Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (13 page)

There was something fishy about Alfred Stahlberg. Even Hermine, the favorite niece who was almost more Alfred’s daughter than Hermann’s, could sometimes withdraw into conspicuous rejection of everything connected with her uncle. When she was little and Carl-Christian a teenager, he was sometimes taken aback by how she alternated between warm affection and defiant dislike of the charming, garrulous good-for-nothing her uncle was in reality. Later, Carl-Christian stopped bothering. He quite simply couldn’t make Alfred out. Neither did he understand his father’s indulgence of his younger brother, when it was obvious at the same time that they were far from emotionally close. People laughed at Alfred, but they also laughed with him. They talked about him, but mostly with him, and they all reveled in the stories he could invent: untruthful, almost poetic in their obvious exaggeration of his own excellence, resourcefulness, and flair for business. Alfred was too corpulent and too intense about everything, but until a few months ago he had nevertheless been quite an elegant man.

Now there was a rank smell about him and, more than anything, Carl-Christian wanted to leave.

“I have to go home,” he murmured almost inaudibly.

As he turned to the door, he saw that Alfred was sitting on Hermine’s bed, holding her hand in his. When she managed, only just, to open her eyes, she greeted him with a smile.

Erik Henriksen stood open-mouthed at the kitchen in Kruses gate.

“Good God,” he said finally. “It’s fabulous here, really!”

“So this is your boyfriend, then!”

Mary revealed her new teeth as she poured a generous measure of mulled wine into his glass, adding some nuts and raisins until it looked more like porridge than a beverage.

“Something to heat you up,” she said by way of explanation, when she topped it all off with a shot of spirits from a bottle of 60 percent proof.

“Hey,” Erik protested, trying to place his hand over the glass. “It’s only twelve o’clock!”

“No harm’s ever come to anyone from a wee nip of the hard stuff on the last Sunday in Advent,” Mary concluded, presenting him with a plaited basket crammed with home baking. “Here. Eat. Baked them myself.”

“Thanks,” Erik muttered, biting dutifully into a gingerbread man while Mary left the kitchen and closed the door behind her.

Putting her index finger to her mouth, Hanne sneaked over to the fridge. Two minutes later she had buttered a heap of four huge sandwiches.

“I’m starving,” she whispered. “But Mary would have launched into a huge meal if I’d told her so. I said we’d just eaten. So …”

She pointed at the basket of cakes.

“You’re both so kind. For looking after her.”

“We’re not actually particularly kind,” Hanne answered. “She works like a Trojan. Keeps this whole house clean and prepares almost all the food. She refuses to accept any payment other than board and lodging.”

“You
are
both kind,” Erik insisted. “I would never have taken in an old prostitute and given her a chance like this. Even though she helped you with the case about the chef that time. Wasn’t she the one who’d swiped the most vital piece of evidence from the crime scene? Was that how you met her?”

“Yes. She stuck to me like glue afterwards. I had to look after her for a while, you see, since we were relying on her testimony. And then she just stayed on.”

“I’d never have been allowed to do that, for heaven’s sake.”

“But then you don’t live like this, either. Mary is here for my sake.”

“What?”

“I … I’m a bit allergic to families, Erik. Mary reminds me that this is a … chosen arrangement. Not a real family.”

“A family is also chosen, you know,” Erik said, obviously confused. “You fall in love, have children—”

“We don’t need to talk about it any more,” Hanne broke in. “It’s not really so very interesting.”

They continued eating in silence. Erik devoured three of the sandwiches and washed them down with tiny sips of the fortified mulled wine. Mary was right: it gave you a warm glow. Feeling slightly light-headed, he quickly keyed in a text message and sent it off.

“My girlfriend,” he explained. “Message that I’ve been delayed.”

Erik wanted to stay there, in Hanne’s kitchen, for as long as he could. The liquor hit him all of a sudden. Everything turned warm and he stripped off his sweater. Only now did he notice that Hanne had not touched her glass, and pushed his own away.

“Have you anything lighter?” he asked weakly.

“Mary no longer drinks alcohol,” Hanne explained. “It’s as if she makes up for it by pressing alcohol on everyone else. Maybe it’s to prove she can manage without it.”

“Or that she remembers how good it is. By the way … where did all the money come from?”

Hanne brought apple juice from the brushed-steel double fridge. She took her time pouring it into two glasses.

“That’s none of your business,” she said eventually.

“Fair enough. I’m asking all the same. Where did the money come from?”

Hanne’s face was blank. She sat for a while looking at him, as if she expected him to answer his own question.

“Nefis,” she said in the end.

“Yes, I realize that. I expect we’d have heard about it, if you’d won the lottery. But why is she so rich?”

“Her father. Her father is loaded.”

“That doesn’t explain very much,” Erik said, disheartened. “Why is her father so wealthy? And why has he given so much to his daughter? Is he dead, or what?”

“Jingle Bells” started up again at full volume when Mary and Nefis suddenly entered the kitchen. Erik jumped out of his skin and slammed the glass of apple juice on the table so hard that it cracked.

“Mary,” Hanne yelled. “We can’t have that on. Turn off that awful song! NOW!”

“I’ll turn the volume down,” Mary said, looking miffed, and disappeared out the door.

Silence did not descend until Nefis had located the plug and brutally pulled it out of the socket.

“I think I’ve broken it,” she whispered hopefully, saying hello to Erik before adding, “Look who’s come, Hanna!”

Billy T. was standing behind her.

“Here’s the Christmas party, then! And conspiracies, I see! Why wasn’t I invited? Here I am, just popping in with something for the Christmas celebrations, and I find two of my closest colleagues sitting talking shop without me.”

“We’re not talking …”

Erik looked in consternation from Hanne to Billy.

“We only—”

“Don’t make excuses!”

Billy T. crashed down on a chair and drew it up to the kitchen table.

“You’d better wipe up that mess,” he said, pointing at the puddle of apple juice, before fixing his eyes on Hanne. “Nefis tells me you’ve decided to share your thoughts on the Stahlberg case with our red-haired friend here.”

Nefis stroked his shoulders lightly and asked in a friendly voice, “Can I offer you something, Billy T.? Wine, perhaps?”

Billy T. hesitated, before a faint smile crossed his face and he accepted a glass with thanks.

Erik was relieved. For a moment everything had seemed spoiled. If Nefis had not intervened, he might just have gone home. So often in recent years he had witnessed how Hanne and Billy T. could reach deadlock in each other’s company: turn sour, become withdrawn. Now they both sat smiling reluctantly, with eyes downcast, like reprimanded children.

“Listen up, then!”

“Okay.”

Hanne took a deep breath and followed Nefis with her eyes as she left the kitchen.

“I think,” she began, “I think the homicide in Eckersbergs gate might have something to do with those fierce family conflicts.”

“Incredibly unoriginal,” Billy T. muttered.

“I said ‘might’. A great deal suggests that Carl-Christian, Hermine, or this Mabelle character has something to do with the murders, either together or individually. It’s not difficult to predict that we’re going to have increasingly strong grounds to focus in that direction as the investigation advances. There’s always a lot of bullshit in those conflicts. And that bullshit suits us very well at present. Everything we find will support our theory.”

“Exactly,” Billy T. said. “Which is a good theory—”

“But also dangerous. It locks us in, and makes us close our eyes to that important piece we prefer not to see.”

“Sidensvans,” Erik said, nodding.

“Precisely. Knut Sidensvans. I can’t rid myself of the thought that his presence was no mere coincidence.”

“We’ve really nothing to go on,” Billy T. said. “It’s bloody impossible to find a single connection between Sidensvans and the Stahlberg family.”

“We haven’t tried very hard, though.”

“No, but what could there be? We’ve already interviewed loads of friends and family of the three victims. No one has ever heard of Sidensvans. There’s nothing to suggest the Stahlbergs might have had plans to publish a book or need any help from a publishing consultant. They probably didn’t require a well-dressed electrician without any tools to change a cable late on a Thursday evening. I just can’t fathom it. All the same, they must have been expecting the guy. There were four glasses set out on the sideboard, and the champers was already opened.”

“Odd that the champagne was opened,” Hanne commented.

“Eh?”

Erik squinted at her.

“You usually open that sort of thing once all the guests have arrived,” she said. “That’s half the fun. Hearing the pop. Drinking while it’s really fizzing. Isn’t that right?”

“You might well know,” Billy T. muttered. “I can never afford that sort of thing.”

Hanne ignored him and ploughed on, “If we go back for a moment to what’s most plausible – namely, that the shootings have something to do with the family conflict – then why did the perpetrator choose to act on this particular evening?”

“One evening’s probably as good as any other,” Erik said.

“No,” Hanne said eagerly, leaning forward. “When four people are liquidated in cold blood in this way, we quickly construct a theory that it was all meticulously planned. I see that the newspapers have already begun to quote anonymous sources in the police about precisely that: the homicides were premeditated. But if someone plans to kill three members of his family, would they not ensure they were at least alone on that evening? Wouldn’t they, for example, make sure that the neighbors were away and—”

“But they were,” Erik interrupted. “All except Backe. He’s senile and dead-drunk most of the time, and it’s pretty certain everyone in the block knows that.”

“Backe isn’t totally with it,” Hanne agreed. “But he has his moments. He does his own shopping and sometimes goes to the theater, in fact.”

“How do you know that?”

“I drove him home, didn’t I? No one else was available, so I did it myself. He’s absolutely prepared to give an account of himself, as long as he has enough alcohol in his bloodstream and is able to collect his thoughts. My point is that taking the lives of three people called Stahlberg last Thursday, in their own home, seems fairly impulsive. A plan – a real murder plan – would probably have been carried out somewhere else entirely. At their summer cottage, for example. As recently as last weekend, Hermann and Turid were in Hemsedal with Preben and his family. The cottage is situated in quite a remote spot, more than one kilometer from the nearest neighbor. I would …”

She leaned back and intertwined her fingers behind her neck. A smile was only just visible at the corners of her mouth as she continued.

“If I intended to take the lives of my parents and my brother, I’d have chosen to do it somewhere I was sure of not being interrupted. At a time when most people are fast asleep. Not in the middle of Oslo on a Thursday evening.”

Erik and Billy T. exchanged glances.

“And then we’re again faced with a whole range of possibilities.”

Hanne looked up at the cupboard containing Mary’s stash of tobacco, but pulled herself together.

“If one or several members of the family are behind this, then it was an impulsive act. A frenzy of rage. A sudden frenzy, which also cost Sidensvans his life because he, by chance, happened to be present at the time.”

Hanne fell silent and closed her eyes. Billy T. tried not to look at her. He felt offended. They were all offended. Not a single soul in the entire police force was unconvinced that the four victims in Eckersbergs gate had been dispatched by one of the Stahlbergs. Even now, the prevailing general opinion was that the killings had been planned in detail, probably over a lengthy period of time. Some even speculated that the ravenous dog had been deliberately planted there. At any rate, the dog had complicated the investigation considerably.

“If the family are
not
behind it,” she suddenly went on, “then we have a fucking problem. To put it mildly. Then we might be talking about a homicide with intent to rob that got screwed up. Or a random lunatic. Highly unlikely, but all the same.”

She caught Billy T.’s eye.

“We might consider that Sidensvans was actually the target,” she said slowly. “The family was simply sacrificed. Either to camouflage Sidensvans’s murder – that sort of thing has been done before – or because he had to—”