Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (28 page)

“That’s what she claims,” Hanne said.

Annmari fixed her gaze somewhere on the wall.

“Naturally, we won’t exonerate Jennifer Calvin here and now, Hanne. In present circumstances, it looks as if her eldest son is the only one who really benefits greatly from this crime. On the other hand, the boy has lost his father, and in a brutal way. Which involves a not inconsiderable loss. Anyway, most of us would consider it to be so. Agreed?”

She shifted her gaze to Hanne and refused to drop eye contact. Hanne did not reply, did not nod, and did not blink.

“Besides,” Annmari continued, “besides, there’s nothing so far to indicate that Jennifer would want her husband dead. Silje and I have done a pretty thorough examination of the woman, and we agree that a woman in her position, with her sparse and very selective network, would hardly be able to plan or perform such an act. Okay? So far at least?”

Hanne shrugged nonchalantly.

“Then of course we have this matter of Carl-Christian’s familiarity with guns. He has a license for a high-caliber revolver, of course, and a dormant membership of a shooting club. In other words we can, with a fair degree of certainty, conclude that he knows how handguns are used.”

Annmari noticed the small signs now. One by one, her listeners leaned back in their chairs. No one any longer found it necessary to take notes; hardly anyone thought it worth the effort of browsing through the document summary she had drafted in the early-morning hours.

They agreed with her. There were far more than reasonable grounds for suspicion.

“And their alibis are quite simply ridiculous,” she rounded off. “Carl-Christian and Mabelle, as you all know, say they were at home. Alone. With no one to confirm that. When all is said and done …”

She struggled to smother a yawn. With tears in her eyes, she shook her head energetically in an effort to stay awake.

“I believe we have enough for an imprisonment on remand. So that we can also make further inroads in the investigation, among other things by being able to conduct a search. The question is whether we should try for both spouses, or only for Carl-Christian.”

“Both,” Silje and Erik said in chorus, and this was followed by nodding and affirmative comments around the table.

Only Hanne sat quite still, her eyes half closed, her face expressionless. Not even when the discussion ran on, informal and somewhat boisterous, did she make any comment. No one seemed to pay any attention to that, before Annmari suddenly blurted: “Do you know, Hanne, sometimes you’re a pain in the neck. What is it you’re sitting there ruminating about?
Must
you be so secretive? Do you reckon the rest of us are idiots, or do you have some other reason to look as if you’re sitting down there, perfectly aware of what happened in Eckersbergs gate last Thursday, but can’t be bothered sharing it with us?”

Hanne smiled feebly and shrugged yet again.

“No, of course not,” she said indifferently. “I don’t know what happened. None of us knows what happened there that night.”

“
But what is it then?
”

Annmari smacked the palms of her hands on the table. The Police Chief turned around abruptly to face her.

“Now then, let’s calm down,” he said. “I appreciate you’re exhausted, Prosecutor Skar. But that’s no reason to take that tone with your colleagues. We’ll get enough of that when these folks …”

He tapped the documents with his forefinger.

“… get their lawyers involved. Then there’ll be a real rumpus. We should save our energy for arguing with them, don’t you think?”

“No,” Annmari said harshly. “Now, for once, I want to speak up. Hanne Wilhelmsen – look at me. Look at me, I said!”

Hanne raised her head lethargically.

“Share it with us,” Annmari said. “Share your thoughts with us, Hanne!”

Her voice was no longer aggressive. Instead something desperate, almost sad, came over her entire being: she stood with her shoulders hunched and her head inclined.

“If Hanne Wilhelmsen doesn’t wish to participate in the discussion, I don’t see any reason to force her,” Jens Puntvold said. “Strictly speaking, we’re more concerned with following up this line of inquiry that you have presented, Skar.”

“I absolutely insist on hearing what Hanne thinks,” Annmari said. “Nothing other than that.”

Now almost whispering, she sat down unceremoniously.

Hanne scratched her cheek with her thumb for some time. It seemed as though she still had no intention of saying anything whatsoever. She sat leaning back in her seat, looking nonchalant, and began to move her head vigorously from side to side, as if more preoccupied with her stiff neck than with Annmari’s unexpected fit of temper.

“Hanne,” Håkon Sand said, sotto voce. “Maybe you ought to—”

He pressed his knee against hers and she tensed all of a sudden.

“I’m sorry if I seem reserved,” she said, staring at Annmari. “I don’t mean to be, really. I’m … concentrating in fact. And I’d have liked to share my thoughts with you, but they’re … more of a general character, and this is probably neither the time nor the place—”

“I think we should take your word for that,” Puntvold broke in. “Continue, Skar!”

“We’ll take our time,” the Chief of Police said. “If Skar wants to take your comments into consideration for the actions she is now contemplating, then she should hear them. Make a start, Wilhelmsen.”

Shrugging, Hanne snaked her way forward to the flip chart, where she took a fresh sheet and drew the letters from A to E.

“This is how we all think,” she said, pointing under the B with the marker pen. “That if B follows after A, C after B, and D after C, then we take it for granted that E is the next letter in the sequence. That’s elementary, banal logic, quite simply because, when presented with the letters A, B, C, and D, we assume that we’re looking at the beginning of the alphabet. It’s so probable that we could almost swear that E is what follows. Our entire system of justice is built up around such a mindset. And that’s all to the good.”

She replaced the lid on the marker pen and turned to face her audience. Erik sat with his mouth open and his eyes nailed firmly to the alphabet. Jens Puntvold doodled in annoyance on a paper cup and appeared demonstratively uninterested. The two youngest investigators sat taking notes, as if they were at a lecture on an examinable topic. Silje rotated her ring repeatedly.

“Every single day, people are sentenced to imprisonment on the basis of such conclusions. Since specific, precise, and incontrovertible proof is unfortunately in short supply in our business, then as a rule, courts have to come to a decision about guilt and innocence on the basis of circumstantial evidence. And I …”

She raised her voice to forestall Håkon’s interruption.

“… I’m not really criticizing that. That’s simply how it is, and we all have to live with it. Our system would come crashing down otherwise. That A and B and C and D come one after the other, by sheer chance, is totally unlikely. But I can’t help thinking a great deal about the fact that our prejudiced attitude toward the sequence, consequence, and connection of things can sometimes be abused. At the very least it’s
conceivable
.”

Again she turned to the flip chart, and wrote “ELL” in capital letters on a new sheet of paper.

“There’s a letter missing here,” she said, pointing. “An initial letter. Which one?”

“C,” they answered in unison.

“Sure?” Hanne asked: she sensed a certain enthusiasm in the others now. “Are you quite sure?”

“C for cell,” Erik said. “It’s obvious.”

“C,” several of them repeated.

“Are you all
absolutely
sure?”

Impatience spread as a slightly irked ripple through the room.

“Okay then,” Hanne said and completed the word. “It becomes ‘CELL’. But if I tell you that you have chosen C because you are all in the police force, what would you say then?”

“Where are you going with this, Hanne?”

Puntvold frowned and looked at his watch.

“I’m illustrating how mistaken we can be,” Hanne said tartly. “I’m trying, since you insisted we had time for this, to demonstrate how we interpret a set of given, but incomplete, information, according to who we are and where we believe we are heading with the information. The missing letter doesn’t have to be C. It could be B, H, or S, for instance.”

“ ‘BELL’, ‘HELL’, ‘SELL ’,” she wrote, underlining each three times. “If we had a teacher in the room, then it’s more likely he would have gone for ‘B’. A clergyman would most likely choose ‘H’. And a shopkeeper would almost certainly come up with ‘S’,” Hanne said. “For the simple reason that they would not relate to the word ‘cell’, but make daily use of ‘bell’, ‘hell’, or ‘sell’, depending on their line of work.”

Hanne tore the sheet off the flip chart. “The point I’m trying to make is …”

“That’s what I’m honestly wondering!”

Now it was the Superintendent’s turn to show irritation. “What on earth has this to do with the Stahlberg case? With all due respect to both you and the Chief, I’d like to remind you that we’re sitting here on double overtime on Christmas Day and surely have more important things to do than learn new guessing games!”

“It’s all the same to me,” Hanne said. “By all means. I really wasn’t the one who insisted on this. Really, I’d prefer to be eating Christmas breakfast at home right now, so …”

She put down the marker pens and tried to make her way past Silje, who had tipped her chair against the wall behind her.

“No,” Annmari said so loudly that Hanne stopped in her tracks. “I’m the one, at the end of the day, who’s going into court to petition for imprisonment on remand. I find Hanne’s explanations interesting. I want to hear more. You can just leave, if you think this is a waste of time. Go on, Hanne. Please.”

The Superintendent seemed caught completely off guard and distractedly lifted his coffee cup to his mouth without drinking, before returning it to the table.

“She’s pulling rank,” Erik whispered in Silje’s ear. “My God!”

The situation was practically unheard of. Even though Annmari was a police lawyer and therefore, from a prosecution point of view, senior to the Superintendent, it had been years since any of the lawyers at police headquarters had taken such a tone with experienced and highly placed officers. The silence in the room became unbearable. Even Puntvold, the self-confident Head of CID, seemed bewildered: he opened his mouth a couple of times without finding anything to say.

“I’m merely attempting,” Hanne began at last, trying not to look in the direction of the Superintendent, “to show how our interpretations are guided by our expectations and experiences. The more comprehensive and complete a picture, situation, or case is, the easier it becomes to draw definite conclusions about what is missing. Here …”

She retrieved the torn-off sheet of paper from the floor and held it up.

“… the word fragment I gave you was as good as complete. No one here was in any doubt about what was missing. But you were nevertheless wrong. Or more correctly: you
could
have been wrong. No one can know for certain whether I was thinking of ‘CELL’, ‘BELL’, ‘HELL’, or ‘SELL’.”

Even Håkon seemed alert now: he had put on his glasses at last and his eyes appeared clearer, more focused.

“No matter how long the chain of circumstantial evidence in a case may be,” Hanne went on. “Not to mention the motives being ever so convincing, ever so solid, so …”

The Superintendent sat like a pillar of salt. Hectic red blotches were obvious on his cheeks. He was at a loss as to what he should do with his hands. In the end he clasped them firmly. Hanne could see that his knuckles were white.

“If the three deceased Stahlbergs are A, B, and C, then Knut Sidensvans is an alien X,” she continued. “He doesn’t fit in. My worry is that we are pushing him aside like a stray letter of the alphabet, instead of asking ourselves: what was the man doing there? Is there an explanation for his presence? Might it be the other three who are accidentally on the scene, and the X that gives this case meaning? It seems illogical, of course. It’s so much easier to search for cause, connection, and meaning where it hits us between the eyes – namely in a family so dysfunctional that it resembles the one I … My point is that …”

Hanne was speaking to Annmari now, and to her alone. The Police Prosecutor sat with her arms crossed, and nothing could be read from the blank expression beneath her graying fringe. But she was following Hanne’s argument. At the end of the day it was Annmari who would decide which direction this investigation would take. Not Hanne herself, not the Superintendent, not the Head of CID, or the Chief of Police. Not even the Public Prosecutor. Annmari Skar was the lawyer with responsibility for the case, and from the very first moment she had taken unusually forceful control. It seemed that she had hardly gone home for the past week, and no one was in any doubt that Annmari was the only person at headquarters with anything like a comprehensive overview of the entire, enormous set of case documents that the Stahlberg inquiry now comprised.

“Where are you actually heading with this, Hanne?”