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- Herausgeber: Orenda Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Varg Veum
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Fresh from rehab, Norwegian PI Varg Veum faces his most complex investigation yet, when a man is found drowned, a young woman disappears, and the case of a missing child is revived. The classic Nordic Noir series continues… 'As searing and gripping as they come' New York Times 'One of my very favourite Scandinavian authors' Ian Rankin 'The Norwegian Chandler' Jo Nesbø ***Now a major TV series starring Trond Espen Seim*** ________________________ PI Varg Veum has returned to duty following a stint in rehab, but his new composure and resolution are soon threatened when a challenging assignment arrives on his desk. A man is found dead in an elite swimming pool and a young woman has gone missing. Most chillingly, Varg Veum is asked to investigate the 'Camilla Case': an eight-year-old cold case involving the disappearance of a little girl, who was never found. As the threads of these apparently unrelated crimes come together, against the backdrop of a series of shocking environmental crimes, Varg Veum faces the most challenging, traumatic investigation of his career. ________________________ 'Every inch the equal of his Nordic confreres Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø' Independent 'Staalesen continually reminds us he is one of the finest of Nordic novelists' Financial Times 'There are only two other writers that I know of have achieved the depth of insight in detective writing that Staalesen has: Chandler, and Ross MacDonald …' Mystery Tribune 'Employs Chandleresque similes with a Nordic Noir twist … simply superb' Wall Street Journal 'Masterful pacing' Publishers Weekly 'The Varg Veum series is more concerned with character and motivation than spectacle, and it's in the quieter scenes that the real drama lies' Herald Scotland 'Unsettling, moving, sad, hopeful and hopeless … it's rich and it's sharp and it's cynical and sentimental all at once' NB Magazine 'A complex, layered plot in which human tragedy and mystery combine to play out beautifully in a classic Nordic noir with a touch of Christie' Live & Deadly For fans of Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø, Jorn Lier Horst, Harlan Coben and Jussi Adler-Olsen
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PI Varg Veum has returned to duty following a stint in rehab, but his new composure and resolution are soon threatened when he’s thrown into a complex, three-pronged case.
A man is found dead in an elite swimming pool and a young woman has gone missing. Most chillingly, Varg Veum is asked to investigate the ‘Camilla Case’: an eight-year-old cold case involving the disappearance of a little girl, who was never found.
As these three apparently unrelated threads come together, against the backdrop of a series of shocking environmental crimes, Varg Veum faces the most challenging, traumatic investigation of his career.
Bitter Flowers
GUNNAR STAALESEN
Translated by Don Bartlett
Bergen, Norway
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As there is actually a company in Hilleren, it would be appropriate to point out that the one described in this book, like all the characters, is purely the product of the author’s imagination, with no connection to reality.
—GS.
He who laughs last is the last to laugh.
—Erling T. Gjelsvik
CONTENTS
1
It was a quarter to eleven when I parked my car in the drive of the empty house.
A hundred metres away there were two other cars. One was red; the other grey. There was no one in them.
Neither of us spoke.
We got out of the car. Her eyes were the same colour as the darkest patches of the evening sky above us. The air was heavy with fragrance.
‘You know they have an indoor swimming pool, don’t you?’ she said, with a searching gaze in my direction.
‘You mean we should have brought our swimming things?’
She smiled suggestively and shrugged her shoulders, as though to say: Do we actually need them?
I met her gaze. It was impenetrable.
In fact, her hands had touched the majority of my body. But that was because she was employed as a physiotherapist at Hjellestad Clinic, where I had spent the past two months; the first as an in-patient, the second as an out-patient. Or, as they prefer to call you in those circles, a client.
‘Well, maybe not,’ I said casually, opening the gate.
The house had a Kleiva address and was situated on the broad, relatively exclusive peninsula protruding into the north of Nordås bay. It was discreetly set back from the road, on top of a hill and hidden by a small well-tended copse. Roman orgies could have been going on up there and no neighbours would have lost any beauty sleep as a result. And the postman never got further than the gate, where a sign announced with the utmost clarity: THIS DOG BITES.
I nodded towards the sign and mumbled: ‘I hope it’s on holiday, too.’
She smiled. ‘At Norway’s most luxurious kennels, you can be sure.’
It was one of those light June evenings when the air bursts with summer promise and the stars are still pale. There was a thick scent of bird cherry and lilac. The honeysuckle enticed us with its wet, pungent fingers, and the season’s first roses floated like waterlilies on the gentle breeze.
We followed the white gravel path from the gate up to the house. Rhododendrons and apple trees lined our route. Among the small rockeries there were carpets of eager flowers: blue Carpathian harebells, white carnations and yellow-and-violet pansies.
The owners were architects, and the house had been designed for this plot and the surrounding terrain. It bestrode the hilltop, a façade of natural stone, glass and wood, and was probably worth its weight in bankruptcies.
‘You should see the view of the sea,’ she said.
‘From the swimming pool?’
She chuckled. Her hair was short, dark and trim, her nose tanned, her body slim and sinewy. She was dressed for the summer in a white T-shirt and baggy, cream-coloured cotton trousers.
Wearing a shirt and jacket, I was slightly more formally attired. ‘Have you got the key?’
She nodded and produced a little key ring. ‘There are four keys. Two for this door and two for the side entrance into the cellar. There are security locks on both.’
‘Sounds sensible. And what do we do when we’re inside? Check all the windows—’
‘…switch on the lights, put on a radio, make the house seem occupied…’
‘Splash in the pool.’
She angled a glance at me. ‘Oh, yes? Would you like to?’
‘Let’s see,’ I said, avoiding her gaze. The only women I had had any contact with over the last six months had been vinmonopol assistants, and I feared Lisbeth Finslo might be too much for me. The thought of sharing a pool with her, as nature intended, produced a dull throb on the deepest bass inside me. But our relationship was professional. She had kneaded me with her restless, muscular fingers and had found me my first job after I had been given a clean bill of health. All I had from my sojourn at Hjellestad was a little scar on my forearm and three tiny stitches, and this job looked like being one of the easiest ever.
She unlocked the door and we went in.
We entered a hallway clad in natural stone. There was green grass in wall niches and there were spotlights in every corner. Sliding doors made of untreated wood hid wardrobes; grey slate tiles covered the floor. The house definitely had character, but I had no sense that this was a home, more like a hallway leading to a study centre for passionate conservationists.
‘Pål and Helle have always placed great emphasis on using natural materials,’ she said.
‘I’m beginning to see that,’ I answered.
As she set foot on the stairs to the next floor, she called out: ‘Hello?’
No one answered.
‘Are you expecting someone to be here?’
She glanced at me. ‘What? No. I … It’s just a habit I have. I can’t shake it off.’
I stared at her neck. It was slim – and tense, and I felt exactly the same. From the instant we had crossed the threshold of the empty house I had sensed it in my body. Something ominous, scary, like when a dog scents death…
We were upstairs. The ‘steppe’ we entered probably went by the name ‘lounge’. Unbleached leather furniture was scattered across a floor covered with rush and burlap rugs. On the walls hung collages of stone, shell and dried flowers, alongside a gigantic painting of a lion family, with the King of the Jungle gazing towards Nordås bay through a glass wall and sliding doors, as though he was musing on all the food swimming around out there. On a knee-height shelf running the length of the room was a selection of expensive art books, and in an alcove decorated mainly with bamboo and glass there was a generous bar cabinet that sent a sigh of nostalgia through me. It was eight weeks since I had last tasted a drop of alcohol.
‘Impressed?’ she asked.
‘I feel like an explorer,’ I mumbled. ‘Can we afford this safari?’
‘They can.’
‘I thought these were troubled times for architects as well.’
‘They worked round the clock in the early eighties and invested wisely. In recent years they’ve concentrated on special projects and jobs abroad. That’s why they have to be in Spain for the next two months.’
‘Children?’
‘No. I suppose this is a sort of consolation.’
‘And where’s the swimming pool?’
Her mind seemed to be elsewhere. ‘What? Oh, that.’ She pointed to a partly open door at the end of the room. There was a dim light shining from below. ‘I’ll go down and check everything’s OK.’
‘Don’t dive in until you’ve made sure it’s full of water.’
As she left, I reached out a hand and made a grab for her. But I was too late. My fingers brushed against her forearm, unable to hold her.
She felt the touch and half turned to me on her way to the door. The smile she sent me was nervous and her gaze so veiled that it hurt to look at her. But she didn’t stop.
I watched her. She fitted into these surroundings. As wary as a gazelle, she crossed Kleiva’s African steppe, and when she opened the door wide at the end of the room it was as though she were about to enter a menacing jungle.
Like an echo, I heard her voice on her way down to the pool: ‘Hello?’
I went towards the glass wall and looked out.
It was as if Peder Severin Krøyer, the Skagen painter, had visited Norway in the summer and left an unfinished picture, which posterity had done its best to destroy.
If you squinted, the Nordås waters lay like shimmering glass beneath the still-light sky. The verdigris leaves of the trees across the bay stirred in the breeze, and the silhouetted landscape on the other side of the fjord, where Edvard Grieg had played his melodies evoking unsullied Norwegian nature, was blueish black and uninhabited. But if you opened your eyes wide you saw that the glittering water wasn’t a reflection of the moon but of a thousand sitting-room windows, and that beyond Troldhaugen, the home of Grieg and his wife, along the southbound motorway, noise barriers sliced through the countryside like a wooden sword fashioned by a talentless thirteen-year-old.
Down on the water, I glimpsed the outline of a man sitting all alone in a little boat, outboard motor switched off, fishing rod in hand and not a sniff of a bite: a Krøyer sketch.
Behind me, I heard a faint noise and spun round towards the door Lisbeth Finslo had just left through. She was back, standing in the doorway. The greenish sheen behind her lent her an almost supernatural appearance, and when she took two unseeing steps into the room, she moved like a ghost. She was pale, transparent, as though the blood inside her had drained away. Her lips moved soundlessly, unable to utter a word.
I ran over to her. When I reached her, she slumped against my chest so heavily that I almost lost my balance.
‘What is it, Lisbeth? Are you…?’
She looked up at me, her eyes black. Her face was grey, her mouth distorted into a hysterical grimace. When she did finally say something, her voice was a toneless staccato. ‘H-he’s d-dead, Varg. Dead! I had no idea. I didn’t understand.’
‘Who’s dead? Who are you talking about?’
She part turned her head and stared at the door behind her. ‘Down there … in the pool.’
I looked at her. Her eyes were spinning and rolled under her eyelids.
I pulled her further into the steppe room. ‘Look, sit down here. Breathe calmly and relax until I return. Think about something else.’
She slumped into the deep canvas chair, nodded wearily and looked up at me with an indefinable expression in her eyes.
I stared at her. ‘Are you alright?’
She nodded again without speaking.
‘Then I’ll go…’ I gestured towards the door. ‘I’ll be back in no time.’
She looked at me vacantly, as though she didn’t believe me, as though she thought I was going for good.
Then I left her. I bounded down the stairs in long strides.
The room I entered was similar in style to the hall. Around the green swimming pool there were the same grey slate tiles. One wall was clad with untrimmed sawn timber, like a mountain cabin. The others were covered in a wide variety of natural stone, like a topographical map of Norwegian rock from the coast to Jotunheimen. In square wooden boxes there grew a profusion of flowers, enhanced by strategically placed spotlights. On small plinths and in wall niches there were stuffed animals, from weasels to foxes, frozen in motion, with glassy eyes.
Here, too, the whole wall facing the sea was made of glass, but in the lower section there was a metre-high aquarium spanning the length of the room. Silent fish swam around like abandoned fauna, their greys and reddish-yellows contrasting with the blueish-green contours of the landscape on the opposite side of the fjord, visible through the aquarium like the print of a slightly blurred graphic design.
All that was missing was a small glacier up in the right-hand corner and a ‘Wedding Procession in Hardanger’ video on a screen beneath, then you could have invited a Japanese travel group on a mini-cruise and left them alone for hours. This room was an adventure zone for world-weary ecologists – or architects suffering pangs of guilt about all the shoeboxes they had enlarged and drawn doors and windows on.
But the man at the bottom of the pool was no National Romantic artefact placed there for the benefit of visitors. He was lying face down, like a diver who had come to grief, as lifeless as the stuffed animals surrounding this unusual swimming pool.
I threw off my clothes and dived in. The chlorine gave the water a grainy texture. I didn’t reach him at my first attempt, but I did at the second. I grabbed his jacket and dragged him to the surface.
I swam to the edge, got out and pulled him up after me. He was literally a dead weight. He must have swallowed an enormous amount of water.
When, finally, I managed to get him out, I cast a quick glance over him. He was a man in his late thirties, dark-haired after his immersion in the water, with a pale face upon which death had already bestowed blue lips.
Without any hope, but unwilling to reject any possibility of life, I bent back his head, opened his airway, placed my mouth on his cold lips and gave him a few blasts from my lungs. He didn’t object.
I searched for a pulse, first on his wrist, then at the side of his neck.
Nothing. He had floated into the beyond.
With difficulty I rose to my feet and looked down at him.
He was casually dressed: an open-necked shirt with short sleeves, a light-blue jacket and faded jeans. On his feet he wore light-brown moccasins. He had definitely not taken the plunge of his own free will.
I quickly dressed and cast a final look around the room. There was nothing to suggest that any crime had taken place. No sign of a struggle, no marks on the dead body.
It was as if the dead man was a natural element in the National Romantic tableau: drowned fisherman brought ashore, or perhaps the last tourist, his garb taken into account.
I shook my head and retraced my steps up the slate staircase.
The door was closed.
I pushed it open and glanced at the chair where Lisbeth Finslo had been sitting. It was empty. The whole room was empty, as though finally the ecological catastrophe had occurred.
‘Lisbeth!’ I shouted. ‘Where are you?’
No one answered.
I crossed the room and ran downstairs to the hallway. The front door was open.
I ran outside. ‘Hello? Lisbeth! Are you there?’
Still no answer.
I cast around. The light summer sky had become a sardonic grimace. The breeze through the apple trees sounded like the whisper of evil spirits, and the luxuriant rhododendron bushes stood like darkened mausoleums in the evening air.
I jogged down to the road. My car was where I had left it. But the red saloon had disappeared from the car park a hundred metres away.
I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter past eleven.
In the distance I could hear the wail of sirens.
2
It was darker now, and the scent of jasmine stronger. If you can describe as darkness the gentle dimming of light that is the Nordic summer night. And if you can call it a scent when it rolls over you like the wave of the century.
Up by the Straumeveien turning there was a flash of blue light. I stood by the gate to show them where to go.
They came in two vehicles, a patrol car and a white civilian BMW. Four police officers jumped out of the patrol car, while Hamre and Isachsen got out of the BMW. When Hamre caught sight of me, an expression of acute distaste crossed his face. Isachsen gave a wan smile, one of those you are sent for free because no one else wants it.
Hamre came over to me, nodded dutifully and looked past me, up towards the house. ‘Was it you who rang, Veum?’
‘No. It must’ve been Lisbeth. Finslo.’ I looked around. ‘She must be around somewhere.’
Hamre turned to one of the officers. ‘Wasn’t it a man who rang?’
A constable with a face like a boy scout’s and a reputation as a hoodlum nodded affirmatively. ‘Yes.’
Hamre subjected me to a long stare.
I went cold. ‘A man? Who was it?’
Hamre nodded to the constable. ‘Did he give his name?’
‘No. He only said there was a dead body at this address. Then he rang off.’
‘You don’t remember phoning, Veum?’ Hamre said acidly.
‘It wasn’t me.’ And it wasn’t the man in the pool. So who was it? And had Lisbeth Finslo left with him, in the red car that was no longer there?
I had goose pimples over my whole body. To distract myself, I turned my attention back to the new arrivals.
Inspector Jakob E. Hamre was a couple of years younger than me. I observed with satisfaction that he had acquired some new wrinkles on his forehead and that the skin round his chin had tightened, making him look older and more marked than he had before. His dark-blond hair was speckled with grey, and he looked resigned, as most Bergen police officers did during the eighties, for understandable reasons.
He was wearing loose leisure clothing: light-brown sandals, white cotton trousers, a short, eggshell-coloured tracksuit jacket with green speed stripes down the sleeves and an open, red-and-white checked shirt.
Police Officer Peder Isachsen displayed less sartorial elegance and dressed according to the economic vicissitudes of Grand Magasin: cheap, brown Terylene trousers, a blazer that had been modern in 1962 and a light-blue peaked cap that would not have looked out of place on a Swedish pensioner driving through Norway on holiday.
‘What happened?’ Hamre asked.
‘I’ll tell you everything I know.’
‘For a change, eh?’
‘It isn’t much.’
Hamre sighed. He turned to the other officers and said loudly: ‘Let’s go up to the house. Veum has something he wants to show us.’
We followed the gravel path upward.
Hamre coughed and looked at me. ‘Why’s your hair so wet?’
‘I had to swim to the bottom of the pool to get the dead body.’
Isachsen stepped on my heels from behind. ‘Does that mean you’ve moved it?’
I half turned. ‘You think I should’ve left him there, do you? Until I was sure he was stone-dead?’
We arrived at the house. Hamre muttered, ‘We never get anywhere with the sort of people who own houses like this. Because we always end up on the phone, talking to some journalist who feels obliged to interrogate us about police violence.’
‘You sound bitter, Hamre.’
‘How do you reckon you’d sound if you’d worked for the last ten years in what from the outside resembles a travelling funfair?’
‘And from the inside?’
‘A nuthouse. We can hardly bend over to tie our shoelaces in a public place for fear that someone will call it police violence.’
‘No smoke without fire, Hamre.’
‘There’s never been a hint of a conflagration, Veum.’
Hamre nodded to one of the constables. ‘Sæve, you stay here by the door. Don’t let anyone in … or out.’
The constable nodded. He had the proportions of a bouncer, and a midge wouldn’t have got through the doorway while he was there.
We went in. Hamre’s mood didn’t improve at the sight of the hallway, and when we entered the steppe dollar signs and question marks appeared in his eyes. ‘Who did you say these people were?’
‘Architects.’
He nodded, as though I had confirmed his worst fears. ‘Architects and dentists.’
‘Where’s the body?’ Isachsen asked impatiently.
‘Through that door over there and downstairs.’
‘And what were you doing here, Veum?’
I looked at Hamre. ‘I’ll explain everything.’
He nodded and glared at Isachsen disapprovingly.
We walked down to the swimming pool in single file and the ‘wows’ grew in volume, as if a group was being shown around and had just spotted the architects’ private national park.
The body was lying where I had left it. No one had started to prepare it for taxidermy. Yet.
He was on his back and staring up at the ceiling as though it was all too much for him. This time I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: the shadow of bruising under the stubble on his chin.
Hamre knelt down professionally beside the dead man and did what I had done: searched for the pulse that didn’t exist. At the same time, he peered up at me. ‘Have you any idea who he is?’
‘Never seen him before.’
‘So, it’s not the architect then?’
I shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen him, either. But from what I’ve been told he’s in Spain with his wife. They work together.’
Hamre patted the man’s jacket. Then he put his hand in one of the pockets and took out a sodden wallet.
He opened it and extracted a driving licence. ‘Hm. Aslaksen. Tor. Born the fourteenth of the twelfth, forty-nine.’ He glanced from the photograph on the card to the dead man’s face. ‘Well, that’s that cleared up.’
He placed the wallet on the floor and stood up. ‘We’d better not do anything now until the experts have gone through the room with a fine-tooth comb.’ He pointed at one of the officers. ‘Will you contact forensics?’
The man nodded and was gone.
Hamre walked to the edge of the pool and looked down. ‘So he was lying on the bottom, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was you who found him?’
‘No.’
He turned to me with an enquiring expression.
‘The woman I mentioned. Lisbeth Finslo. She fo—’
He raised a hand with a tired flourish. ‘We’ll do this upstairs … in the lounge.’
Before leaving, he cast his eyes around the room one more time while slowly shaking his head. ‘I haven’t seen anything like this since I went to the university museum with the kids. What must it have felt like to splash around in here?’
‘Do you know Theodor Kittelsen’s painting of the Nix?’ I said, leading the way up the stairs.
3
We had sat by the glass wall facing Nordås, as far from the bar with the bamboo furniture as we could. Hamre and Isachsen both had a notebook on their laps. As for me, I could feel a tingling in the little scar on my forearm. I would have given the last two months of my life for a dram.
Jakob E. Hamre faced me with a neutral expression and said: ‘Right. Lisbeth Finslo. Who is she? Where is she? And what was she doing here, with you?’
‘I can answer the first and the last questions.’
Hamre made a gesture for me to continue.
‘She’s a physio at Hjellestad, where I was treated for a couple of months.’
Hamre raised his eyebrows, while Isachsen let out a long whistle and exhibited another of his cheap smirks. ‘Hjellestad Clinic?’ Hamre asked and made a note.
‘Exactly.’ It didn’t bother me to say this aloud. The psychologist there had told me it was the only sensible thing to do: own up to my stay at the clinic openly and honestly to anyone who needed to know.
Not without some sympathy, Hamre added: ‘It’s been a tough decade for you too, Veum, hasn’t it?’
I nodded. ‘I hit the wall at Christmas and from then on it was all downhill.’
‘But at least you met a woman there,’ Isachsen was quick to add.
I ignored him. To Hamre, I said: ‘When I was discharged, she got me this job. The owners are abroad, as I told you, and the idea was that I would look after the house. Pop by at various junctures, remove all the junk mail from the post box, switch on the radio and TV, and cut the grass whenever it was necessary. In short, make the house look occupied. A cushy number. One of the easiest I’d ever had. Or so I thought.’
‘And how long have you had it?’
‘I started today. Lisbeth came up with me, let me in—’
‘Just a moment, Veum. She had the keys?’
‘Yes, she knows the architects. She’s helped them like this for a few years herself, but this time she’s going on holiday and anyway…’ I gazed across the fjord. ‘I think she did it to help me get on my feet. A kind of therapy.’
Isachsen snorted to himself, while Hamre nodded pensively. ‘So you haven’t met your employers face to face?’
‘No.’
‘What are their full names?’
‘The ones I’ve been given are Helle and Pål Nielsen. The company’s called Embla.’
‘Embla?’
‘Yes, you know – Ask and Embla. The Adam and Eve of Norse mythology. And in Agnar Mykle’s writing.’
Hamre made a note. Then he said: ‘And this Lisbeth Finslo … the relationship between you was…?’
I smiled sheepishly. ‘Professional.’
Isachsen snorted again.
‘I mean client and therapist. That was all.’
Another snort. I turned to him. ‘Is there something wrong with you or what? Have you got nasal polyps? Is there something stuck further up? A pea brain for example?’
Hamre raised his voice. ‘And when you got here, what happened?’
‘We had a look around. She showed me where things were. Then she went down to the pool.’
‘Alone?’
‘Er … yes.’
‘Why?’
I hesitated for two seconds. ‘She wanted to check that everything was in order.’ I sent Isachsen an admonitory glare. He didn’t utter a sound.
Hamre leaned forward slightly. ‘And where were you while she went down?’
‘Up here.’
‘In here?’
I nodded.
‘And you didn’t hear anything?’
‘Not until she came back up … and was standing in the doorway over there.’
Hamre raised a hand. ‘Let’s get this clear. When you two came here, everything seemed to be in order. The door was locked?’
‘There were two locks.’
‘And you didn’t notice anyone in the house?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t hear anything?’
‘Correct. But…’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, it was just a feeling I had. That there was in fact someone here. And she seemed to sense it, too.’
He made a note. ‘And then when she came back up…’
‘I ran over.’ I pointed to the door. ‘She seemed shaken. In shock. And she said…’ I thought back, trying to reconstruct the conversation.
‘Yes?’
‘Something like: “He’s dead … I had no idea … I didn’t understand.”’
‘Did she say that? She had no idea? She didn’t understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’
He made another note. ‘“He’s dead”. Did that sound like she knew who he was?’
‘Ye-es. I think so.’
‘I see. And then … What happened then?’
‘I put her in that chair and went down to the pool. When I saw him lying at the bottom of the pool I dived in and brought him up.’ I cast a fleeting glance at Isachsen and said fiercely: ‘Naturally enough, I didn’t know how long he’d been there.’
Hamre continued quickly: ‘No, of course not. You did the right thing. The first rule is to establish whether the victim is alive. But he wasn’t, it seems.’
‘No.’ I scratched my ear. Years ago, people used to say if your left ear itched, it meant you were being talked about or you would hear some bad news. I feared it would be bad news. ‘And when I came back up here, she was gone.’
Hamre stared at me with expressionless eyes. They were blue and cold, with a touch of green glacier. ‘Gone?’
‘Yes. I called her name, of course. I ran outside. But I couldn’t see her anywhere.
‘And, so, it wasn’t you who rang us?’
‘No.’
‘And it wasn’t her, either,’ he said, rapt in thought, and added: ‘So who was it then?’
4
The Forensics team arrived, chatting and joking, as unaffected as if they were on a country walk.
Hamre looked at Isachsen. ‘Find out where this Lisbeth Finslo lives. And get someone to go through this house carefully, room by room.’
‘And if any more bodies turn up—’ I muttered.
Hamre interrupted me. ‘Let’s go down to the pool.’
‘Shall I send an officer to her house?’ Isachsen asked.
Hamre gave the question some thought. ‘No, I’ll go there later. And find the dead man’s address as well.’
Isachsen nodded and went out to the cars. I followed Hamre down.
The forensic investigation had started. The body had been photographed, and they were about to divide the room into zones that each of them would examine superficially before conducting a more detailed search.
‘Tell us exactly where he was in the pool when you found him,’ Hamre said.
I approached the edge of the pool carefully and pointed downward. ‘About there. But I doubt you’ll find any fingerprints.’
‘You’d be surprised to know what our people can find, Veum. My guess is we already have your blood type.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘You were in the water, weren’t you?’
I stared at him and he nodded. Then he turned to one of the forensics officers, a small guy with a pointed nose and an elongated neck, who I knew went under the amusing surname of Due – pigeon. ‘When the quack comes, tell him I want a report on the cause of death ASAP.’
Due nodded. ‘Anything else?’
Hamre surveyed the stuffed animals. ‘Reckon we’ll get any of them to talk?’
I nodded towards the aquarium. ‘The fish have seen everything too, but they won’t say a word, either.’
‘Who is this man, Veum? What was he doing here? How did he die?’ Hamre mumbled.
‘A burglar?’
‘Who was so alarmed by what he saw down here that he tripped over the edge of the pool and drowned? Did you notice his chin?’
‘Yes, either he’d been in a fight with a blunt razor or someone gave him a helping hand.’
‘A knockout punch to the chin. Enough to render him senseless if it was timed well.’ He sent me an ironic side glance. ‘You didn’t hit him, did you, Veum, eh?’
‘If I had, I wouldn’t be standing here now.’
‘What about Lisbeth Finslo? Could she have done it?’
‘Hit a man of that size so hard he passed out? She’s pretty robust when she has me on the treatment bench, but … Anyway, I’d swear that when she came back upstairs the shock at finding him dead was genuine.’
‘But why did she do a bunk? And where did she go afterwards?’
I shrugged. ‘Shock? Shouldn’t we make an effort to find her and hear what she has to say?’
Hamre nodded decisively. ‘What’s the time? Five past twelve. We can pay her a visit if Isachsen’s found out where she lives.’ Hamre’s expression changed. ‘Unless you know?’
‘I’m afraid not. We didn’t know each other privately.’
‘Yes, you said.’
We exchanged glances, but said nothing.
As we left, I took a final look at Tor Aslaksen. I tried to sear his image onto my brain – dark-blond hair plastered to his skull after the involuntary swim, a straight nose, open mouth with thin lips – to be sure I recognised him the next time we met. Wherever that might be.
We strolled through the steppe to the front door, where the sizable figure of Sæve was posted. Hamre raised his eyebrows.
Sæve shook his head.
We walked past.
It was past midnight, but because it was summertime it would be darker still in half an hour. The night lay around us like a blue blanket sprinkled with oriental oils. From up on Straumeveien came the whoosh of cars passing, but down here it was so quiet you could hear a hedgehog rustling the papers of its supper under one of the bushes.
On our way down to the gate, I said: ‘When we arrived, there was a red car over there.’ I pointed. ‘Half an hour later, when I came out, it was gone.’
‘A red car?’ He eyed me sceptically. ‘What make was it?’
‘I’m not sure. It might have been an Opel Kadett.’
‘Which model?’
‘No idea.’
He looked desperate. ‘Well, please keep an eye open for a … You’re sure of the colour?’
‘Oh, yes.’
We met Isachsen down by the cars. While Hamre was conferring with him, passing on the information about the red car, I looked up at the house we had just left.
An hour and a half ago I had come here in the company of a woman who had been talking about a swimming pool. Now there was a dead body lying on the edge of the self-same pool, and the woman had disappeared.
I looked at the sign hanging on the gate: THIS DOG BITES. But there hadn’t been a single bite mark on Tor Aslaksen.
‘I’m taking Veum with me,’ Hamre said behind me.
‘Why?’ Isachsen asked.
‘He knows the lady. He can introduce me.’
I chuckled inside. I had always liked Hamre. More than he had ever liked me. And I would happily introduce him as soon as we could find her.
‘Follow my car,’ Hamre said, getting behind the wheel of the white BMW.
I got into my old Corolla and kept my eyes glued to his tail-lights. They shone red, like the eyes of a predator on the hunt. And it was me it had spotted.
Above us the sky drew the night in like blue ink to blotting paper. Ahead of us Bergen lay like glowing embers at the bottom of an ash pan, drawn from the mountains around the town.
I switched off the radio and drove in silence. I had more than enough to occupy my mind.
5
Lisbeth Finslo lived in Kirkegate, which stretches from Sandviken church to Formannsvei. At the lower end of the street was Sandviken school, which was due to be demolished. Her address was a house at the upper end, a line of rendered, three-storey houses.
We got out of our cars. Now night was at its darkest. The air was heavy with pollen, and above us the sky had broken out in a rash of stars.
One of the season’s first cruise ships was moored on Skoltegrunn quay, illuminated like a floating brothel. An ocean-going yacht with three lanterns lit slipped into Byfjord, as cautiously as if it were approaching enemy territory.
From the short cut between Ekrengate and Kirkegate, which the locals called the chicken run, came a middle-aged man wearing a long jacket over a bare chest, Bermudas and white trainers. As soon as he spotted Hamre’s white BMW he about-turned and quickly swayed back the way he had come. He was definitely one of the locals.
Hamre eyed him sourly. ‘The Turkey’s into its summer moult.’
I grinned.
‘Do you know why they call him the Turkey?’
I said ‘no’ to allow him the pleasure of telling me.
‘Because after he’s had a few the most you can get out of him is “gobble, gobble, gobble”.’
‘I’ve heard a different story.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘He won a turkey once, just before Christmas, in a lottery. In some miraculous way he managed to persuade the shopkeeper who had given him the prize to exchange the turkey for beer. He was the hero of the street for the two hours it took his pals to drink the beer. But the nickname Turkey stuck with him for ever after, like a token of respect.’
Hamre glared at me.
‘Gobble, gobble, gobble,’ I said, shaking my head.
We walked up to the block of flats where Lisbeth lived. It was painted yellow and reminded me of the dusty Easter chicks you see in shop windows around Whitsun. But the door was green and on one of the nameplates beside the bells we found L. Finslo.
We tried the door. It was locked.
We rang the bell beside her name.
No reaction.
‘I’ve never known the bells in these places to work,’ I said.
Hamre examined the nameplate. ‘First floor, you reckon?’
I looked at the bell. ‘It’s no more than an hour and a half since she disappeared. She might still be on her way here.’
‘How well did you know her, Veum?’
‘Not very. You know how it is. You lie face down on a table, breathing through a hole, and you talk about everyday things. What books you read, what films you like to see, what made my neck muscles so tense. She has a daughter. Fifteen years old, if I remember correctly.’
‘No husband?’
‘She’s a widow.’
Hamre sighed. Then he took out an impressive bunch of keys. He flicked through them, found one and tried the lock. It opened at once.
I said in an ironic tone: ‘How do you do that?’
He didn’t answer, but motioned for me to follow him in.
‘What will you say if we meet someone?’ I asked.
‘Show them our ID.’
‘Mine too?’
We went up a floor. Lisbeth Finslo lived on the right. Her door had square, wired-glass windows and flowery curtains on the inside, about as burglar-proof as paper.
We tried this doorbell, too. We could hear it worked, but no one opened up.
I thought of her firm, strong fingers, how they kneaded and massaged my neck muscles until they softened and turned to butter and silk beneath my skin. I thought of her deep-blue eyes and her tanned nose, and felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. It was a feeling I had experienced before. It never presaged anything good.
Taut-lipped, I found it hard to force out the words. ‘Surely you have a search warrant, don’t you?’
Hamre sent me an amused look. ‘You watch too many American films, Veum. This lady might be suffering from shock. It’s our duty to enter.’
I watched him feel the lock with his finger, then hesitate between two or three keys and decide on one.
It went in, but not round. He coaxed it, without applying much force, muttering to himself.
I glanced at the neighbour’s door. Behind the windows, it was quiet and grey, like a rainy July day.
Hamre tried the next key along. It went in – and round.
There was a faint click in the lock.
Hamre opened the door carefully and stepped inside. ‘Hello?’
No answer.
I followed him in, and we closed the door behind us as carefully as we had opened it.
We were in a small, narrow hallway, painted in vibrant colours: green on the walls and yellow on the ceiling. A mirror in a red frame hung on the wall inside the door, and under a hat shelf there was a row of women’s outdoor clothing. Nothing masculine here as far as we could see.
Three doors led from the hallway. One was half open. Through it we could see a cramped but attractive kitchen, blue and white with gingham curtains by the windows and a blind with an old Bergen motif, partly rolled down. Behind it we looked out onto the yard at the back of the flats and a steep rock face. The kitchen was so clean and tidy it looked as though it had never been used.
On an impulse I went over and opened the fridge. It was empty and smelt of detergent.
Behind me, Hamre said: ‘Didn’t you say something about her going on holiday, Veum?’
‘Yes, I did, but…’
I walked past him into the hallway and across the hall. I opened the door to the sitting room. ‘Lisbeth, are you here?’
Not a sound.
The sitting room was as clean and tidy as the kitchen. The few newspapers there were had been placed in a wooden box beside the fireplace. There were no cut flowers in the vases, and the potted plants looked as if they could survive an environmental catastrophe.
The furniture was simple, the tables were recently polished, the books on the shelves didn’t have any conspicuous dust on them, and on the lid of the record player you could even sign your name with a finger and not leave a visible mark.
Hamre led us into the next room, which was where she slept.
There was something cool and aesthetic about the large bed in the middle of the floor, covered with a shimmering, blue silk quilt and two small ornamental cushions of the same material by the bedhead.
The bed was white, like the rest of the furniture: a dresser, a bedside table and two chairs. One wall was occupied by a wardrobe. A picture, conspicuous by its pastel colours, hung in the centre of the other wall. The motif was a group of pink dianthus superbus on a beach washed clean by a pastel-blue sea that had never heard of seaweed or insoluble nitrates.
The only eye-catching item was a book left on the white bedside table. I went over and read the title page. Cora Sandel, a Norwegian artist and writer. Ah, now my image of Lisbeth was clicking into place.
Hamre opened the door to the last room in the flat and we stepped into a new generation.
It was the archetypal teenager’s room. Practical furniture in red. Boxes and boxes of magazines and school books. Shelves of books, not stacked neatly, side by side, but on top of each other, in a jumble, without any system and ready to come crashing down if anyone said a word out of turn. A desk, superficially tidy as if to satisfy a mother, but without a plan or any sense of symmetry. On the walls there were posters of last year’s teenage idols, partly stuck over one another as fashions changed. The only stars I recognised were Madonna and Tom Cruise, but neither of them was at the front.
The bed showed signs of a maid’s hand: light-blue linen so tight that it would have met with an infantry sergeant’s approval.
Again, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach.
The room told me without any possible ambiguity that this was a child who needed her mother for a few seasons yet. Because it was highly improbable she made the bed herself, and Madonna was no substitute.
‘All the birds have flown the nest,’ Hamre said.
I looked around. ‘What do we do now? Wait here?’
‘No. We start a search. I’ll write a message asking her to contact me when she gets in.’
When, Hamre said.
If, my gut instinct said.
We pulled the door shut as we left.
‘Drop by the station early tomorrow, Veum.’
‘Any special time?’
‘Shall we say ten, so I can clear my desk first?’
Then we got into our respective cars and left Kirkegate in our respective directions, him to the city centre, me up to the Høyden area of town.
6
I unlocked the front door and switched on the hall light. The old folks on the ground floor were in their mountain cabin in Askøy and I was alone in the building.
I opened the post box. It was empty. Then I took the stairs up to the first floor, unlocked my flat, switched off the light behind me and went in.
I hung my jacket up in the hallway, went into the kitchen and opened a litre bottle of Farris, which I carried into the sitting room.
I sat down in the good chair, facing the dead TV screen, poured the mineral water into a glass and looked around.
The same room. The same old furniture, the same books, the same records, the same pictures on the wall. Only one thing had changed. The contents of the glass.
I knocked it back, poured myself another and stood up. I was uneasy.
It had been a hellish six months. From December to April I had walked through a forest of bottles, and there wasn’t a tree left standing behind me.
At the beginning I had walked with my head held high. Then my knees had become weaker and weaker, until they gave way and I sprawled onto all fours. In the end I was flowing through the countryside like a river, until a kindly soul finally picked me up, poured me into a vessel and transported me to Hjellestad.
Up there they received me with sober competence and taught me something I had never learned before: basket-weaving.
They had soft chairs and hard benches.
With the psychologist the chair was soft. I learned to sit with my eyes closed, breathing regularly, my shoulders and arms relaxed. The psychologist had a friendly, somewhat melancholy face and grey, combed-back hair. His name was Andersen. We talked calmly about fathers who died too soon, mothers who died too late and lovers you never saw again. We talked about sons who lived with their mothers, with new fathers, and clients who died while in treatment. And while the psychologist smoked his third cigarette in fifteen minutes, we talked about aquavit. We talked about its smell, its taste and its effect, until the bottom of my mouth was as dry as spruce and my fingers were trembling for lack of something to hold. Something small and round containing something wet and potent. And while we talked the psychologist kept an eye on me through the fog of cigarette smoke, made a few sporadic notes, smiled, chuckled and once in a while tousled his hair with a hand, on which the veins protruded like inverted trenches on a battlefield.
With Lisbeth Finslo the bench was hard. At our first meeting she had shaken hands coolly, introduced herself and told me to remove my top clothing. She hadn’t been sun-tanned then, in April, and her hair had been darker. I lay down on my stomach and breathed through the hole in the treatment bench, and her fingers explored my spine and neck. I told her when she hurt me, and her strong fingertips prodded my muscles like millipedes on stilts. Now and then she filled in a form, pressing her biro down hard, and then she told me to turn over. While she charted my chest and stomach in the same way, I kept an eye on her from below. Her chin looked strong from this angle, and I could see the down on her top lip and under her ears. Occasionally her gaze met mine, and once she said: ‘So you’re a real detective, are you?’ ‘Well, I’m afraid the real bit has faded.’ Then she gave me a last, friendly thump to the shoulder: ‘Let’s see if we can get a bit of colour back in you then.’ And the session was over.
There were to be a lot more sessions, and my muscles slowly loosened and then bulked up. She started me off with exercises for the back, neck and stomach, and when she heard I had quite a few kilometres behind me on country roads, she invited me to a jog after work. ‘You can be the hare,’ I smiled. ‘Let’s keep to the terminology of the clinic and call it the stimulus,’ she responded.
We had run to Store Milde Manor and around the arboretum, under trees full of history, with reddish-brown bark, splintering cones and small light-green plaques that informed us of their provenance.
One run soon turned into many. She was in good enough shape to drag me along at first. But as the weeks on the wagon grew and I slowly felt the strength in my legs and torso return, I was in a position to challenge her.
One warm afternoon in the middle of May, while the sun was playing water polo with the waves in Fana fjord, we sat on a rock by the waterside and recovered our breath after an extra-hard training shift. I had put an arm around her shoulder and, after some initial reticence, she had leaned back against my chest in such a way that I could wrap both my arms around her.
There was a moment’s silence as her hair tickled my neck. I had to clear my throat to gain control of my voice as I said: ‘I’ve never asked, but are you … married?’ She glanced up at me and shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t be sitting here with one of my clients though.’ After a while she added: ‘I’m a widow. And I have a daughter, Kari.’ ‘How old is she?’ ‘Fifteen.’ ‘I have a son of sixteen, Thomas. But I’m divorced.’ ‘Yes, I know. I could tell by your neck,’ she laughed.
Her laughter was infectious. I leaned forward and laughed close to her mouth. She smelt of sweet perspiration, and when we stopped laughing, our lips were our own again. Tentatively, I nibbled at her mouth. Her voice came from a long way away: ‘I have a boyfriend. A steady boyfriend.’ Then she kissed me hard on the lips, almost like a punishment, before turning her head away and freeing herself from my arms. She stood up and brushed the spruce needles from her track suit as she said: ‘We’d better get back. It’s time I went home.’
Later, I felt that we were able to talk about most things, as though we had known each other for years. At the same time, we knew this relationship would not develop into anything more. We still ran around the arboretum once or twice a week, but I never kissed her again, and now…
Now she was gone.
I drank another glass of mineral water and tried to reconstruct the sequence of events.
We had spoken about my discharge from the clinic, and she had said: ‘I think I can help you, with a job.’ ‘A job?’ ‘Yes, a kind of watchman…’
And then, during my last treatment session at Hjellestad she had said: ‘I have the keys. If you have the time, I can show you around this evening.’
We had met in town and driven up to Kleiva together. In the car we had talked about … her going on holiday, home to Florø, her and her daughter, but not…
What was his name actually, this boyfriend of hers?
Apart from on that one occasion, she had never spoken about him.
Could that be where she was? With him?
I stared at the telephone. Should I call Hamre, set him on her trail, or…?
No. All of a sudden, I was tired, dog-tired, so tired that the little scar on my forearm was tingling.
I stroked it with a finger.
A few days before I was discharged from Hjellestad the consultant had called me into his office. He was a youthful-looking, dark-haired man with a cordial nature, so much so that you accepted it as part of his profession.
He had leaned across his desk and spoken to me in confidence, as though someone might hear us from behind the sound-insulated doors. ‘We’ve discussed your case in great detail, Veum. You aren’t a … how shall I phrase it? … a physiological alcoholic. By which, I mean you don’t belong to the type who can’t touch a drop of alcohol without relapsing into the bad old ways. Nor do we think you are an uncontrolled binge drinker. Your problem is more that you’ve got used to having a wee dram, all of the time, so often that alcohol has become a perfectly natural ingredient in your life, like Norwegian brown cheese and sheep sausage are to the rest of us. So natural that when you had your traumatic experience earlier this year – an experience I hope your dialogue with Andersen has clarified – that was all you had to lean on. And then it all became too much. Much too much.’
I had nodded and he had continued: ‘An important factor in your trauma, if I may call it such, is of course, if you don’t mind me saying so, your loneliness.’ He paused for a second before going on: ‘But we’ve also observed your … errmm … ability to establish bonds of friendship with … um … women … One woman,’ he added as though I didn’t understand what he was referring to. ‘And what you most need in your life, Veum, is exactly that. A stable relationship.’ Oh, tell me something I don’t know. ‘As far as the other problem is concerned, I’d recommend total abstinence for six more months so that by the end of the year you can look back on … well, in fact a whole human gestation period without alcohol.’ I could hear the biting sarcasm in my voice as I answered: ‘And out of this gestation period a new Veum shall be born?’
He had nodded seriously and carried on: ‘To help you through this period we can offer you – well, in fact, we’d recommend it – to have a dose of Antabuse implanted under your skin. That will spare you any decision-making, and it’s also a guarantee, both for you and for us, of you keeping, er, our contract.’
I had thought about the bottle I kept in the lowest drawer of my office desk, awaiting my return. I had thought about the bottle gathering dust in my kitchen cabinet and reflecting on the golden days of yore. And I had thought that perhaps it wasn’t so stupid what the consultant had said. Not having to make a decision for the next six months was also a decision, now, then; and I had taken it.
Afterwards I had felt like a chemical process, unstoppable once it had started; and the scar had become an integral part of me, adapted to my new life, the ticket for the rest of the journey.
I drained the last glass, screwed the top on the Farris bottle, carried it back into the kitchen and went into my bedroom.
I opened the window a fraction to let in the town and the night outside. Distant car horns, the sporadic revving of powerful engines and the whine of tyres as they spun round told me that not everything was dead out there. Not everyone was dead. Only some people.
Then I lay down, in a bed as cold as an ice floe and as deserted as an islet in the Barents Sea, where the fish quotas had been reduced for the next ten years.
7
The police station in Bergen, which is still called ‘new’ by people of my age and older, was finished in 1965, when police officials tucked their well-used typewriters under their arms and lumbered across the street from the old greyish-green station, soon to be razed to the ground and replaced by a sterile, modern, new Folkets Hus, for the labour movement, with a typical-of-the-period fur shop in the basement; what a convenient arrangement this was for shop stewards in the 1960s. After discussing which polish they preferred for their cars and how large their first mortgage on the house was, they could go down two floors and buy the wife a fur she could wear to her Saturday coffee and cakes that week. And if there were any dubious elements in the ranks they could stroll across the street and discuss their life stories with a chummy officer in the Police Security Service.
Now, a good twenty years later, the police station was already too small. A number of departments had been moved out to rooms in the blocks around Rådstuplass and the old Morgenavisen
