Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (42 page)

Hanne let the water run for a long time. Instead of finding a glass in the old-fashioned wall cabinets, she leaned over the sink and put her mouth to the stream of water.

When she straightened up, wiping her chin with the back of her hand, she recalled why Nefis had two email addresses and often sent documents to herself at the end of the working day. With her eyes closed, Hanne could hear her voice, singsong, with the trace of accent that had almost disappeared now: “An extra safeguard. If the back-up fails and the computer goes on fire overnight, then my work is on a server somewhere out there in the ether and can be downloaded tomorrow morning.”

Knut Sidensvans was not afraid of a break-in. He was afraid of losing important documents.

Hanne turned off the tap. Then she entered Sidensvans’s living room and opened the files he had sent to himself. There were not many. It took her ten minutes to get them printed out and sorted. Half an hour later she had read them all. It took another thirty minutes for her to understand what she had read.

Painstakingly she folded the sheets of paper and logged out of the machine. She tucked the papers down the waistband of her trousers, before pulling on her jacket. The anxiety of the last twenty-four hours, that deep unease that had bothered her in recent days, for which she had not found any explanation, was gone.

She swore instead. She uttered all the oaths she could think of, blaspheming as she locked the door behind her. When she dashed downstairs to get hold of a taxi as fast as possible, she mumbled in time to the clicking of her heels on the concrete:
Shit. Shit. Shit!

There was a lot to be done. The first priority was to speak to Henrik Heinz Backe.

It was a different woman this time. She was younger and did not seem so friendly. Carl-Christian Stahlberg wondered whether they used women to make him more cooperative. More truthful. He was keen to be cooperative and truthful, but it was too difficult to arrive at what was not a lie without telling lies.

“So, Hermine bought a gun,” the woman insisted. “Do you know anything about that?”

Her voice was light, with a very slight lisp around the “s”. She had a name that contained a number of lisping sounds, but he couldn’t remember what it was. It felt as if the glue in his brain was used up; he remembered so little, and no names. Not even the lawyer’s. He was a well-known personality in the media, that much CC did know. Mabelle must have pulled some strings. Hawk-eyed and vigorous, the lawyer listened attentively throughout the interview, but Carl-Christian could no longer recollect his name.

“What?”

“Have you taken in anything at all of what I’ve been saying?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Have you any knowledge of your sister Hermine buying a gun on November the sixteenth this year?”

“No.”

He wanted to say yes, but it was as if his mouth was choosing its own words, completely independent of his thoughts. Maybe that was fine. His thoughts were so jumbled, and there was nothing but nonsense inside his head. It was just as well that his mouth was running away with itself of its own volition. He smiled.

“This isn’t actually very amusing,” the woman said.

“No,” he replied.

“I want to show you some photographs we have found.”

Photos, Carl-Christian Stahlberg thought.

The woman has some photos.

But the photographs had been burned. He remembered that. They were lying as ash and nothingness in the fireplace.

“They may seem … offensive. I apologize for that. But it’s important …”

He had burned all the photographs. He was certain of that. It was as if his brain had received a jolt; his thoughts seemed to fall into place, into order, some kind of system descended on it all, and he smiled again. The lawyer appeared annoyed. He snatched up the copies for himself, before the policewoman had managed to display them on the table.

“Is this necessary?” he said, shielding them from Carl-Christian’s view. “I can’t comprehend how it can be useful to anyone for my client to be forced to respond to these.”

Carl-Christian could understand none of this. The photographs in the safe in Kampen were gone. He had destroyed them himself, as Mabelle had requested.

“Photographs,” he said, flustered.

“I must ask you to give them back to me,” the woman said.

The lawyer reluctantly handed them over. Carl-Christian waited. Now he really must concentrate. This was important. He had most definitely destroyed the photographs of Mabelle. They no longer existed; they could not possibly be here, in a slim bundle on the table in front of him. He did not even dare to check. Instead he glanced up. His gaze stopped at the ceiling light.

His father might have had an extra set. The photographs might have been lying in Eckersbergs gate, inside Hermann’s writing desk. The police had found them there.

The woman placed her hand on his arm, making him look down in confusion.

They weren’t photographs of Mabelle. They were pictures of Hermine.

When he saw who was standing behind her, and after a few seconds at last realized what his sister and Uncle Alfred were doing, he leaned to one side and threw up.

No one said anything. He vomited over himself and the floor, but no one did anything.

Carl-Christian felt a flash of light inside his head, a silent, white explosion. It was as if everything at once became so clear – all the years in his family, all the quarrels, the discord, his mother’s pained looks and his father’s heavy-handed bullying of them all, and Hermine’s maneuvering through the difficult minefield of which the Stahlberg family had always consisted. He pictured his uncle in his mind’s eye, ingratiating and incomprehensible, deceitful and yet never disowned.

It dawned on Carl-Christian, as in a revelation, why Hermann had given his daughter a fortune on her twentieth birthday. He suddenly appreciated, as he retched yet again, that he should have seen this long ago. Everything would have been different, if only he had been willing to see.

When he finally sat upright again, he had to take tight hold of the table to avoid falling off his chair. He felt light-headed and his stomach was empty and hot. There was no room inside him for anything other than this one thing: he hated his father more intensely than ever. Hated him.

“I killed them,” he said. “I was the one who murdered my parents and my brother.”

Silje Sørensen’s mouth fell open. Of all the contrived lies, of all the untruths this man had served up in the course of a total of more than eleven hours of questioning since his arrest on Christmas Day, this was the most obvious. Silje let her gaze slide from Carl-Christian to his lawyer, in an effort to understand. She could not fathom her own certainty, and sought the lawyer’s help as she stammered: “Why … but that can’t—”

“I killed them,” Carl-Christian repeated angrily; he was on his feet now.

Then, grabbing the top photograph, he tore it into tiny pieces.

“My boy!”

Delighted, the lady in Blindernveien stretched out her arms in an embrace.

“You weren’t supposed to arrive until Monday! And you’re here already.”

Her son knelt down and let his mother hold him tight.

“I thought it was too long,” he murmured, half smothered by her thick woolen jacket. “I couldn’t let you sit here on your own. Stephanie and the children won’t arrive until Monday morning. I thought the two of us could have a couple of days to ourselves. Now that it’s all at a bit of a distance.”

“You’re so kind,” his mother said, not wanting to let him go. “What with your work and everything—”

“There’s not such a lot to do now, over Christmas,” he said, finally extricating himself. “There were just a few things I needed to attend to. Since what happened to Dad came about so suddenly and I had to—”

“All the way from France,” his mother said. “You’re a good boy, Terje. Coming all that way twice in one week. Things are not so difficult for me now. Such a good boy.”

Laughing, Terje Wetterland went out to the kitchen to put on some water for tea.

“It’s the least I could do,” he shouted, rattling cups. “I had such a guilty conscience for leaving you at all. We shall … What’s this, by the way?”

“What’s what, my boy? The tea’s in the jar with the lid beside the—”

“I mean these papers lying on the kitchen table.”

“Oh, those …”

He had returned to the doorway now.

“It’s just a folder your dad had left lying here at home. It was beside his bed. The night he—”

Tears spilled from her eyes, and she closed them.

“Dear Mum,” Terje Wetterland said, sitting down beside her. “We’ll get used to this. I’ll make sure I have a bit more to do here in Norway, and then I’ll be able to visit more often. We’ll get through this, Mum.”

Suddenly she dried her face.

“Of course. I was afraid of forgetting those papers in the bedroom, so I left them out so that you would find them. Would you put them on the shelf in the hallway, please? Then you can take them with you when you clear out his files. Because you said that … You’ll stay long enough to sort out your father’s papers?”

“Yes,” he said, heading back to the kitchen. “And to have a nice time with you. The children are really looking forward to seeing you. They’re so upset about their grandfather. Where did you say the tea … No, I’ve found the container. Camilla has made a lovely drawing she says she’ll put inside the coffin. It was quite touching; she sat for hours on end with it last night.”

Terje Wetterland rinsed the glass teapot. Old tea leaves were wedged in the strainer, and he tried to poke out the worst of them. In the end he gave up and called out: “You don’t make tea very often!”

“Is it too old? Has it completely lost its aroma?”

“No, not at all. It’ll be fine.”

The whistling kettle screeched. He removed it from the hob and set it down on the table while he filled the strainer with tea, and poured the boiling water over it. The strainer was still blocked and the water ran over the edge, all of a sudden; he burned his hand and whispered an oath.

“What is it, dearest?”

“Nothing,” he shouted as he held his hand under the running tap.

Slowly, he watched as a blister the size of a krone coin sprouted at the base of his thumb, smarting painfully.

“
Merde
,” he whispered again, and turned to find a hand towel.

The tea had spread over the table surface, threatening to soak into the papers that had begun to slide out of their folder. He grabbed the cloth and slapped it down on the table. The golden liquid splashed all over the place. With a loud groan, he whisked the documents off the table and held them above his head, as if worried that the tea stain would damage them.

“What is it? What are you up to out there?”

“Nothing,” he muttered, blowing on his burn. “Everything’s okay.”

The documents were apparently unharmed, apart from a light-brown streak and a couple of spatters on the top sheet. Terje Wetterland was taken aback.

“What is this in fact, Mum?”

“What? Can’t you come in here and talk to me? It’s so tiresome with all this shouting.”

Slowly, without taking his eyes off the documents, he walked back to the living room.

“Do you know what these are about?” he asked, trying not to let his own disquiet color his voice.

“Is something wrong? Is there a problem?”

His mother was not so restrained.

“No, not really. Nothing wrong. But I think I should phone the police.”

“The police?”

“Take it easy, Mum. It’s just that these …”

He leafed carefully through the papers, feeling that he ought not to do so. This was not his business: it was like reading someone else’s letter. But he had to. He read, noting names and dates; he struggled to focus; his glasses misted up. He took them off and read through it again.

“Mum,” he said finally. “Were the Stahlberg family Dad’s clients?”

Jenny stood in front of the big puddle on the sidewalk. Concentrating, she put her feet together before she jumped in, making a tremendous splash. Billy T. swore vehemently and grabbed his daughter by the arm. He pulled her away while the youngster screamed and kicked at his legs.

“Daddy’s soaking wet,” he complained. “You mustn’t do that!”

“That’s sore!” the child wailed. “Ouch!”

He let her go and hunkered down. Snot had congealed under her nose and, feeling discouraged, Billy T. noticed the constantly recurring infection that formed yellow pus in the corners of her eyes.

“Listen to me, my girl.”

He forced a smile as he patted her arm.

“Sore,” Jenny whimpered.

“Sorry. But we got so wet. Now Daddy just has to make one phone call—”

“No.”

“Yes. I’m just going to say a few words to Hanne, and then we’ll—”

“No!”

Jenny began to shriek. People hurrying past them alongside the stores in Markveien glared skeptically at him as he grabbed the back of her snowsuit and carried her forward like a bag of bones. Only when he was well inside the park at Olav Ryes plass did he deposit her resolutely on the ground.