by Thomas Enger
The mention of a fire drill gave Henning an idea.
And that was why he showed up at the building on Kristian Augusts gate, where Indrehaug Law had its offices, a few minutes before midday. He rang the bell, and while he waited, he looked at his reflection in the glass door and tried not to think about how awful he looked. When the lock clicked, he pulled open the door and walked with determination up to the reception desk, where a uniformed female security guard looked up at him with little interest.
‘Hi,’ Henning said, giving her a politician’s smile. ‘Just popping up to see Mathilde on the eighth floor.’
The security guard looked at his face for a few moments. ‘Sign here first, please.’
She turned the big visitors’ book towards Henning. He looked at the other visitors – the names of the people they were there to meet, the times they arrived and left. Then, acting as though this was the signature he always wrote, Henning grabbed the pen and scribbled something even he had a problem reading. It didn’t seem to bother the security guard at all.
As he waited for the lift, he looked up at the sign on the wall and tried to memorise the names of some of the companies that had offices there, so that, in the unlikely event he should meet anyone he knew, he could give a cover story. Judging by the number of companies, hordes of people would have to take the stairs when the fire alarm went off in a few minutes.
The lift arrived, as did two women, carrying with them the smell of coffee and waffles from the canteen. Henning stepped inside, keeping his eyes on the floor. The women pressed the third and fourth floors, and Henning the eighth, and the little box carried them upwards. An oppressive silence surrounded them, and it was hot. Henning felt his pulse rising. His head was still thumping.
He had been to the eighth floor before, after the Henriette Hagerup case in the spring. He’d had a coffee with Lars Indrehaug in his office, having dug up some information that in the end saved the lawyer’s client from being convicted for murder. He remembered that all the doors in the building were locked; he noticed that the women in the lift both had key cards.
But Henning had a plan.
He looked at his watch again. Two minutes left. The lift stopped on the third floor, then the fourth, the women getting out. No one else got in, fortunately. He was alone now. One minute to go.
When the lift reached the eighth floor, Henning stepped out into a corridor with a door at each end. As expected, both were locked. He stood where he was, waiting. Looked at his watch.
Then the fire alarm went off.
And at the same time, all the locks clicked. Henning knew that when the fire alarm went off in a building like this, all of the doors would be unlocked to prevent anyone from being trapped inside. To the right, Mathilde, who he remembered from his previous visit, took off her headset and stood up. Henning went in the opposite direction, hoping she hadn’t seen him, opened the door and carried on down the corridor, past some offices. He heard people moving around in some of them, but continued as quickly as he could through another door and into another corridor, where he found the toilets on the right-hand side.
He snuck into one of the cubicles as quietly as he could, pushed the door to, but didn’t close it completely. He knew that someone would come round to check that the whole floor was empty, so he took off his jacket, sat down on the seat and pulled his legs up. Then he sat silently.
Moving so fast had made him dizzy and he could feel the sweat on his back, making his shirt stick to his body. He looked at his watch. It would take a few minutes to get everyone out, so he waited, listening to voices pass the toilets, to feet tramping across the floor.
Then everything went quiet. For a long time.
Suddenly the door to the toilets was wrenched open. Henning jumped, but closed his eyes, held his breath and tried to sit as quietly as possible. He heard a foot on the tiled floor, but the door in front of him didn’t open. Instead, the footsteps retreated.
Henning released the air from his lungs and looked at his watch again. A door or two slammed, before the noise finally died away and silence prevailed.
He waited for another three minutes before daring to venture out. He didn’t have much more than ten minutes, so he hurried back down the corridor, past a meeting room, some more toilets, walls hung with paintings, then more offices. He turned to the left when he got to the end and went through a room with a large photocopier in the corner. Then he slipped down the corridor on the far side, checking that there was no one there.
At last, once he was sure he was alone, he made his way into Indrehaug’s office.
OK, Henning said to himself, and looked around. A table, chairs, desk, photographs, diplomas on the wall; he could see the greenery of the Palace Park through the window.
But it was the filing cabinet that interested him.
He closed his eyes and tried to retrieve the memories of his last visit to the office, of what Indrehaug had done when he wanted to double-check a detail from a case he’d worked on some years before. He had got up, gone over to the desk, pulled out one of the drawers, taken out a key, then walked over to the filing cabinet.
Henning opened his eyes again, hurried over to the desk and wiped some of the sweat from his forehead, listening for footsteps and movement in the corridor all the while. He heard nothing.
The top drawer of the desk was open. It contained the usual mess: a marker pen, lots of biros – blue and red – paper clips, some lying loose, the others in a clear box. The next drawer down contained a phone charger, a pack of new batteries, a magazine with a photograph of a celebrity holding a gun on the front. Henning moved it to one side, and there, under an empty toothbrush holder, he found a small, thin key. Could that be it?
Henning looked at the clock on the wall. There wasn’t much time left. He went over to the filing cabinet and fumbled a bit with the key before it finally slipped into the lock. There was a loud click, and Henning pulled out the top drawer. There were files and files, but it didn’t take long for him to establish that they only went as far as F. He opened the next drawer. It went as far as L. When he opened the third drawer, he ran an eye over the files until he came to M. And there, behind a file that said IVAR MJØNDALEN was the file labelled ØRJAN MJØNES.
Henning snatched it out, put it down on the top of the cabinet and opened it. He leafed through it quickly, checking the clock again. Six minutes to go until half past. He would have to leave soon. He skipped the first page; next was a thick, yellowed page with all the formal details written by hand. The lawyer’s brief notes were on the next sheet: short descriptions of Ørjan Mjønes’s repeated requests not to give a statement to the prosecution. No explanation as to why.
Henning turned to the next page; a new date; here was a copy of his email correspondence with the public prosecutor. More pages, more notes. He skimmed through more and more pages, and then, when he was almost at the end of the file, he stopped; stared at the sentences in front of him:
Said he couldn’t talk because of ‘Daddy Longlegs’. When asked directly who Daddy Longlegs was, he said nothing.
Daddy Longlegs? Henning thought. Who can that be?
A moment later he heard something out in the corridor. He realised that the fire drill had finished a few minutes before time and quickly snapped the file closed. Then he put it back where he’d found it, locked the filing cabinet and nipped back to the desk. He put the key back exactly where it had been and promptly left the lawyer’s office.
Only seconds later, two men came in through the door by the reception, laughing. Henning quickly side-stepped into the copy room, went out into the corridor on the other side and into the toilets. He closed the door behind him. He hadn’t noticed it before now, but his stomach felt like a washing machine.
Henning dropped down on his knees and aimed his mouth at the toilet bowl.
15
Nora stepped out onto the pavement. A chilly autumn wind played with her hair. She pulled her black scarf tighter around her neck an
d looked left, then right. An old man in a long coat wandered past. His silver, shoulder-length hair was also being blown about. A long queue of cars stood waiting for the traffic lights to turn green. A girl in the passenger seat of a car full of teenagers looked her up and down with disapproval.
I know, I know, Nora thought, I look like a train crash.
She took her mobile phone out of her bag and checked to see if she’d received any new emails. She had, reams of them, but none that said ‘Hedda’ in the subject field. Instead, she went to missed calls and selected the last number, pressed ‘Call’ and put the phone to her ear, pulling her bag up a little higher on her shoulder.
‘Hello, my name is Nora Klemetsen,’ she said when someone answered. ‘You rang me?’
She moved away from the door.
‘Oh yes, hello. Yes I did. I read your article about Hedda Hellberg this morning.’
The traffic lights changed from red to green and the cars started to move. Nora turned into Tjømegaten, where there was less traffic and fewer people.
‘I saw her the day she disappeared,’ the woman on the other end continued. ‘I remember it, because I hadn’t seen her for a long time.’
Nora stopped outside an art-and-craft shop.
‘OK. Before we go any further, can I ask who am I talking to?’ Nora tucked the phone in between her ear and shoulder, slipped her notebook from her bag, pulled the pen from the spiral with her teeth, then bit off the top.
‘Oh yes. Sorry. My name is Camilla Wergeland.’
Nora jotted the name down.
‘I was in Hedda’s class at primary school. Like I said, I hadn’t seen her for ages, but then I noticed her at Skoppum Station.’
Nora looked up from the notebook. ‘Did you say Skoppum?’
‘Yes, the station before Tønsberg when you’re coming from Oslo.’
‘I know it. What time was this?’
‘Just before midday. I was waiting for a train, and I saw Hedda get off on the opposite platform.’
Midday, Nora thought. Hedda’s flight to Milan was at 9.50 am.
‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same day?’
‘Yes, I’ve even checked my diary to be absolutely sure. It was the day I went to Oslo for a job-seeker’s course. I didn’t know that Hedda was missing until I read the paper today.’
Nora scribbled this down and felt her heart start to race. ‘Did you see if she was with anyone?’
‘She was alone when she got off the train, but there was someone waiting for her.’
Nora raised her eyebrows. ‘Someone was there to meet her?’
‘Yes, she got into a dark-coloured car, and it drove off straightaway.’
Nora tried to absorb the information she had just been given. ‘Did you notice what make of car it was?’
‘No, but I think it was a sports car of some sort. The kind where you can take down the roof.’
Nora made a note of this. ‘You didn’t happen to notice the registration number?’
‘Not the numbers, but I think it was an LJ number plate. But then, practically every number plate in Vestfold starts with LJ.’
Nora nodded and wrote down LJ and underlined it twice. ‘Did you see if the person driving was a man or a woman?’
‘It was a man, I’m fairly sure of that.’
A dog trotted up beside Nora, sniffed her legs. The owner, a woman of more or less the same age as Nora, pulled him back.
‘Do you remember anything about him? Hair colour, features; what he was wearing?’
Camilla Wergeland gave it some thought.
‘Was he young? Old?’
‘He definitely wasn’t old, I’m sure of that, but I only saw him briefly, and in profile. But I seem to remember that he had dark hair. Shoulder length, I think.’
Nora looked around for a bench, but couldn’t see one.
‘Can you remember anything else about him?’ she asked, and started to walk.
Again, Camilla Wergeland spent some time thinking about it.
‘No, I can’t remember anything else,’ she said at last.
A car drove into the car park, narrowly avoiding a puddle by the pavement. Nora jumped to the side all the same.
‘Before Hedda got into the car,’ she asked, ‘did you notice if she had anything with her? Was she carrying anything?’
Nora slipped between two women who were coming out of City Shopping and carried on up the street. There was nowhere to sit here either.
‘Now that you mention it, I think she was pulling a small suitcase. I tried to call her, but she didn’t hear me. Or didn’t want to hear me, I think, because I noticed that she turned her head slightly when I called her name.’
Nora passed a man in dirty clothes who was sitting on the pavement with a plastic cup in front of him.
‘What was she wearing? Can you remember?’
‘She looked very elegant, as always. Boots, I think; dark jeans, grey jacket. And she was wearing sunglasses.’
Nora chewed her pen.
‘OK, thank you,’ she said. ‘It would be great if you could call me if you remember anything else.’
‘I will do.’
‘Thank you, once again. It’s great that you called.’
‘My pleasure.’
Nora ended the call and pushed open the door to Spicy, a café opposite the car park that spoke of late, drunken nights and found herself a table by the window. It didn’t take long for her to give in to temptation; she ordered some French fries, which came with too much spice and ketchup, and ate them greedily as she mulled over what the new information might mean and what she should do next.
The obvious thing was to call the police; what Camilla Wergeland had witnessed was sufficiently startling and fresh. Then Nora tried to think professionally. The contents of the follow-up article for tomorrow’s paper were now obvious. She could devote a column to quotes from William Hellberg about his sister – what kind of person she was. There were also some quotes from Hedda’s best friend that she could use, but she would also have to get a statement from the police at some point.
Whatever she did, though, going back to Oslo now was out of the question. She was not going to just hand this over to the police, she was going to do a bit more investigating herself. After all, it was her friend who was missing and she had a head start on the competition.
When she had finished eating, she took out her laptop and wrote her notes down in a Word file, then started to work on an article. Then she called the head of Home News and told him what he could expect from her in the course of the day. She’d already thought about photographs, and said that she would go to Skoppum Station to take some, but that it would have to wait for later.
Next she phoned Tønsberg Police. She was transferred to Inspector Cato Løken. Nora gave him all the information she had just heard from Camilla Wergeland. She also gave him Camilla’s contact details, as well as her own. Løken thanked her for her help and promised he would do his best to answer her questions when she called later to find out how they were getting on with the case.
After Nora hung up, she sat staring out of the window for a while. It was almost one o’clock and she felt that she had managed to get quite a lot done already. But she still felt restless.
There weren’t many cars in the car park, but she saw that Camilla Wergeland was right: practically all of them had LJ registration plates. Only Nora’s rental car from Oslo and a couple of others were different.
Her eyes stopped when she saw a car parked a few spaces away from her own. It was too far away for her to see the registration number, so she picked up her mobile phone, packed away her laptop and was soon standing by the car, which also had an LJ registration number.
Nora looked around, then went to the rear of the car; there were brown flecks of mud on the tyres and at the bottom of the doors. Nora was still holding her mobile phone, so she typed in the registration number and sent a message to the NPRA, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration. Sh
e had no idea how many people drove a cabriolet in Tønsberg, but it couldn’t be that many.
Only seconds later, her phone beeped. The name that appeared on her screen made her start.
Nora dialled Camilla Wergeland’s number again.
‘Sorry, there’s just one little last thing,’ Nora said. ‘The man who picked Hedda up at Skoppum station: you didn’t happen to notice if he was wearing a cravat?’
Camilla said nothing for a few seconds.
‘Yes, actually he was, now that I think about it,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps it was just a scarf, I can’t be sure.’
Nora realised that it was a leading question, and that she should take the answer with a pinch of salt. But all the same.
‘Good. That was all. Thank you.’
It could, of course, be a coincidence, Nora thought, as she put her phone away. There must be plenty of men who liked to wear a cravat. But there were people who used a particular piece of clothing as a kind of signature. Nora had no idea whether Fritz Georg Hellberg was that sort of person or not, but he had been wearing a cravat when she spoke to him not long ago, and he had also been wearing one in the photograph on the wall at Hellberg Property.
And it was his car she was now looking at.
16
You should perhaps take it easy, Henning said to himself as he wiped his mouth then hauled himself up from the toilet floor. His temples were throbbing again now.
Henning rinsed his face with cold water before he went back out into the corridor. He managed to slip out of the locked doors behind a woman who clearly had an errand on another floor. Henning avoided catching her eye; he didn’t want to frighten her.
Back at the reception desk, he signed himself out, smiled at the apathetic security guard, and then stepped once again out into daylight and felt the delightfully cool air against his burning cheeks. Even though it wasn’t far to his flat in Grünerløkka, he took a taxi, and then tottered up the stairs, knowing full well that he should lie down for a while.
But first he wanted to find out as much as he could about Daddy Longlegs.