by Anne Holt
THE POKER TURK
The doorbell rang.
Darius wailed with displeasure and jumped down from the bed. Selma scrambled out of a deep sleep and the cosy quilt. She grabbed a T-shirt and hopped into a pair of trousers on her way to the door. The only person who knew she lived here was Jan Morell.
‘You could just have phoned,’ she said as she opened the door.
‘Hello there!’ said the Poker Turk.
He was holding up an old car key.
‘The Amazon,’ Selma said, sounding confused.
‘Yip. It’s parked in Hesselbergs gate. In front of number six. Just down the road from here. With brand spanking new winter tyres. I changed the spark plugs too. And the oil. The brake fluid. More or less a full service. Plus I installed a DAB adapter. The FM band is dead nowadays, you know.’
He gave a broad grin. His brilliant white teeth were all at sixes and sevens inside his mouth.
‘I realize you’re a bit short of money,’ he said, winking. ‘Pay me back when you can afford it. Or not. All the same to me.’
Selma tried to shake herself properly awake.
‘It can’t stay here in Løkka,’ she told him. ‘It’ll be stolen. Would you like to come in?’
He shook his head.
‘Have to go. I fitted an alarm as well.’
He handed her the key, which had acquired a fob.
‘You just press here …’
A long, slim index finger sporting two silver rings showed her how the alarm functioned.
‘And here when you’re locking it. Alarms aren’t terribly effective, but they’re better than nothing. And you’ll need the car now and again. A nuisance to pick it up from my place every time. Will I see you soon?’
Selma was still struggling to stay wide awake.
‘Sure,’ she mumbled. ‘Thanks a million.’
‘Anything for you, Selma. Anything for the best lawyer in the world.’
With a toss of the head, he thrust his hands into his jacket pocket and rushed down the little staircase, past the mailboxes and out.
KARMA
This wasn’t how the manuscript was supposed to end.
Not like this.
The man with the thick grey hair snatched up the sheaf of papers and hugged them close. Several pages escaped his embrace and fell to the kitchen floor. He bent down and tried to pick them up, but dropped several more. And then even more. He released his grip, and let the nearly 150 pages cascade to the floor.
‘Not like this,’ he said in despair, searching for the final pages in the chaotic pile of paper. ‘Not like this. Not like this. Not like this.’
They were supposed to meet up, all of them. In section twelve. The very last episode.
Jan Morell, Arnulf Selhus, Morten Karlshaug and himself. They were to come together when the three of them had received their punishment. People should pay the accurately devised, exactly allotted, and surgically precise penalty they deserved. He had spent two months measuring it all out – they would learn how everything could fall apart and the world go to hell while it still went on spinning as if nothing had happened.
As if everything was just as before, even though nothing actually was.
He had discovered their weaknesses. Their greatest fears. Jan Morell’s was obvious to anyone who paid attention. Morten Karlshaug himself had spoken of his unbearable claustrophobia in an interview in the New York Times in 2011. It had been harder to find out what Arnulf Selhus was most afraid of, but rumours circulated about him just like everyone else.
In the end he had been certain.
They would sit down when it was all over, according to the manuscript, around the circular kitchen table. No one would have the superiority that sitting at the top of the table would confer. Not even himself. They should all be equals when they met. All four should have suffered the same loss, felt the same pain.
The manuscript was finished and everything should proceed as he had decided.
The last episode was a chamber play.
He couldn’t find the end. The pages had all got mixed up. They had slid out, he tried to push the pages together with his palms, but they were jumbled up. Became crumpled. Furious, he snatched at the papers, put them on the kitchen table, one and two and three at a time, in a mishmash strewn on the tabletop, and it was impossible to locate the final pages.
The perfect conclusion.
The manuscript was entitled Karma, and it was all about balance.
About equilibrium in the universe. About justice, about no one getting more than they deserved, neither of happiness nor torture. They should discuss things. All four of them; he had spent an entire week on the dialogue in the concluding section of the manuscript. It dealt with what they had done, insisting that no one could get away scot-free. With the interaction between actions and consequences, a logical argument of the natural world that was impossible to escape. He had marked the kitchen table with the points of the compass.
E, W, S and N: he had inscribed them with painstaking accuracy where the compass had shown where the letters should appear.
Karma.
Action. Deeds. Implementation. But primarily the motive behind the choices you made in life. The consequences that flowed from them, the response the circumstances gave to an individual’s behaviour.
His motives were noble. He wanted to bring balance. For forty years he had meekly accepted his fate. He had been robbed of his life when only seven years old, and nevertheless continued to exist without complaining. No protest. With head bowed, he had always done as he should. His duty. He was skilled at his job, but never said much. His life fell silent when everything went wrong, and remained silent as he grew up. He sought solitude wherever it could be found. He went fishing. Hunting. Always alone. He had borne his sorrow, accepted his loss and played as well as he could the cards life had dealt him.
His reward had come late, but it had been worthwhile.
He was so little when it had all happened. Everything became chaos and darkness, and all of a sudden he was moved away. He had no idea who they were, the three boys he had seen in the woods. The three nameless skiers who had sealed his family’s fate one day after Christmas in 1977 had long ago been reduced to faceless, vague contours. The only thing he remembered after all those years was a ski helmet, until a photograph in a newspaper, almost exactly forty years later, gave him the answer to the question he had never quite dared to ask.
Fate decreed it. The black Madshus skis in the Ski Museum, with the King and Jan Morell laughing in front of the display case, was his reward for all those silent years.
A memory had been unleashed.
It was pure karma.
A fortnight of thorough searching later, he had found the names of the other boys, in a photograph in the National Library database, where there were complete annual volumes from the time when Dagsavisen had been called Arbeiderbladet. Jan Morell was even wearing the ski helmet and looked unmistakable.
The boys looked happy in the picture.
One of them was laughing. The others were smiling. They were grinning at the photographer after completing the Grenaderløpet ski race from Hakadal to Asker.
The man with the shock of silver hair sat down on one of the chairs.
N was written on the table in front of him.
North, where according to the manuscript he was supposed to sit, but the script was now a mess, and he couldn’t find the ending.
It had all been karma.
Nearly everything. It had been so easy. So unexpectedly easy. Even the bank account numbers that he hadn’t quite known how to get hold of, had beckoned to him like the working girls in Bankplassen when the Finance Director’s door had been left open. It had taken him less than a minute to find the list of accounts for the entire Selhus family; it had been in the top, lockable drawer of the desk. Which had been left unlocked.
The man was only going to pay some accounts, after all.
Karma.
He alre
ady had Haakon Holm-Vegge’s bank details, from the repayment of a casual loan during a trip eighteen months ago. If the auditor or anyone employed in the finance department, contrary to expectation, didn’t uncover what Arnulf had apparently done, then the punctilious, argumentative skier with a bachelor’s degree in economics would very likely sound the alarm.
If even he overlooked Arnulf’s transgressions, then the man with the grey hair would rouse the sleeping dog himself. He would alert Jan Morell.
Anonymously, of course.
Creating the fake invoices had been a piece of cake.
Everything was fate, everything was karma, and he had bought two tubes of Trofodermin and brought them back from Italy when he had learned, following the near-catastrophe with Hedda Bruun, what the ointment contained. He had only just made a start on the manuscript then, but he had realized that he would find a use for the cream. Karma.
Three treatments with the ointment on Hege Morell’s thigh had turned out to be sufficient.
Karma.
He had placed the second tube at the bottom of Hege’s sponge bag prior to the World Championship weekend in Lillehammer. He had hoped for a random search as soon as the result of the urine sample was made known.
Unnecessary, as things had turned out. And stupid. But no harm done.
Selma Falck was a far greater disappointment. She was the only real challenge fate had sent his way in his work of regaining balance. Following a ski trip on Norefjell the day Hege was exposed for all the world to see, he had gone up to Vettakollen to witness Jan Morell’s pain. To savour the anguish in the timber villa. He had waited until the journalists got fed up and packed up. Endorphins were pumping through his body as he witnessed the despair in the living room behind the vast panorama window. He had challenged fate by walking all the way across the lawn, but none of the people inside had spotted him.
Selma Falck should not have been there.
She was clever and dangerous.
He had seen her leave, together with Hege, who had been alarmed by the footprints. The ski boots were uncomfortable to drive with, but someone had stolen his trainers while he was out on the slopes.
Selma Falck had taken photos, he saw from his hiding place at the foot of the garden. He had sought refuge there when the two women got up from the settees. She had followed his footprints, but not all the way down to where he stood in the shadows holding his breath.
Karma.
Since then he had collated a folder of material on her. Considered including her in the manuscript. Hesitated, and decided against it. He had seen her house. Seen her son, he assumed, through the window on the upper floor, and an old woman in the kitchen, cooking pancakes for supper.
He had gone there on his roller skis. In December he went for lengthy runs every other day and could just as easily make use of the excursion. He had visited her house to get a look at her, but she wasn’t there. However, he knew where she lived and had almost written her into his manuscript.
His back had never given him any problems, but in order to look after the prisoner in the basement he had taken some sick leave.
‘Not this,’ he moaned, slapping his hand on all the paper in front of him. ‘Not this. Not this.’
Everything was off balance, because the prisoner had died. No one was meant to die.
With Haakon’s surprising accident, fate had taken a staggering turn, but the man with the silver hair had no idea what had occurred. Nor did it concern him.
Karma, he thought, and grew livid at the thought of Haakon’s mother.
Vanja Vegge.
‘Cunt,’ he shrieked in a falsetto.
She had let him go. Turned her back on him when he needed her most. Rejected him, the way he was always overlooked and rejected by women.
By women he came close to, quietly and always in vain.
By his mother, who had let him move away with his father, far away from everything that was familiar and true.
By Vanja Vegge, when he had finally found someone to talk to. Someone who understood him and listened instead of turning away.
‘First-class cunt,’ he said loudly and harshly in order to bite off a rage so red it made him dizzy.
Leaving behind the chaos of paper, he went down into the basement and opened his gun cabinet. He took out his big game rifle and crossed to the ammunition chest. Grabbed what he needed.
For a minute or two he stood examining the pictures. A large cross was drawn above Morten Karlshaug’s face. That morning, he had hung up a picture of Vanja Vegge beside the three men.
He ran his finger between the photographs. Back and forth. In the end he slammed it down on Arnulf Selhus’s forehead.
‘You first,’ he said. ‘Then the others.’
THE FUNERAL
Ashabby, sparse crowd of people stood outside the little chapel at Østre Gravlund graveyard. It had stopped raining. Fortunately the temperature had still remained on the right side of zero degrees Celsius. All the same, a bitter wind accelerated through Groruddalen, making the mourners at the funeral turn their backs to the north.
It was all over, and two members of the press had managed, despite all the secrecy and bringing forward the appointed time, to find out about the diversionary tactics. The photographers, however, kept a respectful distance from the bleak, box-like building.
Vanja Vegge and Kristina Holm were clutching their order of service leaflets as the coffin containing Haakon’s remains was carried out to a waiting hearse. Psalms had been sung and speeches delivered. Haakon was described as a fantastic partner and father, a considerate son and a brilliant skier of several years standing.
No one had mentioned anything about doping.
Selma had felt ill throughout the service, as she always did at funerals. It was as if the glass globe around her, the barrier that made it completely impossible to be entirely present in other people’s lives, grew larger and thicker on occasions such as this. Naturally, she knew the etiquette. She did everything correctly. Squeezed hands that had to be squeezed and embraced anyone who needed that sort of thing. She had been out in plenty of time and knew that she couldn’t leave until Vanja and Kristina indicated that they wanted to go home. All the same, it was as if all her muscles were urging her to leg it. Death had an insistent proximity, she knew; it created a forced sense of fellowship, an awkward intimacy that only made her feel a strong compulsion to escape as quickly as possible. Besides, funerals were not the place to be when you didn’t even have the ability to cry.
The funeral reception had been cancelled, thank God.
Haakon’s mothers looked so diminished. Even Vanja who, in addition to being too heavy, was also tall and stately, had withered away entirely in her unfamiliar, dark, monochrome clothes. First the shock of their son’s death, then the viewing on Monday and the memorial ceremony in Maridalen the following day: it had all become too much for them both.
Although their sorrow would never end, their mourning had by now worn them out completely, Selma thought.
Elise stood like a pillar of salt beside the hearse. Her father had his arm around her. Little William was held in his grandmother’s arms and was laughing. He had been given a new fire engine for the occasion, fortunately with no sirens. Selma couldn’t understand why they had brought him with them. He was far too young to be able to remember anything of the service, and it couldn’t be good for him to see his mother in such a state of collapse as she had been inside the chapel.
At last the coffin was safely inside the hearse. Those nearest went across and laid a final hand on the coffin lid. Selma withdrew as far as possible, back into the throng that could barely number more than forty or fifty people. Not a soul from the Cross-Country Skiing Federation, as Vanja had refused to invite them. Selma’s hope was that the close relatives had by now had their fill of hugs, and that she could just shuffle off to her Amazon without having to say her goodbyes. She had parked on the other side of the E6 and Strømsveien, and it was quite a distance to wa
lk to the closest footbridge.
She very nearly succeeded. The hearse rolled slowly away en route to the crematorium at Alfaset. Elise’s father, sister and two brothers escorted Vanja, Kristina and Elise to the relatives’ car park beside the chapel. Selma turned up the collar of her coat and pretended to accompany a group of elderly women who seemed to be walking in the same direction as her.
In the corner of her eye, she noticed that Elise had broken away from the family group.
And was heading straight for Selma.
The impulse to break into a run was almost irresistible. Instead, she stopped and turned towards the brand-new widow with a sympathetic expression on her face.
‘You were wrong,’ Elise said sotto voce, as she came to a halt.
‘About what?’
‘Haakon was unfaithful. I’m not going to tell anyone else. Vanja and Kristina, Mum and Dad, they don’t have to know. But you were wrong, you see.’
Elise was also bereft of make-up today. Her pallor was almost transparent. She was the only one in the entire mourning procession who was dressed in light-coloured clothes – a beige coat, pale brown trousers and a mohair scarf in the same shade as her coat.
It all matched perfectly.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Elise.’
‘Sure. Do you want to know who it is?’
Certainly not, Selma wanted to yell, but instead she put her hand on Elise’s arm.
‘This is neither the time nor the place,’ she said gently. ‘If you like, I can call in on you some day next week. Then we can have a chat, just you and me. It’s probably all a misunderstanding, and …’
‘Sophie Selhus,’ Elise said, slightly too loudly.
A married couple Selma recognized as Vanja and Kristina’s neighbours across the hall, walked past arm in arm. They stopped and stared for a second, before the man dragged his wife onwards.
‘The ballet dancer,’ Elise added.
Quite unnecessarily, as Selma was well aware who Sophie Selhus was. Her brain had taken an unexpected, sudden nap.
‘What did you say?’ was all she could utter.
‘Sophie Selhus. Haakon has always thought her so beautiful.’