by Anne Holt
The body had been dumped in an unattractive spot, far too close to the roar of a four-lane highway, nothing but a transportation route. A place to race through in search of the real hiking terrain further inside the forest. The cadaver was hidden, and most dogs would be kept on a leash so close to a built-up area.
There was nothing more he could do.
He drove to Oslo the same way he had come. Stopped in Kongsberg and cleaned the Toyota in a self-service car wash before he drove on, by now both hungry and thirsty.
He reckoned it might take days for the body to be found. If the snow came soon, it might even take all winter.
What he did not know was that the dead photographer was discovered exactly twenty-four minutes after he had left him. By a woman of seventy-nine, in rough seaman’s boots and ancient oilskins, out in the horrible weather in search of some spruce sprigs to decorate her house.
She couldn’t be bothered going very far. Just a short distance into Vestmarka, eight hundred metres from her own little house.
TRAIN OF THOUGHT
The traffic noise made it impossible to concentrate in the living room.
So Selma had sat in bed for three hours. The bedroom window looked on to the back yard. A former tenant had covered the glass in Christmas wrapping paper that Selma, for want of curtains and in the hope of leaving soon, had resisted the temptation to tear down. Only this morning had she discovered that the lopsidedness of the bed was due to the legs on the left-hand side being sawn short. What such an operation might be good for was beyond Selma’s comprehension. With the help of two old volumes of legal statutes, she had succeeded in making the rickety bed somewhat level.
Darius had started to become more approachable.
His eyes were still blue and hostile, but he sometimes approached her to be petted. His tail usually stood erect with a tiny flourish at the top, something she had come to appreciate was a friendlier sign than when the tail was wagging. Since last Thursday he had caught another four mice, but no longer offered to share the deadly game with her. The cat now killed the rodents properly and left them at the front door, ready for disposal in the rubbish bin at the entry.
To her surprise, she heard him purring, curled up at her feet as she sat with her laptop on her knee in bright daylight tinged red by the Christmas paper on the windowpane.
If it had been easy to build a comprehensive picture of Hege Chin Morell by searching on the internet, her father was far more difficult to pin down. Admittedly, his name generated 153,000 hits on Google, but most were of no interest. The articles dealt primarily with his company, Morell Clear View. Annual accounts and rights issues. Contracts and expansion. New branches and the opening of offices in Asia.
Plus the occasional announcement about Jan’s numerous directorships.
He was also frequently quoted after important ski races. Unfortunately he adhered to the usual parental clichés. Naturally, he was proud and happy. He assured everyone that Hege deserved her success. It was his pleasure to turn up, and his contribution was extremely modest in comparison with hers.
All spoken with a broad smile.
Selma had only found three in-depth interviews with him. The most recent was the paper version that Einar had shown her, a double interview in the Aftenposten weekend supplement. It dealt mainly with Hege. Almost only about her, as even the little that Jan Morell actually contributed was also related to his daughter. He talked about the good fortune of her adoption. About their shared passion for skiing. Father and daughter described her career, winning and losing and everyday life in the timber villa in Vettakollen. They mentioned Katinka’s tragic death in passing. That also focused on Hege, who rather reticently spoke of her grief at losing her mother at the age of only eleven.
What Jan had felt when his wife died could at best be read between the lines. To be honest, there was little to find there either.
The oldest photograph was from DG and was ten years old, while Dagens Næringsliv had caught him making a speech when MCV had bought one of Sweden’s largest consultancy companies and suddenly doubled in size as a consequence. This had happened in 2012. Selma read both of these articles twice over without becoming any the wiser.
In truth, Jan Morell was a very discreet man.
Selma still had no idea about his upbringing apart from that it had taken place in Kjelsås in Oslo. And that he had also been fond of winter sports as a child. This snippet of information had come from an article that wasn’t directly about him, but about the opening of a new exhibition at the Ski Museum. King Harald had been present, and was pictured laughing in front of a showcase full of fibreglass skis from the late seventies. Jan Morell stood beside him, pointing at a pair of plain black skis with rattrap bindings.
These were the very Madshus-brand skis that financier Jan Morell had longed for more than anything else as a teenager. As the son of a single mother, he had to make do with secondhand wooden skis until he was an adult, as he told the ebullient king.
On second thoughts, it occurred to her that the text accompanying the photo did tell her something after all. What the word ‘adult’ conveyed was not terribly specific, but since Jan was born in 1962, he would not have turned eighteen until 1980.
Selma had been fourteen that year and had owned her first pair of fibreglass skis for a long time by then. Black and pale-blue skis from Skilom, she well remembered, and those were her second pair, now she came to think of it. At that age she had not known anyone who still used wooden skis.
At last she could write down something in the Moleskine notebook she had found in one of the boxes Darius had refrained from peeing in.
Poor?
She chewed the pencil.
You couldn’t exactly be called poor just because you didn’t have fibreglass skis. At that time, everyone had less money to spend than nowadays.
Without hesitation, she circled the word and scored through the question mark.
Single mother. Wooden skis, at least until 1980, despite his obvious interest in skiing. Jan Morell had grown up in more impoverished circumstances than most of his contemporaries.
Poor. She stared at the word.
It really told her very little. Her fingers automatically logged in to Facebook. She hadn’t updated her page for the past four weeks. Her feed was, as usual, a blessed mixture of sports videos, offers of sports clothing and equipment, and stories about people she did not know at all and cared even less about.
It was about time she deleted the whole account. She wanted to eliminate people from her life now, not invite them in.
A post from Fredrik Solheim of Dagsnytt Atten, the six p.m. TV news bulletin, appeared. The scandals in the NCCSF were headline news on that evening’s broadcast. The planned participants were not all yet confirmed, but Sølve Bang, the well-known author and skier, would certainly be one.
At last Bang speaks his mind about the current situation in the organization he knows better than most!
‘Shit,’ Selma said out loud.
Darius peered up lazily. The phone rang.
She snatched it up and glanced at the display before putting the phone to her ear.
‘Hi, Jan.’
‘Hi. Any news?’
‘Not really. Nothing worth mentioning. What did you want?’
‘I’ve managed to compile an overview of who was where at specific times. Of the ones on our list. From the Federation.’
‘OK,’ Selma said, trying to conceal how uninteresting she found this information. ‘Send it to me, then, won’t you?’
‘I’ll do that. I’d appreciate it if you’d call in this evening.’
‘As I said, I don’t have anything in particular to tell you.’
‘You have to talk to Hege. She’s stopped training.’
‘I can’t do anything about that.’
‘Yes, you can. She listens to you.’
Selma continued to browse through the DG.no website on her laptop.
‘It won’t do her any harm to m
iss a couple of days training, Jan.’
‘Yes, it will. She has a plan to follow. She’s going to the Olympics.’
Selma did not answer. She surfed a little through the newspaper. DG’s main story was about the discovery of a corpse. In Larvik, it said, in a forested area near to the town. The police were as usual extremely reticent so soon after finding a body, but DGTV.no had made contact with an old lady in a sou’wester with her arms laden with spruce branches.
‘Selma?’ she heard Jan say.
‘I’m here. Wait a minute, please.’
It was incredible that the police hadn’t managed to shield the little woman from the journalists. This was a live broadcast, and she was willingly jabbering away. Alternating between smiles and expressions of horror.
‘You know, I go in here nearly every day,’ she explained enthusiastically as she looked up at the obviously far taller interviewer. ‘All the way to Rømminga, often. I need to keep myself going, you know. But today I just wanted to get some sprigs of spruce so I didn’t go far. The weather’s so awful, but it’ll soon be Christmas. It’s so cosy with spruce branches as decoration, you see. And to think that I came across a body! That photographer, you know! The one they’ve been talking about on the radio and TV. I recognized him right away. Nearly trod on him, my goodness! It’s so dreadful, this business. And it’ll soon be Christmas too.’
‘Selma, are you there?’
‘Yes. It looks like they’ve found Morten Karlshaug. Dead.’
‘What?’
‘In Larvik.’
‘What the hell would Klaus be doing in Larvik? He was on his way to Mongolia, wasn’t he? And … do you know for certain that he’s dead?’
‘Are you close friends?’ Selma interjected quickly, and as she did, a train of thought was set in motion.
‘Childhood pals. We see each other now and again. Not often. He travels a lot. I don’t meet many people in my private life. It’s tragic if it’s confirmed that Klaus is dead, but to be honest, I’ve got other things on my mind at present.’
A uniformed police officer finally came into view, turned the journalist away, and took the old lady with him. The camera wobbled slightly and the studio took over.
‘Morten Karlshaug,’ Selma said. ‘Klaus. And Arnulf Selhus and you. You all hung about together as young lads, didn’t you? Are you still friends with Arnulf as well?’
She closed her eyes. Rewound her memory back to the time when she stood in Jan Morell’s home office with Hege. When they had looked at the big Karlshaug photograph of an eleven-year-old and her mother, and Selma had caught sight of a faded picture of three young men on her way back into the living room.
‘They were best friends,’ Hege had said at the time about Arnulf Selhus and her father.
‘Were?’ Selma had asked.
‘Were,’ Hege had answered. ‘We have to go now.’
She could actually hear Jan Morell lose his temper at the other end.
‘That’s really none of your business,’ he replied sharply. ‘As I told you, I’ve other things to think about at the moment. Will you come tonight?’
‘Yes. But I’ll need to let you know what time. You’ll hear from me later. Have you picked up the news that Sølve Bang seems to be going on the offensive on Dagsnytt at six o’clock tonight?’
No reply. Jan Morell had simply hung up.
IMBALANCE
He hadn’t checked the internet en route. Hadn’t listened to the radio either. The speakers on his mother’s old Toyota were broken. Instead he had attached earphones to his mobile and listened to an audiobook. Augustus by John Williams. It was absolutely impossible to follow. For three hours he had listened to a story in which all the names ended in –us, where the extensive gallery of characters changed their names continuously, and into the bargain the author shifted time and place with no sense of chronology.
It didn’t matter. The point was to be distracted. His thoughts were in total chaos, and he knew his body well enough to be aware that his blood pressure was considerably elevated. His pulse too. It had remained under a hundred all the way from Larvik to Oslo, via byways he realized didn’t matter in the least.
You couldn’t move unobserved anywhere in the Western world these days. There was surveillance everywhere. His only hope was that no one had trained their binoculars on him in particular.
He was seeking equilibrium.
No one was supposed to die. That wasn’t the intention. He hadn’t died, after all. He had just been damaged. Robbed of what had been. What had belonged to him, what he had been born to and into. Only God had control of life and death, and everything had gone completely wrong. One person was dead. Another two were still alive.
‘Imbalance,’ he muttered as he drove the Toyota into the garage, removed the tape and put the plates back on the Honda. ‘Imbalance. Imbalance. Imbalance.’
He drew a tarpaulin over his mother’s old car, locked the garage and went into the house. On his way to the kitchen to make himself something to eat, he checked Aftenposten online on his mobile.
Man Found Dead in Larvik.
No. It should have taken time. It should have taken days. Maybe even all winter.
The man with silver hair walked unsteadily across to the small dining table in front of the window. Collapsed on to a chair and went on reading.
At present the police refuse to say anything other than that they suspect a crime has been committed. The body has not yet been identified, but DG.no has reported that it is the missing photographer Morten Karlshaug who has been found. South-East Police will hold a press conference about the case at seven p.m.
No. No.
He had such a thirst. His tongue was enlarged and was hanging out of his mouth; he pulled a face and staggered over to the sink. Letting the cold water run, he leaned into the stream and drank. He drank like an animal, lapping at the water; it spurted and spilled, and he struggled to swallow enough to quench this terrible thirst that could not be slaked no matter how much he drank.
The world was filled with chaos, and something had to be done.
THE BREAK-IN
Selma Falck knew that the penalty for violation of §325 of the criminal code was up to six years’ imprisonment. By helping herself to Jan Morell’s money without asking for his permission, she had fulfilled not only one of the alternative criteria that aggravated the embezzlement from a legal point of view, but all of them. Firstly, it was a considerable sum of money. Secondly, the money was cash that had been entrusted to her. In addition, the embezzlement had continued over a period of time. And to top it all, in the months prior to the embezzlement being uncovered, she had sent him statements for the credit balance that were not quite in accordance with reality.
To put it mildly.
Every single evening since Jan Morell had exposed her, she had thought about what punishment she actually deserved. A hundred years in hell was the answer she had arrived at, but based on current practice in the Norwegian legal system, she would most likely have been behind bars for well over four years.
Bearing that in mind, a mere break-in was a trivial matter.
She wasn’t even going to steal anything.
With a smile on her face, she followed the elderly man who was taking such pains and going to such effort to unlock the door into the apartment block in Frogner. He thanked her nicely when she held open the heavy door for him, and said goodbye, unsteady on his feet, when he turned right in the entryway to shuffle up the stairs and into his own apartment. The kindly woman dressed in dark clothes with a knitted hat and large glasses continued into the back yard.
It was ten to six in the evening. Sølve Bang was in the NRK broadcasting building in Marienlyst, and would be there for at least another half-hour. At present he lived alone, she had discovered on the internet, and confirmed when she could see that his apartment on the second floor was shrouded in darkness. On Google Maps she had been afforded a bird’s eye view and saw that there were balconies on this side
of the block. Since Google only showed the facades overlooking the street, she was nevertheless far from certain that her plan could be put into action.
She had incredible luck.
The balconies were old and small, with wrought-iron railings in ingenious patterns. The windows must be from some time in the seventies, and the balcony doors looked even older. Fate had shown her further undeserved favour by placing the balconies quite near to a protruding old shaft of around one and a half times one and a half metres. She guessed it had been an old-fashioned privy in earlier times, and the gutter led down inside it along a half-metre-wide gap between the balconies and the shaft.
Blood rushed through her ears. She felt carefree, excited and self-assured. The adrenaline made her breathe through her open mouth, slightly faster than usual; she felt her heart beating, strong and gloriously rhythmical – at one and the same time, this was nothing at all and tremendously risky.
She scouted all around. Most of the curtains were drawn, with light showing in some places. No one was peering out. In the corner, where the gutter ended in a curve that sent the water down into a drain with a grate, she almost disappeared into the soft, sheltered darkness.
It took her less than two minutes to climb up to the second floor. She didn’t even need to enter the first two balconies. With the help of the gutter, the shaft wall and the wrought-iron railings, it was an easy matter to clamber up unseen and cross the final obstacle. On Sølve Bang’s balcony, she hunkered down and caught her breath.
If it was indeed his balcony.
Slight tension in her gut made her put her hands around her eyes like a screen and press her forehead to the glass door. The apartment block’s entryway was situated exactly in the middle of the building with a stairwell on either side. Four apartments in each of them. The intercom apparatus at the door was organized in the same fashion. Two columns with four doorbells on each.