Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (24 page)

“Yes. The Stahlberg case.”

“Yes. I was just thinking that … this gun—”

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to say that on that day – or that night, really; the day after the murders – somebody drilled a hole in the ice up here. Strange business. Don’t know if it was a man or a woman, but it was pitch dark, and there’s no fish there.”

“Wait a minute now. Where was this, did you say?”

“I was just out for a … well, I was going out for a breath of air, you see. On skis. And the conditions were so lousy that I started walking instead. Went down to the lake, and that was when I saw him. The hole was there, when I checked later. But there were no other signs of ice-fishing, exactly. And it was the middle of the night, you see. I’ve never heard of people ice-fishing in the middle of the night.”

“Now I’ll need to ask you to wait for a moment. Let us take this from the beginning.”

Tingling with excitement, the police trainee stole a glance at the computer screen to assure himself that the tape was running. Then he took out a fresh sheet of paper and began over again.

“Where are you calling from?”

“Well, I just wanted to let you know, you see.”

“And we’re very pleased about that. But we need to take this right from the beginning, okay?”

“That’s fine,” the voice said, sounding less tense now.

Seven minutes later, the trainee disconnected the call and sat idly lost in thought, even though the phone kept ringing incessantly.

The worst aspect was that he was no longer sure he could rely on Mabelle. He tried to convince himself that his suspicion was a result of lack of sleep. Since Thursday, he had hardly slept a wink. That impaired his judgment and filled him with doubt and fear, and he knew that. Hostile to everyone, he thought disconsolately, as he stared at himself in the mirror above the bathroom basin. He was thinner already. His eyes seemed even more prominent and a greasy film of stress had spread over his face.

“Mabelle,” he said hoarsely as he tried to push out a non-existent chin.

Hermine, of course, could not be relied upon. She had always been the sweet little bunny rabbit of the family, hopping now here, now there. There was something predictable about her unpredictability. Mabelle, on the other hand, was the anchor in his life. She could be depended upon. She had always been someone who could be depended upon.

The farcical family gathering of the previous evening had turned into the Christmas party from hell. No one wanted to speak to the flabbergasted and deeply offended Alfred. The more distant relatives could barely control their curiosity; they overtly studied the apartment and everything in it, as they chatted quietly in tones of voice characterized by scandal and malicious pleasure. Getting rid of Andreas had almost been worst of all. He had strutted about with unaccustomed pomposity and was slightly too eager to assure Carl-Christian of his belief in his innocence. When all the others were finally out of the apartment, Andreas had wanted to have a strategic discussion, as he called it. Carl-Christian had pretended to faint and smiled wanly from the floor with a rather nasty cut above his eye, pleading to be left in peace.

When they arrived at Hermine’s apartment, it had been more than two hours since her phone call.

She was no longer in the apartment. At least she never opened the door. She did not answer any of her phones. Hermine had simply disappeared and Carl-Christian had no idea what he should do.

Mabelle wanted to alert the police.

Mabelle no longer understood. Hermine was sitting on a new will. Hermine was the only one who knew about the unregistered gun in the safe in Kampen. They had to talk to Hermine before the police had reason to interview her again. Carl-Christian had to know what she intended to say, he had to track down the missing pistol and secure the new will, the contents of which he did not even know.

Hermine might have thrown the pistol away.

Of course she hadn’t thrown the pistol away.

Where do you dispose of a pistol?

Carl-Christian’s laughter was forced and he bit his lip to prevent himself from losing his composure. Slowly he began to smear shaving foam over his jaw, using his fingers to outline little pathways in all the whiteness, drawing the foam up over his nose and around his eyes: he covered his face in foam.

“What are you doing?”

Mabelle was totally transformed. He knew, of course, that the fragile, sorrowing figure of the previous evening was a fabulous concoction, though it seemed as if most of them had been taken in by it. Despite all of them knowing about the destructive conflict between the family members, it was as if Mabelle’s convincing performance had reinforced the family in their belief that there were limits to what a member of the Stahlberg dynasty would permit himself be forced into.

Mabelle had mastery of her own face. Now her eyebrows were well defined, her lips a deep red. A touch of rouge on her cheeks signaled energy and resolve.

“What on earth are you doing?” she repeated.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You look absolutely crazy!”

Without answering, he washed all the foam away.

“You need to shave,” she said harshly. “Those little stubbly whiskers of yours aren’t very becoming.”

“That’s what I was in the midst of doing,” he said, lifting the Gillette aerosol.

“You’re in the midst of falling apart, CC. We can’t afford that.”

Indolently he began to soap his face again. Mabelle continued to stand there.

“Hermine’s a problem,” she said in a monotone. “You’re right, of course. But we’ll have an unbelievably worse problem if the girl has really disappeared and we haven’t reported it.”

“We don’t need to have known anything about it,” Carl-Christian said.

Mabelle took a step forward into the bathroom and leaned toward him.

“Now you’ll really need to pull yourself together!” she roared. “We’re being watched! When are you going to understand that? The police probably already know that we were outside Hermine’s apartment last night. They’re most likely taking continuous printouts of all our phone conversations. They know we’ve tried to reach her. And they know …
they know
…”

Her voice assailed his eardrums.

“
… that it’s Christmas Eve!
Have you ever not known where your sister was on Christmas Eve? What?
Have you?
”

Carl-Christian began to cry. He wept like a small boy no longer bothered that his friends could see him; he sobbed noisily and dipped his head. The foam became too wet and ran in tiny rivulets down his scrawny chest.

“I’m so …”

He couldn’t speak. Mabelle put an arm around his shoulders, turning him toward her, and wiped the shaving foam with the back of her hand as she murmured reassuring insignificant words. In the end she held him close, hugging him to her body, caressing his head and rocking him slowly from side to side.

“I’m so scared that something’s happened to Hermine as well,” Carl-Christian sobbed into her shoulder.

“I know that,” Mabelle said, stroking his wet hair. “We’re both scared. But now you have to listen to me. Then everything will be okay. The two of us, we only have each other, you know.”

“And Hermine,” he gasped.

Mabelle did not respond. She embraced Carl-Christian as hard as she could, and met her own gaze in the mirror over his shoulder. She did not look away. By keeping a tight grip on herself she could steer Carl-Christian. She must assume control. There was no one to turn to; no one would help any of them.

She would keep hold of him for as long as necessary.

The prostitutes never turned up. Mary had delayed dinner by an hour and a half and phoned four different cellphone numbers without obtaining any answer anywhere. In the end she had heaved a deep sigh and kept up a continuous litany of complaint, as if it had been her own children who had let her down. Her mood improved when all the others were seated at the table, wide-eyed, and the food was praised resoundingly.

By around nine o’clock the spacious living room was an absolute riot of Christmas wrapping paper and snacks, half-filled glasses and soft-drink bottles, games, clothes, and books. Mary had unwillingly agreed to turn off all the power-operated decorations before they ate. Now the children were pestering to have them switched on again, but Mary had succumbed to a bribe of a carton of cigarettes and insisted that Father Christmas in the corner had gone to sleep for the night. He was tired out, you see, and they ought to allow him a little break from all the commotion. Billy T. crawled around the floor with Jenny on his back. The four-year-old, dressed in a far-too-large pair of bright-red pajamas, was waving a Barbie doll about.

“Present from Daddy,” she yelled in delight, kissing the Muslim Barbie’s burka.

Billy T. bumped past Hanne’s chair while trying to make camel noises. The look he gave her was brimming with gratitude. Hanne merely smiled and shrugged slightly. She had checked the contents of the bag he had brought last Sunday. As she thought, it had contained no gifts from Billy T. to his wife and daughter. Probably he had shelled out all his money on presents for his sons. Hanne had bought an Afghani Barbie and a miniature doll’s house for the little girl, and a deep-red cashmere sweater for Tone-Marit. To crown it all, she had tricked Billy T. out to the bathroom during the commotion before dinner and made him write gift cards in his own handwriting, to avoid being exposed.

Håkon and Karen’s children were busy assembling a racetrack. Håkon, slightly tipsy, was sitting rosy-cheeked on the settee with his son’s Game Boy, while Karen, Tone-Marit, and Mary played Scrabble at the newly cleared dining table.

“You can’t write that,” Karen said, laughing. “‘Gooday’ … it should be ‘good day’. Two words, and not written like that.”

“Do you say ‘
good day
’?” Mary asked peevishly, creating a dramatic pause between the words, with an emphasis on the “d” in good. “Does anybody say it like that?”

“No, but—”

“Let her write ‘gooday’,” Tone-Marit said. “We can surely have slightly different rules for Mary.”

“Different rules, no!”

Furious, Mary threw the letters away.

“I don’t need different rules, you know! I don’t want special treatment, no I don’t!”

“Scrabble might not be quite the best game for you,” Hanne said. “Shall we go and do the washing-up, you and I?”

The doorbell rang.

At first no one really paid any attention. Then Tone-Marit looked in surprise at Nefis. Karen inclined her head.

“Are you expecting someone? Now?”

She glanced at the clock.

“No,” Nefis said, taken aback.

“I’m not working at the moment,” Mary said.

She had mixed herself a drink of cola, mineral water, Fanta, apple juice, and blackcurrant cordial and had decorated the glass with a red-and-yellow paper parasol and a little Christmas elf impaled on a straw. The children were jumping around her demanding ones exactly the same.

“Somebody else will have to open the door.”

Nefis went. Thirty seconds later, she returned wearing a puzzled expression.

“It’s for you, Hanna.”

“Me? Who is it?”

“A … a boy. A young man. Come on.”

Hanne ran her fingers through her hair as she headed for the hallway.

The boy was about sixteen years of age, lightly dressed, with no cap or scarf. His jeans were painfully tight, and underneath his denim jacket he was wearing only a white T-shirt. He looked up ever so slightly when Hanne tentatively held out her hand and said: “Hi. Who are you?”

He was good-looking, with an oval face and straight nose. His eyes were blue, Hanne could see, and she suddenly felt dizzy: they were dark blue with a distinctive black circle around the iris. His hair was brown, shining, and recently cut.

“You’re Hanne,” the boy said without taking her hand, and a fleeting smile made his mouth curl inconspicuously, a crooked smile, and Hanne stared in disbelief at this mirror image of herself when she was young. “Hi.”

“Come in,” she said, stepping back.

The boy did not move. Only now did Hanne notice that he had a brown canvas duffel bag with him; the sleeve of a sweater was bulging limply between the laces. A cardboard box sat beside the bag.

“I don’t know whether …” the boy ventured, and gulped. “I—”

“You must be … is it you, Alexander?”

His eyes filled with tears. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and once again he lowered his gaze. His lashes were dark, with an odd curl that made them seem longer than they really were. Hanne’s lashes were like that. Hanne had the same mouth as this boy. Even the way he tried to feign indifference, one foot placed lightly in front of the other, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether to come or go, was Hanne’s gesture, Hanne’s movement.

The boy barely nodded.

“They’ve thrown me out,” he whispered. “They’ve bloody thrown me out. On Christmas Eve, of all days. I didn’t know where to go. You’re not in the phone book, but I remembered the name of your lady friend.”