Cold Hearts (22 page)

IT WAS TO BE A LATE NIGHT
at Bergen police station.

I met Vidar Waagenes in the corridor. Torvaldsen had asked for him as his solicitor, and it was not a bad choice. I knew him from before. He was a competent Defence Counsel, and I had even had some jobs from him. With a characteristic flick, he tossed the dark fringe from his forehead and went in to see his client. I was going through all I knew with Helleve and Solheim when Hamre also made an appearance.

‘Nasty business, Atle,’ Hamre said to his colleague before adding, with an oblique glance at me: ‘Usually is, though, when Veum’s involved.’

Waagenes exited the interview room. ‘My client is willing to make a statement.’

‘We await it with bated breath,’ Hamre said.

Helleve and Solheim stood up.

‘I can entertain Veum in the meantime.’

Helleve nodded, Solheim grinned and I didn’t have much to say for myself. Witty repartee lay buried deep on this dark January evening.

‘In fact, he could go home,’ Helleve said. ‘We’ll contact him when the need arises.’

‘It won’t be for a long time then,’ Hamre retorted.
Nonetheless
he stayed behind after the others had gone. At length he said: ‘The sister found them, I understand?’

‘Yes. She was in a deep state of shock. According to Helleve, she has already been admitted to hospital.’

‘But what on earth made her go down to the cellar?’

I upturned my palms. ‘I can imagine Margrethe and Karl Gunnar were on some kind of vengeance crusade. That was what aroused Siv’s suspicions, especially after the murder of Mobekk became public. Besides, I’m quite sure it was
Margrethe
and Karl Gunnar who robbed a certain Lars Mikalsen of heroin with a street value of one and a half million last
Saturday.
They were going to use this money to make good their escape, abroad by the look of it. They just had a score to settle before they left.’

‘And these drugs, where are they now?’

‘Good question, Hamre. No idea. If your guys haven’t
stumbled
across them.’

‘Have you spoken to Atle about this?’

‘Yes. He knows as much as I do.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve started playing with an open deck, Veum?’

‘With hands as bad as mine, yes.’

Hamre gave a wry smile. ‘You’ve never been very good at poker, have you.’

‘Not as good as you, no, I don’t suppose I have.’

‘Well, Veum. You can take the evening off. As Atle said, we’ll summon you if we need you. Stick around. Don’t go to Siberia however much we wish you would.’

He smiled his crooked smile, sighed and headed for his office with heavy steps. His next move would be a call to the public prosecutor, I guessed. A charge was a serious matter even if the main suspect did have two cold bodies in his freezer.

‘I’ll send you a card from Siberia then, Hamre.’

‘Do that, Veum. Have a good trip.’

I sat for some moments watching the door of the interview
room where Helleve and Solheim were grilling Alf
Torvaldsen
, with Vidar Waagenes as the vigilant listener. I would have given half my monthly wage to be in there myself. On the other hand, that was not a huge sum of money, so it was no big deal.

As I left I patted my inside pocket, to no avail, then
remembered
my mobile phone had suffered a sudden and brutal demise out by Flesland. Instead I went to the nearest telephone booth and rang Haukeland Hospital to hear how Hege was getting on. After a lot of humming and hawing I was told she had been transferred to the Orthopaedic Department. I was also given her room number. ‘But it’s too late to visit her now,’ the woman on the switchboard said. ‘I just want to deliver some flowers,’ I said, pulling out from the kerb and setting off for the hospital.

At Haukeland there was, to a certain degree, an open-door policy. If I took a lift up to the sixth floor and rushed past the duty nurse’s room I could, without much difficulty, make my way to her room, which she shared with three other women. I assumed my most official face, said ‘Hello, ladies’ and pulled the curtain around her bed.

She seemed to be asleep. Her eyes were closed and there was a peaceful expression on her face. Sleeping, she looked much younger than she was, and now, if not before, I recognised her clearly from the time she had been in the same class as Thomas, when she had been young and innocent and on the threshold of what was to be a much more difficult life than any of us could have imagined.

‘Hege,’ I whispered.

She blinked and looked around, disorientated. One arm was in plaster and inside a sling, and her eyes looked a bit drugged.

On seeing me, she said: ‘Varg?’

I nodded, sat on the chair by her bed, leaned forward and said in as soft a voice as I could: ‘I’ve got something important to tell you, Hege.’

She looked at me with big eyes. ‘Not … Maggi?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

‘Have you found her?’

‘Yes.’

She grasped my hand and pulled it close: ‘Was she …?’

I nodded. ‘I’m sorry to say this, Hege, but … yes. She’s dead. Both her and her brother.’

‘Oh, shit! Shit, shit, shit!’ Tears came into her eyes, but it was more from fury than despair. ‘The bastards! The bloody bastards!’

‘Who do you have in mind?’

Then the dam burst. She let go of my hand, hid her face in her hands and cried without restraint, deep, painful sobs that wracked her whole body.

From one of the other beds in the room someone said: ‘Hello! What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just some sad news.’

‘OK.’ That was enough to set her mind at rest, it seemed.

There was only one thing to do. Let her cry it out. She was not the first client of mine who had ended up in tears, and she would not be the last. My creditors had the same problem. I was a walking tear-jerker, and I seldom disappointed.

Eventually she calmed down. She groped for the box of tissues on her bedside table, snatched a handful and dried her bare, unmade-up face, looking more like a young girl and more
disconsolate
than I had ever seen her before. Snot and tears ran from her nose, and she looked at me with shiny, red-rimmed eyes.

‘Come on,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘Tell me how you found her.’

I told her about the horrific discovery in Minde, about
Margrethe
and Karl Gunnar.

‘But … wasn’t it …?’

‘No. It wasn’t perhaps who you were thinking of.’ I told her about Torvaldsen and his car and what I had found out about him and Mobekk, that it must have been them Margrethe had refused to go with on the Friday evening, and posited my own theory that Torvaldsen had also killed Tanya.

‘But what …? Why?’

‘It’s a complicated story, Hege, with roots going back to a difficult upbringing. We can discuss it in detail when you’re out of here. Have the doctors said how long you have to stay?’

‘A couple of days or so.’

‘Then what will you do?’

She shrugged. ‘Suppose I will have to go back to work.’

‘To work, as you call it! With your arm in a sling?’

‘Bound to be some men who think that’s exciting. If only you had an inkling of how many weird types we meet. So that they can play doctor, you know,’ she said with a mischievous grin. ‘Won’t get rich lying here, anyhow. You need to have your fee as well.’

‘Well, the advance’ll cover most of it. Besides, the outcome wasn’t much to boast about.’

‘No, but you did find her.’

‘And more important than that, Hege. Your so-called
protectors
are behind bars.’

‘What? You mean …’

‘Both Malthus and Dalby were arrested earlier today. They’ve
been in for questioning all day and are bound to be charged … with something.’

‘What? But then …’ For a moment she looked quite dazed. ‘But who will I …? With no one to look after me, then …’

I leaned forward. ‘Perhaps this is precisely what you needed, Hege. A chance to get away. I can talk to Cathrine.’

‘Cathrine?’

‘Leivestad.’

She stared at me, big-eyed. Then she said weakly: ‘Yes … that’s great. Talk to her.’

‘I’ll ask her to come up here and have a chat with you … tomorrow at the latest.’

She nodded without enthusiasm.

Behind me I heard a door open. ‘What’s all this then?’ a voice asked. The woman in the adjacent bed must have answered with a gesture, for the curtain was drawn and a stern
dark-haired
nurse impaled me with her eyes: ‘Just what do you think you’re doing here? It’s way past bedtime.’

I got up and tried to appear genuinely apologetic. ‘I had to pass on an urgent message.’

‘Patients have to sleep. This is a flagrant breach of our rules. Would you please come with me?’

‘OK, OK. I’ve passed on the message. The patient won’t be able to sleep very well tonight.’

Her expression became flintier, and I nipped past her in case she should feel the temptation to become violent. Before leaving, I turned to Hege. ‘Get better soon, Hege. If you need anything, you know where to find me.’

She nodded mutely and blinked.

‘See. She’s exhausted, the poor darling,’ the nurse said and
directed me out of the room, with as firm a hand as air traffic control.

She escorted me all the way to the lift, and I was not treated to the tiniest of smiles by way of a send-off. So there was not much else to do but go home. But I didn’t sleep very well, either. There were still some questions I felt I didn’t have a proper answer to yet.

A WEEK PASSED
and I hadn’t heard from anyone. I followed the case as well as I could through the newspapers, but not much came out there that I didn’t already know.

The police appeared in court on Saturday morning and applied for four weeks’ remand for Alf Torvaldsen with a ban on visitors and mail. The court reduced custody to two weeks for lack of evidence, but accepted the bans.

Newspapers across the country had big spreads on the case, but since one person had already been charged, they soon lost interest. Local newspapers had delved through their archives and found the Gimle case, although no direct link between the two cases was proved. It also appeared from the newspapers that the suspect was being questioned in connection with the murder in Nordnes, where a prostitute had been found dead in the sea. There was tangible evidence here, asserted the police lawyer, who was awaiting the results of DNA samples before the case would be presented to court in its entirety.

In a separate article I read that two men had been charged with threatening and unlawfully restraining a person the
newspapers
called ‘a local private detective’, a case that was also under investigation, although the local private detective had not yet been summoned to further interviews.

After a week I could not control myself any longer. I rang Helleve and asked if there were any new angles on the case. Helleve growled and mumbled something I didn’t catch.

‘What did you say?’

‘Would you mind dropping by, Varg? We need to have a chat with you, anyway.’

‘Thought you’d never ask. I’m as good as outside your door, Atle.’

I was, five minutes later. He showed me into his office and indicated the vacant chair.

He looked worn out. His face was drawn and pale, and the bags under his eyes darker than they usually were. ‘Let’s kick off with the good news, Varg. We found definite traces of
Torvaldsen’s
DNA under the nails of the prostitute in
Tollbodhopen.
Furthermore, there were scratch marks on both of his hands, and not least … he has confessed.’

‘Right! Everything?’

He nodded. ‘By and large, as you presented it to us. But he does not admit raping Margrethe in 1988, and he claims that what he did to Margrethe and Karl Gunnar was nothing less than self-defence. They had arrived together, and he had noticed they were worked up. So he had been on his guard the whole time. When Karl Gunnar attacked him with a
candlestick,
he managed to wrest it out of his grip and knock him unconscious. Margrethe tried to escape, but he caught up with her and knocked her down with it as well.’

‘An energetic office manager, I must say.’

‘Driven by desperation, if you ask me.’

‘But he hasn’t given a plausible explanation as to why he didn’t ring the police while the two were still unconscious, and what on earth was he thinking of when he deposited them in his freezer?’

‘No. He doesn’t understand how his mind was working. Waagenes is bound to plea that he was not responsible for his actions at the time of the crime.’

‘It didn’t sound like that when he spoke to me. He said he gave them a merciful death and was going to get rid of the bodies later.’

‘Well …’ He splayed his hands. ‘Waagenes has obviously changed Torvaldsen’s mind.’

‘And the candlestick, did you find it?’

‘Yes. It was the same one
fru
Mobekk had reported missing. In fact, he had put it in the freezer as well. We found definite traces of DNA on it from Mobekk, Karl Gunnar and
Margrethe,
and what’s more his own and Karl Gunnar’s
fingerprints.
So, from that point of view, all the pieces have fallen into place, Varg. The forensic ones anyway.’

‘And Tanya?’

‘At first he claimed he hadn’t had anything to do with her. But when we presented the DNA evidence he changed his statement. He claimed the trick had been nothing out of the ordinary, but she had tried to rob him and he had reacted with such force that she …’ He gave a laconic smile. ‘That he
accidentally
killed her, as he put it. He claims that after what he had experienced with the others he was forced to get rid of the body, in the simplest possible way.’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary? After killing two people a couple of days earlier, and his neighbour and drinking partner Carsten Mobekk being found murdered the same morning? He was intent on getting rid of a troublesome witness, Atle. That’s how it’s all connected.’

He nodded wearily. ‘I suppose so. We just have to tie up the circumstantial evidence.’

‘Has he admitted that he and Mobekk beat up Tanya on Friday evening?’

‘He doesn’t call it a beating, but concedes that perhaps they both went a bit too far.’

‘And Margrethe had seen them?’

‘Yes, he says Mobekk and he had been drinking on Friday evening and then they had decided to take a drive through the red-light district. Torvaldsen admitted that after his wife died he had been there often, but it seems it was the first time for Mobekk. Driving through the streets, they spotted Margrethe, and according to Torvaldsen, Mobekk had got wildly excited at the very thought.’

‘He probably remembered they had done it to her once before.’

‘Possible. When she refused to go along with them they picked up Tanya, and Torvaldsen maintained it was because of the frustration they felt towards Margrethe that they had been a bit too hard-handed with her.’

‘Well … Why are you looking so dejected, Atle? The case seems to be in the bag.’

He looked at me pensively. ‘There are still some loose threads. What made Siv go into the cellar, for example?’

I tried to recapitulate the conversation I’d had with Siv a week and a half ago. ‘Don’t forget that it was me who put her on the trail.’

‘You?’

‘Yes. I had a chat with her, must have been last Tuesday. Picked her up from work and drove her home. She told me that Margrethe and Karl Gunnar had stayed with her over Friday night. They’d said they were planning to go on their way, which they did … on Saturday. Since then she hadn’t heard a word from them.’

‘And you forgot to tell us this?’

‘Forgot? I found this out on Thursday afternoon, and the next morning I was lured to Flesland and locked up by Malthus and Dalby. How’s that case going by the way?’

He raised a hand in defence. ‘Let’s take one thing at a time, shall we, Varg?’

‘Well … We touched on what happened to Mobekk of course, and I’m afraid I happened to mention … the
fingerprints
you’d found, Margrethe’s and Karl Gunnar’s. Hers at the crime scene, and both of theirs in the stolen car.’

His face went puce. ‘You’re afraid you happened to mention!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a damn cheek. Happened to mention! Bloody hell, Varg. Perhaps you’re the one who triggered this whole chain reaction. She puts two and two together, goes to her childhood home, for some reason or other goes into the cellar and opens the freezer … and finds them there.’

‘Have you … questioned her?’

‘Questioned? It’ll be a long time before we get the
opportunity.
She’s been admitted to Sandviken Hospital. According to the doctor in charge she’s in a state of serious psychosis. It’s impossible to contact her, and also in a legal sense she’s beyond our reach.’

He sat glaring at me.

I said: ‘What about … the other case? The robbery of Lars Mikalsen.’

He heaved a deep sigh. ‘Let’s take this point by point, Varg. Lars Mikalsen denies everything. The situation being what it was, we had no reason to hold him. He’s already at home in Møhlenpris.

‘But …’

‘We don’t have a scrap of evidence. Where are the drugs, for example?’

‘Well, I assume you searched everywhere.’

‘We’ve searched everywhere they could conceivably be. But you know … They could have buried them somewhere. Put
them in a safety deposit box. Sent them in a registered package to themselves. So far they haven’t turned up anyway.’

‘But he knew Margrethe?’

‘That was more or less the only thing he admitted. That he’d had a few beers with her at Børs Café now and then. And that he knew the brother, of course. It’s a small world. But he denied, in the strongest terms, that they had attacked him when he came off the Danish ferry. His line is now that it could have been a man from Østland he’d had an argument with in the bar the night before.’

‘These Østlanders.’

‘He flatly rejects any suggestion that he was smuggling drugs. He’s never done that kind of thing, he says.
You can take my word for it.’
Helleve grinned and splayed palms. ‘Again … burden of proof, Varg. We have to have the package, at the very minimum.’

‘But Malthus and Dalby …’

‘They deny everything, of course, as well.’

‘They can’t!’

‘Oh no?’

‘I’ll testify against them. Unlawful restraint and … what lawyers call serious threats.’

He nodded. ‘Fine, Varg. But how much will they get for it? Two years tops. Besides, Malthus denies all knowledge of this. He pins the blame on Dalby, which in the best-case scenario may cause the alliance to develop cracks and Dalby to start talking. But discipline in these circles is fierce. Dalby knows that if he says too much, he risks a very unpleasant period in prison. And Malthus is sitting on the resources, economic as well as legal.’

‘Hell! And the pimping?’

‘Will you get one of the women to testify against him? Can you present their financial accounts? It’s an uphill
struggle
. Don’t you think we’ve been there before, Varg? “Bergen, Bergen, Bergen,” he quoted. “Norway’s biggest village. Doesn’t matter where you go, home is uphill.” Anything else?’

‘Not that I can think of?’

‘Well … then I’ll have to sift my way through my piles of paper and see if I can strike gold. Have a very lively weekend, Varg. Celebrate with moderation.’

‘Thank you. Not a lot to celebrate, is there.’

‘No, you’re right.’

I found the way down to street level and into what optimists call fresh air. January still hadn’t relinquished its grip. I had a feeling that the whole town found itself in a kind of collective depression, brought on by the grey weather and the
thermometer,
a lethal alliance in this rain-laden town, kilometres and kilometres from all climate zones. Indeed, in a way, a climate zone in itself.

On rare occasions I wished I lived elsewhere. This was one of those. As far away as it was possible to go. But, as on most days, I didn’t get any further than my office.

My letter box was empty. There were no messages on the answer machine. No one needed me.