Medusa (16 page)

Roger Åheim, who owned the petrol station, was a man Signy wouldn’t hesitate to describe as ‘warm hearted’. It turned out he was cousin to Åse Berit Nytorpet, whom she worked with at Reinkollen. He always gave Signy a little wink. Though he wasn’t far off sixty, he was still a ladies’ man. In fact, if what she heard was true, he’d just become a father again. Now, seeing how desperate she was, he put everything else to one side to fix her wheels for her so she could get about.

A young lad Signy knew from before she moved house took over from him behind the counter. Although he couldn’t be that young, she thought; it must have been all of twenty years ago when she was his teacher at the primary school in Kongsvinger. Not that
that
was any kind of happy memory; he’d been a right little mischief. Smart enough when it suited him, but that wasn’t very often. He was always playing truant, hanging out with boys five or six years older than him and drinking beer. When he went to secondary school, things turned really bad. He’d been in jail apparently, and now he’d ended up here. He was probably still struggling and didn’t exactly look a picture of health with his shaven head and tattooed skull. But Signy was the kind of person who cared about people. Every now and then she called in at the petrol station, bought a few small things and had a chat with the lad.

But on this particular morning she sat on the battered sofa in the corner and nervously flipped through the newspaper as Roger Åheim jacked up the car and started work. The last murder victim had a daughter just eight years old. They’d found bear tracks everywhere, all around where she was lying.

Up here we’ve always had bears
,
Åse Berit Nytorpet had said a few days earlier when Signy showed her a picture of the first woman to be killed.
Maybe now they’ll understand what it’s like.

But there was something else she’d said too, something Signy was still puzzling over.

Some people I know would be prepared to go pretty far to make people down there see sense. Might even drug a bear and drive it down to Oslomarka and let it out there.

– You’re surely not saying you know someone who might’ve done something like that, Signy had protested.

I’m not saying anything. What I’m saying is, it’s not out of the question that I know someone with strong views on this business.

That was what had kept Signy awake last night. On several occasions over the past week Åse Berit had hinted that she knew something about what was going on down there in Oslo. And then always that zip-fastener mime across the lips with the two fingers.

By the time Roger Åheim had got the last of the winter tyres on, Signy had made up her mind. She couldn’t keep this to herself. She had to tell someone about it.

A
POWERFULLY BUILT
fair-haired man emerged from the lift on the ground floor at police headquarters and walked over to reception.

– Detective Sergeant Norbakk, he said and held out his hand. The handshake wasn’t as firm as Axel Glenne had expected, judging by the upper-arm musculature. – Come with me, he added with a nod towards the lift door.

On the way up, Axel looked him over. The sergeant was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and was probably about thirty years old, although that thick curl hanging down over his forehead perhaps made him look younger than he was.

– Probably isn’t easy for a doctor to get away from his office in the middle of the afternoon, he observed, most likely as a way of neutralising the tension that arises in a lift when two strange men are standing face to face.

– You’re right there, Axel agreed with a friendly smile, though in fact he was attending a three-day seminar on lung disease. He thought better of asking why they had requested that they meet up in person rather than deal with it over the telephone. Actually, he could understand why. The previous evening a female officer had called him and told him who the murdered woman in Frogner Park was. Afterwards he’d spent half the night lying awake, and found it hard to follow what was being said at the seminar in the morning.

They came to a halt on the seventh floor.

– We’re going over into the red zone, the sergeant told him.

Axel was led down a corridor with red-painted doors and linoleum in the same colour, with no explanation being offered for the significance of the colour-coding. Presently they came to a door that was slightly ajar. There was a nameplate on it with the sergeant’s name. His first name was Arve, Axel registered. He was shown to a chair by the window in the cramped office. It looked out across Grønland and the Plaza Hotel, with Bjørvika and the opera house just visible on the left. The desk was tidy, a pile of documents next to a computer, a couple of copies of the legal code; the shelves were crammed with folders.

– The chief inspector will be here in a moment. Coffee?

Axel nodded and Norbakk disappeared, returning with a thermos and three cups.

– Sugar? Milk?

When Axel declined he said:

– Me too, I don’t like junk in my coffee.

Just then the door opened. Axel gave a start and turned round. The man standing there was a little under medium height, wearing suit trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was thinning on top, and thick grey eyebrows formed a bridge across the powerful crooked nose.

– Viken, he said, sitting down on the chair nearest the door without offering to shake hands. – You’ve already met Norbakk.

The conversation – Axel preferred to call it that, although
interview
sounded reasonable enough – went on for over an hour. An unnecessarily long time. He had planned to catch the 4.30 boat. It was his turn to make dinner. Marlen had her violin lesson. And he had planned to go over Tom’s weekly homework with him, something he overlooked too often and that gave him a guilty conscience. But he was careful to give no indication of his impatience. Said what he was able to say about Cecilie Davidsen. He had never before been in the situation of being interviewed about a dead patient, and he decided to be open about her sickness. Yes, of course the diagnosis had come as a terrible shock to her. No, the prognosis had not been good. Possibly three years to live. It was the young sergeant, Norbakk, who asked about this. He looked up from the computer he was working at and observed Axel with calm, direct eyes. On those occasions when he did speak, he kept it short and his voice was relaxed, unlike the chief inspector, who sounded pressured and a little hoarse. If he had to choose which one of the two to drink a beer with, thought Axel, it would be Norbakk, no question about it. As for the other one, Viken, there was an impenetrable sullenness about him, and he seemed to exude something that filled Axel with unease. When was the last time Axel had seen Davidsen? he wanted to know. Axel gave him the date of the visit to her house. Was it usual to go to patients’ houses out of office hours? The chief inspector’s delivery was patronising and insistent, but it was the penetrating stare that irritated Axel most and brought on a sort of reluctance. He spun it out a bit, didn’t tell Viken how he’d stood outside Davidsen’s front door, how the daughter had opened up, the scared way she’d looked at him. The messenger of death, was what he had thought. Though not
this
death, the death he was being questioned about now.

But most of the conversation was about Hilde Paulsen rather than Cecilie Davidsen. How well had he known her? Did they work closely together? Had he had any contact with her outside work? Exactly where was it he had met her that afternoon? Had he met anyone else? Axel forced his lips into a smile. He was a good observer. He noticed things, big things, little things. But to remember every detail of a bike ride nearly three weeks ago was asking a bit much. He remembered a woman carrying a child in a back frame, three or four people out jogging. Naturally the elderly couple out at the Nordmarka chapel; he could give them a detailed description of the woman’s face if they wanted. A cyclist had raced past him, that was near the chapel too. And after meeting Hilde Paulsen, a steady stream of keep-fitters and walkers, with and without dogs, on their way to and from Ullevålseter. Approaching Sognsvann, he’d met three women in headscarves and long coats, probably Turks or Kurds. One of them limped and looked as though she had problems with her hip. Directly behind them a person he recognised from television. A former newsreader for NRK who now had his own talk show on another channel and was what you might call a celebrity. And in the car park by the lake, a cyclist with a child-trailer. It was dark by then, and he remembered thinking it was too late to be taking a child out into the forest. Why was he walking when he had the bicycle with him? He told them about the puncture in his rear tyre, then the run and the swim in the tarn. But nothing about the spruce shelter. He didn’t know why. Only that the shelter made him think of Brede. Brede had no place in this conversation.

Where were you last Thursday afternoon? the chief inspector wanted to know. When he heard the answer, he observed drily:

– Well, well, the day of your weekly bike ride. And here was me thinking you doctors worked round the clock. Were you with anyone?

Axel had come to tell them what he knew about two women who had been murdered, not to defend anything he himself might have been up to in his private life. He thought it through quickly and came to the conclusion that Miriam had no place in this conversation either.

– No, he replied, and felt himself crossing a threshold as he lied to the chief inspector. – I was alone.

D
ETECTIVE
C
HIEF
I
NSPECTOR
Hans Magnus Viken piled the takeaway cartons from China Dragon on to the plate and pushed it to one side as he clicked the remote control. There was a debate programme on TV2:
Should dangerous animals be allowed close to people’s homes? What are the limits?
The murder cases weren’t mentioned, but the programme was fuelled by the general uncertainty in the air. Viken switched to a travel channel. Pictures of a desert sunset. Looked like Morocco. He watched for a while before getting out the DVD he’d brought home from work with him. Only now did he have time to watch the whole of the Monday press conference, not just the few extracts he’d seen on NRK that same evening. It was useful to watch all TV appearances, which was why they were recorded and handed out to everyone taking part. Learning media skills was as important a part of the job as actual policing skills, they were constantly being told.

The Chief Superintendent led the conference, underlining how important the case had become. As usual he was decidedly pompous, sitting there with his dress uniform and his well-groomed hair, which Viken suspected he dyed to hide any traces of grey. He was rather like the smug chief of police in those children’s books about Cardamom Town, and some of the younger officers even referred to him by the fictional chief’s name – Bastian.

It was Finckenhagen who had asked Viken to join them. She was another one who just loved the limelight, he’d realised a long time ago. But this was so big that she obviously felt comfortable sharing it with him on this occasion. She didn’t look too bad, he had to admit as he watched her taking over after the chief’s introduction. Her summary of the case was adequate, and she dealt reasonably well with the questions. On a couple of occasions she handed them over to him. The contrast was evident. He was more concise, and more precise. The way people wanted their police to be, he thought.

The best bit of the press conference came at the end. There were Swedish and Danish journalists there, of course, but also French and Italian, and a team from German TV. No matter how many times they denied that a killer bear was on the rampage in the centre of a European capital, the case continued to attract worldwide attention. The bear prints, and the claw marks on the two dead women, were
gefundenes Fressen
for everyone who had news as their business, and the pictures had already been spread to all parts of the globe. After Finckenhagen had staggered her way through a couple of sentences in primitive English, Viken took over the show. About ten years earlier, he’d taken part in an exchange project and spent a year with the police force in Manchester, and he answered questions from the foreign media in fluent English. Even permitted himself a joke.
Of course, people do call Oslo ‘the city of tigers’, from the days when people thought it was a dangerous place to be wandering about in at night. But let me state categorically, once and for all: there are no tigers on the prowl here.
He had worked out the joke at the morning briefing, and it turned out to be a hit. Chuckles and grins from the journalists. The chief came up to him afterwards and shook his hand.
Good show, Viken
. A German journalist approached and asked if he could do an interview. As he sat watching the recording, Viken felt well pleased. One–nil, Finckenhagen, he noted, certain that she would have made the same observation.

He switched to NRK in time to catch the evening news. The bear murders, as they were inaccurately known, had been relegated to item number three. The same pictures from Nordmarka and Frogner Park were shown. Then an interview with the chief. Finckenhagen was being kept off stage after a bad mistake on the news the day before. She’d been naïve enough to respond to the proposal to declare southern Norway a bear-free zone. Everyone knew that the politician who had come up with the idea was an incorrigible drunkard who would do or say anything for another fifteen seconds of media fame. Finckenhagen fell for it, and people were saying the chief was not pleased with her. Two–nil, Viken nodded as he peeled a banana he’d bought from a 7-Eleven. They had a calming effect on the stomach, he’d discovered. Every bit as good as the pills his doctor prescribed for him. Despite saying there was nothing the matter with him, the guy still tried to get Viken to stuff himself full of chemicals.
Your stomach is just a touch oversensitive
was his idiotic diagnosis. And in an effort to be funny he added, citing a few crime novels he’d read:
Don’t all detectives have upset stomachs?