Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (6 page)

“Cozy, really,” Billy T. mumbled to himself as he lowered his
head to avoid a mobile made of colorful cardboard witches decorated with crepe paper and dead birch rods. “This isn’t quite how I had envisioned it.”

“Did you picture it more like something out of Dickens? Or what did you imagine?” Hanne Wilhelmsen asked, standing still and listening. “It’s so incredibly quiet here!”

In answer, a woman came running down the stairs. Somewhere in her late twenties, with long blonde hair in a French braid, she wore an embroidered quilted vest and flared denim jeans that were either bang up-to-date or heirlooms from the seventies.

“Sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I was on the phone! Maren Kalsvik.”

Her handshake was firm, but her eyes were red ringed and bloodshot. Her face was bare, with no hint of makeup, but her eyelashes were dark and unusually long. It must be her hair that was bleached, although it did not appear to be.

“All the youngsters have been transferred elsewhere. Just for the next twenty-four hours. It was the police . . .”

She stopped, somewhat bewildered.

“That is to say, the ones who were here during the night and early this morning, your colleagues . . . They were the ones who said so. That the children shouldn’t be here while they were inspecting the place. The crime scene, I mean.”

Running a slim hand with short nails over her fringe, she appeared even more exhausted.

“You’ll probably want to see it as well.”

Without waiting for a reply, she turned on her heel and walked upstairs again, the two police officers following her. The corridor they reached had a window at either end; the gable walls of the house and the corridor itself probably were about two meters wide, with doors on either side. They turned right, obviously heading for the room that lay farthest in, on the left-hand side.
Maren Kalsvik paused at the doorway and drew back, her eyelashes glittering with tears.

“We’ve been told not to go inside.”

That did not apply to Hanne Wilhelmsen, who crept underneath the red-and-white plastic tape draped across with a warning not to enter the room. Pulling the tape down, Billy T. stepped across.

“She was sitting there,” Hanne said, nodding in the direction of a desk chair upholstered in red woolen fabric while she leafed through a folder she had produced from a large shoulder bag. “With her back to the window. Facing the door.”

For a moment she stood staring at the desk as Billy T. approached the window.

“Odd position, as a matter of fact,” she added, directing herself to Maren Kalsvik, who was still standing at a respectful distance from the doorway. “Desks are usually placed facing a wall.”

“It was her way of saying that everybody was welcome to come in,” Maren replied. “She would never sit with her back turned.”

Billy T. opened the window and cold, fresh air blasted into the room. Maren Kalsvik came closer to the plastic tape but jumped back when she discovered it was about to loosen at one end.

“The window was locked from inside,” she informed them. “At least that’s what the police said this morning. The catches were closed.”

Billy T. tugged at a substantial spiral hook screwed into the wall right beside the windowsill.

“Fire rope fastener?”

He did not wait for a response but instead leaned out and peered downward. The ground below the window was covered by a thin layer of old snow, with no prints. As he let his eye run over the house wall, he noticed an obvious trail underneath the other four large windows on the upper floor. The snow had been trampled away entirely, and dozens of footprints crisscrossed the earth. Pulling his head back inside, he rubbed his earlobes.

“Where does that door lead?” he asked, pointing to a narrow door on the side wall.

“That’s the staff bedroom. We sometimes use it as an office as well. That’s where I was sitting speaking on the phone when you arrived.”

“Is it eight children who live here?”

“Yes, we’ve actually got room for nine; we have a spare bed at present.”

“Are all the bedrooms here on the first floor?”

She nodded. “They’re situated along the corridor here. On both sides. I can show you them.”

“Yes. Shortly,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said. “Has anything been reported stolen?”

“No, not as far as we can see. We don’t know, of course, what might have been in the drawers, but . . . the drawers are locked. They haven’t been broken open.”

“Where’s the key?”

When she posed the question, Hanne Wilhelmsen was standing half turned away from Maren Kalsvik but nevertheless thought she noticed a hint of confusion cross the woman’s face as she turned and made eye contact. Just a touch. Perhaps it was simply a figment of her imagination.

“It’s under the plant pot,” Maren Kalsvik answered. “On the bookshelf over there.”

“Aha,” Billy T. said as he lifted the decorative pot.

No key.

Maren Kalsvik seemed genuinely surprised.

“It’s usually there. Perhaps the police have taken it?”

“Maybe.”

The police officers exchanged a look, and Hanne Wilhelmsen jotted something in a spiral notebook before stuffing the papers back in her bag and indicating that they wanted to see the bedrooms.

Olav and Raymond shared a room. So did Glenn and Kenneth, while Anita and Jeanette had the room farthest away at the other end of the corridor. The twins stayed on the opposite side of the corridor. Two rooms were unoccupied.

“Why do some have to share when there are two empty bedrooms?”

“For social reasons. Kenneth is scared to be on his own. The twins want to be together. Olav . . .”

She stopped abruptly and repeated her continual hand movement across her fringe. “Olav is the one who disappeared. Agnes thought . . .”

Now she was clearly on the verge of tears. She took a couple of convulsive breaths before pulling herself together.

“Agnes thought Raymond would be a good influence on Olav. He’s tough and big and actually quite good with the younger ones. Although he protested about having a new roommate. From purely social, or educational reasons, if you will. The empty rooms are used for doing homework and that kind of thing.”

“Have you still not heard from the runaway?”

“No. We’re dreadfully worried. He hasn’t gone home, but that’s not particularly odd. He had no money, as far as we know, and it’s a terrible distance to walk.”

Billy T. strode along the corridor, counting out the meters under his breath. Back at the director’s office, he had to raise his voice so the others could hear him.

“This window here, it doesn’t usually remain open?”

He could see from the faint lilac-colored dust along the ledges that the technicians had been searching for prints.

“No,” Maren called back. “It’s always closed at this time of year. But we had a fire drill yesterday. The youngsters were flying up and down the ropes and ladders for an hour.”

He could see that. The window had become warped and opened only very stiffly, but he banged it open with brute force.
Below, he saw the same jumble of footprints that he had spotted underneath the windows on the other wall of the house. The emergency ladder could slide along the wall so that it could not be accessed from the ground. It was broad and sturdy, with rough, scuffed rungs. He tentatively released the lock on either side, and the lower part tumbled to the ground on well-greased runners. A solid piece of machinery. He pulled on a wire that looped over a smaller runner at the side of the window, and the lower part of the ladder returned obediently. When it was all the way up, it clicked decisively, and Billy T. folded the locking mechanism back into place before closing the window, quickly ascertaining that the rooms opposite the director’s office were two bathrooms, one large and one small, and approached the two women again without uttering a word.

“We must interview all of you,” Hanne Wilhelmsen was saying, almost apologetically. “You’ll be called in turn. It would be a fantastic help if you could take the trouble to compile a list of everyone who lives here, and even more important, everyone who works here. Their names and dates of birth, of course, but also their background, residence, family situation, how long they have worked here, and so on. As speedily as possible.”

The woman nodded.

The two police officers returned to the ground floor with Maren Kalsvik at their heels. They inspected the remainder of the house in silence, making a few notes. The woman with the French braid closed the door behind them around an hour after their arrival.

Without further instructions, Billy T. jumped over a low-growing hedge dividing the gravel path from the grassy lawn. Turning up his jacket lapels, he buttoned up in front with the two remaining buttons that had not yet been torn off and thrust his hands into his pockets. Then he scurried around the corner, stopping below the only gable window on the first floor, around
six meters above the ground. Understanding what he was up to, Hanne Wilhelmsen followed close behind.

A week of mild weather had soaked the terrain to such an extent that numerous footprints, small and large, were outlined on the brown earth. Frost had set in that morning, and the area now looked like a miniature lunar landscape, with shallow valleys and sharp little mountains crisscrossing, lacking any structure and utterly lacking any significance.

“That fire drill happened at a helluva convenient time,” Billy T. commented glumly. “Even the most finicky crime scene technician would be at a loss here.”

“But they have made an effort all the same,” Hanne said, waving her finger toward tiny particles of plaster that almost merged into the patches of frost, and the red contrast spray in several of the prints. “If anyone walked here
after
the fire drill—and they would of course have had to do that if they were using this route into the house—then those footprints would be
on top.
Do we know when the frost set in?”

“Not until the early hours of the morning. In fact, it was still soft underfoot here when the police arrived at half past one.”

The chief inspector picked her way carefully around the well-trodden area in the private hope that it still harbored a secret or two they might be able to wrest from it. She subsequently took up position immediately beside the wall and stretched up to reach the folded fire ladder. There was a gap of more than half a meter from her fingertips to the foot of the ladder.

“Can you manage it?”

Tentatively they exchanged places, but even Billy T., six foot seven in his stocking feet and with arms like a gorilla, had some distance to go to reach the bottom rung of the ladder.

“An umbrella or something with a hook at the end would be enough,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, blowing on her right hand.

“No, the catch prevents it from being pulled down from
here. I checked it from the top. Solid machinery. This ladder here can only be operated from inside. Exactly as it should be. And it can also only be put back in place again from inside. If you pushed it up from here, you’d have to be fairly strong to replace it on its catch up there. And you haven’t a chance of locking it.”

“But then,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, “we’ve the following choice: either this isn’t the way the murderer entered the building, or else we have a very limited list of suspects.”

Although Billy T.’s expression revealed he was fully aware of her reasoning, she added quietly, “Because if the ladder was used, then it was used by someone who had access in order to lower it earlier in the evening, so it was standing ready for use,
and
had the opportunity to lock it again afterward. From inside. Realistically, that means one of the staff.”

“Or one of the youngsters,” Billy T. muttered, shivering.

The temperature continued to drop.

 • • • 

The hunger was worse, even though he was freezing as well. Really he should have put on more clothes. Long underpants, for example, would have been useful. Luckily he had kept an outdoor jacket in his room, though his leather jacket that was hanging downstairs on a hook in the porch with his name in cheerful flowery lettering above it would have been better. But he hadn’t thought. Or he hadn’t taken the chance. Anyway, his sneakers weren’t particularly suitable for this time of year. And his tongue was stinging like fuck.

The fire rope had been bloody easy. Glenn and Terje had said he didn’t dare, but it was just that he couldn’t be bothered. Not then. He couldn’t be bothered with anything when someone was dishing out orders. But it had gone really well when there was a point to it. Even with the rucksack on his back.

How far he had walked since he had left the foster home was impossible to calculate, but it felt like many kilometers.

“I’m probably still in Oslo,” he said under his breath in an attempt to convince himself, as he peered from the garage at the million twinkling lights of the city underneath a pink haze down the hillside below him.

It was stupid that he didn’t have any money. He hadn’t thought about that either. Inside a sock, tucked deep in the third shelf of the closet in the room he shared with Raymond, he had stashed a hundred and fifty kroner. Mum had given it to him. A hundred and fifty kroner was a lot of money, maybe even enough money for a taxi all the way home. He had a feeling, somewhere deep down inside, that this was exactly the reason he had been given precisely that sum of money. A hundred kroner or two hundred kroner would have been more logical.

“Logical means that something is easy to understand.”

His teeth were chattering, and he pressed his hands against his stomach as it emitted a long, low growl for food.

“I’m starving to death,” he continued quietly as his teeth set off on an uncontrollable merry dance. “Either I’ll freeze to death, or I’ll starve to death.”

The house to which the garage he was sitting in belonged lay in darkness, although his Swatch showed it was ten past nine in the evening. At five o’clock he had expected that someone would arrive home, but no one came. There was no car there either, despite the colossal size of the garage. Perhaps they were away, the people who lived here. It was probably a family. Outside the entrance steps there was a handsome sledge, the kind with skis underneath and a steering wheel. At Christmas he had been so sure he would receive one like that, but then he was given a paint box instead. Mum had looked sorry. But he knew she was hard up. He had been given a Power Ranger as well, and at least that was something he had wanted. But Mum didn’t remember it was
the red one he had yearned for. The red one was the boss. He had got the green one. Just like the time two years ago when he’d got the Michelangelo turtle when he had wanted only Raphael.