by Thomas Enger
‘Yes, she did mention that,’ Bjarne said, when Henning had finished.
‘Did she?’ Henning said.
‘Yes, she told me about it. That it had happened, I mean. She wanted me to find out how you knew.’
Henning almost told him that he had a secret source in the police, but didn’t know the person’s identity, as he’d only chatted with them online.
‘You can tell her it’s nothing to worry about,’ he said, instead.
‘Nothing to worry about? Of course it is.’
‘Yes, but it’s not dangerous in the way that she thinks it’s dangerous. Pia’s probably scared that I’ll write about it. But I won’t. I’m on leave, and it’s in everyone’s best interests that you can sort out your security problems without the rest of the country knowing. After all, the most important thing is that you have people’s trust. I’m more interested in whoever managed to do it. How and why they’ve been allowed to operate freely, as it would seem they have.’
Neither of them said anything for a while.
‘Is that why you’ve taken leave?’ Bjarne asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And it’s because of all this – Jonas, Pulli – that someone is trying to kill you?’
‘Yep.’
Another silence.
‘You should have contacted me ages ago.’
‘But I had nothing to give you. And I still don’t. What I’ve just told you wouldn’t hold up in court.’
‘No,’ Bjarne said with a sigh. ‘It wouldn’t.’
The firemen were busy running up and down the stairs. Gunnar Goma talked to everyone who went past.
‘And while we’re on the subject of circumstantial evidence,’ Bjarne continued, ‘we’ll need to have it confirmed or discounted, first of all. And that won’t necessarily happen overnight. I’ll need help. So I suggest I tell the others about it first, and then…’
‘No, don’t,’ Henning said.
Bjarne looked up at him.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m not sure how long these people’s arms are, or what size ears they’ve got. They presumably managed to get hold of Pia Nøkleby’s username and password, so I wouldn’t trust everyone around her a hundred percent. And that means, everyone around you, too, I’m afraid.’
‘So what do you recommend I do, then?’ Bjarne asked.
‘Only choose people you trust implicitly,’ he said. ‘Two – max three. And make sure that no one else knows what you’re working on.’
‘A unit within a unit, you mean,’ Bjarne said.
‘Something like that.’
Bjarne nodded slowly and looked straight ahead.
‘See what you can do,’ Henning said, and stood up. ‘And in the meantime, I’ll try to find out who this Daddy Longlegs guy is.’
Bjarne stood up too. ‘How are you going to do that?’ he asked.
Henning turned to the policeman and said, with a twinkle in his eye: ‘I’ll see if I can fight my way in there.’
48
Nora hurried out to the car, got in and started the engine. That was intense, she said to herself as she reversed out of the driveway. I wonder what Unni and Fritz said once I’d gone.
As she drove away from the large house in Solvang, her breathing relaxed. But the conversation she’d had and everything that Ellen’s mother had said, churned around in her head. The old woman had clearly not had anything to do with the family after Ellen disappeared. If what she implied was true, that perhaps wasn’t so strange.
Ask him where their money comes from.
Her phone started to vibrate in her bag, so she stopped the car, dug it out and put her earpieces in. Her heart sank a little when she saw who it was. She took a deep breath and kept her eyes on the road.
‘Hi, Iver,’ she said, the first word loud, the second quiet.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Um … where are you?’
‘Tønsberg,’ Nora said, braking at a junction and changing down into first gear.
‘Are you still working?’
‘Mm,’ she said, looking right and left.
‘Are you going to stay there tonight, too?’
‘Don’t know. Possibly.’
Nora drove on, waiting for Iver to continue. When he did, his voice was warmer than usual.
‘We need to talk, Nora.’
She didn’t answer.
‘But I don’t think talking on the phone is the best idea. Can I come down there?’
Nora was driving slowly, and saw in the rear-view mirror that a car was driving close behind her.
‘Now?’ she asked.
‘Yes, or later this evening, perhaps?’
She put on her indicator to show the driver behind he should overtake.
‘I don’t know, Iver. I’m working and…’
The car sped past her.
‘…I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ she said. ‘But sometime this afternoon should be fine.’
‘OK, great. Where are you staying?’
Nora drove into a parking place. She didn’t really know where she was, but it didn’t matter.
‘Hotel Brygga.’
‘Great. See you later then.’
‘Mm,’ Nora said and ended the call. She exhaled. At last, she thought. But what was there to talk about, really? How was he going to convince her that he really wanted them to be a family?
If that was what he wanted to talk about.
Nora couldn’t bear to think about it right now, so instead she turned her thoughts to the picture she’d seen on the wall in William’s office and again in Fritz’s house – Morsevik Farm. She decided to look it up on the internet, to see what information she could find about the farm. She grabbed her phone, typed in the name, and quickly saw that the owner was a man called Jarl Inge Dommersnes, who was born in 1929, according to the tax records.
Nora wondered if he was still alive.
She decided to find out.
Morsevik Farm was in an idyllic setting, not far from the main road, about halfway between Åsgårdstrand and Tønsberg. Nora turned off onto a narrow dirt road with fields on both sides. Further on, the road split in two, either side of a large oak tree, with one track leading to a barn and the other to the main house, a big white building.
Nora drove up to the house, where there was a kind of roundabout with various shrubs and bushes growing in the middle. An old blue Toyota – covered in mud and dirt all the way up to the windows and its rear more rust than paint – was parked by the front door.
Nora parked, got out and rang the doorbell, then stepped back to look at the house while she waited. The walls had clearly not been painted for years. Some roof tiles had slipped off. She rang the bell again. This time she heard footsteps inside. When the door opened, she was looking straight into the eyes of an old man who had a pair of spectacles on a cord round his neck; they looked more like magnifying glasses. Nora wondered if he was slightly deaf as well.
‘Yes?’ he said, looking down at her from the doorway. His voice was strong and clear; he sounded like he might sing in a choir. His face was furrowed and wrinkled, and his skin, which was otherwise fair, was given extra colour by all the moles. He had at least fifteen on one cheek alone. His hair was snow white and looked like silk.
Nora introduced herself.
‘Yes?’ he repeated, squinting down at her.
‘I’d like to ask you some questions about your house,’ she said. ‘Well, about the whole farm, really.’
The old man peered at her even more intently. He was wearing red tracksuit trousers and a matching jacket, open at the neck, his chest hair sticking out.
‘Could I start by asking how long you’ve lived here … Mr Dommersnes, isn’t it?’
He nodded and looked at her for a few seconds more.
‘Are you going to write something about my farm?’
‘No,’ Nora assured him. ‘I’m writing about the Hellberg family. I’m just doing some background research, and if I’m not mista
ken, Morsevik Farm was Hellberg Property’s first ever sale, just after the war.’
‘I don’t know whether it was the first or the tenth,’ Dommersnes said, and came out onto the step. ‘But it’s true, I bought the farm in 1948. And we’ve lived here ever since – my wife and I. Or that’s to say, there’s only me now; my wife died four years ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Nora said.
He waved it off. ‘She was in a lot of pain at the end, so…’ he said.
Nora waited a little before she continued. She felt she needed to choose her words carefully.
‘Can you tell me what happened? When you bought the farm?’ she started.
He peered at her again. His mouth opened and he narrowed his eyes, revealing a long row of uneven, coffee-stained teeth.
‘How the transaction was made? Whether it was an easy process? That kind of thing.’
‘Of course. There were no problems as such. I’d inherited a reasonable amount of money from my father, who’d died shortly after the war, and I’d always wanted to have my own farm. The man who lived here had no relatives to take over, so we got the lawyer to sort all the paperwork so I could buy it. Would you like to come in and have a cup of coffee?’
Nora smiled. ‘Yes, please, that would be nice.’
Dommersnes stepped back and opened the door fully for her. He stooped as he walked down the hall. She immediately felt the cold seeping in through her coat.
‘Sorry, it’s a bit cold in here,’ he said, as if he’d read her thoughts. ‘It’s a big house, and I can’t afford to keep all the rooms heated.’
Nora decided to keep her jacket on for the moment.
‘We can sit in the kitchen; it’s warm there. Just keep your shoes on, it’s already dirty in here anyway.’
Nora did as he said, and followed him through the dark house, its walls looking like they were full of history. The rooms smelt of wood smoke and tobacco – of lives lived. There was a black wood-burning stove in the living room that looked like it might weigh a ton, but it was not lit at the moment. Beside it was a small pile of logs.
They went through two doors that she struggled to close, before they got to the kitchen. She could feel through the soles of her boots that the floor was cold here, too, but the air was definitely warmer. A large table took up a good deal of space in the middle of the room. There was an old stand-alone cooker against one of the end walls, and on the other, a worktop with a coffee machine, newspapers and a radio. Some dishes were drying on the draining board, ready to be put away.
‘Please, sit down.’
Nora took a seat and looked around as he got out two cups from one of the top cupboards. There were large windows in two of the walls; the paint was flaking on the window frames and the putty was disintegrating. She could smell burned coffee and she braced herself for the bitter taste when he put a cup down in front of her. She decided to wait a little before drinking it. Dommersnes also put out some biscuits, which she was afraid to eat, even though she was starving.
‘They’re from the shop, I’m afraid,’ he said, with an apologetic smile.
Nora was more concerned about which century they were from, but took one all the same, to be polite. She bit into it; it tasted of caramel and nuts, and the sugar crunched between her teeth.
‘Mm,’ she said.
Dommersnes smiled. ‘My wife’s father was from England,’ he told her. ‘She always used to bring several packets back whenever she went to visit the family. The English know their biscuits. And now they’ve started to sell them here, too. They import all kinds of things these days.’
‘They’re really good,’ she said.
Dommersnes sat down. Nora tried not to look at his nasal hair, which vibrated every time he breathed. There was long white hair sprouting out of his ears as well. She took a sip of coffee and was surprised at how good it tasted; it was just the right temperature, too, as she had let it stand for a few minutes.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What have the Hellbergs been up to now, then, to make you want to write about them?’
Nora arched an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Hm?’ He took a sip of coffee.
‘You said, “What have they been up to now, then?”’
‘Did I?’ He put his cup down.
‘Yes.’
‘Must’ve been a slip of the tongue.’
He let out a brief, forced laugh, and Nora looked at him sceptically, but decided not to follow it up right away.
‘Mr Dommersnes, I…’
‘Please, call me Jarl Inge.’
Nora smiled. ‘There’s a lot going on in the Hellberg family at the moment,’ she said. ‘Ellen Hellberg, Fritz the third’s wife, was found dead yesterday, and there’s everything to indicate that she was killed. Her niece, Hedda – who I studied with – is also missing, and there are those who wonder if something similar has happened to her. And…’ Nora thought for a moment before carrying on. ‘And I wondered whether it might have something to do with the family’s background and wealth. How they got their money. Which was why I asked about the situation when you bought Morsevik.’
Dommersnes straightened his top, pulling down one of the sleeves. Nora drank some more coffee and took another biscuit.
‘Well,’ the old man started. ‘There were no secrets and irregularities involved when I bought the farm; I know that for a fact. But there were rumours going around in the fifties.’
Nora leaned forwards a little. ‘What kind of rumours?’
Dommersnes studied her for a short time.
‘At the start of the war, there were quite a few Jews living around here,’ he told her. ‘Jews who were either deported towards the end of 1942 and never came back, or who simply fled over the border to Sweden. If what I heard was true, then old Hellberg “bought”’ – Dommersnes indicated quote marks with his fingers – ‘some of their properties, so the Germans couldn’t get their hands on them. But not many of them came back, so eventually he sold the properties on and kept the money himself.’
Nora sat with her mouth open. ‘And he hadn’t paid for the properties to begin with?’
‘No doubt he had,’ Dommersnes said, and drank some coffee. ‘But probably only a nominal sum. Presumably the intention was that they would then buy their properties back after the war.’
Dommersnes took a biscuit as well. A few crumbs fell from the corner of his mouth onto the plate and down his front. He didn’t seem to notice.
Nora mulled this over. Could that be what Ellen had discovered and told her mother? Was that why she’d been killed?
‘Do you know which properties they were?’ she asked.
He shook his head, took another bite of the biscuit and swallowed it down with some coffee. Nora thought about the address that Hedda had looked up on the internet: Brages vei 18.
‘I guess there’s no proof of fraud anywhere?’
‘No … at least, I very much doubt it,’ Dommersnes said, and put his cup down on the saucer with a clatter. ‘Unless you were able to find some of the old pro forma contracts and compare them with the sales after the war.’
Nora remembered what Fritz had told her: that Ellen had developed a close relationship with his mother before she died – a woman who had organised the company archives after her husband took over the business in the fifties, and who had proudly told Ellen about her work.
Fritz’s mother might have found something, Nora mused. When she was sorting out all the company letters and contracts. Something that could prove all this. Something that she’d told Ellen about.
Nora had heard lots of stories about what some Norwegians got up to during the war – stories that had eventually filtered out into the public domain. It wasn’t only in other countries that people had behaved appallingly. She knew about prison guards who had treated their fellow countrymen like animals, simply because they were Jews; who had struck and kicked them, not given them enough food or proper beds to sleep in, ordered them to do almost
inhuman tasks at inhuman times. Nora had also read about people who claimed to be helping the Jews cross the border to safety, but who had instead killed them and stolen anything of value they had with them.
People didn’t like to be reminded of it – would rather forget everything to do with the war; and that wasn’t so strange. It was quite human really, to want to cover up uncomfortable truths. But some things, some stories, couldn’t be buried.
Nora decided to ask one of the researchers at the paper to look for more background material. It could provide a starting point for a whole series of articles, she thought. She felt her fingers itching to start writing.
‘The Hellbergs are a rum lot,’ Dommersnes said.
Nora nodded, more to herself; then it struck her what he’d actually said.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘One of them knocked on my door one evening recently and asked if I was interested in renting out my barn.’
Nora’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Your barn?’
‘Yes – said he needed some space,’ Dommersnes continued. ‘Storage space, primarily. And he needed it as soon as possible.’
Nora nodded more thoughtfully this time.
‘I don’t use the barn any longer, I’m too old to repair things; so I thought, why not? And it’s a bit of extra money. Five hundred kroner a month. I almost feel like a crook.’ He smiled.
‘How long ago was that?’ she asked, without smiling back.
Dommersnes squinted up to the left. ‘Um, it must have been a month ago. Or thereabouts.’
A month, Nora thought.
Hedda disappeared just over a month ago.
‘You said, “one of them”. Do you know which one it was?’
He sighed apologetically. ‘I’m not very good with names.’
‘What did he look like? Tall, short, young, old?’ Nora was leaning almost all the way across the table, now.
Dommersnes cocked his head to one side, then the other. Then he met her eyes. ‘He was about your age, I think. Maybe a few years older.’
49