Fear Not Part 35

Silje Srensen was a member of the union, but she had long since abandoned any attempt to keep a record of her overtime. The only yardstick she used was the reaction at home. When her sons became too much of a handful and her husband became more and more taciturn, she tried to spend more time at home. Otherwise, she sneaked off to work outside normal working hours as often as she could.

As the only child of a shipping owner, her decision to train as a police officer hadn't exactly been expected. Her mother had gone into a state of shock and hysteria when she learned of her daughter's career choice. This lasted throughout Silje's first year in college. We've wasted a fortune on boarding schools in Switzerland and England, her mother wailed, and now my daughter is going to throw away her future working in the public sector! If she must get her hands dirty dealing with violent criminals and the like, then why on earth couldn't she become a solicitor instead? Or a legal advisor within the police service, if the worst came to the worst?

That was exactly the reaction Silje had wanted.

Her father had beamed and kissed her on the forehead when she told him she had got into the Police Training Academy. That wasn't exactly the idea.

Silje Srensen had never rebelled as a child or a teenager. Never protested. Not when she was forced to move abroad at the age of ten, only seeing her parents during the holidays. Not when she had to spend two months at a French language school in Switzerland at the age of fifteen, where the working day began at 6.30 in the morning and the Catholic nuns had no qualms about using punishments that were probably forbidden under the Geneva Convention. Silje didn't even argue with her father when he decided that she should squeeze five school years into two and a half; she gained a degree in English by the time she was nineteen. By then she had come of age, and as a reward for her silent patience and remarkable hard work, her father had transferred more than half of his fortune to his only daughter.

Training as a police officer was Silje Srensen's first deliberate act of rebellion.

When she was allocated to work with the legendary Hanne Wilhelmsen during her first year, she quickly realized that this stubborn, rebellious choice of career was going to make her happy. She loved it. The majority of what she knew about police work she had learned from her reluctant, uncommunicative mentor. Although Hanne Wilhelmsen had made herself more and more unpopular through her own headstrong approach, Silje had never ceased to admire her. When Inspector Wilhelmsen was shot during a dramatic incident in Nordmarka and paralysed from the waist down, Silje had grieved as if it had happened to a sister. She never really got over the fact that Hanne had then turned her back on the few remaining friends she had in the big shabby police headquarters on Grnlandsleiret.

Silje Srensen was proud of her profession, but accepted with resignation the parameters within which she was forced to operate.

She decided to sort the cases in order of seriousness. Minor knife crimes and pub brawls with no life-threatening injuries she placed in a separate pile.

You'll probably get away with it, she thought wearily, and tried to forget that several of the cases involved known perpetrators. Their victims would regard any attempt to abandon these investigations as highly provocative. However, that was the way it was, and according to every directive from both the public prosecutor and the National Police Board, she was perfectly justified in prioritizing more serious cases. The public might have some difficulty in understanding the police definition of serious, but that couldn't be helped.

After about an hour the files had been sorted into five piles.

Silje finished off the dregs of her tepid coffee, then picked up three of the piles and placed them in the cupboard behind her.

Two left.

The smallest contained murders. Three files. The first very thin, the second almost as slim. The third was so fat that she had put two rubber bands around it to keep everything together.

Suddenly, she got up and went over to the noticeboard on the wall opposite her desk. She quickly scanned every piece of paper before placing one on the desk and dropping the rest into the large waste-paper basket beside it. She took three sheets of A4 out of the cupboard. They fitted next to each other perfectly at the top of the noticeboard.

Runar Hansen, she wrote with a red felt-tip on the first sheet.

19/11/08.

On the next sheet she wrote Hawre Ghani.

24/11/08.

She chewed the cap of the pen and thought for a moment before adding a question mark.

24/11/08?.

It wasn't possible at this stage to say exactly when Hawre Ghani had been murdered, but at least they had confirmation that he had, in fact, been murdered. The pathologist had found clear signs of garrotting. It was hardly likely that the boy had hanged himself with a steel wire until his head almost came away from his body, then thrown himself in the sea. They were only able to hint at the time of death, but so far the investigation had found no evidence to suggest that the boy had been alive after he went off with a client outside Oslo's central station on Monday 24 November. All the CCTV cameras had, of course, been checked. No joy. This matched Martin Setre's story: the man had approached them just outside the entrance.

Clever b.a.s.t.a.r.d, thought Silje with a sigh.

Marianne Kleive, she wrote on the last sheet of paper.

19/12/08.

She put the cap back on the pen and took two steps back. She felt the edge of the desk behind her legs and sat down.

Three murders. All unsolved.

Runar Hansen was her guilty conscience. She couldn't even bring herself to look through the thin file. Instead, she stared at the name, the anonymous name of a drug addict who had been beaten and abused in Sofienberg Park, apparently without anyone taking much notice. All Runar Hansen had merited was a quick examination of the crime scene some hours after his body had been found, a post-mortem report, and a brief mention in the evening paper. Plus two interviews with witnesses, whose only contribution was that Runar Hansen had no fixed abode and was unemployed, and that he had a sister called Trude.

At least something was happening in the investigation into the murder of Hawre Ghani. The sketch by the police artist had been distributed internally. It had been decided not to make it public yet, because experience indicated this would lead to a flood of calls. The man's appearance was so ordinary that there would be a deluge of callers insisting that they recognized him. Instead, Knut Bork was still working on the prost.i.tution angle. Silje had ordered a new and extensive investigation into the boy's life since he came to Norway. If possible, she was hoping to obtain a clearer picture of Hawre Ghani's tragic fate.

Work on the Marianne Kleive case was proceeding at full throttle.

The murder of the 42-year-old nursery school teacher had all the ingredients of a juicy media story. The private pictures obtained by Verdens Gang just two hours after the murder was made public showed an unusually attractive woman. Thick, wavy blonde hair, a slim figure with long legs and an athletic appearance. Exactly the kind of lesbian the media loved. There was something of Gro Hammerseng about her, Silje thought, as she pinned up the front page she had torn out of VG a few days earlier. And even if her wife, Synnve Hessel, wasn't exactly a celebrity, she occupied such a central position in the Norwegian film world that the papers were able to use their favourite phrase 'the noted and award-winning' when writing about the victim's grieving widow who also looked pretty good, incidentally, even wearing a padded jacket with her hair blowing all over the place at a height of 5,208 metres at North Base Camp in Nepal.

The fact that the murder had taken place in the respectable Hotel Continental also helped. Two days after the body had been found, VG dedicated an entire page to an 'at home with' report on a man named Fritiof Hansen, an insignificant individual who was some kind of caretaker at the hotel. He had found the body, and thanks to his pa.s.sion for the TV series CSI he had managed to keep everyone away from the scene until the police arrived to secure any evidence. In the picture he was sitting in his best armchair with a gla.s.s of beer and a small packet of crisps, looking as if all the cares of the world were resting on his shoulders.

Sometimes Silje Srensen wished the ma.s.s media didn't exist. Sometimes she would have liked to abolish the freedom of the press.

She reached for her coffee cup.

It was empty.

She frowned and looked from one name to the other. She groped for the felt-tip without taking her eyes off the noticeboard. Quickly, she pulled the cap off with her teeth, went over and wrote SOFIENBERG PARK beneath Runar Hansen's name and the date of his death. Under Hawre's name she wrote UNDERAGE MALE PROSt.i.tUTION, and finally across the top of the photo of Marianne Kleive on Gaustatoppen Mountain in the sunshine, wearing a bikini top, cut-off jeans and st.u.r.dy walking boots she wrote CIVIL PARTNERSHIP.

As she was settling back on her desk, there was a knock on the door. She took the cap of the pen out of her mouth and shouted: 'Come in!'

Knut Bork did as he was told.

'Hi,' he said breathlessly. 'I thought I'd just-'

'Stand here,' said Silje Srensen. 'Come and stand next to me.'

DC Bork shrugged his shoulders and obliged.

'What are you up to? What's that?' He nodded in the direction of the noticeboard.

'Those are the three murders I'm dealing with at the moment,' said Silje.

'Three is too many.'

'I had four. I turned one down. Does anything strike you about those three?'

'Does anything strike me? Well, I'd need to look through the files and-'

'No. You're familiar with the cases, Knut. Just look at what's up on the board.'

He frowned without saying anything.

'Look at what I've written underneath the names!'

'Sofienberg Park,' he read. 'Underage male prost.i.tution. Civil partnership.'

He still couldn't see any connection.

'What's Sofienberg Park famous for?' she asked.

'Well ... I know! Those ambulance drivers who-'

'No. Well, that too, but what else? I'm not thinking about the area to the west of Sofienberg Church, but the part behind it. On the eastern side.'

'Gay s.e.x,' he said immediately. 'Buying and selling and mutual exchanges. Not a place I'd want to go in the dark.'

'Exactly,' said Silje with a wan smile. 'That's where Runar Hansen was found. He was murdered on a raw, wet November night at some point between midnight and half past. That's about all we've managed to accomplish in his case. Establishing when he was killed, I mean.'

'Was he gay?'

'No idea. But for the time being, just focus on the reputation of the place. Do you see where I'm going with this?'

She looked at him. A shadow of surprise pa.s.sed over his eyes as he suddenly got the point.

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l,' he said, running a hand over his fair stubble. 'It's strange that LHH haven't started shouting the odds!'

For a long time, LHH the gay and lesbian movement had been trying to get the justice department to take violence against h.o.m.os.e.xuals seriously. The problem, Silje Srensen had always thought, was that attacks on h.o.m.os.e.xuals rarely differed significantly from all the other attacks that happened when people had been drinking. Attacks on women. On men. On heteros.e.xuals and h.o.m.os.e.xuals. People drank. Became aggressive. Fought, stabbed, raped and murdered. For every h.o.m.os.e.xual victim, Silje could come up with a hundred heteros.e.xuals. She couldn't understand why they made such a fuss about it.

But this was striking.

'Runar Hansen is in a park where it's well known that h.o.m.os.e.xual services are bought, sold and exchanged,' she said slowly. 'Hawre Ghani disappears with a male punter. Marianne Kleive is married to a woman. They were all murdered in different ways, in different places, and none of them had any connection with each other while they were alive. As far as we know, that is. But ...'

Her eyes narrowed.

'I'm responsible for three completely independent murder investigations, and each one has a possible link to h.o.m.os.e.xuality. What are the odds on that?'

'b.l.o.o.d.y long,' said Knut Bork, starting to chew on a thumbnail. 'What the f.u.c.k is going on? And seriously, Silje, why hasn't anybody noticed a possible link before?'

She didn't reply. They stood in silence gazing at the noticeboard. For a long time.

'n.o.body cares about the first case,' she said suddenly. 'n.o.body knows anything about the second case. People might have read in the paper about a body being found in the harbour, and there might have been a few lines saying that the dead man turned out to be a young asylum seeker. But that's all. As far as Marianne Kleive is concerned, that case is ...'

She hesitated for such a long time that he carried on for her: 'That case is so unusual and absurd that n.o.body has actually made a connection with the fact that the victim is a lesbian.'

Silje went over to the board, took down the sheets of paper and the newspaper article, screwed them up and threw them in the waste-paper basket. Knut Bork remained standing there with his arms folded as she walked around the desk and sat down.

'You and I,' she said firmly, 'are going to keep this to ourselves. For the time being. It could all be a coincidence, just as every connection can be pure chance; on the other hand it could be ...'

'Something very nasty indeed,' Knut Bork supplied; his thumb had started to bleed.

For the second time in three weeks Johanne was at home alone, and it felt almost frightening. The apartment always seemed so different without the familiar sounds of the children. She noticed that she was moving cautiously across the floor, so as not to make any noise.

'Pull yourself together,' she muttered to herself, putting on a CD that Lina Skytter had compiled, burned and given to her for Christmas. Kristiane was at Isak's until Friday, and every other Wednesday Ragnhild went to visit her maternal grandparents and stayed over.

She had been trying to get hold of Adam for several hours, but her calls went straight to voicemail. Presumably, he was in a meeting. When the day had finally dawned after the restless, fearful night, she had realized she had to talk to him. There was no more room for doubt unlike last night when she kept changing her mind. She had made her decision now, and that very fact made her a little more optimistic about the whole thing.

If only she knew what Kristiane had actually seen.

Even though she realized there must be something, she was still unsure what it was. It didn't feel right to press her daughter any further. Later, perhaps, she thought, as she tiptoed around in her stocking feet, not really knowing what to do.

The music Lina had put together wasn't entirely to Johanne's taste. She went over to the CD player and turned down Kurt Nilsen's voice right in the middle of the chorus of one of his ballads.

She ought to eat something, but she wasn't hungry.

Adam's meeting must be taking a long time; it was three hours since she left the first message asking him to call her.

She could sit down and do some work, of course.

Or read.

Watch a film, perhaps.

She reached for the phone and keyed in Isak's number without even thinking about it. He answered right away.

'Hi, it's Johanne.'

'Hi.' She could hear him smiling on the other end of the line.

'I just rang to ...'

'To ask how Kristiane is,' he supplied. 'She's absolutely fine. We've been to the pool at Bislett, even though children aren't really allowed in except at weekends. She's so quiet that the lady in the ticket office lets her in.'

'Do you let her go into the women's changing room on her own?'

'Of course. She's too big to come into the men's with me! She's starting to develop b.r.e.a.s.t.s, in case you haven't noticed! And she's got a little bit of hair down below too! Our little girl is growing up, Johanne, and, of course, I let her go into the women's changing room on her own.'

She didn't reply.

'Johanne,' he said wearily. 'She's fine! We're making tacos, and she's fried the mince all on her own. She's chopping vegetables and doing a great job. When she's with me we always cook dinner together. She'll be fourteen this year, Johanne. You can't treat her like a child all her life.'

She is a child.

She's the most vulnerable child in the world.

'h.e.l.lo?'

'Yes, yes,' Johanne mumbled. 'I'm here. I'm glad you're having a good time. I just wanted to check if-'

'Would you like to speak to her? She's standing right here.'

There was a terrible clatter in the background.

'Oops,' said Isak. 'Something just fell on the floor. Can I ask her to call you later on?'