Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (17 page)

“Wilhelmsen,” she said brusquely into the receiver.

“Is that Hanne Wilhelmsen?”

“Yes. Who am I speaking to?”

“It’s Maren Kalsvik. From the Spring Sunshine Home.”

“Oh yes.”

“I’m phoning because I’m worried about Terje Welby. You know, the assistant director. The one with the bad back.”

“Why is that?”

Hanne Wilhelmsen placed a finger on her lips as a sign Erik should remain silent, pointing to the door and making a gesture asking him to close it. He misunderstood and was on his way out the door when Hanne placed a hand over the receiver and whispered, “No, no, Erik, come in and close the door. But keep quiet.”

Then she carefully pressed the loudspeaker button on the handset.

“He’s on part-time sick leave and finished early today. But he was supposed to drop by to accompany one of the youngsters to a motorcycle class. He should have been here two hours ago. I’ve phoned him several times. Finally I went to his house, as he stays not far from here, but the door was locked. But only with the one lock. The security lock hadn’t been used, and that usually means he’s at home.”

Hanne Wilhelmsen was not in the mood to worry about a grown man who had been missing for only two hours.

“He might have forgotten about it,” she said wearily. “He could have had something else to do. Perhaps he’s at the doctor’s, for all I know. Going missing for two hours in the case of a person over three years old isn’t a police matter.”

It went quiet at the other end of the line, and then Hanne could hear sounds that told her the woman was crying. Very softly.

“Everything’s probably okay,” said Hanne, trying to reassure her, in a slightly less dismissive tone. “He’ll probably turn up soon.”

“But you see,” the woman began again, before tears got the
better of her. It took quite awhile before she was able to pull herself together.

“There’s so much more to it,” the woman ventured once more. “I can’t explain it over the phone, but there really
is
cause to be alarmed. He . . . I just can’t bring myself to talk about it now. But couldn’t you
please
come over here and see if everything’s okay? Please!”

Erik Henriksen had drawn closer to the desk and telephone and was sitting with his arms folded, elbows leaning on the desktop. She glimpsed his watch, a cheap imitation Rolex Oyster.

“I’ll be with you in half an hour,” she said, wrapping up the conversation.

Erik looked quizzically at her, and she nodded. He might just as well accompany her.

“My God.”

Hanne halted and looked dejectedly at the young officer.

“Here I sit, berating you because nobody’s bothering any longer, and yet I try to dismiss someone who is doing exactly that. Bothering.”

They had a stroke of luck and had to wait only ten minutes for a service vehicle. That was close to a record.

 • • • 

The entrance door was locked, exactly as Maren Kalsvik had said. In the minuscule gap between doorplate and frame, she could see the security lock had not been used, confirming Maren’s account. Thrusting her hand into her pocket, Hanne Wilhelmsen fished out a couple of tissues and attempted to pull the door handle down without touching it too much. Erik Henriksen looked at her in surprise.

“Just a safety measure,” she assured him.

They were confronted with a locked door and a grown man who had been missing for barely three hours. Not exactly
grounds for a legal forced entry. If her dependable colleague, Police Attorney Håkon Sand, hadn’t been so damn modern as to take an entire year’s paternity leave, she could have sorted something out. At the moment Hanne had no idea who was on attorney duty and she needed a lawyer’s permission to break into the apartment.

She had to get inside. The information Maren Kalsvik, convulsed with sobs and in a dreadful state, had spent half an hour relating was so alarming that they were approaching a decision to arrest him. However, explaining to a lawyer that a terrific motive had cropped up and that a suspect had in fact been at the scene of Agnes Vestavik’s tragic demise at an extremely critical point in time was not a conversation one ideally had over the phone. On the other hand, it could be a matter of life or death.

Instructing Erik to stand his ground but not to touch anything, she trotted back to the car and after a great deal of hassle succeeded in contacting the duty lawyer on her cell phone. She was in luck. The attorney was an old—if rather weary—cunning fox. Noting the points, he gave her the green light and transferred her to the crime desk. They promised her backup within half an hour.

Actually they took three-quarters of an hour to arrive, but it was worth the wait. Two silent types, who knew what they were doing, without any further ado positioned themselves outside the door with a substantial battering ram consisting of a heavy square iron plate attached to a long shaft with hand grips for four pairs of hands. Hanne and Erik posted themselves at the rear.

“One, two, and THREE,” called the first officer as they swung the battering ram to and fro at one and two, allowing it to crash through the door at three.

The timber did not have a chance. The door split open, helplessly
releasing its hold on the frame struggling in vain to stay firmly attached, and fell back inside the room. It remained lying at an angle, but the upper part was leaning toward the wall of the hallway, only a meter and a half across. Elbowing her way in front of the two assisting officers, Hanne Wilhelmsen rushed into the apartment.

The hallway was empty, and there was no one in the living room either. She stood still for a second, scanning what appeared to be a typical bachelor’s pad: furnishings were cobbled together, one window lacked curtains, and no attempt had been made to make it attractive or comfortable. No pictures on the walls, not a single potted plant. The kitchen sink was full of dirty glasses.

“Hanne, come here,” she heard from the hallway.

Three male backs were blocking the bathroom doorway. She placed a hand on the nearest pair of shoulders, and they all drew back.

She whistled under her breath.

Terje Welby was sitting on the toilet seat. Or more correctly, his mortal remains were sitting there. He had kept his shoes on, and apart from those, he was wearing jeans with no belt and a T-shirt. His head had fallen onto his chest, and his arms were hanging limply at his sides. Viewed like this, he might appear to be a man who had collapsed after having too much to drink, if his feet had not been planted in an enormous pool of blood and both of his wrists slashed.

Hanne slowly stepped into the room, where there was hardly space for two people. Without touching either the body or any other item, she leaned toward each of his hands, confirming it was only on the left side that he had reached as far as the main artery. But there he had certainly done a good job. A ten-centimeter-long cut ripped through the bottom part of his lower arm, and despite all the blood, she could discern the white of sinew and bone.

An empty whisky bottle had been discarded in the basin. On the floor lay a large carpet knife, with the blade fully extended and covered in blood.

She cautiously placed two fingers on his neck, but he was already quite cold, and there was no sign of life.

“He’s dead all right,” she said softly, backing out of the bathroom. “Send for Forensics.”

The final comment was directed at one of the assisting officers.

“Crime scene technicians? For an obvious case of suicide?”

“Call them in,” Hanne insisted, hunkering down at the bathroom door without taking time to explain her decision to the random policeman sent to assist her.

For his part, he shrugged his shoulders, sending a meaningful glance to his colleague, and sloped off to carry out her order. A chief inspector was a chief inspector, after all.

First they took photographs. Hanne Wilhelmsen, who had to vacate the area to give the technician elbowroom, was impressed by how lithely he moved around in the tiny space without ever coming into contact with the body, the blood, or the walls. He exited the room a couple of times in order to change his film, but did not speak. When the bathroom had been comprehensively photographed, two men began to make precise measurements of the position of the corpse in relation to the ceiling, the basin, and all four walls. They exchanged the occasional comment, and one of them jotted down notes in a spiral notebook once the distances had been ascertained. Hanne noticed that they operated within a millimeter’s accuracy.

Thereafter, they set to work to obtain prints. It dawned on Hanne that it had been a long time since she had been present at a crime scene examination, because instead of using only the black or white powder she was used to, they sometimes made use of some kind of spray that deposited an indefinable color at certain points.

Two hours later, their efforts were concluded. The body was
carefully placed on a stretcher and driven to the hospital, where it would shortly lie on an icy metal bench in a yellow room to be picked clean.

“Clear case of suicide, if you ask me,” one of the technicians remarked as he packed his case. “Do you want us to seal the apartment?”

“Yes, but then we really need to put the door back again,” Hanne replied.

Not long afterward, the door was more or less in place, and two eyelet screws were fastened to the frame and doorplate. A fine metal wire was laced through them and the ends joined together with a little seal of lead in the center.

“Thanks very much, boys,” Hanne said in a lackluster voice as she sent Erik off in the technicians’ vehicle.

“I’m going home. Tell them I’m keeping the car until tomorrow morning.”

She was deeply, heartily sorry.

 • • • 

Erik Henriksen fortunately had the foresight to call a minister. He himself did not feel quite mature enough to break the news to an ex-wife and two little boys that their daddy was dead. The clergyman had promised to attend to it at once. That had been an hour and a half earlier, so he assumed it had all been taken care of. It dawned on him that Maren Kalsvik ought to be told that her anxiety had been well founded. It was not exactly something one did by phone, so he dropped by the foster home on his way home.

It was dinnertime, and from the kitchen the sounds of eating could be heard: the clinking of glass, scraping of cutlery on china, and lots of voices, big and small. As usual, it was Maren Kalsvik who greeted him, and she stiffened when she caught sight of him.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, sounding scared. “Has something happened?”

“Could we go somewhere private?” the police officer said awkwardly, avoiding eye contact with the woman.

She escorted him to a kind of conference room that obviously was adjacent to the kitchen, with a door leading from the dayroom. Flopping down on an office chair, she tugged at her fringe.

“What’s the matter?” she repeated.

“You were right,” he launched into an explanation but caught himself. “I mean, there
were
grounds for concern. He had . . .”

Now he looked around, walking over to the door to ensure it was properly closed.

“He’s dead,” he said softly, after sitting down at the opposite side of the massive conference table.

“Dead? How is he dead?”

“Well, dead,” the officer said, somewhat discouraged. “He had taken his own life. I’d rather not go into details.”

“My God,” Maren whispered, her face turning more ashen than ever.

She closed her eyes and swayed violently in the chair, which did not have armrests. Quick as a flash, Erik Henriksen dashed around to catch hold of her before she fell to the floor. She blinked her eyes and moaned softly.

“It’s all my fault,” she said, breaking down in wild sobs. “Everything’s just my fault.”

Then she leaned close to the bewildered officer who was not especially well trained to cope with what was going on. But he held her in his arms for a spell.

 • • • 

“For fuck’s sake,” Christian whispered excitedly as he tumbled out of the archive room into the adjoining office. Erik Henriksen had led Maren Kalsvik from the conference room upstairs to the first floor.

“This is starting to get spooky!
Fucking spooky!
 ”

He adjusted his clothes and rubbed his neck where, from previous experience, he knew a hickey was shortly about to bloom.

Cathrine, the skinny therapist, twentysomething going on thirty, followed after him. They had been sneaking into the archive room while they thought all the others were eating their meal and had been so wrapped up in their own bodies they had not heard the doorbell ring. When Maren and the police officer entered the neighboring room, they were trapped.

They had heard all of it.

“Taken his own life! My God!”

Cathrine was shaken, but not so much so that she refrained from taking the opportunity to lean toward a mirror beside the window to check her makeup. She made an openmouthed grimace as she ran a forefinger under each eye.

“Does that mean he’s the one who whacked Agnes, or what?”

“Probably,” Christian said with steadily increasing delight, grinning broadly.

“Look at you,” she said, rebuking him gently and stroking her hand over his mouth. “Wipe off that grin. This is awful!”

Taking hold of her wrist, he shoved her down onto a chair and sat on the edge of the table beside her.

“I really would never have believed it,” he said.

“Who did you think it was, then?”

Pushing himself farther onto the tabletop, he parked his feet on the seat of a chair. Then he propped his elbows on his knees and cupped his hands to support his face. His smile had vanished, and he looked deep in thought.

“Who did
you
think it was?” he parried.

Cathrine shrugged her shoulders, hemming and hawing.

“Well, that depends, I didn’t really believe it was anyone in particular, I don’t think.”

“But
somebody
must have done it,” Christian insisted.

“What about Olav?”

“Hah!”

“Don’t be so high and mighty, of course it could have been him! He ran away and everything!”