, a number of other employees could have helped themselves from the cash register in that same time period. Lothe nonetheless lost her job as a result of the indictment, and has been on disability ever since.”

  Lotte handed out a printout of the email and the indictment against Rita Lothe. She let those present read through all the documents before she continued.

  “The person in question who committed the murder of Rita Lothe cares little about hiding traces. In Lothe’s apartment we found a whole series of fingerprints that don’t belong to her. All identical, and most likely the perpetrator’s. It has also come to light that Rita Lothe had sex shortly before the murder. We have a quantity of biological traces that obviously have been sent for DNA analysis. Normally, when a killer leaves many traces behind him, we’re talking about murders that are committed in affect. That is hardly the case here. Very few people go around with a bottle of ether in their pocket without intending to use it. Why the perpetrator chooses to proceed so carelessly is a major mystery. At any rate, we can be reasonably confident that we won’t find him in our registers. If that were to happen, the case would be solved tomorrow.”

  Lotte concluded the session by reviewing some photos that showed bruises under the armpits of the victim, pictures from the apartment, and various other details that they’d found at the scene.

  “One very unpleasant and quite important detail remains.” She breathed in deeply before she dropped the bomb. “Gudmundsson has received a new email. Today, while he was being questioned.” Lotte clicked on the next image in the presentation, and a slightly blurred image showed the text that had popped up on Viljar’s cell phone an hour before.

  A dark silence settled on the room, and the faces around the table wilted.

  Inner Pier, Haugesund

  Tuesday evening, October 14, 2014

  The mood along the city’s wharf promenade was in glaring contrast to how Viljar felt. Here the city’s residents were celebrating noisily at the outdoor restaurants lined up like domino tiles. Viljar, however, was standing with both feet in a bad crime novel. The half-dead journalist in him would have rejoiced, but Viljar Ravn Gudmundsson had lost the spark. More than anything, he wanted to get under a blanket and hide from everything that was annoying. What he needed least of all now was such a demanding case. The emails were sent to him, and Lotte had asked the justifiable question: “Why?”

  Viljar had no idea, but a thought had crept in under his skin while he sat at the pier. A thought that made the hairs on his neck stick up like hog bristle. Black Tuesday.

  He stood up and walked with his gaze stiffly fixed on the cobblestones in the direction of Ranveig Børve’s home. Paid no heed to the pouring rain or the stoop-shouldered people walking along the row of boats by the sound.

  Ranveig lived on Risøy, just to the right across the Risøy Bridge in the city center. The bridge was a connection point between the mainland part of Haugesund and the island that housed some of the city’s key companies. The enormous blue factory hall at the Aibel shipyard, a well-known landmark, loomed in the background.

  Somewhere the city officials had gotten the idea that the bridge could be illuminated in the evening, and a violet tinge gave the city a gaudy, urban hipster aspect.

  Ranveig and her husband, Rolf, had settled down in an old white Swiss chalet when she came back to town after her studies. Since then the couple had renovated the house from a neglected dump into a modern residence for a family with small children. They had paid just over a million kroner for a house that now would sell for five times that much. Rolf was a robust and energetic handyman, and Ranveig had a good eye for the small details.

  The doorbell was the kind that echoes in every room, and doesn’t fade out until a generation has passed. A short time later she was standing in the doorway. Somewhat surprised—this was, after all, the first time Viljar had shown up without an invitation.

  Ranveig was a revelation. Even like this, in workout clothes and with her hair in a tousled bun, she radiated a sensuality that made him tingle inside. It was her eyes. They sparkled with life and promised amazing moments he would never get to experience. Not with her anyway. Viljar apologized and asked if he’d come at a bad time. He could have spared himself the polite phrases, because Ranveig’s astonished expression was quickly transformed into a big, open, and genuine smile.

  “No, no, how nice. Come in,” she said, calling up to Rolf that it was Viljar who had come to visit, and that they were sitting in the room with the open fireplace. She told him that Rolf was busy putting their six-year-old daughter to bed.

  Viljar hung up his topcoat on a massive stand that took up half the width of the hall, before he followed Ranveig to the room with the fireplace adjacent to the living room. Both rooms had panorama windows from floor to ceiling with an amazing view toward Smedasundet. Without asking, Ranveig poured fresh rose hip tea for both of them and took out sugar and lemon. Coffee or beer was evidently not an alternative, Viljar noted.

  She made herself comfortable in a soft purple armchair across from him and looked him over. “Have you been out and had a couple of beers, or what?” Ranveig smiled slyly.

  “Does it already show? Only three pints at MM,” Viljar defended himself.

  “Three pints on a Tuesday evening in October when you’re not on vacation?”

  Viljar hemmed and hawed a little. Felt that it was unpleasant to drag Ranveig into the muck he was standing in, but he needed an ally.

  “Got another email this afternoon. Same sender. This is not someone who’s messing with us, Ranveig. He even confessed to the murder on Fjellvegen today.”

  Ranveig was about to drink from the teacup, but set it down again untouched. “The woman who fell out of the high-rise?”

  “Yep. She evidently got help on the journey, and now he’s announcing the next man out.”

  Viljar fished out his phone to show her the email, but Ranveig stopped him. He looked at her with surprise. There was something in her eyes he was unable to interpret. Instead Viljar put a portion of snus under his lip while he patiently listened to what she had to say.

  “Damn it all, Viljar! You have to go to the police with this, not come to me to chat.” She looked at him sternly.

  Viljar quickly told her about the interview with Lotte Skeisvoll at the police station, and that he was there when the new message arrived. Viljar gave the phone to Ranveig so she could read it. She wrinkled her nose as if he were handing her a pair of stinky gym socks.

  “As you see, it’s almost a copy of the previous email. Apart from the admission at the start and the new ‘judgment’ at the bottom, he has simply cut and pasted what was there last time.”

  Ranveig nodded and finished reading.

  “Same style as last time. No energy. No nerve. No passion. How eager are you to get your message out when you can’t be bothered to write a new one, but just cut and paste?”

  Ranveig looked up from the phone and set it down on the table. “It may be that this is exactly what he wants us to see. He is making the whole thing into such an obvious and poorly executed crime cliché that we’ll realize there is something else altogether behind it.”

  “Okay, I see that. Let’s say you’re right.… Why bother to do this at all then, if it’s not to put the police on the wrong track?”

  The question remained unanswered in the air.

  Ranveig had picked up the phone again and was squinting at it. “Do you see at the very bottom of the message? The letters and numbers.” She gave him back the phone.

  Viljar had noticed that, but hadn’t given it any thought.

 
“‘JN3-5’ … Well…”

  Viljar tried to think through whether anyone used such footers in emails or other correspondence, but couldn’t think of anything.

  “Either it’s a fixed email signature, and in that case it means a lot, or else he has written that in deliberately. This may be important, Viljar!”

  They were interrupted by the patter of bare feet on the parquet floor. Six-year-old Victoria came a little hesitantly into the room. She stopped a moment in the doorway before with a pretend sad face she went over and sat on her mother’s lap.

  “Daddy’s mean!”

  Victoria tried her best to sob. Rolf was standing by the door, following the episode goodnaturedly. A bushy beard hid a little of his smile. He was dressed in green wool clothing from top to toe. Ranveig must have noticed the question mark on Viljar’s face, because she cleared up the mystery at once.

  “Rolf actually just stopped by the house to pick up something. He’s on a deer hunt with his buddies, but was captured by the little princess here.”

  Rolf kept a safe distance from the girl and showed Ranveig by resting his cheek against his hands that the girl wouldn’t go to sleep. Ranveig sent him an air kiss.

  “Daddy won’t let me sleep with the dollhouse in bed.”

  Ranveig smiled and tousled her daughter’s wild curls. She kissed the child on the cheek and pulled her next to her. Let the girl cry out her crocodile tears. When the last sob had quieted down, Ranveig set Victoria down on the floor. Stroked her hair carefully while she looked her in the eyes.

  “Daddy is nice. Do you know that he’s the one who bought the dollhouse? He paid all the money. Then maybe it’s not so strange that he’s afraid it will fall off the bed and get broken, right? Will it be okay if the house sits on the shelf so you can see it from your bed? Do you think you can fall asleep then?”

  Victoria nodded and dried the tears with the back of her hand. She took Rolf’s hand, who had now come over to his daughter.

  “Night, Mommy. Night, strange man.”

  “The strange man is also a journalist, Victoria. He writes too. Just not as good,” she whispered into Victoria’s ear, who giggled.

  Ranveig looked longingly at her daughter, who was now hanging over Rolf’s shoulder on their way up to the child’s room. Then she turned her attention back to Viljar. She looked at him inquisitively.

  He took a sip of tea before he continued talking.

  “You know what, Ranveig, let’s leave that part with the letters and numbers for the time being. I’m not very good at those kinds of puzzles.” Viljar paused for a moment. “I had a slight ulterior motive in coming here.… You have access to the work network from home, don’t you?”

  She nodded in confirmation. As a cultural journalist, she often had late evening assignments to turn in after the desk at the newspaper office had left for the day. For that reason, Ranveig could connect to the internal network by means of Citrix keys and submit finished articles from home.

  “I thought we could do a quick search in our own archives to see if we get any hits on rapists who were acquitted here in town. This guy who calls himself Åmli has produced one anyway, and I doubt that he has access to better search engines, so long as he doesn’t work at the courthouse or with the police, I should note.”

  Ranveig shook her head dejectedly. “Fair enough, but even if we find old articles about rapists who’ve gone free, we never use names, only age and gender,” she objected.

  “That’s true, but the murderer has the same problem too. He’s probably picked out someone who made his story public. We print such things occasionally, when the victim or the one who’s indicted steps out with their name and picture to get their side of the case covered in the media.”

  “You make it sound like the newspaper is a kind of public pillory.”

  Viljar broke into a faint smile at Ranveig’s naïveté. “Call me conspiratorial, but don’t you mark your articles with names when there are scandals going on? Image tags that only you can see, and not the reader?”

  Ranveig sighed. She understood what he was getting at. In cases involving better-known persons, they usually tagged public figures with cases that the general public knew nothing about. In that way, they could quickly locate background material and images if other media were not so reserved as themselves.

  “Perhaps our murderer is going after a slightly better-known face this time. Then he will force the press to see him, and write about him. That’s what he really wants.”

  Ranveig looked like she was cold. She pulled her mauve cashmere sweater tighter around her and crept into the chair in a kind of lotus position, but with her arms tightly coiled around her upper body. She did not seem convinced, but did as he said this time too.

  “Okay … Search terms?”

  “Try ‘rape’ and ‘acquitted.’”

  Ranveig did that, and a whole series of documents appeared on the screen. The majority were nondescript short articles about anonymous rape cases from Haugaland District Court. There was little to be had from the pictures. Heaps of illustration photos, but no faces. They tried further with various search combinations, but with no luck.

  Viljar sat there in his own thoughts. An old case had started to murmur in the back of his mind.

  “Fine, I understand you’re tired, but can you make one last search?” She nodded in confirmation.

  “Search on ‘Claussen’ and ‘exonerated.’” Ranveig turned quickly toward Viljar.

  “Oh, damn it!”

  She wasn’t known for using strong language, but once Ranveig did, there was something big going on.

  Sure enough. This time both articles and images showed up. Shipowner’s son Christopher Claussen was known as a man about town, and seven years ago one of his many festive after-parties led to his being taken into custody, accused of having raped a woman while she was asleep. The case got major coverage, not least when the old man, Sigfred Claussen, told about how he felt having his own son be accused of such a thing.

  Sigfred Claussen was normally extremely media-shy, but this time he had fully supported his party-happy offspring. The indictment of Christopher Claussen was dropped in district court because the police only had evidence that he’d had sexual intercourse with her, not that it had happened against her will. The poor woman didn’t have a ghost of a chance against Claussen’s hired suits.

  “I don’t understand why I didn’t think of this case sooner. Claussen was previously convicted of drunk driving, and that fits completely with the profile the murderer draws. Someone who has been acquitted after having raped at least one woman, but probably more, and who was previously convicted in court in another case.”

  “Several women?”

  “For sure! Claussen’s parties are widely known, and it’s probably more usual than not that he ends up in a hotel room with one of the partygoers. He totally ignores his family, but it seems as if his wife gives him permission to carouse,” Viljar added.

  He patted Ranveig on the back, took his topcoat down from the coatrack in the hall, and was out the door before Ranveig had collected herself to so much as say goodbye.

  Norheim forest, Karmøy

  Tuesday night, October 14, 2014

  The air was heavy and raw. Static. Clammy. Heavy black clouds lay like a lid over the house, which clung to the crags above the Norheim forest. Viljar got the taxi to stop, paid in cash, and made his way quickly through the pretentious villas at the top of the ridge. Here they were lined up in rows, and not a single one for under five million kroner. This was Haugesund’s answer to the mansions on Holmenkoll ridge in Oslo.

  Strictly speaking, Norheim forest was not part of Haugesund. It was in Karmøy municipality, but Viljar didn’t know anyone who lived here who saw himself as a Karmøy resident. The area on the north side of the Karmsund Bridge was characterized as the “mainland side” of Karmøy. A strange and unnatural division of the municipal boundary between Haugesund and Karmøy. Most other places started the boundary
of an island when you drove across the bridge.

  Christopher Claussen and his family lived here, well isolated from the other villas in the development. He’d had a massive modernist villa built a few hundred meters into the popular recreational area. How he got permission from the municipality was still a mystery, but wicked tongues drew a parallel to the fact that at the same time Claussen Shipyards chose to locate their main office in the Norheim industrial area, that too within the boundaries of Karmøy municipality.

  In his new white villa, the Claussen family could be left alone for the most part, with the exception of an occasional person who strayed from the hiking path. Claussen’s lot basically had forest around it on all sides, but the shipping magnate’s son had enough trees removed in front of his living room windows that he had an amazing view toward the sound.

  Viljar had no plans to seek out the shipowner’s son and his family, but he wanted to go up to see if they were actually at home. The family often traveled to more southerly climes, and several times before, he’d made needless trips to Norheim forest when he’d been in search of a comment in connection with cases he was working on. If Christopher Claussen was the perpetrator’s next victim, it would be nice to know in advance if he was home or not.

  In principle, Viljar thought that it was best to leave it to the police to check out Christopher Claussen, but curiosity got the upper hand. Besides, Viljar wasn’t sure that the police would buy his assumption that it would probably be a more known face that would be removed this time. According to the email, the “judgment” would not fall until tomorrow, so it shouldn’t involve particular risk to approach Claussen’s residence right now.

  It was pitch dark in the forest around the villa. It was as if every single tree and every single stone crept closer and squeezed him into a space without doors and windows. He saw nothing, could feel only the gravel that crunched under his running shoes. His heart rate increased, and he had to struggle the whole time not to panic. Fear of the dark had actually come to him as an adult, along with all the rest. All that had led him into the office of the psychologist Vigdis Nygård late one autumn day in 2010. Now, four years later, the fear was just as intact. Just as present. Just as paralyzing.