Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (31 page)

Maren Kalsvik still did not move a muscle. It seemed as if she was not even breathing.

“None of the surfaces in that entire room had been wiped. There were marks and dust and scraps of dirt everywhere. No sign that anyone had taken the time to clean up. The person who killed Agnes and took the knives did not need to bother about anything other than them. The person concerned belonged to the Spring Sunshine Foster Home. The fingerprints belonged in Agnes’s office. Except for on the knives, for no one could have claimed to have touched them.”

The chief inspector crossed over to the door again, pantomiming her role as a murder suspect.

“Perhaps I hear someone coming. Perhaps I’m simply terribly afraid. In any case, I have a difficult time getting away. The simplest thing is to take the knives with me. That’s what you did. And then you chose to disappear down the fire escape. The lucky thing was . . .”

Hanne laughed out loud.

“Quite resourceful of you to haul it up again when you came back. Before the police arrived. Caused us a good deal of trouble, that did. Well.”

She walked slowly back to the chair behind the desk, and
as she passed the suspect, she let her hand slide lightly over her back.

“Like that,” she said emphatically and with a demonstratively satisfied smile as she returned to her seat again. “That’s the way it happened. Approximately, at least. Isn’t that so?”

Some of the blueness had returned to Maren Kalsvik’s eyes. She raised her hand and stared at it as though incredulous that it could still be lifted. Then she ran her fingers through her hair and stared Hanne Wilhelmsen directly in the eye.

“How have you thought to prove all that?”

Where the hell was Billy T.?

 • • • 

Billy T.’s little boys had fallen asleep long ago, after a great deal of fuss and three chapters of
Mio, My Son.
His sister smilingly chased him away before settling down with a pizza and beer and the remote control.

Instead of traveling directly to Grønlandsleiret 44, he called in at Spring Sunshine Foster Home. The receptionist at the police station had delivered a message from Cathrine Ruge just before he had left to collect the youngsters, informing him she could be contacted at the foster home all afternoon. Since the home was not very far out of his way, he thought he might as well drop in.

It was quiet and peaceful in the dayroom. Raymond, Anita, and Glenn were out, and Jeanette was staying the night with a classmate. The twins were sitting watching TV, while Kenneth and Cathrine were assembling a jigsaw on the huge worktable. Kenneth was excited and restless and Cathrine was having difficulty persuading him to sit still.

Billy T. joined them on the puzzle for a few minutes and then had to wait for three-quarters of an hour for Kenneth to fall asleep. Cathrine groaned as she descended the stairs again.

“That boy’s having a dreadful time just now,” she said. “God
only knows how Christian managed to keep them all inside until Olav’s . . . until Olav was taken away.”

She was unbelievably skinny. Her head was a spectral skull glazed with nothing but skin. Her eyes became enormous in her tiny, narrow face, and Billy T. could discern a kind of beauty if it hadn’t been for the woman not being endowed with a single scrap of fat.

“I really haven’t a clue whether it has any significance,” she said half apologetically as she removed two sheets of paper from a folder she had brought down from the first floor. “But on the day Agnes was killed . . .”

Billy T. turned the two sheets to face him.

“I was up there with her. Immediately after Terje had been there. Maren had been there too, but only for a couple of minutes. We talked about a whole lot of things to do with work. Perhaps it took about half an hour or so. A bit about Olav, a bit about Kenneth. Yes, we’re struggling with Kenneth, you see. He’s been placed with three different families, poor thing. His mother—”

“Okay, okay,” Billy T. interjected, waving her one. “Get to the point!”

“I wasn’t really meaning to be nosy, you know. But there was a diploma lying on her desk. From Diakonhjemmet. I recognized it, of course, because I got my qualifications there myself . . . But after a while Agnes lifted the paper and stuffed it quickly into the drawer. It was exactly as if it had suddenly dawned on her that it was lying there, and she didn’t want me to see it. I noticed it was Maren’s before she put it away. It was actually quite bizarre, you see, that it was lying there and that Agnes seemed so abrupt and so on. What’s on it is not exactly a secret, of course. There aren’t any marks or anything like that, it only says ‘pass.’ But I didn’t think much of it. In fact I had completely forgotten about it. But there was something that . . . something that struck me and that I didn’t recall until today . . .”

Cathrine rose to her feet and stood behind Billy T. She leaned over him and pointed at the certificates.

“Do you see that they are different?”

They were indeed. At the top of one it stated
DIAKONHJEMMET SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
in broad capital letters. Underneath was printed “Diploma of Social Work Examination.” Whereas the other one had a symbol at the top, a circle with a thick line forming the upper half and the lower formed by the word “Diakonhjemmet.” In the center of the circle stood a kind of cross, reminiscent of a Nazi Iron Cross.

“Horrible, that Nazi cross,” Cathrine preempted him. “And as you see, they changed the heading to ‘Diploma of Social Work Education,’ not ‘Examination.’ The first one is from 1990; it belongs to a friend of mine. The other one is from 1991. It’s mine.”

A bony forefinger directed his attention to the date near the foot of each page.

“And what’s terribly odd, you see,” Cathrine continued once she had returned to her own seat. “It’s that Maren’s diploma had that iron cross at the top! But she has always claimed she took the exam in 1990 . . . I asked Eirik about it to be sure, earlier today. He was in the year before her, and he graduated in 1989. I just
can’t
understand it, really . . .”

Now she was staring at her hands, folded on the tabletop.

“It’s not my intention to make difficulties for anybody, but it is quite strange, isn’t it?”

Billy T. did not utter a word but nodded faintly. Without taking his eyes from the two diplomas, he asked, “Did you see Maren when she left Agnes’s office? Or later that day?”

The spectral skull was deep in thought.

“Yes, I met her as she was coming downstairs. She told me it was my turn.”

“How did she seem?”

“She was quite grumpy, and I remember thinking she had probably had an argument with Agnes again. They were good friends, really, I didn’t mean it like that, but they disagreed fairly often. About things to do with the children, you see. Agnes was stricter, more old-fashioned, in a way. Last year Maren wanted to take the children abroad on holiday, but—”

“Cathrine!”

A desperate, feeble voice was calling from the top of the staircase. Billy T. did not get to hear what happened about Maren’s plans for a foreign holiday, because Cathrine Ruge stood up and dashed off upstairs. It was twenty minutes before she reappeared.

So Agnes
had
confronted Maren with her deception. It couldn’t have been accidental that her diploma was lying out. If this lanky skeleton had told them what she knew at her first interview . . . It had damn well been the
day
after the murder! The day after! Who knows, Terje Welby’s life might have been spared. Maybe even Olav’s too. Billy T. fought his rising rage. Then the scrawny skeleton reappeared.

“He’s having a dreadful time, you know. Kenneth, I mean. Now he’s got it into his head that there’s a pirate living in the basement. Every night this imaginary pirate comes upstairs to eat all the children. My God . . .”

Her voice was shrill, and the only reason Billy T. did not interrupt her was he was so furious he simply had to keep his mouth shut.

Cathrine continued. “This evening he came home with four big knives, to add to the mess. Anita had taken him over to the playground to divert him when things were at their worst here. He had found them among some stones and insisted it was the pirate who had stashed them there so he could cut the children up. God Almighty. He’s just having a terrible time.”

Billy T. fleetingly shook his head, and his anger disappeared.

“Knives? Had he found some knives?”

“Yes, four horrible, huge knives. I threw them away.”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“Where did you throw the knives?”

“In the garbage, of course!”

He stood up so fast the chair toppled over.

“What garbage can? The one in here, or did you take them outside?”

Cathrine Ruge looked exasperated.

“No, I wrapped them up well so the refuse collectors wouldn’t injure themselves, and then I threw them out there.” She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb.

Billy T. stormed out to the kitchen and tore open the door of the cabinet underneath the sink. Almost at the top, among potato peelings and two discarded sausage ends, lay an oblong parcel wrapped in newspaper. He clutched it carefully and held it up to Cathrine, who was standing in the doorway with her hands by her side and a disgruntled expression on her face.

“This?” he asked, and she nodded briefly.

Eighteen minutes later he was at Oslo Police Station, where an exhausted and disconsolate colleague was sitting, longing for the weekend.

 • • • 

Ten o’clock had come and gone, and she would have to give up soon. Billy T. would hear about it. It was awful to spend a Friday evening in this way. What was worse was that Cecilie was going to be bad tempered all day tomorrow. And worst of all was that she would have to let Maren Kalsvik go.

“It’s funny, you know,” she said quietly to the silent woman, sighing almost inaudibly. “It’s odd how it always turns out that there’s so much turbulence in people’s lives. It happens almost every time.”

She stretched her arms above her head and yawned, before taking a pair of scissors from the desk drawer and starting to cut out a figure from the cardboard of a used writing pad.

“It’s me,” she said, almost to herself. “My fingers have to be busy all the time. That’s why it’s so difficult for me to quit smoking.”

She peered in embarrassment over at the second cigarette packet of the day.

“Take a completely ordinary human being. An average person.”

She had fashioned a lady with a full skirt. With her head tilted to the side and a satisfied expression, she began to draw a face. After that she colored the dress with a pink highlighter pen, and when that was finished, she propped it up against her coffee cup. It stood lopsided, stiff, and straight with a broad blue smile.

“Agnes Vestavik, for instance,” she said dispassionately, pointing at the cardboard doll. “We start to poke around in a seemingly boring, normal, and straightforward person’s life. Then it turns out that the reality is something different. There’s always something more there. Nothing is as it seems to be at first glance. We all have our dark side. If I was murdered, for example . . .”

She stopped. It was late. She was dog tired. The person facing her was a stranger. She continued.

“If anyone murdered me, the detectives here would be as surprised as can be.”

She chuckled quietly.

“The world is one colossal illusion. A distorted image. Look at yourself, for example.”

The cardboard doll fell to one side, without Maren Kalsvik paying any attention to it.

“I like you, Maren. I think you’re a good person. You do something that’s important. Something meaningful. Then a number of things take place that you’re not in control of, and suddenly you’re sitting here. Having murdered someone. The ways of the Lord are truly mysterious.”

Hanne Wilhelmsen no longer had any idea whether Maren Kalsvik was listening to her at all. There was a knock at the door.

It was Billy T.

She was about to give him a murderous look, but when she caught sight of his face, she changed her mind. He had come up with something. And it was of enormous importance.

“Can I have a word or two with you out in the corridor, Hanne?” he asked quietly in a friendly tone.

“Of course, Billy T.,” Hanne Wilhelmsen replied. “Of course.”

 • • • 

They were away for what seemed an age. Red-and-white specks were dancing behind her eyelids, and there was a faint
whooshing
sound in her ears. Besides, it was deathly silent. When she gingerly raised her bottom a fraction, she noticed her legs had gone completely to sleep. Her muscles were tingling painfully, and she felt stiff and sore when she stood up.

The story of the falsified diploma had entirely slipped her mind in the course of the past four weeks. It had all been a catastrophe. It was true, she had always had trouble with examinations, ever since she was at junior high school. Her high school diploma had been hell. Excellent continuous assessment, dreadful examination results. It only became worse and worse.

Her weeklong home assignment had gone well. The snag was the final examination. Something happened to her as soon as she entered an examination hall. The desks spaced out at regulation distance, the stone-deaf old bats who were supposed to ensure there was no cheating, all the lunch boxes, thermos flasks, pencil cases; the whispering silence, the atmosphere before the exam papers were issued; the anxiety experienced by the majority combined with anticipation into a mixture of childish excitement. Only not for her. Maren Kalsvik became frightened and paralyzed. Her last chance disappeared when she resat the spring
after she should actually have graduated from college. She had not been able to afford to repeat an entire additional school year. That was what she should have done. When she stood there, one summer day in 1991, and learned that all her hopes of being a qualified social worker were dashed, she had at first felt nothing but a vast, gray emptiness. Almost the same as now. One hundred and forty thousand kroner in student loans and nothing to show for it. All avenues closed. No fresh opportunities.