Where Roses Never Die

by Staalesen, Gunnar

  ‘OK.’ I got up.

  She didn’t move. ‘I was wondering if…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How much will this cost?’

  I pulled out a drawer from the desk and passed her a sheet of paper. ‘This is a list of my charges. It might look a bit overwhelming, but once I’ve started, I work efficiently and … there may be a discount.’

  She perused the sheet and folded it without a further word. She was, like me, prepared for the worst. At least that was some comfort. She didn’t have great expectations, either.

  She stood up, and it struck me that I hadn’t offered her anything to drink. I was a bad host these days.

  ‘So you’ll come tomorrow?’

  I nodded. ‘Around ten, is that convenient?’

  She said yes and I accompanied her to the door. That was as far as my social graces stretched now.

  I went back into my office, reached for the beaker on the shelf, opened the lowest desk drawer to the left, took out the bottle and filled the glass half-full. The aquavit was clear and shiny, like tears emanating from a deep well. There was more where that came from.

  I toasted an imaginary adversary. Dankert Muus, of all people. The inspector who had hoped to see me again in hell now would have to see me alive. I didn’t ring to warn him I was coming. That would have been too much of a risk.

  5

  With a pensionable age of around sixty it was not unusual for police officers who had completed their service in the force to take on other jobs, some of them on the margins of the same branch. Some were employed by insurance companies, some as investigators. Some worked as bailiffs in the law courts. Some worked for themselves and took on odd jobs, caretaker posts and the like. I knew one who had opened a marina, another who ran a hospice for drug addicts and alcoholics.

  I had seen and heard nothing of Dankert Muus since he retired almost ten years ago. But he was in the telephone directory, with an address in Fredlundsveien, a reasonably peaceful location, as the ‘fred’ part of its name suggested, beneath the forest on the Mount Løvstakken side. The odd drug addict or drunk might turn up there too, but a deer was far more likely. Dankert Muus was probably still man enough to chase away anything that might stray onto his territory, whether it was on two or four legs.

  On the bus up to Søndre Skogvei I had time enough to reflect that if I had an assignment now, the first in a long time, it would be advantageous to be able to drive my own car. If I was dependent on the local bus services I would have a lot of time to kill and I had never been that murderously disposed. But the very thought of meeting a new day without a dram from a bottle of aquavit sent heavy breakers crashing through me, waves from a vast, dark ocean where I had never found peace.

  The house where Dankert Muus lived was a large, semi-detached property, half yellow, half green. Muus lived in the yellow part, with an entrance at the side, midway up a staircase. I rang the doorbell and waited.

  The woman who opened was around seventy years old, white-haired, surprisingly petite and with a friendly expression on her face. ‘Yes, what is it?’ she said, looking at me expectantly.

  ‘Fru Muus?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s Veum. Varg Veum. It wouldn’t be possible to have a few words with your husband, would it?’

  ‘I asked you what this was about.’

  ‘Well, it’s … a cold case. I’m a private investigator.’

  ‘Aha,’ she said, pursing her lips as though this was not a profession whose existence she would necessarily accept. ‘Well, Dankert’s in the garden. You can walk round…’ She pointed to the corner of the house at the end of the staircase. ‘You’ll find him there.’

  I followed her instructions, completed the ascent of the stairs and rounded the corner of the house. I was confronted with a marvellous garden, impressive to behold even in March, not least for an amateur. I counted two apple trees, various soft-fruit bushes, a dominant rhododendron in the background, several beds of sprouting crocuses, snowdrops and some small, yellow flowers whose name I didn’t know, as well as a freshly laid plot where the season hadn’t quite got going yet. In the midst of this stood the biggest perennial I had ever seen, a Dankertus Muusius, with a much-used spade in his hand, staring at me as if I were a murderous Spanish slug that had strayed into Paradise without a visa from El Supremísimo.

  ‘So this is where you bury your bodies, Muus.’

  He stared at me in disbelief. ‘Veum! What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Inspecting the cemetery.’

  ‘I really thought I’d seen the last of you.’

  ‘So you haven’t missed me?’

  ‘Not for a second, Veum. Not one single second.’

  I approached warily, keeping an eye on the spade in case he should strike.

  He had aged in these ten years as well. His body didn’t have the same brutal mass I remembered from when he was an inspector at Bergen Police Station, and, even though I had succeeded in inflaming his temper once again, he didn’t have the same fire as before. His hair had gone white, his skin was grey and he hadn’t quite dealt with all the stubble when he had shaved that morning. His gaze was as dismissive as always and he caught me by surprise when he thrust out a huge paw to shake hands and said: ‘I was sad to hear about your partner, Veum.’

  I swallowed. ‘So you heard about it then?’

  ‘I still talk to some of the folk at the station. Jakob pops by once a month.’

  ‘Hamre?’

  He nodded. ‘He’s getting close to retirement as well now.’ Then he added, not without a hopeful glint in his eye: ‘But you must be too, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, no. People like me haven’t got such an early retirement age as you, you know. And I have nothing to fall back on, yet. Less than nothing, actually.’

  ‘Well…’ He looked around. ‘I love doing this. Gardening. I don’t suppose you’d have believed that, would you?’

  ‘No, you’re right there. I’ve never seen you as the crocus type.’

  ‘But in fact I have been for many years.’

  ‘You can see how well we knew each other.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at me gravely. ‘So what brings you here after all these years?’

  ‘A case you worked on during your spell at the station.’

  ‘Thought so.’

  ‘I believe it was known as “The Mette Case”.’

  A shadow flitted across his face and his eyes darkened even further. ‘I see.’

  ‘You remember it, of course.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes indeed. But not in detail, it’s so long ago. Has someone contacted you about it?’

  ‘The mother.’

  ‘Right.’ He waved his hand in the air, struggling to find her name.

  ‘Maja Misvær.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. I remember her. She was absolutely hysterical, of course. Couldn’t understand how we could draw a blank.’

  ‘Not hard to see why.’

  ‘No-oo.’ He hesitated, even after so many years. ‘But … you never forget cases like these, Veum. A small child and an unsolved crime. Sometimes I still wake up in the middle of the night and lie there thinking about precisely this case. And a couple of others. Not so strange, perhaps. The unsolved cases are always on your mind.’

  ‘Could you give me the gist of the investigation? Even if you can’t remember the details.’

  He grimaced. ‘I fail to see what a hobby-detective like you can do, and after so many years. But … better to leave no stone unturned.’ He nodded towards the house. ‘It’s too cold to stand out here. Let’s go in for a cup of coffee.’

  Muus kicked the soil off his heavy boots and rammed the spade into the bed as a reminder that the day’s work was not yet done. He removed his sturdy gardening gloves and stuffed them in the grey-brown parka he obviously wore outdoors over dark-blue waterproof trousers so that he could kneel down without getting soaked to the skin. Then he led the way to the house and a veranda door at th
e back.

  We went on to the veranda, he pulled off his boots, motioned for me to do the same with my shoes, and then we padded into the kitchen in stockinged feet, where Fru Muus had telepathically already put on the coffee machine. Neither of them said a word to the other, but Muus articulated a few growls, which I interpreted as good-natured, and she nodded and smiled back. For a second or two I felt like an intruder in the Deaf and Dumb Association, but then Muus recovered his powers of speech and grunted: ‘Take a seat, Veum, and I’ll find us some cups.’

  He fetched two large white mugs from a cupboard and put them on the table by the window. The kitchen was kitted out in standard Norwegian fashion. On a wall hung this year’s Bergen calendar, with a picture of sunshine, as usual; to the right of the door leading into the apartment a bell rope with a flower pattern, probably embroidered by Fru Muus in her leisure hours while her husband worked overtime serving the general public. Through the half-open door I glimpsed the sitting room with its well-used beige, moss-green and red-speckled furniture: an armchair, half of a sofa and one end of a well-polished coffee table. I saw an oil painting on the wall opposite: a nature motif from a fjord landscape of the kind you found in most Norwegian homes with ageing occupants.

  Muus poured coffee straight from the jug into the two mugs, pushed one over to my end of the table and then plumped down on the other chair. His wife withdrew discreetly into the inner rooms with no more than a faint chafing sound, like a distant cricket.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, lifting the mug to my mouth and tentatively sipping the hot drink.

  ‘So … what are you after, Veum?’

  ‘You remember the case, I gather. You said you still wake up in the night thinking about it. Is there anything in particular that bothers you about it?’

  His lips curled. ‘No one likes an unsolved case. And this one was especially difficult. In reality there was nothing to find out. She just vanished.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that. Like a magic trick.’

  ‘But naturally you initiated a full investigation?’

  Muus rolled his eyes at being asked such a stupid question. ‘What do you think? Of course we did. Shall I list the steps we took?’

  ‘That would be good.’

  ‘We checked the relationship between husband and wife, to see if there had been any disagreements. Nothing. The father’s alibi was watertight – he was at football training with his son, the poor girl’s brother.’

  ‘They got divorced some years later.’

  ‘Yes, we took note of that, but … in fact that’s not so unusual in cases like this. It puts tremendous pressure on the family.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘We checked him out, both in 1977 and a couple of years later, when we heard about the divorce. The boy stayed with the father when he remarried. That made us reconsider the mother’s role in all of this, but we never got as far as directly suspecting her either.’

  ‘Maja Misvær being behind the whole stunt?’

  ‘Yes, but as I said, there were never any grounds for suspicion.’

  I took another sip of coffee. ‘And the neighbours?’

  ‘We checked them out, one by one. Some were away when it happened – it was a weekend. Some were in town. Others were at home, but … What could the motive have been? And where was the girl? We searched every house in the co-op under the pretext that she might have toddled into a storage room, or indeed any room, or that there might have been an accident. That was what we said anyway, although deep down … you never know what lurks behind closed doors. That’s my experience after a long career in the force, Veum.’

  ‘Yes, mine too, for that matter. The accident theory…’

  ‘Yes, we checked that out too, of course, properly. It’s quite a way to Lake Nordåsvatnet, but we searched the beach and the water. Nothing. We organised a search party to comb the land around the co-op. There were a lot fewer buildings then than now and enough places for a child to … fall into a pond, get stuck in a bog, slip off a cliff. But all in vain. We didn’t find a trace of her anywhere.’

  ‘What about a car? A collision? Someone who picked her up and took her?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, we considered that too. You might recall … there was a car that had been seen in the area at the time she went missing. We never got a decent description of it, but we concluded it was a dark-grey or black saloon, perhaps a Peugeot, but that was as far as we got. We put out a search, but no one responded and we never got any further with our own investigation either.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that’s the hottest tip you have?’

  ‘Had, I think we say. Had, almost twenty-five years ago. However, I would definitely have liked to know more about the car. What make it was, who was driving and what they were doing at that time? These are the questions I ask myself most when I lie awake at night.’

  ‘You checked all the neighbours’ cars?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. None of them stuck out. Most of the neighbours weren’t interested in cars. One of the men in one of the houses tinkered with an old Volvo, but it was light grey and at the time in question his wife was in town with it. Several of the other cars were absent that day because their owners were away.’

  ‘You remember quite a lot about the case, I must say.’

  ‘As I told you, it has never given me any peace.’

  ‘Another standard question, Muus. Were there any registered sex offenders under the spotlight?’

  He glared at me. ‘All of them, actually. We door-stepped every single one of them at liberty in the Bergen district and we checked any prisoners on day release. Later we expanded the search to other police districts. Obviously, with such a large target group some didn’t have alibis, but we never found anything on them, never got close to anything that could have been a clue.’

  ‘How many are we talking about?’

  ‘Of known child abusers – from flashers to rapists – we were probably talking about ten locally and between thirty and fifty nationwide. But that covered the country from Kirkenes to Cape Farewell.’

  ‘Any names that stick in your mind?’

  He scratched his head. Then he shook it. ‘No. None I can put my finger on anyway. Some of them must be dead and buried. I hope so. This is the dregs we’re talking about here, Veum. The lowest of the low. When they’re in prison they go through hell, and they deserve to. Abusing small, defenceless children!’

  I asked gently: ‘Have you two got any children?’

  He looked at me, granite-faced. ‘No,’ he said curtly and I understood at once it would be inadvisable to delve any further in that direction.

  ‘But you suspect there was something like that at work?’

  ‘Either that or, as you suggested, a collision with a car, and the driver took the body to get rid of it somewhere else. Not much to be proud of, either.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t think we’ll get much further than that, Veum.’

  ‘Cecilie Lyngmo was working on the case, Maja Misvær said.’

  Muus sent me a measured look. ‘Yes? Probably was. The whole department was involved, at least at the beginning.’

  ‘Would anyone remember any more?’

  He shrugged. ‘I sincerely doubt it. But by all means try. Most of them have retired now, like me. At least those who would have had anything to contribute.’

  He pushed his mug aside and got up, a sign the conversation was over. Then he placed his fists on the kitchen table, leaned over and looked me in the eye. ‘There’s one thing you should know. If you solve this case, Veum, I’ll forget everything that’s gone on between us over the years. If you find out what happened to Mette Misvær that Saturday in September 1977 you have a friend for life in Dankert Muus.’

  I thanked him, but on the way out I was not at all sure this was something I would anticipate with relish. From my side of the road, it sounded more like a threat.

  6

  Back in my office, after a brief search on th
e internet, I found Cecilie Lyngmo, who, after reaching pensionable age, had travelled ‘home’, as she put it, to a valley north of Flekkefjord.

  When I rang her and introduced myself, she chuckled. ‘Veum? How can I help you?’

  ‘You remember me?’

  ‘You made an indelible impression on me,’ she replied, and not being able to see her I assumed there was an ironic expression on her face. ‘Besides, we rarely heard from you at Bergen Police Station unless there was something you were after.’

  ‘I was also taken there against my will on occasion.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘I’m ringing about the Mette Case.’

  The phone went quiet. ‘I see … Have there been any developments?’

  ‘None, except that it’s approaching the statute of limitations and consequently her mother has contacted me.’

  ‘I see … again. Have you spoken to anyone else?’

  ‘I come hotfoot from Dankert Muus.’

  Again she chuckled. ‘The Muus that roared? How’s he getting on?’

  ‘Believe it or not, he’s grown green fingers. He was digging in his garden on the side of Mount Løvstakken, but whether he was digging for gold or buried dogs, God only knows.’

  ‘You had a chance to grill him, though?’

  ‘Yes. In fact, he was amazingly communicative. But, as you know, it was a long time ago and the details are probably vague inasmuch as he hadn’t got the case files to hand.’

  ‘Was he going to get them for you?’

  ‘There was no mention of that. I doubt I’ll be given access to them. The reason I’ve called you is that I was given to understand by Maja Misvær, Mette’s mum, that you and she got on well during the investigation.’

  ‘Yes, that’s possible. As a woman perhaps I was able to empathise more with how she felt.’

  ‘Exactly. Could you give me your view of the case, now that so many years have passed?’

  ‘Erm. Yes…’ She hesitated. ‘I can try.’

  Cecilie Lyngmo had been forty-seven in 1977 and an inspector for Bergen Police with a special expertise in sexual offences. It was therefore not without reason that she was called in almost straightaway when Mette disappeared from her home that Saturday morning in September. During the first few days she participated in the general search, like everyone else in the department. As time passed and the focus turned to former sex offenders in the local area she was charged with interviewing them, often alongside alternating colleagues. Together with Dankert Muus she drew up the strategy for the developing investigation, and she was sent to several other police districts to interview potential suspects in those parts of the country. All to no avail; like the investigation in general.