The Writing on the Wall (12 page)

LAILA MONGSTAD
let go of my hands as though she’d scalded herself, and in unison we stood up and looked over the partition to the source of the racket.

Holger Skagestøl was herding a group of eight or nine
colleagues
into the room.

A man in his thirties with slightly dishevelled blonde hair, a short leather jacket and a large camera-bag over one shoulder was first, followed by a chap of the same age in a leather waistcoat and blue denim shirt. It was Bjørn Brevik, one of the journalists on the paper, who was doing his best to keep Skagestøl away from the photographer. Close behind Skagestøl followed Trond Furebø and a handful of others, a couple of them intent on pouring oil on troubled waters, the others there out of pure curiosity.

‘I want that film, do you hear?! I want it!’ yelled Holger
Skagestøl
so the whole editorial office reverberated.

‘Better take it up with the desk, then!’ replied the photographer.

‘Goddamn it, you lot can’t treat me like – like – like any Tom, Dick or Harry! I work on this paper, too, you know.’

‘So is that supposed to give us preferential treatment?’ Bjørn Brevik cut in.

‘Preferential treatment?’ Skagestøl seized Brevik by his lapels and pulled him close to his face. ‘I’m talking about normal
protection
of personal privacy! The “Be Fair” code for journalists. Ever heard of it, you little upstart? I’m damned if I’m going to have my private family affairs splashed all over the front page!’

Brevik raised his voice a few decibels too. ‘Let go of me!’

Skagestøl looked as though he was actually tightening his grip, if anything.

Trond Furebø seized him by the arm. ‘Holger …’

‘Let go of me! Do you hear? I –’

Brevik pushed his elbows up and released himself from his grip so roughly that a shirt button ricocheted over the desks. ‘There’s no question of splashing any family affairs over the front page. It’s a news item!’

‘News! They’ve already arrested the guilty party! Why don’t you use a picture of him instead?!’

‘It’s a perfectly normal illustration!’ the photographer piped up his voice rising to a falsetto.

‘Illustration! Do you want me to shove that camera down your throat, eh?’

Trond Furebø cut in: ‘Holger! This is no good. Let’s go and see the editor …’

Skagestøl was starting to calm down. There was a sudden change in his face, and when he spoke again he was dose to tears. ‘Surely you can understand … Bjørn. This is about my daughter.’

Bjørn Brevik nodded. ‘
Your
daughter this time; somebody else’s tomorrow. What would you have done in my shoes?’

‘I’d have made allowances …’

‘
Would
you?’

Skagestøl had tears in his eyes now. ‘Well?’

‘And what if it didn’t concern you personally?’

Trond Furebø came up beside Holger Skagestøl, stepped around him and stood face-to-face with Bjørn Brevik. ‘We’ll take it up with the boss, OK?’

Brevik gave him a look of contempt. ‘OK by me.’

The group broke up. Those who had merely been curious
withdrew
, visibly disappointed that the drama was over. The
photographer
was still trying to keep Brevik between himself and Skagestøl, and all of them headed for the door.

Trond Furebø ran his eyes over the rest of us, standing there like tin soldiers in our boxes in a rather nondescript toyshop sale.

‘What the hell are you lot gawping at?’ he spat out to no one in particular.

When he caught sight of me, he changed his tack slightly and raised his voice. ‘Satisfied now, are you? Bloody nosey parker!’

The door slammed behind him, and those left turned towards me as though only just realising a new specimen had been added to their collection.

I sat down and looked at Laila Mongstad. ‘Any idea what all that was in aid of?’

‘No, but we’ll find out in due course.’

‘But what was that about … have they made an arrest?’

She reached for the phone. ‘If you hang on a second, I’ll ask …’ She dialled a number, asked the same question and sat listening. ‘Oh … I see … No, it was just … Thanks a lot.’

She replaced the receiver and nodded. ‘Apparently it’s that jogger who found her. But so far he’s still a witness.’

Exactly. They
had
seen it then
.

She kissed me quickly on the mouth when I went, as if to show what good friends we still were, unless it was just an expression of her overall generosity.

ON SATURDAY MORNING
I went down to the main door early to collect the paper.

There was no missing the article. The editor had apparently come down on Bjørn Brevik’s side.

The headline read:

There was a large photo showing Holger and Sidsel Skagestøl being led out of the police station by a uniformed policeman. Holger Skagestøl was in the foreground, slightly too close to the flashbulb, and his overexposed face expressed in the clearest
possible
terms that he did not like being photographed. Sidsel
Skagestøl
was partly hidden behind him but was looking straight at the photographer, caught off her guard and anxious, like someone suddenly jumped on in a dark back street.

That was all there was to the article, which, because of the early hour it had gone to press on Friday evening, was considerably briefer than would normally have been the case on a weekday.

After a similarly brief breakfast I rang Karin and asked whether she was ready.

The weekend was not spent in a suite at the Solstrand Fjord Hotel but in long steady sex on the island of Sotra in a cottage I sometimes borrowed from a second cousin who didn’t have much use for it in February anyway.

As soon as we crossed the Sotra Bridge we noticed that the wind had swung to the north-west, that the thermometer was rising and that the weekend would be best suited to indoor activities.

The cottage faced straight into the maw of the sea, and when the wind strength had increased significantly it felt like being in the middle of a gigantic conch, with the constant sound of the sea in your ears. The chasing clouds took on a leaden hue, and we had hardly lit the fire when the first flash of lightning dashed white stitches across the horizon, where the sky was about to rip apart.

The ensuing clap of thunder sent Karin straight into my arms, and even when the thunderstorm had moved off it was no easy matter to get her to shift. With a pot of tea simmering on the
hotplate
, we unrolled our sleeping bags, making one into a sheet and the other an eiderdown and, like two bears still drowsy from their long winter slumber and shunning the first cold dip of the year, went back into hibernation.

We made love like a couple of seventeen-year-olds on their first camping trip.

Afterwards we drank some tea, ate rough hunks of bread with thick slices of cheese and chatted. The advantage of being lovers at our time of life was there were so many stones to overturn, so many branches to pull aside, so much distance covered to talk about.

Late that night, with the gentle sound of her regular breathing beside me, I lay on my back, thinking. Was this happiness? Was this how life was supposed to have been the whole time? And, if so, how long would it last? Who the hell had sent me the death notice in the post?

ON MONDAY EVENING
I reported to the police station. I had come of my own free will, and no one threw me out before hearing what I wanted.

The Sunday papers had been much more sensationalistic in their reports, not least because they had more details to go on than the authors of Saturday’s report.
ANOTHER SATANIST MURDER?
one of them asked.
SACRIFICED TO THE DEVIL
? asked another. Neither of them had any pictures of Sidsel and Holger Skagestøl on the front page, but both had got hold of a photo of Torild from a class picture and given it a prominent place.

It was the mark cut into her flesh and the fact that the body had been discovered near Lysekloster monastery that formed the main grounds for this speculation. The papers had dug up old rumours about black masses and sacrilegious orgies in the hallowed ruins of the monastery. These were stirred into a somewhat speculative brew with not many ingredients, judging by what I already knew about the case myself.

The Monday papers focused on another angle:
CASE SOLVED?
said one of the headlines.
‘WITNESS’ BEING QUESTIONED,
said Holger Skagestøl’s own paper with prominent quotation marks.
SLAIN BY LOVER
? asked Paul Finckel in his newspaper. (Had he tried to get in touch with me during the weekend? I wondered) Surprisingly, none of the papers gave the name or age of the much discussed ‘witness’ or any photos of him, merely saying that he was apparently a young man from among the victim’s closest friends.

Muus was not in his office, but when I looked in on Atle Helleve, there he sat with a selection of the same newspapers spread out on his desk.

I knocked on the doorframe. He looked up, recognised me and gestured towards the headlines. ‘Seen these? You’d not find wilder improvisation at the Voss Jazz Festival!’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Take a pew before someone else does.’

‘How much is there to what they’re writing about?’

‘Not a lot, I can promise you that.’ He scratched his beard. ‘Why

do you ask?’

‘It could be I have a bit of – additional information. Something I’ve turned up.’

‘Oh?’ He looked at me with natural scepticism in his eyes.

‘But I can’t see how this so-called jogger fits into the picture.’

‘Can’t you?’

We sat there looking at one another for a few seconds, but he wouldn’t take the bait.

‘You first.’

‘Well … when Judge Brandt died last Friday, was there a post-mortem?’

He sat up in his chair. ‘There’s a padlock on that case, Veum! If a single word gets out to the pre –’

‘The press already know most of what there is to know about this case, Helleve. Since they haven’t given us any descriptions of the judge in black silk underwear yet, they’re hardly going to do so later, are they?’

‘But how in –’

‘Not all bulkheads are watertight in this office either. Rumours about this have been circulating for so long that this case is
actually
already dead. Unless they’re given something new …’

‘Something new? What do you mean?’

‘Well,
was
there a post-mortem?’

‘Yes, there was. A massive heart attack, from which he died.’

‘A heart attack caused by …’

‘At the judge’s age, you know, and considering what he seems to have been up to at the time … I’ll say no more, I’ll say no more.’

‘And the writing on the wall, was it investigated?’

‘The writing … The sign or whatever he’d tried to make …’ He shook his head. ‘There was nothing to suggest anything criminal had gone on there, Veum. What people do in their free time –’

‘Wasn’t it in office time though?’

‘– and what clothes they choose to wear is their affair. It’s not a police matter at any rate.’

‘Wasn’t it a large “T”? The letter he’d scrawled with his lipstick?’

‘Could have been.’

‘“T” for Torild, for example.’

He mulled it over for a few seconds. ‘Are you trying to suggest that the girl … that she could have been …?’

‘Maybe … I don’t know, Helleve, to be honest, but I’m sorry to say I have a few clues indicating that could have been the case.’

‘That she and Brandt … That he was simply her client?’

‘Could have been.’

‘In that case, we … we need to look into it a bit closer. And it mustn’t get out to that bloody pack of wolves, Veum!’ He pointed, superfluously, at the newspapers spread out in front of him.

‘The bottle of tablets that was found in his room …’

‘Where did you get
that
from?’

I shrugged. ‘A reliable source. Have you found out what was in it?’

‘I don’t think we’ve got the results of the analysis yet. It wasn’t seen as all that important. I mean we know he had a visit from a prostitute, and we know they often take tablets. Which tablets exactly isn’t all that important.’

I nodded towards the newspapers. ‘This Satanist angle, is there anything in it?’

He threw up his arms. ‘She has a sort of mark, behind here, on one of her thighs, but …’

‘No other marks?’

‘No.’

‘And the cause of death?’

‘She was suffocated. Everything points to the fact that someone held a pillow or something like that against her face. Sure as we are that Judge Brandt died a natural death, if you can speak of “natural” in a get-up like that, we’re just as certain that we’re dealing with a regular murder here.’

‘Any sign of sexual assault?’

Helleve glanced at the door and leaned forward. ‘Muus says you’re a dicey bugger. Other people here say you’re straight up.’

‘So, in other words …’

He sighed. ‘No. There’s no sign of rape. But …’

‘Yes?’

‘Semen was found in her, after recent intercourse.’

‘Enough for a DNA analysis?’

‘More than.’

‘How long will it be before you guys get the results?’

‘No idea, really. It’s a very time-consuming procedure.’

‘But in this case the person whose semen it is doesn’t
necessarily
need to be the perpetrator. I mean, if it really
was
Torild Skagestøl who was with Brandt –’

‘You’re jumping to some very hasty conclusions there,’ he cut in. ‘For starters, we don’t know if Brandt
did
have intercourse; we don’t even know if it was Torild Skagestøl he was with –’

‘I’ll come back to that!’

‘We don’t even know if Torild Skagestøl was a – prostitute, or whatever we should call it at her age.’

‘Is there a nicer word?’

‘No, but frankly, Veum, I have a daughter of my own. It’s only two or three years since she was in the Guides …’

‘Yes, so I heard, But she dropped out.’

‘Most of them do in the end.’

‘She didn’t have any needle marks?’

‘Not as far as we could see.’

‘But a blood test would certainly show whether she’d taken
anything
from the bottle of tablets.’

‘We haven’t got that yet either!’

‘But I didn’t finish setting out my hypothesis, Helleve. Because
if
she’d had sex with Brandt, and this boyfriend of hers had somehow found out about it … then the idea of a crime of passion provoked by jealousy or just pure rage isn’t all that outlandish, is it?’

‘Know anything about this boyfriend, Veum?’

‘This much,’ I said, indicating a tiny amount with my thumb and index finger. ‘I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. How did you lot find out about him?’

‘One of her girlfriends gave us his name.’

‘Åsa Furebø?’

He shrugged. ‘The rest was just peanuts. He’d sort of put himself in the limelight anyway.’

‘I hope you lot had the same reaction as I did up where the body was found?’

‘Which was …?’

‘Well, if he wanted to answer a call of nature while out jogging, why would he clamber all the way down a rough slope to a place with hardly any trees, when he could just have walked over to the other side of the road and gone in between the dense conifers?’

‘Exactly. But that’s what he says … that he wanted to avoid the headlights of any passing cars.’

‘Do you mean …? Does he deny it?’

‘Sure he does! The fellow’s a hard nut, I’ll say! Why do you think he’s still only a “witness”?’

‘Hm. Is there anyone I could talk to, do you think? Åsa? Anyone else? Sometimes people find it easier to talk to a – layman … than to you people.’

He scowled at me. ‘Well, there’s only … No, I don’t think you ought to do anything else, except … This prostitution angle, how did you turn that up?’

I told him all I knew both about Jimmy’s and the traffic in young girls to cars and hotel rooms, with a nod to sources in the press I couldn’t name and chambermaids I
did
think I could reveal.

‘This girl, then, who you got to say far too much, was she sure it was Torild Skagestøl who was with Brandt that day?’

‘As good as …’

‘I think we’re going to have to have a word with her in
connection
with this too. The last time it seems to have been a bit too cursory.’

‘This place called Jimmy’s,’ I said, ‘reminds you a bit of those places in the fifties or sixties that were exposed as procuring joints. Know who’s behind it?’

‘No.’

‘Birger Bjelland.’

‘That hypocritical Stavanger creep! If only we could get
something
on
him
…’

‘It’s not that easy, evidently.’

‘He walks a very fine line between his legal activities and what we’re all quite sure is the illegal stuff he’s got his fingers in.’

‘He’s crossed
my
path often enough in the past few years.’

‘But without your being able to link him with anything illegal, right? I mean in the sense of something that would stand up in court.’

‘No, alas. But what about … Al Capone was caught on a tax matter in the end, wasn’t he?’

‘Waste of time. He has a first-rate accountant and sends in immaculate tax returns and annual accounts on time every single year.’

‘But one of these days he’s going to make a slip, Helleve, and then …’

‘Then we’ll stand at the door here and wish him a pleasant stay at His Majesty’s Pleasure, you can bet on that, Veum!’

‘Is it OK if I see what I can dig up on what you call the
prostitution
angle, working on my own?’

‘Provided you keep strictly to that, and I don’t mean as a client, Veum. But if you start to get close to the murder, even by half an inch, then that’s it. Then you’re under an absolute obligation to report it right away – either to me or the nearest police authority.!s that clear?’

‘Message received. Over and out.’

‘And not a word in the paper, Veum!’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die, Scout’s Honour,’ I said and left.