* AN INTERNATIONAL NO.1 BESTSELLER * 'Anne Holt is the Godmother of modern Norwegian crime fiction' Jo Nesbo Now collected together for the first time, the final five novels in Anne Holt's celebrated Hanne Wilhelmsen series. In this splendidly chilling novels, Oslo-based Detective Hanne Wilhelmsen never backs down whatever the task, tracking down serial killers, catching rapists and challenging corruption.
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Anne Holt is Norway's bestselling female crime writer. She spent two years working for the Oslo Police Department before founding her own law firm and serving as Norway's Minster for Justice between 1996 and 1997. She is published in 30 languages with over 10 million copies of her books sold.
Published in eBook in Great Britain in 2021 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Anne Holt, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2015, 2016
Copyright © Berit Reiss-Andersen, 2000 (No Echo)
English language translation copyright © Anne Bruce, 2016, 2017
English language translation copyright © Marlaine Delargy, 2010 (1222)
The moral right of Anne Holt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novels in this bundle are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 648 6
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ
www.corvus-books.co.uk
1
Hairy Mary could hardly remember her real name. She came into the world in the back of a truck in January 1945. Her mother was an orphan aged sixteen. Nine months earlier, she had sold herself to a German soldier for two packs of cigarettes and a bar of chocolate. Now she was on her way to Tromsø. Finnmark was ablaze. Having pushed out in freezing temperatures of minus twenty-two degrees Celsius, the baby was swaddled in a moth-eaten blanket and then turned over to a married couple from Kirkenes. They were walking along the road holding a child of five by the hand, and barely had a chance to gather their wits before the truck with the sixteen-year-old was gone. The baby girl, two hours old, got no more from her biological mother than her name. Mary.
Incredibly enough, the family from Kirkenes managed to keep the infant alive. They held on to her for eighteen months. Before Mary reached the age of ten, she had put four new foster families behind her. Mary was quick-witted, remarkably lacking in the beauty stakes, and what’s more had sustained an injury to one leg during her birth. She walked with a limp. Her body twisted halfway around every time she set down her right foot, as if scared that someone might be following her. If she had problems moving about, she was all the faster at shooting her mouth off. After two combative years at a children’s home in Fredrikstad, Mary headed for Oslo to take care of herself. She was then twelve years of age.
Hairy Mary certainly did take care of herself.
Now she was the oldest street hooker in Oslo.
She was an exceptional woman in more ways than one. Maybe it was an obstinate gene that had helped her survive almost half a century in the trade. It might just as easily have been downright defiance. For the first fifteen years, alcohol had kept her going. In 1972 she became addicted to heroin. Since Hairy Mary was so old, she was one of the very first people in Norway to be offered methadone.
“It’s too late,” Hairy Mary said, and hirpled off.
At the start of the seventies she had her first and last dealings with the social-welfare office. She needed money for food after starving for sixteen days. Only a few kroner; she was fainting all the time. It wasn’t good for business. A humiliating ordeal of being sent from one social worker to another, which only ended up with an offer of three days’ detox, ensured that she never set foot in a social-welfare office again. Even when she was granted disability benefit in 1992, everything was organized through the doctor. The physician was a decent guy, the same age as her, and had never let a single unkind word fall from his lips when she came to him with swollen knees and chilblains. There had also been the odd sexually transmitted disease down through the years, without his smile growing any less sincere each time she limped into his warm surgery on Schous plass. The disability benefit managed to cover house rent, electricity, and cable television. The money from street work went on drugs. Hairy Mary had never had a budget for food. When things became chaotic, she forgot about the bills. The debt collectors came to the door. She was never at home, and never protested. The door was sealed, her belongings removed. Finding a new place to live could be difficult. Then it was a hostel for one or two winters.
She was worn out now, completely worn out. The night was bitterly inclement. Hairy Mary was wearing a thigh-length pink skirt, laddered fishnet stockings, and a long silver-lamé jacket. She tried to wrap her clothes more snugly around herself, but that wasn’t much help. She had to get inside somewhere. The City Mission’s night shelter would be the best option after all. Admittedly, admission was refused to anyone under the influence, but Hairy Mary had been high on drugs for so many years that no one could tell whether she was clean or not.
She took a right turn beside police headquarters.
The park surrounding the curved building at Grønlandsleiret 44 was Hairy Mary’s place of refuge. Conventional citizens gave it a wide berth. An occasional dark-skinned immigrant with wife and countless children sometimes sat there in the afternoons while the kids kicked a ball about and sniggered in terror at Hairy Mary’s approach. The winos were the trustworthy sort. The cops didn’t bother her, either; it was ages since they had stopped harassing an honest whore.
On this particular night, the park was deserted. Hairy Mary shuffled out from the beam of light shed by the lamp above the entrance gate to Oslo Prison. That night’s honestly earned fix was in her pocket. She just had to find somewhere to shoot up. Her steps were on the north side of the police headquarters building. They were not illuminated and never used.
“Fuck! Bloody hell.”
Someone had taken the steps.
That was where she planned to shoot up her fix. That was where she was going to sit and wait until the heroin had reached a proper balance in her body. The steps around the back of police headquarters, a short stone’s throw from the prison wall, those were her steps. Someone had taken them.
“Hey! You!”
The man made no sign that he had heard her. She tottered closer. Her high heels ground into rotten leaves and dog shit. The man slept like a log.
The guy might be good-looking. It was difficult to say, even when she leaned over him. It was too dark. A huge knife was sticking out of his chest.
Hairy Mary was a practical creature. She stepped over the man, sat down on the top step, and fished out her syringe. The pleasant, warming feeling she craved hit her before she had got as far as withdrawing the needle.
The man was dead. Probably murdered. Hairy Mary had seen murder victims before, even if they had never been as expensively dressed as this one. Attacked, probably. Or maybe the guy was a faggot who had taken too great a liberty with one of those young boys who sold themselves for five times the price of a blow-job from Hairy Mary.
She stood up stiffly, swaying slightly. For a moment she studied the corpse. The man had a glove in his hand. Its partner lay to one side. Without any appreciable hesitation, Hairy Mary crouched down and appropriated the gloves for herself. They were too big, but were real leather with a wool lining. The guy had no more use for them. She pulled them on and began walking to catch the last bus to the night shelter. A scarf lay on the ground a few meters from the body. Hairy Mary had hit the jackpot tonight. She wound the scarf around her neck. Whether it was the new clothing or the heroin that helped, she had no idea. In any case, she did not feel quite so cold. Maybe she should even splash out on a taxi. And maybe she should call the police to let them know they had a dead body in their back garden.
All the same, the most important thing was to find herself a bed for the night. She didn’t know what day it was, and she needed to sleep.
2
Santa Maria, Mother of Jesus.
The picture on the wall above the bed reminded her of one of her forgotten scraps from childhood. A pious face gazing down above hands folded in prayer. The halo around her head had long ago faded to a vague cloud of dust.
As Hanne Wilhelmsen opened her eyes, she realized that the soft features, narrow nose, and dark hair with severe middle parting had led her astray. She saw that now, though she did not understand why it had taken such a long time. It was Jesus himself who had watched over her every single night for nearly six months.
A ribbon of morning light fell across the shoulder of Santa Maria’s son. Hanne sat up and her eyes squinted against the sunlight forcing its way through the gap in the curtains. Stroking the small of her back, she wondered why she was lying crosswise in the bed. She could not remember the last time an entire night had been lost in deep, undisturbed sleep.
The cold stone tiles on her feet made her gasp for breath. In the bathroom doorway she turned to study the picture again. Her gaze swept over the floor and came to a sudden halt.
The bathroom floor was blue. She had never noticed that. She put the knuckle of her index finger against one eye and stared down with the other.
Hanne Wilhelmsen had lived in this spartan room in Villa Monasteria since midsummer. It was now almost Christmas. The days had been drab, just as all other colors were absent in and around this huge stone building. Even in summer, the Valpolicella landscape outside the enormous window on the first floor had been monotonously free from true colors. The vines clung to golden-brown trunks and the grass beside the stone walls was scorched.
A chilly intimation of December struck her half an hour later when she opened the double doors leading out to Villa Monasteria’s gravel courtyard. She ambled aimlessly across to the bamboo woods on the other side, maybe twenty meters away. Two nuns stood in animated conversation on the path that divided the grove in two. They dropped their voices as Hanne approached. When she passed the two older, gray-clad women, they bowed their heads in silence.
The bamboo on one side of the path was black. On the other side the stalks were green. The nuns were gone when Hanne turned around, perplexed about what had caused the inexplicable difference in color between the slender plants about the thickness of her thumb on either side of the path. Hanne had not heard the familiar shuffling across the gravel yard. She wondered fleetingly what had become of the nuns. Then she let her fingers brush over the bamboo stalks as she scurried up to the carp pond.
There was something going on. Something was about to happen.
In the beginning the nuns had been friendly. Not particularly talkative, of course: the Villa Monasteria was a place of contemplation and silence. Sometimes a brief smile, perhaps at mealtimes, a quizzical look above hands that gladly poured more wine into her glass, and an odd softly spoken word that Hanne could not understand. In August she had almost made up her mind to spend the time learning Italian. Then she had dismissed the idea. She wasn’t here to learn anything.
Eventually the nuns had realized that Hanne preferred complete stillness. Even the astute manager. He accepted her money every three weeks, with no more than a simple grazie. The fun-loving students from Verona, who sometimes played records so loudly that the nuns came running within a few minutes, had spotted a kindred spirit in Hanne. But only in the beginning.
Hanne Wilhelmsen had spent six months being entirely alone.
She had in the main been left in peace to her daily battle not to bother about anything. Recently, nevertheless, she had been unable to divert her curiosity from the obvious fact that something was about to happen at Villa Monasteria. Il direttore, a slim, omnipresent man in his forties, raised his voice increasingly often to the nervously whispering nuns. His footsteps pounded harder than before on the stone floors. He dashed from one incomprehensible task to another, immaculately dressed and trailing a whiff of sweat and aftershave. The nuns were no longer smiling, and fewer of them assembled at mealtimes. However, they sat increasingly often in silent prayer on the wooden benches in the small chapel dating from the thirteenth century, even when there was no Mass. Hanne could see them from the window as they padded, two by two, in and out through the heavy timber doors.
It was difficult to tell the depth of the carp pond. The water was unnaturally clear. The fishes’ plump movements along the bottom seemed repellent, and Hanne felt a trace of nausea at the thought of them swimming around in the convent’s drinking water.
She sat down on the wall surrounding the pond. Heavy oak trees, almost bare of leaves, were outlined against the wintry sky. A flock of sheep grazed on the northern hillside. A dog was barking in the far distance, and the sheep huddled more closely together.
Hanne yearned for home.
She had no reason to yearn for home. All the same, something had happened. She didn’t know what; nor did she know why. It was as if her senses, blunted through a conscious process over several months, were no longer lurking in enforced hibernation. She had started to notice things.
Six months had passed since Cecilie Vibe died. Hanne had not even attended the funeral of her partner of almost twenty years. Instead she had shut herself into their apartment, numbly registering that everyone had left her in peace. No one rang the doorbell. No one had attempted to come in. The phone was silent. Only junk mail and bills in the mailbox. And eventually a settlement from an insurance company. Hanne had had no idea about the policy Cecilie had taken out years before. She had phoned the company, got the money paid into a high-interest account, written a letter to the Chief of Police, and applied for leave of absence for the rest of the year. Alternatively, the letter could be considered her resignation.
She had not waited for an answer and instead simply packed a bag and boarded the train, heading for Copenhagen. Strictly speaking, she did not know whether she still had a job. It was of no concern to her, at least not then. She had no inkling where she was going or how long she would be away. After a fortnight of traveling haphazardly through Europe she had stumbled across the Villa Monasteria, a run-down convent hotel in the hills north of Verona. The nuns could offer her tranquility and home-made wine. She signed in late one evening in July, intending to move on the following day.
There were prawns in the pond. Small ones, admittedly, but prawns all the same: transparent and darting by fits and starts in flight from the indolent carp. Hanne Wilhelmsen had never heard of freshwater prawns. Sniffing, she wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jacket and let her eyes follow il direttore’s car along the avenue. Four women dressed in gray stood under a poplar tree gazing up at her. Despite the distance, she could feel their eyes on her face, sharp as knives in the drizzly air. When the manager’s car disappeared out on to the highway, the nuns wheeled around abruptly and bustled toward the Villa Monasteria without a backward glance. Hanne got up from the wall. She felt cold and rested. A huge raven, flying in oval circuits below the low-lying clouds, made her shiver.
It was time to go home.
3
Housing one of Norway’s three major publishing companies, the anonymous building was nonetheless modestly tucked away in a back street in the city’s most unprepossessing district. The offices were small and uniform. No history of the publishing house decorated the walls, and no dark furniture or plush carpets graced the interior. Along the glass walls dividing the office cells from the endless corridors hung newspaper clippings and posters, evidence of a memory that only extended a few years back in time.
The conference room in the Literature Section, reminiscent of a lunch room in a social-welfare office, was situated on the second floor. The table was pale veneer and ordinary office standard, and the orange upholstery on the chairs belonged more to the seventies. The publishing company was Norway’s oldest, founded in 1829. This publishing company had history. Serious literary history. The books on the cheap IKEA shelves lining one wall, however, looked more like mass-market paperback novels. A random selection of that autumn’s publications was displayed with front covers facing out; they looked as if they might topple at any minute and clatter to the primrose-yellow linoleum floor.
Idun Franck stared absent-mindedly at Ambjørnsen’s most recent bestseller in the Elling series. Someone had turned it upside-down and the dust-jacket was torn.
“Idun?”
The Senior Publishing Manager raised his voice. The five others in attendance sat with expressionless faces turned to Idun Franck.
“Sorry—”
She leafed distractedly through her papers and picked up a ballpoint pen.
“The question is not really how much this project has cost us to date, but whether the book can actually be published at all. There has to be an ethical consideration of … Can we publish a cookery book when the chef who wrote it has been stabbed to death with a butcher’s knife?”
The others seemed unsure whether Idun Franck was joking. One of them gave a slight smirk, before swiftly smothering it and staring at the table top as a red flush spread over his face.
“Well, we don’t know whether it was a butcher’s knife,” Idun Franck added. “But he certainly was stabbed. According to the newspapers. In any case, it would be considered rather tasteless to follow up a gory murder by publishing an account of the victim and his kitchen.”
“And we don’t want to be tasteless. We are, after all, talking about a cookery book,” Frederik Krøger said, baring his teeth.
“Honestly,” muttered Samir Zeta, a dark-skinned young man who had started in the Information Department three weeks earlier.
Krøger, the stocky Senior Publishing Manager, who tried to hide his bald pate under an awe-inspiring comb-over, made an apologetic gesture with his right hand.
“If we can go back and examine the actual concept for a moment,” Idun Franck continued on her own initiative. “We were definitely on the track of something. A further development of the trend in cookery books, so to speak. A sort of culinary biography. A mixture of cookery book and personal portrait. Since Brede Ziegler has for several years been the best—”
“At least the most prominent,” Samir Zeta interjected.
“… the most prominent Norwegian chef, he was a natural choice for a project such as this. And we had come quite a long way with it.”
“How far?”
Idun Franck was well aware what Frederik Krøger was querying. He wanted to know how much the whole thing had cost. How much money the publishing house had thrown out the window on a project that, in the best-case scenario, would have to be put on ice for some considerable time.
“Most of the photographs are done and dusted. Also the recipes. However, there’s an appreciable amount of work to be undertaken with respect to Brede Ziegler’s life and personality. He insisted on concentrating first on the food, and then we were to follow up with anecdotes and reflections on his life connected with each individual dish. Of course, we’ve chatted a great deal, and I have … notes, a couple of tapes, and suchlike. But … the way I see it today … Can you pass me the pot?”
She tried to pour coffee into a cup without a handle, decorated with the Teletubbies. Her hand was shaking, or perhaps the thermos coffee-pot was too heavy. Coffee spilled across the surface of the table. Someone handed her a blank sheet of paper. When she placed it over the spillage, the brown liquid seeped out along the edges and ran across the table, dripping on to her trousers.
“As I was saying … We could of course make use of what we have for a straightforward cookery book. One among many. The pictures are good, for that matter. The recipes are fabulous. But is that what we wanted? My answer would be—”
“No,” Samir Zeta said, feeling too warm in his sweater.
Frederik Krøger pinched the bridge of his nose and hiccuped.
“I’d like you to put that down on paper, Idun. When I … With figures and all that. We’ll take it from there. Okay?”
No one waited for an answer. Chair legs scraped across the floor as they all scuttled out of the conference room. Only Idun was left sitting there, her eyes fixed on a black-and-white photograph of a cod’s head.
“Saw you at the cinema yesterday,” she heard and looked up.
“What?”
Samir Zeta smiled and ran his palm over the door frame.
“You were busy. What did you think?”
“Think?”
“About the movie! Shakespeare in Love!”
Idun lifted the cup to her mouth and swallowed.
“Oh. The film. Excellent.”
“A bit too theatrical for my liking. Movies should be movies, in a sense. Even if the actors are wearing costumes from the sixteenth century, they don’t need to talk like that, do they?’
Putting down her Teletubbies cup, Idun Franck rose and tried, to no avail, to wipe a dark stain from her trouser leg. Then she looked up, smiling faintly as she collected her papers and photographs, paying no heed to the spilled coffee that had stuck two large color photographs of fennel and spring onions together.
“Actually I really liked the film,” she said. “It was … warm. Tender. Colorful.”
“Romantic,” Samir said, grinning. “You’re an absolutely hopeless romantic, Idun.”
“Far from it,” Idun Franck said, closing the door softly behind her. “But at my age that would be permissible anyway.”
4
Billy T. was fascinated. He held the glass up to the light and studied a ruby-colored spot wedged inside pink pack-ice. Russian Slush was most certainly not the best drink he had tasted. But it looked beautiful. He twisted the glass toward the chandelier on the ceiling and had to screw up his eyes.
“Sorry—”
Billy T. held his hand out to a waiter in blue trousers and immaculate collarless white shirt.
“What is this, in actual fact?”
“Russian Slush?”
One corner of the waiter’s mouth tugged almost imperceptibly, as if he didn’t quite dare to smile.
“Crushed ice, vodka, and cranberries, sir.”
“Oh, I see. Thank you.”
Billy T. drank, though strictly speaking he might be said to be on duty. He had no intention of presenting the bill to the Finance Section; it was seven o’clock on a Monday evening, December 6 to be precise, and he could not care less. He sat on his own, fingering his glass as he scanned the room.
Entré was the city’s new, undisputed “in” place.
Billy T. had been born and raised in Grünerløkka. In a two-room apartment in Fossveien his mother had kept him and his sister, elder by three years, in line while she worked her fingers to the bone in a laundry farther up the street and spent her nights mending clothes for extra payment. Billy T. had never met his father. It was still unclear to him whether the guy had done a runner or his mother had turned him out before their son had arrived into the world. Anyway, his father was never mentioned. All Billy T. knew about the man was that he had been six foot six in his stocking soles, a womanizer of the first order, and an out-and-out alcoholic into the bargain. Which had in all likelihood led to an extremely premature death. Somewhere far back in his memory, Billy T. had gained an impression that his mother had one day come home surprisingly early from work. He could only have been about seven years old and kept off school because of a bad cold.
“He’s dead,” his mother had said. “You know who.”
Her eyes forbade him from asking. He had gone to bed and had not got up again until the following day.
There was only one picture of his father in the apartment in Fossveien, a wedding photograph of his parents that had, surprisingly enough, been allowed to remain on display. Billy T. suspected that his mother used it to prove that her children had been born in wedlock, if anyone should be impudent enough to assume any different. If a stranger were to set foot inside the front door of their overcrowded apartment, the wedding photograph was the first thing they spotted. Until the day when Billy T. had come home in his stiff uniform, having passed his exams at what was then called police college. He had sprinted all the way. Beads of sweat hung from the synthetic fibers of his clothing. His mother refused to let him go. Her skinny arms were locked around her son’s neck. His sister sat laughing in the living room as she opened a cheap bottle of sparkling wine. She had become a fully qualified nurse two years earlier. The wedding photograph had disappeared that same day.
Billy T. had not acquired a taste for alcohol until he reached the age of thirty.
Now he was over forty, and weeks could still pass between the occasions when he drank anything other than cola or milk.
His mother still lived in Fossveien. His sister had moved to Asker with her husband and eventually three children, but Billy T. had remained in Løkka. He had experienced all the ups and downs of the district since the start of the sixties. He had grown up with an outside toilet, and been at home on the day when his mother, tearful and proud, had run her fingers over their newly installed WC in what had until then been a closet. He had seen the urban regeneration program break the back of one housing cooperative after another during the eighties, and had lived through trends and fashions that came and went like birds of passage in Cuba.
Billy T.’s love for Grünerløkka was anything but trendy. He was not someone who had only recently fallen in love with Thorvald Meyers gate’s tiny, jam-packed bars and cafés. Billy T. lived outside the Løkka community that had formed in the course of the past four or five years. It made him feel old. He had never been in Sult waiting an hour at the bar for a table. At Bar Boca, where he had once ventured for a glass of cola, his eyes had stung after only a few minutes of claustrophobic posturing at the bar counter. Instead, Billy T. took his youngsters to the McDonald’s across the street. The world outside his windows had become something that did not impinge on him at all.
Billy T.’s love for Grünerløkka was connected with the buildings. With the houses, purely and simply, the old workers’ apartment blocks. Below Grüners gate, they were built on clay soil and had unexpected cracks in the middle of their façades. As a little boy, he had thought that the houses had wrinkles because they were so old. He loved the streets, especially the short and narrow ones. Bergverksgata was only a few meters long and came to an end at the slope down to the Akerselva river. The current can take you away, he remembered; you mustn’t venture into the water, the current might take you away! His body turned red with eczema every summer. His mother complained and scolded and smeared liniment on his back with furious hands. The boy jumped into the polluted water just the same the very next day. Summer after summer. It was a holiday as good as any.
Entré was located on the south-west corner of the intersection between Thorvald Meyers gate and Sofienberggata. A department store full of old-fashioned women’s clothes that never sold had resisted the forcible modernization of Løkka for years. However, big business had won out in the end.
He was sitting on his own at a table just beside the door. The restaurant was crammed, despite it being a Monday. The makeshift sign on the door had been written with a marker pen that had scored through the paper. Billy T. could read the reversed lettering from where he was seated:
THE RESTAURANT’S OWNER AND CHEF, BREDE ZIEGLER, HAS PASSED AWAY. IN MEMORY OF HIS LIFE AND WORK, ENTRÉ WILL REMAIN OPEN THIS EVENING.
“Fuck!” Billy T. said, gulping down an ice cube.
He should not be sitting here. He should be at home. At the very least, Tone-Marit should have accompanied him if he was going to eat in a restaurant for once. They hadn’t been out together since Jenny was born. That was almost nine months ago now.
A molar was causing him extreme pain. Billy T. spat the ice cube out into his half-clenched fist and tried to drop it unnoticed on the floor.
“Anything wrong?”
The waiter bowed slightly as he placed a glass of Chablis on the tablecloth in front of him.
“No. Everything’s fine. You … you’re staying open today. Don’t you think many people will feel that’s … disrespectful, in a way?”
“The show must go on. It’s what Brede would have wanted.”
The plate that had just landed in front of Billy T. looked like an art installation. He stared in bewilderment at the food, lifting his knife and fork, but had no idea where to begin.
“Duck liver on a bed of forest mushrooms, with asparagus and a hint of cherry,” the waiter clarified. “Bon appetit!”
The asparagus was arranged above the liver like an American Indian tepee.
“Food in a prison,” Billy T. murmured. “And where the hell is the hint?”
A solitary cherry sat in splendor at the edge of his plate. Billy T. pushed it in and sighed in relief when the asparagus tent collapsed. Hesitantly, he cut a slice of liver.
Only now did he catch sight of the table beside the massive staircase leading up to the first floor. An enormous picture of Brede Ziegler was displayed on an immaculate white tablecloth flanked by two silver candlesticks, a black silk ribbon draped across one corner. A woman with an upswept hairdo approached the table. She picked up a pen and wrote a few words in a book. Then she held her hand to her forehead, as if about to burst into tears.
“You’d think the guy was a royal,” Billy T. muttered. “He hadn’t done anything to deserve a bloody book of condolence!”
Brede Ziegler had looked anything but regal when the police had found him. Someone had phoned the switchboard and slurred that they ought to check their back steps. Two trainee police officers had gone to the bother of following that exhortation. Immediately afterwards, one of them had come running, out of breath, back to the duty officer.
“He’s dead! There is a guy there! Dead as a—”
The trainee had stopped at the sight of Billy T., who quite by chance had popped into the duty office to collect some papers, bare-legged and wearing only a singlet and shorts.
“Doornail,” he had finished the sentence for the young man in uniform. “Dead as a doornail. I’ve been exercising, you know. No need to stare like that.”
That had been eighteen hours ago. Billy T. had gone straight home without waiting to find out anything further about the dead man. He had taken a shower, slept for nine hours, and arrived at work one hour late on Monday morning in the forlorn hope that the case would end up on some other chief inspector’s desk.
“Great minds think alike.”
Billy T. looked up, at the same time struggling to swallow an asparagus spear that could never have been anywhere near boiling water. Severin Heger pointed at the chair beside Billy T. and raised his eyebrows. Without waiting for a response, he plumped himself down and stared skeptically at the plate.
“What’s that?”
“Sit on the other side,” Billy T. spluttered.
“Why’s that? I’m fine here.”
“Bloody hell. Move yourself! It looks as if we’re—”
“Boyfriends! You’ve never been homophobic, Billy T. Take it easy, won’t you.”
“Move yourself!”
Severin Heger laughed and lifted his rear end slowly off the seat. Then he hesitated for a second before sitting down again. As Billy T. brandished his fork, something stuck in his throat.
“Just joking,” Severin Heger said and got to his feet again.
“What are you doing here?” Billy T. asked, once his throat was clear and Severin was safely seated on the opposite side of the table.
“The same as you, I assume. Thought it would be a good idea to get an impression of the place. Karianne has interviewed a whole load of these people today …”
He used his thumb to point vaguely over his shoulder, as if the staff were lined up behind him.
“… but it’s helpful to take a look at the place. Check out the ambience, in a manner of speaking. What’s that you’re eating?”
The food had been reduced to a shapeless jumble of brown and green.
“Duck liver. What do you think?”
“Yuk.”
“I don’t mean the food. The place!”
Severin Heger rapidly surveyed the room. It was as though his many years in the Police Security Service had enabled him to look around without anyone even noticing that his gaze had shifted. He held his head absolutely still and half-closed his eyes. Only an almost invisible vibration of his eyelashes betrayed that his eyeballs were actually moving.
“Strange place. Fancy. Hip. Trendy and almost old-fashioned sophistication at the same time. Not my cup of tea. I had to flash my police badge even to get through the door. Rumor has it there’s a waiting time of several weeks to book a table here at weekends.”
“Honestly. This food is awful.”
“You’re not supposed to mash it all up into a mush, either, you know.”
Billy T. pushed his plate away and took a gulp of white wine from the huge glass with a splash of liquid at the bottom.
“What can I say?” he murmured. “Who could be interested in killing this Brede Ziegler?”
“Aha! Numerous candidates. Just look at the guy! He’s … Brede Ziegler was forty-seven and a social climber all his life. In the first place he had an amazing favorite hobby: picking fights with everything and everyone in the Norwegian culinary milieu. Secondly, he’s achieved great success in everything he has—”
“Do we actually know that?”
“… both economically and professionally. This place here …”
Now they both had a good look around.
The Entré restaurant represented the fashion pendulum’s swing back from the minimalist functionalism that had dominated the business in recent years. The tablecloths were voluminous, white, and swept the floor. The candlesticks were silver. The tables were placed asymmetrically in the room, some of them on small podiums ten or fifteen centimeters above the rest. From the first floor a staircase flowed down, reminiscent of something from a Fitzgerald novel. The interior architect had understood that nothing should block the massive sweep of old, ornamental timber, and had created a wide corridor of open floor space all the way to the entrance. Four crystal chandeliers of varying size were suspended from the ceiling. Billy T. fidgeted with a rainbow-hued reflection of light shimmering on the tablecloth in front of him.
“… was a success from day one. The food, the interior, the ambience … Have you not read the reviews?”
“The wife,” Billy T. said wearily. “Has anyone spoken to his wife?”
“Farris mineral water, please. Blue. No ice cubes.”
Severin Heger nodded to a waiter.
“She’s in Hamar. Went to her mother’s before any of us had managed to talk to her properly. The clergyman arrived, the girl cried, and an hour later she was on the train. It’s understandable to some extent that she might need some motherly comfort. She’s only twenty-five.”
“Twenty-four,” Billy T. corrected him, polishing off the last of the wine in his glass. “Vilde Veierland Ziegler is only twenty-four years old.”
“Which means that our friend Brede was pretty well exactly … twice as old as his wife.”
“Almost.”
The waiter, who had just removed the catastrophic remains of the first course, made a fresh attempt. The plate was bigger this time, but the food was equally impregnable. Islands of mashed potato were arranged into a defensive fort around a piece of Dover sole decorated with thin strips of something that had to be carrot and something indefinably green.
“It looks like a fucking game of Pick-Up Sticks,” Billy T. said despondently. “How on earth do people eat food like this? What the hell is wrong with steak and French fries?”
“I can eat it then,” Severin offered. “Thanks.”
The waiter deposited a glass of Farris with a sprig of mint hanging on the rim in front of him and vanished.
“No, you bloody won’t. That dish cost three hundred kroner! What are these green streaks in the sauce? Confectioner’s coloring?”
“Pesto, I think. Go ahead and try it. They had only been married for six or seven months.”
“I know. Do we know anything about his assets, inheritance, will, and so on? Does everything go to his wife?”
Severin Heger’s gaze shifted to a couple in their forties who had lingered for some time at the condolence book. The man was wearing a tuxedo, the woman an eggshell-colored dress that would have been more appropriate at another season. Her skin looked dull and pale against the heavy silk fabric. When she turned around, Severin could see that she was weeping. He looked away when their eyes met.
“You haven’t ordered red wine with the sole?”
The waiter poured another glass without blinking.
“My sister says you can drink red wine with white fish,” Billy T. said stubbornly and took a demonstratively large swig.
“Cod, yes! Halibut, maybe … But Dover sole? It’s up to you. And no, we know next to nothing about money and suchlike. Karianne and Karl are working their socks off. We’ll know a lot more tomorrow.”
“Do you know that his real name is Freddy Johansen?” Billy T. said with a grin.
“Who?”
“Brede Ziegler. He was damn well called Freddy Johansen until he was grown-up. What a show-off. Pathetic. Changing your name – honestly. Especially for a man—”
“And you say that, though you dropped your own surname twenty years ago!”
“That’s different. Completely different. This is tasty, in fact.”
“It looks good. Wipe your chin.”
Billy T. unfolded the stiff linen napkin and rubbed his jaw.
“I spoke to Forensics this afternoon. Ziegler was very unlucky. That knife wound—”
He raised his own knife and directed the blade at his chest.
“It struck here approximately. If it had gone in just a couple of centimeters farther to the right, then Ziegler would still be alive.”
“Oh, shit.”
“You can well say that.”
“Did they know anything more? Force – I mean, above and down, the other way around, left-handed murderer, small man, strong man. Woman? That sort of thing.”
“Nothing at all. They’re not clairvoyant, either, you know. But something more will be forthcoming. Eventually. Aren’t you going to eat at all?”
“I’ve eaten. But you … My goodness, there’s Wenche Foss!”
Severin Heger spoke in a whisper and tried to avert his eyes.
“Well, then,” Billy T. said. “She is allowed to go out, you know. What did you mean when you said that everyone and his aunt could have had a motive for killing Brede Ziegler? Apart from that the guy had a career, I mean.”
“I thought she only went to the Theater Café.”
“Hel-lo.”
“Sorry. I’ve spoken to Karianne—”
Severin tried to keep his eyes fixed on Billy T.
“And got some kind of summary of the witness statements up till now. Although we’re used to everybody jabbering away about ‘oh, so shocking’ and ‘no, I can’t think of anyone who would want to kill the man’ and … This case is entirely different. The witnesses seem shaken, of course, and that sort of thing, but all the same, they are … Not exactly shocked. Not the way we’re used to. They all have thoughts about who might have done it. They speculate indiscriminately without batting an eyelid.”
“That could have more to do with the witnesses themselves than our homicide victim. Many of the people who surround a guy like Ziegler are attention-seekers. They just want to make themselves seem interesting.”
The First Lady of the National Theater had positioned herself at the condolence book, together with a young curly-mopped actor.
“Is it permissible to read what people write in that book over there, do you think?” Severin Heger asked.
“No. For fuck’s sake, you’ve become fixated on celebrities! Get a grip.”
“We should’ve had Hanne Wilhelmsen here,” Severin Heger said all of a sudden as he straightened his back. “This case is just up her street.”
Billy T. laid down his cutlery, clenched his fists, and smacked them down on the table on either side of his plate.
“She’s not here,” he said slowly without looking Severin in the eye. “She’s not coming, either. There’s you, me, Karianne, and Karl, as well as five or six other investigators if it turns out we need them. We don’t need Hanne Wilhelmsen.”
“Okay, then. I was just trying to make conversation.”
“Fine,” Billy T. said, sounding exhausted. “The syringe. Have you found out anything else about that?”
“No. It was lying right beside the body, and looked as if it had just been dropped there. It doesn’t need to have anything to do with the murder. Or have you heard anything different from Forensics?”
“No.”
The dessert was microscopic and devoured in thirty seconds flat. Billy T. waved for the bill.
“We’re leaving,” he said as he paid in cash. “This place isn’t for the likes of us.”
He came to a sudden halt at the exit door.
“Suzanne,” he said softly. “Suzanne, is it you?”
Severin Heger stopped as well, his eyes appraising the woman. Tall, slim bordering on morbidly skinny, she was dramatically dressed in a blue-and-black outfit. Her face was pale and narrow, and her hair drawn back from her forehead. She looked as if she wanted to offer Billy T. her hand, but changed her mind and instead gave a perfunctory nod of her head.
“B.T.,” she said quietly. “Long time no see.”
“Yes, I … What are you doing …? Lovely to see you.”
“Could you please decide whether you’re coming or going?” the head waiter, a strange-looking man with an over-large head, said with a smile. “You’re blocking the door standing there.”
“I’m coming in,” the woman said.
“I’m going out,” Billy T. added.
“Hello,” Severin Heger said.
“Perhaps we’ll bump into each other another time,” the woman said, disappearing into the restaurant.
The December night was unusually mild. Billy T. turned his face up to the black sky.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Severin Heger said. “Someone who’s allowed to call you B.T., eh!”
Billy T. did not answer.
He had more than enough to contend with, struggling to keep his body calm. He held his breath to avoid gasping. Suddenly he broke into a run.
“Bye, then,” Severin shouted. “See you tomorrow morning.”
Billy T. was already too far away to hear.
Neither of the two police officers had noticed a young man peering into the restaurant through the window that overlooked Sofienberggata. He was holding his hands like a funnel around his eyes and had been loitering there for some time.
Severin Heger had turned his back on Billy T. and started to walk east. If he had taken the opposite direction, an automatic reflex might have made him talk to the boy.
At least he would have, if he had seen the young man’s face.
* * *
Interview with witness Sebastian Kvie, edited extract
Interviewed by police officer Silje Sørensen. Transcript typed by office colleague Rita Lyngåsen. There are in total two tapes of this interview. The interview was recorded on tape on Tuesday December 7, 1999 at Oslo police headquarters.
Witness:
Kvie, Sebastian, ID number 161179 48062
Address: Herslebsgate 4, 0561 Oslo
Employment: Entré Restaurant, Oslo
Given information about witness rights and responsibilities. Willing to provide a statement.
The witness was informed that the interview would be taped, and a transcript produced later.
Interviewer:
Can you first of all tell us something about what you do? About what connection you have with the deceased and that sort of thing? (Coughing, some unclear speech.)
Witness:
I’ve worked at Entré since it opened. That was on March 1 this year. (Paper rustling, mumbling in the background.) I qualified in catering at Sogn High School in the spring of ’98. I worked for a few months at the Hotel Continental immediately afterwards. Then I was traveling in Latin America for a while. Nine weeks, in fact. Brede Ziegler said that he’d heard about me from others, and wanted me for Entré. It goes without saying that I fucking wanted the job. I was really happy that a guy like him had heard about me as well. The pay is shit-awful, but it always is when you haven’t yet made a name for yourself.
Interviewer:
How … did you like it?
Witness:
Basically, I’ve worked non-stop since I started. For instance, I didn’t get a summer holiday this year. I’m meant to be off every Monday and every second Wednesday. But that’s only in principle. But what the fuck – I really enjoy it. Entré is the most exciting kitchen in the city right now. Both because … I mean … (Unclear speech.) Although I really only have to do what I’m asked, I learn a huge fucking amount. The head chef is very efficient, and quick to praise those of us who put in a bit of extra effort. Actually, all of us do that on the whole. Brede isn’t scared to lend a hand, either. He’s worked in the kitchen himself, five or six times at least. That’s bloody brilliant, when you think about all the other things he has to attend to. I mean, he fucking owns the whole place. Most of it, anyway. That’s the impression I’ve got, at any rate. I’ve heard that he owns a lot of other stuff too, but I’m not really sure what.
Interviewer:
I don’t like to be prudish, but it would help matters a great deal if you didn’t swear so much. This interview is going to be written down word for word from the tape recording. It actually looks pretty stupid in print.
Witness:
Oh yes. Sorry. I’ll be more careful.
Interviewer:
Did you know Brede Ziegler well?
Witness:
Well … well? He was my boss, of course. Chatted to me quite often, at work, I mean. But know him … (Longish pause.) He was older than me, you see. Much older. So we weren’t exactly friends. I can’t really say. It wasn’t as if we would go for a beer or to a football match together. (Laughter.) No. Not like that.
Interviewer:
Do you know who the deceased was actually friends with?
Witness:
Everybody! You name ’em!(Loud laughter.) There were loads of celebrities around Brede. They attached themselves to the guy. There was something about … Of course, I was quite shocked when I heard that Brede had been murdered. But he was really pretty controversial, you know. In the trade, I mean. He was so fucking … so damn successful! (Feeble laughter.) Apologies. Won’t swear. Sorry. (Pause.) Brede was the very best, you know. There must have been an incredible number of people who were jealous. It was as if everything he touched turned to gold. And loads of people out there are quite petty, you know. In our trade there’s a lot of jealousy. More than most, anyway. At least that’s my experience of it.
Interviewer:
Do I interpret you correctly if I say that it seems as if you … admired Brede Ziegler? Almost a bit star-struck?
Witness:
(Soft laughter, changing to coughing.) I read an article about Brede Ziegler in one of my mother’s weekly magazines when I was eleven. He’s kind of always been my hero, I guess. My greatest wish is to be like he was. Hugely accomplished and generous with it. For instance, I’ve heard he was thinking of giving each of us our own Masahiro knife for Christmas. With our name on it and all that. Sort of engraved on the handle, you know. Maybe it was only rumor, but I’ve heard that anyway. It would be just like Brede. (Lengthy pause, paper rustling.) He always remembered names. Even the people who come and go in the dishwashing section, he talked to them as if he knew them well. I will say that Brede Ziegler had great insight into people. And he was the best chef in Norway. Without a doubt, if you ask me.
Interviewer:
Did you know the deceased’s wife?
Witness:
I met her only once. I think, anyway. She’s called Vilde or Vibeke, or something like that. Much younger than Brede. Pretty. She popped in once a couple of months ago to pick him up. Didn’t get any particular impression of her. I’ve no idea if she’s in the habit of eating at Entré, since I’m in the kitchen all evening, and it’s rare for me to get time to peek out into the restaurant. That day she came to collect Brede, we weren’t open yet. I was standing talking to Claudio, the head waiter. She didn’t say hello to us. Maybe seemed a bit high-and-mighty. Maybe she was just in a hurry.
Interviewer:
Have you—
Witness (interrupts):
You really shouldn’t ever listen to rumors. But I’ve heard that Brede snatched the girlfriend from a boy who’s not so very much older than me. Twenty-five or -six, maybe. I don’t know the guy, but he’s called Sindre something-or-other and works at the Stadtholdergaarden. Smart guy, I’ve heard. But that’s just rumor, you know.
Interviewer:
What do you think, then? (Pause, sound of chair scraping, somebody entering the room, sounds of something being poured into a glass.)
Witness:
About what?
Interviewer:
About this whole business.
Witness:
I’ve no idea who killed Brede. But if I were to take a guess, it’s most likely that it has something to do with jealousy. Crazy, of course, totally crazy to kill someone just because you don’t like them being successful at this or that, but that’s what I believe anyway. As for myself, I was in the kitchen at Entré on Sunday evening. I arrived between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, and didn’t go home until after two that night. I was with other people the entire time, apart from the three or four times I had to go for a pee.
Interviewer’s note: The witness gave a good, coherent statement. The witness was provided with coffee and water during the interview.
5
“Stazione termini. Il treno perMilano.”
The manager had followed her to the taxi that was waiting outside the gate beside the dry-stone wall. He chided the driver and expressed concern about Hanne Wilhelmsen’s sudden departure.
“Signora, why can’t you wait – very good flight from Verona tomorrow!”
But Hanne couldn’t wait. There was a plane to Gardermoen from Milan that same day. The train from Verona to Milan took less than two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes closer to home.
At passport control she felt faint. Perhaps it was her travel jacket. It had belonged to Cecilie. Like a vague memory, she caught a scent she had thought gone. Leaning against the counter, she waved on the people behind her.
The apartment.
Cecilie’s things.
Cecilie’s grave – she didn’t even know where it was.
An official handed her passport back. She could not summon the energy to take it. Her arm would not rise. Her elbow on the counter was aching. She counted to twenty, pulled herself together, snatched the burgundy-red booklet, and legged it. Out of the queue, out of the airport terminal, off the road leading to home.
Hanne Wilhelmsen was back in Verona. She had followed her very first impulse. From Verona there would be a flight to Oslo via Munich the next day.
She had hardly seen anything of the city. She had confined herself to the Villa Monasteria and the hills around the old convent since she had arrived in July. To begin with, the students had tried to entice her to Verona at weekends; it took less than fifteen minutes by car. Hanne had never succumbed.
The long series of days from brownish-yellow summer to wet December had assuaged some of the pain that had paralyzed her the night Cecilie had died. In a way, Hanne had moved on. All the same, she needed more time. Just twenty-four hours. In twenty-four hours she would board the flight to Norway.
She would go home to the apartment with all Cecilie’s more or less half-completed renovation projects. Hanne would go home to Cecilie’s clothes that still lay neatly folded and sorted in one half of the wardrobe in their bedroom, beside Hanne’s unsystematic chaos of trousers and sweaters.
She would search out Cecilie’s grave.
Hanne stood in Piazza Bra in Verona, struggling to shut her ears to the clamor of the city. When she reluctantly listened, it was composed only of voices. The city traffic was shut off from the extensive square. The shouts ricocheted off the ancient marble walls surrounding the Arena di Verona in the center of the city and reverberated back across all the market stalls, at which hundreds of vendors sold sausages and crockery, car vacuum cleaners and gaudy finery per la donna.
Her rucksack chafed her shoulder. She wandered aimlessly, away from the teeming crowds of humanity, into the shade; a side street. She had to find a hotel. A place where she could leave her luggage, spend the night and prepare herself for the long journey home. She wasn’t sure whether it had already started.
6
The morning meeting should have commenced twelve minutes ago. Billy T. had not yet shown his face. Karianne Holbeck had fixed her gaze on a hook screwed into the ceiling just above the door, trying to avoid looking at the clock. Sergeant Karl Sommarøy had pulled out a Swiss knife and was gently whittling the bowl of a pipe.
“Far too big,” he explained to whoever was interested. “Doesn’t sit well in my hand.”
“Do you use studded or unstudded tires?”
“Eh?”
Glancing up, Karl Sommarøy brushed some shavings from his trousers.
“I’m not giving up studded tires, anyway,” Severin Heger commented. “I’m going to pay the fucking fine for as long as that’s allowed. Yesterday morning, for instance, when I was going out—”
“Good morning, folks.”
Billy T. crashed through the door and slammed a ring binder down on the desk.
“Coffee.”
“Say the magic word,” Severin commanded.
“Coffee, for fuck’s sake!”
“Okay, okay. Here you are! You can have mine. I haven’t touched it.”
Billy T. raised the cup halfway to his mouth, but put it down again with a grimace.
“Let’s summarize what we have, and then divide up the assignments for the next forty-eight hours. Something like that. Severin. You go first.”
Severin Heger had traipsed around on the very top floors of police headquarters for years on end. He had enjoyed working for the Security Service. It was exciting, varied, and gave him a sense of importance. An exhausting period of scandals and carpet-bombing from a unified Norwegian press corps had not eradicated his enthusiasm for the job that he had aspired to ever since he had been old enough to understand what his father did for a living. Severin Heger enjoyed the work, but nevertheless always felt scared.
At the age of eighteen he had reluctantly reconciled himself to the idea that he was gay. It would not prevent him from reaching the goals he had set for himself. On his twentieth birthday – after a puberty filled with competitive sports, soccer, and incessant wanking – he decided never to tell anyone, never to show anything that might betray what would cause his father to kill himself, if he ever got to hear. His father had sailed with Shetlands Larsen during the war, and had been highly decorated for his efforts for his homeland. In the fifties and sixties he had worked for the Police Security Service. That was when Communists lurked in every trade union, and the Cold War was truly icebound. Severin was an only child and a daddy’s boy, and only once did the façade crack, when he had attempted to chat up Billy T. He was solicitously rejected, and since then Billy T. had never uttered a single word about the episode.
The Head of Security Services had been forced to resign in the wake of the Furre scandal, when Berge Furre, a respected historian and former Socialist Left politician, was himself investigated by the Security Service while serving on the Lund Commission, set up to look into the activities of the self-same Security Service. This resulted in the appointment of the first female boss of the Police Security Service, though her tenure proved short-lived. Before she left, though, she had managed to summon Severin Heger to her office and declare: “It’s not a security risk that you’re gay, Severin. What’s suspicious is that you put so much energy into hiding the fact. Give in. Look around you. We’re approaching a new millennium.”
Severin recalled that he had stood up without giving an answer. Then he had gone home, slept for a long time, got up, taken a shower, and, smelling sweet, had paid a visit to the gay club Castro that same evening. After spending a night making up for lost time, he requested a transfer to the Crime Section. His father had died two years earlier. Severin Heger finally felt liberated.
“All we know for certain are the following—”
He tapped his fingers one by one on the edge of the table.
