Two cars are parked quite a distance from each other outside the apartment block in Helgesensgate. Henning knows that reporters have been trying to call his mother and that they have rung her doorbell.
He also knows that gaining access to a block of flats is easy, as is knocking on every available door until you find the person you are looking for. But when Henning lets himself in and walks up the stairs, he can see that the caretaker, Karl Ove Marcussen, has done his bit to make the job more difficult for the vultures. He has unscrewed the name plate saying ‘Christine Juul’ and hopefully disconnected her doorbell and telephone as well. In addition he unplugged the aerial to make sure she can’t watch television. Henning’s mother is one of the few people left who still swears by landlines.
He lets himself into her flat, but doesn’t call out her name until he has closed the door behind him. As always he is met by the stench of cigarettes, but the smell isn’t as pungent as usual.
He walks in without first taking off his shoes, but pulls up short when he spots his mother in the kitchen. Or rather, slumped on the kitchen table, her cheek pressing against the surface. Next to her are an empty bottle and a shot glass.
She’s dead, Henning thinks, and a mixture of grief and relief washes over him. The first emotion surprises him. The second fills him with shame. But then one of her fingers twitches and she moves her head. It looks as if she is trying to lift it, but she fails.
His initial relief changes into disappointment while he tries to convince himself that it isn’t caused by the fact that she is still alive. Even so he can’t help wishing that she, for her own sake, would soon let go. She is trapped in her body, plagued by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as she is.
With a feeling of dismay he helps her up, but she has no strength left in her arms. And he realises from the smell of her breath that there is no point in trying to talk to her. She is quite simply too drunk.
For a brief moment her eyes light up, she manages to focus, but then she sees who it is. Her excitement turns into contempt.
‘And here I was hoping it would be Trine,’ she slurs.
Henning looks at her. He sighs and allows yet another of her hurtful comments pass. He tries to lift her up, but she fights him like a child. Henning lets her slump back down on her chair. Her upper body falls forwards again. He takes hold of her shoulders; she makes a pathetic attempt to shake off his hands, but this time he keeps hold of her.
‘The radio,’ she says still slurring. ‘It’s not working. Can you do something about it? I haven’t been able to listen to the radio for two days.’
Henning nods and promises to fix it.
‘And the TV,’ she adds.
‘I’ll have a look at that as well. Come on,’ he says, lifting her up again. ‘We’ve got to get you to bed. You can’t sleep here.’
Once again she fights him.
‘Come on, Mum. Work with me here.’
He realises she doesn’t just smell of cigarettes and alcohol. Her clothes haven’t been washed for weeks. He dreads to think when she last had a shower.
‘Come on. Don’t be difficult now.’
At times Henning had to resort to bribery when Jonas acted up and refused to go to nursery, get dressed or go to bed. Sometimes Henning would bribe him with films, other times with pancakes or sweets. And when none of the usual inducements worked there was only one option left.
Force.
And Henning thinks about Jonas as he picks up his mother, ignoring the protests she spits at him. She mentions Trine again, she mutters something about cigarettes and her glass, but he just carries her out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. And when her struggle to free herself leads to nothing, but only wears her out and makes her breathless, she starts to gasp and point. Henning realises what she wants and puts her down on the bed. He fetches her breathing apparatus and sees her grab the mask with the desperation of a drug addict. She closes her eyes and inhales the medication that loosens up the slime and relieves the gurgling in her chest.
And it strikes him how desperately we cling to life no matter how much each heartbeat hurts.
Gradually she regains control of herself while the machine whirrs and hisses. And when her body has calmed down and her lungs are once more in a tolerable condition, she releases her grip on the plastic tube and sinks further on the bed. A few seconds later she is asleep.
It’s like trying to get up after a knockout only to be punched in the face again. Just as they have eliminated suspects in one murder inquiry, news of another comes in. And now they have to focus all their resources on that, at least for the next forty-eight hours. It’s not always like this, fortunately, but it happens more and more often. The cases are starting to pile up.
Bjarne parks outside the police cordons next to several patrol cars and stays in his car while a grey light falls across rooftops that still show traces of days and nights of precipitation. And the rain continues to fall.
As usual curious onlookers have congregated nearby. It looks as if they are holding a bizarre vigil and there is an aura of morbid expectation in the raw air. Bjarne finds Emil Hagen at the entrance to the block of flats.
‘What’s happened?’ Bjarne asks.
Hagen stuffs a piece of chewing tobacco under his lip.
‘Woman in her mid-thirties, strangled. There appears to have been a struggle.’
Bjarne looks up to get an impression of the building. Grey walls. Black gunk from spray cans on the walls. The windows overlook the city, but they are dark as if there is nothing behind them. The whole building has been cordoned off. Blue lights are flashing all around them. It’s a grim day in Oslo.
‘The victim’s name is Johanne Klingenberg,’ Hagen continues.
‘Who found her?’ Bjarne asks.
‘A neighbour, her landlady, heard the cat whimper,’ Hagen explains. ‘I believe it’s been a problem before and she knocked on the door to ask her to put a stop to the noise. When there was no reply, she tried the door. And found it was open.’
‘Had she heard anything leading up to that point?’
‘No.’
‘Did anyone else see or hear anything?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ Hagen says. ‘I’ve only just arrived myself.’
Bjarne takes another look around.
‘I think I’ll go upstairs and view the crime scene.’
‘Okay,’ Hagen replies. ‘I’ll find Sandland and start speaking to the other neighbours while you do that.’
Bjarne can smell mould as he climbs the stairs. A wall lamp is askew. No light bulb.
The rent is probably in the same league as Daniel Nielsen’s
, he thinks, even though the hessian wallpaper is a little more faded and grimier.
The door to the victim’s second-floor flat is open. He enters and nods to familiar faces. Ann-Mari Sara, the crime scene technician, is already there.
‘Always working,’ he says.
‘As long as people keep dying in this city, then—’
Sara takes a photograph as Bjarne steps inside the living room. There are definite signs of a struggle. There is a cushion on the floor. The glass coffee table has been knocked over, but not damaged. The remote controls lie scattered; the batteries from one of them have fallen out. The rug under the coffee table, brown and threadbare, is bunched up as if someone quickly pushed the table away. Shards from a broken mug are smeared with thin and sticky brown dregs. Bjarne thinks it must be tea, he can see black flecks in it. Tea leaves, possibly. Or cigarette ash.
The victim is lying on her back on the sofa. Her long hair spills out in a wreath around her head. A hair band from a ponytail lies next to her, brown just like the sofa. One leg hangs over the front. She is still wearing her trousers and her blouse, white, but wet. Sweat, possibly. The upholstery under her is also damp.
Bjarne detests the thought that the bladder empties itself at the moment of death. The loss of dignity at the end of life. One of nature’s little cruelties.
But at least she’s dressed
, he thinks, which makes it unlikely that the motive is sexual,
if
the struggle is related to her death. And the fact that there has been some kind of fight in the living room gives him some encouragement. The chance of finding DNA evidence is considerable. And God knows they need an open and shut case right now.
‘Did she live alone?’ he asks.
‘Looks like it,’ Sara remarks. ‘Only one toothbrush in the bathroom.’
More flashlights go off, which blind Bjarne for a second before he can see properly again and take another look around. There is a candle stuck in a red wine bottle on the windowsill. He would have expected a woman in her thirties to have had flowers here and there, but all he sees are lamps and candlesticks. Pictures on the wall.
Sara’s camera flashes again and it’s as if the sharp, artificial light makes the pictures stand out more clearly. Bjarne goes over to the wall and looks at one of the framed photographs.
The glass has been smashed.
He takes a step closer as a chill runs down his spine. Even the broken glass can’t hide the smile of a boy who can’t be more than two years old.
He doesn’t come here often. But now that Henning has unlocked the door to the attic room and looked inside, he wishes he hadn’t come at all. There are so many memories stored up there, in everything he sees. Boxes of clothing, toys, shoes that would have been too small for Jonas today. An old scooter, a pair of skates. He can’t bear to let them go. It’s as if Jonas will be even further away from him if he were to throw out his things. Just thinking about it feels like a violation.
Even so he enters the attic room and finds the box he is looking for; he carries it down to his flat and wipes off the dust before he opens the lid. He stares at the piles of photos and photo albums. He deliberately avoids looking at pictures of Jonas. What he is interested in right now are photographs of Trine and him, the identical collages their mother made for them the Christmas when they were ten and twelve years old respectively.
The idea came to him when he saw an old photograph of Jonas, Nora and himself on the mantelpiece in his mother’s flat. It made him realise there is so much about Trine he has forgotten. He blows hard into the box and the dust whirls back in his face. He instinctively recoils before he starts rifling through the photographs. It doesn’t take long before he finds the album he is looking for.
He opens it so that the light and the air can reach it. The first page is blank. Then – a photo of Trine and him as babies, eighteen months apart. They are lying on the same blanket, with the same open gaze aimed at the camera. Henning can see how much they looked like each other as babies.
He turns the page and sees more baby pictures of them together on the floor. Henning’s back is ramrod straight and his hand reaches out to Trine, who is lying on her back with her legs in the air. They play. They smile. There are pictures of them in their cots, pictures of them lying under a duvet on the sofa with dull eyes and feverish foreheads. Pictures of them growing bigger. Pictures from birthday parties, Christmases, from the pebble beach near their cabin in Stavern of them trying to skim stones. Two ‘1’ candles on a birthday cake the year Trine turned eleven. Trine puffing up her cheeks ready to blow out the candles.
I wonder what I did
, Henning thinks to himself.
What did I do that made Mum hate me and worship Trine?
Henning looks at the photo album again, the pebble beach, the rocks, the ships in the Skagerrak. He can’t remember when he last visited the cabin, but it must be many years ago. He remembers how the small community and the holiday resort seemed to die every year in mid-August. Their sun-loving cabin neighbours would disappear before the schools started again. When Henning’s family came back in September to shut down the cabin for the winter, their neighbours would already have left. The sea could carry on gambolling without an audience. And it occurs to him that if Trine has gone somewhere to be alone right now, then that has to be the place.
*
It has started to rain again when Bjarne comes back outside, a cold shower with big, heavy drops. But neither the wet nor the cool autumn air has any effect on him. An uneasy gut feeling has brought on a fever that is spreading to the rest of his body.
Two crime scenes in the space of just a few days presenting with very similar evidence.
Is that a coincidence
? he asks himself, and answers his own question immediately. Photographs can easily get broken in the heat of a struggle. Murder by strangulation is not uncommon. And only Erna Pedersen was mutilated after her death.
But even so.
Shortly afterwards Bjarne sees Emil Hagen outside the entrance to the apartment block. Because of the heavy rain they get into one of the patrol cars, but don’t start the engine. The raindrops batter the windscreen. Big curtains of water are blown across the bodywork.
‘I checked with the emergency services,’ Bjarne says. ‘There were no calls to them from the victim’s mobile.’
Hagen runs a hand over his wet face and wipes it on his trousers.
‘I’ve spoken to those neighbours who were at home,’ he says. ‘Nobody heard anything.’
Bjarne tries looking out through the windscreen. It’s starting to mist up. Outside two police officers walk past, chatting to each other, but their words can’t be heard inside the car.
‘But there was one interesting thing,’ Hagen says. ‘The victim reported a break-in two weeks ago.’
Bjarne turns his head to his colleague whose jaw looks even more tightly clenched than usual.
‘Nothing was taken, but she said – if I’ve understood this correctly – that someone had been bleeding in her flat.’
‘Bleeding?’
‘Yes. She found a blood stain right next to the cat basket, I believe. And someone had smashed a photo on the wall.’
Bjarne looks at him.
‘Two weeks ago?’
‘Yes.’
‘The same picture hanging there now or a different one?’
‘I’m not sure, but I think it was the same one. It’s possible she hadn’t replaced the frame. Or the glass yet.’
‘And left broken glass on the floor?’
Bjarne shakes his head.
‘I highly doubt that.’
Hagen doesn’t reply. A smell of wet leather rises from his jacket.
How bizarre
, Bjarne thinks.
Someone broke a picture in the victim’s home two weeks ago and the same thing happens again today?
This is definitely not a coincidence. And it bears witness to a deep-seated rage.
‘Who handled the investigation?’ Bjarne asks.
Hagen looks at him.
‘It was low priority. Nothing was stolen. And nobody got hurt.’
‘Except, possibly, the man who broke in.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But what about the blood? Can that help us?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hagen says. ‘I guess it’s at the back of the queue at the lab, like everything else.’
Bjarne shakes his head and sighs.
‘What kind of blood was it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are we talking drops, blood spurts – what was it?’
‘A smear. Like if you have a cut, but you don’t know it and then you accidentally touch—’
‘I know what a smear is, Emil.’
The investigators sit in pensive silence for a few seconds while the rain lashes the windscreen. Bjarne puts his hand on the door handle.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I guess we’ll have to do what we always do.’
‘I guess so.’