The Consorts of Death (31 page)

‘That was my reaction, too.’

I could hear him thinking aloud. ‘Nonethless, Veum. I still want you to carry on with your enquiries. Concentrate on
Hammersten
. That’s by far the best card we have.’

‘You’ll still cover my costs?’

‘Naturally, Veum. We’ll pass this onto the police anyway, so take the time you need.’

After ringing off, I sat looking out of the window. We had all heard about solicitors’ bulging wallets, but this was more like pockets stuffed with wads of notes. My creditors could look into the future with confidence, if this carried on.

The day after, it rained. It was mean, probing rain and made me turn up my jacket collar that bit extra; another reminder that winter was around the corner. The light was lower, the days shorter, and it was a long, long time to next summer. That didn’t matter all that much. I had more than enough to be getting on with.

The first thing I did was to call Vegard Vadheim, the detective at Bergen police station I got on best with. I told him I had some information for him about several earlier cases to do with the ongoing investigation into the Angedalen double killings. I asked him to dig up the files of two of them from their archives: the case against Mette Olsen and a man called David from the autumn of 1966 and the case against Vibecke Skarnes in 1974.

‘And what do I get in return?’

‘I’ve got some info, as I said. I think it will interest you.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Especially if you dig up all you have on Terje Hammersten at the same time.’

‘Hammersten? It’s never been easy to pin anything on him.’

‘I’ve noticed. If you have any files on the big seventies alcohol smuggling ring in Sogn and Fjordane, I may have something for you there, too.’

‘Doubt we have much on that lying around.’

‘Then I have something to tell you about it.’

We agreed I would drop round the police station after lunch.

Before that I met Cecilie Strand over a cup of coffee and a roll at the café in Sundt. From the corner table looking over
Torgallmenning
, the main square, it was possible to imagine we were the mother and father of the whole town, with a full perspective of everything that went on down there. We had no idea how wrong we were; or perhaps we did.

Cecilie sat listening attentively to everything I had to tell her from Førde, restricting myself to things directly relevant to my investigations. I only mentioned Trodalen Mads in a subordinate clause, although it didn’t seem to make much of an impression, and I referred to Grethe Mellingen as ‘our social services colleague there’. There were tears in her eyes when I told her about the time I met Jan face to face, and once again I was reminded of the close, intimate, almost family situation she, I and Jan had found
ourselves
in during the spring and summer of 1974, with Hans Haavik as a kindly uncle.

‘But … do they really think he did it?’

‘The Public Prosecutor definitely thinks so. And the evidence against him is compelling, I have to admit.’

‘But why would he do it? Such a brutal thing?’

I shrugged. ‘This girl, Silje, claimed she had been subjected to sexual abuse by her foster father. That may have been enough.’

She sent me a doubtful look.

‘By the way … something new about Svein Skarnes came to light while I was there too.’

‘Svein Skarnes?’

’Yes, just listen.’

I told her about the link between Skarnes and the smuggling, the murder of Ansgår Tveiten and Hammersten’s role in both affairs, as well as his appearance in Sunnfjord the day after the double murder.

‘The day after?’

‘Yes, and his alibi in Bergen is no less than Hans Haavik.’

I told her everything I knew, and in the end she looked as
bewildered
as I was becoming. In a way, it seemed as if everything and nothing fitted. Threads led in all directions, but none of them met, and the pattern was still a mystery, even for a trained observer like myself. But I was convinced there was a pattern.

‘Anything else new?’ I asked, drawing the session to a close.

She shrugged and drained her coffee cup. ‘No, I suppose by and large everything is the same here. But when you hear things like this you wonder about what we do. Whether we’re having a
beneficial
effect at all.’

‘That’s exactly what Hans said the other day in Førde. So I’ll say to you what I said to him: Yes, we are. You are. You might slip up a few times, but you’re successful many more times. Aren’t you?’

‘Mm … but then you dropped out.’

‘I didn’t drop out, Cecilie. I was gently given the boot. And I’ve continued in the same area, in my own way.’

‘As a private investigator.’ She smirked.

‘Yes.’

We took the broad marble stairs down to street level again. On two of the floors we were met by our own reflection in the same chequered mirrors that had been there since my childhood, in the days when taking the escalator up to the top of Sundt was the closest a little Bergensian got to an amusement park. We both looked somewhat disillusioned, like a disgruntled couple who had just agreed that there was no way of avoiding separation and divorce after all.

I gave her a quick hug on the pavement and went for a walk around a small lake called Lungegårdsvann and over to the library to kill time before meeting Vegard Vadheim. At the local branch I found the newspapers from 1974 on microfiche and refreshed my memory of the Vibecke Skarnes case, though I didn’t end up much the wiser.

Just before one o’clock I announced my presence at the police station and was met by Vadheim at the desk. When we arrived at his office, he knocked on the adjacent door, popped his head round and a female colleague of his, Cecilie Lyngmo, joined us.

‘Cecilie was the officer responsible for questioning Vibecke Skarnes at that time, so I thought it would be a good idea if she came along,’ he explained, and I nodded.

I said hello to Cecilie Lyngmo, whom I had met before but I had not been introduced. She was in her early fifties, a strapping woman, but she didn’t give the impression of being overweight. Her hair was greyish-brown, no sign of it having been dyed. She beamed when we shook hands, a firm grip.

‘A few years ago now, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘
Fru
Skarnes must have been out for some time.’

I nodded. ‘She lives in Ski, just outside Oslo, I’ve been told.’

‘She’s no danger to her surroundings, if you ask me.’

‘So, in your view, she could have gone free at the time?’

‘No, no. Even an unpremeditated murder is murder. But she found herself in an unhappy situation, as so many women do.’ We all sat down, and she continued: ‘Inside the sheltered walls of home they’re subjected to systematic violence, direct or indirect, for years. And the one time they defend themselves, it ends in – murder.’

‘But that was taken into account during the trial, wasn’t it?’

‘To a certain extent. But one character witness after another spoke up for the husband. The Counsel for the Prosecution had done a very good job there.’

‘Sounds to me as if you’d have preferred to work with the defence.’

She said drily: ‘Now and then it can be like that, when you’ve seen all the nuances. We investigators are victims of the case; we’re much closer to the case than the lawyers. And among other victims of the case I include the accused just as much as the real victims.’

‘Yes, I can remember several of the witnesses myself. I was in court for a couple of the days.’

Vadheim cleared his throat, to join the conversation. ‘You said something on the phone about new information, Veum.’

‘Yes, listen to this.’ In broad outline, I told them what I had heard about Svein Skarnes and the smuggling racket.

They listened attentively. In the end, Vadheim said: ‘But all you have is allegations made by this Dale, an ex-employee of Skarnes. No concrete evidence, no documentation.’

‘Would he have any reason to lie though?’

‘Maybe not. But you never know. An ex-employee, conflicts in the workplace, chance to get back at …’

‘Yes, but Skarnes has been dead for ten years. How can you get back at someone who’s been in his grave since 1974?’

‘No, you’re right, of course.’

I turned back to Cecilie Lyngmo. ‘When you questioned Vibecke Skarnes long ago … what sort of impression did you have of the marriage?’

‘As I’ve already said, and the main point of the defence’s plea was that Vibecke Skarnes was an abused housewife who
happened
to push her husband down the stairs and accidentally kill him. She painted a very credible picture of a tragic marriage. They didn’t have children, either, until they adopted one. And he was a pretty restless chap. She had little to be happy about and received minimal understanding from her husband. On top of that, she hinted that he had committed a number of infidelities without covering up any more than he was absolutely duty-bound to do. I remember she was very suspicious of his secretary.’

‘A classic affair, in that case. I met her by the way. The secretary.
Fru
, or was it
frøken
? Berge or Borge, I think.’

‘Well, all this is history now. She was sentenced, and the appeal was unsuccessful. Now she’s out. So what use would any new information be?’

I shrugged. ‘Justice is a word in my dictionary,’ I said.

‘Yes, but what’s the point? The husband’s dead, as you said. The wife’s served her sentence. The son …’

‘Exactly. The son, or the adopted son, to be accurate. He’s alive, and right now he’s locked up, charged with a double murder in Angedalen.’

She glanced at Vadheim. ‘Yes, you mentioned something about that.’ Then she turned back to me. ‘And this is the same boy?’

‘One of the many parallels between these cases.’ I went through the case for them, including the connection between Klaus Libakk, Svein Skarnes and the smuggling ring. ‘And one more thing,’ I concluded. ‘When I was talking to Jan Egil, we eventually touched on what happened in 1974. And then he said something which never came out at the time, neither during the police questioning nor at the trial.’

I had their undivided attention.

‘He claimed that while he was sitting in the lounge playing with his toys he heard the doorbell ring. Then someone arguing with his father.’

‘Yes, the mother,’ Vadheim said.

‘But she didn’t need to ring. She had a key.’

‘Yes, yes, but if she knew her husband was at home anyway.’

‘No, it doesn’t make sense. At least there’s an element of doubt here. Someone might have visited Svein Skarnes that day. It could’ve been Terje Hammersten, for example.’

‘Hammersten! So that’s why you wanted to know what we had on him.’

‘At any rate, this Harald Dale claims that Hammersten
physically
threatened Skarnes several times in 1973 in connection with the debt he was left with, after the smuggling business fell apart in Sogn and Fjordane earlier that year.’

‘But why didn’t all of this come out at the time?’

‘Because Dale was too scared to risk his own skin, of course. And, if we are to believe the rumours, Hammersten had shown what he was capable of when he did Ansgår Tveiten in. But, as you said on the phone earlier today, Vadheim: It’s never been easy to pin anything on him.’

‘And the same applies now. As long as all this is pure
speculation
. Here at the station we need tangible proof.’

‘I know. So what have you got on him from the past?’

Vadheim sighed and held out a thick file. ‘Look. This is our friend Terje Hammersten’s record. Fat, heavy and not very
delectable
. Most of it’s trivial stuff, frequent use of violence in
connection
with threats. He’s what they used to call a torpedo in America, a heavy.’

I opened my palms. ‘There you go!’

‘But never anything big. Just minor matters. He’s had a few
relatively
short prison terms.’

‘Yes, I can remember he got one in 1970.’

He nodded, distracted. ‘The longest stretch he had was two years.’ He flicked through the pile of papers. ‘From 1976 to ’78. I see there’s a lot of material about the Bygstad killing, too, but he had a cast-iron alibi in Bergen, so nothing there.’

‘The alibi was drinking pals, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, but there are several … neighbours. The man who ran the grocery where they bought beer. A prostitute he’d been with.’

‘Easy enough to get if you lean hard on the right people. Or if you have some cash to wave around. But you didn’t manage to crack the alibis, I see.’

‘No, not that time. And now it’s definitely too late.’

I nodded. ‘What about the other case I asked you to dig up? That’s even older.’

‘Yes.’ He took out another file, considerably thinner, and opened it. ‘The case against David Pettersen and Mette Olsen,
November
1966. He was given eight years, she was acquitted. He topped himself after the sentence was pronounced.’

‘Yes, I know. But … were they picked up at customs by chance, or were there grounds for suspecting them?’

He began to flick through.

‘She thought they’d been set up,’ I added.

He took out the documents from the case file and flicked through to the end. Then he nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. An
anonymous
telephone call, it says here. August 30th, 13.05. The same afternoon they were nabbed.’

‘A telephone call? Where from? From Copenhagen?’

‘Nope. From Bergen.’

‘From Bergen! Was any attempt ever made to trace the call?’

He nodded again. ‘It would certainly have helped the defence during the trial. But they never got any further than one of the telephone booths at the railway station.’

‘But who the hell would want to inform on them in Bergen? I assume the drugs were coming here?’

‘Here, and maybe travelling further. We’ll never know. But think back, Veum. This was in 1966, right at the beginning of the new drugs boom. It was still tied up with dope romanticism and hash heaven, sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll. No one knew about the consequences, what tragedies and misery it would lead to for coming generations.’