Blessed Are Those Who Thirst: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (20 page)

Now Billy T. moved his colossal frame from the window ledge. His backside was cold after sitting on the dilapidated fresh air system for twenty minutes. Maneuvering himself around Hanne Wilhelmsen, he came to a stop with his arm leaning against a shiny bookshelf, as he peered down at the witness.

“Now we’ll get straight to the point, Iversen,” he said. “Where do you usually hang out on the weekends?”

The man did not respond. The scratching was now pronounced.

“Stop that,” Hanne Wilhelmsen ordered, irritated.

Though Cato Iversen was becoming desperate, it barely registered. The two police officers studied him intently but still could not see anything other than a touch of nervousness. Iversen had no idea what to say. Therefore he blurted out the truth.

“I drive a pickup,” he said softly.

Billy T. and Hanne exchanged looks, and both smiled.

“You drive a pickup,” Hanne repeated slowly.

“Did you drive your pickup on Saturday, May twenty-ninth, too? What about Sunday the thirtieth?”

Bloody hell. They had him. All the other stuff was simply window dressing. Despite Hanne Wilhelmsen’s outburst a minute earlier, he was scratching his left hand desperately. It had become painful, so he stopped.

“I want to speak to an attorney,” he exclaimed suddenly. “I’m saying nothing further until I get to speak to an attorney.”

“But my dear man, Iversen,” Billy T. said smooth as silk, crouching down in front of him. “You aren’t accused of anything.”

“But I’m suspected of something,” Iversen replied, and now they could see he had tears in his eyes. “And so I need an attorney.”

Leaning across her desk, Hanne switched off the tape recorder.

“Iversen. Let one thing be crystal clear. We are interviewing you now as a witness. You do not have the status of either a suspect or an accused. Ergo you have no need of an attorney. Ergo you have the right to walk out of this room and out of this building whenever you like. If you nevertheless choose to have a chat with an attorney, and have another conversation with us afterward, you are of course free to do so.”

She grabbed the telephone and placed it directly in front of him. Then she slapped the Yellow Pages beside it.

“Go ahead,” she invited him, checking quickly around the little office to see whether there was anything he should not access. She grasped a bundle of case files and, taking Billy T. with her, headed for the door, where she paused.

“We’ll be back in ten minutes,” she said.

*   *   *

It turned out to be rather more than a mere ten minutes. They sat in the operations room, each with a glass of Hanne’s morning brew. The ice had melted, the sugar had sunk to the bottom of the nearly depleted container, and with the tannin the drink was not nearly as refreshing as it had been several hours earlier.

“Now he’ll haul himself in,” Billy T. said. “We didn’t need to say very much.”

“Your appearance alone can frighten the most innocent of people into confessing anything at all.” Hanne grinned, draining her glass. “What’s more, I don’t know if he’s quite ready to be pulled in.”

“Something’s making him quake, that’s for sure,” Billy T. remarked. “That’s my opinion. But I’ve got to go. I’m wiped. You probably are too,” he added, attempting to make eye contact.

She did not respond and simply raised her empty glass in a
hollow toast as he left the room, to be replaced by Erik Henriksen storming in.

“I found her,” he puffed. “She was actually on her way here! She was standing right in the doorway! What were you wanting her for?”

*   *   *

It took only an hour and a half to organize a face-to-face. There appeared to be a surprising number of broad-shouldered, blond men with receding hairlines in the police. Five of them were now standing in company with Cato Iversen in the identity parade room. On the other side of a one-way glass window, Kristine Håverstad stood biting her nails.

This was not why she had come, of course. She had almost collided with the freckled police officer as she diffidently approached the police station. She still had time to retreat from her purpose when he, beaming with pleasure, had confirmed her identity and brought her inside. Luckily, she hadn’t needed to say anything at all.

Detective Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen appeared far more exhausted than she had barely a week prior. Her eyes seemed paler, her mouth tighter and more determined. The previous week, Kristine Håverstad had thought her strikingly beautiful. Now she was an ordinary woman with attractive features, wearing no makeup. She did not seem terribly enthusiastic either, though she was friendly and welcoming enough.

The six men followed one another into the room, like a flock of well-fed geese. When the first had reached the far end of the floor, they all turned to stare blindly into the windowpane. Kristine knew they could not see her.

He wasn’t there. They all looked alike. But none of them was the man who had attacked her. She felt tears well up. If only . . . if only it had been one of them. Then he would have been safe from her father. She could attempt to patch up her life again. She would be spared from warning the police that her own father
was planning to commit a murder. Life would have been so totally different if it had only been one of them. But it wasn’t.

“Perhaps number two,” she blurted out.

What was she doing? It was definitely not number two. But by forcing them to hold one of them, she would be able to buy herself some time at least. Some time to think, some time to dissuade her father. A few days, perhaps, but something was always better than nothing.

“Or number three?”

She looked questioningly at Hanne Wilhelmsen, who however was sitting like a sphinx, looking directly ahead.

“Yes,” she decided. “Number two or number three. But I’m not at all sure.”

Detective Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen thanked her for her assistance, ushered her out, and was so disappointed she forgot to ask Kristine Håverstad what her original errand had been. It did not matter. Slinging her bag across a narrow shoulder, Kristine Håverstad disappeared from the police station, in the sure knowledge she would never have been able to bring herself to tell tales on her father.

Number two in the lineup was office worker Fredrik Andersen of the Subpoena section.

Number three was Police Sergeant Eirik Langbråtan, a pleasant fellow who was a crime desk operator. Cato Iversen, who had been number six in the row, received a handshake, a lackluster apology, and permission to leave.

Having reached the far end of Grønlandsleiret and out of sight of anyone watching him from the enormous curved building, Iversen entered the Lompa restaurant, where he bought himself two liters of beer all at once. Sitting down at a table tucked inside the premises, he lit a cigarette with trembling hands.

On the night of May 29, he had been on board the Danish ferry with a pickup loaded with smuggled liquor. That would never, ever happen again.

*   *   *

Virtually an entire working day had been wasted on a dead end. It was nothing less than disheartening. But this would not turn out to be the most dominant event in A 2.11 that day.

Chief Inspector Hans Olav Kaldbakken entered Hanne Wilhelmsen’s office for his daily briefing. He did not look good at all. Sitting down in the chair with stiff, labored movements, he lit himself a cigarette, his twentieth that day, though it was not yet half past three.

“Are we getting anywhere, Wilhelmsen?” he inquired hoarsely. “Have we anything else to go on apart from this . . . this Cato Iversen? For it can’t be him, can it?”

“No, it can’t be, true enough,” Hanne Wilhelmsen answered, massaging her temples.

The confirmation was a considerable understatement. Cato Iversen possibly had his own skeleton in the cupboard, but that would have to wait for another day. Hanne had a gut feeling Kristine Håverstad would have recognized her assailant. It puzzled her why the young woman had picked out two people who so evidently had not done her any harm. It may have been a deeply subconscious desire to give them something. But it had been worthy of note. She’d have to think about it another time.

“Saturday is approaching,” Kaldbakken said ponderously. “It’s getting terribly close to Saturday.”

He had a peculiar dialect and swallowed his words before they were completely enunciated. But Hanne Wilhelmsen had worked with the same boss for many years and always understood what he meant.

“It is indeed, Kaldbakken. It’s getting near to Saturday.”

“Do you know something,” he said, leaning toward her in an unusual display of familiarity. “Rapes are the worst things I know. I just can’t stand rapes. And I’ve been a policeman now for thirty years.”

He was momentarily lost in thought but quickly pulled himself together.

“For thirty-three years, to be precise. I started in 1960, which doesn’t exactly make me an old man.”

Giving a stern smile, he coughed violently.

“The sixties. Those were the days. It was good to be a policeman then. Well paid, so we were. More than industrial workers. Quite a lot more. People had respect for us in those times. Gerhardsen was still prime minister, and people were all pulling in the same direction.”

The smoke was already clogging the room. The man rolled his own cigarettes and was spitting tobacco in between his soft-spoken mumblings.

“At that time we had about two or three rapes a year. Terrible commotion. We usually got the bastard too. It was mostly men here then, and rapes were the worst crimes we knew. All of us. We didn’t give up until we’d caught them.”

Hanne Wilhelmsen had never experienced this. She had worked with the chief inspector for seven years and had never talked about anything more intimate than an upset stomach. For some reason, she took this as a bad sign.

Kaldbakken sighed deeply, and she could hear the gurgling in his overexerted bronchial tubes.

“But on the whole it’s been good being in the police,” he commented, gazing dreamily into space. “When you go to bed at night, you know you’re one of the good guys.

“And girls,” he added with a cautious smile. “It gives a meaning to your existence. At least it has up till now. After this spring, I don’t know, to tell the truth.”

Hanne Wilhelmsen well understood him. It had really been a dreadful year. For her, despite everything, things were going fairly easily. She was thirty-four years old, only just born when Kaldbakken, stiff and straight in his newly pressed uniform, had
been patrolling along the long, quiet streets of Oslo. She had a lot going for her. Kaldbakken did not. She came around to wondering how old he was. He looked well over sixty, but that couldn’t be right. He had to be younger than that.

“I haven’t got much left to give, Hanne,” he mumbled.

It scared her that he called her Hanne. Until today she had never been anything other than Wilhelmsen to him.

“That’s nonsense, Kaldbakken,” she ventured, but gave up when he brushed her aside.

“I know when it’s time to give in. I—”

A terrifying, violent paroxysm of coughing suddenly gripped him. It lasted for a disturbing length of time. Finally, Hanne Wilhelmsen stood up uncertainly and placed her hand on his back.

“Can I help you? Do you want a glass of water or something?”

When he leaned back in the chair, gasping for breath, she became seriously alarmed. His face was gray and pouring with sweat. Moving to the side, he struggled for air and then fell heavily. There was an awful crunching sound as he hit the floor.

Standing with her feet apart above the crumpled body, Hanne Wilhelmsen managed to turn him around and shout for help.

When there was no response after two seconds, she kicked the door open and shouted again.

“Call for an ambulance, for God’s sake! Phone for a doctor!”

She then set in with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her old, worn-out boss. Two breaths, then heart massage. Two breaths, and heart massage again. There was a snapping sound inside his chest, and she realized she had broken some ribs.

Erik Henriksen was standing in the doorway, bewildered and redder than ever.

“Heart massage,” she commanded, concentrating her efforts on his breathing.

The young lad squeezed and squeezed. Hanne Wilhelmsen
blew and blew. But when the paramedics stood at the door nine minutes later, Chief Inspector Hans Olav Kaldbakken was dead, at only fifty-six years of age.

*   *   *

In a drab, unattractive room in a boardinghouse in Lillehammer, the little Iranian woman from Kristine Håverstad’s block was sitting, brokenhearted. She was on her own, terribly far from home, with no one to ask for help. She had chosen Lillehammer completely by chance. Far enough away but not too expensive on the train. Moreover, she had heard of the folk museum at Maihaugen.

She should of course have spoken to the police. On the other hand, you couldn’t always rely on them. She knew that from hard-earned experience. Quite intuitively, she had felt confidence in the young female officer who had spoken to her briefly the previous Monday. But what did she know, a little woman from Iran, about who could be trusted?

Taking out her Koran, she sat leafing through the pages. She read a little here and there but found no words of comfort or advice. After two hours, she fell asleep and did not wake until it struck her she had hardly eaten anything in two whole days.

*   *   *

As expected, her boss had been as cross as two sticks. She had apologized, promising him a doctor’s note. Wherever she would get that from now. The emergency doctor, perhaps. At the Rape Crisis Center they had been friendly and courteous when she had gone there for the most humiliating examination imaginable the previous Sunday. All the same, she was reluctant to go there and ask. Well, she’d have to deal with that problem later. Grumpy and dismissive, her boss had muttered something about the youth of today. Kristine couldn’t be bothered being provoked. She had never been out sick before.

“Kristine!”

Radiant with happiness, one of them grabbed hold of her. It was unbelievable that he was eighty-one years old. Unbelievable, since he had been in the navy for five years during the war and after that an alcoholic for almost fifty. But he stood his ground, in obstinate protest against the lack of recognition afforded to him and his long-dead shipmates.