Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (31 page)

She fumbled to look at her watch between her gloves and the slightly-too-tight edge of her sleeve.

Ten past five. It was probably all over. Hermine, Mabelle, and Carl-Christian Stahlberg would all have been arrested and each installed in an interview room at police headquarters. It was unnecessary for Hanne to be present. If it all progressed as everyone seemed to believe, then they would spend a long time in custody. Weeks, probably, maybe the entire time until the main proceedings commenced, and the first interview was therefore nothing but window dressing anyway. They would be subjected to the anxiety of being exposed, hauled in, and locked up.

Then it would be her turn. It had been decided that she would interview Carl-Christian at nine o’clock the following morning. She crossed her fingers that there would not be a single lawyer in the city willing to spend ten hours at police headquarters in the middle of the Christmas holidays. Although, as things had developed among Oslo’s criminal law advocates, they might even be waiting in line. They seemed prepared to do almost anything for their fifteen seconds on TV. In this case, there might well be considerably more. The Stahlberg case could easily be their ticket to fame, if not exactly glory. Hanne found herself making a mental wish list: an overview of lawyers with integrity and willingness to cooperate in their client’s best interests. It was uncomfortably short.

Kruses gate was deserted.

Not one of the curtains stirred. No faces suddenly retreated. Hanne ought to enjoy this, she ought to feel at home among people who took care of their own business and were almost inaccessible to one another. To Hanne, Frogner was a district where people were reduced to names on door plates and where a tentative nod on the stairs was all you could expect of your neighbor. She ought to be predisposed to living in such a place.

Instead she was disturbed by the lack of curiosity. It robbed her of the possibility of assuming what others might think. They were to be found, of course, behind closed doors and drawn curtains, there were people here too – many in fact – but it would be impossible for her to serve them up half truths about themselves. It made her uneasy and tense when she travelled home, escalating as she neared her apartment and not diminishing until she could shut herself in behind the anonymous door with three meaningless surnames engraved on a brass plate below the doorbell.

She rounded the corner of her own apartment block. She was on the point of passing through the gate when she started so violently that she dropped the ring binder she had carried all the way home.

A dog brushed against her leg. It emerged from behind the low wall where a garbage-shed of stained timber had been built only a few weeks earlier.

The dog was gray and ugly, its neck too large in comparison with its narrow, squat hindquarters. One ear had been practically torn off. The street lamp highlighted a gash along its left flank. The animal was limping badly, but maintained a remarkable pace as it traversed the street and disappeared into a back yard a hundred meters farther along the street.

Hanne’s breathing was labored. Her body had received such a powerful rush of adrenalin that she felt warmth creep back into her frozen toes. She crouched down to retrieve her ring binder, taken aback by how afraid she had actually been. It was the silence of course; and besides, she had been completely lost in her own thoughts when the horrible beast had suddenly appeared. Her pulse was still pounding when a thought struck her: she straightened up slowly and neglected to pick up the ring binder.

She had heard about this dog. Nefis had attended the residents’ meeting some time in the autumn when a decision had been taken to build a special hut for the garbage bins, to keep rats and other animals out. Hanne remembered it now, clearly; she had laughed out loud at the belief of people in the west end that a simple shed could keep rats at bay. But Nefis had also mentioned a dog.

In truth it was a frightening creature, and Hanne lingered for a long time, deep in contemplation, without noticing how cold she had become.

She scared so easily these days, and that worried her.

Alexander slept the way teenagers do, almost spreadeagled across the bed, on his stomach, with his face resting on his right hand and his left arm dangling over the edge. The quilt covered only the middle of his body. In the dim light that sneaked into the room from the hallway, Hanne could just discern a single buttock. The boy was sleeping naked with his socks on. At one time they might have been white. Now the soles of his feet were finely outlined with dirt and dust, and the elastic was loose around his legs.

A cardboard box sat beside the bed, along with a duffel bag stuffed full of clothes. They had still not been opened.

“He doesn’t really believe all this,” Nefis whispered. “He’s doing nothing to settle in.”

“What did you expect?” Hanne said. “He’s only been here for twenty-four hours.”

“What was it like?” Nefis asked, still whispering, even though the boy was fast asleep.

“What do you mean?”

“To be thrown out.”

“I was never thrown out. I was frozen out. That’s even worse. Or …”

She would have to resist the urge to tuck the boy in more snugly. Actually they shouldn’t be here at all. He had closed the door when he went to bed. It crossed Hanne’s mind that Alexander was a big boy, entitled to privacy and being left to sleep in peace, undisturbed by two lopsided aunts he didn’t even know.

Slowly she approached the bed. She lifted the quilt carefully and replaced it the right way around, covering him and tucking the edges lightly under his feet. The dangling bare arm she left well alone.

“Like that,” she said quietly, nudging Nefis gently aside, before closing the door. “I must go to bed,” she said. “Tomorrow will be a long day.”

Nefis crept along after her to their own bedroom.

“Are you ever going to be able to take a proper holiday?” she asked, before answering her own question: “Never, of course.”

“I took a week off last summer.”

Hanne padded into the bathroom and began to brush her teeth.

“Five days,” Nefis corrected her.

“Are we going to argue now?”

“No. What was it like?”

“Wonderful. Unaccustomed. Strange.” Hanne smiled with her mouth full of toothpaste.

“I didn’t mean your days off,” Nefis said, stretching out on the unmade bed without taking off her clothes. “I meant being frozen out.”

“It’s too late, Nefis. I can’t go into that now. I survived.”

Nefis pulled a smile as she picked up the remote control from the bedside table. Hanne finished in the bathroom and, standing stark naked, opened out her arms.

“Aren’t you getting ready for bed?”

“Yes, of course. But first you can tell me something about what it was like.”

“No. I can’t face that just now.”

“Then I want a story.”

The video on the massive LCD screen on the wall a couple of meters from the foot of the bed flickered convulsively as Madonna cavorted mutely. Nefis took Hanne’s hand and drew her close.

“A story before we go to sleep!”

Sometimes Hanne had the idea that Nefis thought she was less talented. For a long time Hanne had realized that the short stories Nefis demanded, in exchange for acceptance of Hanne’s silence about the real things in life, were fragments she pieced together to form a complete picture of Hanne’s childhood.

“It won’t be a long one,” Hanne said.

“Not too short, either—”

Pulling her down on to the bed, Nefis rolled Hanne on to her back.

“No,” Hanne said with a smile; on the big screen, Madonna was dancing a Spanish flamenco to deaf ears.

“Yes!”

“I have to ask you something first.”

Nefis was almost on top of her now, a pleasant weight on her abdomen and mount of Venus.

“Wait,” Hanne said. “That dog …”

Nefis’s mouth tasted of olives and parsley.

“Wait,” Hanne said, trying to wriggle free, giggling and slapping the hands that stroked her thighs. “That mongrel you were talking about during autumn – when you decided to build that ridiculous garbage shed out there – what sort of animal was that?”

Nefis was right on top of her now, with all her clothes on, and entwined Hanne’s arms with her own. The buttons on her blouse scraped Hanne’s stomach. Nefis’s tongue was toying with her ear lobes.

“Listen to me, Nefis! That dog … I just want to know if it’s been here long. Does anyone own it?”

Nefis hauled herself up abruptly. Her hair hung like a dark curtain over her face. In the backlight from the TV screen, Hanne could scarcely distinguish her features.

“A dog, Hanne. A stray dog. Someone said it had been here for a long time, for years. It’s frightening, especially for children. Besides, it makes a mess of the garbage. Somebody said they were going to phone the health authors.”

“Health authorities,” Hanne said, laughing. “Fine. Are you going to get undressed?”

“I thought you could do that,” Nefis said, kissing her again.

Hanne unbuttoned her blouse.

She had escaped yet again. She had escaped telling about the time when she was five years old and wanted to sleep with the light switched on.

In her mind, the closet was full of blood-sucking bats and the only way to keep them shut inside was to leave the light shining all night long. When she woke to a dark house and clear, terrifying, rustling noises from the closet in the corner, she had hardly dared to lift her hand to switch on her bedside lamp. The bulb had been unscrewed and removed. The ceiling light had also been disabled. Her father got into the habit of casting her room in darkness at night time. A year later Hanne had declared at suppertime that bats lived in caves, churches, attics, and other dark, roomy places and naturally could not survive in a little closet full of clothes and shoes. Anyway, she now knew that vampire bats did not exist in Norway at all. Her father had nodded in satisfaction and stopped coming into her room at night.

Hanne had now stripped Nefis naked, her whole body, soft and firm and voluptuous.

THURSDAY
DECEMBER
26

T
he old lady in Blindernvei was alone again. Her son had left her early that morning as he had a flight to catch. He would be back on Monday for the funeral, but in the meantime had to return home. It was only fair. After all, he had a wife and child and a demanding job. His own life. Just as she would also have to carve one out for herself, now that Karl-Oskar was dead. One of us had to go first, as her husband always used to say. They had both sent up a silent prayer that it would be them. In the end it turned out that he was the one.

Terje had cleared things out for her. It would be more correct to say
with
her: they had slowly gone through drawers and cupboards. It had been so good, almost beautiful, to clear Karl-Oskar out of the house without him ever being truly gone.

Terje had left only the bedroom in peace. No one apart from her would go through Karl-Oskar’s most personal possessions.

His pajamas were still tucked, neatly folded, under the pillow. She sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and touched her cheek with the worn, soft fabric.

His clothes would go to the Salvation Army. They had decided on that together, several years ago, on one of those evenings when they had sat out on the terrace, each with a drink, watching the sunset over Tåsen. Material things should not be romanticized, Karl-Oskar felt, insisting that they should send all of it to people who needed it more than they did. Clothing and everything else that had no special significance for the surviving spouse should go. He had been almost brusque when he said that, as if he suddenly found it tasteless to discuss departure and death.

She was the surviving spouse.

Setting the pajamas down on the blanket, she stood up stiffly and walked over to the wardrobe. Halfway across the room, she stumbled across something.

Seeing that it was a folder, she picked it up.

The paramedics had been in here of course. They had genuinely tried to revive Karl-Oskar, that Thursday only a week ago. It felt longer. It was so difficult to remember. The folder must have been lying on the bedside table and must have fallen on the floor in the midst of all the commotion caused by their resuscitation efforts. She hadn’t been over on that side of the room since Friday morning, when that odd little clergywoman was due to arrive and Kristina had made her husband’s bed for the last time. She hadn’t noticed anything then. Perhaps that was not so strange, since she had hardly any recollection of tidying up.

The house was overflowing with flowers. Even now, in the midst of the festivities, friends and acquaintances, business connections and distant relatives had gone to the trouble of sending condolences. No one had left behind a folder. It was probably nothing important.

Kristina tried to remember which meeting Karl-Oskar had actually intended to attend on that fatal evening just prior to Christmas. She rubbed her hands together, rocking from side to side.

He might simply have omitted to mention it to her.

She would have remembered, of that she was certain.