I jumped out of bed, snatched a dressing gown, staggered into the hall, opened the door a fraction and peered out.
In the old days they used to send Ellingsen and Bøe. But Bøe had retired and the budget was slashed, so now they sent Elllingsen on his own.
He showed me his ID, to be funny, eyed my bare legs dubiously and said: ‘Your presence is required at the station, Veum.’
‘Who by?’
‘Duty officer, Kripo.’
‘But I’ve told them—’
‘They want you to make another statement.’
‘That’s what you get for informing the police, Elling. Next time I’ll just leave the body.’ I stepped aside. ‘You’d better come in while I throw on some clothes. If I have permission.’
He waited in the hall while I dressed. I splashed some water on my hair, brushed it, ran my hands over the stubble on my face, looked out of the window to check the weather, went back to the hall and said: ‘What day is it today, actually?’
He stared at me. ‘It’s Sunday. And it’s five o’clock in the afternoon. Welcome back to civilisation, Veum. Welcome back to Planet Earth.’
‘I could’ve wished for a better reception committee than you, Elling. Are we off?’
‘We’re off.’
Halfway down the stairs I asked: ‘And who’s the duty officer this weekend?’
‘There’s a Muus loose aboot the hoose,’ he grinned.
I sighed with a heavy heart. ‘Happy Christmas, Elling. Happy Christmas.’
17
Inspector Dankert Muus smiled like an unpopular son-in-law at his mother-in-law’s funeral. His office had the stale, heavy stench of cremated cigarettes and a recent corpse was still hanging from between his thin lips.
He made a strikingly sallow impression. His complexion was a lighter shade of the ash on the dead cigarette, and he looked as if he had been trying to sell Christmas trees in July.
I sat down on the chair in front of his desk and glanced at Ellingsen, who was standing by the door as though afraid I might make a run for it.
Muus shook his head. ‘I cannot fathom why they would’ve let you go. How much evidence have you destroyed? How many alibis have you come up with?’
‘If so, that would’ve been while I was asleep.’
‘You still claim you only found him?’
‘What else would I claim?’
‘And this man you say you found…’
‘Johnny Solheim.’
‘Correct. Did you happen to know him?’
I nodded. ‘We grew up in the same district. But I hadn’t seen him for fifteen to twenty years … until yesterday.’
‘Yesterday? When exactly?’
‘By which I mean … the day before yesterday. Another pal of mine and I were out … on a pub crawl. We stopped off at a place where Johnny Solheim was performing, and we went to see him in the interval.’
‘To see him?’
‘Yes, we said hi.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, for old times’ sake. Nothing special.’
‘Nothing special?’
‘No.’
‘And this was on Friday? Is that right?’
I nodded.
‘And thirty-six hours later he was … dead.’ Muus glanced up at Ellingsen and said: ‘Nothing special.’ Then he turned his attention to me again. ‘And yesterday? Saturday?’
‘On Saturday … I visited him again.’
‘You don’t say. To chat about old times?’
I looked past him without answering.
He leaned forward. ‘Well? What about, then?’ He leaned back, took the case file and held it in his hand. ‘When we talked to his wife – widow I suppose she is now – we asked her a number of routine questions.’
‘When did she get home? Was she there when you…?’
His face was like granite, his eyes like icicles. ‘One of the questions we asked her was this: Did anything unusual happen yesterday?’
‘Oh, yes? And?’
He opened the file and took out a business card. I recognised it at once. It was mine. ‘“Yes,” the lady said. “Yesterday I had a visitor who asked after Johnny because he wanted to talk to him. A man I’d never seen before,” the lady said. “But he gave me this card…”’
He took a long, leisurely pause. ‘Well, Veum. What was it you wanted to talk to Solheim about?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Perhaps you were talking to him at about two last night?’
‘No, I didn’t talk to him last night. I met him immediately after I’d spoken to his wife, where she’d told me he’d probably be – in the video shop he owns in Kringsjåveien. The lady who works on the counter can confirm this. Someone called Stig Madsen can as well. I told all this to your officers at the crime scene, Muus. There’s no reason to play smart, so…’ I splayed my hands.
‘Right. And it was a coincidence that you happened to be in exactly the same part of the street as him after not having seen each other for fifteen to twenty years? They should write No Special Reason on your gravestone, Veum.’
‘I thought you’d reserved that epitaph,’ I said.
‘So what did you talk about?’ he barked.
I didn’t answer.
‘You’re refusing to answer?’ He was beginning to flush in his own personal way, a hue that was redolent of rotten plum. ‘In which case, I will have the exquisite pleasure of inviting you to spend a night in our most elegant suite for remand prisoners. Eight square metres and a fresh-air vent in the cellar. Would sir require a wake-up call?’
I said sourly: ‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to sleep. Is there any chance I can speak to a solicitor?’
He unleashed one of his special smiles. It was rigid. ‘Of course, Veum. Tomorrow. Tomorrow there’ll be the hearing and lawyers and all the fun of the fair. Press statement and morning conferences, fingerprints and witness interviews. Nothing will be as before, Veum. Nothing.’
‘Thank you. And who’s taking me down?’
‘Ellingsen will. Ellingsen, cuff him this time. That makes a better impression.’
‘We’re not taking the lift, are we? I’ve heard about what you do to suspects in there,’ I said.
Muus smiled. ‘Yes, our pleasure. Take him in the lift, Ellingsen. Up and down a few times. That softens them up. Most of them confess after that.’
‘I meant that as a joke,’ I said.
‘Me, too,’ said Dankert Muus.
18
The cell wasn’t as luxurious as he had promised. Eight paces in one direction, four in the other covered the whole area. My marathon training would be severely disrupted if I stayed here for longer than a day.
High up on one wall a narrow window with frosted, wired glass would have let in light if it had been earlier in the day. A plank bed was attached to one wall, and at the back of the cell there was a drain in the floor which I could have crawled into and hidden in if I had been the size of a toy mouse. Alternatively, I could use it for other pleasurable activities.
A few hotel suites down, a croaky voice was singing a very personal version of ‘Silent Night’. From the other side came a low, hurried mumble, like less confident souls bidding at a herring auction. Later in the evening it would be livelier, when they brought in the more unruly weekend revellers and flushed out the dregs from Sunday’s glass of cheer.
I lay back on the plank with my hands behind my head and my eyes shut.
It was only now that Johnny’s death was hitting home. The shock was delayed. As with all sudden deaths it took you time to absorb what had happened, that someone had passed the point of no return.
I could see him there, lying on his back on the cellar steps, like a drunk who had lost his bearings. I saw his eyes when he caught sight of me, purged of derision and full of desperation. I saw his mouth open to say something, the blood issuing forth, the big bubbles of air in it and the gaze that was no longer there, the whites of his eyes. I saw the deserted street, the gr
ey shreds of sleet falling from the heavy sky, a lupine wind that hunted in packs down the street, and I heard … the sound of running footsteps. Had I left the Hot Spot thirty seconds earlier I might have seen everything, the person fleeing – the person Johnny had met. The person who had killed him.
Johnny Solheim. I hadn’t had any contact with him for fifteen to twenty years. In the last few days I had met him twice. And now he was dead.
I didn’t know him now. The time I’d known him was long gone, but I had a feeling I was going to get to know him again. I felt I was being pulled backwards in time, through a dark tunnel, only to be disgorged onto the street at some point more than thirty years ago.
Once again we were leaving school, Pelle and I, Paul and Jan Petter. Past the Catering College, where the boxer dog, Lasse, as old as Methuselah, always lay, keeping guard over the steps to the street. We turned down Nordnesveien and had a clear view of the Swiss-chalet-style Troyebygget, the customs office, Skoltegrunn quay and the Norwegian America liners. On the right-hand side were the first new-builds, which were known as the Red Cross houses because they were intended to be replacement housing for those who had lost their homes during the war; however, it was mostly people from other districts who had moved in. On the left, Haugeveien showed us its rear: high-walled, cramped backyards where sheets hung to dry like white flags hoisted in a plea for safe passage. In the middle of the street was the sailmaker’s house with its grey end-wall, and behind it everything was as it had always been. It was a densely populated district with joined wooden houses, alleys full of nooks and crannies, criss-crossing paths and openings, surprise stairways and the occasional fenced-in courtyard. Down there, in a green house, was where I lived. And in a grey house towards Fritznersmauet was where Johnny Solheim lived.
He had been a year older than us, and many years stronger, and we had always had great respect for him, not least because the brutality he had experienced at home had made him an unpredictable beast on the street. He could blow in like a tornado down the alley, kicking and lashing out in all directions, punching and swearing like a trooper.
After the 17th May celebrations, when his father had hurled their furniture out of the window while Johnny and his mother stood in Nordnesveien waiting for a taxi and Johnny shook his fist at his father muttering ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you, I will,’ his father took the hint, packed his bags and left for good. We never saw him again. But Johnny enjoyed greater respect than ever.
From then on he became the man in the house, and there was something grown-up about him, which set him even further apart from us. He reappeared in our lives in the late fifties as a singer and The Harpers’ front man, a local mixture of Elvis and Ricky Nelson, with footwork he had learned from the stalls in the Forum and Logen cinemas, an acceptable vibrato and a wicked glint in his eye the devil would have envied. And of course it was him who went off with Anita, our street’s most voluptuous trophy.
Now the threat he had once directed at his father had turned on him, Anita was history and he would need the footwork and the glint in other places than here on earth. He was recording his first LP in a studio unknown to us, in the stable of the greatest manager of them all.
Down here, he had signed off on two LPs: The Harpers’ somewhat belated Bergen Beat in 1964, towards the end of their heyday, and a solo LP in 1967, forgotten by everyone except his worst enemies. Nonetheless he had achieved more than I had. He had definitely left his mark on his times, and as long as there are Bergensians alive who remember that period, they will recall Johnny Solheim, most of them.
I opened my eyes and stared up at the grey ceiling above me.
And where had I left my mark, other than on the inside of school books that had long been burned and for a few moments in the lives of people who would rather forget?
I let myself drift back to the time when girls came back into our lives, after it had been just us boys for a few years.
When I thought back to the girls their faces tended to merge into one another, as quickly as, in those days, you were tossed from one crush to the next – and then back to the first. There were dark blondes with glasses in the autumn, light blondes with a tan in the summer, curly redheads skiing the Vidden trail in the winter – and an assortment of girls in the spring.
But the biggest romances came in autumn. Then you needed the heat from new solar systems. Then the streets were dark and wet and waiting for you to walk hand in hand around the big Lungegård lake, to kiss all the way round, until you reached the brightly lit streets by Nygård bridge and through the Florida district, where it was a little harder to kiss in the Norway of the late fifties.
There was Sylvelin, who came from another part of Bergen and only lived for a year or two in our street, a blazing sun in her hair, a spring breeze in her eyes, a broad, healthy face, a spontaneous beam and already then a hint of laughter lines. She walked through our hearts in flat shoes and we never touched her.
There was robust Reidun, auburn hair and freckles strewn across a lively face. Lean and sinewy, she was better at football than most of us and she saved her kisses for footballers with a moped from Fridalen and Landås.
There was Lisbeth, who made her entrance to the sound of drunken shrieks and the clink of bottles, and made her sexual debut on a building site long before the rest of us had put away our toy pistols, dark-haired and even darker-eyed, as bewitching as a wood nymph and prey to rumours.
And there were others, girls who came and went or girls who were just there, taken for granted most of the time, only to become significant at a given time in our lives. There was Anita, who accompanied us through our childhood as a busty dream until Johnny made off with her for a housewife’s existence in Paddemyren. There was Lillian, who allowed ten of us boys in a line to touch her thing – tentatively, afraid of burning our fingers – behind the huts in Nordnes park before the biggest boys took her to the park, perhaps to do other things. There was Annemette, who attracted crowds when she – long-legged and attractive, large teeth and small nose – was the lollipop lady in Haugeveien. And this was only the start.
Later, at upper secondary, we met other girls from other parts of the Bergen area. We learned to go on long cycling trips to Sandviken or up to Inndalen, we went to Paradis and Laksevåg and learned the names of new streets in the town centre and in Skansen. There were girls who were passing ships in the night and there were girls who stuck around for a while, whose names always sent a tingling sensation into your abdomen when you repeated them later. Girls who were etched in your brain, like pictures. Gro, with rain running down her face, a light-blue waterproof and a tense, white tendon on the side of her neck, under a tree somewhere in Fana, when the whole class was on a bike ride. Svanhild with straight, dark hair, who I had two long dances with on a school trip to Mjølfjell while the Everly Brothers sang ‘I’ll do my crying in the rain’. There were seasons that made your senses reel, grappling with bra straps and suspender belts, stocking elastic and tight bodices, the scents of lily and honey, freshly mown hay and ripe fruit. There were breathless rides across endless mountains of wanton desire, dreams upon dreams upon dreams, until one day, for one entrancing moment, one blessed soul offered you their goblet of wine to taste, gently, oh, so gently, with a condom purchased amid much clearing of the throat across the chemist’s counter in Jonsvollsgaten, pulled on like leggings to protect you against snowdrifts and sudden changes of temperature: a girl called Elisabeth who was short-sighted, but who had finally taken off her glasses, in her parents’ bed, in borrowed sheets…
Faces merging into faces. Only one was clearer than all of the others. Through all these years of to and fro, there was no one more present than Rebecca.
I closed my eyes.
Rebecca.
Rebecca and Johnny Solheim.
I opened them again and shook my head.
I hadn’t seen her for so many years, it was impossible for me to imagine her in his arms, unless it was another Rebecca, not the one I
had seen in the photograph Jakob had given me. A younger Rebecca. ‘My’ Rebecca. Rebecca who moved from our street in 1956 and I met again two years later when we started at upper secondary.
A few moments remain fixed in my memory. One such moment was the time in the gallery of the local parish hall when our eyes met in a tacit vow while her father was preaching to the congregation below. Another was the August day in 1958 when we arrived at the venerable, yellow school building that concealed a ramshackle gymnasium evil tongues claimed was from Ludvig Holberg’s day and a new-build that still smelt of glue and paint, after only six months’ use. She stood there in a crowd of girls, her back half turned, and I walked in a semi-circle to catch her eye. I saw that it really was her, and she came over to me and said shyly: ‘Hi, Varg.’ I said: ‘Hi.’ Then it turned out we were in the same class.
For three years we were together. We were moved around the classroom, so the diagonals between us were in constant flux. But we were there. In the same room. We listened. To the same voices. And occasionally our eyes met, over Jakob’s head or whoever was in the way, and in our faint smiles we forged thin, almost invisible, bonds that only when school was over would suddenly bring us closer, for a brief while, until they were broken for good and we went our separate ways forever.
She was still a young girl, physically gauche, who yawned openly in the first lessons, hid her giggles behind a hand when someone made a joke and became solemn if for some reason the conversation turned to religion.
She attended Christian Youth meetings every week, and a couple of times I managed to coax Jakob along to the clubhouse in Kalfarveien, though he was unaware of why. He was clearly bored while I, attentive and excited, watched her fold her hands, lower her head and pray to a God I didn’t know.
For a short period she got it into her head that she was going to save me, but pitted against such thorny questions as who Cain’s wife was, where angels came from and where Jesus was between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, she soon realised that this was futile. Unable to force myself to change, I lost a piece of her soul then and there.
Fallen Angels Page 12