Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (16 page)

“Strictly speaking, do we know for sure they had a relationship?”

“Let me spell this out,” Billy T. said, counting on his fingers. “Number one, he’s talked about a new lady friend to his workmates. He’s a car salesman. Number two, he’s told the same folk that he’s screwing his way to some money. Number three, he had just moved house. That meant he had changed his number, and so she had written it down. Number four, his number was the very last phone number in her life that Agnes rang.”

“How do you know that?”

“Quite simple, I hit the repeat button on her phone. Last number. To that
idiot.
”

He punched his fist on the desk by his side.

“And number five, her husband talked about how distant and irritable she had been these last few months.”

“That’s not exactly decisive evidence you’ve got there,” Hanne said.

“No, I agree. But that blockhead might have told me what was going on, and I could stop building castles in the sky! I’m willing to listen to anything at all; it’s difficult enough to think about Agnes Vestavik sitting on his lap, a fat, bald car salesman. She was supposed to be conventional and Christian!”

“Prejudice and presumption again, Billy T. Religious people have the same urges as you and me. You’ll have to try to find a chink in his armor.”

She used both hands to shove his back off her desk.

“Off you go, I’ve got work to do. What’s more, if they were lovers, why in the world would he kill her? Wouldn’t that be biting the hand that was feeding him?”

“Sure,” Billy T. mumbled, trudging back to the obstinate car salesman.

“Have you reconsidered? Willing to be a bit more cooperative, perhaps?”

“That’s what you say,” the man exclaimed, furious. “The police
are going about poking their noses in at my workplace, asking questions and making life difficult for me, dragging me in for an interview in the middle of the working day and accusing me of killing and murder and even worse than that!”

Billy T. did not even crack a smile.

“Have I for a single second accused you of murder?”

The man stared at his shoes. Now Billy T. could discern a touch of uncertainty in his broad masculine face.

“Listen here,” he continued, his voice almost friendly now. “I’m accusing you of only one thing in the meantime, and that is that you were having an affair with Agnes Vestavik. That’s certainly not a crime. When we ‘poke our noses in’ to that, it’s not to punish you. It’s in order to construct the most complete picture possible of what her life was like. What she did, whom she knew, and how she lived. To be quite honest, we’re really stuck. It’s not so easy to come up with a motive for killing a neat and proper foster home worker with a neat and proper life. When we discover it’s not so neat and proper after all, then obviously we’re going to be interested. That doesn’t mean, though, that we think you’ve killed your lady friend.”

Bingo. That was a far better tactic. Appealing to his better nature.

Leaning forward, the man put his head in his hands and sat there, without moving a muscle. Billy T. allowed him whatever time he needed.

Eventually he lifted his head, stroking the bristles on his cheek as he took a deep breath.

“We had a relationship. A kind of relationship. I mean, we didn’t have sex. But she was . . . We were . . . in love.”

It seemed as though he had never used the word before and thought it too beautiful for his coarse, wide mouth. He appreciated it himself.

“We were involved with each other,” he corrected himself. “We met to chat, to be together. We went for walks. She was . . .”

He did not manage to explain what she was, for he was now fighting tears and emerged victorious. But it took several minutes.

“You have to understand I could never have murdered Agnes! My God, she was the best thing that had happened to me for years!”

“How did you meet?”

“How do you think? She came to buy a car, of course. She came with her husband, a nondescript fool. Didn’t even know the difference between cylinder capacity and horsepower. It was obvious Agnes was the one who held the purse strings, and she was the one who subsequently followed the matter up. We got on well, and so . . . well, so it just continued.”

“What about your talk at work? About screwing your way into some money?”

“Oh, that . . . just boys’ talk.”

He did not even seem embarrassed. Billy T. felt tempted to comment that boys over sixteen should not tell lies about that type of thing, but he let it be.

“What were you talking about on the evening she was killed?”

“Talking? I didn’t see her that evening!”

He stared in alarm at Billy T. and gripped the armrests tightly.

“Take it easy. I mean the phone conversation you had. She phoned you from her office. At some time or other that evening.”

The man looked genuinely taken aback.

“No, she didn’t,” he said explicitly, shaking his head vigorously. “I was in Drøbak with a car and didn’t get back until after midnight. Met an old pal and had a few cups of coffee in a café before driving back. I can prove it too!”

Billy T. made a face and stared the other man directly in the eye without uttering a word. The car salesman lost the tussle and dropped his gaze.

“Well,” Billy T. said, “didn’t she know you wouldn’t be at home?”

“I don’t remember, but
I
knew at least that she would be working. She had problems at work. Something about someone having let her down. She didn’t say very much about it, but she was extremely disappointed.”

“Someone? Male or female?”

“No idea. She was very particular about professional confidentiality. Said very little about the youngsters there as well, even though they took up all her days and nights.”

Billy T. fetched a cup of burned coffee for the man and started to write. Within half an hour there was nothing more to be heard in the little office apart from Billy T.’s bulky fingers battering the computer keyboard. When he considered himself finished, he had only one question remaining.

“Was there to be something more between you? Was she talking about a divorce?”

The expression on the man’s face was impossible to decipher.

“I don’t know if anything would have come of it. But she told me she had made up her mind long ago, and that she had told her husband so.”

“Did she say that quite clearly?”

“Yes.”

“Straight out: ‘I’ve told my husband that I want a divorce,’ not ‘My husband doesn’t want a divorce’ or ‘He’ll be upset if we get divorced’?”

“Yes, straight out. Several times. At least . . .”

He cast his eyes to the ceiling, considering carefully.

“At least she said it on two occasions.”

“Okay,” Billy T. said curtly and obtained the witness’s signature on the interview report before bringing the session to a close.

“Stick around in Oslo, won’t you?” he added as he opened to door to the corridor.

“Where else would I be?” the man replied as he vanished out of sight.

 • • • 

Tone-Marit was nobody’s fool. She had been with the police for four years and nine months and had only three months to go until she could call herself sergeant and add another stripe to the one she already possessed on the uniform she seldom or never wore. Although she hadn’t been in the section for more than a year, Hanne was already impressed by the twenty-six-year-old. She was thorough rather than innovative, and conscientious rather than actually smart, but thoroughness and conscientiousness had shaped many exceptional investigators.

Now she was stuck. She didn’t have a great grasp of bookkeeping and sat with three thick loose-leaf binders facing her, terms like “current assets” and “fixed assets,” “operating profit” and “balance sheet” swirling in her head for two hours.

Something
had come to her attention in the meantime. An unusual number of receipts had been authorized by Terje Welby. As far as she had understood, his role as assistant director had largely been overtaken by Maren Kalsvik. True enough,
she
didn’t have the power to authorize payments, but it would then have been natural for Agnes Vestavik to assume most of the economic responsibility.

“Ask the boys in Accounts,” Billy T. advised her after leafing through the folders at random. “For the moment, I’ll give this Terje Welby a little shake.”

He grinned broadly in anticipation, and Tone-Marit gratefully packed up the binders to do as he said.

“Have you found out anything more about the missing thirty thousand from Agnes’s bank account?”

Placing her hands on the folders, Tone-Marit nodded.

“Only that they were withdrawn in three different locations around the city. And that the account was blocked two days later. The same day that Agnes was killed. I’ve asked the banks to look
for the actual checks, so we can see what’s going on. But that can take time; everything not on the data system takes an age of course.”

“So does everything that’s on the data system,” Billy T. muttered.

 • • • 

It was only a week since Agnes Vestavik’s murder, and Hanne felt it had been an eternity. Little response was forthcoming from the superintendent, who was normally a considerate man with great sensitivity to the problems of his subordinates. Today he had brushed her off. The double murder in Smestad occupied all his resources: a shipowner and his somewhat dipsomaniac, decrepit wife had been found with their heads blown off in what seemed to be the most grotesque robbery and murder in Norwegian criminal history. The newspapers were gorging themselves in the borderland between social pornography and gossip column, mixing smoothly with the usual smear campaign against incompetent police officers, and the police commissioner was impatient, to put it mildly. Agnes Vestavik’s fate had aroused a scintilla of interest on the first day, but now it was ancient history. For everyone except the small band of four still fumbling around hunting for motive and opportunity.

“My God,” Hanne muttered. “Times have changed. Ten years ago, a murder such as this would have turned the department upside down. We would have been given twenty men and all the resources we needed.”

Erik Henriksen did not know how to take the outburst. Did she mean he was a lightweight? He chose to keep his mouth shut.

“But . . .” She suddenly smiled, as though she had only just realized he was sitting there. “What have you found out?”

“The Lover,” the young officer began. “He’s had severe financial problems.”

Financial problems. Who on earth doesn’t
have financial problems?
Hanne Wilhelmsen thought, refraining from lighting the cigarette she so longed for.

“People don’t go around killing other people even if they have financial problems.” She sighed. “Every other person would probably say they have problems of that nature if we asked them. We have to find out something more! Something more . . . passionate! Hatred, contempt, fear, something in that direction. The guy was besotted with the woman. They weren’t married, so he didn’t have any financial interest in her.”

“But the boys at work say he had been very quiet recently. The past couple of weeks or so. Seemed almost depressed, they said.”

“So what?” Hanne challenged as she formed a tent shape with her fingers. “What does that imply? If Agnes had broken up with him, or whatever we should say to describe ending a platonic relationship, then he still doesn’t have any grounds for killing the woman! With a knife! And what’s more, it would be remarkable if nobody noticed or heard a distressing argument between two former lovers ending in murder.”

She shook her head, discouraged, and sat up straight in her office chair.

“No, now I’m being unfair, Erik.”

She smiled.

“I don’t mean to take it out on you. But isn’t this a strange case? No one’s bothered. The superintendent can hardly take the trouble to speak to me. The newspapers are completely uninterested. The foster home continues as though nothing has happened. The youngsters shout and play, her husband remains living where he has always lived, the world goes on spinning on its axis, and a week after Agnes Vestavik was dispatched, it’s almost as if I’m not bothering either. In a month’s time, hardly anyone will remember the case. Do you know one thing—”

She interrupted herself by digging out an edition of
Arbeiderbladet
from a pile of newspapers on the floor.

“Here,” she said, leafing through to a headline. “There are now more homicides committed in Oslo in real life than in crime novels! For the first time in history. Heavens above!”

She slapped the palm of her hand against her forehead.

“Novelists can’t even keep up with us! A murder here, a homicide there, who cares? Now there have to be two at once in order to gain any recognition. Or else the corpse has to be desecrated or the victim wealthy. Or a prostitute. Or a footballer or a celebrity or a politician. Or even better: the
perpetrator
is rich or a celebrity. An anonymous woman who doesn’t have any special qualities other than a quiet life with a ‘sort of’ lover, and nobody’s going to get excited about it. Are you bothered by this?”

The final interrogative was said as Hanne leaned across the desktop, staring him directly in the eyes.

Erik Henriksen swallowed audibly.

“Of course I’m bothered about it,” he mumbled, swallowing again. “It’s my job to be.”

“Exactly! We bother about it because it’s our job. But the superintendent’s not bothered, he’s quite happy to push it all over onto our plates. The newspapers aren’t bothered, because they haven’t found enough gossip in the case. And we don’t bother ourselves either, since we’re able to go home with glad hearts every evening and eat our meatballs and gravy without a single thought for a four-year-old somewhere who has lost her mother in a way that it’s actually part of our task to prevent.
Prevent!
That’s our foremost task, you know! To prevent crime. When did you last prevent a crime, Erik?”

He was tempted to explain how he had prevented a friend from drunk driving last Saturday night but sensibly let it drop.

The phone rang, startling Erik Henriksen. Hanne Wilhelmsen allowed it to ring four times before answering.