The Man in the Window (18 page)

Chapter 23

Old Friends

    Gunnarstranda strolled down Vogts gate searching for the workshop run by Stokmo's son. He flipped a few bits of plastic dangling down at face height to the side - this was an invention whose purpose he could not begin to understand. Were these strips supposed to signify something or were they an aid for blind people to find their way in winter? There was ice on the pavement. He squeezed himself up against the wall as the tram passed. Finally he found the right house number. However, since there was no sign over the entrance, he stood hesitating before going into the back yard. He passed a dirty fork- lift truck with a petrol tank behind the seat and he stopped to eye a rusty iron staircase running diagonally up the end wall of the two-storey building. Every step consisted of three parallel grooves, yet a slippery sausage of ice had attached itself to the edge of most of the steps. Gunnarstranda took a good grip of the hand rail on the way up. The window was dark. He peeped in through the pane and found himself facing an old Singer sewing machine on a workbench. Behind it, a toboggan lay on its side on the floor, and along the walls were cardboard boxes filled with unidentifiable scrap. At the back of the room he could make out the shape of a door. He pulled at the external door. It was locked. He straightened up and scoured the area. The view was limited to the houses around the back yard. They were old buildings; the plaster was crumbling off all of them. The lower part of the walls in the yard was half-timbered. A tram rattled past, and a car hooted its horn in the street. Down in the yard there were two abandoned washing machines stacked on top of a pile of pipes. A wide door opened into a workshop containing gas cylinders for welding apparatus and huge wire-cutters on coiled cables. Gunnarstranda pulled his coat tighter around him and picked his way down the steps with care. The snow had drifted up the walls. Clumps of white snow hung from the plaster. It looked like there had been a snowball fight. He peered in through the half-open workshop door. No one around. He continued round the corner into the yard and found out why the snow was stuck high up on the wall. A Norlett snow-blower was positioned beneath a wire glass window. Inside, there was light.

    Three heads turned towards the door as he opened it. Two men wearing oil-stained overalls sat at a table along one wall, with their packed lunches and Thermos flasks between them. The third man in the room, a fierce-looking individual with a bushy moustache, sat behind a desk. On his head he was wearing a back-to- front baseball cap, inscribed with SAMVIRKE ASSURANCE.

    'I'm looking for Jonny Stokmo,' Detective Inspector Gunnarstranda said.

    'He's not here!' said the man with the moustache good-naturedly, raising a cup to his mouth. The cup was furnished with the same legend as the cap. He slurped his coffee.

    'But you know the name?' the policeman said.

    One of the overalled men grinned, revealing two teeth in his top set, like a mouse sniffing in the air. The lenses of his glasses were impenetrable.

    The moustachioed man took his time to put down the cup before exchanging glances with the other two and starting to grin as well. 'Bloody hell,' he sighed, sucking the coffee off his moustache. His outburst set the third man off. 'Grill them,' he whinnied. 'Grill them with spices.'

    The man with the moustache ignored him. 'Would you like some coffee?' he asked the policeman. 'Don't listen to Moses,' he said, inclining his head towards the man with the whinny. 'He's crazy.'

    'Barking mad,' said the man with the glasses and the mouse-teeth.

    'Half-baked,' replied Moses.

    The man at the desk eyed Moses. 'What are you going on about?' he asked. 'No one can understand a word!' The moustache gestured towards Gunnarstranda.

    The latter perceived this as a suitable moment to reveal his identity. 'Police Inspector Gunnarstranda,' he said. 'Murder Squad.'

    'Oh, shit,' answered the man at the desk, smiling into his moustache.

    'Steam them in butter,' said Moses, causing the man with the mouse-teeth to snigger and slap his thigh. 'Steam them in butter,' the man with the mouse-teeth repeated. 'With macaroni.' 'No - pickle them,' Moses said. 'Put them in barrels - in cod-liver oil and salt in the 69 position.'

    'Moses is trying to think up horrible ways to eat cod,' the man with the moustache explained. 'Pull yourself together now, you halfwit,' he said to Moses.

    'Think of something else for dinner,' the man with the mouse-teeth said.

    'Anyone here know Jonny Stokmo?'

    'That's my father,' the man with the moustache said, taking off his cap and revealing a shiny pate surrounded by a wreath of grey hair gathered into a long ponytail.

    'I need an urgent chat with your father,' Gunnarstranda said.

    'Understand,' said Junior. 'Just a shame that he doesn't. What do you reckon, Moses?'

    'At the farm,' Moses said.

    'Christ, you are crazy,' the man with the moustache replied, swivelling his chair towards Gunnarstranda. 'To hear the truth, listen to drunks and nutters.'

    'Where's the farm?' Gunnarstranda asked in a soft voice.

    Junior swivelled round on the chair and took a newspaper from the table. 'You look younger in the photo,' he said, showing him the paper.

    Gunnarstranda contemplated the picture of himself.

    'You've got hair here,' Junior said.

    Gunnarstranda had always been irritated by the photograph the newspaper used. He had just returned from a holiday in southern Europe. In the picture he was frowning like an idiot. His face was as red as a lobster, he had bags under his eyes and because he was so short he was looking up at the camera. 'Where's the farm?' he repeated with authority.

    'Do you know Bendik Fleming?' the moustachioed man asked.

    Gunnarstranda nodded slowly.

    'He sends his regards,' the moustachioed man said.

    Gunnarstranda nodded again: 'That's a long time ago. I think…' Gunnarstranda ruminated. 'It must have been in '92,' he said at length. 'I think he went down for a couple of years…'

    'No problem with your memory,' the man with the mouse-teeth said, taking a slice of bread from his lunch box with black, oil-stained hands. He bit off a large chunk and began to chew, with thoughtful eyes.

    'How is Bendik?' Gunnarstranda asked.

    'Drinks a lot.'

    'That's not so good,' Gunnarstranda said with sympathy.

    'But he doesn't turn nasty any more when he's drunk. He laughs.'

    'Better than killing people,' Gunnarstranda said. 'Send him my regards,' he added and cleared his throat.

    All three of them stared at him.

    'Hasn't your father got a telephone?' Gunnarstranda asked.

    'Yes he has, but he's switched it off - a mobile.'

    'Why's he switched it off?'

    'I imagine he suspects you will ring,' the man with the moustache grinned.

    'Where's the farm?' Gunnarstranda repeated gently.

    The man called Moses slipped off the table he was sitting on, crossed the floor and pointed to a framed aerial photograph hanging on the opposite wall: a farm from the air. 'There,' he said, grinning at his boss behind the desk.

    Gunnarstranda checked his watch. He would be eating out in a short time. So he asked Stokmo Junior if he would mind drawing him a map.

    Two hours later he opened the door to Hansken, a restaurant where Tove Granaas was waiting for him, engrossed in a book.

    Gunnarstranda's first, and somewhat less private, encounter with Tove had taken place at a meeting of the local garden association. The theme advertised on the posters had been lilies. Since he had known the speaker, and had neither wanted to meet him nor believed the man could teach him anything new, he would probably have stayed at home that evening too, had the chairman not rung him a few hours before and reminded him about the meeting. Old Bohren, the speaker, was an arrogant, retired bureaucrat who loved to provoke the policeman into trivial rows over botanical phenomena.

    He had told the chairman of the garden association there was no point in trying to get him to join; he already subscribed to the magazine, and the chairman knew this very well. Becoming a member was quite out of the question, a point which he had made perfectly clear a month before when giving an association slide show about indicator plants in lime soil.

    Nevertheless Gunnarstranda trotted along to the gymnasium where folding tables with the requisite plastic chairs stood in rows alongside the wall bars. He arrived through the emergency exit doors, nodded to the left and right and found a free seat in the far corner. Most of the audience arrived in pairs at such meetings. In fact, it didn't bother him to sit on his own, he thought, so long as he got away from Bohren - the pompous pensioner from the Department of Justice who loved the sound of his own voice. He was anxiously keeping an eye on the entrance when an arm bearing a coffee flask entered his field of vision. 'Is this seat free?' she asked. But before Gunnarstranda could find his voice, she had sat down.

    'Nice to see you again,' she said. He knew he had seen her before and searched the archives of his memory.

    'You questioned me concerning a murder,' she explained, on noticing his reaction. 'At work,' she added.

    'Tove,' he stammered, once again falling for her smile. 'Tove Granaas.'

    'Imagine you not recognizing me when we last met.'

    Gunnarstranda was embarrassed to think of her in the audience at his talk. 'Did you come to the last meeting?'

    Her hand woke him from his reverie again. 'I've been stalking you,' she said. 'As a murder squad detective, you're almost a celebrity.'

    A man at the neighbouring table raised his cup and signalled that it was empty. She grabbed the flask in front of her and passed it to him in one movement. A light waft of perfume brushed his cheek as she whirled back. In her plain knitted sweater and jeans there was something summery about her. Her hands were small with strong fingers and short nails. Hands that have seen work, he thought. When he looked up again, her attentive eyes were still there. She supported her head on her hands and talked about the problems of growing narcissi. 'I put them in a proper bed, set the bulbs in autumn, but something always goes wrong and they never come up.'

    'Poor drainage. Dig a deep hole and fill it with leca pellets or sand.'

    'How deep?'

    'Deep enough for the bulbs to be three bulb lengths under the ground.'

    'You make it sound so easy.'

    'Put lots in every hole, lots of bulbs, fifteen, twenty, then there'll be a beautiful clump of them.' In his enthusiasm he bent over the table and before he could compose himself, he heard his own voice say: 'I can help you.'

    Once the words were said, he could have bitten off his tongue.

    'Well, it's too late now anyway,' she answered. 'As it's winter.' Gunnarstranda gulped with gratitude. 'You can get them started indoors and put them out when the ground is frost-free,' he consoled her.

    A little later they saw Bohren come in, without a tie, but with a ridiculous neckerchief around his neck. With his long body supported on a stick, he stood surveying the room with displeasure. The policeman knew he was being watched. But as soon as he felt Bohren's eyes on him, he looked away.

    'There's Bohren,' Tove said in a loud voice.

    He stared right at them, but made no move.

    Gunnarstranda nodded slowly.

    The measured gaze the pensioner returned was microscopic. The retired department head twisted gently and hobbled off into the room, away from them.

    'I hope I haven't taken his seat?' Tove whispered, in a conspiratorial voice.

    'For God's sake, stay where you are,' Gunnarstranda whispered back in the same hushed tones. And for the third time in an unusually short time she gave his arm a light squeeze.

    Since then neither of them had been to any meetings at the local garden association. However, they had been to the restaurant three times.

    As Gunnarstranda sat down and met her smile, he was looking forward to the conversation as much as the meal.

Chapter 24

The House in the Forest

    Company halt, Frølich thought, remembering forced marches in full army kit many years before. The rain falling down from the sky, uniform soaked, stiff, cold, his reluctance to move a single muscle. The only way out had been to wait, stand still and wait until the sky or an officer announced a change in their situation. Now: Eva- Britt and he were at the restaurant. Even though they had finished eating some time ago, even though he had a hundred things to do, it behoved him to wait calmly. It was a ritual the two of them had lapsed into because Eva-Britt had always hated hurrying. But it was also a ritual he was beginning to loathe from the bottom of his heart. There were two similar feelings competing for the upper hand behind his calm exterior: the feeling of stress imposed by inactivity and the feeling of annoyance because he allowed himself to be cowed by her need for contentment. He stretched his legs, ripped the foil off the third or fourth toothpick and looked around. At the adjacent table sat a young chrome-dome listening to a woman of the same age who gesticulated with both hands when she talked. Frølich had picked up that she was a waitress. She was telling stories about insufferable customers to chrome-dome, who was stifling a yawn and fiddling with a toothpick, too.

    Frølich's eyes searched the room and at length they settled on Eva-Britt's face. She had been talking without stop for quite some time. Frank had no idea what she was talking about.

    'How did I end up here?' he thought and drained his glass with enforced patience while watching the talking face; the lower lip he had once longed to nibble to pieces, the eyes he had compared with a dash of the Mediterranean, enclosed behind the lowered eyelids. He asked himself the question: 'How did
we
end up here?'

    A few years ago it would have been both natural and feasible to stop this babbling with a kiss. Today she would be angry, offended and ashamed on his behalf. And he may well have knocked the glasses over in the attempt.

    He thought of her navel, the hollow in her stomach, the rounding of her stomach when she stretched in the morning. They were images that had to be sought out, which no longer fell into place of their own accord.

    'Where's the spark gone?' he thought, looking at one long leg under the table. Knee-length boots, Eva-Britt's trademark, the plinth to carry her body. Footwear emphasizing the erotic mystery that women's legs point towards and men's eyes seek out.

    Now he no longer felt any spark. And he imagined she would also have the same feeling of emptiness. 'Why do we pretend?' he wondered.

    They had eaten a fillet of lumpsucker fish. The waiter took their plates. And at long last she was quiet as the man cleared the table. For that fragment of a second he detected panic in Eva-Britt's eyes. As soon as the waiter had gone, she started up again. Now she was having a go at TV hosts and the banality flourishing in new TV series.

    'Isn't that right?' she asked, and for one split second he caught a hint of aggression in her eyes. She may have thought she had caught him letting his mind wander.

    'We had all this in the discussion on TV last night, didn't we?' he answered slowly. 'The topic was done to death.'

    She was hurt. Because the answer was too brutal, he thought. In other words, being uninterested, or not feigning interest, is too brutal. However, he could feel his irritation growing and hardening because she was hurt by his sense that he was wasting his time. Eva-Britt was hurt, never angry, but she would not allow herself to reveal too much of the hurt. Instead she fled into a self- constructed state of mind, a sort of wasteland where she did not perceive the essence of a change in mood and the substance of an atmosphere - Eva-Britt's demilitarized zone. Here the important thing was to be disarming, to find neutral ground as soon as possible. As usual she blew out her cheeks. 'I am just
so
full,' she said, imitating a beach ball. 'All blob!' This word was supposed to represent the inflated cheeks. 'All blob!'

    Frank Frølich gave a leaden nod.

    'That fish almost exploded my
taste buds!'

    Frølich nodded again as the waiter came with coffee and liqueurs. As she sipped her cognac, she rolled her tongue around her mouth. 'Mm,' she said, smacking her lips. 'Mm, mm, now I think my
taste buds
are going
berserk.'

    Frølich nodded.

    'The last time we were here, we had snails for starters. Do you remember? And ravioli with sage and pure butter, un-ex-pur-gat-ed fat, and afterwards filet mignon!'

    Frølich nodded.

    'I was so full. I just sat like this…'

    Her cheeks bulged.

    Frølich sub-vocalized the words.

    'All blob!'

    He nodded again. Afterwards he looked out of the window because he knew she would be extra hurt if he checked the time too obviously. The jeweller's clock glowed on the other side of the street. It said ten minutes past ten.

      He managed to negotiate himself an hour at work, but on condition that he went back to hers afterwards. At midnight he was back. Eva-Britt had just finished in the bathroom. Since she was wearing a nightdress, Julie must have gone to bed. He was tired and took a hot shower. When he had finished she was already in bed. She was lying under the duvet, naked and warm. As soon as he joined her, she grabbed his sex with both hands. They made love in a variety of positions for a long time, but he was fantasizing about Anna. Afterwards he slept like a log, still dreaming about Anna. He dreamt she was lying on top of him, like in the early hours almost a month ago. In the dream she sat up, but when he met her gaze, she had Ingrid Jespersen's face. He shuddered and woke up. It was the middle of the night. He had an erection. For some minutes he lay staring into the darkened bedroom before rolling on top of Eva-Britt again and fondling her into consciousness. That morning he had breakfast in bed. Eva-Britt gave him a warm, gentle smile and said it was fine if they lived apart so long as they were able to work positively at the relationship.

    He drove Julie to school before heading for the Swedish border. A new, harsh winter day was dawning. The flawless snow-covered fields of 0stfold reposed between swathes of forest and road. The sky was a blue parchment. The trees extended their thick branches into the air and might have looked like Chinese script had it not been for the frost; statues dressed in white armour of rime and ice crystals.

    After taking the wrong road several times, he eventually found the ice-covered lake. Occasional tips of yellow stubble protruded through the snow in a field where a flock of crows was holding court. Judging from the activity, it seemed to be a rather tedious affair they were discussing. The snow glittered and reflected the dazzling light; wonderful weather for skiing if it hadn't been so cold. Smoke was coming from the chimney in what had to be Jonny Stokmo's farm. Frølich turned off, up the little incline towards the white house and passed a low barn before swinging into the yard. Beneath the bridge leading to the barn stood a Belarus tractor fitted with a snowplough. Obviously a gasket was leaking somewhere because the snow under the engine was black with oil. A barrel of diesel stood on its end beside a Mazda pick-up truck with rusting joints. Frølich turned to the farmhouse and caught a movement behind the window. At once the front door opened. A man with a checked shirt and two ends of a moustache extending down to his chin appeared on the step.

    The room smelt of a mixture of sweat, resin, tobacco smoke and rancid frying fat. The walls were bare, the floor covered with lino. Jonny Stokmo bent down and checked the cylindrical wood-burning stove to see if it was time to add more fuel, then closed the door again. Frølich decided not to take off his shoes when he saw Stokmo was wearing winter boots. 'They're miserable bastards,' Stokmo said in answer to Frølich's question about whether he knew the Folke Jespersen family.

    He had sat himself down on a rocking chair in front of the TV set. Frølich headed towards a sofa on the opposite side of the coffee table covered in newspapers and full ashtrays. Stokmo mumbled:

    'They'd have the shirt off your back. I may once have had a high opinion of Reidar, but that's got to be a bloody long time ago. He was just like them.'

    'Like whom?' Frølich interrupted and took out his worn, old notepad.

    'Like those two slobs, his brothers. That's
them,
and his boy, Karsten. He's one of
them.
My father knew Reidar well. I never did, and now they've killed the poor sod. Have you wondered what they're fighting about? A corner shop. Hell, it's nothing more than a kiosk crammed with old lumber. Have you thought about that? That shop is nothing, a pile of crap, apart from a few things Reidar nicked from other people, or rubbish others rejected. Do you understand? They're miserable bastards!' Stokmo pulled a grimace beneath his truck- driver moustache. 'Perhaps I shouldn't say this, you being a policeman, but I'm going to be honest and tell you who Reidar was: a bloody rag-and-bone man who got himself a good-looking tart and a flat in West Oslo. But that's not what you'll hear. No, Reidar Folke Jespersen was a businessman, big guy with white hair and beard, once on first-name terms with our famous resistance fighter, Max Manus, and went around wearing a black beret on Independence Day! You should have seen the old codger, carrying a briefcase down the stairs to the kiosk that was his pride and joy. Just imagine it. Reidar was an old man who thought he could live for ever by doing two workouts a week on a cycle trainer. I saw it with my own eyes, for Christ's sake, and I was the only person who did a stroke of work - who do you think drove to the houses of the bloody deceased or to demo jobs to carry away old desks, corner cabinets or old wood burners, and clean them up for auction or some flea market?'

    'But he did keep the family going. His son must have received some sort of income…'

    'Karsten's pushing fifty. What do you think he does in the shop with two customers a day? He's sitting in the backroom in the shop writing pornographic novels and so-called true stories for magazines. It's not the shop that keeps Karsten going, it's the missus that keeps Karsten going. She's head of accounts for a big firm in Oppegard.'

    'Did Karsten work for free?'

    Stokmo shook his head. 'You have to understand that nothing was normal about Reidar. He was eighty years old, but refused to hand over the shop to his son. Think about that!'

    'But why?' Frølich asked.

    'Some posh tart from Frogner,' Stokmo said bitterly, 'might turn up and pay a thousand for a rotten bit of wood, and Reidar was the one who pocketed the kroner, no VAT, black. I'm telling you Reidar was a miserable bastard!'

    'You mean he was greedy?'

    'The word greedy doesn't quite cover it,' Stokmo snarled. 'Look around here,' he said, encompassing the room with a swing of his strong workman's hand. 'This is nothing much, a smallholding, but anything that has any value in this house Reidar haggled off my father and sold as an antique. Once I picked up an old workbench from a carpenter's workshop up in Gran, then I found a matching stool and I thought of putting it in the cart shed, but before I could get it here, Reidar had sold it as an antique dining table, sold it for ten thousand kroner - of which I got nothing, not one ore. I have seen Reidar sell an old motorbike helmet and claim it was a rice bowl from the Congo. That's the Reidar I knew. Loved money and himself.'

    Frølich sent Stokmo a calm look of appraisal. Neither spoke for a few seconds.

    'The word greedy,' Stokmo repeated, 'does not cover it.'

    'But you,' the policeman said slowly, looking up from his notepad. 'You earned an income from the shop.'

    'Yes.'

    'Driving goods around, second-hand goods?'

    'Second-hand goods and antiques. As I said, clearing houses after the death of the owner or ones up for demolition, that sort of thing. Reidar had a chat on the phone and if he needed me, I jumped in the truck and was there.'

    'So it wasn't fixed work?'

    'No.'

    'But then it finished?'

    'Shown the door three weeks ago.'

    'Why was that?'

    Stokmo hesitated for a few moments. Then came the answer: '
That
is a private matter.'

    'It can't be private when one of the parties is dead.'

    'It was about money - everything is about money - especially where the Folke Jespersen family is concerned.'

    'You'll have to be a bit more precise than that.'

    'He never paid me what he owed. And I'd had enough.'

    'And you left?'

    'Left? I didn't go when the sack of shit phoned me.'

    'Some say it was the other way around. That Reidar gave you the boot?'

    Stokmo sneered. 'Can you see what I mean? They're miserable bastards, the whole lot of them.'

    'So Reidar didn't give you the boot?'