Pierced (30 page)

He tries to laugh it off, but Nylund isn’t amused. ‘It’s no secret, Nylund, that you employ people who have links to criminal gangs. You wouldn’t happen to know a man in that business who is slim, tall and always wears his hair in a ponytail?’

Nylund looks at him, smiles wryly. ‘Did you say your name was Gundersen?

‘Yes.’

‘You ask some strange questions, Gundersen.’

‘Someone has to.’

‘Are we done?’

‘So you don’t know anyone who fits that description?’

Nylund shoots him a condescending smile. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I can help you.’

‘Okay. Thanks for your time.’

Nylund abandons his still half-full glass and walks up the spiral staircase to the first floor. This is taking too long, Iver frets. How the hell does Henning get these people to talk? Just for once he would have loved to tell Henning something he didn’t already know.

Henning is munching a slice of crispbread and rereading his own article about Thorleif Brenden when his mobile rings. It is Bjarne Brogeland. The inspector skilfully ignores pleasantries.

‘I’ve seen the video footage,’ he says. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’

Henning swallows and tells Brogeland his suspicions about Brenden’s clenched fist and Pulli’s sudden, perturbed look.

‘It’s not a particularly good camera angle, but something happens while Brenden has his hands on Pulli’s back,’ Henning tells him.

Silence. He reaches towards the windowsill and turns off the fan. The hum in the kitchen stops and the heat immediately starts sticking to him.

‘Have you discovered the cause of Pulli’s death yet?’ he asks.

‘The preliminary autopsy report provided no answers except that . . . ’

Brogeland stops.

‘Except what?’

‘I can’t tell you, Henning. Sorry, I—’

‘Come on, Bjarne, you know I won’t write anything that would harm your investigation.’

Brogeland exhales. ‘They found an abnormal lesion on his neck.’

‘From what?’ Henning asks eagerly.

‘They don’t know. But it could be a tiny prick. From a needle or something similar.’

‘A needle,’ Henning mutters, remembering what Dr Omdahl told him about nerve toxins. In which case it must have been a highly poisonous substance.

‘Clever,’ Henning says. ‘Tore Pulli was a diabetic. And he used to have loads of piercings.’

‘So what?’

‘When we met, I asked him if he had grown used to needles and injecting himself with insulin. He said that he hardly noticed it these days.’

Henning smiles to himself. It was a clever plan.

‘I spoke to his girlfriend earlier today. She showed me the drawing Brenden left under her pillow. Was she any help?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you produced an E-fit of this guy Brenden is talking about? Do you know who he is?’

‘Not yet,’ Brogeland replies. ‘But we’re working on it.’

Henning nods. ‘So when can I write that Tore Pulli was murdered?’

‘We’re not sure about the cause of his death yet, Henning. And you can’t start speculating either, or we run the risk that whoever could have been behind it will disappear.’

‘Okay,’ Henning sighs.

When they have ended the call, Henning listens to the silence in the flat. He has a bad feeling about this. Even though Brogeland refuses to be drawn, it looks very much as if Pulli was murdered, probably poisoned. But will they be able to detect which kind of poison was used? The final autopsy report won’t be ready for two months, at the earliest. And even if they do find evidence of poisoning, how will they trace it back to the people who made Brenden kill Pulli?

Henning logs on to FireCracker 2.0 again, but 6tiermes7 isn’t online. Then his mobile vibrates. A text message from Iver.

Sorry. Small catch from Åsgard. Iver.

Henning rings Iver immediately. Two heads are better than one, he thinks, and presses the mobile to his ear while he waits. It takes only a few seconds before Iver’s recorded message can be heard. He must be on another call. Perhaps he is talking to Nora, arranging to go over to hers when he has finished work. Or perhaps he is asking if he can go over there straight away.

Thinking about Nora and Iver shouldn’t hurt so much. Not any more. But he can’t dodge the punch that hits his chest every time. He can’t just erase his ex-wife like a typo.

Henning waits a few minutes before he tries Iver again. Same result. He looks at his watch. A quarter to eleven. Glumly, he hobbles to the bathroom and cleans his teeth, changes the compresses under his feet and tries calling Iver a third time when he has finished. And yet again he gets Iver’s voicemail.

Never mind, Henning thinks, and decides to call it a night.

Iver takes a deep breath as soon as he leaves Åsgard and instantly feels better for it. Cleaner, too, now that he thinks about it, even though the summer night is still humid.

He tries to look inconspicuous, desperate to avoid meeting anyone he knows on his way out of a club no one can claim is selling anything other than fantasies and orgasms. He decides to head home. Right now the thought of crashing with a cold beer in front of the television is more tantalising than a night-time visit to Nora’s.

Iver crosses Bogstadveien and continues into the darkness down Josefinesgate where the tall buildings and sloping wilderness gardens with swings and sandpits are partly lit up by the full moon. He passes Josefine, where he has spent many a Tuesday night listening to live music on open-mike night when the management allows both the talented and the not-so-talented to have a go. A few hundred metres further ahead the left wall of Bislett Stadium curves towards the roundabout. Iver takes out his mobile and sends Henning a text about tonight’s small catch.

The footsteps appear out of nowhere. Heavy footsteps from boots with hard soles, but Iver doesn’t have time to turn around before he feels an iron grip on his neck. He can’t move his head as he is dragged into a yard and brutally thrown on the ground. He can feel shingle under his body, crunchy sharp pebbles, his legs dig into them as they kick out, but it doesn’t get him anywhere. He is flipped on to his back as if he weighs nothing at all. His eyes close instinctively when a fist comes hurtling towards his face. He hears it make contact, feels his jaw and cheek give and everything starts to throb. The blows rain down on him with a speed that takes his breath away. The back of his eyes begin to sting, a pricking light appears and he hears nothing, he feels only intense pain.

The blood is running from his mouth and mingles with saliva and tears. Iver tries to raise his arms to protect himself, but they refuse to obey and fail to ward off the blows landing on him. Soon he no longer feels the pounding, the punches simply make contact and fling his head from side to side. But he is able to think that if this assault doesn’t stop soon, the ending will be terribly, terribly bad.

The smoke is different this time. The opening stretches further. Henning sees fumbling hands in front of him trying to wave away the smoke. Somehow they succeed. The contours of a CD rack appear as he coughs and splutters. He stops and turns to the left where the stripe of light continues. But then the smoke thickens again, the light disappears, and even though he swings his arms frantically, it makes no difference. Everything in front of him goes completely black.

Henning sits up with a start, quickly wipes his face and looks around for the flames. But he can’t hear the crackling of fire and the door is still intact.

Those infernal dreams again.

He lets himself sink back on to the pillow and waits for the smoke detector above him to flash. In the distance a siren wails. There is always a siren somewhere, he thinks, there is always someone whose life is about to be changed for ever by something happening at this very moment. There is no guarantee that promises us we can close our eyes, safe in the knowledge that we will open them again. Life, as we know it, can change in an instant.

Jonas once asked him a question, as he often did – especially at bedtime. It could be a simple one such as why the walls were white or a more complicated one such as what was wrong with the man they saw on their way home from nursery, the one who was sleeping on a bench in Birkelunden Park. But it might also be something more profound, thoughts Henning could easily see would baffle his son without Jonas finding the time to think them through or remember them long enough to articulate during the day. But the questions would come at night when everything calmed down.

‘Daddy, do you hate Mummy?’

There is nothing unique about what happened to Nora and Henning. It happens every day, all over the world. People meet, they fall in love, they fall out of love, fall in love with each other again. They do stupid things or experience something that makes it impossible for them to go on living together. So they part, often to start over with another person. Or not. It’s not unique. And yet, from time to time, the thought of why it had to happen to him absolutely chokes him. Why did it have to be them? Why did it have to be Jonas?

‘
Did Mummy say that?
’

‘
No, but
—’

Henning turned over, rested on his elbows and looked at Jonas. But the more he thought about it, the harder it became to come up with an answer. The moment stretched out, it became too long for him to contain it, and all he could finally say was, ‘
I don’t hate Mummy, Jonas
.’

No explanation. Just a brief statement, like when a child says ‘because’ when you ask them to explain why they cut up the newspaper with a pair of scissors. And Henning doesn’t know how long he lay there, on his elbows, looking at Jonas’s searching eyes, but it felt like for ever.

A persistent buzzing sound and a sharp light bring him back to the present. His eyes dart to the bedside table where his mobile is vibrating. Henning leans across and picks it up. ‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s . . . Nora.’

Henning can hear voices in the background. He sits up. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s Iver.’ A note of panic has entered her voice. ‘He’s in hospital. He was attacked and beaten up.’

‘What?’

‘He’s in a coma.’

Henning’s jaw drops. His eyes flicker from side to side. ‘Where are you?’ he asks.

‘At Ullevål Hospital.’

‘Okay,’ he says, and stands up. ‘I’m on my way.’

Iver, in a coma, beaten senseless. Given what he was investigating, it can be no coincidence, Henning thinks and throws 200 kroner on to the passenger seat for the cab driver. He rushes inside the hospital. Walking as fast as he can manage, he makes his way to Emergency Admissions. The highly polished floor swims in front of his eyes as he goes through two doors, passes waiting next of kin, sees white walls and randomly displayed pictures with equally random motifs and notices doctors and cleaners, but he doesn’t look anyone in the eye. Not until he sees Nora.

She gets up from a chair and comes to meet him. Even from a distance he can see that her eyes are red. She doesn’t stop walking until he embraces her, and then she clings to him.

Christ, how she clings to him.

He holds her for a long time and feels his body grow hot all over. Old memories are reawakened, images he doesn’t want to see and certainly doesn’t want to relive. But he is incapable of suppressing the memory of their time together, which is so far distant now that nothing can bridge the gap between them. And he hates himself because it hurts him so much that she is crying and even more that she is crying for somebody else.

‘What are the doctors saying?’ Henning asks and holds her out from him.

She sniffs and shakes her head at the same time. ‘They don’t know very much yet.’

‘He’s still in a coma?’

She nods and dries the tears from her eyes. They walk over to a seating area and sit down.

‘Who found him?’

‘An old lady who lives nearby. The noise woke her up so she decided to have a look outside.’

‘But she didn’t see who did it?’

Nora shakes her head again, lifts her hands to her mouth and squeezes her eyes tightly shut. Fresh tears roll down.

‘How did you find out?’

‘Iver briefly regained consciousness when he was brought in here.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘Not that I know of.’

Henning nods. A nurse marches past them.

‘Have the police been here?’

‘Yes, but they’ve gone again.’

Henning breathes in deeply, stays in his seat and looks around without taking anything in.

‘Have you been to see him?’

‘Only for a minute.’

‘What did he look like?’

Nora stares at him for a long time. Then she says in a voice that breaks, ‘Bloody awful.’

Henning returns her gaze, watches her tears. ‘Are you staying here until he wakes up?’ he asks her.

She nods.

‘It could be a long time – you know that, don’t you? The doctors never try to rush this. You must let nature take its course. Iver will wake up when he is ready.’

She looks at him with eyes that well up. ‘
If
he wakes up.’

Henning doesn’t know how Nora reacted when she was told that Jonas was dead. Nor does he want to know. But he heard that she lost fourteen kilos in the four weeks that followed. Several of them are still missing, but she is slowly starting to recover. And if there is anything left of the Nora he knew, then she has been balancing on a knife’s edge every single day since.

Henning considers a sentence that is forming itself inside him. He never thought he would say it, let alone mean it. ‘Iver is a fighter, Nora. He’ll be all right.’

She looks at him. ‘I hope so.’

‘He will.’

‘I can’t bear to lose . . . ’

Henning is grateful that she doesn’t complete the sentence. He pulls his jacket more tightly.

‘Give him my best when he wakes up,’ he says and stands up.