Frei nodded, and I went on: ‘We collect the necessary information about what took place first of all, in order to devise a credible sequence of events, a scenario. Only then is it correct from a tactical point of view to conduct an interview with the suspect, so that we know enough to ensure the information that emerges can be controlled and possibly refuted in the process.’
‘Who reported him?’
‘Did I say that he’d been reported?’ I pulled a smile and shook my head.
‘So you have already spoken to the person in question who’ – hesitating, she gave a lopsided smile before she continued – ‘might possibly have reported the officer?’
‘Of course. It’s crucial to clarify as early as possible whether this is a formal complaint, in other words an internal disciplinary matter for the police station, or whether a crime has been committed. Most cases we receive have been wrongly directed to Internal Affairs and more often than not concern simple formal complaints or disciplinary matters where no crime has taken place. We usually sift these out fairly quickly without any interview required.’
‘But this case doesn’t fall into that category?’
‘No. The person I’m going to interview tomorrow is also involved in another case we looked into earlier but was dropped, so it’s possible that the indictment will be altered eventually. We’ll see.’
We walked on towards the city centre through a narrow street where a number of small birds had gathered in the trees on either side.
‘Altered to what, then?’
‘You know I can’t answer that,’ I said, smiling to myself. The stroll across this peninsula, populated by timber and stone houses, to the accompaniment of bird chatter and the rustle of autumn leaves, was doing me the world of good. I felt like a different person, not Thorkild Aske with all his defects, rules, facts and places he had to be, people he had to meet and characterise according to standard criteria, but merely this nameless individual who was moved by the sound of footfalls on the tarmac, the scent of autumn and the woman by his side.
‘Is he in trouble?’
All of a sudden, Frei stopped again and looked at me, this time for longer than before.
‘What do you mean?’ We were standing in the shade of a massive tree, its trunk stained with green moss.
‘Nothing.’ Frei blinked rapidly before taking my arm and pulling me onward.
I came to a halt and held her back. ‘What is it? Do you know this officer?’
Frei was reluctant to look at me. ‘No, it’s nothing,’ she answered quickly. This time her eyes merely slid swiftly past mine. She leant lightly against me with her hands between us, and her face turned to the ground, so that her hair brushed up against my chin. ‘Relax. I’m just curious, that’s all.’
My head drifted slowly forward. I noticed that I was breathing through my nose, soundlessly and mechanically, as if struggling to remain calm and not move a muscle for fear that the tiniest motion would shatter the image in the water.
Without warning, Frei looked up at me, and before I had time to think I leaned all the way forward. My lips only just touched her top lip and the tip of her nose before she abruptly drew back. She retreated to the stone wall that stretched out on this side of the street. ‘What are you doing?’ Her eyes were wide open and she used her hands to hug her body as though in self-protection.
‘I … I’m sorry.’ I took a step back, as if to give even more space to the distance between us that had suddenly opened out. ‘My God, I thought, I—’
‘No,’ Frei gasped, shaking her head in desperation. ‘We’re not … You and I can never …’
Without completing the sentence, she simply turned on her heel. She broke into a run along the street and didn’t look back.
I was left standing there, watching her leave, until she was gone. ‘You’re lying,’ I whispered through gritted teeth. ‘Time after time.’
In the end I turned tail and walked back the same way we had come, before heading from Storhaugveien in the direction of the bus station. My face was burning, a blaze of anger and pain that wove its way through me from the inside out, as I hurried off down the city streets towards my hotel.
I knew that I had gone too far. This was not part of the game. I was on the verge of losing control of the situation.
MONDAY
CHAPTER 28
I don’t reach Tromsø until one o’clock. The ferry from Olderdalen to Lyngseidet had been cancelled, and I had to drive round. My entire body is aching after the long drive on rugged, bumpy roads.
The tide is all the way up to the edge of the quay, and as I turn in to Grønnegata, heading to the city centre, I see that the road is flooded. On both sides, workers from the Highway Authority watch as excavators pile snow and slush on waiting lorries.
A chill mix of snow and rain pummels my face and hair as I open the car door. Inside Police Headquarters I cross to the reception counter and announce my arrival. A stout woman in her mid-twenties asks me to wait, and I take a seat on an uncomfortable bench between two flower troughs filled with plastic plants and clay pebbles.
Five or six minutes later, a man emerges from a door and asks if I am Thorkild Aske. I nod and stand up when he beckons me. He disappears through the door long before I reach him and I find him waiting outside another half-open door at the end of a long, narrow corridor with pictures of former police chiefs on the walls.
‘In here,’ says the police officer, with a mug in one hand and a document folder tucked underneath his arm. He is holding the door open. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’
The room is bare, with fibreglass wallpaper on the walls and linoleum on the floor. All it contains is a rectangular table with two chairs on one side and a hard, uncomfortable chair on the other. I could have told them that nowadays we were supposed to sit as equals during these sessions, using similar chairs with a small table in front of them, rather than between us. At least the prevailing witness psychology insists that is the optimum stimulus for communication.
‘OK, then.’ The officer is tall and athletic, with bright blue eyes and a narrow mouth. ‘Sit down.’ He points at the hard, uncomfortable chair.
‘Thanks.’ I stop just in front of the table. ‘Tell me, though, can’t I take one of those other chairs? This one looks terribly uncomfortable.’
‘That chair is perfectly OK, it—’ he starts to say.
‘Brilliant! Thanks very much,’ I say breezily, exchanging chairs and making space on my side of the table. ‘So, what are we to talk about today?’
‘Just a moment,’ he mumbles, keeping a lookout along the corridor. No one seems to be coming to his rescue, and in the end he closes the door before taking a seat on the remaining cushioned chair.
‘Well, then,’ he begins, opening his folder. ‘We can make a start by filling this out,’ he says. ‘While we wait.’
‘Terrific.’ At once I notice how my unwillingness to participate in these surroundings, now that I am no longer in the driving seat, tugs and tears at me under my skin. That was also how it had felt in the interviews following what happened to Frei. Ulf would have remarked that my own misplaced professional pride is the driving force behind this infantile compulsion to prolong and sabotage situations such as this. As for me, I simply can’t come up with another way of tackling it.
‘We’ll start with your personal details,’ the officer continues.
‘Don’t you have computers up here?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Excellent: Thorkild Aske, date of birth January sixth, 1971.’
‘Where?’
‘In Skuflavik, Iceland.’
‘Norwegian citizenship?’
‘Yes. The certificate is lying about somewhere if you require it.’
The officer waves his hand without glancing up from the paper. ‘Unmarried?’
‘Divorced.’
‘Employment?’
‘Job-seeker. Are you hiring, by the way?’
‘I understand y
ou previously worked for Police Internal Affairs in Bergen, where you were a lead interrogator?’
‘Correct. But not anymore.’
‘No, I know that.’
‘Of course you do.’
After a moment’s hesitation, the man goes on without meeting my eye. ‘You were previously found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and served a prison sentence. Tell me about—’
‘Can’t we just say that I know that you know, and then we can move on to whatever this is all about?’
Finally the man looks up at me: ‘What can you tell me about the events that took place at …’ He leafs through some papers in the folder: ‘Blekholm Lighthouse.’ He jots this down on the paper and then adds: ‘From Saturday the twenty-fourth of October up to and including Sunday morning the twenty-fifth?’
‘So you haven’t found them yet?’
‘No,’ he answers curtly, again without a glance in my direction. ‘Tell me, when exactly did you arrive at the lighthouse and when did you leave?’
‘I was there from six a.m. on Saturday until five a.m. on Sunday. What about the boat? Have you located it?’
Another man enters the room. He is older, even older than me, with silver hair, and is slim with a straight, pointed, aquiline nose of aristocratic quality and appearance. This man stops for a moment or two in front of the hard, uncomfortable wooden chair before sitting down when neither of us shows any sign of willingness to change.
‘I am Superintendent Martin Sverdrup.’ He proffers his hand. He is from the north of Norway but uses the hybrid dialect that you sometimes hear politicians and other people from these parts switch to when they are on TV or in civilised company.
His handshake is firm and reassuring. ‘Thorkild Aske,’ I reply before slouching in my chair again.
Martin Sverdrup rubs his hands and shakes his shoulders as if we are simply three good friends gathered around the fireplace to discuss the weather and fishing. So it is now time to build a relationship through trivial small talk. A method intended to make the eventual transition to harder questions proceed more smoothly. In other words, they also teach the KREATIV technique to police officers in northern Norway.
‘Coffee?’ Martin Sverdrup opens with a jovial, friendly nod towards the door.
‘Who, did you say?’ I decide I’m not going to take the bait today.
‘Coffee, tea … would you like anything?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Soft drink? Or water?’
‘OK, water.’
‘We don’t have any fancy bottled water, but the tap water here tastes very good.’ Martin Sverdrup steals a glance at his colleague with the pen in his hand and a blank expression on his face before returning his attention to me. ‘That will be acceptable, I expect?’
‘No, forget it,’ I say. ‘I’d prefer a cup of camomile tea.’ I look across at the policeman who is still just sitting there, pen in hand and staring straight ahead. ‘Or juice. Do you have any orange juice?’
‘Er, I don’t know if …’ Martin Sverdrup looks quizzically at his colleague. ‘Steinar? Do we?’
‘Do we what?’ The man lets the pen fall on the table as if he has just been roused from a deep daydream.
‘Juice. Do you know if we have any?’
‘Forget it,’ I interject. ‘Coffee, then. Black.’
‘Great. Excellent.’ Martin Sverdrup focuses on his officer again: ‘Would you run and fetch some, then?’
Steinar churlishly pushes the folder and sheet of paper he was in the process of filling out across to his boss, adding the fountain pen as an afterthought, before getting to his feet and disappearing from the room.
‘OK, Aske.’ Martin Sverdrup skims the fields already completed. ‘Back to you,’ he says. ‘You know why you are here?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Yes, excellent.’
‘Terrific. Well, let me get straight to the point.’
‘Yes, let’s do that.’
‘First of all, fill me in on the background to your arrival here and your reasons for being out at that lighthouse.’
‘The parents of the boy who vanished from the lighthouse at Blekholm some time last weekend paid me to come up here and search for him. His mother bought the lighthouse for her son Rasmus last summer, and he was busy renovating it with the idea of turning it into some kind of activity hotel. When I got there, I contacted the local police chief and met him and his sergeant at the police station. Later, they drove me to Skjellvik, and from there I arranged a lift over to the lighthouse the following morning.’
‘And when did you next speak to Bjørkang or his sergeant, Arnt Eriksen?’
‘That same evening when I found a woman in the sea.’
‘A woman, yes. What can you tell us about her?’
‘Young, early twenties, about five foot two, dark mid-length hair. Wearing a nightdress and T-shirt.’
‘Facial features?’
‘None.’
‘None?’
‘Her face was gone, and so was one of her lower arms. She appeared to have been in the sea for some time. The body was in the early stages of hydrolysis and had already acquired the soap-like appearance that—’
‘And then she disappeared?’
‘Yes.’
‘All of a sudden?’
‘Someone came up out of the water and took her away.’
‘Did you see what that person looked like?’
‘He was wearing a diving suit.’
‘Did you see or hear a boat?’
‘No.’
‘So he came directly up out of the water?’
‘Straight up. Like a rocket.’ My hand describes a soaring action above the table that separates us. ‘Swish, swish.’
The corners of the superintendent’s mouth drop a notch or two as he struggles to ignore the hand movement and swishing sounds. ‘Do you have any idea who it was or what happened to the corpse?’
‘I don’t like to speculate.’
Martin Sverdrup turns to a different page. ‘What did you do then?’
‘I phoned Bjørkang as soon as I had pulled her ashore and asked them to come and pick us up from the lighthouse.’
‘What time was that?’
I take out my mobile phone and locate the call. ‘Half five in the afternoon, and I spoke to the sergeant a few minutes later.’
‘And when was the next time you saw or spoke to either of them?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Sure?’
‘As shooting.’
‘Are you taking any kind of medication at present?’
‘Loads.’
‘OK.’ Sverdrup uses a finger to scratch between the knuckles on his other hand. ‘Sorry about that. Let’s both take a breather before we continue. What do you say?’
‘Fine,’ I answer, my shoulders slumping. ‘Have you found them?’
Martin Sverdrup shakes his head slowly.
‘Nothing?’
He shakes his head again. This time even more slowly. ‘We’re searching the area where we think the ship was wrecked. It will be undertaken as a systematic search for a wreck using an echo sounder, and we calculate that the chances of finding them are pretty good. Sooner or later.’
‘Preferably sooner, rather than later,’ I interject.
‘Do you have any idea why they would have brought diving equipment with them on the trip?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Diving equipment. Diving equipment that can’t be accounted for has been removed from the boathouse in the marina. We believe they took it with them in the boat.’
Why on earth would Arnt or Bjørkang put on a diving suit and head out to the lighthouse just to pick up the body and leave me sitting there like a fool? And if it was one of them I saw, where are they now? It strikes me that if this is the scenario the police are now working on, that they did in fact come to the lighthouse while I was there, and subsequently disappeared, then the outcome
might go hard if they don’t turn up again soon. Extremely hard.
‘Who goes diving in a storm?’ I finally ask.
‘Well, according to you that was exactly what someone did – the person who stole this woman’s body you claim to have found.’
‘Maybe I only dreamt it, then,’ I respond crossly.
‘Is that a possibility?’ Sverdrup asks with some misgiving.
‘No.’
‘Sure?’
‘What am I doing here, Martin?’ I ask in annoyance, opening out my arms. ‘What if you tell me instead what my status is in this case?’
‘Witness,’ the superintendent says hastily.
‘For the meantime,’ a voice suddenly makes itself heard from the doorway, and a male figure slips into the room, his eyes directed at me. Stalking across the room, he takes hold of the vacant chair, pulls it away from the table and sits astride it directly opposite me. My former boss in Internal Affairs gives a brief nod as he scrutinises me from head to toe. ‘Tell me, Martin,’ Gunnar Ore continues, his torso inclined towards the chair back with his arms dangling over the top. ‘How do you actually interrogate a lead interrogator? Do you have any idea?’
CHAPTER 29
‘How’s it going, Gunnar?’ I ask.
‘Marvellous,’ Gunnar Ore answers. His powerful, hairy forearms seem even more muscular and tanned since the last time we saw each other, back when he was still my boss in Internal Affairs. ‘What about you?’
‘Like a square peg in a round hole.’
‘Oh, as good as that?’
‘Yes, to tell the truth.’
We remain seated, mutely sizing each other up.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask in the end. ‘Are you still in Internal Affairs?’
‘No, back in Delta.’
‘The Emergency Squad?’
‘Correct.’ Gunnar Ore nods without taking his eyes off me for a single second.
‘Minding the store, eh?’
His narrow lips resemble a straight line scored across his suntanned face. Gunnar is fifty-three, but nevertheless every single muscle in his body tenses when he moves: even his facial muscles contract and relax easily and elegantly beneath his skin when he clenches his teeth to make his lips even narrower. When he took up his post as the new head of the Western Section of Internal Affairs, from his previous job in the Emergency Squad, rumours were already flying around the place that he had taken part in the action at Torp two decades earlier, and that he was, to quote: a sharp shooter. Gunnar Ore counts on respect wherever he goes, and people found it natural to accord him that, whether they already knew him or not. It was simply something that coursed through his blood, and that you could not escape.
I Will Miss You Tomorrow Page 12