Where Roses Never Die

by Staalesen, Gunnar

  ‘I hope not! If you set foot in here again, I’ll call security. Have you got that?’

  ‘Message received loud and clear. That’s fine. I’ve already gone.’

  Actions spoke louder than words and I left Randi Hagenberg where she was, telephone in hand and an angry expression on her face, wondering to myself what button I had pressed this time, and what had made her react with such ferocity.

  It was becoming more and more of a problem that Nils Bringeland was dead. But it was still possible to track down Joachim, whichever address he was staying at.

  13

  Even after Karin’s death I had still maintained my links, which went back many years, with the National Register. Several of her colleagues, whom I had met through her on various occasions, had promised me that if the worst came to the worst and there was something I needed help with – in total confidentiality, naturally – all I had to do was give them a buzz. And the worst did actually come to the worst, before anyone could have anticipated it. How long their charity would last was impossible to say, but so far I’d had no reason to complain. Not about that, at any rate.

  The last registered address for Joachim Bringeland was a hostel in Jonas Reins gate, which I doubted the highly respected parish priest and Independence Party man the street was named after would have viewed with much more than the very scantest forbearance. The stench from the staircase in the dilapidated old house with a chimney must have been worse than the odour from Gehenna, the pile of rubbish outside Jerusalem which, according to bible researchers, had been the inspiration for the traditional description of hell. As I stepped inside the front door a well-nourished rat darted into the hall, stopped and kept a wary eye on me in the semi-gloom in case I should lay my hands on the overturned dustbin just inside the door.

  A few floors above me I heard loud music, and from somewhere else in the house the sound of two people involved in a fierce slanging match, although it was impossible to make out what the quarrel was about. The theme was unlikely to have been theological.

  The light in the hall was dim, but someone had hung a handwritten note on a door to the left, announcing in big, black, felt-pen letters: OFFICE. RECEPTION. On the wall beside the office door hung what I assumed were the house rules, but the print was so poor it was impossible to read much more than the heading. Before knocking I took the liberty of picking up the dustbin, to the angry hisses of the resident quadruped at the back of the room.

  I already knew the situation, so it came as no surprise. If you were homeless in Bergen and received help from the local council you could end up in anything from a tourist hotel to a workman’s shed, and the range of hostels was phenomenal, from the relatively well run to the scandalous, which appeared in the newspapers at regular intervals, not infrequently in connection with violent crime. This was clearly one of the latter category.

  A hoarse voice welcomed me to the hostel, but the eyes I met categorically denied the proposition. Behind a tatty desk, so flimsy it would have had difficulty passing muster at the Salvation Army charity shop, sat a big, burly man, looking like a fatted pig two weeks before Christmas and as endearing as an aching abscess on your backside. A shaver hadn’t come near his face for the last week and a haircut was unnecessary for the as-good-as-hairless pate. He was wearing a yellowish shirt, which might originally have been white, and a black leather jacket that could not have been blacker. Gehenna PLC had an administrator to match the establishment, lucky them. Nowadays this was the best the backstreets had to offer.

  ‘Yes?’ the voice said.

  ‘I’d like to visit someone called Joachim Bringeland. He’s staying here, I’ve been informed.’

  ‘Jokken? Yes, he drops in now and then.’

  ‘Drops in?’

  ‘Yes, he’s got a room here. That’s right. He generally uses it to doss in. He’s not there now though.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know my con artists, let me put it like that.’

  ‘I see. Has he lived here long?’

  He scrutinised me from under heavy eyelids. ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘Varg Veum.’

  ‘You’re not from the papers, are you?’

  ‘No. I’m investigating a case.’

  ‘You don’t look like a cop.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m a private investigator.’

  ‘Right. Well, diddle ma dangle. Now I’ve seen the lot.’

  ‘Joachim Bringeland,’ I said with emphasis, to get us back on track.

  ‘This is a low-threshold establishment. Did you notice?’

  ‘That’s more syllables than I thought you could manage.’

  ‘It means the door is high and the gate is wide.’

  I nodded silently without saying what I had on the tip of my tongue: It had to be. Otherwise he wouldn’t have got in.

  ‘Jokken’s been on drugs since his teens. Now he’s past thirty. There’s little more than skin and bone left of him. He rattles his way up to the park every day. First into town to get some dibs – don’t ask me how! Then into the park to haggle for the dose of the day. He might have a cup of tea later on. At night he comes back here. If he’s still in the black he might have a packet soup with him, which he heats on the hotplate in his room. We have to check every night that he and the others have remembered to switch them off. We do the rounds at about ten to be on the safe side and sometimes later if we’re nervous.’

  ‘I see you take your job seriously.’

  ‘We do indeed, Mr Private Detective! Without people like us, Jokken and the rest would be sleeping rough, and you can imagine how that’d be – in winter anyway.’

  I nodded my agreement. A roof over your head was better than nothing, even if the house beneath was rat-infested. ‘Tell me Mr Manager … I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘You can call me Tiny. Everyone else does.’

  ‘OK. Is that what your birth certificate says?’

  ‘None of your bloody business.’

  ‘Why don’t you try and keep the place out there clean?’ I nodded towards the hallway. ‘It stinks of rotting rats.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’ll tell you why, pal. First, we’ve been ordered by the authorities to keep our rubbish indoors, but whenever one of the lodgers comes home you can bet your life they kick a dustbin over and send it flying. Half of them don’t reach their rooms without shitting themselves. The other half spew up like pigs at some point in the night, so what’s the point? We had some women from Africa to clean up for a while, and that was pretty good, but they had to be paid, right, and we had a budget to keep, so eventually we decided to do it ourselves.’

  ‘With the obvious results.’

  ‘Look, we do the cleaning once a week. You’ve just come on a bad day, OK?’

  ‘I see. So if I want to find Joachim Bringeland you’d recommend I go for a walk in the park?’

  He smirked. ‘Go for it! They like your sort up there. Just leave your wallet at home. And afterwards it’s best if you don’t say you’ve been there. Catch my drift?’

  I nodded, turned to the door and left.

  ‘Bye, snoop!’ came a mutter behind me.

  I couldn’t be bothered to answer, just nodded, then slammed the door so hard that the rat, which was now standing on top of the dustbin in an attempt to get the lid off, recoiled, landed on the floor and slid along the wall back into the hall. Upstairs the music had stopped and no one was quarrelling any more. This seemed like a bad omen. But I didn’t go up to check. It was outside my remit for the moment.

  14

  If I was going to search for Joachim Bringeland in Nygårdsparken the right place to begin was what was known as Flagghaugen – Flag Hill. It had been given this name after the Battle of Nygård on 18th May 1869, when the boys from two of the town’s biggest marching bands met right here. It was on this hill that the Nygård boys defended their flag while the Nordnes lads had to carry their, later legendary, ‘blood flag’ back to Nordnes, stained red with blood. Typicall
y, no one ever agreed on who won the battle.

  What everyone did agree on was that Nygårdsparken had changed character from the time it was established as a recreational area to improve people’s health. A walk in the park in those days had been like wandering through a wonderland, a mixture of a British park and a Chinese garden, where white swans swam serenely around the lake and the only sounds you could hear were the chirruping of birds in the trees, the quacking of a duck in a pond, the tinkle of the evening tram over in Møhlenpris and the faint petticoat swish of the young lady who accompanied you before you paused beneath a tree and kissed. A walk through Nygårdsparken nowadays was a far riskier enterprise, at least if you ventured up to the area around Flag Hill, which Bergen’s drugs milieu had turned into its headquarters since the late 1970s. Ten years later the local council, with the help of the police, had decided to clear the park. The result was that the drugs community spread to the town centre; but when syringes were left outside the entrances to the Bergensian ladies’ favourite cafés their mille-feuilles went down the wrong way and they immediately demanded that the guilty parties were sent packing whence they had come. With that the outcasts returned to the Garden of Eden on Nygård Hill, where the snake had taken its place on the royal throne and Adam and Eve had long been forgiven their indiscipline. Since then things had only got worse.

  With my past in social welfare and present in crime investigation it was rare I went there without meeting someone I knew. The same happened this time too. A couple of them nodded and said hello. Many demonstratively looked in another direction.

  On the hill I caught sight of Little Lasse in one of the huddles. He was easy to spot, one metre eighty-five tall, long hair like a louse-ridden lion’s mane down to his shoulders. His enduring survival made him a winner in these circles, though hardly in any others. On catching sight of me he looked away. He never liked me visiting him here, and when I beckoned to him he left his group only with the utmost reluctance and cut across to meet me. He was followed by a handful of suspicious stares. The owners were probably wondering what he had to do with me.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Veum?’

  ‘Coincidence meeting you here, Lasse. I’m looking for someone called Joachim Bringeland. Down at the hostel he went under the name of Jokken. Do you know him?’

  He licked his lips. ‘Terribly dry for the time of year, isn’t it.’

  I got the hint, took out my wallet and peeled off a blue banknote for him. ‘Will that do?’

  He shook his head as if clearly rejecting an advance, but with a swift dart of his hand a conjuror would have envied, he pocketed the note before I even had time to register it was gone.

  ‘Do you saw women in half as well, Lasse?’

  ‘Only if they ask.’ He stretched out his hand in the shape of a soap dish. ‘From the bottom up.’

  ‘I was looking for Jokken Bringeland…’

  He craned around and squinted at one of the rhododendron bushes. ‘I think that’s him sitting on the bench. He and Mottled Marte have split a dose.’

  ‘Mottled?’

  ‘White hair with black blotches. Fits, doesn’t it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And Veum … Don’t come here again. You’re bad for my reputation.’

  ‘Most of them know who I am. I’m on their side, for Christ’s sake.’

  He grimaced. ‘Up here you’re a cop all the bloody same.’ With a brusque movement he turned and went back to the huddle where he was before. He was returning to his own, but they didn’t receive him warmly. He’s been infected by a Mr Clean&Sober, he has. But then they knew nothing of my alcohol consumption over the last three years. From that perspective, we were in the same boat, the whole lot of us.

  I strolled in the direction he had pointed, rounded the rhododendron and surprised the somewhat moth-eaten couple on the bench: she had just inserted the syringe and only the whites of her eyes were visible; he was nervously fiddling with the same syringe, her blood had tinged the tip red. When I appeared he fumbled with the syringe and hid it beneath his threadbare, greyish-brown parka. His eyes sought mine, from an angle and wavering, like a whipped cur, ready for another beating.

  ‘Joachim Bringeland?’

  He nodded mutely. ‘Yes?’

  The description Tiny had given me was accurate. Joachim consisted of nothing but skin and bone, protruding eyes, spikey unwashed hair and a sparse blond beard around a mouth of bad teeth. He couldn’t have weighed much more than the latter end of forty kilos. The woman beside him was not much better, leaning against him, her legs spread in filthy jeans, her mouth agape, her eyes looking inwards and her face as expressive as a plaster mask. They looked like two castaways on a raft somewhere in the ocean, far from land and beyond all hope.

  ‘My name’s Veum. Your mother told me where to find you.’

  His flickering eyes tried to focus. ‘My mother? How?’

  ‘I’m working on an old case and trying to talk to everyone who might know something about it.’ When he didn’t react I added: ‘The Mette Case.’

  This time I had a reaction. A sudden convulsion went through him, as though I had hit him. His upper body swayed and he gripped Mottled Marte even harder, as if for help and comfort. ‘Me-Me-Mette?’

  ‘You remember it, I can see.’

  ‘Who the hell has started digging that up?’

  ‘The mother. I’m sure you remember her.’

  He nodded weakly. ‘Håkon’s mother.’

  ‘And Mette’s.’

  ‘Yes…’ He sat staring in front of him, then added: ‘But that’s one helluva long time ago.’

  ‘Soon be twenty-five years.’

  ‘We were only kids.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Apparently he didn’t wish to say any more, so I continued: ‘Do you remember anything from then?’

  ‘Hardly. I was six or seven years old.’

  ‘Eight, I was told.’

  ‘OK. Eight, then.’ His voice quivered and he spoke in such a low voice I had to lean forward to catch the gist. ‘But I don’t remember anything. Nothing except the fuss.’

  ‘The fuss?’

  ‘Yes, all the searching. The questions. Everyone was summoned to the police station, even my mum and dad. Yes, and a woman came to talk to us kids as well, but we knew nothing of course. What could we know?’

  ‘No? You never saw any suspicious persons lurking around?’

  ‘Suspicious … The only person was that pedo who used to visit Eivind and Else and them.’

  ‘Eivind and Else…’ I took out my notebook and flicked through. ‘The Stangelands, do you mean?’

  ‘But everyone knew about that. He was even put inside for a while.’

  ‘Are you talking about Jesper Janevik?’

  ‘Don’t remember what his name was, but probably.’

  ‘He was only held in custody for a night.’

  ‘Alright. So that wasn’t anything, then.’

  ‘But he used to visit the Stangeland family?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Mm, did he ever try anything?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He had convictions for indecent exposure, or something like that.’

  ‘He didn’t expose himself to me, anyway.’

  ‘And … Eivind and Else didn’t ever say anything about him?’

  ‘He was their uncle for Christ’s sake. Or some kind of relation.’

  I flicked through my notebook. ‘Do you remember where you were on the day Mette disappeared?’

  ‘Eh! That’s more than twenty years ago. Do you remember where you were?’

  ‘Where I was, nothing that serious happened. Or I’d have remembered.’ When he didn’t react to that I went on: ‘The police must have asked you.’

  ‘Yes, it’s possible, but honestly I don’t remember. I was probably at home. It was a Saturday after all.’

  ‘Håkon was at football training.’

  ‘Yes, but he w
as smaller than me and I only played football in the street. I never liked it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what did you like, Joachim?’

  He chewed his lip. ‘What I liked? Well, I … Music maybe. Sitting at home and finding radio stations where they played cool songs. Making the walls reverberate. Mum and Dad would go nuts at times, but I still didn’t stop. That was my music, you know. My songs. Later I found out the names of the groups I liked. ZZ Top, AC/DC, that sort of thing.’

  ‘So the day Mette disappeared you were in your room with the sound system on full blast and your head in hard-rock heaven?’

  He grinned wanly. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And what was it that brought you here?’ I spread my arms to take in the park around us.

  He shrugged and looked down. ‘Nothing in particular. It just happened.’

  ‘It just happened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ve never tried to do something about it?’

  For a second or two he met my eye. ‘No. Never.’ Then his gaze went inwards and was lost.

  I stood looking at him. Not much hope there. The lights were on, but no one was at home. And the hand inside his jacket was shaking as though he suffered from serious convulsions. I knew what he was after. I knew he wanted me to go. So I fulfilled his wishes, cut down through the park to the road and walked to the gate. Each visit here left me as depressed as the last. But the craving to slake my thirst had not abated. I had to find something to do.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost six o’clock. Dusk was advancing on the town. Perhaps there was time for another trip to Solstølen, now that most people would be home from work. And what could be better than a visit from a dogged PI coming to remind them not only of the bad old days but, for some, the worst days of all?

  15

  In the pitch darkness, with lights illuminating the houses, Solstølen looked even cosier than earlier in the day. All the kitchen windows shone; in some of them I could see people moving around. From the house where Randi Hagenberg and Nils Bringeland had lived came the sound of children crying; from the Torbeinsvik family’s house something redolent of music.