The Fourth Man (13 page)

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Authors: K.O. Dahl

Tags: #Suspense, #Crime, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Detectives, #Police Procedural, #Police, #Oslo (Norway)

BOOK: The Fourth Man
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When Gunnarstranda came into the office, he just managed to nod to Yttergjerde and wrestle off his coat before the telephone began to ring. He picked up the receiver and barked into it as usual: ‘Please be brief.’
‘Frølich here.’
‘Good morning. Up early and no weeping?’
‘I talked to Langås yesterday, Reidun Vestli’s ex-husband.’
‘You’re not letting go, then?’
‘He said something about a chalet. Elisabeth had stayed with Reidun Vestli in a chalet in Valdres.’
‘So?’
‘I thought I was supposed to play with an open hand, as you requested. I intend to go there now and find out whether Elisabeth is hiding in the chalet. She might be. I think …’
‘I know about the chalet,’ Gunnarstranda said, immediately regretting his interruption. The line went quiet and he knew he would have to bring the silence to an end. He said: ‘It was in Vestre Slidre.’
‘It
was?
’
‘It burned down a few days ago.’
‘Burned?’
‘I happened to be in the area by chance.’
‘And which chance was that?’
Gunnarstranda stretched back in his chair. He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and stuck it between his lips. He was silent.
‘Hello,’ Frølich yelled impatiently. ‘Are you there?’
‘Frank Frølich, have you got a chair to hand?’
‘Out with it! Tell me!’
‘Perhaps you’d better sit down. I received a report yesterday, addressed to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, and I wouldn’t have taken any notice, had it not been for the land registry document. A property burned to the ground, a chalet belonging to Reidun Vestli. The Nord-Aural police report talks about finding long bones in the ashes of the chalet.’
Silence again.
‘Long bones, Frølich. Do you know what that means?’
‘It doesn’t have to be her.’
‘Of course not.’
Silence again.
‘But Reidun Vestli’s chalet burned down a few days ago. What is special about this is that someone was in the chalet at the time of the fire. If Reidun Vestli hadn’t lent the chalet to Elisabeth Faremo, it might have been a thief who broke in, went to sleep with a fag in his mouth and caused the fire. But that’s not what we thought, is it? We both thought there was a chance she might have let Elisabeth use the chalet, didn’t we?’
Frølich’s voice, clearly strained: ‘How are you going to approach this case?’
‘Standard procedure. Look for DNA to establish the identity of the remains.’
‘How?’
‘We’ve been to the Faremo flat.’
‘Find anything?’
‘A hairbrush. On her bed. I’ve requested a DNA profile and I’ll match it with that of the bones in the chalet.’
This time there was a longer pause before Frølich’s question: ‘When are you expecting an answer?’
‘Any time now.’
After Gunnarstranda had put down the receiver he sat looking glumly at the telephone. Yttergjerde turned to him. ‘How did he take it?’
Gunnarstranda lounged back and said: ‘How do you think he took it?’
 
That night Frank Frølich didn’t sleep. The duvet was drenched with sweat, as if he’d had a fever. When he tried to get out of bed, his legs almost gave way. His head was buzzing. He was thinking:
I have to go there, have to find the chalet.
He had no idea where it was, no idea where he should start searching. Yet he couldn’t just lie there doing nothing.
He had to find out where the chalet was. There was only one person he could ask.
So he got dressed and left the house. It was freezing, although he didn’t feel the cold. The ice on the car windscreen was as hard as the road surface. He found a scraper, but it had no purchase. He banged on the ice with his fist, hammered away, but that didn’t help. In no time at all he was out of breath and tired, to no effect. He got into the car, started it up and put the defroster on full. He waited apathetically behind the wheel until the ice had melted. Then he drove off. He went through the city to Vækerø and took a right turning into Vækerøveien.
He parked alongside one of the many picket fences. Oslo West lay in the dark, apart from the odd lamp posts casting yellow-grey cones of light between the terraced houses. After getting out of his car, he went over to Reidun Vestli’s house. It was night, but he couldn’t care less. He regarded his hands for a few seconds. They were shaking. Would it be right or wrong to talk to her now? He had no idea and continued on his way, passing a couple of cars with iced-up windows. Shortly afterwards he banged the door knocker. Nothing happened. He listened, but couldn’t hear any sounds inside. Went back down the steps and walked slowly around the house. The night frost had scattered crystals of ice over the soil in the flower beds. He retreated and stood back a few metres, studying the house. It was the last in the row. He walked back onto the frozen lawn, leaving clear footprints in the hoar frost. He went to the veranda – it was poorly maintained, a kind of decking made with pressure-impregnated wood. The railing had been put together with stained slats which were going rotten. A couple of withered potted plants had been shoved into the corner. In the centre of the veranda there was a green pot half full of sand and old cigarette ends.
Long bones in the ashes.
He walked to the window and spied through a crack between the curtains. Came face to face with two white feet sticking up in the air. The nail of one big toe was varnished. He knocked on the door. No reaction. The feet didn’t move. He tried the veranda door. It was unlocked.
She was lying on her back with her mouth in a rigid grimace, her eyes staring up and behind her as if trying to catch eye contact with someone residing in the wall. She was dead. He didn’t need any doctor or forensic scientist to confirm that side of the matter. But he did feel tired all of a sudden.
Who will mourn you?
he thought and felt the nausea rising.
Long bones in the ashes of the fire.
Sleeping pills scattered around the upturned glass on the bedside table. Some had fallen on the floor; some were in the pool of vomit on the pillow.
Cause of death: poisoning or suffocation as a result of vomit produced by the body’s reaction to poisoning.
The odds? 1: 2. He guessed suffocation. However, the nausea he felt could not be attributed to her, to the stench of the dead body, the stench of dried vomit or the stench of stale air and old cigarettes. Nausea was his body’s reaction to this universe of death, of mutilation; the absence of grief, the absence of normality.
Where was Elisabeth’s grief when she lost her brother? He sank back against the wall. Who will
grieve over you? he thought again, contemplating the pitiful feet protruding from under the blanket.
Your ex-husband? Who will presumably hate you more now that the chalet you quarrelled over has burned down.
He wanted to be sick. Long bones. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. Breathed in deeply. Where was the suicide note? No envelope, no shaky writing on a piece of paper, no indication of any leave-taking in the immediate vicinity. He cast a glance at the computer. It was switched off. But Gunnarstranda was bound to seize it. Nausea was rising in him again, but this time it was a reaction to himself. His own pitiful condition.
Long bones
. Here he was, next to a corpse and fearing for the life of another. And what if it
was
Elisabeth who had died in the fire? Could that explain why Reidun Vestli would kill herself? He swallowed his queasiness, stood up, went out onto the veranda and gulped lungfuls of fresh air. Supporting himself on the rotten railing, he sat down on the edge of the veranda and phoned Gunnarstranda.
 
The Key
 
 
Frank Frølich sat up in his all too spacious double bed, looking at the pillow and duvet beside him. No one had been there since Elisabeth – the night she vanished and Arnfinn Haga was murdered in Loenga. The bedding had not been changed; the creases in the sheet had been made by her body. She had left behind one single black hair, a line winding over the crumpled pillow like a path across mountainous terrain on a map. Next to the bed, on the bedside table, there was an empty wine bottle with a candle stump in the top. A makeshift light – her work, one night when there was a power cut. Afterwards the flickering light had cast dramatic shadows of their bodies on the wall.
This reminiscence could equally well have emanated from a book he had read, or a film he had seen a long time ago. The drawer in the bedside table on her side was not properly closed. Naked, he got up and walked around the bed. No earrings, no rings left behind on the table top. He was about to close the drawer properly when he spotted something. He pulled out the drawer. It was a book. Poetry. Her book. The one she often had her nose in. For a brief instant he saw himself coming into the bedroom from the bathroom: Elisabeth naked on the bed, her chin supported by her arms; she looked up at him and closed the book.
Her book. The images were no longer faded. It was like holding a fragment of Elisabeth between his hands. He perched on the bed, excited by his discovery.
He opened the book with trembling hands. There was a bookmark. The sight of it caused a shiver to run down his spine. It was an embroidered bookmark – delicate – white silk with black designs embroidered in tiny stitches. The image the signs formed gave him a shock. It was the same motif as Elisabeth’s tattoo. He moved the bookmark to one side and read:
I forget no one
pain also passes
along a snapped twig
I forget no one
if I kiss you
 
He sank back down onto the bed. The words evoked their decisive encounter: the evening she had followed him home. The crush on the Metro, the sound of footsteps on the tarmac, the image of her silhouette against the street lamp. He could feel her warm breath on his cheek.
He flicked back. The words were the last verse of a long poem written by the deceased lesbian writer, Gunvor Hofmo.
He read the first verse of the poem:
I have lost my face
In these wild rhythms
Only my white body dances
 
Was that how she saw herself? A body without a face? He read again: ‘I forget no one if I kiss you’. The image of Elisabeth dissolved as he read. Had she left the book on purpose? Or had she simply forgotten it? A replica of Elisabeth’s tattoo, so peculiar to her, and unlike anything else, an intimate signature taken from her body, placed over the sentence she had used to initiate their relationship –
I forget no one if I kiss you.
He could hear Gunnarstranda’s voice in his head: long bones. The words were immediately drowned by the noise of the crackling flames in his head. An image: a gigantic bonfire, a house aflame, a glowing heat, window panes exploding. Nothing else visible except the contours of a body enveloped in flames. Zooming in. The contours materialize into flesh – flesh blistering, melting, body fat hissing, burning with a yellow flame until it is carbon. His thoughts stood still, paralysed by the vision until he began to feel the book in his hands again.
If they were Elisabeth’s remains in the ashes of Reidun Vestli’s weekend chalet, if Elisabeth was dead, how was he ever going to recover?
He read the poem again. New images in his consciousness: him in the act of making love, a long time ago, the image duller, no colours. Elisabeth putting down the book and saying it wasn’t possible to read the same book twice.
Then he knew: it was about an old love. The sentence referred to one person in particular. He stood up and gazed blindly out of the window: Elisabeth initiating a relationship with him back then had to mean betraying someone else. But whom had she betrayed? Reidun Vestli? Could it be so simple? No, it couldn’t. This was about forgetting. This was something from the distant past. But who was it she didn’t want to forget?
And who was unable to answer? Her brother was dead. Reidun Vestli – dead. He weighed the embroidered bookmark in his hand. Embroidery. A motif tattooed on Elisabeth’s hip. There was a chance that someone had seen this tattoo before.
After a long shower and some breakfast, he switched on the computer and logged onto the net, Yellow Pages, Tattooists, Search. The list of outlets was long: Purple Pain in Heimdal, Odin’s Mark in Lillestrøm, Ow! Tattoo and Piercing in Bergen, Hole in One in Bodø. He narrowed the search down to the Oslo region and printed out the list. He looked at it.
Almost like working as a cop again. A house-to-house job.
Perhaps he should do that? Report back to work and continue the investigation as part of his job? He dismissed the thought, left his flat and went down to his car.
It was a trek, in and out of tattoo parlours, walls covered with kitsch – motorbikes, skulls, sword and flames, roses, scorpions. In most of the places young girls were lying on their stomachs having a decoration tattooed onto the small of their backs. In others they lay on their backs and had roses or calligraphic symbols on their groins and thighs. One man wanted a crown of thorns around his arm; another wanted the name Leif Ericson on his leg. The routine was repeated: first of all, Frank Frølich showed the photograph of Elisabeth, then the bookmark with the unusual motif on. It looked like crow’s feet: strange lines with curls on. He didn’t find anything remotely similar. Many of the tattooists supplied photographs of their body decorations. Most of the practitioners looked like followers of the motorbike culture. But not a nibble anywhere.
In between visits, he stayed at home continuing the search on the net. He searched the words from the poem, a variety of word combinations, but without success. It was while he was going through the list on the printout for the third time that his eye was caught by a business called the Personal Art Tattoo Studio. What was special about the shop was that it was located in Askim.
It was a shot in the dark, but Jonny Faremo’s body was found there – in Askim. He might as well try there as anywhere.
He got ready, picked up his car keys and took the lift down. Out on the street, he breathed in the damp, heavy air. It had turned mild again. It wasn’t raining, but the air was full of vapour, a grey moist consistency, tiny drops of water, hovering in the mist and gently, ever so gently, floating to the ground.
After getting in the car, he took a wrong turn and ended up driving towards Olso city centre instead of towards Ski. So he headed for Simensbråten, went up Vårveien, over the hump and turned right, down Ekebergveien. He braked just before Elisabeth’s apartment block. A sudden impulse almost made him come to a complete halt.
You aren’t dead. I refuse to believe that
. It was pathetic, but the emotion was strong. He was certain she was there, in her flat. He reversed into the car park, got out and ran down the steps to the Faremo apartment. The door hadn’t been sealed. He stood gasping for breath. And rang. Not a sound. He rang again, listened and knocked. The apartment was dead.
But there were sounds coming from the neighbouring flat. He turned towards the adjacent door. The sounds from behind it died away. He went over and rang the bell. The sound of feet. A shadow flitted across the peephole in the door. More seconds ticked past until the chain rattled and the door was opened.
‘Nice to see you again,’ Frølich said.
The old man stared at him. His lips were quivering; his face was distorted into a grimace with a fixed squint into a sun long since disappeared.
‘We met a few days ago. I was making enquiries about Elisabeth Faremo. You said she had packed a rucksack and had gone away. You’ve spoken to the police about the same conversation. Do you remember me?’
The man nodded.
‘I was wondering about something,’ Frank Frølich said. ‘You’ve lived here longer than the Faremos, haven’t you?’
The man nodded again.
‘Do you know how long they lived together here? Did they move in at the same time?’
‘Why —?’ The man spluttered and found his voice. ‘Why are you here asking questions?’
Frølich chewed that one over. In the end he said: ‘For personal reasons.’
The man gave him a long, hard look. Eventually the answer seemed to pass muster. At least Frølich was unable to detect any scepticism in the other’s eyes when he said: ‘She moved in first. The brother came a few years afterwards.’
‘Can you remember what year it was when she moved in?’
The man shook his head.
‘Try.’
‘It must be a good ten years ago. Must be.’
‘And she lived on her own at first?’
The man shook his head. ‘There were a number of chaps, of course, particularly one, before the brother came to live here.’
‘Chaps?’
‘Yes, well, she’s a good-looking girl and there have been men, you know, but there was one who lasted quite a long time. I don’t think he lived here; he just stayed here for stints. I remember because I was a bit doubtful. He was one of our new countrymen, you know. He went off, thank God. At first we thought Jonny had given him the heave-ho, but Jonny was her brother, wasn’t he?’
‘One of our new countrymen?’
‘Yes, not a Negro, more like a Turk or a Slav. Slightly rounded head and long nose. Can’t remember what his name was, though. Something with an I … or was it an A … Ika? Aka? Nope.’ He shook his head. ‘Time passes; we get older.’
The information wasn’t a lot of use. Frank Frølich was being a policeman now. He had a job to do.
Elisabeth Faremo, ex-lover, long bones.
No resonance in his head, no fever, no disturbing images, no crackling flames. He pinched his arm and felt pain.
It was still early morning as he crossed Mosseveien driving towards Fiskvollbukta and Mastemyr. The journey to Askim took three-quarters of an hour. He was driving against the rush-hour traffic and the late-winter sunrise. He passed Fossum Bridge and the motorway construction site. When he turned off the roundabout on Europaveien, down towards the station and into Askim town centre he found the tattoo studio right in front of him. It was next to the offices of Lilleng Frisør in a solitary yellow building beside the railway crossing gates which divided the small town into two. On the other side of the railway line, opposite the beginning of the pedestrian area, there was a cafeteria which looked like a red military barracks.
The tattoo shop hadn’t opened yet. Frank Frølich decided to go for a walk around the town. He wandered through the pedestrian zone and turned right along a winding road which finally ended in a crossroads with traffic lights. Large square buildings dominated the landscape. This town could have been anywhere – flat land broken up by barrack architecture and special offers on groceries. But behind it he could glimpse greater ambitions: adventure pools, a manufacturing plant — the old Viking factories which had, as usual, been converted into a shopping centre.
As Frank Frølich was strolling over the railway lines on his way back, ten minutes later, he heard the familiar roar of a Harley in the bend by the station.
The man was a rotund, jovial type with long curly hair. Frølich showed him the photograph of Elisabeth Faremo, but he didn’t recognize her. Then he gave him the bookmark with the design of Elisabeth’s tattoo on. Which he did recognize.

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