by Anne Holt
An interminable Olympic thriller of a final without any greater potential loss than one hundred pounds sterling. That brought a dizzying profit and an intense craving to do it all over again.
A taxi with a light on its roof came driving from the south on Snarøyveien. She flagged it down and crept into a compartment that smelled of pepper. The boy behind the wheel, he couldn’t possibly be more than twenty-five years old, had fair hair and had pushed a pair of incongruous sunglasses on top of his head.
‘Sinsenkrysset,’ Selma said curtly. ‘No, change that. Drive me to the Narvesen kiosk in Vogts gate. We’ll drive on from there, I just need to do some shopping first.’
She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes.
Everything was unravelling.
Selma herself was falling apart. She was trying to be a detective without the slightest idea of how to go about it. Her strength was to unpick evidence. Not to locate it. She was good at building a valid case from known facts. Not finding facts when she had no idea where they were hidden.
She simply couldn’t do it. Her thoughts were going round in circles, they had no beginning or end, and they twisted around in a circular pattern she neither understood nor recognized.
Selma Falck was a trademark. A brand fashioned from memory and stringency, frames and straight lines. Logic. She was resilient and strong, intelligent and streetwise.
And she never gave up.
Now she was about to capitulate.
Somewhere in everything that had happened in this past short week, all the same, lay something she hadn’t quite grasped, something annoying, a tiny stone in her shoe that she had never had time to stop and get rid of.
She just had no idea what it was.
‘Deli de Luca,’ she leaned forward and addressed the driver. ‘Not Narvesen.’
‘They’re both at the same fucking intersection,’ the ill-tempered driver said as he accelerated along the E18 towards the city.
THE CORPSE
He wasn’t ill.
Vanja had said that he wasn’t ill.
Just affected, as she said. Influenced by an extremely traumatic event in his childhood that had never been cleared up. Nothing was really wrong with him. He had grown up. Behaved well. Never done anything worse than incurring two points on his driving licence. Obtained an education and got a job. A dream job, in fact. He earned good money, had a house and even friends. Sort of friends. He didn’t really need them. The best thing was his work, because he was good at that, and going skiing.
He was still an expert skier, and he wasn’t ill.
Vanja had said that, but Vanja wasn’t here now to see how bad it was. All of it. Haakon’s death, which made him sad, and Haakon’s positive drugs test, which confused him and aggravated his headache.
Vanja was in pain herself.
It wasn’t his fault.
‘Cunt,’ he snarled, and washed down four Paracet tablets with water.
It was a double dose, but his headache was really killing him.
The silence from the cell was bothering him too. Up here in the living room he had never heard anything, the work of installing the insulation had taken several weeks, but the absence of entreaties from the other side of the door when he had been down there cutting off the water supply earlier that evening made him more anxious than ever. He could have made the wall move, just to force a reaction. Or at least have looked in through the hatch.
He must go down. Just to check.
Always best to be on the safe side.
Not allowing himself time to change his mind, he got up abruptly and went out into the hallway. He opened the basement door and went downstairs.
It was still very quiet. Now that the water had been turned off, there wasn’t even the sound of the low susurration from the pipes. He tramped extra hard across the floor, lifted the bolt on the hatch and opened it.
The man was asleep.
He was lying on his side on the bunk, with his legs at a strange angle. It looked as if he had decided to stand up, but hadn’t had the strength and half of him had lain down again. One foot reached all the way to the floor. His arms were clamped to his chest, totally flat and crossed.
‘Hey!’ the silver-haired man called out.
It occurred to him immediately that he should disguise his voice. That was the plan. That was how he had written it down, in the manuscript, the precise plan that would ensure everything went smoothly, and that no one would ever find out who he was.
‘Hello,’ he croaked. ‘Are you awake?’
Still no reaction in there.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘Wake up!’
He couldn’t open the door. It was far too risky. It could all be an act. Open the door and then, hey presto, the guy jumped up on his feet. Even if he was ever so debilitated after the days spent down here, desperation could bring undreamed-of strength. It was obvious that the man was desperate, and that was nothing to reproach him for.
Instead he hammered on the door with both hands. The cold metal made his fists smart. He stopped. Peered inside.
It looked as if the prisoner was dead.
But he couldn’t be.
‘Hello!’ he bellowed, failing to remember that his voice should be someone else’s. ‘Are you sleeping? Get up! Now!’
Still silence.
His headache was on the verge of bursting his head now, and he felt he was about to lose his temper. He was so unused to this that he forgot his own intentions about taking the greatest caution and instead picked up a wooden ski from the stack behind the carpenter’s bench, lifted the latch on the steel door and opened the cell where the prisoner was still lying as if he were dead.
The prisoner was dead.
He understood that immediately. The man had spewed up, it looked like; a disgusting, unrecognizable mass had seeped out of his mouth and nose. His eyes were only half closed, as he saw when he moved closer. His eyeballs were colourless and completely vacant, as if his life had departed through them in the end.
The man with the grey, thick hair began to cry. He walked over to the cadaver and laid it out on the bed. The legs were already affected by rigor mortis and the corpse would not lie flat.
He fetched a bucket of hot water and a few cloths. And then he carefully washed the naked body, changing the water and using a mild soap, baby soap, he cleaned the dead man before drying him thoroughly and dressing him in the clothes he had been wearing when he arrived.
Closed his eyes.
The man in the house with a cell in the basement cried and cried. When he was finished with the body, he sat with his back to the wall, the construction that was only meant to scare him, and sobbed with his face on his knees and his hands around his ankles. The cell with the movable wall was only intended to torment the man on the bunk, torment him the way he deserved and had to be tormented, before everything could be over and done with and they could call it quits.
He had not meant for anyone to die, and could no longer bear any of it.
THE CONFIDENCE
‘My gambling has cost me everything, Einar.’
The old down-and-out looked at her. He went on chewing a huge piece of ciabatta without saying a word. When he was finished, he drank the still-hot coffee in greedy gulps. Wiped around his mouth with the Mesta mitten.
‘It had to happen some time,’ he said, unruffled, as he picked up the pack of Smil chocolates.
‘What?’
‘Gambling doesn’t pay off in the long run. If it did, there would be no bookies.’
‘But …’
‘You’ve played for high stakes for years now, Mariska. High and often. You know, even though I was up shit creek at the time you were my lawyer, I wasn’t stupid. Mental illness doesn’t make you any more stupid than you already were. Quite the opposite, I’d say.’
Selma hid her face behind her cup. She felt an unfamiliar warmth on her cheeks, a slightly elevated pulse rate, as if she were seeking absolution for her sins
from a priest and still didn’t entirely know whether it would be granted. In the taxi on the way from Fornebu, the idea of confiding in Einar hadn’t yet occurred to her. Neither had it while she sat in the vehicle feeling so miserable. Nor when she had bought some food for him, with chocolate and cola and everything she knew he’d like. Not even when the grumpy taxi driver had dropped her off at the Rema 1000 supermarket just beyond Sinsen subway station, had she envisaged the possibility that the sentence would ever be spoken: ‘My gambling has cost me everything.’
She lowered her cup a little and went on: ‘The house, Jesso and the children. I’ve put myself in a totally impossible situation, I’ve accepted an assignment I’ve no chance of solving, and so really have no chance of earning a sou for. What’s more, I’m of no fixed abode at present.’
Einar Falsen smiled, cocked his head, swept a peremptory hand across the piles of stones and exclaimed: ‘There’s plenty of room here!’
With a low chuckle.
Einar himself had chosen to live as he did. In the first few years, after he was convicted and compelled to submit to obligatory psychiatric treatment, his friends and former colleagues had queued up to look after him. Three years in an institution had impaired his health. Nevertheless he was no longer regarded as presenting any danger to others and was released into a society he could only cope with by withdrawing from it. Countless attempts to move him indoors and give him dignity, as most people understood the term, had all ended in failure. Einar could not endure a normal existence. He began to roam about. One by one his friends gave up. For a number of years, however, he still had a few he could turn to when the winters became too harsh. And whenever he was physically ill, which happened only seldom. He could sleep on a settee for a night or three, before he set off once again, away from everyone who had once cared about him.
In the end he had only her.
She had never let go of her former client.
When she had approached him tonight, jumping from boulder to boulder beneath the continuous noise of the interchange, he had looked so peaceful. Tucked away under the concrete construction, with all his bags and baggage, he had sat in his sleeping bag reading the newspapers in the glow of a flickering, flaming torch. The yellow light had fallen upon his face, making it look even coarser. The wrinkles deeper, the eyes even darker. His beard wilder than ever. He had smiled at her, the usual reception, found a cushion and bin bag and welcomed her as the close friend he obviously believed her to be.
The secret had spilled out by itself.
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I haven’t yet fallen as low as that.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he had said, with a smile, as he dropped four pieces of chocolate into his mouth.
She told Einar about it. Told him all about it. Nearly all. Not about the footprints in the slush, that was still too recent, unexplained and frightening. But about everything else. About the beginning, the bookmaker in London, and about the end, the exposure when Jan Morell had come along to her office one Monday in November and reduced her life to rubble. She told him about everything in between, the years when hell-bent was the only course to take, and luck was usually on her side. In between it all she wove the story of her unsuccessful efforts to find out what had happened to Hege Morell. About Sølve Bang and hidden tubes of Trofodermin, about faint-hearted home helps and a Jan Morell who seemed increasingly knackered and surly with each day that passed without any progress. She confided in him about the embezzlement, about that galloping embezzlement, that unplanned, arrestable offence that had virtually snowballed all by itself, and that only an idiot would have thought she could get away with.
‘You’re not an idiot,’ Einar said once Selma had unburdened herself. ‘You’re just stark, raving mad with gambling fever.’
‘Don’t tell anyone.’
He gave a wide grin. Selma noticed he had lost yet another tooth since the last time they’d met, the right upper canine. The gap caused him to struggle slightly to pronounce the letter ‘s’.
More than an hour had passed since her arrival. Einar had lit his gas burner. Selma had brought a bag full of small gas canisters when she had still been on top of the world and could bring him more than coffee, food and chocolate. Six weeks ago, in fact. Now he had only two left, she noticed. One of these was now burning red and a beautiful shade of pale blue between them, and gave off a little heat when they curled their hands around the flame. The torch had burned down. The food was all eaten up. The traffic above their heads seemed more muted than she could ever recall.
‘What do you want now?’ he asked her.
‘Want?’
‘Yes. What would you like? What is it you’d like to happen?’
‘I’d like to turn back time and quit helping myself to other people’s cash.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘I’d like to win the bet with Jan Morell. I want to find some peace without having to resort to gambling on the sly. I’d like to find a place to live. I want people to stop contacting me. Today I had nineteen missed calls and twenty-nine text messages. Friends, former colleagues. Journalists. It’s driving me crazy.’
‘Mobile phones are the work of the devil,’ he said, nodding. ‘Incidentally, I’d start with the first one.’
‘Win the bet?’
‘Yes. If you manage to resolve the Chinese girl’s case, a lot of the rest will fall into place. Then you’ll have an incredible amount of dosh, get the rest of your debt wiped out, and will be able to make a fresh start. Get treatment. Drive out your demons. Concentrate on solving Hege Morell’s case, that’s what you should do.’
‘I’ve tried, Einar. For a week, now. I’m just treading water. Or to be more correct, I’m going round in circles. This business of Haakon’s mysterious death, and especially the fact that he too had Clostebol in his body when he died, hasn’t exactly made the case any simpler.’
‘Forget Haakon. It’s not those lesbian friends of yours who have engaged your services. It’s that Croesus up on the hill there.’
‘One case may well be connected to the other.’
Einar tugged off his mittens and curled his hands around the gas flame.
‘That’s of no consequence. If they’re linked, then you’ll solve both cases by finding out what happened to Hege. If they’re not linked, then you’re wasting a lot of energy and screwing up your own investigation by looking into Haakon’s case.’
‘But where should I begin?’
‘With yourself.’
Selma looked up from the dancing, almost pulsating, gas flame. Einar leaned forward and placed a heavy hand on her lower arm.
‘With yourself,’ he repeated. ‘You have to start by focusing on what you’re good at. Give it a try, now.’
‘I’m systematic.’
Silence reigned. A tram, empty at this time of night, rattled past along Muselunden to its berth for the night. A magpie had perched on a stone only two or three metres away from them, its coal-black eyes glinting with the reflections from the gas flame.
‘And pretty smart,’ Selma went on.
‘You’ve got a phenomenal memory,’ Einar added helpfully.
She nodded.
‘Also, you’re a good judge of human nature, even though you actually like to keep everyone at arm’s length. At the very least.’
‘I’m a good lawyer,’ she said quickly, aware for the first time that the conversation was causing her a touch of revulsion.
‘Yes. But that won’t help you much in this case.’
Yet again there was silence between them. Only now did Selma notice that she was starting to feel cold: Einar had given her a brand new fleece blanket he claimed to have bought at the Nille store earlier that day.
At least it didn’t smell too bad.
‘Make use of what you’re good at,’ he said, almost impatient now. ‘Use your systematics. Those analytical abilities of yours. Your memory. The fact that you’re no stranger to human traits. Your contacts, for Christ’
s sake! You know everyone.’
‘Yes, of course, but how?’
Einar gave a loud, almost theatrical, sigh. Scrambled up and out of his sleeping bag. The customary odour of dirty male over-whelmed Selma, and she had to struggle not to show it. He was wearing nothing but long underpants. He planted his feet inside a pair of safety boots and stood in front of her, legs straddled.
‘What you’ve actually told me,’ he said, raising his voice, as if standing in an auditorium, ‘is that you can’t find a motive for sabotaging Hege. To be even more precise, for each motive you’re able to come up with, you can find counter-arguments that undermine its probability.’
Selma tucked the blanket more snugly around her.
‘The most obvious one,’ Einar continued, ‘which we discussed as recently as the evening you accepted the assignment, is that someone wants to hound the Chinese girl off the ski trail.’
‘Hege,’ Selma murmured.
‘Hege, right,’ Einar replied, nodding his head. ‘The Winter Olympics are round the corner, she’s the favourite in most of the distances, and lots of people could benefit from Hege not lining up at the start of any of them. On the other hand …’
He lost his balance for a second, and had to use a nearby boulder to steady himself. The startled magpie took flight.
‘On the other hand, Norway doesn’t only have the best female cross-country skier. We have four or five of the best. At least, we have plenty who could win. For a foreigner to get rid of Hege, it would have a limited effect. To put it mildly. There’s a queue of potential Norwegian gold medal winners behind her. The foreigners would have to drug the whole gang of Norwegians to improve their own chances significantly. For a Norwegian skier …’
He drew his unbelievably filthy fingers through his beard.
‘Each and every one of them has a chance, in fact. They could all beat Hege Morell on a good day. At least most of them could. To run the risk of sabotaging a teammate would be crazy when you think of how uncertain the gain would be.’
Selma glanced up at him with increasing astonishment. He hadn’t yet mentioned the mobile phone, tramlines, the CIA or a headache. Standing there with the crotch of his underpants almost reaching down to his knees, his ear flaps dangling and his beard sticking out in all directions, he looked exactly like what he was.