Lethal Investments (6 page)

The police station door had just shut behind him when he pulled up and turned. Too late. He had been seen. The face of the woman from the temping agency had already lit up. Her stout body undulated towards him.

‘Ha, ha. Hi, Frank!’

A bowl of jelly fleeing a children’s party, he thought and braced himself. Again he was amazed by this combination of large torso and tiny head. Mauve punky hair up top and slender stiletto heels down below. She waved. Black leggings at bursting point over the stomach. Her whole body pitched and rolled.

‘I’ve been fussing around here for hours on end, worse than a broody hen!’

Between his eyes, he felt his patience being tested.

‘And there you are! Just as I’ve forgotten what it was I wanted to ask you!’

She burst into loud laughter, grabbed his arm and pulled him towards the stairs while stealing furtive glances around her. He tried to free himself but without success. Yawing flesh rubbed against his shoulders and hips.

‘It’s about that letter you asked me to write to the police officer in the provinces!’

She thrust a few papers into his face, obscuring his view of the staircase. Someone was coming down and Frank had to squeeze sideways and restrain her on the step below him.

‘Ooh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Let’s get physical!’

He continued and tried to put some distance between them. But she followed him up the stairs and down the corridor. Panting two paces behind him. Waving the paper in front of her and speaking while pointing to a word that was misspelt. He grabbed the door handle of his office and turned. ‘Absolutely fine,’ he bowed. ‘Write it your way, no problem.’

The plate of jelly slopped to a standstill. Hands on her hips. ‘Do you know what your boss said to me?’

She nodded towards the office door behind his back.

Whatever he said, it can’t have been bad enough, Frank thought, and let her steam ahead, glance to both sides, lean back and demonstratively button her mouth as two uniformed officers passed. ‘He told me to go to . . .’

She paused for two seconds. ‘Hell,’ she mouthed. Peering conspiratorially to both sides again.

‘I didn’t answer,’ she assured him. ‘But he’ll eat his words, mark you me!’

Frank, thinking the suggestion was not a bad one, blinked with heavy eyelids. ‘I’m sure you misheard,’ he said diplomatically.

‘Not me, no. But I know why he’s like that!’

Frank could feel his curiosity aroused.

She was nodding her head, in earnest. ‘They say he changed when he was widowed. So that’s at the heart of the matter.’ Head still nodding. ‘He isn’t getting what he needs, you know! Hasn’t done for several years!’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Beg’s the word. Begging for it, he is.’

She spun on her thin stiletto heels and the rolls of fat set off a new wave. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing though! Ha, ha!’

The next moment she stormed down the corridor. Her backside juddered with each stomp of her calves.

All of a sudden she came to a halt. Turned round. ‘Au revoir,
chéri
!’

And rounded the corner.

‘Schwenke rang,’ Gunnarstranda’s voice resounded as he opened the door. A cigarette bobbed up and down in his mouth. Frank slumped on a tatty blue swivel chair and blew out his cheeks.

‘Don’t be so hard on the clerical staff,’ he said.

‘Fatty?’

Gunnarstranda rubbed his nose and dropped the cigarette in a faded red ashtray bearing the scarcely legible word
Cinzano
in peeling white letters. He chewed his biro and mumbled. ‘She’ll have to learn to knock before trampling down people’s doors!’ And then: ‘Tottenham at home to Leeds?’

‘Away team wins,’ Frank said, switching on the computer.

Gunnarstranda did not agree. ‘Isn’t there a Norwegian between the sticks at Tottenham?’

‘Go for a draw then.’

A few taps on the keyboard. Soon the blue screen came up.

‘Executioner have anything new to say?’

‘Nothing. Apart from what the girl had eaten. And we knew that anyway. Also, he reckoned he could establish death occurring at somewhere between five and eight on Sunday morning. And that was hardly news, either.’

Frank nodded slowly. Thinking to himself that this piece of information was actually very useful. Nevertheless, he knew his boss well enough to realize that the time had no doubt been underlined in thick red ink in the man’s brain.

‘What do you reckon about Sigurd Klavestad?’ Gunnarstranda asked across the desk. ‘Do you think he was telling the truth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ Gunnarstranda said, nodding to himself as he continued to fill in the pools coupon.

Frank frowned. ‘Why?’

Gunnarstranda kept writing and counted the crosses.

‘Why?’ Frank repeated, louder.

‘I let him go,’ Gunnarstranda said without looking up. ‘I’ve put Jack Myrberget on his tail for the time being.’

The coupon was finished and he put it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket hanging over the back of the chair. Took another coupon from the pile at the bottom of the drawer. Filled out the squares without any difficulty this time.

‘I’ve used this line of twelve numbers now for twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘Every week for twenty-five years. Do you know how much I’ve earned from it?’

‘No.’

‘Fifty-four kroner. Last Saturday. I got ten right.’

‘Is that all you’ve won in twenty-five years?’

‘With that line, yes. But I know it’ll do the trick one day!’

‘Fifty-two weeks a year. For twenty-five years. Have you ever bothered to work out how much money you’ve wasted?’

‘Whoa there. Just imagine if I win!’

‘Fifty-four kroner!’

Gunnarstranda put back the coupon. ‘What did you find out about Software Partners?’

Frank swung himself round again. ‘Oslo West,’ he summed up. ‘Nice people, every one over forty with varying risk margins. Expensive clothes, expensive place, computer technology. Five employees. I spoke to three of them. The only oddity was that they had put a new lock on their filing cabinet. A beast of a lock. I’m writing a report on it now.’

He snatched a bag from the floor. ‘I was given a whole pile of glossy advertising.’

He lifted the bag of brochures. ‘The outfit’s small but they boast as if they were IBM. Apparently they’re in a period of expansion. I didn’t understand all of it, but they’re going to increase their equity and get more distributors up and down the country.’

Gunnarstranda took some of the material from the bag. ‘I’ve got some bedtime reading then,’ he mumbled.

‘Finance Manager,’ Frank continued from the chair, ‘is someone called Øyvind Bregård, an unmarried bodybuilder. Not very talkative outdoor type who claims he spends his free time hiking in the forests and fields. Admitted, after a lot of fuss, having gone to bed with Reidun, a while back. She gave him the elbow.’

‘Anything there?’ Gunnarstranda asked.

‘Possible – he doesn’t have an alibi for the Saturday. Claimed he went to bed early to go walking on the Sunday. Which he also did alone.’

The inspector nodded slowly.

‘The Marketing Manager’s called Svennebye. Apparently he’s vanished into thin air. His wife rang and was very animated while I was there. Her husband hadn’t come home from the office after news of the murder was announced. Wife hasn’t seen him since.’

Gunnarstranda whistled. Fingers groped for the butt in the ashtray.

‘I promised the secretary I would follow this up,’ Frank said with some hesitation. ‘She seems pretty run-of-the-mill. Oldest one there. Just a bit jumpy.’

He waited until the inspector had lit up.

‘Then there’s this other woman, Sonja Hager. I mentioned Bregård’s fling with the dead girl, and she got all het up.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Far from it. The woman’s married to Engelsviken, the MD. No, not jealous.’

He walked to the sink in the corner. Drank some water. ‘But she gets pretty aerated about marriage as an institution,’ he concluded. Wiped the back of his hands on his beard.

Gunnarstranda was smoking. ‘Anything there?’

‘Something I can’t put my finger on,’ Frank said, walking back to his place. ‘She thought Reidun Rosendal was using other people.’

‘How so?’

Frank shrugged. ‘Think it’s all wrapped up with sex.’

‘Using men?’

‘Don’t know. The woman was generally very vague.’

Gunnarstranda patted his pockets and gripped the door handle.

‘You’ll have to put that in your report. Take the evening off when you’ve finished.’

Frank sat staring at the door as it closed, then turned back to his computer. When I’ve finished, he thought, downhearted, and made a start.

Gunnarstranda parked his car at the very top of the ridge, where the gravel road stopped and widened into a turnaround. An hour and a quarter’s drive from Oslo, to Hurumlandet, the peninsula to the south. If the gods were with you, that is, because the traffic lights had to be green at various strategic points and Oslo Tunnel free of congestion.

The gods weren’t today. He checked his watch with a grim expression. He had been forced to stop the Skoda at least seven or eight times on the road out of Oslo. The engine had been playing up. It died if he did more than seventy. Started spluttering and coughing, and he lost speed, with the result that he had drivers up his backside angrily flashing their lights and honking their horns. Until he felt duty-bound to pull in, to park, nose pointing into the ditch, and to let the worst of the traffic drone past, nervous all the time that the car wouldn’t start again. He had gone through the repertoire. Pulled out the choke, put his foot down on the accelerator, hoping that it would manage a few more kilometres until the same thing happened. A dreadful trip. But now at long last he was at his journey’s end.

His annoyance at the rigours of the drive had not yet subsided. So he sat calmly looking out of the car window until the familiar feeling announced its arrival. That wonderful feeling of being at home. Private. He thought about Edel. She had managed to make a kind of garden out here. Now, since she was no longer alive, he continued where she had left off. Her whole life she had wanted a place like this and got it in the end. Gunnarstranda did what she could not. Took over. Half his life he had lived not knowing the difference between an ash leaf and a maple leaf. Now he knew a great deal more besides. And four years had passed since she died.

He as good as lived here for six months of the year, from late April till well into October. This was his private haven. Yet he was unable to see the brown pine trunk in front of his cabin without feeling a prickling up his spine. The tingling and the image of Edel in rubber boots with the woven basket over her arm, back from mushrooming. He mused on why it was always that image. Why there were no others and why he got this simultaneous tingling.

From the large pine a little path led twenty-five metres to the cabin which was concealed behind two large rocks. It was at the front that the miracle revealed itself. Spring, summer and autumn. Here she had produced whatever there was to produce in this climate. And he had maintained it. Already now, as he was unloading the files and papers from the car, a worried frown was carved into his forehead. The problem of watering during the summer. You never knew, a case like the murder of Reidun Rosendal could be a protracted affair. For the next few weeks he would not be able to live here at any rate, but what would it be like in May, when perhaps the spring drought would come?

This line of thought was interrupted by heavy steps and the crack of twigs. From the undergrowth by the road came a man dressed in a faded Icelandic sweater and raggedy trousers. Gunnarstranda recognized his neighbour Sørby, who saluted him with a hand to his forehead and a nervous smile.

Gunnarstranda mumbled something incomprehensible in response and concentrated on his luggage.

Sørby belonged to the coterie of pensioners who stuck together out here, partied, played accordion and dressed in rags. The policeman did not like him. The man was an old windbag. Talked about his kids as if he were confiding state secrets.

Gunnarstranda couldn’t give a flying fart about people’s children or grandchildren. Least of all those this fat bastard was responsible for begetting. Besides, he suspected that the gang of pensioners was talking behind his back at accordion evenings.

Inasmuch as Sørby considered it appropriate to stand there, irresolute and docile, the man could not be on an honest errand.

Gunnarstranda squinted with distaste in the man’s direction. Wondered what the fat scarecrow had been doing in the area. Snooping probably. Him and the others.

United, they were such a powerful force. Until they sneaked up one after the other to ask about cuttings and roots. The ones who didn’t dare went nosing around when the ‘cop’ was in Oslo. Gunnarstranda always found evidence of their movements afterwards. Later there were often a few new stalks among the trees by Sørby’s plot, before they all died. For neither the wife nor the idiot himself knew what a spade was, or manure, or lime, or anything.

‘That’s looking good,’ the pensioner fawned, waggling his head towards what was visible of a planned extension to the cabin.

Gunnarstranda shrugged and lifted a bag in each hand.

‘Cost a bit, won’t it?’ Fatso chatted.

‘It will indeed. A bloody packet. You wouldn’t be able to afford it.’

Don’t think you’re used to being insulted, Gunnarstranda thought, revelling for a moment in the sight of the other man’s fallen face before curtly bidding him goodbye and turning his back.

Afterwards he walked along the mountain looking at the tendrils lying across the cliff face, checking the buds and stems. Went on towards the west of the cabin where a five-by-one-metre hole had been scraped out down to the rock, away from the wall, and a line of poles had been cemented in. The footprints from Sørby’s tramping around were clearly visible in the wet gravel. Good thing I haven’t bought the materials yet, he thought. So the man won’t be tempted. Anyway, there won’t be time for any building for a while.

He straightened the plastic sheet covering the small cement mixer and walked back. Lit a cigarette on the stool in front of the outside fireplace.

Edel had been the one to attend to social matters. As for him, he met enough people in the course of his job. Too many to waste his free time chatting. Edel would certainly have taken pity on Fatso in the raggedy trousers. Would probably have strolled down to his place with plants and handy tips. Although the advice would have been a waste of breath, anyway.

The air was still. But then you were shielded from the wind up here. It could come only from the south, and that was rare. The lake in the valley lay smooth and shiny and emphasized the silence with its reflections of the bare trees. He stood up. The characteristic squeal of the telephone penetrated the timber walls.

It was Jack Myrberget. Sigurd Klavestad’s travelling companion.

Jack, as was his wont, did not beat about the bush:

‘Sigurd Klavestad is not on his own any more.’

‘Mhm,’ grunted Gunnarstranda. He had settled down on the sofa and put his feet on the table; he was relaxed and waiting. It was dark indoors, and outside the dusk was not even capable of bringing a shine to his shoes.

‘He caught the bus along Drammensveien and got off at Vækerø. Ambled over to some building called Rent-An-Office. Lots of small businesses.’

‘Names?’

‘Didn’t the woman work for a computer company?’

‘Software Partners they call themselves.’

‘That’s where they are.’

Gunnarstranda gripped the receiver harder. ‘More!’

‘He went in at three and came out at half past. Together with a woman. About thirty, dressed like an office worker, long dark hair, one seventy tall, nice-looking, black birthmark between her mouth and chin.’

‘And then?’

‘I’m looking straight at them now. They’re sitting and drinking wine across the street. Fingers interlaced, occasional floods of tears. What do I do if they go separate ways?’

Gunnarstranda deliberated. ‘Follow the male,’ he decided at length. ‘But keep me posted.’

That’s it,
he thought, putting down the receiver.
Sodding car. It would have to give up the ghost today of all days!