Medusa (15 page)

He straightened up and took a couple of paces back, stepped into something sticky. He shone the beam downwards. Fresh faeces covered not only the plastic overshoes but also part of the tips of his shoes. He let out a string of curses and looked around for something to clean it off with.

– The technicians have found tracks, Nina Jebsen told him.

Her voice was so studiedly calm that he turned to look at her.

– Tracks?

She pointed in the direction of one of the white coats squatting by the stream a few metres away. The next moment Viken was at his side. The track in the mud was about the length of a child’s foot, but much broader, and with clear signs of claw marks. He was no wildlife expert, but he was in no doubt that this track was like the one they had found up in the Nordmarka. He opened his mouth, but what he was about to say stuck in his throat.

The technician shone his torch along the edge of the stream.

– There are more tracks here. They seem to disappear into the water.

Viken’s stomach had turned into a burning acid bubble bath. He peered up towards the top of the slope. Heard voices up there, a car starting, someone calling. Maybe they’d picked up what was being said down here with those directional mikes. The helicopter had dropped lower and was circling like a giant bird in the dark sky. He tried to imagine the reaction when news of what he now believed to be the case became known. There would be a storm. A tidal wave. He swallowed down the jet of heartburn that pulsed all the way up into his mouth.

B
Y THE TIME
Nina Jebsen had finished making out her crime-scene report, the canteen was open. She would have time to pop up there and get a sandwich and a Bonaqua before the meeting began. She took her breakfast back down to the office she shared with Sigmundur Helgarsson. As usual, something or other had delayed him, and she was pleased enough to have the room to herself for a while. She removed the sandwich wrapping, picked up one of the pieces of bread and as best she could scraped off the mayonnaise. There was some left on the lettuce, but she didn’t have time to take it to the toilet to wash it off.

As she munched away, she reread what she had typed. It was as though she only now realised what she had seen in Frogner Park the night before. She pushed the half-eaten sandwich to one side, took a few swigs of the mineral water with its sickly raspberry taste, opened
Aftenposten
’s net edition. Main headline:
Found murdered.
She knew this was just the beginning and opened VG Nett to get a better idea of what was in store.
Killer bear tracks in Oslo centre
. She gaped. The photograph had been taken from the helicopter and showed the crime scene by the water, the dead woman, the technicians in white, a figure that might have been herself. The press conference was going to be a lot of fun. It was due to start at ten o’clock. Agnes Finckenhagen and Viken would be there, and someone from the eighth floor, maybe the chief of police himself. Viken had made it clear that there would be
no mercy
for anyone found leaking information in the case. She had to smile at his phrase, like the title of some fifty-year-old Western, but there was no reason to suppose he didn’t mean what he said. Viken wasn’t as hard to get on with as some people claimed. He was like a reasonably complex machine; it was a question of finding out how it worked. She’d said something along these lines to Sigge Helgarsson one morning after he’d been hauled over the coals, but he didn’t seem to share her view. A while back Sigge had started referring to Chief Inspector H. M. Viken as His Master’s Voice, abbreviated in due course to just the Voice. Nina Jebsen thought it was a pretty appropriate nickname, but she didn’t use it herself.

– We’ve got one hour before the section leader and I have to leave, Viken announced.

Nina fidgeted with the corner of the report lying in front of her. She thought it was comical, the formal way he always referred to Agnes Finckenhagen as ‘section leader’. It was just six months ago that she’d been appointed to the post. There was not much doubt that Viken had been bypassed. A man with thirty years’ experience in the job, with a recognised talent as an investigator. When he led a team, there were not many who would cross him, and certainly not those who wished to carry on working in the section. And if you were loyal, he would take you under his wing. It was a safe place to be for a newcomer; she wasn’t the only one to have discovered that. He spoke out for them against the higher-ups;
loud and clear
, as he would say himself. And then they had gone and appointed an outsider as section leader. A woman ten years his junior, with little experience of crimes of violence. Viken had contented himself with the observation that it was amazing how far you could get with a few evening classes in Better Leadership at the Business Institute. Especially if you were a woman. And then he kept his mouth shut.

– Do you need to expand the group? asked Jarle Frøen, the police prosecutor who had been put in formal charge of the investigation. A joke, as long as it was Viken who was leading it. Frøen was regarded as one of the weakest of the lawyers. Maybe that was why Viken seemed so pleased to have him along, thought Nina. The lawyer was a tubby man with a pear-shaped head, along the sides of which a few reddish tufts still clung. He wasn’t much older than her but looked more like someone in his mid-forties.

Viken seemed to be weighing the pros and cons before answering.

– Let’s wait until we know what kinds of skills we’re going to need.

– The woman last night, this Davidsen, do we have a cause of death for her? asked Arve Norbakk.

Viken looked over at Nina.

– Know anything about that, Nina?

– I spoke to the woman who’s handling the case at the Pathological Institute, a Dr Finnerud …

– I think you mean Plåterud, Viken grinned.

Nina Jebsen felt herself going red.

– Correct. She’s found a number of hypodermic needle marks on the arms and legs. They also have a provisional result from the blood tests.

– And you didn’t tell us until now, Viken interrupted. – Did they find any trace of a narcotic called thiopental?

– Yes, they did.

Viken scratched his thick lower jaw. As usual he was wearing a freshly ironed white shirt. – We haven’t told anyone that was what Hilde Paulsen was given an overdose of.

He looked around the table.

– Two women killed in exactly the same way. Let us make this assertion: the perpetrator is the same. Or perpetrators.

He gave them time to digest this. Then he asked:

– What about time of death?

– According to Plåterud, Davidsen had been dead for more than ten hours but less than twenty-four before she was found.

– Less than twenty-four hours, Viken repeated thoughtfully. – I will presume the animal tracks by the water were left at the same time as the body.

He swallowed the rest of his coffee.

– Outside these walls we’re going to be as careful as fuck, pardon my French, Nina, you who are so young and unsullied.

She responded with a weary little shake of the head.

– But in here we can be as creative as we like. We damn well need to be. We know that Hilde Sofie Paulsen’s body had marks on it indicating an attack by a bear. If we leave out Spitsbergen, then it’s extremely rare for anyone to be threatened by a bear in Norway. But now we find a second victim, Cecilie Davidsen, with wounds remarkably similar to those we found on Paulsen, and animal tracks in Frogner Park that are practically identical to those we found up in the Nordmarka. Which of you supposes that a large brown bear is prowling the streets of central Oslo?

He bared his teeth. To Nina it was unclear whether he was smiling or imitating the imagined animal.

– We have to look at other possibilities here. Come on, Sigge, you grew up with polar bears as your next-door neighbours.

The Icelander gave a little laugh, though he obviously didn’t think it was particularly funny.

– It might have escaped from somewhere.

– A bear sanctuary? The nearest one is in Hallingdal; that’s over a hundred miles away. Think it took the bus?

Helgarsson rolled his eyes, but Nina saw that the corners of Agnes Finckenhagen’s mouth were twitching.

– Some people keep animals illegally, she offered.

Viken clicked his tongue a few times.

– I’ve heard of boa constrictors in bedsits, even Amazonian lizards sticking their heads up out of the next-door neighbour’s toilet bowl, but a bear in a bedroom? Any other suggestions? Arve, you know more about wildlife than the rest of us – can we rule out the possibility that there was a bear in Frogner Park, or can we not?

Arve Norbakk looked around, and to Nina it seemed his gaze rested on her a moment.

– Bears avoid people, he told them. – It’s unthinkable it might make its way down into a town. Not on its own.

– What do you mean? Could somebody have brought it here and turned it loose?

Norbakk shrugged his shoulders.

– Either that, or the victim has been moved after being ripped by bear claws.

Viken nodded.

– The plaster that was found under Hilde Paulsen’s nails might have come from a cellar. Maybe the body was taken out into the marka. But what about the tracks?

Arve Norbakk dotted his pen against a sheet of paper as though sending a signal in Morse code.

– I was wondering about that. The tracks have clearly been made by a bear’s paw, but all of them look like marks made by hind paws. So the bear must have been walking upright the entire time.

– Like a circus act, Viken observed.

Norbakk permitted himself a smile.

– A bear will rise up on to its hind legs when faced with a potential danger, he said. – It does so to get a better overview and to pick up the scent of whatever’s approaching. It can look as if it’s dancing. But if it’s going to attack or flee, it quickly gets back down on all fours. Another thing is that the pattern of movement seems odd. There are about twenty metres of tracks before they disappear into the water. But the two paws are much too close together. On top of that, there isn’t a single track further down the bank, or on the other side. So where did the animal go?

The question was still hanging in the air when the meeting broke up a couple of minutes later.

Nina scrolled down through the list of witness statements on the subject of Paulsen’s disappearance. She carefully read the account given by the man who found the body. Or rather, the man who owned the dog that found the body. Fifteen people had come forward to confirm that they had seen Paulsen in the marka on the day she disappeared. She noted the names down in her notebook. The last confirmed sighting was that made by a doctor, Axel Glenne, who had called them a few days later. She leaned back in her chair, thinking. Something had struck her. She looked out of the window, over the row of hazels and the rooftops down in Grønland. Something she’d read. Her computer had already gone into hibernation and she woke it up and scrolled through the names once again. Found the interview with Cecilie Davidsen’s husband. He had attended at Majorstua police station to give his statement. He had raised the alarm after a couple of hours when his wife had failed to return from the hospital and didn’t answer her phone. She had just been told she had cancer and would be operated on in a few days’ time. The prospects weren’t good. He was afraid she might be in shock. At last Nina found what she was looking for: Cecilie Davidsen’s doctor. He had been a great help to her, according to the husband. His name was Axel Glenne.

I
T HAD BEEN
snowing since early morning. A total surprise to everyone, even the meteorologists, who had forecast rain.

Signy Bruseter stood on the steps in front of her house and looked out miserably across the fields sloping down towards the village. She didn’t like the winter, it was too long already, and now here it was snowing heavily and only the middle of October. Her house lay at the end of a farm track, almost two kilometres from the main road. The farmer who did the snow-clearing for her was reliable, but suppose he was ill? Or if he couldn’t get his tractor started and had to take it in for repairs? The thought of being snowed in here at the edge of the forest made her shiver, and she bitterly regretted ever having moved up here. She pulled the shawl tighter around herself, trotted across the yard and opened the garage door. She kept her winter tyres down at the petrol station in Åmoen; she knew the owner and he was always good to her and changed them at short notice. Now it was a question of how to get to the main road and then the seven kilometres to the Esso station.

Luckily the snow was fairly light and hadn’t frozen hard yet. All the same, she drove in first gear all the way down. There was more on the news about the murders in Oslo. She couldn’t bear hearing about them but couldn’t stop herself either. No suspects as yet, they said, and interviewed a female officer. Fincken-something-or-other.
We’re following up all the leads we’ve had so far, we’re encouraging anyone who thinks they might be able to help to come forward.
Signy didn’t like her voice; it was brittle.
Yes, we do believe it’s likely that the two cases are connected. But neither of the victims was killed by a bear.
She sounded arrogant.
No, absolutely not. It would be meaningless under the circumstances to demand that southern Norway be a bear-free area.

The news continued with a story about a car bomb in Iraq. Signy switched off and stared out at the white flakes that came streaming towards the windscreen. They’re not in control, she complained to herself. They’ve no idea what to do. She’d been lying awake all night. She had hardly any coffee or bread left and hadn’t had time to shop. She’d said yes to the offer of an extra shift. Mette Martin was always nice and cheerful, but she evidently expected Signy to cover whenever anyone was sick. That was the way it was when you lived on your own and had no one else to look after. These afternoon shifts were stupid; it meant she didn’t get home until about eight, too late to bother making supper. She had a bowl of spinach soup she could heat up. She’d boil a couple of eggs to have with it.