by Anne Holt
Five hours in a bare cell had left its mark on Tussi Gruer Helmersen. Her lipstick had bled into her wrinkles, forming a red star pattern around her narrow lips. The lilac turban had been used as a handkerchief and was smeared with black make-up stains. Mixed remains of mascara, eyeliner, and shadow had congealed below her eyes.
“Friends!” she screamed in falsetto with her face pressed against the bars on the door. “Guilty and innocent! Let us unite in a common …”
Although she could not see her audience, they responded with emphatic noises. Some begged for quiet. Others joined in with cheers of encouragement. One guy who was absolutely smashed messed his pants and had a great time describing his artistic efforts. At the far end of the corridor, a deep bass note could be heard, rhythmic and repeated: “Fucking cops. Fucking cops.”
Once Hanne Wilhelmsen had let herself into Tussi’s cell, the old woman ceased the political pleas to her fellow-prisoners.
“You have to let me out of here,” she whispered in despair. “This is too much for me. Please, Mrs. Policewoman!”
Hanne explained that they were only waiting for one or two interviews with her neighbors.
“It’ll soon be over, Mrs. Helmersen. An hour or so, and then you’ll certainly get permission to leave.”
“An hour—”
“On condition that you sit nicely on that bunk there and keep quiet for a while.”
Tussi shuffled across the concrete floor and sat erect with her hands on her lap. Her eyes were hopelessly confused, and Hanne faltered slightly as she locked the cell door behind her. It should be against the law to arrest old people.
Children too, she thought when she glanced into the next cell.
The boy was adult enough, at least physically. The face that turned to her made her stop all the same. The boy must be about twenty. He was weeping silently.
“What’s your name?” Hanne asked, without knowing why.
“Daniel Åsmundsen,” he sobbed, wiping his runny nose with his sleeve. “Can you help me?”
“What kind of help do you need?”
“Can you phone someone for me?”
“Phone someone,” Hanne repeated, looking around for a custody officer. “You have the right to let your family know you’ve been arrested. Has nobody told you that?”
“No.”
He sniffed and rose stiffly from the concrete bunk. He seemed unsure whether he was allowed to cross to the cell door.
“I’ll call your parents,” Hanne said crisply. “What’s their name? Have you got a phone number for me?”
“No!”
The boy was right beside the door. Hanne saw that she had been mistaken about his age; the boy must be nearer twenty-five. He had big blue eyes in a round face, but a five o’clock shadow was conspicuous on his jaw.
“Don’t phone my mother! Phone … If you could phone my aunt, Idun Franck. Her phone number is two-two—”
“Idun Franck? Do you know …? Is Idun Franck your aunt?”
“Yes. Do you know her?”
The boy attempted the suggestion of a smile. Hanne unlocked the cell door and took Daniel Åsmundsen with her through the crossfire of shouts and shrieks from the other prisoners. Now they all had aunts they wanted her to phone.
“I’m taking number eight with me for interview,” she said brusquely to the Duty Sergeant.
“Take ten of them, for all I care,” he replied, turning to a trainee officer. “Where the hell is that duty psychiatrist?”
The shoeless hooker was still standing in the middle of the floor, screaming for footwear. She had scraped her toes on the floor until they bled. Officers walked round her in wide body-swerves. She had become part of the furniture, an awkward pillar in the middle of the floor and a hindrance to them all, but no one now felt compelled to do anything about it.
“Here,” Hanne said. “Take mine.”
She pulled off her own boots, the Texan ones with silver spurs and heel studs.
“Thanks,” the woman in the fur coat murmured, taken aback. “These are brilliant, by the way!”
She pulled them on with a strenuous effort and smiled triumphantly at the Duty Sergeant behind the counter. He did not even look in her direction. The woman gave a sigh of contentment and trudged out into the night, just before Christmas, with a brown paper bag under her arm, proudly holding her head up high. Hardly anyone noticed her disappear.
55
Hanne Wilhelmsen had not really envisaged Idun Franck’s apartment as it appeared late on the evening of Monday December 20, 1999. When the publishing editor had been interviewed five days earlier, her clothes had been in matching colors, her hair clean and shining; there was altogether something delicately attractive about the middle-aged woman. Moreover she had, despite the unpleasant line of questioning, conveyed a mental strength that underscored her appeal.
The Christmas cactus at the window would have been better suited to the desert. It hung sadly with its bushy head, surrounded by faded dried flowers. The air in the apartment was stuffy and there was a fair sprinkling of dirty clothes all over the place. Idun Franck had a hectic flush on her cheeks when Hanne and Silje Sørensen ascended the stairs to the second floor. She had obviously used the few seconds from the time they had rung the doorbell until they arrived at the door to remove the worst of the mess. There was still a dirty cup on the coffee table. The ashtray smelled foul and should have been emptied two days earlier.
“Have a seat,” Idun Franck said, looking glumly at the living room without making any move to lift the voluminous handbag from one chair or the stack of newspapers from the other.
Hanne and Silje sat side by side on the settee.
“Coffee?” Idun Franck suddenly blurted out and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Won’t it take far too long?” Silje whispered. “Coffee, I mean.”
She scratched her stomach.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have any milk,” Idun Franck said in a loud voice as she placed three cups on the table. “I didn’t manage to do any shopping on the way home today. Now there’s only eleven days to go.”
“Eleven days?”
Hanne Wilhelmsen picked up a copy of Unni Lindell’s The Dream Catcher from the sideboard and leafed aimlessly through it.
“Till the end of the world,” Idun Franck said, laughing. “If we’re to believe these prophets of doom. Maybe we shouldn’t. Have you read it?”
Hanne shook her head.
“No. I don’t have time for that sort of thing.”
“I’ve often wondered whether police officers read crime fiction,” Idun Franck said; there was a different tone in her voice now, a strained inflection that made her sound younger. “Or whether you get enough of that stuff at work. What is it you want actually?”
Silje picked up the empty cup and rotated it between her hands. The coffee machine gurgled loudly from the kitchen and they could just hear the strains of “O Holy Night” from the neighbor’s apartment below.
“Jussi Bjørling,” she said softly.
“Are we to talk about Jussi Bjørling?”
Without waiting for a response, Idun disappeared into the kitchen again.
“There’s not much Christmas spirit here,” Silje said in a hushed voice. “It’s sometimes a bit untidy in our house, but not so …”
She ran a finger over the coffee table.
“… filthy!”
Three of the walls in the living room were covered in bookcases from floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall. Nevertheless there was barely space for them all; beside the door to the small balcony there were three tall piles of excess books.
“Books create dust,” Hanne said, shrugging; she thought in alarm about what her own apartment had looked like when Nefis had arrived on Friday night.
“Here,” Idun Franck said, pouring. “No milk, sorry, as I said. Sugar?”
She lifted the bundle of newspapers and sat down.
“I see you have lots of books,” Hanne said, looking
round with a smile. “Are any of them valuable?”
“Do you mean from a purely literary point of view? Yes, definitely.”
Idun smiled wanly and waved her right hand apologetically.
“Mea Culpa. No, I probably own a few copies that might raise a couple of thousand kroner at auction. No more than that.”
Hanne raised her backside and produced a yellow note from her pocket.
“Is there anyone else in your family who collects books? I mean really valuable books? Antiquarian.”
Idun Franck obviously apprehended very little. Her face showed traces of genuine astonishment, quite a different expression from the strained, watchful gaze with which she had greeted them.
“My father,” she ventured tentatively. “He had an extremely valuable collection. We don’t really know exactly how valuable, but it’s probably worth many hundred thousand kroner. If not more. It’s Daniel, my nephew, who—”
She closed off the remainder of the sentence by fiercely biting her bottom lip. A faint blush grew visible above her low-necked sweater.
“It’s actually Daniel we’ve come to talk about,” Hanne said lightly, smiling.
“Daniel? Daniel?”
Idun held her cup tightly without lifting it to her mouth.
“Has something happened to Daniel? Where is he? Is he—”
All of a sudden there were tears in her eyes and her lips were quivering.
“Relax,” Hanne said, and it crossed her mind that this reaction was excessively protective for an aunt. “Daniel’s fit as a fiddle.”
Silje pulled out two transparent bags marked “Evidence 1” and “Evidence 2” from a voluminous handbag.
“Did these belong to your father?” Hanne asked as Silje placed the books neatly side by side on the table, as if they were being sold to a less-than-enthusiastic purchaser.
Idun Franck shot a brief glance at the packages.
“I do believe so. Can I open them?”
Hanne nodded and, taking the books out of their bags, Silje handed them to Idun.
“The Hamsun has a singular background,” she said, closing the book. “My father was a Supreme Court advocate. He defended Justice Minister Riisnæs at his trial for treason. The man was absolutely stark staring mad and was found criminally insane. As far as I know, he remained in Reitgjerdet Psychiatric Hospital until the seventies. He gave my father that book in ’46. We never found out how he himself had laid hands on it. We’ve never been in any doubt that it was valuable. In fact, my father was slightly doubtful about whether he should keep it. It might even be stolen. But …”
She shrugged.
“… it’s so long ago now. This one here …”
Gingerly, she opened Farthest North.
“Yes. My father bought this when I was a young girl. A long time ago as well. Time marches on.”
Her smile was deferential, but her shoulders had slumped. She seemed relieved in a way, without daring to show it.
“Then everything’s perfectly all right,” Hanne said, slapping her thighs. “Daniel was hauled in when he tried to sell these books today. However …”
She held out her arms and gave Idun Franck a broad smile.
“Now that you’ve confirmed that Daniel has neither attempted to sell stolen goods nor tried his hand at forgery, then we’re the ones who owe him a substantial apology.”
“Is Daniel …? Have you arrested Daniel?”
“Relax. Just a little misunderstanding. I’ll go straight to police headquarters now and release your nephew.”
Hanne and Silje had gone out to the hallway before Idun Franck said anything more.
“Is it usual—” she asked, and broke off. “When you’ve done something like this, arresting a young man for—”
“Theft, receiving, and/or criminal deception,” Hanne helped her out.
“Exactly. Do you send out two officers to question witnesses so late in the evening? Usually, I mean?”
“Service,” Hanne said curtly. “The boy doesn’t have a record. It’s absurd for him to spend time locked up with us in the midst of the Christmas rush for something he hasn’t done.”
“But couldn’t you …” Hanne nudged Silje, and they had both already reached the next landing when they faintly heard her continue: “… just have phoned?”
Neither of them answered, but once they were out in the street, Hanne punched the air in annoyance.
“Shit! I forgot something!”
She pressed the intercom button.
“Has Daniel spent a lot of money lately?” she asked when Idun finally answered.
“No … Daniel is very careful with money. But he did splash out on a trip to Paris for me a few months ago. He said he had been saving for a long time to give me an extra-special present. It was just the two of us, and we had such a …”
Idun Franck broke down in tears. The sound turned into dull crackling over the intercom, and Hanne muttered a half-hearted excuse, before running after Silje.
“The woman’s blubbering,” Hanne said morosely as she wound her scarf an extra turn around her neck.
“I can well understand it,” Silje said. “I agree with her. What really was the reason for us to go storming into her home … Two of us! You could just have phoned, Hanne. It was no big deal.”
She looked askance at her colleague.
“You promised me you’d look at everything I’ve got on Sindre Sand,” she said. “You said you’d look at it tonight. It’s quite amazing, he—”
“Annmari said he would be brought to court tomorrow.”
“Yes! You’re going to—”
“We’ll wait,” Hanne said, putting her arm around Silje’s shoulders. “If he’s to be brought to court, then you’ve had a response and you don’t need my opinion, do you? Okay?”
Silje Sørensen wriggled free.
“No,” she said, offended. “It’s not okay at all. We could have spent this past hour on … I can’t fathom why we had to waste valuable time on—”
“There’s something about Idun Franck,” Hanne interrupted again. “Or perhaps—”
She stopped abruptly. They had entered the park west of Oslo Prison, south of police headquarters. A thick snowfall had cloaked the previous day’s open muddy expanse. Hanne scanned the prison wall and her eyes did not pause until she caught sight of the back steps where Brede Ziegler had been found murdered fifteen days earlier.
“Or …”
Silje had stopped. Hunching her shoulders against the cold and shuffling her feet, she gave a lengthy yawn.
“Maybe it’s really Daniel there’s something about,” Hanne said. “Something or other. I just can’t work out what it is. If … I’ll race you!”
They ran, laughing, stumbling, and jostling each other, throwing snow and tripping up all the way, until Silje slapped her mitten on the metal doors into Oslo Police District Headquarters.
“I’m getting old,” Hanne complained, gasping for breath. “You go home! I never want to see you again!”
Daniel was released before midnight. He did not call his aunt or his mother before he went to bed. As he fell asleep, it dawned on him that his grandfather’s books had been left behind at police headquarters. He could pick them up tomorrow. He was not going to be able to sell any of them, anyway.
At five o’clock in the morning he was awakened by his own sobbing.
56
Hairy Mary did not come crawling back, she arrived limping. It was far beyond her comprehension that Hanne could make such a fuss over a measly syringe.
“I don’t deal with shit,” she muttered, shuffling on toward Lille Tøyen all the same.
It was a long way from Bankplassen to Hanne’s apartment. Hairy Mary had no money for a taxi. Her welfare remittance was delayed, which is to say that the payment form was drifting between addresses she had left behind long ago. It was early on Monday evening. The two nights she had spent in the open had been harder to bear than any Hairy Mary could bring to mind. O
n Saturday night she had located a heating duct behind the garbage at a gas station at about five o’clock in the morning. She had hallucinated about clean sheets and hot food, and for the first time in her life had been really scared of dying. That syringe in the bathroom at Hanne’s had been a mistake. Next time she would take care to go down to the basement. The key hung on a hook behind the front door, inside a key cupboard in the shape of a little house with a picture of a padlock on the front. Hairy Mary had already been into the store room, where she had helped herself to a pair of winter boots, but only to borrow. They were too big, and after almost three days outside she might just as well have padded about in a pair of pumps. It was not yet nine o’clock at night. The traffic was abominable in Bankplassen. Fathers were still dillydallying about with wives and children doing Christmas shopping, and it was too early for inebriated partygoers keen to round off their festivities with a cheap shag. Some young girls had commandeered her corner. Hairy Mary didn’t have the energy to argue. She was struggling to focus; it was difficult to make out whether there were three or four of them.
“No way do I deal with shit,” Hairy Mary said angrily, panting for breath as, fishing out the key from her bra, she let herself in.
Making herself at home, she headed for the kitchen and opened the fridge. A bowl of black olives made her pull a face. Her gaze continued to run over the contents until she spotted a side of salmon that made her mouth, with the lamentable stubs of teeth, salivate.
After almost forty-five years on drugs, Hairy Mary’s childhood memories had vanished into a gray mist. The only thing she really remembered was the family who had looked after her from when she was seven until she was nine. They owned a smokehouse. Mummy Samuelsen was kind and round as a barrel. She had dentures bought in Tromsø and an ample lap, and had taken on four illegitimate children, for lack of any of her own. In the evenings, when Daddy Samuelsen came into the living room and filled it with the heavy aroma of smoked salmon, he had tossed the salmon skins into a frying pan on the open fire in the hearth. The children were allowed to eat their fill of crispy fish skins and oily salmon, and washed it down with hot chocolate. Hairy Mary had taught herself to read and write. Daddy Samuelsen had roared with laughter and clapped his hands when the wee girl had corrected his accounts with a copying pencil; her blue lips had smiled in delight and she got two caramels for her trouble.