Pierced (19 page)

Henning buys a baguette from Deli de Luca on his way home and eats it as he walks. The thought of what awaits him makes him speed up.

Heidi let him have the rest of the week off though she couldn’t refrain from sighing heavily when he refused to give her a reason. Instead she said,
‘Fine. You need it. You look dreadful.’

Henning said nothing.

Back in his flat he sits down on the sofa and takes out the mini cassettes with his initials on. He peels off the tape, scrunches it into a ball and throws it on the kitchen floor. None of the tapes are labelled with a date or year, and it’s impossible to see if some of them are more used than others.

Henning finds his old tape recorder in the driftwood cupboard, plugs in the power cable and inserts the first cassette. Soon he hears his own voice.

What did you think of Statoil’s handling of this matter?

The reply is provided by a female voice he can’t identify.

Statoil’s promises concerning my role and the company’s self-imposed obligations in respect of human rights were false and misleading. This individual case is symptomatic of a greater problem.

Henning fast-forwards. The woman’s voice follows him for twelve minutes and thirty-six seconds before another woman’s voice appears after a short break. Henning recognises the voice immediately.

The man was stabbed in the chest. He has been taken to Ullevål Hospital, but his condition is unknown. His attacker appears to be a woman and she is now in police custody.

The voice belongs to Assistant Commissioner Pia Nøkleby and is professional and grave as it always is when he asks her for a quote or two on the record. Henning fast-forwards through a story about sexual abuse of schoolchildren before he works out that this tape must have been recorded at least one year before Jonas died. He finds a marker pen, puts a big black cross on that cassette and inserts the next.

It’s going to be a long night.

The feeling just before it happens is always the worst, when the body knows it needs to vomit but tries to fight the inevitable. And then it happens anyway, violently. Thorleif throws himself forwards while his stomach contracts and expels what little is left in his gut into the lavatory bowl. His intestines contort repeatedly, but nothing more comes out of his mouth.

He hacks a couple of times and lets the saliva drip but avoids looking down. The smell rising up towards him is enough. Tears press against his eyelids. Thorleif gets up, sniffs and flushes the lavatory. The sound of running water ricochets against the wall and inside his head where it jolts around, stirring up a chaotic mix of thoughts and emotions. His legs struggle to support his body. He staggers over to the sink and turns on the tap.

Thorleif recalls what he told Guri Palme yesterday.
‘I was sick this morning.’
It had been a white lie, but less than twenty-four hours later it proves to be true. Will he be able to go to work today?

He washes his face. He looks at the water dripping from his eyebrows and beard. You won’t be able to run over anyone. You’ll never be able to kill another human being. The very thought is enough to send him back to the lavatory bowl. He tries to ignore it, but there it is again, he recognises the revolting feeling, it’s only a matter of seconds now, and then it comes. He leans over the lavatory bowl, hugging the porcelain. The mere smell is enough to make him gag, but only saliva comes out. Saliva and mucus. He kneels down, spitting.

Soon he gets up again, splashes water on his face a second time, checks his watch: 5.30 a.m. He is due at work in four and a half hours.

He has to pull himself together.

Henning falls asleep around three o’clock in the morning and for once Jonas doesn’t haunt his dreams. Some hours later he is woken up by his mobile ringing, but when he answers it no one is there.

Henning drinks a mouthful of tepid Coke and opens the curtains. He goes to the kitchen and tips what is left of yesterday’s flask of coffee into a mug and puts it in the microwave. While he waits for the coffee to heat up, he looks at the cassettes on the kitchen table. Six of them are marked with big black crosses. The notepad next to them is filled with notes and names, but Henning’s pulse doesn’t quicken as he looks at them with fresh if still half-asleep eyes.

The microwave oven beeps. Henning takes out the mug and sips the hot liquid carefully. He sits down and puts on his headphones again. With slow and still sleepy motions he inserts the seventh cassette, presses play and listens. He hears his own voice. Boring questions. Bland answers.
Have you any idea of the motive?
Fast-forward, fast-forward, fast-forward. He drinks more coffee and presses play again.
So what is your next move in this case?
More fast-forwarding before he stops again. More play. He hears a man’s voice: . . .
they might kill me.

Henning looks up. He rewinds to the start of the sentence and presses play for the umpteenth time.
I’m risking my life meeting you. If they find me, they might kill me.
Henning presses stop again.

He recognises the voice as belonging to Rasmus Bjelland and soon puts a face to a story. All it takes is a few internet searches to refresh his memory.

Bjelland was convicted of drugs smuggling in the early nineties. He was given a lengthy custodial sentence, Henning recalls, seven or eight years. When Bjelland was released, he started working as a carpenter without notable success. A limited company he set up, Bjelland, Bygg & Bolig, went bankrupt after trading for only eighteen months.

Like many other bankrupts at the time, Bjelland decided to try his luck in Brazil, more precisely in Natal – a pearl on the Atlantic coast and a city with 800,000 inhabitants. In the spring of 2006,
Dagens Næringsliv
reported how the city was becoming a haven for Norwegian criminals. For years dirty money had been poured into various construction projects, later sold to Norwegians desperate for some sun and easily tempted by the favourable prices and generally low cost of living. They didn’t know that the million-krone construction projects were financed and controlled by criminal gangs who never filed a tax return in Norway. Even members of notorious gangs such as B-gjengen and Svenskeligaen invested in the Natal property market.

In 2004, Rasmus Bjelland married a Brazilian woman. She was responsible for attracting investors while Bjelland handled the construction side. Together they managed to build some smaller residential complexes which made them sufficient profits to reinvest. However, the people already running the show in Natal were perfectly happy with the existing set-up and resented the arrival of yet another property shark trying to get a share of their market.

On an autumn day in 2006, one of Bjelland’s business partners was found shot and killed outside the fishing village of Ponta Negra, an undeveloped area where Bjelland and his wife were planning their biggest project yet. Police concluded that the man, who was found with three bullet holes in his forehead and cash in his pocket, had been the victim of an armed robbery. Bjelland was terrified.

The story uncovered by
Dagens Næringsliv
formed the basis of a huge Norwegian–Brazilian police operation. On 9 May 2007, 230 police officers in Natal carried out Operation Nemesis, the biggest raid the authorities in the province of Rio Grande do Norte had ever undertaken. They searched thirty-three flats and offices looking for documents to prove fraud and money laundering and confiscated items to a value of 300 million kroner. At the same time, in Oslo, eighty police officers carried out Operation Paradise and raided various locations associated with money laundering in Natal. While fourteen people were arrested in Natal, eleven were remanded in custody in Oslo. Seven people were later charged by Norway’s serious fraud office, Økokrim.

Rasmus Bjelland and his Brazilian wife were not among those arrested though their office was turned upside down. This led to suspicions that Bjelland had been in cahoots with the police prior to the raids and that the search of his office was purely for show. It didn’t take long before a price was put on his head and Bjelland went into hiding.

Rumours that a minor Norwegian property tycoon in Brazil now headed the hit list of several organised crime gangs soon reached most news desks, and Henning knew that Bjelland would not be easy to find. One day, however, he received a tip-off that Bjelland had settled with his creditors in Norway and had applied for witness protection – a request granted to only a few people since Kripos set up the programme in 2004.

After several phone calls back and forth, Henning finally tracked down a middleman who agreed to pass on a request for an interview, but it was turned down point blank. Nor did Bjelland take Henning’s bait that the article could serve as a pre-emptive defence brief. Henning had practically given up when the middleman contacted him and told him that Bjelland had changed his mind.

One overcast day in the summer of 2007 they met at Huk Beach. Henning remembers a man who was scared of the shadows and ready to do whatever it took to appear innocent and unjustly accused. In theory, talking to Norway’s most wanted man was a scoop, but Henning was left with a bad taste in his mouth – not necessarily because he believed that Bjelland was lying, but because he was allowing himself to be used as Bjelland’s mouthpiece. Another of Bjelland’s demands was that Henning would not write anything about his application for a new identity, which was being processed, since it would make him look even more suspicious; nor would he tell the readers that Bjelland was planning on staying in Norway. Henning had had to bite on this bullet, too. He even remembered the headline: I’m No Snitch.

Perhaps that’s the answer, Henning thinks to himself. Maybe the people who were looking for Bjelland thought that Henning knew Bjelland’s location since he had managed to interview him. But why torch Henning’s flat?

Perhaps they had made previous attempts at contacting Henning before opting for a more drastic approach. For all Henning knows, they may not have meant for anyone to die, only for Henning to become more co-operative. No matter what their motive was, it wouldn’t have worked. Henning never knew the identity of the middleman. Their only point of contact had been through an anonymous email address.

Henning looks up his own story on the Internet. With the benefit of hindsight he sees that it was definitely a good one. He took a fine picture of Bjelland from the back with a hood covering his head, looking out across Oslo Fjord. Mysterious and appealing. The story offered hitherto unpublished information. Reading his old article again stirs a memory in Henning of the man he was before Jonas died. He can hear the hunger in his own voice in the hunt for the big story. He recognises the feeling, not because he plans to write anything about Jonas but because he senses he might have hit on something.

He checks the Internet for more recent information about Bjelland, but his searches generate no hits. That must mean his application for a new identity was approved, Henning thinks. In other words, Rasmus Bjelland could be anywhere in Norway with a new face. Finding him again would be practically impossible. Nor is there much to suggest it would serve any purpose.

B-gjengen or Svenskeligaen, Henning thinks. He knows there aren’t many members of Svenskeligaen left in Oslo. And he can’t knock on the door of B-gjengen and ask them if they were behind a fire in a flat that led to the death of a six-year-old boy. He has to come up with another way to approach them.

But how?

The answer is obvious though it goes against the grain and holds little appeal for Henning.

Tore Pulli.

Before Thorleif unlocks his car, he stops and glances around. Cars and buses zoom up and down Bygdøy Allé. Pedestrians are quietly using the pedestrian crossing, but nobody is walking down Nobelsgate in his direction. His hands tremble as he opens the door and gets in. He checks the rear-view mirror. Sees nobody.

He takes a breath, starts the engine and drives towards the centre of Oslo where he finds a parking space in Kirkegaten. The engine has just stopped when there is a bang on the windscreen. Thorleif is startled and jumps, but all he sees is a man in tracksuit bottoms and a white T-shirt walk away from the car at a leisurely pace.

Then Thorleif notices the yellow Post-it note attached to the windscreen. He gets out, searches for the man and sees him disappear around the corner. He doesn’t look back. Thorleif snatches the note and reads what it says.

Oslo Cathedral. Five minutes.

A wave of panic sweeps through him, and he has to make an effort to breathe. It’s starting again. He leans forwards and supports himself against the bonnet of the car while he tries to calm down. He stands like this for a while before he straightens up and takes a deep breath. Then he walks up Kirkegaten in the direction of the cathedral whose spire and verdigris top soar towards the open sky. His footsteps are feeble, reluctant, as if deep down he is hoping they will refuse to lead him to his executioner, acquire a will of their own and carry him to safety. Thorleif looks up at the pedestrians coming towards him, trying to make eye contact, but nobody returns the looks he gives them.
I’m on my own
, he thinks.
I’m the only one who can deal with this.

He crosses Karl Johansgate and continues towards the cathedral while he wonders if he can stop himself from crying. The cathedral door is open, he sees, as he crosses the street by the taxi rank on Stortorvet. He enters the darkness and is instantly mesmerised by the silence that always fills a church space.

He hears mumbling, sees fingers pointing up at the ceiling, at the stained-glass windows and the paintings. He checks his watch. He needs to be at work in five minutes. He swears quietly to himself and instantly feels remorseful in view of the location and his surroundings. His shame evaporates when he detects the smell of leather behind him. He spins around and stares right into a grave face. The same face he learned to fear yesterday.