Burned (27 page)

Perhaps I’m just paranoid, he thinks, perhaps I’ve been out of the game too long to know that this is completely normal, that nothing is going to happen? But there was something about the way Brogeland spoke which got his attention. Brogeland was worried. He knows about this gang. And as Nora said: they’re not nice people.

He catches himself wondering how this is all going to end. If they are trying to kill him – as Brogeland hinted – because he can place Yasser Shah in Tariq Marhoni’s flat, they won’t stop until they have succeeded.

Chapter 48

Henning needs to check a couple of things. When he arrives at the office, he is thinking about them and practically collides with Kåre Hjeltland at the coffee machine. Kåre is about to step aside, when he sees who it is.

‘Henning.’

‘Hi, Kåre,’ Henning replies. Kåre gazes at him as if he were Elvis.

‘How are you? Bloody hell. Bloody hell, you must have been scared shitless?’

Henning reluctantly agrees that he was a little scared, yes, he probably was.

‘What the hell happened?’

Henning takes a step back and hopes that Kåre won’t notice. While he gives him the abbreviated version, he checks the room. Gundersen isn’t there. But he spots Heidi. And he can see that Heidi has spotted him.

‘Listen, I didn’t manage to get back to the staff meeting,’ he says. ‘I heard Sture was going to say a few words?’

‘Yes, a lot of fun that was, he-he. Same old story. You were lucky, you had a good reason for getting away, away, AWAY!’

Kåre grins from ear to ear, once his tic has died down.

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing we haven’t heard before. Bad times, you lot need to generate more pages and do it faster, if we’re to avoid cuts and boo fucking hoo.’

Kåre laughs and smiles – for a long time. Heidi would probably enjoy cutting me right now, Henning thinks. But he’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it.

He excuses himself by saying he needs a word with Heidi before he goes home for the day. Kåre understands and slaps him hard on the shoulder, three times. Then he is off again. Henning decides to strike first.

‘Hello, Heidi,’ he says. She turns her head.

‘Why the hell –’

‘Bad times, slowdown in the advertising market, we need to deliver more pages, cuts.’

He sits down without looking at her. He feels her eyes on him and is reminded of the North Pole.

‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

He turns on his computer. Heidi clears her throat.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Working. Is Iver around?’

Heidi doesn’t reply immediately.

‘Er, no. He has gone home.’

He is still not making eye contact with her and tries to remain unaffected by the unpleasant silence which envelops them. Heidi doesn’t move. When Henning finally looks up, he is surprised by the expression in her eyes. She looks like she has had a puncture and there is no sight of a bus stop for miles.

‘I’m close to breaking a really good story,’ he says in a milder voice and tells her about his meetings with Yngve Foldvik and Tore Benjaminsen, tells her that the police will soon eliminate Mahmoud Marhoni as a suspect, and that from now on, the focus of the investigation will be on Henriette Hagerup’s closest circle of friends. He doesn’t mention his sources, but Heidi nods all the same and doesn’t pressure him.

‘Sounds very good,’ she says. ‘Will it be an exclusive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great.’

The sting in her voice has gone. Perhaps I’ve finally broken her, Henning thinks. Perhaps I have won The Battle. Or perhaps she is like Anette Skoppum. Perhaps she is one of those people who keep trying, only to get deeply upset when they fail.

Ten minutes later, Heidi goes home. She even calls out ‘take care!’ He says ‘you too’. Then his thoughts return to the three things he has come to check. He starts with Spot the Difference Productions.

Neat name. He guesses that whoever set up the company was fed up with continuity errors in films and their manifesto is never to make such howlers themselves. He looks forward to the newspaper headlines the day Spot the Difference Productions actually make some. They must be tempting fate.

He reads everything he can find about the company on the Internet. They have produced a couple of films, which he hasn’t seen yet and has no intention of ever seeing. They have a website, whose homepage is a collage of continuity errors from different Hollywood productions. He recognises photos from
Gladiator, Ocean’s 11, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man, Titanic, Lord of the Rings
and
Jurassic Park
. There are more, but he can’t place them off the top of his head. It says
‘Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been
seen
’ in a small font at the bottom of the page, and the quote is attributed to Robert Bresson.

He clicks away and finds the page with contact details. Spot the Difference Productions have two producers and a director on their staff. He decides to call the first person on the list, for no reason other than he has such a fine first name. He rings Henning Enoksen’s mobile. The call is answered after several long rings.

‘Hello, Enok here.’

The voice is dark and deep, but welcoming.

‘Hi, my name is Henning Juul.’

‘Hello, Henning,’ Enoksen says, greeting Henning like an old friend.

‘I work for the on-line newspaper,
123news
. I’m working on a story about Henriette Hagerup.’

A moment of silence follows.

‘I see. How can I help you?’

Henning quickly explains that he is curious about the screenplay written by Henriette Hagerup, which Spot the Difference Productions had taken out an option on.

‘Hagerup, yes,’ Enoksen sighs. ‘A tragedy.’

‘Yes, it is,’ Henning says and waits for Enoksen to add something. He doesn’t. Henning clears his throat.

‘Can you tell me anything about the script?’

‘Will you be writing about this?’

‘No, I doubt it.’

‘Then why do you want to know? Didn’t you just say you were a reporter?’

Enoksen’s powers of deduction are impressive.

‘I’ve a hunch that the script might be important.’

‘Why?’

Something tells him that Enoksen was a right pain at school.

‘To find out what happened, to find out who killed her.’

‘Right.’

‘So, please, would you tell me about the script, which you must have liked, since you took out an option on it?’

He hears mouse clicking in the background, fingers skating across a keyboard.

‘Well, to be honest, it was mostly my co-producer, Truls, who was in touch with her.’

‘So you’ve never read the script?’

‘Ah, well, obviously –’

‘What’s it about?’

More clicking.

‘It’s about –’

He pauses to cough.

‘It’s about, eh, I don’t actually know what it’s about. Like I said, it was Truls who dealt with Henriette and Yngve, and –’

‘Yngve?’

‘Yes?’

‘Yngve Foldvik?’

‘Correct. Do you know him?’

‘Was Yngve Foldvik involved with the script?’

‘He was her supervisor, I think.’

‘Yes, but I thought she’d written the script in her own time? Not as part of her coursework?’

Enoksen hesitates.

‘I don’t really know anything about that.’

Henning decides he needs another chat with Yngve Foldvik.

‘Do you and Truls normally buy options on scripts you haven’t discussed?’

‘No, this was a special case.’

‘How?’

‘Truls and Yngve used to work together, Yngve tipped us off about Hagerup’s script.’

‘I see.’

‘But remember, it was only an option.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means we think the script has potential and we want to develop the idea, see if we can turn it into a decent film.’

‘You’re not obliged to do anything more?’

‘That’s right.’

That question came automatically while Henning’s brain was busy absorbing the information he had just been given. Yngve Foldvik was actively involved in a project that Henriette Hagerup hoped would launch her career. Henning wonders if Foldvik’s interest extends to all his students, or if his enthusiasm is reserved for pretty young women with an outgoing personality and a flirtatious streak.

‘Do you think I could have a quick word with Truls?’ Henning asks, while he checks the company’s contact details and reads that Truls’s surname is Leirvåg.

‘Er, he’s a bit busy right now,’ Enoksen says, quickly.

‘Okay.’

He deliberately waits a few seconds. But Enoksen doesn’t elaborate.

‘I’ll try him on his mobile later. If you could tell him that I would like a word, that would be great.’

‘I’ll try to remember that.’

‘Thank you.’

Henning hangs up, wondering what was on the tip of Enoksen’s tongue.

Chapter 49

A couple of quick Internet searches inform him that Henriette’s parents are called Vebjørn and Linda, and that she has an older brother, Ole Petter. He looks up Anette Skoppum. Her parents, Ulf Vidar and Frøydis, are both over seventy, so Anette is most definitely an afterthought. She has three older sisters, Kirsten (thirty-eight), Silje (forty-one) and Torill (forty-four). In a matter of minutes, Henning has established that neither the Hagerups nor the Skoppums are a good match for the Gaarder family in the script.

He drops the idea and visits a public register of licences. Here, you can search for information from three different categories: 1) Business Type and Named Licence Holder. 2) Licences. 3) Applications for Cross-county Routes. The page is produced by the Department of Transport in collaboration with Hordeland County Council, which might explain the convoluted language.

Henning moves the cursor to box 2, selects ‘Oslo’ and ‘Taxi Licences’ and types in the serial number ‘2052’. Then he hits
‘enter’
. The answer pops up instantly. And his heart skips a beat.

Omar Rabia Rashid.

He knows where he has heard that name before. Omar Rabia Rashid is the man Mahmoud Marhoni was driving a minicab for. It wasn’t a coincidence. Why else would Omar’s taxi be there, in that very place? Why else would those two men be staring at him?

Omar is registered as having three minicabs in Oslo. The number three is blue and when he clicks on it, a page entitled ‘Information about the Licence Holder’ appears. It sounds a dead end, he thinks, but is pleasantly surprised at the text which fills the screen a few seconds later. He skims through it and smiles. Omar, he thinks.

I know where you live.

*

He decides to go home. The urge to sit down, have a think and work out what to do next is impossible to ignore. He waits until some of his colleagues, two women, get up and he follows them. They exit the office building. The black gate is open. He leaves some space between him and the women, walks down the pavement and checks the street. Two large stones divide Urtegata in half, making it impossible to drive in the direction of Grønland.

A Honda and a Ford are parked behind the stones. Both are empty. There is a man with a mangy-looking dog lying at his feet outside the Salvation Army building. If he were to suddenly jump up and pull out a Kalashnikov, Henning is prepared for that. He is surrounded by open spaces, the River Aker flows quickly down the hill, and it would be easy to point the mouth of a gun out of a car window and start firing.

No. That’s enough. He has to stop looking for assassins. He has only been back at work for a few days, and already he has managed to convince himself that hardened criminals are trying to kill him. Enough. I don’t want to live like this, he tells himself.

He decides to stroll along, take his time and enjoy the afternoon sun, which has broken through the dense layer of clouds over Oslo Plaza. He approaches Grünerløkka with a growing sense of composure. And when he lets himself into his flat, he decides to take no notice of the smoke alarms. He is about to go into the kitchen, when he stops in his tracks.

Damn, he thinks. There is no way I can ignore them.

Chapter 50

I’m so looking forward to this, Brogeland tells himself, when he knocks on Gjerstad’s door. Gjerstad’s deep voice shouts out ‘come in.’ Brogeland enters. Gjerstad has his telephone pressed against his ear, but he gestures towards the chair in front of his desk. Brogeland sits down. If only Sandland could be here now, he thinks, then maybe –

Gjerstad is listening and making ‘hm’ noises. He listens for a long time, before he finally nods and says:

‘Okay. Then that’s how we’ll do it. Keep me posted.’

He hangs up and looks at Brogeland.

‘Yes,’ he says with a sigh. There is a hint of weariness in his voice, but Brogeland pays no attention to it. This is his moment. He places Hagerup’s script on the desk and looks expectantly at Gjerstad, who picks it up and starts flicking through it.

Brogeland spends the next few minutes summarising. When he has finished, Gjerstad isn’t looking at him with satisfaction. Quite the opposite.

‘And you got this from Henning Juul?’

‘Yes. Juul is –’

‘Let me tell you something about Henning Juul,’ Gjerstad snarls and stands up. He starts pacing to and fro.

‘Some years ago, a man was killing prostitutes in Oslo. He was no Jack the Ripper, far from it, but he murdered some girls from Nigeria and threatened to kill some more unless we took them off the streets. He contacted us directly to announce his intentions.’

‘I remember the case. If –’

‘There was obviously no way we could do that, even if we wanted to. Firstly, we never give in to threats of that type, and secondly, the girls move around all the time and their pimps protect them.’

Gjerstad strokes his moustache and stops right in front of Brogeland.

‘Henning Juul found out that the killer was talking to us and had warned of further attacks. When the next Nigerian girl turned up with forty-seven stab wounds to her back, stomach, chest and face, Juul launched a major campaign. Hung us out to dry as the Big Bad Wolf because we hadn’t responded to the killer’s threats. To top it all, Juul tracked down the killer himself and interviewed him – without letting us know, so we could arrest him. Bottom line, Juul cared more about making us look like idiots than catching a killer. What does that tell you about Henning Juul?’