In the Darkness (3 page)

Sejer peered down at the report and rubbed his neck. It always impressed him the way criminal pathologists managed to pull together a semi-rotten mass of skin and hair, bones and muscles, and turn it into a complete human being with age and weight and physical attributes, condition, previous complaints and operations, dental hygiene and hereditary disposition.

‘Remnants of cheese, meat, paprika and onion in the stomach,’ he said aloud. ‘Sounds like pizza.’

‘Can they be sure after six months?’

‘Yes, of course. When the fish haven’t eaten it all. That sometimes happens.’

The man called Sejer was made of solid stuff. He was in his forty-ninth year, his forearms were already reasonably tanned, he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves and the blood vessels and sinews were conspicuous beneath the skin, making them look like seasoned wood. His face was well defined and a little sharp, his shoulders straight and broad, his good overall colour gave the impression of something that was well used, but which would also endure. His hair was spiky and steel-coloured, almost metallic and very short. His eyes were large and clear, their irises the colour of wet slate. That was how his wife Elise had once described them years before. He’d found her description charming.

Karlsen was ten years his junior and slight by comparison. At first glance he could give the impression of being a dandy, without solidity or weight, he had a waxed moustache and a high, impressively bouffant head of hair. The youngest and sprightliest of them, Gøran Soot, was struggling to open a bag of jelly babies without making too much of a rustling noise. Soot had thick, wavy hair, a compact, muscular body and a fresh complexion. Taken on its own, each part of his body was a feast for the eye, but all together they were rather too much of a good thing. He, however, was unaware of this interesting fact. Seated by the door was Chief Inspector Holthemann, taciturn and grey, and behind him a female officer with close-cropped fair hair. At the window, with one arm propped on the sill, sat Jakob Skarre.

‘How are things with Mrs Einarsson?’ Sejer asked. He cared about people, knew that she had a young son.

Karlsen shook his head. ‘She seemed a bit bewildered. She asked if this meant she’d get the life insurance money at last, and then broke down in despair because the first thing she’d thought about was the cash.’

‘Why hasn’t she had anything?’

‘We had no body.’

‘I’ll take that up with the appropriate person,’ said Sejer. ‘What have they been living on these past six months?’

‘Social security.’

Sejer shook his head and flipped through the report. Soot stuffed a green jelly baby into his mouth, only its legs protruded.

‘The car,’ Sejer went on, ‘was found at the municipal dump. We rooted through the rubbish for days. In fact he was killed in a completely different location, possibly by the river. Then the killer got into the car and drove it to
the
rubbish tip. It’s extraordinary if Einarsson really has been in the water for six months and hasn’t turned up until now. That’s quite some time the murderer has been clinging to the hope that he would never surface again. Well, now he’s had a reality check. I imagine it’ll be quite a hard one, too.’

‘Did he get caught up on something?’ Karlsen wondered out loud.

‘Don’t know. It’s a bit strange, that, the riverbed is pure gravel, it’s not long since it was dredged. He may have been swept in towards the bank and got caught up on something there. His appearance was roughly what we’d have anticipated, anyway.’

‘The car had been cleaned and hoovered inside,’ said Karlsen, ‘the dashboard had been polished. Wax and cleaning stuff everywhere. He left home to sell it.’

‘And his wife didn’t know who the prospective purchaser was,’ Sejer recalled.

‘She knew nothing at all, but that was par for the course in that household.’

‘No one phoned asking for him?’

‘No. He told her quite suddenly that he had a purchaser. She thought it was strange. He’d scraped and saved to get that car, tinkered with it for months, treated it like his baby.’

‘Maybe he needed money,’ said Sejer urgently, rising. He began to pace. ‘We’ve got to find that buyer. I wonder what happened between them. According to his wife he had a hundred kroner in his wallet. We ought to go through the car again, someone sat in it and drove it several kilometres, a murderer. He must have left something behind!’

‘The car’s been sold,’ Karlsen put in.

‘Wouldn’t you just know it.’

‘9 p.m.’s pretty late to go showing off a car,’ said Skarre, a curly-haired man with an open face. ‘It’s bloody dark in October at nine in the evening. If I were going to buy a car I’d want to see it in daylight. It could have been planned. A kind of trap.’

‘Yes. And if you want to test drive a car, you head out of town. Away from people.’ Sejer scratched his chin with well-clipped nails. ‘If he was stabbed on the fourth of October, he’s been in the river six months,’ he said, ‘is that consistent with the state of the body?’

‘The pathologists are being difficult about that,’ said Karlsen. ‘Impossible to date that sort of thing, they say. Snorrasson told of a woman who was found after seven years, and she was as good as new. Some lake in Ireland. Seven years! The water was freezing cold, pure preservation. But we can assume it happened on the fourth of October. It must have been quite a strong person, I should have thought, judging by the results.’

‘Let’s look at the stab wounds.’

He selected a photograph from the folder, went to the board and clipped it in position. The picture showed Einarsson’s back and bottom; the skin had been thoroughly washed and the stab wounds left crater-like depressions.

‘They do look rather strange, fifteen stab wounds, half of which are to the lower back, bottom and abdomen, and the remainder in the victim’s right side, directly above the hip, delivered with great force by a right-handed person, striking from above and slicing downwards. The knife had a long, thin blade, very thin in fact. Perhaps a fishing knife. Altogether a strange way to attack a man. But you remember what the car looked like, don’t you?’

All at once he strode over and hauled Soot out of his chair. His bag of goodies fell to the floor.

‘I need a victim,’ Sejer said. ‘Come here!’ He pushed the officer over to the desk, took up position behind him and grabbed the plastic ruler. ‘It could have happened something like this. This is Einarsson’s car,’ he said, pushing the young policeman over on to the desktop. His chin just reached the far edge. ‘The bonnet is up, because they’re busy looking over the engine. The killer pushes the victim on to the engine and holds him down with his left arm while he stabs him fifteen times with his right.
FIFTEEN TIMES.’
He wielded the ruler and prodded Soot’s bottom as he counted aloud: ‘One, two, three, four,’ he moved his hand and stabbed him in the side, Soot squirmed a bit, as if he was ticklish, ‘five, six, seven – and then he stabs him in the nether regions …’

‘No!’ Soot leapt up in horror and crossed his legs.

Sejer stopped, gave his victim a small push and sent him back to his chair as he fought to suppress a smile.

‘It’s a lot of times to strike with a knife. Fifteen stabs and a whole lot of blood. It must have spurted out everywhere, over the killer’s clothes, face and hands, over the car and the ground. It’s a bugger that he moved the car.’

‘At any rate, it must have been done in the heat of the moment,’ Karlsen maintained. ‘It’s no normal execution. Must have been an argument.’

‘Perhaps they couldn’t agree on a price,’ quipped Skarre.

‘People who decide to kill using a knife often get a nasty shock,’ said Sejer. ‘It’s a lot harder than they think. But let’s assume it actually was premeditated, and at the opportune moment he pulls out his knife, for example just as Einarsson is standing with his back to him, bending over the engine.’

He narrowed his eyes as if conjuring up the scene. ‘The killer had to strike from behind, so he couldn’t easily get
at
what he wanted. It’s much harder to reach vital organs from behind. And maybe it took quite a number of stabs before Einarsson finally collapsed. It must have been a terrifying experience, he’s stabbing and stabbing, his victim goes on screaming, that makes him panic and he’s unable to stop. That’s what happens. In his imagination it’ll be one or two lunges. But how often has the killer been content with that in all the many knife murders we’ve dealt with? Off the top of my head I can recall one instance with seventeen stab wounds, and another with thirty-three.’

‘But they knew each other, do we agree on that?’

‘Knew and knew. They had some kind of relationship, yes.’ Sejer seated himself and put the ruler away in the drawer. ‘Well, we’ll have to begin at the beginning again. We must find out who wanted to buy that car. Use the list from October and begin at the top. It might be one of his workmates.’

‘The same people?’ Soot looked at him dubiously. ‘Are we going to ask the same questions all over again?’

‘What do you mean?’ Sejer raised an eyebrow.

‘I mean that we ought to be finding new people. The answers will be the same as last time. I mean, nothing’s really changed.’

‘Hasn’t it? Perhaps you’ve not been listening all that carefully, but we’ve actually found the victim now. Stuck like a pig. And you say nothing’s changed?’

He fought to hold back a note of arrogance. ‘I mean, we’re not going to get different answers because of that.’

‘That,’ said Sejer holding back an even larger one, ‘remains to be seen, doesn’t it?’

Karlsen closed the file with a little snap.

*

Sejer replaced Einarsson’s folder in the filing cabinet. He filed it next to the Durban case, and thought that now they could keep each other company. Maja Durban and Egil Einarsson. Both were dead, but no one knew why. Then he leant back in his chair and placed his long legs on the desk, patted his backside and fished out his wallet. Jammed in between his driving and skydiving licences he found the picture of his grandson, Matteus. He had just turned four, he could recognise most makes of car and had already had his first fight, which he’d lost grievously. It had been a bit of a surprise, that time he’d gone to Fornebu Airport to pick up his daughter Ingrid and son-in-law Erik, who’d been in Somalia for three years. She as a nurse, he as a Red Cross doctor. She’d been standing at the top of the aircraft steps, tanned golden all over and with her hair bleached by the sun. For one wild second it had been like seeing Elise, that first time they’d met. She carried the little boy on her arm. He was four months old at the time, chocolate brown, with crinkly hair and the darkest eyes he’d ever seen. The Somalis were a beautiful race, he thought. And he gazed at the photo for a while before replacing it. It was quiet in the Portakabins now, and in most of the large adjacent building. He pushed two fingers into his shirtsleeve and scratched his elbow. The skin flaked off. Underneath there was new, pink skin which also flaked off. He pulled his jacket off the chair back and locked up, then he paid a lightning visit to Mrs Brenningen on the reception desk. She put down her book immediately. In any case, she’d reached a promising love scene and wanted to save it for when she was under the bedclothes. They exchanged a few words, then he nodded briefly and headed for Rosenkrantzgate and Egil Einarsson’s widow.

Chapter 4

HE GLANCED QUICKLY
in the mirror and ran his fingers through his hair. Because it was short he didn’t alter its appearance at all. It was more an act of ritual than vanity.

Sejer took every opportunity to get out of the office. He drove rather slowly through the town centre; he always drove slowly, his car was old and sluggish, a large blue Peugeot 604 which he’d never had any reason to change. In snowy conditions it was like driving a sledge. Soon he was passing colourful houses, each home to four families. They were on his right, pink, yellow and green; the sun was shining on them now making them glow invitingly. They’d been built in the fifties and possessed a certain patina that newer houses didn’t have. The trees were well grown, the gardens fertile, or at least they would be when the spring arrived. But it was still cold, spring was late in coming. They’d had dry weather for a long time, and blobs of dirty snow lay like rubbish in the gutters. His eyes searched for number 16 and recognised the well-maintained green house the moment he saw it. The entrance was a chaos of trikes, lorries and plastic toys of all kinds, which the children had indiscriminately brought out from cellars and attics.
Bare
asphalt was always tempting after a long winter. He parked and rang the bell.

After a few moments she came to the door, with a thin little boy hanging on to her skirts.

‘Mrs Einarsson,’ he said, bowing slightly, ‘may I come in?’ Jorun Einarsson nodded vaguely and a touch unwillingly, but she hadn’t many people to talk to. He was standing quite close to her, and she caught the smell of him, a mixture of jacket leather and a discreet aftershave lotion.

‘I don’t know any more than I did last autumn,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Well, apart from the fact he’s dead. But I was expecting that, of course. I mean, the way the car looked …’ She put an arm around the boy as if to protect them both.

‘But now we’ve found him, Mrs Einarsson. So things are a bit different, aren’t they?’ He kept quiet and waited.

‘It must have been some nutcase who wanted money.’ She shook her head distractedly. ‘Well, his wallet had gone. You saw that his wallet had gone. Even though he had only a hundred kroner. But people kill just for loose change nowadays.’

‘I promise this won’t take long.’

She gave in and retreated down the corridor. Sejer stood in the doorway to the living room and looked about. He always felt a certain dismay when it struck him just how similar people were; he saw it in their living rooms, how they filled them. They were the same everywhere, arranged in the same symmetry, with the television and video as a kind of focal point for the rest of the furniture. This was where the family huddled together to get warm. Mrs Einarsson had a pink leather suite and a shaggy white carpet under the coffee table. It was a feminine room. She’d lived alone for six months, maybe she’d spent the
time
expunging any masculine influence, if there’d been any to begin with. Then, as now, he could see no trace of loss or love for the man they’d found in the black river water, grey and perforated like an old sponge. What anguish there had been was directed towards other things, practical things. What was she going to live on and how could she get out and find another man when she hadn’t got the money for a babysitter? Such thoughts depressed him. They caused him to examine the wedding photo above the sofa, a somewhat lavish portrait of the young Jorun with bleached hair. Standing next to her was Egil Einarsson, slender and smooth-cheeked like a confirmation candidate and sporting a thin moustache. They posed to the best of their ability before a mediocre photographer, very concerned with their appearance. Not with one another.