The Lion's Mouth (12 page)

“Oh yes, yes. One girl. There is indeed one woman in this whole building that you
actually
do respect, Billy T. Her Royal Highness Hanne Wilhelmsen. And do you know why? Eh? Do you know?”

For a moment she seemed to hesitate, as though she did not dare; she licked her lips with the tip of her pink tongue, and inhaled deeply.

“Because you’re never going to get her into bed! Because she’s out of the question! The only woman you actually respect is a lesbian, Billy T. That’s something you really should think about.”

“NOW YOU GIVE OVER!”

He got to his feet and kicked the wastepaper basket so hard that it smacked against the wall; then silence descended on the room. Even the neighboring office, from where they had previously heard loud conversation, had fallen quiet. But Billy T. did not restrain himself.

“Don’t you bloody dare come here and make nasty comments about Hanne Wilhelmsen! You … you don’t even come up to her
ankles
! Not even to her ankles! And you never will!”

“I’m not saying anything nasty about Hanne,” Tone-Marit said calmly. “Not in the slightest. I’m saying something nasty about you. If I had anything to say to Hanne, I would say it to her face. At the moment we’re talking about you.”

“To Hanne’s face? To Hanne’s face? You’d have needed to swim, then, wouldn’t you? Eh?”

Tone-Marit tried to stop herself smiling, but her eyes gave her away.

“For heaven’s sake, now you’re being childish.”

“For heaven’s sake, for heaven’s sake,” he mocked, in a reedy, distorted voice.

Then Tone-Marit began to laugh. She made an effort to hold the laughter back, but it forced itself out, bubbling up, and eventually it erupted into a long, rippling burst. Tears flowed from the narrow slits below her eyebrows. She plumped herself down on a chair, holding her stomach with the palm of her hand, rocking to and fro, and finally she began hiccupping so ferociously as she slapped herself on the thighs that Billy T. could not restrain himself either. He guffawed and swore under his breath.

“I’d better talk to the guy then,” he muttered at last as he took hold of the slim green folder. “Where is he?”

“I’ll go and get him,” Tone-Marit said, drying her eyes, still not quite able to compose herself.

“Get your damn carcass out of here, anyway,” Billy T. said.

But he smiled as he said it.

“You really should speak to a psychologist,” Tone-Marit mumbled inaudibly as she closed the door behind her.

11.30,
OLE BRUMMS VEI
212

“I
can’t find it anywhere,” Roy Hansen said to the trainee police-woman with pigtails and big, blue eyes. “Sorry.”

“And you’ve looked everywhere?” the epitome of Norwegian womanhood asked quite unnecessarily, as she fiddled with her police cap.

“Of course. Everywhere. Handbags and closets and pockets. Drawers.”

It had been an extremely painful experience. He had smelled the scent of her body in her clothes; the entire closet was redolent with Birgitte’s fragrance, and the fragile, delicate scab that had formed over the bleeding wound since Friday night had been ripped away. Her handbags, full of familiar objects. The key ring he had made for her that summer they had turned twenty: a reef knot that had never untied and that she had used to joke was as solid and secure as the love they had for each other. A dark red lipstick that was almost used up; in a flash he had seen her in his mind’s eye, the perfunctory, habitual way she applied the waxy color to her lips. A theater ticket, old and faded, from an evening he would remember for the rest of his life; it had caused him to pause in his search, standing alone in their bedroom as he sniffed at the ticket and wished himself back, far back, to the time before they became caught up in the Major Project: Birgitte’s political career.

“Her pass is quite simply
not
here. Sorry.”

A young man was sitting on the settee, and the trainee police officer assumed he was the son of the house. He was wearing uniform, and was terribly pale. She tried to give him a smile, but he stared right past her.

“We’ll have to leave it then. Perhaps she had actually lost it. I’m really sorry for disturbing you.”

When she closed the front door behind her, she paused momentarily on the stairs, deep in thought. On Friday Volter had forgotten her pass. That had been clearly ascertained. All the same, they had examined her office thoroughly, and it wasn’t there. The pass was apparently the size of a credit card, with a photo and a magnetic strip on the back. An ordinary, government pass, that was not in the widower’s home either. Curious.

Well, the Prime Minister may have mislaid it. Simple as that. She could have put it somewhere in the townhouse apartment that her husband had not thought of looking. After all, he had just lost his wife, and probably was not thinking straight.

The trainee officer settled in the driver’s seat and inserted the key in the ignition. She then froze for a moment before arriving at a decision and starting the vehicle.

It bothered her that they could not find that pass.

12.07,
OSLO POLICE STATION

B
illy T. was in a bad mood, and the man on the opposite side of the desk was not much happier.

“Let’s go over this one more time,” Billy T. said briskly, attempting to make contact with the man’s evasive eyes. “So, an alarm sounded. From the conference room adjacent to the Prime Minister’s restroom. At—”

“At twenty-three minutes to six. If you don’t believe me, you can check the log.”

“Why on earth would you suspect that I don’t believe you?” Billy T. commented. “Hey! Look at me!”

The security guard did not lift his head, but raised his eyes ever so slightly.

“Why shouldn’t we believe you?”

“Why else would I be called in here for a second time?” the man said sulkily. He was twenty-seven years and a few months old, according to the papers facing Billy T. on the desk.

The guard was a strange character. He was not exactly ugly, but he was certainly far from handsome. Though he was not quite repulsive, there was something indefinably unpleasant about his whole appearance. His face was pinched, his chin pointed, and his hair in need of a shampoo. His eyes might have been attractive if
the man had looked more attentive; his eyelashes were long and dark. He could have been twenty, or just as easily approaching forty – Billy hadn’t been able to guess his age until he’d checked the paperwork.

“You must appreciate and understand that your witness statement is fairly central to this enquiry, man!”

Billy T. grabbed a diagram of the fifteenth floor; a copy of the overhead acetate the Police Chief had shown them the previous day.

“Look at this!”

He pointed to the conference room, which quite clearly was only separated from the Prime Minister’s office by a narrow restroom.

“You were here. At an extremely critical point in time. Tell me what took place.”

The security guard snorted like a horse, spraying drops of spittle across the desk, and causing Billy T. to scowl.

“How many times do I have to tell you this?” the guard enquired crossly.

“Just as many times as I decide.”

“Can I have something to drink? A glass of water?”

“No.”

“Am I not even entitled to a glass of water?”

“You are not entitled to anything at all. If you want, you can stand up and leave the police station. You are a witness, and we require you to give a statement voluntarily.
But you’d damn well better do so! And without any more fuss!”

He banged his fists on the table, at the same time snapping his teeth together ferociously. His hands were tender after his outburst half an hour earlier, and a stab of pain jolted through his forearms.

That helped. The security guard straightened up, literally, sitting bolt upright in his chair as he used his hands to brush his shoulders.

“I was sitting in the guardroom. Then an alarm sounded in the conference room. They are the silent type of alarms; you don’t hear them in the actual location, only down in our office. They go off all the time, every other day at least, and we don’t usually pay much attention to them.”

He was speaking to the table edge.

“But we do have to check, of course. Always. So I went up then … That is to say, it’s always supposed to be two of us who check, but we’d had quite a busy day because of the renovation work, and my partner had fallen asleep. So I went by myself.”

Now he was trying to communicate with the ill-treated waste-paper basket in the corner.

“So I took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, because it was the other guy, the one who was asleep, who had the keys for the elevator to go all the way up. I said hello to the guard at the entrance, and went upstairs to the fifteenth floor.”

“Hold on a minute.”

Billy T. waved with the flat of his hand.

“Can you take the elevator directly up to the fifteenth floor? Without passing the man in the glass booth?”

“Yes, to the sixteenth as well. But you need to have a key. Without the key, the elevator only goes as far as the fourteenth.”

Billy T. pondered why this had not been mentioned when the Chief of Police had made his speech the previous day. He would let it lie for the moment, though they should all have been alerted to such an obvious method of accessing the Prime Minister’s office. He quickly scribbled down “Elevator” on a yellow Post-it note, and stuck it to the lampshade.

“Continue,” he demanded.

“Yes, well, then I went into the conference room, but there was nobody there. A faulty connection, as usual. They’ve never been able to sort out that system.”

“Was the door to the restroom open?”

The security guard suddenly stared at him, for the very first time. He hesitated, and Billy T. could have sworn that a minuscule tremor crossed the man’s cheek.

“No. It was closed. I opened it and peeped inside the restroom, I had to do that, because someone could have hidden in there, but it was empty too. The door from the restroom to the Prime Minister’s office was closed. I didn’t touch it.”

“And then?”

“And then … Yes, well, then I went downstairs again. That was that.”

“Why didn’t you speak to the secretary in the anteroom?”

“The secretary? Why should I speak to her?”

Now the guard looked really surprised, but he had dropped his gaze and was studying something on Billy T.’s shirtfront instead.

“I don’t usually … Besides, she wasn’t there.”

“Yes, she was. She was there all afternoon and evening.”

“No, she was not!”

The security guard shook his head vigorously.

“She might have been in the toilet, for all I know, but she definitely wasn’t there. I can see …”

He leaned across the diagram, pointing.

“Do you see? I would have seen her from there.”

Billy T. chewed at his cheek.

“Mmmm … okay.”

He removed the yellow note from the Anglepoise lamp, and jotted down “Toilet?” before replacing it.

“So then you went back down again. To … What was it you called it?”

“The guardroom.”

“Oh yes.”

Turning toward an enameled aluminum shelf at his back, Billy T. grabbed a thermos flask and poured steaming coffee into a cup decorated with a sketch of Puccini. The guard looked quizzically at the coffee cup, but did not receive a response.

“I see you’re interested in guns,” Billy T. remarked, blowing noisily on the scalding hot drink.

“Is it that obvious?” the guard said querulously, glancing at the clock.

“Very funny. You do have a sense of humor, don’t you? From the papers, you know. It’s in there. I know most things about you, you see. I also have your security clearance here.”

He waved a sheet of paper provocatively before replacing it at the bottom of the pile.

“You shouldn’t have that,” the guard said angrily. “That’s not in accordance with the regulations!”

Billy T. grinned broadly, and fixed his eyes on those of the guard: this time the man did not manage to avoid his gaze.

“Now just you listen to one little thing. Right now we’re not exactly paying too much attention to the regulations, here at the station. If you’ve anything to complain about, just go ahead and try. Then we’ll see if we can spare anyone to look into that kind of thing at the moment. I doubt it, actually. What kind of gun do you own?”

“I’ve got four guns. All of them registered. They’re all at home, so if you want to come home with me, then—”

He stopped abruptly.

“Then what?”

“I can bring them here, if you want.”

“Do you know, I think I would like you to do just that,” Billy T. said. “But I emphasize that it’s a voluntary action on your part. I’m not
ordering
you to bring them in.”

The man muttered something under his breath that Billy T. could not catch.

“One more thing,” the Chief Inspector said suddenly. “Do you know Per Volter?”

“The Prime Minister’s son?”

“Yes. How did you know that, by the way?”

“I’ve read the newspapers, haven’t I? Umpteen papers this past couple of days. No, I don’t know him.”

His entire body became increasingly agitated, and he fleetingly, unnervingly, crossed his left foot over his right.

“But,” he added all of a sudden, “I know who he is, of course. A good shot. Competition marksman.”

“Does that mean you’ve met him?”

The security guard took a conspicuously long time to consider this.

“No,” he said, and for the second time looked directly into Billy T.’s icy blue eyes. “I’ve never met him. Never in my whole life.”

14.10,
MOTZFELDTS GATE
14

T
he loudspeaker on the computer piped its snappy electronic tune before progressing to a long-drawn-out, tense wail. Little Lettvik shuffled into her workroom, a voluminous apron wrapped around her body and a cigarillo in her mouth. The machine took its time to receive the message, and when the tiny envelope appeared at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, she immediately clicked into her inbox.

The message had no sender. She directed the cursor at the top line, and double-clicked again.