Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (40 page)

“Who?”

“Management. They’re pissed off. You’ve played on so many concessions in this system of ours that their patience is running out. The Superintendent—”

“He’s most angry at
you
.”

“I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not me we’re talking about. The Superintendent is really annoyed that you can never work as part of a team, that you never … You know what I mean. What
he
means. Puntvold is also fed up to the back teeth. He’s been at me no less than three times to get rid of you. And that’s just in the course of this past week.”

“Two-faced bastard!” Hanne said indignantly. “He’s been sucking up to me, you know.”

“He thinks you should take a holiday. That you’re overworked. That this fuss you’ve made about Sidensvans is a sidetrack. And to be honest, he’s not alone in thinking that.”

“What about you, then?” Hanne asked, finally looking her in the eye. “Do you agree?”

Annmari stood up and shook her leg.

“To some extent,” she said, sitting down in her chair again. “I agree that a holiday would do you good. After all, that was the intention, wasn’t it? That you should have a fortnight’s break over Christmas?”

“Is Sidensvans a sidetrack, in your opinion?”

Annmari still would not touch the guns. She simply studied them, through the plastic, as if she could not yet take in that they had turned up.

“Knut Sidensvans is the victim of a brutal crime,” she said. “And as such, he’s definitely important. But the way this case has exploded now, I can’t quite see that there’s any great hurry to investigate him in particular. Of course it will have to be done. But we have limited resources. We’re overflowing with evidence. It’s as if a dam’s been opened. We have to hasten slowly. Find some relevance in it all, build it stone by stone, and ensure that the prosecution, when it eventually comes about, is as unassailable as possible. All in good time, Hanne.”

“But listen to me!”

Hanne shoved the evidence bags aside with the back of her hand, nonchalant and reckless, before leaning forward to the Police Prosecutor.

“We ought to secure these as soon as possible,” Annmari said, pointing. “They can’t just lie here and—”

“A crime,” Hanne said loudly, and Annmari almost jumped out of her skin, “has its own entirely special character. Sometimes I think that a crime has its own … personality. What has helped me over all these years is that I always try to put myself in the perpetrator’s shoes. Get under the skin of the crime. I try …”

She put her hand behind her ear and gave a fleeting smile.

“I try to listen,” she said. “To what it tells me.”

“And the Stahlberg crime tells you—”

“Many things. In the first place, that it can’t have been planned. Not the way it was carried out, at least. Of course someone may have had plans that evening, to kill one or several of the victims, but the whole crime scene is too chaotic, too … loud. Too noisy. The perpetrator – or perpetrators – for instance, had amazing luck not to be seen, not to be heard.”

“Silencers,” Annmari said, pointing.

“But think of the shrieks. The screams.”

“But Hermine was seen. Seen running from the crime scene.”

“Maybe.”

Hanne nodded energetically.

“It’s certainly possible. Of course, we don’t know for sure that it was her, but it’s certainly possible that Hermine committed the murders. If this woman gun dealer of Billy T.’s—”

“Woman?”

“Forget it. If the gun dealer can identify this Glock here, then Hermine’s well and truly caught out. But listen, Annmari. Listen to the crime. Try to follow the logic of the murders.”

Annmari found herself actually listening, holding her breath in an effort perhaps to sense a voice, through the wall, from the guns, inside her own head.

“Can you hear it?”

Hanne’s eyes locked on to hers.

“The situation is chaotic,” she said softly. “Sidensvans has paid a visit. A welcome guest. He has to be received hospitably, with champagne and open sandwiches. Cake. The father of the house opens the door. Happy, perhaps. Then Sidensvans is shot.”

“But we don’t know—”

“Sidensvans was shot first, Annmari. Look at it now. Listen. He falls forward. Hermann—”

“Hanne! We haven’t yet reconstructed it all. We’re working flat out on—”

“Listen to me, for Christ’s sake!”

Hanne was stretched out across the desk now and grabbed both of Annmari’s hands.

“The perpetrator is standing on the stairs, or at the front door. He or she shoots Sidensvans. After that, the person goes up on the landing and shoots Hermann. Preben must have come rushing through. Then he was attacked as well. That’s the only way the placing of the bodies can be explained. Sidensvans with his overcoat on and his feet across the threshold. Hermann just inside from him, and Preben—”

“Okay then!”

Annmari pulled back her hands.

“Of course, that’s what we’ve used as some sort of working hypothesis, but what—”

“The perpetrator then goes farther inside the apartment. We’ve thought the whole time that it was to get Turid. She had to die, too. But what if the perpetrator was not looking for her at all? What if the murderer just wanted to make sure there were no witnesses to it all?”

“But she—”

“Sidensvans was killed
first
, Annmari. If Hermine is the guilty party, then I want to know what she had against Sidensvans. The way this case is speaking to me, it’s telling a story of a murder that went wrong.”

“Four murders.”

“That might not have been intended to happen at all. That we today, eight days later, are sitting with bucket-loads of evidence that might already be sufficient for a conviction, that ought to tell us something. Have you ever …”

She smacked herself hard on the forehead, as if the pain would make her thoughts clearer, her words more convincing.

“Have you ever experienced a case in which we’ve stumbled across so much evidence in such a short time? Eh? Have you?”

Hanne was almost screaming. Annmari raised her palms and hushed her.

“No, but—”

“The Stahlbergs were a broken family,” Hanne said, suddenly quiet. “A beautiful façade in the process of cracking open badly. But family members hating one another does not mean that they kill one another. We owe it to the three suspects to think along alternative lines. For a while. If for no other reason than for the sake of appearances. We owe it to ourselves to do that.”

She rose stiffly from her chair.

“I have to go,” she said. “I’ve lots of mail to sort through.”

“Now? It’s … half past midnight!”

“It has to be done sometime. And by the way …”

With her hand on the door handle, she turned toward Annmari for the last time.

“If Hermine is able to commit murder,” she said slowly, “something she might well be – why, then, didn’t she kill Alfred? Why on earth didn’t she kill a guy like that instead?”

Then, with a shrug, she left Annmari sitting on her own again.

Hanne Wilhelmsen had emptied her pigeonhole, crammed full of mail, in the deserted front office. The in-tray in her own office was also stacked high. For more than a week she had only managed to sort roughly through what had been pressed into her hand. It would take hours on end to sift through all of it. Since she wouldn’t get any sleep anyway, she would sit at her desk for as long as she could bear to. She was obviously no longer particularly welcome at headquarters. Fair enough, then, to work through the night, with no others to relate to. Undisturbed, the way she liked best.

She was abnormal and different. Obstinate and lacking in flexibility. Maybe she had always been like that. Kåre might be right: there could be something wrong with her, from birth onward, something genetic perhaps, an inherited defect that made her impossible to love, even as a little child. For so many years she had thought that her differentness was something she had chosen. But maybe it was all an illusion. She had not chosen. She
was
defective.

Gritting her teeth, she unscrewed the lid of a half-empty cola bottle.

It was not only her fault. Not everything was her fault. A four-year-old should not hear that she is a waif who was found on a rubbish tip, she mused, just because she did not read as early as her siblings. Of course, her father had been joking. But she was a child, and she had believed him.

Hanne breathed more easily.

She had a home; she had Nefis. They belonged together, the two of them. And Mary. Alexander had arrived, and they were a complete family now.

She began to place the internal envelopes in one bundle, the official envelopes bearing logos in another, and everything she was not quite sure what to do with she placed in a separate pile. When everything had finally been sorted, her chest sank. Three piles of paper towered on her desk.

“My God,” she muttered. “Might as well pour water through a sieve.”

When she carefully tried to push two of the bundles back, to make room to work on the last pile, everything toppled over. Documents and envelopes, loose sheets and notifications now lay in a haphazard heap on the floor. Her headache suddenly grew more intense.

One letter had sailed all the way over to the door. For a minute or two she sat, nonplussed, wondering whether to leave it all lying there. Go home. Sleep. The cleaner would take it all away. Someone else could take care of the damn mail.

Of course they couldn’t.

Starting at the door was possibly not such a bad idea. The law of chance was just as good as any other system, it struck her, feeling discouraged.

The envelope that was lying on its own, just inside the threshold, was from Telenor, the phone company.

Hanne ripped it open and let her fingers run over the close print of the columns that showed which numbers Knut Sidensvans had called during the final period of his life. Five calls on the day of his murder and more than forty in the previous week. Some of them were quite lengthy.

Hanne went back to her seat without taking her eyes off the document. Letters and papers rustled around her feet: they covered almost half the floor area now. She sat down slowly and switched on her computer. The printout only gave the numbers Sidensvans had phoned and been contacted by, no names. She must have forgotten to specify what she wanted. The court order had been easy to obtain. It would take days to order a new printout.

The computer screen flickered blue and eventually settled.

The search program was highly efficient.

The day of Knut Sidensvans’s death, he had called the University Library twice. Both calls had lasted less than two minutes. At the crack of dawn he had had a longer conversation with the Meteorological Institute. At 13.32, he had obviously ordered a Chinese takeaway. She had no need to look up his very last phone call. The number was very familiar. Sidensvans had spoken to someone at police headquarters, Grønlandsleiret 44.

At 14.29 on Thursday December 19, the very last phone conversation Knut Sidensvans had had was with someone in the police.

That was actually not so strange.

He was working on an article about the police force. Knut Sidensvans was going to write about the police, and naturally had sources there.

Not particularly strange.

The very last phone call in the man’s life.

Once again, Hanne felt that unfamiliar anxiety. It swamped her, a sadness mixed with anxiety that left her feeling indecisive and longing to go home. She struggled to remember when she had last felt like this, whether she had ever before felt that a case terrified her and made her want to let go.

When it dawned on her, she felt hot. As she keyed in Directory Enquiries, she noticed that her hands were ice-cold.

“Åshild Meier,” she requested. “In Drøbak. Put me through, please.”

The publishers’ editor picked up after three rings, obviously half asleep.

“So,” she said, taken aback, once Hanne had duly apologized for the lateness of the hour. “This book is quite comprehensive. It will be more of a reference book, a … altogether more than thirty articles, in fact, and when we’ve decided on the order of the articles, instead of a more chronological, uniform—”

“What was Sidensvans to write about?” Hanne interrupted her. “I just want to know what he was to write about.”

“He had taken it upon himself to describe the development of crime in the major cities,” Åshild Meier said. “From 1970 until the present day. With Sidensvans’s knowledge of statistics, we thought he would be well suited to draw some pictures of … trends, you might say. He was going to compare the development in Oslo and Bergen with three selected smaller cities. An enormous task, of course. Several of the articles could be considered more as dissertations. But then we don’t plan to have the book ready for publication until January 2006, either. By then the Police Directorate will have been in existence for five years. But of course you know that.”

“How far had he reached?”