Burned (4 page)

Chapter 5

Heading back to his desk, Henning expects the worst. Heidi Kjus appears not to have noticed him, and yet she twirls around on her chair to face him the instant he gets there. She stands up, smiles her brightest Colgate smile and holds out her hand.

‘Hi, Henning.’

Business. Courtesy. False smiles. He decides to play along. He shakes her hand.

‘Hi, Heidi.’

‘Good to have you back.’

‘It’s good to be back.’

‘That’s – eh, that’s good.’

Henning studies her. As always, her eyes radiate earnestness. She is ambitious for herself and for others. He prepares for the speech she has undoubtedly rehearsed:

Henning, you were my boss once. Times have changed. I’m your boss now. And I expect that you blahblahblah.

He is taken aback when it fails to materialise. Instead she surprises him for the second time.

‘I was sorry to hear about – to hear about what happened. I just want to say that if there’s anything you need, if you need more time off, just let me know. Okay?’

Her voice is warm like a rock face on a sunny afternoon. He thanks her for her concern, but for the first time in a long time, he feels an urge to get stuck in.

‘So Iver is going to the press conference?’ he says.

‘Yes, he worked late last night, so he’ll be going straight there.’

‘Who’s Iver?’

Heidi looks at him as if he has just suggested that the earth really is flat.

‘Is this a joke?’

He shakes his head.

‘Iver Gundersen? You don’t know who Iver Gundersen is?’

‘No.’

Heidi suppresses the urge to laugh out loud. She controls herself as if she has just realised that she is talking to a child.

‘We hired Iver from
VG Nett
last summer.’

‘Aha?’

‘He delivered big stories for them and he has continued to do that here. I know that TV2 are desperate to get him, but so far Iver has been loyal to us.’

‘I see. So you pay him well.’

Heidi looks at him as if he has sworn in church.

‘Eh, that’s not my area, but –’

Henning nods and pretends to listen to the arguments which follow. He has heard them before. Loyalty. A concept that has worn thin in journalism. If he were being charitable, he might be able to name two reporters he would describe as loyal. The rest are careerists, ready to jump ship every time a fatter pay package is offered, or they are so useless that they couldn’t get a job anywhere else. When a relatively undistinguished
VG Nett
reporter is poached by a rival on-line publication, and later declines an offer from TV2, it’s bound to be about the money. It’s always about the money.

He registers Heidi expressing the hope that he and Iver will get along. Henning nods and says ‘mm’. He is good at saying ‘mm’.

‘You’ll get to meet each other at the press conference and then you can decide who will be doing what on this story. It’s a frenzied murder.’

‘What happened?’

‘My source tells me the victim was found inside a tent, half buried and stoned to death. I imagine the police have all sorts of theories. It’s obvious to consider foreign cultures.’

Henning nods, but he doesn’t like obvious thoughts.

‘Keep me informed about what you do, please?’ she says. He nods again and looks at the notebook on his desk, still in its wrapper. Brusquely, he rips off the wrapper and tries one of the four pens lying next to it. It doesn’t work. He tries the other three.

Damn.

Chapter 6

It’s not far from Urtegata to Grønland police station, where the press conference is being held. Henning takes his time and strolls through an area which Sture Skipsrud, his editor-in-chief, described as ‘a press Mecca’ when
123news
relocated here. Henning thought it was very apt.
Nettavisen
is there,
Dagens Næringsliv
has an ultra-modern office block close by and Mecca features in most flats in the neighbourhood. If you ignore the tarmac and the temperature, you might just as well be in Mogadishu. The aroma of different spices greets him at every corner.

Henning is reminded of the last time he was heading the same way. A man he had interviewed decided to kill himself a few hours later, and both the police and the man’s relatives wanted to know if Henning had said something or had opened old wounds which might have pushed the man over the edge.

Henning remembers him well. Paul Erik Holmen, forty-something. Two million kroner mysteriously went missing from a company Holmen was working for and Henning had more than suggested that the extravagant vacation Holmen had just taken, combined with the renovation of the family’s holiday cabin in Eggedal, might explain the whereabouts of the missing money. His sources were reliable, obviously. Holmen’s guilty conscience and the fear of being locked up got too much for him and consequently Henning found himself in one of the many interview rooms at the police station.

They soon released him, but a couple of jealous reporters thought it was worth a paragraph or two. Fair enough, Henning could appreciate it was newsworthy to some extent even though Holmen would probably have topped himself anyway, but stories like that can be hard to shake off.

Human memory is selective, at best, and plain wrong at worst. When suspicions are raised or planted, it doesn’t take much for speculation to turn into fact and suspicion into a verdict. He has covered many murders where a suspect is brought in for questioning (i.e., arrested), usually from the victim’s close family (i.e., the husband), and all the evidence points to him. Later, the police find the real killer. In the meantime, the media circus has done its utmost to drag up anything in the husband’s past which might cast aspersions on his character. Trial by media.

In the short term, truth is a good friend, but the doubt never goes away. Not among people you don’t know. People remember what they want to remember. Henning suspects someone out there hasn’t forgotten his role in Paul Erik Holmen’s last act, but it doesn’t bother him. He has no problem living with what he did, even though the police gave him a bollocking for trying to do their job.

He is used to that.

Or, at least, he was.

Chapter 7

It feels odd to be back inside the grey building at number 44 Grønlandsleiret again. Once upon a time the police station was practically his second home; even the cleaners used to greet him. Now he tries to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, but is hampered by the burn scars on his face. He is aware that the other reporters are looking at him, but he ignores them. His plan is just to attend, listen to what the police have to say and then go back to the office to write – if, indeed, there is anything to write about.

He freezes the moment he enters the foyer. Nothing could have prepared him for the sight of the woman leaning towards a man who shows every sign of being a reporter. Dark corduroy jacket, suitably arrogant presence, the ‘did-everyone-see-the-scoop-I-pulled-off-yesterday’ expression. He sports designer stubble which makes his face look more sallow than it is. His thinning hair is gelled and swept back. But it’s the woman. Henning had never imagined he would see her, here, on his first day back.

Nora Klemetsen. Henning’s ex-wife. Jonas’s mother.

He hasn’t spoken to her since she visited him at Sunnaas Rehabilitation Centre. He forgets when it was. Perhaps he has suppressed it. But he’ll never forget her face. She couldn’t bear to look at him. He didn’t blame her. She had every right. He had been looking after Jonas, and he had failed to save him.

Their son.

Their lovely, lovely son.

They had already separated at that point. She only visited him at the hospital to finalise the divorce, to get his signature. She got it. No ulterior motives, no questions, no conditions. In a way, he was relieved. He couldn’t have coped with her in his life – a constant reminder of his own shortcomings. Every glance, every conversation would have been tarred with that brush.

They hadn’t said much to each other. He was desperate to tell her everything, tell her what he had done or failed to do, what he remembered of that night, but every time he breathed in and got ready to speak, his mouth dried up and he couldn’t utter a single word. Later, when he closed his eyes and daydreamed, he talked like a machine gun; Nora nodded, she understood, and afterwards she came to him and let him cry himself out in her lap while she ran her fingers through his hair.

He has been thinking he should try again, the next time he saw her, but now is clearly not the time. He is working. She is working. She is standing very close to some reporter – and she is laughing.

Bollocks.

Henning met Nora Klemetsen while he worked for
Kapital
and she was a rookie business journalist on
Aftenposten
. They ran into each other at a press conference. It was a run of the mill event, no drama, merely the announcement of some company’s annual results with so little headline-grabbing potential that they only warranted a paragraph in
Dagens Næringsliv
and a right-hand column on page 17 in
Finansavisen
the next day. He happened to sit down next to Nora. He was there to profile one of the senior executives who would be retiring shortly. They yawned their way through the presentation, started giggling at their respective and increasingly hopeless attempts at disguising their boredom, and decided to go for a drink afterwards to recover.

They were both in relationships; she was living – semi-seriously – with a stockbroker, while he had an on-off thing going with a stuck-up corporate lawyer. But that first evening was so enjoyable, so free from awkwardness that they went for another drink the next time they found themselves covering the same story. He had had many girlfriends, but he had never known someone who was so easy to be with. Their tastes were compatible in so many ways, it bordered on scary.

They both liked grainy mustard with their sausages, not the usual bottled Idun rubbish. Neither of them liked tomatoes all that much, but they both loved ketchup. They liked the same type of films, and never had protracted arguments in the video store or outside the cinema. Neither of them liked spending the summer in hot foreign places when Norway offered rock faces and fresh prawns. Friday was Taco day. Eating anything else on a Friday was simply unthinkable.

And, gradually, they both realised they couldn’t live without each other.

Three and half years later they were married, exactly nine months afterwards Jonas arrived and they were as happy as two sleep-deprived career people in their late twenties can be, when their life is a plank full of splinters. Not enough sleep, too few breaks, minimum understanding of each other’s needs – both at home and at work – more and more rows, less and less time and energy to be together. In the end, neither of them could take any more.

Parents. The best and the worst human beings can become.

And now her arm is entwined with another man’s. Unprofessional, he thinks, flirting at a press conference. And Nora spots him halfway through a fit of laughter. She stops immediately, as though something is stuck in her throat. They look at each other for what seems like forever.

He blinks first. Vidar Larsen, who works for NTB, touches his shoulder and says ‘hi, so you’re back, Henning?’ He nods and decides to follow Vidar; he says nothing, but he makes sure he get as far away from Nora as he can, looking no one in the eye, following feet and footsteps through doors he could find blindfolded. He takes a seat at the back of the press room where he can watch the back of other people’s heads rather than vice versa. The room fills up quickly. He sees Nora and Corduroy enter together. They sit next to each other, quite a long way forward.

So, Nora, we meet again.

And, once again, we meet at a press conference.

Chapter 8

Three uniformed officers enter, two men and a woman. Henning instantly recognises the two men: Chief Inspector Arild Gjerstad and Detective Inspector Bjarne Brogeland.

Bjarne and Henning went to school together in Kløfta. They were never best friends, even though they were in the same year. That might have been enough to start a friendship back then. But it takes more. Chemistry and compatibility, for example.

Later, Henning also discovered that Bjarne was a Romeo whose ambition was to sleep with as many girls as possible, and when he started turning up at the Juuls’, it wasn’t hard to decipher Bjarne’s true intentions. Luckily, Henning’s sister, Trine, was on to him and Henning avoided having to play the part of Protective Older Brother, but his loathing of Bjarne stayed with him throughout their adolescence.

And now Bjarne is a policeman.

*

Not that this is news to Henning. Both of them applied to the police academy in the 1990s. Bjarne was accepted. Henning wasn’t. He was rejected long before the admission process even started, because he suffered from every allergy known to man, and had had asthma as a child. Bjarne, however, was the physically robust type. Twenty-twenty vision and great stamina. He had been an athlete when he was younger, and performed quite well in heptathlons. Henning seems to recall that Bjarne pole-vaulted over 4.50 metres.

What Henning didn’t know was that Bjarne had started working in the Violent and Sexual Crimes Unit. He thought Bjarne was a plain-clothes officer, but everyone needs a change now and again. Now he is up there on the platform, gazing across the assembly. His face is grave, professional, and he looks imposing in the tight-fitting uniform. Henning reckons he can still pull. Short, dark hair, hint of grey above the ears, cleft chin, white teeth. Tanned and clean-shaven.

Vain Bjarne, Henning thinks.

And a potential source.

The other man, Chief Inspector Gjerstad, is tall and slim. He has a neatly trimmed moustache which he strokes repeatedly. Gjerstad was with the murder squad when Henning started covering crime, and he seems to have stayed there. Gjerstad despises reporters who think they are smarter than the police and, to be fair, Henning thinks, I’m probably one of them.