Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (38 page)

“It almost looks as if the woman’s right,” Billy T. said. “There’s nothing here. Unless we’re going to make a fuss about these pills. We probably won’t bother. Four Rohypnol, some Valium, and some stuff I can’t quite identify. They were probably left behind by Hermine.”

He entered the small bedroom. A pine double bed took up most of the space. A narrow closet in the corner was empty. The curtains were closed. Billy T. drew them apart carefully. The windows could not have been washed in years, and the ledge was sticky with asphalt dust.

“I don’t understand what Hermine used this place for,” Silje said. “Why would she sit in such an unsavory place, when she has a sumptuous apartment on the other side of the city?”

“There could be many reasons for that,” Billy T. muttered as he began to knock on the walls. “She might have acquaintances she doesn’t particularly want to drag along to where the posh folk live, for example. Hey, listen to this!”

His clenched fist suddenly created a different, heavier sound on the wall. He struck a number of blows from the floor in an upward direction, one more time.

“There’s something here. It’s hollow.”

A gap could be seen in the plaster and a safe door was visible through it. Billy T. reached in and extricated a graphic magazine; on the front cover there was a woman bathing with a dark-blue night sky in the background.

“Bingo!”

Billy T. had a wide grin on his face.

“Do you know anyone who can open this kind of thing, Silje?”

The safe was badly mounted. There were gaps between the metal and the plaster on the wall on both sides, and the contraption was obviously off level.

“This could probably just be ripped out,” Billy T. said, touching the simple lock tentatively with his finger. “But it would be a fucking nuisance to have to haul it with us. Bloody heavy, for sure.”

“It’s a code lock,” Silje said, sounding discouraged. “We’ll have to bring someone here who can pick it open.”

“That’s probably not necessary,” Billy T. said. “When was CC born?”

“Don’t mess around. He must have a better code than that!”

Billy T. rapped hard on the safe with his knuckles.

“A man who sets up a safe like this is thick enough to choose his date of birth as a code – his or his wife’s or their children’s. Everybody warns against it, most people do it. Quite simply because we have so many numbers we have to carry in our heads that we choose the simple option when we can. Fish out your notebook, then! Now at last we can make use of those clever-girl facts of yours.”

Silje pulled a pink notebook out of her handbag.

“August the seventeenth 1967. But that can’t be the code. You only need four digits. Not six.”

Billy T. fiddled with the combination lock.

“One seven zero eight,” he said aloud.

The handle did not budge.

“What did I say?” Silje muttered.

“One nine six seven,” Billy T. ventured.

This time the metal handle slid down with a mechanical click and the door opened easily.

“Look at this,” Billy T. said. “What have we here, then?”

Silje leaned toward the container. It could not be more than forty square centimeters. A shelf divided the little safe into two spaces. The lower part held a green metal canister. In the upper part there were three cardboard boxes, one of them with an open lid.

“Billy T.,” she whispered. “It’s ammunition.”

“Of course. What had you expected? That he stored his aftershave here?”

“But—”

“Not very professional to keep something like this in a place where we’ll obviously find it. That depends, then, on what kind of ammunition this is. If I’m not entirely mistaken, then …”

He pulled the green canister from the safe and placed it on the unmade bed. The lid was not lockable. He opened it.

“Look at this!”

Excited, he lifted the revolver from the container, holding it up to the harsh light from the ceiling lamp.

“This, Silje, is one of the most exquisite handguns ever made. Korth Combat Magnum. I’ve never seen the like.”

He looked tempted to take off his rubber gloves, feel the metal, run his fingers over the stock, and feel the heavy tactility of a handcrafted revolver.

“It weighs close to a kilo,” he said as he felt it, moving his hand up and down as he smiled broadly. “It takes four months to construct one. Do you see this screw here?”

He pointed with his little finger.

“This is where you make fine adjustments to the pressure on the trigger. Look how solid everything is! Compact and heavy. And feel that stock!”

He seemed unwilling to hand over the revolver.

“Walnut,” he mumbled. “This is the Rolls-Royce of revolvers, Silje. Costs just under five thousand dollars in the USA. Haven’t a clue what the price is in this country. Have you seen …”

Billy T. turned the gun over, weighing it in his hand yet again, turning it toward the light; the steel gleamed harshly blue.

“But what about this?” Silje said; she had lifted out one of the boxes and took hold of something farther back in the safe. “This doesn’t belong to a revolver, does it?”

At last Billy T. looked up. He squinted at the object Silje was presenting to him, using a pincer grip between thumb and forefinger.

“This belongs to a pistol, don’t you think?”

Billy T. put down the revolver, reluctantly and carefully, wrapping it in a soft cloth and replacing the lid of the green container.

“A cartridge clip,” he said. “That’s a cartridge clip. And this …”

He opened one of the cardboard boxes.

“… is 9mm subsonic ammunition. For use with a silencer. And it can’t be used with this baby here at all.”

His fingers tapped on the green metal as he shook his head slowly.

“But it suits a Glock excellently. And I don’t see such a gun anywhere. If that cartridge clip there slides into a pistol of the same type …”

He smacked his lips and shook his head.

“… then Carl-Christian and Co. are up shit creek, I must say.”

“They have been for some time now,” Silje replied.

It was already past three o’clock in the afternoon when Hanne Wilhelmsen walked along the corridor to her own office, with a large hat pulled down over her forehead.

“Wilhelmsen,” Audun Natholmen said, obviously relieved. “You’re here at last.”

He leapt up from a chair he had dragged over to the wall.

“Lots of people have been looking for you,” he said, his smooth forehead wrinkling as he took in her swollen, bleary eyes. “Is something wrong? Are you ill?”

“Yes,” Hanne lied. “An eye infection. It’s kept me at home. Have you been waiting long?”

“I’ve been searching for you all day long,” he said; only now did she notice that he kept looking around, as if afraid of something or someone. “I must …”

His voice cracked. He swallowed noisily.

“Chief Inspector, I’m really in hot water now.”

“Come in,” she said, unsure whether it was curiosity or annoyance she felt. “You could just have let yourself in and waited in my office. Sitting here in the corridor, like any other visitor …”

He followed so closely behind her that she could feel his breath on her neck. The moment they were inside, he closed the door behind him, emphatically, as if he really wanted to lock it.

“I’ve found the guns,” he said.

Hanne was about to sit down. She stood for a moment with her knees bent, tensed, before plumping herself down in the seat.

‘You’ve what, did you say?”

“The guns,” he said in a loud whisper. “I found a Glock and a .357 Magnum. In the tarn. The lake I told you about, you know. The place where I—”

“What … what is it …?” She tore off her hat and tossed it on the floor. Her mouth opened, but her thoughts would not form into words.

“Well, you said that
you
would have done it,” he complained.

“I said it would be really crazy!”

“But that you would have done it and kept your mouth shut.”

“I was joking! I was joking, for God’s sake!”

She desperately struggled to gather her thoughts. Rational, she thought, be rational. All she heard was the scraping sound of her own teeth as she ground them together. Audun Natholmen just sat there, like a lanky schoolboy with a guilty conscience; too small for his uniform, with a blank face, a childish face, a puppyish parody of a policeman.

“You’re a police officer, Audun.”

“Trainee,” he muttered.

“Where are they now?”

“At home,” he said.

“At your house?”

“Yes. I’ve been so scared, and then I didn’t quite know … My pal said he was going to phone the
VG
newspaper, because there’s lots of money in—”

“Let’s go.”

Most of all, she wanted to give him a thrashing.

He tagged along after her, subdued and with head bowed, but nevertheless with a childish, irrepressible delight that he might have solved the biggest homicide case in the history of the Oslo Police Force.

Annmari had to compose herself, to avoid turning away in disgust. As a police prosecutor, she had seen enough pornography to feel pretty inured. She had fast-forwarded through endless amounts of evidence from inner-city dives, searching for molestation of children. As far as sexual congress between adults was concerned, there was hardly anything that had the ability to shock her. However, this was something else. The young woman and the far older man were pictured in sexual activity that to some extent was not unfamiliar to Annmari, but all the same it knocked her sideways. She felt physically sick.

“It’s just because you know them,” Erik Henriksen said quietly; he stood leaning over her as she flicked through the photographs.

“I don’t know them.”

“You know who they are. That makes it worse. More embarrassing. All that shit we have to watch after those useless raids Chief Puntvold insists on conducting from time to time, they only have to do with strangers. Nameless, almost faceless people. This is far worse. Don’t you think?”

Annmari nodded imperceptibly.

“But it doesn’t help that they’re so bad,” she said. “From a purely technical point of view, I mean. If I screw up my eyes a bit, I can barely identify the two of them.”

“The images must have been taken with a hidden camera,” Erik said, straightening up. “Now things are really getting serious.”

He pulled a grimace as he rubbed the small of his back.

“When did you last get some sleep?” he asked.

“Don’t remember. Do you think Hermine’s the one who’s ensured that these photos are found?”

“Difficult to say. They were in her possession, of course. Brilliant that you ordered a more thorough ransacking of her apartment, by the way. She had some sort of hidden cupboard. Behind a set of drawers in the kitchen she had mounted a sheet of plywood. The pictures were inside there, together with an empty bag with traces of what we provisionally believe to be heroin. From experience, I’d say it’s most likely that he’s the one who’d want to preserve them. You know, to relive and enjoy later. Anyway, it’s too early to say where the photographs were taken. We’re investigating that, of course, and since they were found at Hermine’s … No, I don’t know.”

“Damn and blast,” Annmari said in disgust, turning the pictures over. “It’s nothing to do with me, what people do behind closed doors, and maybe I’m being judgmental. But there must be forty years between them. And then they’re uncle and niece. Good Lord, what a family! Killing and fucking each other … yuck!”

“Is it illegal, what they’re doing?”

“No. She’s an adult, after all. But … yuck!”

Erik laughed and patted her on the shoulder.

“Now you’re being just a tiny bit childish, Prosecutor Skar.”

“Maybe so. In any case …”

She glanced fleetingly at the clock. It was twenty minutes to five.

“Where’s Hanne?”

“I’ve no idea. Everybody’s asking for her. Her cellphone’s switched off. Even Billy T. doesn’t know what’s become of her. But what are we going to do with this, in actual fact?”

Again he pointed at the photographs. They were now stacked, picture side down, at the far edge of Annmari’s desk, as if she had no wish to defile her workplace any more than was strictly necessary.

“We’ll go straight to Alfred Stahlberg’s house, of course. He obviously has a closer relationship to Hermine than we thought.” Once again she made a tart grimace and added in slight irritation: “Has the guy been interviewed at all, in connection with Hermine’s disappearance?”

“Oh yes. Over the phone.”

“Over the phone,” Annmari fumed. “I can make sure it’s not over the phone this time. Send a patrol car. Uniforms. I want the man here. Now. And if he won’t come willingly, then I’ll write a blue-form summons.”

“For what, though? What would you charge the man with, then?”