Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (33 page)

It was correct that she had been there. Eirik was sleeping, something that had confirmed a dawning suspicion he was taking something or other that he shouldn’t, at least not when he was given the task of looking after eight sleeping youngsters.

The meeting with Agnes was, however, shorter than Hanne Wilhelmsen assumed. It had lasted only ten minutes. First she had considered begging. All her pride vanished when she realized she was about to lose her job, forfeit her entire existence.

Agnes had told her about Terje. About knowing that Maren knew. Her voice was unfamiliar and quietly distorted, filled with rage that had to be suppressed because of eight sleeping children. Agnes could understand the business of the diploma, she had said. She could make sense of that. In a flash she showed something resembling sympathy, and her voice returned to something like normal. It did not last long. She could not forgive the real betrayal. Maren had gone behind her back to cover up embezzlement. Agnes waved the papers furiously, the fraudulent diploma in one hand, the statement detailing Terje’s malpractice in the other.

Maren Kalsvik wanted to beg. Then she caught sight of Agnes’s eyes and realized it was futile.

She had given her a week to write her letter of resignation. There was nothing more to be done. She had turned away and quietly left the office.

On the landing outside she had stood still for a moment, as tears got the better of her. She attempted to smother her sobs, and when she thought she heard movements from one of the children’s bedrooms, she had crept down the stairs. Eirik was still fast asleep. When she came outside, she started running. She had to flee. She sprinted around the house, crashed down through the back garden, stumbled over the fence, and somehow managed to reach home.

When Eirik phoned a couple of hours later, she battled against a feeling of relief that overwhelmed her in a wave of guilt. When only a few minutes later she was standing on her own in Agnes’s office, it was lying there. The diploma. On the desk, together with other papers. Eirik had not spotted it. She folded it over and placed it in her pocket. Totally without thinking.

She had thought it was Terje. Until the suicide letter arrived. Then she feared the worst. Then she had it confirmed. Olav had seen her running. He had seen her crying. He had told her the truth before he died.

It was all her fault.

“Are you willing to make a statement?”

The judge was staring at her over a pair of reading glasses, perched so far out on his crooked nose that they were about to fall off.

“No,” she said aloud.

He sighed before whispering a message to the secretary, and then rasped a horrible, racking cough. He continued his questioning of the prisoner: “Do you plead guilty or not guilty with respect to the charge?”

Maren Kalsvik gazed yet again at Hanne Wilhelmsen. The chief inspector was leaning forward across the desk, touching her silk scarf as she tensely returned her gaze. When Maren Kalsvik shifted her weight from left foot to right before replying, she did not look at the judge. Instead, she smiled faintly as she looked the chief inspector in the eye.

“I’m guilty,” she whispered.

Straightening her back and dropping her eyes from Hanne Wilhelmsen’s scrutiny, she cleared her throat before repeating, more loudly this time: “I am guilty.”

Continue for an excerpt from

1222

The newest installment in

Anne Holt’s acclaimed Hanne Wilhelmsen series

Available from Scribner in paperback and eBook

Translated from the Norwegian by Marlaine Delargy

A train on its way to the northern reaches of Norway careens off the track during a massive blizzard, 1,222 meters above sea level. The passengers abandon the train for a nearby hotel, centuries-old and practically empty, except for the staff. With plenty of food and shelter from the storm, the passengers think they are safe—until one of them is found dead the next morning. With no sign of rescue and the storm continuing to rage, Hanne Wilhelmsen is asked to investigate. Curiosity and natural talent for observation force her to take an interest in the passengers and their secrets. When another body turns up, Hanne realizes that time is running out, and she must act fast before panic takes over. Trapped by the storm and now trapped with a murderer, Hanne must fit the pieces of the puzzle together before the killer strikes again.

Praise for
1222

“I really loved this snowbound book.”

—Carolyn See,
The Washington Post

“There’s nothing cliché about Holt’s take on this tried-and-true mystery genre.”

—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

1

A
s it was only the train driver who died, you couldn’t call it a disaster. There were 269 people on board when the train, due to a meteorological phenomenon which I have not yet understood completely, came off the rails and missed the tunnel through Finsenut. A dead train driver comprises only 0.37 per cent of this number of people. Given the circumstances, in other words, we were incredibly lucky. Although many individuals were injured in the collision, these injuries were mostly minor in nature. Broken arms and legs. Concussion. Superficial cuts and grazes, of course; there was hardly one person on board who wasn’t physically marked in some way after the crash. But only one fatality. Judging by the screams that ripped through the train minutes after the accident, one could have gained the impression that a total disaster had taken place.

I didn’t say anything for quite some time. I was convinced that I was one of only a few survivors, and besides I had a tiny baby I had never seen before in my arms. It came flying from behind when the impact occurred, brushed against my shoulder and hit the wall right in front of my wheelchair before landing on my lap with a soft thud. In a pure reflex action I put my arms around the bundle, which was yelling. I started to get my breath back, and became aware of the dry smell of snow.

The temperature dropped from unpleasant static heat to the level of cold that threatens frostbite within a remarkably short time. The train listed to one side. Not very much, but enough to
cause pain in one of my shoulders. I was sitting on the left in the carriage, and was the only person in a wheelchair on the entire train. A wall of dirty white was pressing against the window on my side. It struck me that the enormous quantities of snow had saved us; without them the train would have jackknifed.

The cold was debilitating. I had taken off my sweater back in Hønefoss. Now I was sitting here in a thin T-shirt, clutching a baby to my chest as I realized it was snowing into the carriage. The bare skin on my arms was already so cold that the whirling, blue-white flakes lay there for a chilly second before melting. The windows had caved in all along the right-hand side of the carriage.

The wind must have increased in strength during the few minutes which had passed since we stopped to allow people to get on and off the train at Finse station. Only two passengers had disembarked. I had noticed how they leaned forward against the wind as they struggled across the platform towards the entrance to the hotel, but it didn’t seem any worse than normal bad weather up in the high mountains. Sitting here now, with my sweater tightly wrapped around the baby and with no chance of being able to reach for my jacket, I was afraid that the wind was so strong and the snow so cold that we would freeze to death within a very short time. I curled my body over the tiny baby as best I could. With hindsight I can’t actually say how long I sat like that, without any contact with anyone, without saying anything, with the shouts of the other passengers like disconnected fragments in the dense howling of the storm. Perhaps it was ten minutes. It might have been only a few seconds.

“Sara!”

A woman was glaring furiously at me and the child, which was entirely pink, from its cardigan to its tiny little socks. The small, clenched fists that I was trying to cover with my own hands, along with the furious, yelling face, had a pale pink tinge.

The mother’s face, on the other hand, was blood-red. A deep
cut in her forehead was bleeding freely. That didn’t stop her from grabbing the baby. My sweater fell to the floor. The woman wound a blanket around her daughter with such speed and skill that this couldn’t possibly be her first-born child. She tucked the little head inside the folds, pressed the bundle to her breast and yelled accusingly at me:

“I fell! I was moving along the carriage and I fell!”

“It’s OK,” I said slowly; my lips were so stiff that I had difficulty speaking. “Your daughter isn’t hurt, as far as I can tell.”

“I fell,” sobbed the mother, kicking out at me without making contact. “I dropped Sara. I dropped her!”

Freed from the troublesome child, I picked up my sweater and put it on. Despite the fact that I was on the way to Bergen, where I was expecting pouring rain and a temperature of plus two, I had brought my padded jacket. Eventually I managed to get it down off the hook on which it was still hanging, miraculously. In the absence of a hat, I knotted my scarf around my head. I didn’t have any gloves.

“Calm down,” I said, tucking my hands into the sleeves of my jacket. “Sara’s crying. That’s a good sign, I think. But I’m more concerned about . . .”

I nodded in the direction of her forehead. She paid no attention. The child was still crying and was determined not to be consoled by her mother, who was trying to tuck her inside her own fur coat, which was far too tight. Blood was pouring from her forehead, and I could swear it was freezing before it reached the sloping floor, which was now covered in snow and blood and ice. Somebody had trodden on a carton of orange juice. The yellow lump of ice lay in the middle of all the whiteness like a great big egg yolk.

The warmth refused to come back into my body. On the contrary, it was as if my thicker clothing was making the situation worse. True, the numbness was slowly receding, but it was being replaced by piercing, stabbing pains in my skin. I was shaking so
hard I had to clench my teeth to avoid biting my tongue. Most of all I wanted to try to turn my wheelchair around so that I was facing all the cries, facing the weeping of a woman who must be right behind me, and the torrent of swear words and curses coming from someone who sounded like a teenage boy whose voice was just breaking. I wanted to find out how many people were dead, how badly injured the survivors were, and if there was any way of securing the windows against which the wind was pressing as it increased in strength with every passing second.

I wanted to turn around, but I couldn’t bring myself to take my hands out of the sleeves of my jacket.

I wanted to look at my watch, but couldn’t bear the thought of the cold against my skin. Time was as blurred to me as the whirling snow outside the carriage, a chaos in grey with strips of blue-lilac glimmers from the lights that had started to flicker. I couldn’t grasp the idea that it was possible to be so cold. More time must have passed since the crash than I thought. It must be colder than the train driver had said over the loudspeaker on our way into Finse. He had warned the smokers: it was minus twenty, and not a particularly clever idea to try to grab a couple of minutes’ pleasure. He must have been wrong. I have experienced temperatures of minus twenty many times. It has never felt like this. This was a deadly cold, and my arms refused to obey me when I decided to check the time in spite of everything.

“Hello there!”

A man had forced open the automatic glass doors leading to the luggage racks. He stood on the sloping floor with his legs wide apart, wearing a snowmobile suit, a thick leather hat with earflaps and a pair of bright yellow ski goggles.

“I’ve come to rescue you!” he bellowed, pulling his goggles down around his neck. “Just take it easy. It’s not far to the hotel.”

His accent indicated that he was local.

I couldn’t quite work out what one man was going to be able to do in this carriage full of wailing people. And yet it was as if his very presence had a calming effect on us all. Even the pink baby stopped crying. The boy who had been swearing non-stop since the crash yelled out one last salvo:

“It’s about fucking time somebody turned up! Fucking hell!”

Then he shut up.

I might have fallen asleep. Perhaps I
was
in fact on the point of freezing to death. At any rate, the cold was no longer so troublesome. I’ve read about that sort of thing. Even if I can’t claim that I felt the pleasant drowsiness that is said to precede death from the cold, my teeth had at least stopped chattering. It was as if my body had decided on a change of strategy. It no longer wanted to fight and shake. Instead I could feel muscle after muscle giving in and relaxing. At least in that part of my body where I still have feeling.

I’m not sure if I fell asleep.

But something has disappeared from my memory. The rescuer must have helped quite a lot of people before I gave a sudden start.

“What the hell . . .”

He was bending over me. His breath was burning against my cheek, and I think I smiled. Immediately after that he squatted down and examined my knees. Or rather my thigh, as I would soon learn.

“Are you disabled? Are your legs crippled? From before, I mean?”

I didn’t have the strength to answer.

“Johan,” he shouted suddenly, without getting up. “Johan, over here!”

He was no longer alone, then. I could hear the sound of an engine through the storm, and the gusts of wind from outside carried with them the faint smell of exhaust fumes. The roaring noise came and went, grew louder and then faded away, and I came to the conclusion that there must be several snowmobiles
at work. The man called Johan knelt down and scratched his beard when he saw what his friend was pointing at.

“You’ve got a ski pole through your thigh,” he said eventually.

“What?”

“You’ve got a ski pole right through your thigh.”

He shook his head in fascination.

“The loop snapped off when it hit you and caught on your trousers, but the pole itself . . .”