Yours Until Death (26 page)

As we led the little police delegation up through the darkness, Hamre said, ‘I have a colleague, Veum. Down at the station. His name’s Muus. I’m sure you know him.’

I nodded.

‘I happened to mention you had something to do with this case. I should say – with the other case. He didn’t give you an especially good recommendation. Veum? he said. Keep that guy away from anything to do with the case, Jakob. The
fellow’s
like flypaper, he said. Turn him loose in the dark and you can bet he’ll find himself a dead body, he said. He said dead bodies have a thing about you.’ He paused dramatically. ‘I’m beginning to see what he meant.’

‘He doesn’t like me,’ I said. ‘We once met over a body, and I stumbled over his murderer for him. He didn’t like me any better after that.’

Hamre stopped and our followers almost ran into us. I heard one of them swear. ‘You guys keep going,’ Hamre said.

‘The hut’s straight ahead,’ I said.

Hamre and I stood there. Then he turned to me and his voice was acid. ‘I’m a policeman, Veum. A detective. My life consists of misery and cruelty, of people who murder one another because of a bottle of beer or a safe with fifty kroner in it – or a useless cheque book. Or because people sleep with people they shouldn’t. Or for a million other stupid reasons.

‘Three hundred days a year I investigate robberies and other
more or less violent crimes. When somebody hands me a body on the three hundred and first, I try to find out who did it. Along with about fifty other slobs who’ve made a living out of the medal’s back side. I don’t expect a medal either. Police chiefs and judges and Ministers of Justice get medals.
Detectives
get ulcers. I don’t expect citations or decorations or any other damn thing. I don’t expect so much as a pat on the head. But a dead person is something I take very seriously. The dead aren’t something you play games with. You don’t sit in an office with a view of Vågen and wait for them to fall in your lap.’

‘Listen,’ I said.

‘Shut up, Veum. I give this speech only once, and I don’t hand out the transcript afterwards. I don’t give a shit how you pay your rent, or for your car, or your booze or your daily bread. I don’t give a shit if you sneak around and tail cheating husbands and wives until your eyes fall out of your head. I’m telling you just one thing. Stay the hell away from dead bodies. And I’ve a good mind to lock you up until this case is dosed.’

‘Can you lock up all your suspects, Hamre?’ I said.

‘I can lock you up. And that would do me.’ He suddenly looked tired. ‘Listen, Veum. It isn’t personal. You’re a nice guy. I’d have a beer with you if things were different and if it wouldn’t put me on the shit-list down at the station. Just do me a favour, will you? Don’t go finding any more bodies. OK?’

‘Well.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ll try not to.’

‘Do that little thing,’ he said. Then he walked quickly up to the hut. I followed him. Slowly.

I waited outside with a young constable whose face looked as if somebody’d walked on it. It was a flat square face like a postage stamp. His mouth was tense, the muscles rippled along his jaw. We had nothing to say to one another.

I tried to think about something else. Something pleasant. What was Solveig Manger doing? Was she relaxing, a book in her lap, legs propped up, staring into space? Was her husband sitting in another chair, a biography of Hemingway in his hand? Was there perhaps a TV on the opposite wall? Were they watching a new and different life unfold by the light of the screen?

They’d never be alone again. There’d always be another person in the room with them. And that person would always be dead.

No, it wasn’t pleasant.

Hamre came out of the hut and glared at me. Or through me. ‘They’re never very pretty,’ he said.

Nobody said anything.

The other cops followed him. We stood there. Silent and helpless. It’s always like this. Nobody knows what to say. And nobody wants to start doing what’s got to be done.

Hamre looked at me. ‘You didn’t touch anything?’ he said flatly. ‘It’s just the way you found him?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. I didn’t see – a weapon.’

‘Right. And you didn’t see anybody on your way here?’

‘Not a living soul.’

‘Don’t be funny, Veum.’

‘I wasn’t …’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ He brushed me off. ‘What were you doing here anyway?’

‘I wanted to talk to …’ I nodded at the hut.

‘What about?’

I walked up to him. ‘See my face? It’s never been pretty, but maybe something’s happened to it since you and I last saw each other.’

‘You can’t miss it. I mean your face.’

‘There was no way Joker and his gang could miss it.’

Pause. Two cars stopped on the road and a new search party began combing the woods.

The four cops looked at me. ‘So in other words, you two had unfinished business?’ Hamre said.

‘Yes, but I …’

He interrupted. ‘We’re not that stupid, Veum,’ he said. ‘We know you didn’t kill him. And we don’t think you’re that stupid either.’

One of the cops piped up. ‘You’re famous for never killing anybody, Veum. You just beat their brains out.’

I took a look at him. I’d never seen this one before. I must have made an impression. His face was covered with
mustard-coloured
freckles, and the hair sticking out from under his cap reminded me of withered grass.

‘Didn’t catch your name,’ I said.

‘Isaksen,’ he said. ‘Peder Isaksen.’ His was a voice you’d like to forget. Like the last sentence in a bad novel.

‘OK. Calm down, you two. That’s enough,’ Hamre said. Then he walked over to the newcomers.

I looked at Peder Isaksen. He looked at me. Hard. Just another fan of mine. Welcome to the club. No way I’d ever feel lonely.

‘Do you need me?’ I said to Hamre’s back.

He swung around, his mouth open, and he jammed a finger in my face. ‘Don’t move, Veum. Don’t move so much as a metre. And let’s not hear one word out of you.’ Then he turned away.

He didn’t hear one word out of me. I leaned up against a tree, sucked on a cough drop and tried to look as if I were bored out of my mind.

An hour passed. More police came. The activity around the hut was strictly routine. People arrived, ducked through the doorway and looked inside the hut. Then they straightened up, their faces stony. Some of them disappeared inside and came back out after a while. I began imagining what they were doing in there. When I’m bored I have a dirty imagination.

Nobody talked to me. I could have been part of the tree I was leaning against. Once Hamre came out of the hut, looked worriedly past me at all the buildings and said to a colleague, ‘That’s a hell of a lot of people to check up on.’

As I stood there I tried to imagine what had happened.

Joker could have arranged to meet somebody here at the hut. They’d gone inside, probably to talk. There’d been an argument and one of them had pulled a knife. Either one of them. They’d fought for the knife and Joker had lost.

It was so easy to say. But it was only a theory and it didn’t tell me who the other person was. And it didn’t tell me if this death had anything to do with Jonas Andresen’s.

There was one person I needed to question and I wanted to get to him before Jakob E. Hamre did. But Jakob E. Hamre had told me not to move by so much as a metre. He’d also told me not to talk, so maybe he wouldn’t notice my disappearing. Not immediately, anyway. I knew he would sooner or later, and my only defence would be to hand him a murderer.

I stood and watched. It wouldn’t be long now before Hantre
turned things over to the technicians and began the
investigation
itself: the endless, routine rounds of questioning.

The police had already trampled the mud around the hut into a map of chaos. Some of them stood around in small groups and talked, and none of them paid any attention to me.

I stepped a little way away from the tree. Went back to it. Stood by it. There were some junipers growing behind it and if I could just slip between them I’d quickly be invisible in the darkness. I leaned my shoulders against the tree and gradually started easing around it. Hamre came out of the hut. He stood in the doorway. I could see him glance quickly in my direction but I acted as if I hadn’t noticed. He motioned to a technician, said something to him, and the two of them disappeared inside the hut.

I disappeared behind the tree. Flitted sideways between the junipers, quickly sneaked ten or fifteen metres down that sparsely covered slope and then moved faster. I held my breath, waiting for somebody to yell. Nobody yelled. I went even faster. Branches hit my face and twigs snapped underfoot but still nobody yelled.

Once on the road I slowed down so I’d look like an ordinary citizen. But as tense and stiff as I was, I knew I hardly looked like somebody out for an evening stroll.

I walked quickly to the high-rise. Got in the lift. Pressed the button for the twelfth floor.

The lift began to move. Like a majestic seagull it slowly soared past the floors: first, second, third. I thought of Wenche Andresen. She’d taken lifts like this one. Fourth, fifth, sixth. Jonas Andresen had taken lifts like this one before all lift doors had closed for him. Seventh, eighth, ninth. I began to think of Solveig Manger and wondered if she’d ever taken a lift like this one. But I never finished the thought.

The lift stopped between the ninth and tenth floors. And the lights went out.

The most frightening thing wasn’t that the lift had stopped or that it was as black as pitch in there. What really scared me was that after about a minute the lift rose again. Not evenly and slowly as it had, but jerkily. Somebody was up in the motor room. Somebody was using the emergency hand-crank to run the lift. But it wasn’t because of a power failure. Somebody was slowly but surely hauling me upward. Somebody who had already killed.

When you’re stuck in a lift and the light goes out, it’s dark. There’s no sky with its pale stars, no moon somewhere below the horizon to cast its shadow of light against the vault of heaven. No distant electric lights, no windows you can run to, no bonfires down in the valley. There’s nothing. You’re in the middle of blackness, and if you stretch out a hand you discover that the blackness is hard, metallic, and close, close around you.

If you’re stuck in a lift with the light on, you have some sense of security. The light shields you in the hollow of its hand. But when you’re stuck in a lift and it’s dark, there is no security. Then it’s as if the lift’s shrinking around you, as if it’s only a question of time before you’re crushed between the heavy steel walls.

What I felt when the lift stopped was pure, naked anxiety. The kind which grabs and shakes your body, the kind with no limits or meaning, no source. No beginning. It takes over your stomach, your guts, it squeezes your heart, your throat. My mouth went dry in seconds and I had trouble breathing. My ears roared. I had to lean against the wall and if I could have seen anything, I would have felt it was spinning. But the darkness was so intense that there wasn’t room to feel faint in. Because if you’re going to feel faint you’ve got to have at least one reference point, no matter how unstable it is.

When the lift started moving, the anxiety changed. Became
focused. There’s nothing like a nameless infinite fear, but once you know what to be afraid of, then you can brace yourself. Fight back. No matter how bad it is.

And I knew what to be afraid of. I knew somebody was cranking the lift up to him. I knew I had to try to get out of the lift before he cranked it all the way up. Otherwise he’d be standing there waiting for me and he wasn’t about to hand me a medal for good conduct.

Suddenly there was a break in the darkness. It was light from the oblong window in the door to the tenth floor going by. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t react until it was too late. The lift continued to jerk upward. My only chance was to be ready for the next door. The only time I’d be able to escape was when the lift was exactly level with the door. A few centimetres below, a few centimetres above, and the door wouldn’t open.

I walked to the wall where the door should appear and rested my hands against it. Felt the wall sliding downward. Waited for the separation between the wall and door.

There!

The door’s lower edge eased down from the ceiling, but the other one must have known what I was up to and he cranked faster when the lift reached the crucial point. The window came into view and I fumbled despairingly for the door handle. Found it, grabbed it and when the lift was level with the door, threw myself to the left and tried to yank the door open.

It moved a little before it slipped back into place. That was that. The lift rose tirelessly. Then I realised that there were twelve floors but that the lift probably went as far as the motor room. That gave me a new chance. The twelfth.

I got set again, but this time I held one hand against the wall and the other ready to grab the door handle.

There!

A new door rolled down the wall. I tensed my muscles, planted the soles of my feet on the floor and against the wall, and stared blindly towards where I knew that oblong of light would appear. It slowly moved downward. And then the lift stopped. Ten centimetres below the door. He’d caught me off-guard. I tried to look through the window but it was too high. Then I was nearly thrown off my feet. The lift shook violently. Then it glided by the door and continued upward. He’d outsmarted me.

I knew there was only one way out of this. Like it or not, I had to meet him.

Now that the lift had passed the door, it stopped. And I stood there in the darkness on the threshold of a cement coffin crammed with machinery. I didn’t have to wonder why the lift had stopped. He was catching his breath. It hadn’t been easy cranking it up by himself.

But it won’t be long now, murderer. Don’t give up. Whet your knife, murderer. A new victim’s on his way.

As I stood there, I searched for something I could use as a weapon. The only thing I had was the little flashlight. Not very effective, but good to have. Maybe I could manage to blind him with it.

I was sure it was a him. A man. No woman could have cranked the lift up so skilfully. A woman would have invited me in for a cup of coffee or a quiet drink. And it would have been a quiet drink. The last one. A woman would have
poisoned
it. A woman would have put her arms around me and slit my throat with a stiletto. Or she would have tried
appealing
to my sympathy and understanding. She wouldn’t have invited me to a deadly tango in the darkness on the threshold of a lift. No. It was a man.

And I was pretty sure who the man waiting for me was.

That gave me two trump cards to play. But they were the only ones. The other cards – whether I’d survive, whether I’d be able to ask my questions or whether I could do anything at all in the next hour – were not. And there wasn’t a Joker in the pack now. It was between me and him.

The lift moved again.

‘Roll out the red carpet,’ I said softly. ‘Here comes the clown.’

Nobody answered, and the darkness was as total as ever. My eyes still hadn’t adjusted. I had only an inkling of the lift’s four corners.

The lift jerked several times, as if he were standing there kicking the crank. What would he meet me with?

If he had a gun, I hadn’t a chance. He could pepper the whole lift with a sawn-off shotgun in seconds and I’d end up as a couple of kilos of hamburger. And that’s how I’d look. Exit Varg Veum: of earth thou art come, to hamburger thou shalt return …

With a little jump the lift stopped in front of the thirteenth door. The thirteenth door on the thirteenth floor. Sounded terminal.

The oblong window was black. I couldn’t see anything. I listened to my tense ragged breathing. Not many choices. I could open the door and try to rush into the darkness and to one side before anything happened. The most dangerous moment would be when I opened the door and stood there in plain view with only one free hand. Or I could wait for him. But then I’d be boxed in.

I waited. The endless seconds became one minute. Two minutes … I didn’t have the nerve to wait any longer. I gripped
the door handle with my left hand. And shoved. Followed the door to the left so that it was a sort of shield. And when I’d opened it all the way, I lowered my head and hurled myself out into the darkness.