Night

by Bernard Minier

  She closed her eyes, massaged her eyelids, cursed the woman on the train, took a puff of her cigarette, and opened her eyes again. The spurt of blood had not reached the big crucifix up there, but it had splattered the Virgin and Child, and the tabernacle a bit lower down. She could see constellations of little reddish-brown spots on the gilt and on Mary’s indifferent face. Close to 3 metres: the distance the geyser had travelled.

  The Vikings burning their dead at night on tomb-ships; Loki, god of fire and deviousness; Jesus next to Odin and Thor; Christians evangelising the pagan people of the north by force, cutting off their hands and feet, gouging and mutilating; Viking princes converted to Christianity through pure political interest. The end of a civilisation. Kirsten thought of this in the silence of the church.

  Outside, the city was still sleeping in the rain. As was the harbour, where an enormous bulk carrier spiked with antennae and cranes, and painted grey like a battleship, was moored in front of the wooden houses of Bryggen. Was it time to invoke the spirit of place? The past of this church went much further back than that of the churches in Oslo – to the early twelfth century, in fact. There might be no national theatre here, no royal palace, no Nobel Peace Prize or Vigelands Park. But here the savagery of the ancient past had always been present. For every sign of civilisation there is a corresponding sign of barbarity; every light struggles against obscurity, every door that opens on a home full of light hides a door opening onto darkness.

  She had been ten years old when she and her sister spent their winter holiday with their grandparents in a small town not far from Trondheim called Hell. She adored her grandfather; he had the funniest face, and he loved to tell them all sorts of silly stories and sit them together on his lap. One night he asked them to take some food out to Heimdall, the German shepherd that slept in the barn. When she emerged from the well-heated farmhouse into the December night it was so cold it felt as if the blood in her veins would freeze. Her boots crunched on the snow, her shadow led the way through the moonlight like a huge butterfly as she headed towards the barn. It was completely dark when she entered the barn, and her heart was in her boots. It was sadistic of her grandfather to send her out there when it was so dark. Heimdall greeted her with a bark, pulling on his chain. He was grateful for her caresses, and licked her face affectionately while she hugged his warm, throbbing body, burying her face in his musky coat and telling herself it was cruel to make him sleep outside on such a night. Then she heard the whimpering. So faint that if Heimdall had not been silent for a moment she would not have noticed it. The sound came from outside, and she began to be truly frightened, her little girl’s fertile imagination picturing some strange creature adopting a plaintive voice to lure her outside. And yet she went. And to her left, glowing faintly in the corner between the barn and the lean-to, were the bars of a cage. Kirsten went closer, her heart pounding, as the high-pitched whimper grew louder. She had a terrible sense of foreboding. After half a dozen steps through the snow, her fingers touched the bars, and she looked between them. There was something, there at the back, against the cement wall. She squinted. A young dog, hardly bigger than a puppy. A little mongrel with a long nose, low-lying ears, and short tawny fur. His head was practically glued to the cement wall because his collar was attached to a ring, and he trembled violently. Even now she could still see the gentle, affectionate, imploring look that the little dog sent her. A look that said, ‘Help me, please.’ It was the saddest thing she had ever seen. She felt her heart shatter into a thousand pieces. The little dog didn’t have the strength to bark, and his eyes opened and closed with fatigue. She grabbed hold of the icy bars, wanting to break open the cage and run away with him in her arms. Overcome with despair, she staggered back to the farm to plead with her grandfather. But he was adamant. For the first time he would not give in to her whims. It was a stray, a mongrel that had stolen some meat: it had to be punished. She knew it would be dead by dawn if she did nothing. She had cried, pleaded, shouted with rage in front of her stunned, frightened sister, who began to cry too. Her grandmother had tried to calm her down, but Grandfather looked at her sternly, and in that moment she saw herself locked up in the dog’s place, the collar tight around her neck, fastened to the metal ring on the wall.

  ‘Put me in the cage!’ she screamed. ‘Put me in there with him!’

  ‘You’re completely mad, my poor child,’ said Grandfather, his voice hard and pitiless.

  She recalled that episode when she read in the newspapers that the Norwegian state had created a police force that would be charged with combatting cruelty towards animals: the first on the planet.

  Shortly before Grandfather died in hospital she waited until her sister and the rest of the family who were at his bedside were out of earshot, then she leaned over to murmur in his ear. She saw his loving gaze as she leaned closer.

  ‘Old bastard,’ she murmured. ‘I hope you go straight to hell.’

  She had used the word in English to refer to his village, but she was sure he got her point.

  Now she gazed at the pulpit, the altarpiece, the large crucifix up on the wall, and the frescoes, and she remembered that even Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu – better known as Mother Teresa – had spent the greater part of her life in the dark night of faith, that in her letters she had spoken of a ‘tunnel’, of ‘terrible darkness in [her], as if everything were dead’. How many believers lived like this, in utter darkness, making their way through a spiritual desert which they kept secret?

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Strand.

  ‘Yes.’

  She touched the screen on her tablet. The images of the little film from the Bergen police reappeared.

  Ecce homo.

  The woman lying on her back on the altar, her back arched as if she has just received an electric shock or is about to have an orgasm;

  Her head dangling off the side of the altar into the void, her mouth wide open, her tongue out; she seems to be waiting for the host, with her head upside down;

  A blurry close-up: her face is red and swollen, and almost all the bones – nasal, zygomatic, ethmoid, upper maxilla, mandible – have been broken. There is also a deep rectilinear crushing of the middle of the frontal bone, which makes it look as if a furrow has been dug there, the crushing no doubt caused by an extremely violent blow with a long blunt object, probably a metal bar;

  Finally, her clothes have been partially torn, with the exception of the missing right shoe, revealing a white woollen sock with a dirty heel.

  She took in every detail. A scene with the imprint of profound truth, she thought. The truth of humankind. Two hundred thousand years of barbarity and the hope of a hypothetical afterlife where humankind, supposedly, would be better.

  According to the initial findings, the woman had been beaten to death, initially with an iron bar, which had been used to crush her ribcage and skull, and then with the monstrance. The technicians had drawn this last conclusion from the presence of the object itself on the altar, bloodied and overturned, and the very particular pattern of the wounds: the monstrance was surrounded by bands which made it look like a sun; these bands had left deep gashes on the victim’s face and hands. Her throat must have been cut just afterwards, and it had caused blood to splatter in the direction of the tabernacle, before her heart stopped beating. Kirsten focused. At every crime scene, there is one detail that matters more than the others.

  The shoe. A North Face walking boot, black with white motifs and a fluorescent yellow sole; it had been found upside down at the foot of the rostrum, a good 2 metres from the altar. Why?

  ‘Did she have any papers on her?’

  ‘Yes. Her name was Inger Paulsen. No criminal record.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Thirty-eight.’

  ‘Married, any children?’

  ‘Single.’

  She looked at Kasper. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring but maybe he took it off for work. He had the air of a married man. She moved a bit closer to him, shi
fting from personal space to intimate – less than 50 centimetres – and she sensed him stiffen.

  ‘Have you found out what she did for a living?’

  ‘She was a worker on a North Sea oil platform. Oh, and blood tests showed elevated alcohol intake.’

  Kirsten knew all the statistics by heart. She knew that the homicide figures in Norway were considerably lower than in Sweden, one and a half times lower than in France, almost half that of Great Britain, and seven times lower than in the United States. She knew that even in Norway, the country that according to the United Nations had the highest index of human development, violence was proportional to the level of education, that only 34 per cent of murderers were not unemployed, that 89 per cent were men, and 46 per cent were under the influence of alcohol when the crime was committed. Hence there was a by no means insignificant probability that the murderer was a man, and a fifty-fifty chance that like his victim he had been under the influence of alcohol. There was an equally significant chance that he had been known to his victim: spouse, friend, lover, co-worker … But the mistake all the novice cops made was to let themselves be blinded by statistics.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked, blowing her smoke in his face.

  ‘What do you think?’

  She smiled. And thought.

  ‘There was a struggle,’ she said. ‘A secret meeting and a struggle that turned ugly. Look at her torn clothes: the shirt collar almost pulled off from underneath her jumper, and the shoe, all that way from the altar. They fought, and he got the upper hand. Then, in his fury, he killed her. All this theatrical setting is just for show.’

  She removed a fleck of tobacco from her lips.

  ‘What the hell were they doing in the church?’ she added. ‘Shouldn’t it have been locked?’

  ‘Clearly one of them got hold of a spare key,’ he said. ‘Because the church is closed most of the time. And there’s something else.’

  He motioned to her to follow him. She brushed off the ash that had fallen on her coat, buttoned it up against the chill, then followed him. They went out the way they had come in, through a side door. Kasper pointed to footprints in the thin layer of snow – the first of the season, it was early this year – which the rain was already effacing. She had noticed them when she came up the path marked off between the tombstones by the forensics team. Two sets of footprints in one direction, and one in the other.

  ‘The murderer followed his victim into the church,’ he said, as if he were reading her thoughts.

  Had they arrived together, or one after the other? Were they thieves fighting over their loot? Two people who had arranged to meet there? A druggie and her dealer? A priest? Lovers who were turned on by fucking in church?

  ‘Was this Paulsen woman a practising Christian?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Which platform did she work on?’

  He told her. She stubbed her cigarette out against the wall of the church, leaving a black streak on the stone, then she kept it in the palm of her hand and glanced at the lit windows of the building across the way. It was still dark. The typical wooden houses of the Bryggen district, which dated from the eighteenth century, shone with rain. The storm sketched sparks in the glow of the streetlamps, and her hair was damp.

  ‘I imagine you questioned the neighbours?’

  ‘Nothing gained from the house-to-house,’ said Kasper. ‘Apart from the homeless man, no one saw or heard anything.’

  He locked the church door and they headed back to his car through the little gate.

  ‘And the bishop?’

  ‘They dragged him out of bed. They’re interviewing him right now.’

  She thought again of the metal bar the murderer had had on him. Then something else occurred to her.

  ‘And what if it was the other way around?’ she said.

  Kasper glanced at her as he turned the key in the ignition.

  ‘The other way round from what?’

  ‘What if it was the murderer who arrived first and the victim followed him?’

  ‘Into a trap?’ asked Kasper, frowning.

  She looked at him but said nothing.

  Hordaland Police Headquarters. On the seventh floor police chief Birgit Strøm was examining Kirsten with her deep-set little eyes. She had the broad, flat face of a grouper fish, her mouth reduced to a slit whose corners stubbornly refused to curve either up or down.

  ‘A fight?’ she said, with her raspy voice. (Too many cigarettes, thought Kirsten.) ‘Then in that case, if it wasn’t premeditated, why would the murderer go into a church with an iron bar?’

  ‘It was premeditated, quite clearly,’ Kirsten replied. ‘But Paulsen fought back. She has cuts on her palms from the monstrance. As if she had been trying to defend herself. They fought, and at some point Paulsen lost one of her shoes.’

  Kirsten noted a fleeting gleam in the grouper’s eyes. The police chief’s gaze settled briefly on Kasper then returned to Kirsten.

  ‘Fine. In that case, how do you explain that we found this in one of the victim’s pockets?’

  She leaned back and reached for a transparent bag on the desk where she had placed her voluminous behind. Which had the effect of accentuating her no less voluptuous bosom. Kasper and the other officers of the Hordaland police investigation team followed her movements as if she were Serena Williams preparing to serve for the match.

  Kirsten took the evidence bag.

  She already knew what was inside. It was because of this that they had called her. They had made her come in to the police station not through the main entrance on Allehelgens gate, but through the little bulletproof door at the rear, on Halfdan Kjerulfs gate – as if they were afraid someone might see her.

  A scrap of paper. Handwritten. Block capitals. Kasper had informed her over the telephone the day before, when she was still at Kripos headquarters, less than an hour after they discovered the body, so this was no surprise, she already knew.

  It was her name on the scrap of paper.

  KIRSTEN NIGAARD

  2

  83 Souls

  The helicopter hurtled through the gusts. In the half-light Kirsten could just make out the necks of the two pilots, and their headphones and helmets.

  The pilot was going to need all his skill tonight because there was quite a storm out there. That was what she was thinking, sitting at the rear, cramped in her survival suit, while the single windscreen wiper did its best to fight off the torrential rain. In the glow of the dashboard instruments, thick drops rolled skyward from the air pressure. Kirsten knew that the most recent accident involving a helicopter headed to one of the offshore platforms had been in 2013. A Super Puma L2. Eighteen people on board. Four dead. Before that, a Puma AS332 had crashed off the Scottish coast in 2009. Sixteen dead. And two other accidents, without casualties, in 2012.

  These last few days the weather conditions had stranded over 2,000 offshore workers between Stavanger, Bergen and Florø. This evening the helicopters had at last been able to take off and get everyone home again. But the conditions remained borderline.

  She glanced over at Kasper. Sitting on her right, his gaze was glassy, his mouth open. Kirsten focused her attention ahead of her again. And at last she saw it. Emerging from the darkness, perched 20 metres above the invisible surface of the ocean, it seemed to be floating in the night like a spaceship.

  Latitude: 56° 4’ 41.16’’ N

  Longitude: 4° 13’ 55.8012’’ E

  Two hundred and fifty kilometres from the coast. Hardly more isolated than if it had been lost in space …

  Below them was total obscurity and Kirsten tried in vain to make out the tall steel pylons that plunged straight into the raging waves. She knew they touched bottom, 146 metres below the surface, in other words the height of a forty-eight-storey building. The difference being that instead of solid walls, there were only four frail metal legs surrounded by a roaring, tumultuous ocean to bear all the weight of that floating city …

 
The closer the helicopter came, the more the Statoil platform began to look like a chaotic, precarious pile. Not one square inch of space was clear between the decks, footbridges, stairways, cranes, containers, miles of cables, pipes, fences and derricks, and on top of it all, six floors of living space stacked up like prefab modules on a construction site. There were brilliantly lit sections then others that were invisible, swallowed by the dark.

  A sudden gust, stronger than before, caused the helicopter to swerve off its path.

  What a bloody night, she thought.

  There were thirty nationalities down there: Poles, Scots, Norwegians, Russians, Croats, Latvians, French … ninety-seven men and twenty-three women, split into night teams and day teams. One week working nights, one week days, in twelve-hour shifts, the same for a whole month. After four weeks, bingo! You were entitled to twenty-eight days off. Some of them went surfing in Australia, others went skiing in the Alps, others went back to their families; the divorced men – the most numerous – partied hard, blew a good part of their wages or went off looking for a new, scarcely pubescent, companion in Thailand. That was the upside of the job: you earned a good living, you had a lot of time off and travel was cheap with the airline miles you racked up. But then stress, mental health problems and conflicts were probably frequent on the rigs, she figured. There was bound to be a certain number of hotheads in a place like that, borderline cases, Type As. She wondered if Kasper had already put her in this category: Pain in the arse, for sure. With his chubby, teddy-bear demeanour he must be a Type B: tolerant, unambitious, rarely aggressive … Calm, too calm. Except tonight: when they left solid ground he had finally abandoned his good-natured manner and now, in spite of his build, he looked like a little boy.

  Only thirty more metres or so to go. The landing pad consisted of a poorly lit hexagon with a big H in the middle, covered by a net stretched across the ground, all of it suspended above the void at the edge of the platform. A metal stairway led to the superstructure.