Sister

by Kjell Ola Dahl

  They fell into silence again.

  Eventually he noticed that her shoulders were shaking. He leaned forward. Saw her face. It was distorted. She was crying.

  He didn’t know how to react. He was alone with a crying elderly woman. All that occurred to him was to reach out and hold her hand in his.

  After sitting like this for some long, pain-racked minutes she freed her hand and stood up. With her back to him, she rubbed her face with the back of her hand.

  ‘How do you see this?’ he said. ‘How do you interpret the police not being interested in investigating?’

  She didn’t move and didn’t answer at once. At length she went to the kitchen table and tore a sheet of paper from the roll. She wiped her eyes and screwed the paper into a ball in her fist.

  ‘She was thirty-three years old. She had all her life in front of her. The person who stole her from us, stole everything from her. But the crime which is as heinous as the murder is that he’s being allowed to go unpunished. Can you understand that? I don’t wish to hate. I don’t wish to despise anyone. But I can’t repress these feelings. As much as I want to see her murderer punished, I want the police punished, the DPP, or whatever the bastards call themselves. Morally and legally these people in authority are not one jot better than the person who took her from us.’

  He rose to his feet.

  She ignored him, left the kitchen and went into the adjacent room. She plumped into a chair and lifted a remote control.

  A TV show was starting. A well-known voice said something and canned laughter underlined that what they said was funny.

  Frølich made his way to the hall and found his own way out.

  30

  Before leaving the house, he opened the garage door and peeped in. An ancient, tired-looking Opel Astra was inside. So in this instance Shamal had been telling the truth. He lowered the door, got in his own car and drove off.

  He couldn’t let go of the conversation with Shamal and tried to visualise what might have happened.

  Guri rang Shamal and told him to leave her house at once. So she must have known the killer was going there. Then the killer drove off in her car, so he must have travelled there with her. She must have known who he was. She must also have known how dangerous he was. Nevertheless she went there with him.

  But first of all she called him – Frank Frølich – and told him to go to her house. She didn’t say anything about this being dangerous. She didn’t mention the person she was going there with and she might be afraid of.

  Why didn’t she?

  Had she thought Frank might be able to prevent something happening to her? Or was this person only a danger to Shamal and not to him?

  He squeezed the wheel, trying to remember what Guri had said on the phone. She had told him to hurry, but she hadn’t given the impression that the place was dangerous.

  What she said to Shamal, but not to him, must have been very important though. On the other hand, she must have grossly underestimated the situation, as she ended up being killed herself.

  She must have put the kettle on to serve her guest and herself. That suggested she didn’t fear the man. So she must have considered him a danger to Shamal, but not to her. So why had she been killed? What was the motive?

  The killer couldn’t have known she had put the kettle on. If he had, he would have turned off the hob before leaving. After all, he’d gone to the trouble of making her death look like suicide.

  The killer must have been somewhere else, not in the kitchen. She had come out of the kitchen, into another room, where the killer was. So she didn’t say anything to the killer about having put the kettle on.

  Then it had happened, but how?

  She didn’t have any skin under her fingernails. She couldn’t have been able to put up much resistance. She had been taken by surprise.

  He imagined a shadow with a rope in his hands. Tightening the rope and forcing her body to the floor.

  Afterwards he must have carried her to the outbuilding and under the barn ramp. And staged a suicide.

  And the police wanted to let all this evil go unpunished.

  He had worked himself into a fury. Had to pull in. Found a bus lay-by. Sat looking vacantly into the distance with his hands on the wheel.

  It must be possible to do something.

  He took his phone. Searched for the number and called Nicolai Smith Falck. The journalist picked up at once.

  ‘This is Frølich. I’ve got a tip-off.’

  ‘OK.’

  The journalist almost sang the little word. He hadn’t heard the guy so elated since the accident in Bygdøy.

  ‘It’s about Guri Sekkelsten. The case was held to be a suicide and dropped. You asked me what I thought about the police’s conclusion. So I reckoned I’d tell you what I saw when I arrived at the crime scene.’

  ‘OK.’

  Slightly more measured tone this time.

  ‘I met her car coming in the opposite direction as I approached the house. Someone was leaving the crime scene in her car.’

  He paused to give Falck time to make notes. But he couldn’t hear the usual sounds of a keyboard. He must be writing with a pen.

  ‘Is that all?’ Falck asked.

  ‘She’d put a kettle on the hob. I took it off a few minutes before I found the body. These are two facts the police chose to ignore when they drew their conclusion that she killed herself.’

  ‘Any more?’

  ‘She’d made arrangements with people. Ones she hadn’t called off before she died.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That should be more than enough. Someone about to commit suicide doesn’t make arrangements with people for after her death.’

  ‘Who had she made arrangements with?’

  ‘They want to be kept out of this.’

  ‘I don’t know, Frølich. All this comes from – and excuse my language – an ex-cop with grubby hands.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You were suspended from the force. You’re out for revenge.’

  ‘I retired and I’m living well as a freelancer. I want to have as little as possible to do with the police.’

  ‘Nevertheless, the case will be stronger with the names of those she had made arrangements with. I can interview them.’

  Frølich was annoyed and had to take a deep breath.

  ‘You can interview your sources. You can interview the man who led the investigation. You can interview the prosecuting authority. You can confront both of them with this information and ask why the case was dropped when several facts suggest she was the victim of a criminal act and not suicide.’

  ‘As you said, these are my sources.’

  So what, Frølich thought. Is this journo a complete idiot?

  ‘And I’m a freelancer,’ Falck continued. ‘Anyway, I’ll have to sell this case to the desk and the editor. I don’t know. I’ll take it up with the desk, then let’s see how it develops.’

  The conversation was over.

  His car hadn’t changed. The side of the hill to the west hadn’t changed. The dim light hadn’t changed. Only he had. He was so angry he wanted to smash something.

  He looked out at the evening sky and already knew that what he had said would never appear in print.

  Nicolai Smith Falck was a typical representative of his profession. Like a goat on its way to new pastures and greater satisfaction, he had no thoughts of anything else.

  So what, he thought. You’ve always known the man is spineless and pathetic. Concentrate on things you can change.

  31

  The matt sheen on the paintwork of Matilde’s T-bird glowed as he drove past, looking for a place to park his car. Even though the windows of the flat were dark, he was anxious when he walked in through the building’s front door. Checked the post box. Nothing. Went on to the lift. His anxiety rose with the lift. When he opened his flat door, his diaphragm was hurting.

  He entered.

  Leaned against the do
or and felt the silence vibrate. Empty flat. He checked his phone probably for the fifth time since they had parted. What did it mean that she hadn’t come to the flat or contacted him?

  Why don’t you ring her? he asked himself.

  I dread the conversation, he answered.

  So what should he do now? Go to bed? Out of the question. He was wide awake and his body was in ferment inside.

  Almost automatically he sat down in front of the computer. Plugged in Fredrik Andersen’s memory stick. Flicked aimlessly through the police documents. He no longer had any sense of why he was doing this or what he was looking for.

  The lifeboat story had turned out to be a myth with no basis in reality. The assignment was finished. Jørgen Svinland was no longer interested in whatever he might have to report back on. The only connection he had with the Sea Breeze and Svinland was the fact that he intended to pay back some of Andersen’s advance.

  Nonetheless, he had to write a report. He couldn’t be bothered to make a start. Instead he skimmed documents on the memory stick.

  He could see how people could get hooked on this case. The amount of material was immense. In addition to the quantity of police interviews, there was quite a number of reports on the ship’s fire-prevention facilities and safety standards. Certificates and descriptions documenting the state of the damaged ship before and after it had been towed to harbour. He could see that he would never have a complete overview of the Sea Breeze case.

  He started to search for names in the material. He wrote ‘Bernt Weddevåg’ in the search box and got one hit. The name of the retired marine inspector figured in a recently dated report – a police document.

  Weddevåg had said he was one of Fredrik Andersen’s most important sources. If that was correct, Andersen must have stored material from Weddevåg in other places than on this stick, which wasn’t surprising. As far as he could see, this stick contained nothing that Andersen had written himself. It contained secondary sources and background material, documents from the police, the legal system, the fire service and investigators.

  He wrote the name of the first mate, Rolf Myhre, in the search box and got a lot of hits. He opened the last dated file. It was a police interview carried out barely two years ago.

  He skim-read the report. Tick-Tock Rolf said in the interview what he had told Frølich.

  He clicked back to the first page. Here there was a list of formal items, such as his date of birth, name, permanent address and so on. There was also the name of the policeman who interviewed Myhre: Bjørn Thyness.

  He had to read the name again. And sat looking at it. Trying to digest what this might mean. Bjørn Thyness had been in the group who investigated the Sea Breeze a second time. There was a link between Bjørn Thyness and Fredrik Andersen. A link as solid and strong as an anchor chain.

  So how deeply involved was Gøril’s partner in this matter?

  He wrote ‘Bjørn Thyness’ in the search box.

  And he got hit upon hit upon hit. Bjørn Thyness had been deeply involved in the investigation. Bjørn had done lots of police interviews. And now Bjørn was working in the immigration unit. Bjørn Thyness had been spying on Fredrik Andersen, who was writing a book about Norwegian asylum and immigration policies. Andersen and Thyness had had almost parallel careers in recent years, in their own areas of course. One a critic; the other the criticised.

  Another question followed on naturally from this: Could Thyness have known Guri?

  Guri worked with asylum seekers. Bjørn worked with asylum seekers.

  32

  He pushed his chair back. Staring into the air. Thinking he had to curb his imagination. He didn’t know if Guri and Bjørn Thyness had met. He had to stick to what he did know. Which was that Thyness had been spying on Andersen. What was more, Bjørn had to know quite a lot about the Sea Breeze. Presumably Thyness knew the case a lot better than Andersen did.

  He heard the voice on the phone: I’ll find you.

  Could it have been Bjørn?

  He took a deep breath.

  The fact was that both the writer Fredrik Andersen and the policeman Bjørn Thyness had knowledge of the tragedy in the Skagerrak. But they had diametrically opposed views on the matter.

  He would have liked to be a fly on the wall when the investigation team were working on the aggravated arson case for the second time.

  Who had led the discussion?

  What arguments had been employed?

  Who had articulated the final reasoning behind the police stance on the case?

  What was said aloud and what wasn’t talked about?

  Who had provided the opposition when the views were too defensive or cowardly?

  Had anyone protested at all? And, if so, how were the counter-arguments received? What evidence had the police based their arguments on; what evidence had they rejected? Why did the police and Andersen construe the evidence so differently?

  Fredrik Andersen’s source was Bernt Weddevåg, who had said that the basis for his own investigations regarding the sabotage was formed when he read the fire crews’ log.

  Perhaps that was the place to start.

  He pulled the laptop close again and searched for the log. He had skimmed through the report once before when he found the name Oda Borgersrud. Now he got the document up again and read it in greater detail.

  The log covered several pages. The task-force leader went through everything they had done on board the ferry systematically. Starting with the moment the fire teams boarded the Sea Breeze from the helicopter in the early morning until they clambered ashore thirty-six hours later.

  The task-force leader mentioned conflicts that had arisen between the fire officers and the three crewmen who had been flown back to the damaged vessel to assist them. The task-force leader believed the three men had worked against their best efforts to extinguish the fires. He wrote that the three crewmen disappeared below deck as soon as they came on board – and that there was friction the few times the fire teams met them.

  A whole page of the log was devoted to an attempt to extinguish fires in a corridor on deck four, on the starboard side of the ferry, twelve hours after the ship had been evacuated.

  The firefighters’ leader categorised this conflagration as an oil fire because of the duration and intensity. The problem was simply that the oil fire arose in a corridor within the passenger section, where there shouldn’t have been any oil. He thought, however, that he knew where the oil was coming from and indicated a fractured pipe in the rack under the corridor ceiling. The oil must have flowed out through the fracture and therefore someone must have operated a pump to generate the flow.

  Frank Frølich sat up straight and tried to remember the phrasing Bernt Weddevåg had used in their conversation. It had to be this scenario Weddevåg had been talking about. Weddevåg thought that this open pipe must have been connected to one of the ship’s diesel tanks by someone with malicious intentions. According to Weddevåg, the presence of fossil fuel was the only logical explanation for the blaze’s intensity and duration as well as the extent of the damage to those who had been in the corridor. Bearing in mind the photographs of the charred woman and the twenty bits of coal that had once been a human, Frølich was inclined to agree with Weddevåg.

  33

  He went back to the document index in the memory stick and studied the dating of the files more thoroughly. Several of them were relatively recent. There were new police documents as well as the investigation committee’s report. The number of newer items suggested that Fredrik Andersen had followed the case carefully, even after his book had been published. Andersen had, for example, contacted Oda Borgersrud and put paid to the myth of a missing lifeboat.

  Frølich clicked on the document containing Bernt Weddevåg’s name. It turned out to be quite large. In fact, it was a report on the leader of the fire crew. It was more recent and signed by Bjørn Thyness.

  One element of the criticism levelled at the police work done in 1988 had be
en that the police hadn’t interviewed the fire crews. They, after all, had fought the flames for hours, and it was obviously a glaring error that the police hadn’t been interested in their observations.

  When the police were ordered to investigate the case again the fire crews were finally interviewed by the police, including the task-force leader. The report by Bjørn Thyness was a commentary on this procedure, in which he constructed an argument against the fire officer’s statement. Thyness claimed that this officer was not a reliable witness.

  He had to reread the sentence. It did actually say that: “not reliable”.

  But why not?

  He read on. The reason for the man’s alleged unreliability was that he had been in contact with Bernt Weddevåg.

  What was this? Bjørn Thyness had assassinated the character of the fire-crew leader. Thyness’s report concluded that the police should ignore everything the task-force leader said in interviews.

  Frank had to get up and walk around the flat. He walked back and read the text on the screen again. This document, signed by Bjørn Thyness, was possibly the most important on the whole memory stick. The document must have been written to manipulate the investigation.

  The case stank. In actual fact the Sea Breeze no longer existed. It hadn’t been possible for the police – when they carried out the second investigation – to secure new concrete evidence. The boat had been scrapped years before. Speculation about sabotage on board the Sea Breeze could therefore be nothing but speculation – unless it could be backed up with tangible evidence, such as eyewitness accounts. The log the fire-crew leader had written in 1988 was a specific, lengthy and comprehensive eyewitness account. He had described in great detail the mystifying oil fires. He had described the tenacious efforts to extinguish blazes where originally no combustible material existed. He had described the protective outfits they wore, which began to burn because of the intense heat. He had described flames that grew in intensity when water was sprayed on them. He had described the protective visors that cracked and broke because of the extreme temperatures. He had described a heat so intense that crews working in shifts could only manage ninety seconds at a time. He had described a fracture in a pipe for which there was no natural explanation. In other words, he had described a blaze that started many hours after they had assumed all the fires were extinguished – an oil blaze in a place where an oil blaze should not have been possible. The task-force leader’s log and the eyewitness accounts were the closest one could come to proving that sabotage was carried out while the ferry was being towed.