Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (2 page)

BOOK: Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel)
3.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Hanne Wilhelmsen was both dreading and looking forward to Christmas.

The television was broadcasting a dramatization of the Christmas gospel story. Oddly enough, the baby Jesus was blue-eyed. The Virgin Mary wore heavy make-up and had blood-red lips. Closing her eyes, Hanne turned down the volume.

She tried not to think about her father. These days, that demanded all her strength.

The letter had reached her too late, three weeks ago now. Hanne suspected her mother of ulterior motives for using the postal service. Everyone knew that snail mail was no longer reliable. The message reporting his death had taken six days to reach her. By then the funeral had already taken place. Actually that was just as well. Hanne would not have attended anyway. She could visualize the scene: the family on the front pew, her brother with his mother’s hand in his, a repulsive claw, covered in eczema, sprinkling flakes of skin all over her son’s dark suit trousers. Her sister would most likely be wearing some expensive creation and would burst into tears at regular intervals, but not be so distressed that she neglected to look her brilliant best for the assembled congregation; her father’s colleagues from home and abroad, a few celebrated academics, elderly women no longer in full control of their morning ablutions and who therefore dispersed an odor of old-fashioned perfume along the rows of pews.

Her phone played an Arabian dance. Mary had tinkered with the list of ringtones and felt that oriental tunes would please Nefis. Hanne grabbed the receiver swiftly, to prevent Mary from reaching it first.

“Billy T. here.” The words were spoken before she managed to say anything. “It would be best if you came over here.”

“Now? It’s past eleven o’clock.”

“Now. It’s a major case.”

“Tomorrow’s my last workday before the holidays, Billy T. There’s no point in me starting something I won’t be able to finish.”

“You can damn well forget about that time off, Hanne.”

“Cut it out. Bye. Ring someone else. Call the police.”

“Very funny. Come on. Four bodies, Hanne. Mother, father, and son. And somebody else whose identity we haven’t figured out yet.’

“Four … four bodies? Four people
murdered
?”

“Yep. In your own neighborhood, by the way. If you want, I’ll meet you there.”

“Quadruple homicide—”

“Eh?”

“Do you mean we’re faced with homicide times four?”

A demonstrative sigh crackled through the receiver.

“How many times do I have to repeat it?” Billy T. asked her irascibly. “Four dead people! In an apartment in Eckersbergs gate. All of them shot. It looks fucking horrendous. Not only are the bodies punctured, but there … There’s been … someone’s been there afterwards. An animal. Or something like that—”

“Good God …”

On the TV screen, Joseph had begun to knock on doors at nightfall. In a brief close-up of his knuckles rapping on a rustic door in Bethlehem, Hanne noticed that the actor had forgotten to remove his wristwatch.

“Absurd,” she mumbled. “An animal?”

“A dog, we think. It has … eaten its fill, you might say.”

“Eckersbergs gate, was that what you said?”

“Number five.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“I might take longer than that.”

“Fine.”

They both hung up simultaneously. Hanne gulped down the last of her coffee and stood up.

“Are you thinking of going out?”

Mary stood with her legs astride, her hip leaning on the doorway, and her gaze forced Hanne to sit down again, raising her hands in a defensive gesture.

“This is an extremely serious case,” she began.

“I’ll give you serious,” Mary barked. “Nefis is coming home in half an hour. She’s on her way from the airport. She’s been gone for a whole week now, and I’ve been busy in the kitchen since seven. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I must.”

Mary sucked through her teeth. For a moment she seemed to be thinking of something else.

“Then you’ll have to take some food with you. Are you going to meet that slob?”

“Mmm.”

Ten minutes later, Hanne was ready. She had two plastic boxes of venison stew in her shoulder bag, half a sliced loaf spread generously with butter, a couple of apples, one and a half liters of cola, a large bar of chocolate, a packet of napkins, two plastic cups, and some silver cutlery into the bargain. She tried to protest.

“It’s the middle of the night, Mary. I don’t need all this!”

“Yes, you do. We never know when we’ll see you again,” Mary muttered. “Remember to bring that silver cutlery home with you!”

With that, she shut the door firmly behind Hanne, using all three locks.

Hanne had never grown accustomed to these streets. The wide spaces between the grand apartment blocks and forbidding villas cloaked in darkness created an atmosphere of angst, as if something dreadful were about to happen. Infrequent pedestrians crossed the road diagonally, with their eyes on the ground to avoid being drawn into any kind of intimacy with others. It was natural for Mary to choose to shut herself inside. After almost half a century under the influence of drugs and alcohol, isolation was probably a good idea. It was impossible to understand why all the other residents of this area seemed to make the same choice. Maybe they were perpetually absent. Maybe no one really lived here. The whole of Frogner is a stage set, Hanne thought.

She tugged her winter jacket more snugly around her frame.

It was pretty crowded outside the stone villa at Eckersbergs gate 5. Red-and-white police tape constrained a small group of curious spectators, but the interior of the cordoned area was swarming with uniformed colleagues. She recognized several of the journalists making friendly overtures to the youngest and most inexperienced police officers: shocked, immature, on edge, and easy to engage in conversation. The number of journalists swelled unbelievably fast, as if they all lived in the vicinity. At the sight of Hanne Wilhelmsen, they did no more than hoist their shoulders brashly to ward off the cold, conveying a greeting by lifting their heads ever so slightly.

“Hanne! Brilliant!”

Sergeant Silje Sørensen broke free from a group of eagerly gesticulating police personnel.

“My goodness,” Hanne said, sizing her up. “Uniform? This must be something to write home about.”

“Had an extra shift. But yes, this
is
something to write home about. Come on in!”

“I’ll wait for a bit. Billy T. will be here soon.”

She was dazzled by the temporary lighting that the police had already managed to rig up, making it difficult to gain a general impression of the apartment block. Hanne stepped back a few paces, using her hand to shield her eyes. It did not help much, until she walked all the way to the opposite side of the street.

“What are you looking for?” Silje Sørensen asked, following in her footsteps.

Silje always asked questions. Pestered. What are you looking for? What are you doing? What are you thinking? Like a child. A smart but slightly annoying child.

“Nothing. Just looking around.”

The apartment block was antique-rose in color, with broad cornices. Above each window was a statue of a man battling a hideous fabled creature. The front garden was tiny, but a broad paved footpath snaking around the western corner of the building might indicate a more impressive back yard concealed at the rear. The building seemed to contain only four apartments. The one on the top left-hand side was in darkness. Frugal lamplight shone from the ground and first floors on the right of the building, leaving little doubt about where the crime had taken place. Through three of the windows down on the left she could see figures in white overalls and hairnets moving to and fro, precise and apparently purposeful. Someone drew a curtain.

Suddenly Hanne was embraced from behind and lifted off her feet.

“Bloody hell,” Billy T. yelled. “You’ve put on weight!”

She kicked him on the shin with the heel of her boot.

“Ouch! You could just have said something.”

“I have done,” Hanne told him. “Don’t lift me every time you see me. I’ve said that a thousand times.”

“You just say that because you’re getting fatter and fatter,” he grinned, brushing her shoulders. “You never mentioned it before. Never. You used to like it.”

Snow was falling more thickly now, light, bone-dry flakes.

“I don’t think you’re any fatter,” Silje was quick to say, though Hanne was already halfway across the street.

“Let’s go inside,” she murmured, noticing how dread had made her feel queasy.

The eldest of the three murder victims bore a resemblance to the famous portrait of Albert Einstein. The corpse lay in the hallway with one hand tucked under his head as if he had made himself comfortable on the floor, his hair forming a voluminous garland around his crown, with a bushy mop in the middle. His tongue also dangled from his mouth, extended to a bizarre length, and his eyes were wide open.

“That guy looks as if he’s had a shock. An electric shock!”

Billy T. leaned inquisitively over the old man.

“If it hadn’t been for this here, eh?”

He used a pen to point to an entry wound just below his left eye. Not particularly large, it appeared black rather than blood-red.

“And this. And this.”

The doctor, obviously responsible for the cadaver’s shirt front being carefully folded to one side, waved Billy T. aside. Between the sparse gray chest hairs, Hanne could see two further wounds.

“How many shots are we actually dealing with?” she asked.

“Too early to say,” the physician answered tersely. “Quite a number. You ought to have had a pathologist here, if you ask me. It’s about time you had a workable rota system sorted out with the Forensics Institute. All I can say is that these people are dead. Pretty grotesque, in my opinion. That man over there’s the worst, I believe.”

Hanne Wilhelmsen did not want to look at “that man over there”. She had to steel herself to step around the old man and take a closer look at the body in the overcoat. An ill-tempered grunt sounded from one of the technicians, who could not bear having police investigators tramping around the crime scene.

Hanne ignored him. When she leaned over the corpse nearest to the front door and noticed how the exit wound in the skull had been licked clean of blood, her nausea increased. Swiftly straightening her back, she swallowed and pointed at the body of the third man, whose age she estimated at about forty.

“Preben,” Billy T. introduced him. “The elder son of the father, Hermann, over there. That much we know, at least.”

His arms were by his sides, as if the son of the family had stiffened into a military pose as he hit the floor. His pale-blue shirt showed two small bullet holes on the breast pocket and his shoulder was ripped open with dark, fleshy lacerations.

The doctor nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I haven’t managed to look at him more closely. The dog has gorged itself on … if we are talking about a dog, that is.”

“Come here!”

Billy T. waved her toward the kitchen at the end of the spacious, dark hallway. Dressed all in white, he looked odd, with green socks outside his shoes and a paper hairnet stretched tight on his head.

A woman’s body stood by the kitchen sink. She had no hair, but a wig lay on the floor beside her. The woman’s pale scalp was disfigured by scars. She wore an elegant pink dress and her eyes were wide open, with a piercing, almost reproachful look. A perplexed young police officer was making a feeble attempt to set her hair to rights before Billy T. stopped him.

“Are you crazy or what? Don’t touch! Hell and damnation, what are you doing here anyway? This place is overcrowded as it is.”

Irritated, he began to sort out those who were necessary from those who were not. Hanne stood calmly by, struggling to make sense of what she could see.

The woman was actually upright.

Her face was singularly sexless. That must be because of the lack of hair. When Hanne approached more closely, she saw that the woman’s eyebrows were also fake, painted on, a bit too high, too distinctive. Above her left eye the painted brow formed an arch toward the bridge of her nose that served to reinforce her skeptical expression. Her eyes were open. Pale-blue, small, and without lashes. On the other hand, her mouth was well formed, with full lips, and appeared younger than the rest of her face, as if it had recently been worked on by a plastic surgeon.

“Turid Stahlberg,” Billy T. said, having now halved the number of people present in the apartment, and the atmosphere was conspicuously quieter. “Her name’s Turid. Tutta, to the family.”

“Stahlberg,” Hanne said, slightly confused, as she surveyed the enormous kitchen. “Not
the
Stahlberg family?”

“Yep. Hermann, the father, is the eldest of the three you saw in the hallway. I’ve also introduced you to Preben. He is forty-two. What is actually keeping this lady on her feet?”

Billy T. leaned forward and tried to peer behind the upright woman. Her ample backside was resting on the kitchen worktop and her feet were planted on the floor, well spaced, as if she had found her sea legs when faced with the killer.

BOOK: Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel)
3.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Blue Voyage: A Novel by Conrad Aiken
Under Strange Suns by Ken Lizzi
Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Laura Meets Jeffrey by Jeffrey Michelson, Laura Bradley
Chicken Chicken by R. L. Stine
My Naughty Minette by Annabel Joseph