Where Monsters Dwell (17 page)

“My condolences,” said Singsaker. “You must be in shock.”

Jens Dahle stared at the inspector, his eyes doleful.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “To tell the truth, there’s still part of me that expects her to come home from work at any minute. When you rang I was asleep on the couch. I dreamed that I was cooking dinner for her. Fish soup. She loves fish soup, and I made it for her, even though I knew the kids wouldn’t like it. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a dream about daily life.”

Singsaker was afraid that Dahle was more out of it than he’d first believed, and to make sure that they fully understood each other, he said, “This is a bit strange, because we’ve spoken several times before, but now it’s important for you to realize that I’m Chief Inspector Singsaker. And that I’ve come from the Trondheim police to talk to you about the murder of your wife, Gunn Brita Dahle.”

Jens Dahle seemed to wake up a bit.

“I may be in shock, but I haven’t lost my mind. I know very well who you are.”

“And are you prepared to answer some difficult questions?” Singsaker asked, adding, “This could wait. But the sooner you’re ready to help us, the faster we’ll be able to solve this case.”

“I’m happy to answer your questions right now,” said Dahle. “Shall we sit down?”

Dahle showed him into the kitchen, which had recently been remodeled. Oak and white laminate. Very tasteful. Clearly the work of professional craftsmen, which told him that Dahle could afford it, and that he seemed to know something about carpentry.

They sat down at the heavy oak table that took up most of the space on the parquet floor.

“Coffee?” Dahle offered politely.

“Only if you feel the need for some.”

“I don’t know what I need,” he said, going over to a built-in coffeemaker that looked expensive. “Espresso?” he asked.

Singsaker considered the question absolutely absurd under the circumstances. A discussion he’d once had with Anniken popped into his head. In his opinion, “espresso” ought to be pronounced “expresso” in Norwegian, like explicit and express train, since all these words come from the Latin verb
expressare,
which means to express something or press something through. Anniken’s completely plausible argument was that espresso was an Italian word and should be pronounced in Italian and not Latin. But she agreed that at any rate he had a sophisticated argument for pronouncing the word “espresso” in a lowbrow way. Now he sat there wondering why Jens Dahle, who pronounced the word in resounding Italian, would bother to serve anything but black Norwegian-style coffee. Still, Singsaker did say yes to an espresso. Dahle brewed the inspector a double, prompting a lot of gurgling and coughing from the machine. He poured himself a glass of water, and then came to sit down.

Singsaker looked at him for a moment before they started. By now Dahle had taken off the shirt and tie he’d been wearing that morning and put on a loose, thin wool sweater with a crew neck. A bit strange to wash the car wearing a shirt and tie, and then change. When he’d met Dahle this morning, he was dressed to go to work after taking time to give his car a quick wash. When going to work was no longer an option, he had changed his clothes. But who goes and changes clothes the minute he hears that his wife has been killed? Singsaker wondered. At the same time he knew there was seldom a logical explanation. There could be no pat answer to what a man might do after being told that his wife had been murdered.

“Let’s get the most important things out of the way first. We know that Gunn Brita Dahle, your wife, was killed before ten
P.M.
on Saturday.”

“You do?”

“There’s a video from the surveillance camera inside the book vault.”

“Did you get the murder on video?” Dahle looked downright terror stricken.

“No, not the murder itself. That would have made it easier for us, of course. But we do have pictures showing that her body was lying in the book vault at ten o’clock Saturday night. Possibly before then as well. So I have to ask you if you can confirm where you were from Saturday morning until Saturday night.”

“As I told you this morning, I was at the cabin. You don’t think that
I
did it, do you?”

“At this point we have no specific theories about the case. We’re just gathering information. If you don’t feel like answering questions right now, it can wait.”

“No, that’s fine. I’m just a little out of it. That’s all.”

“I understand,” said Singsaker calmly, and went on. “Could anyone else testify that you were at the cabin during that time?”

“Only my kids. We were at the cabin all day. I was in and out, of course. The kids were playing with their LEGO and Nintendo. We went to bed early.”

“I see. And your children, how old are they?”

“I have a ten year-old girl and an eight year-old boy,” Dahle said dully.

“All right. Where are they now?”

“I sent them to stay with friends when they got home from school. So far they haven’t been told.”

“OK. This cabin—where is it?”

“The cabin is out on Fosen, not far from Brekstad.”

“Would you say that it’s isolated, or can other people see the cabin?”

“It’s in a grove between two low, rocky crags. We’re quite secluded there. It’s probably about a kilometer to the neighboring farm. The couple at the farm, Isak and Elin Krangsås, can certainly confirm when we arrived and left. They usually keep an eye on the road. But they’d have a hard time saying whether we were at the cabin the whole weekend, I’m afraid.”

“From Brekstad, how long would you say it takes to drive to Trondheim?”

“There’s a ferry from Brekstad to Vallset on the other side of the fjord. It’s also possible to drive to Rørvik and take the ferry to Flakk. With either route it’s about two hours by car to Trondheim, including the ferry ride if you know the departure schedule.”

“Two hours, and both ferries are hooked up to the electronic AutoPASS system, I suppose?”

“No, only the ferry between Rørvik and Flakk.”

“So if you take the ferry to Vallset, it’s possible to travel to or from Trondheim without leaving an electronic record anywhere. Is that right?” He stared intently at Jens Dahle. He was a man in mourning. There was no reason to suspect him of murder, but there was something in him that enjoyed seeing Dahle sweat. But Jens Dahle wasn’t sweating nearly as much as he would have expected.

“You can pay cash on the ferry and otherwise avoid traffic cameras, but you still have the toll stations around Trondheim. It’s not easy.”

Of course Singsaker knew about the toll required to enter Trondheim by car. What interested him was the fact that Jens Dahle had thought of it, too. He was definitely a man who kept a clear head. Somebody at the station would have to go through all the toll stations, speed traps, and ferry crossings and search for his license number, credit card, or other possible traces he might have left. But the search would most likely just confirm his alibi. Dahle wasn’t an easy man to read. If Singsaker had been a gambling man, he would have bet that Dahle actually was on Fosen all weekend, a bet that probably wouldn’t have high odds.

“We just have to check everything,” he said.

“I understand.” Jens Dahle picked up his glass of water and drank half of it in one gulp.

“You’re an archaeologist, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And you work at the Science Museum?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So you worked next door to your wife? Then you probably know your way around the Gunnerus Library fairly well, don’t you?”

“Sort of. Actually, we were careful not to visit each other too often. We chose to live separate lives at work. The reason I know people at the library is mainly because I had to deal with them in my job. The two institutions cooperate a great deal. I often needed material for my work.”

“So you’re a frequent borrower?”

“Yes, you could say that.”

“But based on what you know, would you say that your wife had a closer relationship with some of her colleagues than with others?”

“Not really. Gunn Brita gets, I mean got, along well with all of her colleagues, but none of them were close friends of hers.”

“And there was no one who harbored animosity toward her?”

“Not that I know of.”

“So you don’t think that anyone at her workplace would have wanted to kill her?”

Dahle gave him a defeated look and said, “To tell the truth, I have no idea who could have wanted to do that, either at the library or anywhere else.”

“No, I guess not.” Here Singsaker paused to sip the espresso that Dahle had made for him. Even though it had cooled off, it was perfectly brewed. The espresso machine that the Dahle family had had installed was no toy. He sat there wondering which of them had insisted on buying this marvel. But now wasn’t the time to ask about that sort of thing.

“Exactly what is your job at the museum?” he asked.

“At the moment I have a research position. That is, I’m in charge of a number of excavations, I do some teaching, and I write articles.”

“But you don’t do any of the digging?”

“No, only seldom. The excavation work is usually done by students on summer jobs and archaeologists hired as temps. It’s a pretty crappy profession, really. We really push the boundaries when it comes to complying with workplace regulations,” he said with an ironic smile.

“By the way, the other day I came across an article that you wrote a long time ago,” said Singsaker.

“Oh, really? Which one?”

“‘Forensics of Time.’”

Jens Dahle looked like he was trying to remember it. Then he smiled and said, “Oh, that one. I’d hardly call that a scientific article. I wrote it many years ago, back when I was working on my doctorate, if I’m not mistaken. How did you come across it?”

“It was on the Internet, in a database.”

“Well, yes, there’s no controlling one’s digital life, is there? But I assume the journal that published it has the rights in order.”

“I only had time to read the first page,” Singsaker said. “What’s the rest of it about?”

“It deals with a find we made out on Fosen back then, at the Krangsås farm. Actually, not that far from where my cabin is located. There was a chapel there in the Middle Ages with an old cemetery. When I set out to write about it, I made a big deal out of the fact that many of the skeletons we found exhibited striking signs of injuries. We could see that many of the bodies may have been killed in the same way. But as an archaeologist it’s obviously not possible to determine a definite cause of death from five-hundred-year-old bone fragments. The whole thing was rather speculative. But the article did create a stir, as I recall. The most interesting thing about that dig was probably that we found the
Johannes Book
.”

“The
Johannes Book
?”

“Yes, it’s one of the most important sources of the medieval history of the Trondheim area. It’s a book handwritten on parchment from an age when paper was becoming more and more common. It was written by a priest in Fosen just after the Reformation. A rare treasure. It’s particularly known for its surprisingly good medical knowledge. And for its aphorisms.”

“Aphorisms?”

“Yes, wise sayings. Such as: ‘The center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere.’ For scholars the aphorisms in the
Johannes Book
raise a lot of questions. For instance, why does Johannes the priest write about the universe and not about God? Has he lost his faith? Is he a Nordic representative of the growing scientific currents in the Renaissance? Where did this Johannes come from? Had he studied at a university? The aphorism I mentioned is of particular interest for several reasons. As early as 200
B.C.
it appeared in a book we call the
Corpus Hermeticum
, which belongs to the writings of the Gnostics: ‘God is a comprehensible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.’ And around the year 1200 the French theologian and poet Alain de Lille wrote exactly the same words in one of his texts. Almost five hundred years later, in 1584, the mystic Giordano Bruno in Italy wrote: ‘The center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ The interesting thing is that this was written several decades after the
Johannes Book,
which was created around the middle of the fifteen hundreds. But it doesn’t end there. A hundred years later the mathematician and philosopher Pascal wrote: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere in which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.’ This quotation, which keeps cropping up, was also mentioned by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges in
Ficciones,
which came out in 1944. It’s an example of how we constantly repeat ourselves, and how few ideas are actually original. But Borges wrote about this before we found the
Johannes Book,
so naturally he was not quoting from that source. But it’s coincidences like this that contribute to the mystique surrounding this strange text, which continues to confound scholars. Was Johannes the priest a mystic or a sort of gnostic, or was he merely a freethinker who had lost his belief in God as a unifying force?” Jens Dahle fell silent. When he talked about his work, he seemed to be in his own world.

“This book must have been quite a find. How did you come across it in a graveyard?” Singsaker asked.

“We didn’t find it in the graveyard. The couple at the farm had it on their bookshelf, with no idea what it was worth or what it meant. The book had been at the farm since the nineteenth century. I noticed it one evening when they invited us over for coffee. The farmer told me a peculiar story about how the book had come to be owned by his family. It was his great-great-grandfather who acquired it.”

“Acquired it?”

“Yes, one day more than a hundred and fifty years ago an elegant gentleman from the city suddenly showed up at his farm. The man introduced himself as a book collector, and he wanted to give the book to the people who lived on the farm. Naturally the farmer’s great-great-grandfather asked him why. He replied that this book belonged there. Apparently he also claimed that there was a curse on the book, and that the only place it could find peace was on that very farm. The book collector intimated that the book had been written by a murderer before he left the farm, never to return. In the farmer’s family this had always been a good story that they told with a gleam in their eye. But they had never noticed any sign of a curse. One of us remarked on the statement that the book was supposed to find peace out there. The farmer reiterated that this was what the book collector had claimed, and he couldn’t vouch for what might happen if anyone took the book away from the farm.