by Thomas Enger
Unni sent her a swift look. ‘Why do you ask about Georg?’
‘Just curious,’ Nora repeated. ‘About family relations and things like that.’
Unni shifted in the chair again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, hastily, with an edge to her voice. ‘As I said, I’m not interested in hunting.’
Nora scratched her temple and studied the woman on the other side of the table. Not a hair was out of place, but she had more colour in her cheeks. A single, stubborn wrinkle had become increasingly visible on her forehead. She plumped the cushions behind her.
‘She’s always been a family person, Hedda. And I’m sure that if she’d been a boy, she would have joined the family business. But she was the youngest, and always wanted to do her own thing. Stubborn as a mule.’
Nora looked at Unni, waiting for her to carry on.
She started to laugh. ‘I remember one time, when Hedda was little,’ she started, ‘she must have been about two or three. We didn’t live in this house then, but we had to keep her tied her to a tree in the garden, almost like a dog. It was the only way to keep a check on her. Otherwise she just ran off.’
Unni smiled – a broad smile that eventually faded. She reached over to a brass box that stood next to the ashtray on the table, took out a cigarette and lit it with a lighter from the same box.
‘She was quite a special child, Hedda. Often sat on her own, just thinking. I sometimes wondered what she was thinking about, but she never answered when I asked.’
Unni took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled slowly. Then she shook her head.
‘The past few months have been terrible for this family,’ she said. ‘First Oscar, and then Hedda.’
She pursed her lips, looked away. But Nora could still see that her eyes were glistening. The telephone in the hallway started to ring – a loud, old-fashioned sound. Unni got up, placed the cigarette in the ashtray, and once again put her hand to her back as she started to walk.
‘It’s probably just my lawyer,’ she said, partly to herself, partly to Nora.
She excused herself and went out into the hall. The ringing stopped and Nora could hear her voice, but not what she was saying. She stared at the cigarette burning down in the ashtray; was tempted to lean forwards and stub it out, but she didn’t.
A few minutes later, Unni came back. She apologised again.
‘Is everything alright?’ Nora asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ Unni said, dismissively. ‘Whoever broke into the summer house appears to have got in through a hole in the fence, which I thought had been repaired ages ago. But, clearly not.’
‘Did many people know about it?’ Nora wondered.
‘Certainly, most people in the family. And I’m sure some others, people who go for walks out there and the like.’
Nora nodded slowly. ‘Did you have much contact with your daughter?’
Unni didn’t answer immediately.
‘Not as much as I would have liked,’ she said eventually. ‘She was so busy with her company.’ She raised her eyebrows.
Nora had already considered her next question carefully, and now decided just to ask it straight out.
‘Daniel Schyman,’ she started, ‘was he a family friend?’
Unni sat staring at Nora for a few seconds, the cigarette hovering in front of her mouth. Her lips slightly parted again.
‘He’s Swedish,’ Nora added. ‘Retired.’
‘No,’ Unni said brusquely and shook her head. ‘I’ve never heard the name before. Is that … someone the police suspect?’ She almost sang the question.
‘No, not at all,’ Nora said. ‘He’s … he’s just a name that cropped up when I was digging around.’
Unni breathed in more nicotine. Then she stubbed out the cigarette, rubbed her temples and looked at Nora with kind eyes.
‘I’m sorry, but I think I’m going to have to call it a day,’ she said. ‘I’m utterly exhausted by everything that’s happened.’
She got up, pressed her temples with her index fingers and smiled apologetically.
‘Of course,’ Nora said, and pushed herself up from the chair. ‘It was very nice talking to you. Thank you for your time.’
Unni didn’t answer. She accompanied Nora to the door, where she put on her jacket and scarf and then sat down on a stool to pull on her boots. Unni waited by a table, wiping an invisible layer of dust from the leather cover of the visitors’ book.
Nora stood up again, and held out her hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll ring if I hear anything more about Hedda.’
Unni gave a fleeting smile. Nora recognised the sentiment: gratitude devoid of hope. She squeezed Unni’s hand; it was thin and dry.
‘Goodbye,’ Unni said, and closed the door.
Nora drove slowly away from Kalvetangen, ruminating on the woman she had just met, on the life she led – her sore back, the cigarettes that had become her constant companion, the silence. She might well be rich in terms of goods and gold, Nora thought, but she was struck by the fact that she had never met a more lonely person.
29
Henning couldn’t tell which way the taxi driver was going, but he was definitely driving too fast, almost dangerously so. Henning drifted in and out of sleep, looking at the cars and lights and people that flew by as he tried to remember what planet he was on.
They drove over a speed bump and up a hill. The street grew darker, the taxi slowed. Then over another speed bump. They were in Markveien. Henning recognised the red, floodlit exterior of Paulus Church. The car slowed further, and stopped just outside Bobby’s kiosk on the corner, which was still open.
The trip had made Henning nauseous and dizzy; he staggered as he got out of the car and ended up in the middle of the road, with cars on all sides. The lights from one shone straight in his eyes. He heard Iver talking to the driver and the receipt being printed.
‘I can manage from here,’ Henning slurred, when Iver closed the car door behind him. Henning stuffed his hands into his pockets, dug out the keys, then dropped them on the ground. He bent down and tried to pick them up, but failed, as a pain shot through his hips, reminding him that he hadn’t taken his tablets for a while.
‘Yeah, right. Certainly looks like it,’ Iver said.
The taxi drove off as Iver helped Henning up and gave him the keys. Henning stood there swaying, then focused on Iver.
‘I can manage,’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, for Christ’s sake.’
Then everything happened at once.
A car that had been parked with its lights on at the junction with Steenstrups gate rumbled into life. There was a screech of rubber, and the engine’s thunder changed key as the car accelerated, making Henning turn his head. But all he saw was blinding lights. Then came a deafening roar. Above it he heard Iver shout out his name and felt him slam into his side, forcing the air from his lungs. It was only then that he realised the car was heading straight for them. Time paused infinitesimally. Then he was falling, Iver clasped around him. A dull thud in his head told him they’d hit the asphalt hard. But somehow his body didn’t register the impact; he just heard the grumble of the car as it accelerated down Markveien, wheels screaming as it swerved. It was all over in a matter of seconds.
The noise of the engine faded into the sounds of the street.
Henning lay where he had fallen. Iver rolled off him. They didn’t move. Henning felt something warm trickle down his forehead; the ground beneath him was cold. Slowly, slowly he turned over and looked at Iver, who was breathing fast and hard, his eyes wide open.
Henning sat up and shuffled away from a pile of glass from a shattered car window.
‘Did you get the registration number?’ he asked.
Iver shook his head.
Henning breathed heavily. The sharp light had made it difficult to see what kind of car it was. He had only caught the colour – white.
‘What the fuck was that about?’ Iver said.
He
nning tried to take in the colours and sounds around him.
‘Someone just tried to kill me,’ he said quietly.
‘Why?’
Henning got up, staggered a bit, then brushed the dust and dirt from his clothes.
‘We have to get away from here,’ he said. ‘They might come back.’
He ran his hand over his head and felt something in his hair. Grit. He pulled it out, then gave a hand to Iver and pulled him up. A man and a woman passed by, arm in arm, and looked over at them.
‘Who’s trying to kill you?’ Iver asked.
Henning took a deep breath. ‘It’s a long story. Do you want to come in?’
Iver straightened his jacked. Stopped. ‘To your flat? Now?’
‘Yes.’
Iver stared at him. ‘Someone just tried to run you over and kill you, Henning. They know where you live. What are the chances they’ll try here again?’ Iver pointed at the building where Henning lived.
‘They won’t dare try inside.’
Iver threw up his hands in disbelief. ‘You never know. There’s no way I’m going to let you go in there now. We’re going back to my place. You can crash on the sofa.’
Henning looked at him. ‘On your sofa?’
‘What – you want my bed?’
Henning looked straight ahead; it was a long time since he slept on anyone else’s sofa. Then he considered what Iver had just said.
He might have a point.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘But you better have some good food in the fridge.’
30
Nora checked into a hotel in the centre of Tønsberg – a room with a view over the canal, free Wi-Fi and a desk where she could work on her laptop. She didn’t have long now to finish her piece for tomorrow’s paper, and she still had no idea how to pitch it. She tried to call Cato Løken, but there was no reply.
Perhaps he was busy questioning Georg, she thought. And even though she’d won his trust, he still might not tell her anything.
Nora logged onto the internet and checked what the other papers had written, but none of them offered a new or interesting angle on Hedda’s disappearance. She saw that Løken had given a statement to the Norwegian News Agency, but it was neutral and said nothing new.
To keep herself occupied, she decided to do a background check on the other members of the Hellberg family. She discovered that Hellberg Property was established in 1948 by the lawyer, Fritz Hellberg I, who died six years later in a car crash. From 1954 until the yuppie era in the eighties, the company had progressed well under the leadership of Fritz Jnr, before Fritz Hellberg III took over. Following a heart attack, this Fritz had passed the reins to his nephew, William, and that was when Hellberg Property had started to buy up sites and old tenement buildings for new flats and development. It was also when the company really started to prosper.
The Hellberg family appeared to be a fine combination of lawyers, property magnates and trophy wives. Fritz III married Ellen – née Nygaard Næss – in 1975; Oscar married Unni – maiden name Lerche – in 1971, when Unni was only nineteen. Nora decided to draw up a family tree, based on their relationship to Hedda.
It took her twenty minutes to write a reasonable family history, and she was pleased with the background and context she had created for the story.
Nora tried Løken again. This time, after many rings, he answered.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Have you finished questioning Georg?’ Nora asked, pulling the earpieces from her bag and plugging them into the phone.
Løken started to laugh. ‘You don’t waste time on small talk, do you?’
Nora put down the handset with a smile and noticed in the mirror opposite that her teeth looked anything but white. She pursed her lips.
‘I’ve got a deadline in half an hour, and I’m sure that you have more than enough to do, so I don’t want to waste time talking about the wind and weather.’
‘You could certainly say that,’ Løken sighed. ‘And no, we haven’t finished. We’ll probably carry on for the rest of the evening, perhaps even the whole night; it depends. The family lawyer is being obstructive, so it’s pretty slow going.’
Nora stood up, picked up the phone and dug her toes into the soft, dark-green carpet. She realised she wasn’t going to need her notepad for this conversation. She stopped by the TV, ran a finger over a laminated page that was stuck down beside it, giving a list of channels one to thirty-two.
‘Has he said anything about picking up Hedda?’
‘No.’
She turned towards the bed. ‘Nothing about where he took her? The trip to Sweden?’
‘Afraid not,’ Løken said, and let out another sigh.
Nora sat down on the bed. The soft mattress bounced.
‘And he’s free to leave the police station whenever he wants?’
‘We can hold him for forty-eight hours before we either have to apply to keep him on remand or release him.’
Nora lay down, the phone on the duvet beside her.
‘And it’s a right you’ll make full use of ?’ she asked, looking up at the ceiling. A spider was crossing the yellow surface at speed.
‘For the moment, yes. But please don’t write anything.’
Nora ran her tongue over her lips. ‘What can I write then?’
‘That there are leads pointing in a specific direction and we’re questioning everyone who knew Hedda.’
She sat up again. The abrupt movement made her dizzy. ‘You think that he’s killed her, don’t you?’ she said.
‘I’m afraid I can’t comment on that,’ he replied.
Nora scratched a spot just above her ear. ‘What do the Swedish police have to say? Do they think Hedda’s disappearance has anything to do with the Daniel Schyman murder?’
‘It’s too early to say.’
Outside the hotel window, a boat made gentle splashing sounds as it travelled by on the canal. A seagull cried nearby, and was immediately joined by several others.
‘OK, I’ll just write that you’re working on some very strong leads. Does that sound alright?’
‘Yep, you can say that.’
Nora ran through things quickly in her mind. Was there anything else she wanted to know?
‘What about the gunshots? Have you got any further with that?’
Løken exhaled noisily. ‘No. But we’ve had some calls from the local press. Some neighbours heard the shots and phoned to see what was going on, particularly after we got there.’
Nora stood up again and wandered over to the desk, where her laptop screen had gone into sleep mode. The screensaver was a picture of her and Iver at Liseberg, on a carousel that had been far too fast for Nora’s liking. But it had made her smile, and still did now.
‘What did you tell them?’ She touched the laptop, the picture vanished.
‘That a couple of shots were fired at the Hellbergs’ family summer house, but that it was still unclear as to why they had been fired and by whom. I pointed out that it’s the middle of the hunting season and that perhaps they were just trial shots. And as no one was injured, I don’t supposed it will attract much attention.’
Nora nodded. That sounded about right.
She thanked him for his help and ended the call, then sat down at the keyboard and decided that her angle would be that the police now believed that Hedda’s disappearance was a criminal case and they had leads that pointed in a clear direction. It was sufficiently vague, but would still provoke curiosity. Combined with the background story she had written earlier, it could be a good piece, after all.
She lay back down on the bed, exhausted, but her head still full of questions. She squeezed the ball in her right hand, then her left hand, then her right hand, as she stared up at the ceiling. She had the impression there wasn’t enough space between her ears and her body felt heavy and sore, as though she had spent an entire day in a shopping centre. She should really go out and have a proper meal, but she felt more like eating some junk and going to be
d.
In the end, she raided the minibar for crisps and nuts; she even found a Toblerone, which she wolfed down. She then lay in the bath, splashing her feet and stroking her belly, filled with morbid thoughts about her diet.
She wondered what Iver was doing, if he was at work or out on the town. No doubt one of the two. She could just picture him: quick movements, charming, eye contact. Nora knew that he came across as an exciting and dynamic person. And she had seen his eyes when a beautiful woman came into the room.
They had discussed it intermittently – what was allowed and what wasn’t – and Iver had always said that it would be unnatural for him not to indulge his love for women when there were so many of them. But he never actually did anything, he claimed, just dreamed about it, thought about it.
Nora gave herself a good soak and scrub, even though hotel soaps always made her skin so dry. She should have bought a change of clothes or three, and a toothbrush, as she didn’t know how long she’d be here. She decided to do it as soon as the shops opened the next morning.
She got out of the bath, dried herself and slipped under the duvet. The spider was still moving around on the ceiling, as if it didn’t know where to go.
Perhaps Hedda had gone to Sweden with Georg, and that was where she was now. Maybe they had planned to kill Daniel Schyman together, but then something had gone wrong, so Hedda hadn’t come back with him. Or maybe Georg had killed them both. Or perhaps he’d not done anything with her until they got back to Hulebakk, and that was why he was going back there the day Nora had followed him. He’d wanted to hide the body properly. And then he took a shot at Nora when he saw her snooping around; tried to scare her off.
You’re taking it too far, Nora told herself, as she felt her eyelids drooping. The greatest mystery was still why they would want to kill Daniel Schyman in the first place.
31
The bacon hissed and sizzled, sending fat up onto the white tiles behind Iver’s cooker. Henning sat at the kitchen table and observed Nora’s lover.