Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (11 page)

Like a child caught in the act, she thought. Downright denials
about something that was so blatantly obvious. Catching his eye, she held his gaze.

“Terje. I
know
that Agnes knew. You know that too. I
know
she had papers to prove it. You know that as well. I’m your friend, for God’s sake!”

This last was spoken emphatically, and she underlined it further by striking the table.

“Those papers were there before Agnes died, and they were gone when the police turned up. There’s only one possible explanation: you were there and removed them at some point during the evening or night. Don’t you think you might as well admit it?”

He sat there, paralyzed, in the chair.

She stood up and turned away from him before suddenly whirling around again.

“I can help you, Terje! For God’s sake, I
want
to help you! I don’t want you to be arrested for something you haven’t done! We’ve traipsed in and out of here every day, eaten meals together, chatted together, we’ve almost lived together, Terje! But if I have to take responsibility for this here . . .”

She gesticulated expressively with her arms, turning her eyes heavenward and muttering something he couldn’t catch.

“Honestly. I’m holding something back from the police. I can’t be answerable for that unless I know what happened. And what didn’t happen. Don’t you understand that? You mustn’t go on lying! Not to me.”

As though he were gathering his strength, he breathed in and out three times, deeply and rapidly.

“I was here,” he whispered. “I was here around twelve o’clock. I was going to take the papers from the drawer. But only to see what she actually knew, Maren! When I saw her dead in the chair, I was totally shocked.”

He cradled his head in his hands and rocked his body to and fro.

“You just
have to
believe me, Maren!”

“You can’t have had enough of a shock to prevent you from finding the papers and taking them with you, then,” Maren said calmly.

She had sat down again, and now her right hand was continually running through her hair.

“No, what should I have done? If the police had found them, I would be the most likely candidate to be the killer!”

Glenn burst in through the double doors. Startled, Terje kicked his foot against the table in front of him.

“Sh . . . sugar,” he said through clenched teeth, turning abruptly toward the boy who was requesting money to go to the movies. “How many times have I told you to knock on doors before you go into a room? Eh? How many times have I told you?”

Enraged, he grabbed hold of the fourteen-year-old’s arm and squeezed it tight. Glenn whimpered and tried to pull himself free.

“Let me go, you,” he complained. “Have you gone crazy or what?”

“I’m so sick and tired of you doing whatever you want all over the place,” Terje spluttered, releasing his grip on the boy and at the same time shoving him roughly against the wall. “Now you need to get a bloody grip!”

“Ten kroner deducted from your weekly pocket money,” the youngster mumbled, rubbing his left upper arm. “I only wanted cinema money!”

Maren had witnessed these goings-on with an amazement that stunned her rigid. Now she pulled herself together and gave Terje a stern look before escorting Glenn out of the room and handing him a fifty-kroner note.

“Is he sick, or what?” Glenn asked.

“He’s got a sore back,” she said reassuringly. “He’s upset too. About Agnes. We all are. What film are you going to see?”

“
The Client
.”

“Is there much violence in it?”

“No. It’s just the usual kind of thriller, I think.”

“Fine. Come straight home. Have a nice time.”

The boy muttered all the way out into the hallway, vigorously rubbing his tender arm.

Maren returned, closing the doors again. After a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed hold of an old black key hanging on a nail beside the doorframe, inserted it into the classical keyhole, and rotated it. There was a grinding of metal against metal, demonstrating that the key had hardly ever been used in many years. She sank into the winged armchair once more. Although she was clearly marked by the events of recent days, it was as though something had flared up in her weary eyes. A spark of vitality, an almost serene determination. Terje felt it rather than saw it and took heart.

“You won’t say anything to the police?”

He was pathetic. Not only had he lied, both about having been at the home at a rather critical point in time, and also about Agnes not knowing about his embezzlement from the business accounts. As well as the somewhat significant point that he had appropriated the papers from the director’s desk drawer. Now it looked as though he was ready to kneel down and beg for assistance.

“Why did you lie, Terje? Did you not trust me?”

His gaze flitted from her face and was about to fall to the floor. Then he caught himself and rested his eye instead on a point twenty centimeters above her head, remaining sitting like that, with his arms on the armrests and gripping the edges tenaciously with his hands, almost as though he were at the dentist’s. He did not answer.

“I need to know exactly what happened. Was it the shortfall that Agnes wanted to talk to you about earlier in the day? Was that why she embarked on a round of staff interviews? Did she show you the papers?”

“No,” he eventually whispered. “No, she didn’t show me any
papers. She simply told me she had discovered certain irregularities, and she was extremely disappointed. She waved some papers about, and I understood that they concerned me. She asked me . . .”

Now, drawing his feet up onto the chair, he lowered his head, with an eye on each knee, like a child, or almost like a deformed fetus. When he continued, his voice was indistinct and difficult to understand.

“I was to make a written statement before anything would happen. I was to hand it in the next day. That is to say, the day after she . . . she died.”

Suddenly he let his feet drop to the floor again. He did not cry, but his face was contorted into a kind of rictus Maren had never witnessed before. Fleeting tics crossed his mouth in lightning flashes, and his eyes almost looked as though they were about to disappear into his head. For a moment she was really frightened.

“Terje! Terje, pull yourself together!”

Standing up, she perched on the table between them. She attempted to hold his hand, but he would not relinquish his grasp of the armrest, so instead she placed her right hand on his thigh. He felt abnormally hot; the heat burned through his trouser leg and made the palm of her hand sweaty after only a few seconds.

“I won’t say anything. But I need to know what happened. You must understand that. So I don’t say anything wrong to the police.”

His eyes had fallen back into place. He was breathing more quietly and she could see his knuckles were no longer quite so chalk white.

“I only wanted to know what she had found out. For all I knew, she might only have uncovered a tiny fraction. And most of it had been put back again, you see. I was only . . . She was smart, wanting to have my version first.”

“Are you sure she was dead when you came on the scene?”

“Sure?”

Now his eyes were fixed on hers again, in disbelief.

“She had an enormous knife between her shoulder blades and wasn’t making any sign of breathing. That’s what I call dead.”

“But did you check? Did you take her pulse, or did you consider the possibility of artificial respiration? Was she warm, for example?”

“I didn’t touch her. Of course I didn’t. I was in a state of total shock. The only thing I could think of when I managed to compose myself was to take those papers and get the hell out of there.”

“Was the drawer open?”

“No, it was locked. But the key was where it usually is. Underneath the plant pot.”

“Did you know that too?” She seemed slightly surprised.

“Yes, I found out about that a few years ago. I caught her by accident once. Idiotic hiding place. Just about the first place anyone would look. Did you know about it?”

She did not reply but instead stood up and stepped over to the window again. Darkness had settled like a viscous carpet over the garden, with an irregular pattern of wet white rags overlaying all the dark gray. As she pulled her vest tighter with a familiar movement demonstrating she virtually lived in that garment, it struck her that it was time for the children’s television.

“The police wouldn’t have believed you,” she said to his reflection on the windowpane. “I have problems myself. The way you’ve lied about it.”

“I appreciate that. I can’t expect you to believe me. But it’s true, Maren. I didn’t kill her.”

She let him have the last word but gave him a look he was unable to interpret as she left to keep Kenneth and the twins company in front of the TV screen.

 • • • 

“Oslo Police are searching for twelve-year-old Olav Håkonsen, who disappeared from his home on Tuesday evening. The boy was apparently wearing denim jeans, a navy blue jacket, and sneakers.”

“Goodness, I thought the news program had stopped issuing that kind of missing person report,” Cecilie Vibe exclaimed from her relaxed Friday pose on the sofa.

A vague, fairly worthless photograph of the boy accompanied the news report, delivered by a pale, oval, nondescript female face with a remarkably mellifluous voice.

“They make exceptions,” Hanne mumbled, hushing her with an arm motion.

“The boy is about five foot two in height and strongly built. Information should be directed to the Oslo Police or your nearest police station.”

The well-dressed woman then moved on to describe an allegedly two-headed cat that had been born in California.

“Strongly built, I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” Hanne said. “From what I understand, the boy is grossly overweight.”

She zapped over to TV2, where a dark-haired lady was smiling repeatedly and talking about nothing at all. She zapped back to the weather forecast on NRK.

“Tickle my feet,” she requested, propping her feet on Cecilie’s lap.

“Where can the boy have gone?” Cecilie asked, absentmindedly stroking the soles of Hanne’s feet with her fingers.

“We don’t actually know. It’s starting to seem a bit sinister. We were pretty sure he would go home to his mother by some means or other, but he hasn’t managed to do that. Or had the opportunity to. Take off my socks!”

Cecilie pulled the white tube socks from her feet and continued her hand movements.

“Do you think something has happened to him?”

“Not sure. If it hadn’t been for the boy running off by himself, and therefore probably trying to hide, we would be really scared. Another child abduction, possibly. But he’s in hiding. He’s twelve years old and can probably hold out for a while. We’re assuming he ran away willingly. It’s not likely that he’s been exposed to
any criminal activities. If we assume he didn’t murder the lady at the foster home, and we do, then the disappearance has nothing to do with the murder at all. He’s been threatening to run away since he arrived there. But obviously we’re concerned. For instance, he might have seen or heard something. And we’re very interested in
that
. But . . . a twelve-year-old on the run is not good under any circumstances. Don’t stop!”

Cecilie resumed her tickling, still as uninspired as ever.

“What’s it actually like at that kind of foster home? I didn’t think we had institutions of that type any longer. And why did they say he had disappeared from ‘his home’?”

“Probably don’t want to stigmatize him too much, I would think . . . The foster home looks almost like an ordinary home, only much larger. Very nice, really. The youngsters looked as though they enjoyed being there. We certainly don’t have many foster homes like that, with a group of children being looked after, any longer. Most children are placed in individual foster homes.”

Cecilie began to invest more energy in her touch, allowing her featherlight fingers to glide up Hanne’s leg, underneath the fabric of her trousers. An irreverent interpretation of Grieg’s music blasting from the TV set announced the start of
Around Norway.
Hanne used the remote control to reduce the volume. Sitting up on the sofa without lowering her legs, she leaned toward her girlfriend and they kissed, warm, slow, and teasingly.

“Why don’t we have children?” Cecilie whispered to Hanne’s mouth.

“We can try to make one now, at once,” Hanne said with a smile.

“Don’t joke.”

Cecilie drew back, pushing Hanne’s feet down onto the floor.

Hanne inflated her cheeks and allowed the air to flow out through her lips in an exaggerated gesture of resignation.

“Not now, Cecilie. We’re not going to discuss that now.”

“When, then?”

They looked at each other, and an old, almost forgotten battle flared into a new skirmish.

“Never. We’re finished with that. It’s been decided.”

“Honestly, Hanne, how many years have passed since we made up our minds? Back then I was quite clear—it was for the time being. Now we’re almost thirty-six, and I can hear my biological clock ticking louder and louder.”

“You? Biological clock? Huh!”

Hanne caressed Cecilie’s face, smooth, soft, and with no more than a tiny network of fine laugh lines at the corner of each eye. She wasn’t only pretty, she was wearing incredibly well. People who had not known them for a long time were convinced Hanne was several years older than her partner. In fact, she was sixteen days younger. Her hand slid down toward Cecilie’s breasts.

“Don’t do that,” Cecilie said in annoyance, pushing away the unwelcome hand. “If we’re going to have children, we have to make a decision soon. Tonight’s as good as any other night.”

“No, it’s not, think about it.”

Hanne grabbed the beer bottle sitting between them and refilled her own glass. Her movement was so abrupt that the liquid spilled over profusely, running over the tabletop and menacingly threatening to overflow the edge onto the carpet. She swore and rushed out with angry stride to fetch a cloth. The beer had already formed a dark stain on the yellow carpet by the time she returned, and it took her several minutes to set things straight. Cecilie made not the slightest sign of helping. Instead, with feigned interest, she watched a story about a man who had taken a doctorate in Latin at the age of ninety-three and in addition woodcarving as a hobby.