Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (4 page)

Grabbing her bag, she fumbled for the keys and let herself in.

“Fuck!” she said through gritted teeth.

She ignored the elevator and slowly took the stairs.

FRIDAY
DECEMBER
20

A
s usual, the silence woke her at the crack of dawn. She had always slept lightly in the mornings, and without the familiar friendly clamor of the east end and the soothing sound of heavy traffic through Tøyen, she no longer felt the need for an alarm clock. Not even to be on the safe side. Even though only two hours had elapsed since she had dropped off, she knew how futile it was to turn over and try to prolong the night. An open window would have helped, of course. Fresh air and noise would have kept Hanne asleep for another hour or two. Clammy with perspiration, she pulled the quilt aside and got up. Nefis muttered in her sleep, with half her body visible under her thin blanket. The dark-blue oriental pattern made her skin appear paler than it was. She looked childlike as she lay there, mouth open and arms above her head. A sliver of saliva had left the outline of a stain on the pillow. The room temperature was more than twenty degrees Celsius. Hanne felt terribly thirsty.

The copy of
Aftenposten
had already been delivered. The aroma of fresh coffee hit her as she entered the kitchen and closed the door quietly behind her. As usual, Mary had programmed the machine for half past five. The entire kitchen was filled with absurd aids, all with timers and precision controls for every conceivable and inconceivable requirement. Nefis wanted it like that, and Nefis could afford it. Nefis had money for anything and everything. Nefis was building her first real home at the age of thirty-eight and delighted in filling it with unnecessary gadgets that Mary used with enthusiasm and surprising proficiency, despite the old woman being hardly able to spell her way through an instruction leaflet.

Hanne filled a mug with coffee and poured in some milk, before drinking half a liter of juice straight from the carton. She did not feel hungry. To her amazement, her cigarette craving was always acute in the mornings. When she had finally managed to quit about a year ago, she had been most afraid of the evenings. Of alcohol. Of socializing with other people. The stress of her job, perhaps. All the same, it was the mornings that had proved to be the test. She felt the gravitation toward the cabinet above the cooker, where Mary’s stash of rolling tobacco was kept, bought by Nefis on a monthly basis and painstakingly sealed in plastic containers by their housekeeper, who adhered scrupulously to Nefis’s instruction to restrict her smoking to her own small section of the apartment.

The coverage in
Aftenposten
was extravagant. Virtually the entire first page was dedicated to the murders in Eckersbergs gate. A composite image was splashed over six columns: the façade of the apartment block formed the backdrop to three personal photographs of the mother, father, and eldest son in the Stahlberg family. The photo of Hermann Stahlberg had obviously been snapped on board a boat; he stood smartly at the rail, dressed in a blazer with gold buttons and the shipping-company emblem on its breast pocket. He gave a faint smile, with his chin thrust forward as he stared past the photographer. His wife’s smile was broader, in a photo taken indoors. She was cutting into a cream cake decorated with more candles than Hanne could be bothered to count; the flash was reflected in her glasses, making the woman look hysterical. The image of Preben was indistinct, though he seemed far younger than his forty-plus years. His hair was mid-length and he wore an open-necked shirt. It must have been taken years ago.

Where did the journalists get them? Hanne wondered, struggling to drown her cigarette craving with coffee. Only two or three hours after the murders, and they’ve already acquired some personal photographs. How do they do it? What questions do they ask, when they contact friends and family, before the blood has even congealed at the crime scene? Who hands over such things?

“My dear Hanna,” Nefis said softly.

Startled, Hanne whipped her head round. Nefis, stark naked, held out her arms.

“You always jump! What am I to do? Do I have to wear a gong around my neck?”

“Bell,” Hanne corrected her. “A gong is huge. Like in an Indian temple and suchlike. You need to get yourself a bell. Hello, by the way.”

They kissed tenderly. The scent of night still clung to Nefis, and goosebumps formed on her skin as Hanne caressed her back.

“Don’t walk about like that, though. Mary might come in.”

“Mary never comes out of her quarters before eight,” Nefis said, but nevertheless plucked an enormous woolen sweater from a chair back and drew it over her head. “Like so? Am I … respectable enough now?”

Nefis had grappled with a new language with the same enthusiasm that she embraced most aspects of Norwegian life. Although she still refrained from pork and insisted on an unbearably hot bedroom, she had begun to knit with great fascination, become tolerably good at skiing, and in addition displayed an incomprehensible interest in Oslo trams. She wrote angry letters to the editor complaining about the Tramway Company’s constant reductions in public-transport facilities. When Hanne occasionally reminisced about their first meeting, in a piazza in Verona in 1999, it was a completely different woman she pictured, an almost unreal memory. The Nefis of that time was a deep secret, harboring an impenetrable passion. When she encountered Norway, it was as if she were rushing headlong, as if she were desperate to catch up with something she wasn’t clear about, something that had never belonged to her at the time when she, despite her impressive academic career, had first and foremost been the beloved daughter in an enormously wealthy Turkish family.

Nefis could use words such as “respectability” and “paradigm-shift”. However, she had never learned to pronounce the name of her live-in partner.

“Hanna,” she said ecstatically, twirling around in a sweater that reached to her knees. “It scratches! Come on, let’s go back to bed.”

Shaking her head, Hanne drained her cup and refilled it.

“Is this your case?” Nefis nodded at the newspaper.

“Yes.”

“We heard it on the news last night. Mary and I. Hoooorrrible!” She drew out the “o” so much that Hanne simply had to smile.

“Go back to bed. I’m heading straight for work, once I’ve had a shower.”

Instead, Nefis pulled a chair over to the table and sat down.

“Tell me,” she said. “Some sort of famous family? I got that impression from the radio.”

“Famous …”

Hanne lingered on the word.

“Not exactly. But well known to people who read pink newspapers.”

“Pink newspapers,” Nefis repeated doubtfully, before the penny dropped. “Business papers!”

“Yes. I’m not really up to speed yet. But the family – that is to say, the father, I think …”

She pointed at Hermann Stahlberg.

“… owned a medium-sized shipping company. Not such a huge concern, but pretty lucrative all the same. He’d been smart enough to duck in and out of various tonnages just in advance of cyclical fluctuations. But I don’t think he’s ever been particularly well known. Not outside the trade, anyway. I hadn’t heard of either him or his shipping company until they began to quarrel. The family, that is. That must have been …”

She pondered.

“… two years ago? One year? Difficult to say. I don’t know the details. Not at all. I expect I’ll know a great deal more before this day is out, though. But if my recollection’s not entirely mistaken, then it had something to do with one son being preferred over the other.”

“That’s an old story, isn’t it?”

“Is this where you’re sitting, then?”

Mary shuffled over to the coffee machine. Her pink terry-toweling dressing gown was puffed up around her chest and gathered at the waist with a silk cord from an old-fashioned curtain. The pompoms slapped against her skinny thighs with every halting step she took. She looked like a party balloon.

“Mary, for heaven’s sake,” Nefis said, laughing. “It’s far too early for you!”

“Are you aware of all the things I have to do before Christmas Eve, eh?”

Gruffly she began to count on her scrawny fingers.

“One: we’re still short of two kinds of Christmas baking,
fattigmann
cookies and
jødekake
cakes. Two: the decorations from last year have to be vacuumed and maybe even repaired. There was a pretty wild party here on New Year’s Eve, if I remember rightly. Also, I’ve a lot of new things to try out. Three: I have to—”

“I’m off anyway,” Hanne said, getting to her feet.

“I thought so! And when are you coming back, may I ask, Your Ladyship?”

“I’ll phone,” Hanne said airily, heading for the living room.

“Hanne,” Mary said, grabbing her by the arm. “Does that mean …”

She curled her index finger toward the open newspaper.

“Does that mean we can dream on about that Christmas holiday of yours?”

Hanne smiled feebly, but did not answer.

“Honestly, Hanna.”

Nefis rose to stand by Mary’s side, forming a wall of familiar complaint and vexatious unanimity.

“I’ll phone,” Hanne said obstinately, before leaving the room.

When she clambered into her car twenty minutes later, she was still aware of the vague taste of sleep on her tongue from Nefis’s mouth.

What she wanted most of all was to take sick leave. Maybe that was what she should do. Unequivocally. She would endure this day and all it offered, and then come to a decision later. In the late afternoon, perhaps.

Or over the weekend.

In an apartment in Blindernveien, an old woman sat in floods of tears. A cleric was seated beside her on the overstuffed settee, trying to provide consolation.

“Your son will be here soon,” said the pastor, a woman who had not yet reached the age of thirty. “His plane has already landed.”

There was not much more to say.

“There, there,” she said helplessly, stroking the old woman’s hand. “There, there.”

“At least he died happy,” the widow said all of a sudden.

The pastor straightened her back, feeling relieved.

“He died in my arms,” the old woman said, her grimace changing to a smile.

The pastor stared into her tear-stained face, partly shocked, but mostly embarrassed, and said, “A cup of coffee, maybe? Your son will be here shortly.”

“I can’t talk about this with him! That would be far too awkward. For both of us. It’s none of my son’s business that his father and I still enjoyed the physical side of our marriage. For heaven’s sake! What’s today’s date?”

The pastor quickly racked her brains, but this time did not dare express any sense of relief: “The twentieth. Yes. December the twentieth. Soon be Christmas Eve.”

She could have bitten off her tongue. The widow burst into tears again.

“My first Christmas without Karl-Oskar. The first one after so many …”

The rest disappeared in violent sobs. It crossed the pastor’s mind that she would just have to let her cry. And her son had better get here soon!

“We usually go to Duvamåla,” the widow eventually said. “Yes, that’s our house in the country, you see. Since I’m called Kristina and my husband Karl-Oskar, we thought it would be fun to call it that.”

Duvamåla.

Obviously unfamiliar with the Wilhelm Moberg series,
The Emigrants
, the pastor did not understand any of it, but she seized on the subject eagerly.

“Our summer cottage is called Fredly,” she stammered.

“Why is that?” the old woman asked.

“Well …”

“At least he died happy,” the widow brusquely repeated.

Exuding a scent of light summer perfume, she was remarkably well groomed for someone widowed scarcely twelve hours earlier. The pastor began to notice a whiff of her own stress and clutched her arms to her body to conceal the rings of perspiration.

“Is it too hot in here?” Kristina Wetterland asked. “Perhaps you could open the balcony door? When will my son’s plane land?”

“He landed a while ago,” the pastor said, feeling quite distraught now. “As I said some time ago, he should have landed—”

“You
are
a pastor, aren’t you?”

A slight edge had crept into her voice now. She was more composed.

“Yes. Temporary post.”

“You’re young. You’ve a lot to learn.”

“Yes,” the pastor agreed.

Kristina Wetterland, widow of Supreme Court Advocate Karl-Oskar Wetterland, blew her nose energetically into a clean, freshly ironed handkerchief. Then she folded it neatly, pushed it up the sleeve of her cardigan and took a deep breath.

They heard keys rattling somewhere in the distance and someone enter the apartment. A moment or two later, a mature man stood in the living-room doorway. Tall and well dressed, he appeared extremely flustered.

“Mum,” he exclaimed. “My dear Mum! How are you?”