Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (16 page)

He stopped again, his face to the wind now, his cheeks stinging.

“Kluten was completely convinced, Hanne. I just wish I’d pressed him harder about where he got this story. He avoided answering every time I broached it, and in the end he was so exhausted I thought it best to let him go.”

“And now it’s too late,” Hanne said, opening the door on the driver’s side.

“But it is at least a lead,” Billy T. said, sounding disheartened.

“A lead,” Hanne reiterated, with a burst of laughter. “You can say that again. That’s the fattest and ugliest lead we could have dreamed of. What’s more, it’s about the only one we have. I’ll drive.”

“Where are we going?” Billy T. asked.

“We’re going to the publisher’s.”

“The publisher’s? What are we going to do there?”

“Find out a bit more about Sidensvans.”

“Sidensvans?”

Billy T. hit his right arm off the dashboard; he was cramped and uncomfortable in the small police car.

“You don’t give up,” he muttered, struggling to push the seat back. “Do you still think the key to this case lies with Sidensvans? Good Lord …”

Something broke underneath the seat as it jolted back. Billy T. bit his tongue hard in the sudden jerk.

“Ouch! Fuck! I’m bleeding.”

“Poor wee soul,” Hanne said, smiling, finding first gear at last.

Alfred Stahlberg had a terrible hangover, even though it was approaching half past ten in the morning. His alcohol intake the previous night had at least made him sleep. Or go out like a light, he thought woozily. He remembered little apart from desperately searching for more vodka.

His brain pulsed rhythmically against the inside of his skull. The pain caused by each beat crept down his neck and made it difficult for him to move his head. He had not showered in four days and his shirt front was stained. Not until today had he been aware of his own smell: pungent and repulsive. He pulled a face at his reflection. The slight movement caused the pain to radiate toward his eyes. He spilled a few drops as he poured vodka into a kitchen tumbler. It all vanished in a single gulp.

That helped.

A little.

He poured himself another, and his headache slowly retreated. He tried to take deep, calm breaths. He was in sore need of a shower. He had to have clean clothes. He was dead tired, even though it had been ten hours since he last looked at the clock. He must have slept for at least eight of them.

In the shower, he stared down at his body. The water ran over his pale flabby frame slowly, almost like syrup, as if his skin were tacky. Alfred was the ugly one. The useless little brother. The weak one, the one who squandered his father’s legacy and never experienced any success.

He was a fool and had expended too much energy on refusing to acknowledge that.

Such a lot had to be organized.

Someone had to take the lead now. Someone must guide the family, steer them through the maze of legalities and gossip they were faced with, without anyone seemingly able to get a grip on it all. It ought to be him. He was the last man of the older generation of Stahlbergs. The thought weighed heavily on him; he sank to his knees, but struck his forehead on the tiles and staggered back into an upright position. The water did not make him clean. He could not even see his own sexual organs under his potbelly. Using both hands, he scratched himself, scratching and scraping until his nails were full of dead skin and thin lines of blood trickled over his paunch.

Alfred was a failure and was tired of suppressing that.

The hot water petered out. He shuffled away from the shower, attempting to hide his body in an enormous bath sheet. Alfred Stahlberg was a fool; he was unsuccessful and ugly. He could see it for himself and he sniffed through tears of self-loathing.

On the other hand, it was impossible for him to digest that he was also a criminal.

Åshild Meier of the publishing house was a small woman. She reminded Hanne of a weasel, with her rapid movements and her eyes darting here and there as she tried to clear a space for them both.

“Sorry about the mess,” she said, shifting a pile of manuscripts from one chair to an already over-filled work desk. “My grandchild. Say hello to the police, Oskar!”

Oskar, about eighteen months old, sat underneath the desk, looking doubtful. Crouching down, Billy T. snapped his fingers and made noises. The toddler gurgled. Hanne warily said hello and smiled when the youngster peeked out. The child burst into tears. His grandmother took the boy by the arm and they left the small office.

“Me and children,” Hanne said, shrugging.

“Get yourself one,” Billy T. said. “That helps.”

“It’s the day before Christmas Eve, after all,” Åshild Meier said, when she returned minus the child. “Most people are already on holiday. So it didn’t matter so much. About Oskar, I mean. He sometimes comes here because—”

“That’s absolutely fine,” Billy T. said. “I’ve five children myself. Know what it’s like. Great having grandparents.”

“Five? My goodness!”

“And they have a total of no fewer than
twelve
grandparents,” Hanne said tartly.

Billy T. blushed slightly and began to pick at a scab on the back of his left hand.

He had grown more submissive in recent years, Hanne thought, wishing she could bite back her words.

At the beginning of their friendship, the first few years – at police college and later at Oslo Police Station – he had been outstanding: a big athletic guy who filled every room he entered. Not only by virtue of being six foot seven in his stockinged feet: Billy T. was the perfect police officer. Born and brought up in the inner city, kept in check by a hardworking single mother with old-fashioned values and a heavy-handed approach to childcare. She had steered the young boy away from the worst pitfalls in an environment where only half of his friends survived long enough to reach the age of thirty. Billy T. knew Oslo better than anyone else in the entire police force: a streetwise hooligan with invaluable knowledge of Oslo’s crooks. He had been only a hairsbreadth away from becoming one himself.

Now the station had been transformed into Oslo Police District, the police college into a university faculty, and the really major criminals no longer came from the east end of Oslo. In a sense, Billy T. had deflated. Even the many children he had acquired, all by different mothers, had turned into some kind of stigma. Earlier, he had paraded them proudly as proof of his enthusiastic libido and excessive virility. Now he was more subdued and Hanne had twice caught him withholding the fact that they were all half siblings.

“But maybe we could make a start? What was it you actually wanted to know?”

“Knut Sidensvans,” Hanne said casually.

“Yes, you said that when you phoned. It was absolutely dreadful, all this about the murder, but I don’t really see what I can contribute.”

“Did you know him well?”

“Well? No. In fact, I don’t think anyone did. He was actually quite a strange person. A bit … odd.”

“Odd?”

“Yes. Different. Though we’re used to that, to some extent, in this line of business.”

Åshild Meier gave a burst of shrill laughter.

“In actual fact he was a friendly soul. It was just a bit difficult to see that. Besides, he was a priceless resource for us. As a writer, of course, but first and foremost as a consultant.”

“What does that kind of work entail, in fact?”

“Here in our department it can be so many things,” the editor explained. “Naturally, we have ordinary language consultants. They edit copy, and correct the language. Improve it, plain and simple. But since we publish books that often deal with real events, we also use consultants for the content. Both to assess whether the submitted manuscript or the suggested book is something we want to take a chance on, and later in the process as a sort of assistant, or external examiner, if you like. We also sometimes use legal expertise. To avoid committing libel, for example. So—”

“Sidensvans was a kind of fact-checker, then,” Hanne broke in.

“Yes.”

“In what areas?”

Now Åshild Meier was laughing heartily.

“Yes, you may well ask! The man actually started over in the school textbook department.”

She pointed vaguely in midair, as if the school textbook department was situated directly behind Billy T.’s back.

“He is – or was, I suppose I should say now – an electrician. Originally. He taught at Sogn Technical College for years, and wrote a textbook himself twenty years ago. It was good, apparently. Then he began as a consultant on school books, until someone discovered that the guy was a veritable fount of all knowledge. Knut Sidensvans was, in truth, one of a kind. And not an easy man to socialize with. But then we didn’t socialize.”

“What subjects did he deal with?” Hanne asked. “Here at the publishing house, I mean?”

“Quite a number.”

Åshild Meier began to search through the crowded wall shelves.

“Cars.”

She handed Hanne a coffee-table book about Ferrari.

“Admittedly, it’s translated from Italian and therefore fairly safe to publish, but a lot of adjustments were necessary for Norwegian circumstances. Not least, the translator needed help with regard to technical expressions, and that sort of thing.”

“Sidensvans didn’t even have a driving license,” Hanne muttered, shaking her head.

Åshild Meier finally sat down.

“He had no formal education,” she said. “Apart from his apprenticeship papers, of course. But he knew an incredible amount. Knowledgeable, and a bit stubborn. For instance, he would only work with me. I was granted leave a couple of years ago, and during that period no one here saw anything of him. He appeared again a few weeks after I came back.”

“So there’s nobody here who can give us any more information,” Billy T. said, quite redundantly. “About his family relationships and that kind of thing. About his social circle.”

“No, definitely not.”

She laughed again, staccato and shrill.

“He was extremely concerned about fairness.”

“I see,” Hanne said.

“He was thoroughly preoccupied with everything having to follow the correct procedure. By accident, one time we had deducted too little tax from him. He became totally devastated. It was a matter of a very small, insignificant sum and we corrected it a short time later. But I had the impression that he couldn’t sleep, for fear of being caught by the tax office.”

“Slightly over the top, perhaps. I agree.” Hanne smiled easily and added, “What was he working on at present? A colleague of mine mentioned something about—”

“At the moment he was doing some writing, in fact,” Åshild Meier interrupted. “A short foreword for a book about vintage cars. But much more important: he was to write one of the chapters in a major work about the history of the Norwegian police.”

She beamed, as if it had only now dawned on her that she was speaking to two representatives of the force.

“It’s really fascinating! We’re working with the National Police Directorate and are in the process of getting a number of wonderful writers to contribute. Lawyers and police officers. Several professional historians, of course, as well as journalists. We even have someone convicted of homicide, to write about his experience with the forces of law and order. The wartime chapter will be particularly fascinating, and for that we’ve actually got our hands on one of the foremost—”

“But this Sidensvans doesn’t exactly sound fascinating,” Billy T. objected.

A vaguely disgruntled expression crossed Åshild Meier’s face.

“Then I must have expressed myself badly,” she said. “Sidensvans was extremely fascinating. A bit odd, as I said, but fascinating people are often strange. Besides, this is a book we knew that he would approach with—”

As she was interrupted by someone knocking at the door, she glanced swiftly at the clock.

“Time flies! I actually have a meeting now … Come in! But of course I can—”

Getting to her feet, Hanne shook her head. “No, not at all. We’ve taken up enough of your time.”

A woman, obviously a colleague, popped her head in and said, “The meeting’s started, Åshild. Are you coming?”

“Just a minute!”

In some confusion, she gazed from Hanne to Billy T.

“It’s fine,” Hanne reassured her once more. “I’ll phone if there’s anything further. Thanks for all your help.”

In the end, Mabelle’s nagging became unbearable. What’s more, Carl-Christian realized she was probably right. If the police suspected them – and it would be a miracle if that were not the case – then they would find the apartment sooner or later. It would be better to take a chance now. Empty the place. Quickly remove what was risky. So he had gone, partway by tram, partway on foot, taking absurd detours as he went.

He carefully removed a graphic print from the wall in the bedroom. The safe was locked, in accordance with regulations. He opened it and found the pictures lying where they should be.

He had wanted to burn them at once. When Hermann Stahlberg had triumphantly flung a bundle of semi-pornographic pictures of Mabelle on the table and threatened to publicize them, if CC did not withdraw the legal action he had initiated against his father, what Carl-Christian wanted most of all was to destroy them. When he arrived home, without having said a word to the old man apart from a mumbled “You’ll be hearing from me”, he had lit the fire. It was Mabelle who had stopped him. When he had reluctantly, and with intense embarrassment, told her about Hermann’s last move, she had sobbed bitterly for an hour. Then she dried her tears and became surprisingly rational.