by Anne Holt
This should be his apartment.
Her eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, and in the shadows inside, in what must be a living room, she eventually made out the subject of the massive photograph above the settee.
A young skier. Just a young lad. At top speed, clad in the red of the national team outfit, with blue shoulders and white lower arms, in a race that would give him his first and only World Cup triumph.
There were no decals on the window warning of a security alarm. She had thought through this potential problem in advance and decided she would have to take a chance. In the first place Sølve Bang was not the type to spend money on something that could not be eaten, drunk or boasted about. And in the second place she could make herself scarce long before anyone from the Securitas company turned up, the same simple way she had come.
Yet another intoxicating stab of adrenaline hit her when she realized that she wouldn’t even need to pick the lock. The door-frame was ramshackle, and it was enough to jiggle it and then use the largest blade of the Swiss army knife she had brought with her, at the same time as firmly wrenching the door handle. Exactly like the door on Jesso’s mother’s summer cottage, where hardly anyone ever used a key to gain entry.
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
It smelled stuffy and reeked of Indian food. The living room furnishings were strikingly spartan. An old, worn corner settee was placed under the huge photograph and a winged armchair with a reading lamp stood beside the window. The atmosphere in here was old-fashioned and dismal. ‘Dilapidated’ was the word that sprang to mind. The stucco between the wall and ceiling was beautiful, but here and there it had disintegrated and no one had bothered to repair it. The plaster ceiling rose looked original and elegant, but the chandelier was missing. Three cables protruded from a brown, irregular hole in the middle where the hook had apparently fallen off. One wall was covered in bookshelves that seemed to have been built in ages ago. Books were crammed in all over the place, standing and lying, but she swiftly noticed that there was some kind of system in the profusion. Double doors were open into the next room, and if possible it was even more spartanly furnished. A desk was placed in the centre of the room, and on the desk sat a computer.
Selma stood absolutely still and listened.
She could hear the hum of traffic. Someone shouting out there on the pavement, as well as someone else laughing. A pipe began to rumble, but soon stopped. Inside the apartment it was deathly quiet.
She approached the computer and roused it.
The screen saver was an illustration in Sølve’s last book, which had been published seven years earlier. The machine requested a password.
Selma leaned down and wrote The Future of the Past, the title of the book.
Wrong.
She tried Forgotten Tracks, Sølve Bang’s breakthrough novel as an eighteen-year-old, but that brought her no further forward.
Until now she’d had unbelievable luck. The password, however, could be anything at all. Expensive wines. Exotic locations. Ski wax or dates or names of restaurants. As for herself, she used the same password everywhere except for her online bank account, aninejohannes123. Idiotic, she knew, and anyway, Sølve Bang had no children.
Don’t think of the children. Change your password.
She let the machine go back to sleep.
The writing desk was actually a large dining table with no sets of drawers underneath. Everything Sølve might need for his work was on the desktop. A simple Canon printer. A stack of paper. A cup filled with pens and a mug of congealed coffee. Yesterday’s copy of Aftenposten was lying beside it.
Since the bookshelves in the other room were exclusively for books, she would have to check the bedroom. He must keep documents somewhere. Sølve Bang hadn’t had a permanent job all his life and must necessarily have lots of contracts lying somewhere.
She made for the door in the centre of the living room wall. It led into the kitchen, as it turned out. It couldn’t ever have been redecorated since the apartments were built, and it seemed cold and bare. Even the fridge, freestanding and placed right beside a smaller door that Selma immediately assumed must lead to the servants’ quarters of yesteryear, looked like an antique. At any rate, it must have been from the seventies, considering its dirty-brown colour.
At least there were plenty of drawers and cupboards in the kitchen, but Selma took a chance on him not having hidden his papers in there. Her elation at the risk she had taken in breaking in was now abating, and she began to get seriously nervous. She hurried through the room with the writing desk, out into a stub of a hallway. Stopped in front of the first door. Gingerly pushed the handle down and opened it wide.
The bedroom was chilly. An elastic band between the catches held a book clamped to prevent the window from closing. A digital alarm clock with oversized numerals on one bedside table bathed the room in a faint, icy-blue light. An unmade double bed was located beside the wall adjoining the living room. Disheartened, she opened the first wardrobe door, aware that it would take ages to search through them all.
The wardrobe was empty. She stood peering into the darkness for a few seconds before closing it and opening the next one.
It was empty too.
She couldn’t understand this at all. It was beyond dispute that he lived in this apartment. Sølve Bang was always elegantly dressed and usually wore a tweed jacket or blazer. He had a wide variety of both, and it seemed obvious that the bed was in use.
This was a vain man’s secret sleeping chamber, with a completely empty wardrobe.
Dispirited, she opened the third wardrobe, which had double doors.
There they were, jackets hanging on their own, and trousers neatly folded on hangers. The wardrobe was divided in two, with wire baskets stacked on one side. Socks and boxer shorts, singlets and T-shirts. All tidily folded and stored as if someone was employed to do so. Four pairs of dress shoes were rigidly lined up on the floor and brightly polished. One pair of brown, three pairs of black.
No loose papers. No cartons, shoeboxes or plastic trays.
Selma closed the doors and opened the next wardrobe, this one too with double doors. One side was divided into ordinary shelves; the other was open with a wardrobe pole at head height. One solitary dressing gown hung there.
The shelves were loaded with ring binders. Probably twenty of them, maybe more, inscribed with their contents. Here were old manuscripts, dated and numbered. Tax returns and receipts, loan agreements and contracts. Sølve Bang was a man with a sense of order, Selma realized, and she stopped breathing when she spotted a slim sheaf of papers in a red plastic cover. It was lying on the second shelf from the bottom. Both the cover and the papers had holes punched for insertion into binders. They did not belong on their own on the shelf; this was something Sølve Bang had recently looked at. She grabbed the cover and removed the stapled-together sheets of paper.
It took Selma less than ten seconds to appreciate that she really had found what she was looking for. This was a contract, an agreement between Statoil (The Principal) and Sølve Bang (The Author) about writing the history of skiing in Norway (The Work). Selma located the relevant clause at once. After reading it, she used her mobile to take a photo of each of the five pages. Returning the pages to the cover, she put the folder back in place. As she was about to close the wardrobe doors, her eyes caught sight of the almost-bare wardrobe floor.
In the far corner, half hidden beneath the long dressing gown was a pair of ski boots. They looked brand new, but had been taken out of their box, which sat beside it.
Fischer, Selma read.
Fischer RCS Skate Boots. She stood staring at them and forgot to breathe. An involuntary gasp for air jolted her out of her paralysis, and she only just remembered to take a photo of the boots and the box before she let herself out of Sølve Bang’s apartment.
Exactly the same way she had come.
THE BUS TRIP
Selma Falck had hardly ever had a head
ache in her life. Now it felt as if her brain was too large for her skull. An oppressive tenderness behind her eyes and at the back of her head made her ears ring, forcing her to keep clamping her jaws firmly together to counterbalance a difference in pressure that probably did not exist.
At the same time, there was chaos and a streak of light inside her skull.
A theory was taking shape, but all the pieces failed to fit.
She was growing increasingly convinced that Jan Morell was important. He had a central place in her imaginary jigsaw puzzle. Einar was right that it looked as if, of the two, Hege’s dad was the one who took the doping scandal more to heart and was punished hardest. Unlike Einar, Selma had met both father and daughter regularly since the story had broken. The developments since last Thursday all pointed in the same direction. If Hege didn’t exactly accept the situation, at least she hadn’t continually dug down into the depths of despair. As her father had.
At the press conference just over half an hour ago, the police had confirmed that the dead body found in the forest outside Larvik was in fact Morten Karlshaug. Selma had read this on her mobile as soon as she had put enough distance between herself and Sølve Bang’s apartment block, and could take off the glasses she usually wore when she was playing poker. They were from the eighties, big and heavy, and the lenses had a pale-blue graduated tint.
Of course, it could all be a coincidence.
Coincidences did happen.
Often.
Incidents A and B happening at the same time was not the same as A and B having something to do with each other. Nor that they had caused each other to happen or that A and B together had happened as the result of a common C. Correlation was not the same as causality.
Selma had to get hold of a packet of Paracet tablets.
Then she would go to Årvoll, she decided so suddenly that, without thinking about it, she put on considerably more speed. She could take the 25 bus from Valkyrien to Lofthus terrasse. Arnulf Selhus’s address was accessible in the phone directory, and according to the map, it would take her only a few minutes to walk there from the bus stop.
She remembered the photograph in Jan Morell’s home office, from the time when Hege had dragged her in there to see the portrait of her and her mother. A faded old snapshot of three young men was displayed by the door, big lads, one wearing a ski helmet that had once been red, white and blue. Arnulf Selhus, Morten Karlshaug and Jan Morell. Jan was the eldest and tallest of the three, and even in the photograph the most self-assured.
The alpha male.
At Majorstua she caught the bus in the nick of time after popping into a kiosk for some painkillers. It was now ten to seven, and the bus was only half-full. She found a seat beside the window almost at the very back. Leaned her head against the ice-cold glass. Closed her eyes.
Jan was punished through his daughter being caught taking drugs.
Morten was, from what the police had already claimed, the victim of a crime. He was dead.
They were both in the old photograph.
It could be a coincidence.
Probably it was just a coincidence.
All the same. Jan Morell’s deficient childhood piqued her curiosity. Wealthy people, especially those who had come into their fortune through their own hard work, often used a difficult childhood to exaggerate their success. At least a modest upbringing. The hotel magnate Petter Stordalen sold second-rate strawberries in the town square for his strict father. This was something he harped on about, and he had even based his business philosophy on it. The investor Stein Erik Hagen came from a relatively prosperous family, but was fond of slumming it by calling himself a ‘shopkeeper’ even once he was well into his tenth million.
Jan Morell could, according to the little that Selma had found out about him, have been really poor. At least by Norwegian standards. Between an upbringing by a single mother without the money to buy her youngster proper skis, even at the end of the seventies, and a fortune of more than eleven million kroner, there must lie a fascinating story.
One that he had refused point blank to tell.
There could be good reasons for that, of course.
The bus pitched and swayed through Oslo. Her headache was easing. Her eyelids felt heavy, and she noticed that she kept sliding into some kind of doze. At one point she even dropped off, but woke when the bus braked suddenly at an intersection.
Some people were more private than others.
Jan Morell was a man who held the majority of people at arm’s length. His childhood belonged to him, and there didn’t have to be any other reason for him being reluctant to share it with anyone.
Well, apart from the king.
At the Ski Museum. In front of a showcase displaying black Madshus skis.
The third man in the photograph from the seventies was Arnulf Selhus.
If the Finance Director in the Norwegian Cross-Country Skiing Federation was walking around, hale and hearty, with not a care in the world other than that a real threat to its reputation was hanging over his organization, Selma would put aside her shaky theory. Two people from the same old picture being struck down could well be a coincidence.
Three?
Hardly.
She had to check.
What Sølve Bang had to do with the photograph on Jan’s office wall was no longer a mystery. As usual, he was just out to safeguard himself, and didn’t entirely fit into the picture, quite literally. That he might have trudged around in Vettakollen and Ormøya with ski boots on his feet, probably with no other purpose than to cause alarm, was nevertheless a mystery so complex that Selma found it best to lay it to one side. At least until later. Haakon Holm-Vegge, possibly knocked down and definitely dead with traces of a demonstrably ineffective dose of Clostebol in his body, didn’t fit in anywhere either. Neither in the jigsaw puzzle Selma was trying to piece together, nor in the theory she was using as a template.
All the same, she chose not to let that stop her.
They were approaching Lofthus terrasse. Selma got up and stood ready at the door when the bus drew to a halt. She shivered in the cold. In the city centre it had been drizzling, but up here on the heights flurries of snow were blowing in from the east. Selma tried to shield her mobile from getting wet when she checked her direction on the map.
The house was only three minutes away.
A large villa painted with brown wood stain, in Selma’s opinion definitely built in the early seventies, with a BMW X5 and a Honda Civic parked in the courtyard. Light shone from several windows, and as Selma turned off from the street, opened a squeaky gate and strode towards the entrance, two, maybe three, dogs began to bark inside.
It certainly looked as if someone was at home, and she rang the doorbell.
NEW PLAN
Everything was unbalanced.
He was too. He noticed that he lurched as he walked across the floor. He had a pain in his head, but only on one side. His right foot felt numb until he gave himself a hard slap on the thigh and realized that all the pain was situated on the left side.
He hated imbalance. Symmetry was vital.
He hadn’t meant for anyone to die.
He was no killer, and that was why the plan had been designed as it had been. Earlier. The whole time, until the photographer hadn’t endured his punishment and had died. Now everything was ruined. Because of the photographer’s death, everything had gone awry. It couldn’t be put right again, and life had become seriously lopsided.
He guzzled yet another glass of water. Moved into his bedroom, tore off his sweater and stuffed it into the laundry basket. Pulled down the roller blind and lay down on the bed, on top of the quilt, with his trousers on. His singlet smelled rank, he knew. He tried to breathe deeply and slowly, in through his nose, and out through his mouth.
Arms exactly the same distance from his body. Legs at exactly the same angle from his hips. Weight equally distributed on a point in the middle of the small of his back.
His breathing
was already more regular. His pulse slower. He gathered all his concentration on that point in his back, the centre that held his body together and in place.
Balance.
It could be restored.
The photographer could not be brought back to life, but he could mete out the same punishment to the others. That would bring harmony. That would be fair.
As Vanja crossed his mind, he opened his eyes abruptly. She had left when he had needed her. Her absence disturbed him. He had been rejected, by her, as by all other women, when it had mattered most.
It hadn’t been his intention for anyone to die.
‘Cunt!’ he snarled into the room, and quickly sprang to his feet.
He was still terribly thirsty.
THE MOELVEN HOUSE
The woman who opened the door might be about thirty years of age, only a few years older than Arnulf Selhus’s ballet-dancing daughter Sophie. She also bore signs of being wife number two or three. A bit too blonde, a bit too thin and perfume that was slightly too overpowering. Her face was narrow and feminine, with a mouth on which she had at least demonstrated some restraint in her dealings with Botox.
‘Selma Falck?’ she blurted out.
The dogs were barking like crazy from the upper floor.
‘Yes,’ Selma said, smiling and holding out her hand. ‘We haven’t met before.’
‘Eh … no. Benedicte Selhus.’
Her hand disappeared inside Selma’s. Her handshake was so limp that Selma couldn’t stop herself. She squeezed it hard. A grimace of pain crossed Benedicte’s face, and she withdrew her arm.
‘What’s this about?’
She was dressed in pale-blue, skintight jeans and a beige wrap-over cardigan in angora yarn on top of a chalk-white T-shirt. With an almost helpless gesture, as if she felt threatened and very small, she pulled the cardigan tightly around her and crossed her arms. Her narrow shoulders were pushed forward. She looked as if she was steeling herself for a plane crash, and made no sign of willingness to invite Selma in.