Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (7 page)

Maybe he had slept for a while. At least he was surprised to see the time was now past midnight. The middle of the night. It was a long time since he had been awake so late. The house was still deserted. His hunger was so great that he felt dizzy when he stood up. Without really making a decision about it, he approached the outer door. Of course it was locked. With an ordinary lock and padlock.

He stood on the concrete stair, his hand resting indecisively on the wrought-iron railing. For ages. Then he peered over the edge, down at a fairly large basement window reaching all the way to the ground. He trudged down the four steps, and before thinking about it any further, had used the sledge as a battering ram to smash the window. It dawned on him there might not be enough room for him to slide through the window frame, but it went smoothly. He threw his rucksack down first. On the inside, there was a long counter only a meter from the window, so it wasn’t even creepy making his way inside. Because he was quite afraid of the dark, he managed to locate a light switch, and a considerable number of seconds went by before it struck him it was obviously pretty stupid to have the light on. Holding the door handle tightly, he darkened the room and stepped out into a little corridor where a staircase leading to the ground floor was visible in the very faint light entering from outside, through the broken window. Fortunately, the door to the ground floor was not fitted with a lock.

There wasn’t much food in the refrigerator. There was no milk, for example. He also couldn’t find any bread, although he looked high and low. But there were a few eggs in a drawer in the fridge door, and Olav knew how to cook eggs. First you had to boil the water, and then wait for seven minutes. Although he hadn’t
eaten eggs with fish cakes before, it tasted delicious now. He was so hungry. It was slightly difficult to eat without touching the wound on his tongue, and the stitches constantly grated on everything, but it was okay. And the entire pantry was full of canned food.

It was two o’clock before he fell asleep, in a darkened kitchen with no cover other than a long lady’s coat he found in the hallway. Totally exhausted, he didn’t even have the energy to think about what he would do the next day. That didn’t matter. Now he just wanted to sleep.

 • • • 

He was only three years old the first time he injured me. Really it wasn’t his fault. He was just a burly three-year-old. Although he picked up such a horrendous amount, and the kindergarten boasted that he was so smart (maybe they were just trying to comfort me), he still had only about ten words to say.
Mummy
was not one of them. He must have been the only child in the history of the world who couldn’t say
Mummy.
His kindergarten teacher reassured me by saying that all children were different. She had a brother who was a professor, she said, and he hadn’t spoken a single word until he was four. As though that would be any concern of mine.

I had made the dinner. He was sitting in his Tripp Trapp chair that I’d been given money by social services to buy. There was only just enough room for him behind the safety rail, but I couldn’t really take that off, as he wasn’t old enough yet. He was extra grumpy. I had accidentally burned his fish fingers; I had suddenly suffered from an upset stomach and spent ages in the toilet. The charred pieces were inedible, but fortunately I had more in the freezer. He began to get impatient. I was becoming dreadfully nervous because of all his screaming. Noisy, tearless, and disruptive screaming. The neighbors gave me meaningful looks if I fumbled slightly too long
with the lock on the garbage chute and was unlucky enough to encounter one of them, so they must have heard him.

I didn’t have anything other than a packet of licorice boats to give him to pacify his impatience. It disappeared fast. When I was finally able to shovel five fish fingers over from the frying pan to his plate decorated with Karius and Baktus, I thought he was satisfied. After putting the frying pan back on the cooker to cool down, I sat myself directly across from him and peeled two potatoes. He looked contented, with his mouth full of fish. I smiled at him, he was so sweet and angelic as he sat there, so quiet and happy. I reached out for his hand.

Without any kind of warning, he stabbed his fork into the back of my hand. It was only a child’s fork, luckily, the kind with only three tines, almost like a cake fork. But it broke through my skin with a strength that no one would believe came from a three-year-old child, and blood spurted out. I was so gobsmacked that I couldn’t do anything. He tore the fork loose and put all his strength behind another lunge. The pain was indescribable. But the worst thing of all was that I was so scared. I sat with a three-year-old facing me, and I was more afraid of him than I had ever been of his drunken father.

My God, I was scared of my three-year-old son!

 • • • 

Terje Welby had been lying awake for three hours, the adrenaline coursing suddenly and undesirably through him every time he was anywhere near the verge of sleep. The sheet was already damp from his exertions. He hauled himself around, moaning; his back was bothering him. Placing the pillow over his head, he muttered to himself, “I
must
sleep. I simply
must
sleep.”

The telephone rang.

He battered his hand on the bedside light and the glass shade scudded to the floor, smashing into a thousand pieces. He sat up,
sucking the blood from his fingers and staring in dismay at the telephone.

It did not give up, and it seemed as though the noise jangled more and more. All of a sudden he grabbed the receiver.

“Hello!”

“Hi, Terje, it’s Maren here. Sorry for phoning in the middle of the night.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he rushed to say, noticing on the bedside clock that the day was only three hours old.

“Terje, I need to know. ”

“Know what?”

“You know what I mean.”

He sat up against the headboard, pulling at his clammy T-shirt.

“No, honestly, I don’t!”

Silence fell.

“Had Agnes found out about it?” she asked at last.

He swallowed so loudly she could hear it over the phone.

“No. She hadn’t found out.”

If nothing else, he was pleased she could not see him.

“Terje, don’t be angry.”

“I’m not angry.”

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Was it you who killed her?”

“No, Maren, it wasn’t me. I did not kill her. ” His back was more painful than ever.

4

L
ook at them out there. Look at them!”

Charging into the sparsely equipped chief inspector’s office without knocking, Billy T. gesticulated out toward Åkebergveien, where two men in coats were scuffling wildly. A Volvo was sitting there with its snout impertinently far up the backside of the latest model Toyota Corolla.

“There was a bang, and then the guy in front flew out and hauled the other guy from his car without as much as a hello! I bet ya a hundred that the Volvo’ll win.”

“Who is the owner of the Volvo?” Hanne asked without showing much interest but at least standing up and moving over to the window where Billy T. was now positioned, in brilliant good humor.

“The guy with the lighter coat. The tall one.”

“I’m not betting against him,” Hanne said, as the man in question dealt a perfect right hook to the Toyota owner, who stumbled backward, losing his footing and falling to the ground.

“Self-defense, pure and simple,” Billy T. roared. “It was the Toyota who started it!”

As the man struck down was attempting to clamber back to his feet, two uniformed police officers came running. With no caps or jackets, they had probably seen the incident from some window or other as well.

“Typical Torvald,” Billy T. commented irritably. “Spoiling everything.”

He remained standing for a minute to see how things turned
out, but of course the two combatants stopped fighting as soon as they clapped eyes on the pair in uniform. They obviously smoothed it over and were surprisingly quickly absorbed in completing an insurance claim form.

“Life offers pleasures large and small,” Billy T. said as he sat down to face his boss. “Though it hasn’t decided to give us particularly much in the way of pleasures in this foster home case.”

“Oh?”

“Forensic traces: millions. Usable: zilch.”

An enormous fist covered the cigarette packet lying on Hanne Wilhelmsen’s desk.

“I’ve told you that you need to stop that,” he interrupted himself. “You’re killing yourself, darling.”

“You know, I get enough of that at home. I can’t bear having the same song and dance here too,” she retorted with an unexpected note of irritation in her voice.

Billy T. was not so easily frightened off.

“Cecilie’s the chick to tell you. She knows what’s good for her girlfriend. A physician and all that.”

Her expression darkening, Hanne Wilhelmsen swiftly rose to her feet and closed the half-open door to the corridor beyond. Billy T. made use of the opportunity to crumple the packet in his hand, with at least ten cigarettes inside, and throw the whole lot in the wastepaper bin.

“So. One packet fewer coffin nails,” he declared in satisfaction.

She became angrier than he had anticipated.

“Listen here, Billy T. You’re my friend. You put up with a lot from your friends. But I demand one thing: respect.
Both
for my insistence that I don’t want talk about my private life when others can overhear,
and
for my belongings. Nag me if you like about my smoking, I know you do that with the best of intentions.
But leave my bloody things alone!
 ”

Furious, she leaned over the wastepaper basket and fished out
the crumpled pack of cigarettes from among the paper and apple cores. A couple of the cigarettes had survived, although they were bent. Lighting one, she took several deep puffs.

“So. Where were we?”

Billy T. lowered his hands, left flailing in midair after his outburst.

“Apologies, apologies, Hanne. I really didn’t mean to—”

“Okay,” she truncated his remarks with a faint smile. “Forensic evidence.”

“Loads,” Billy T. mumbled, shamefaced and still taken aback by her violent reaction. “Fingerprints all over the shop, except where we want them. On the knife. It’s entirely lacking in traces of the person who used it. A pretty ordinary knife. Bought at Ikea, of all places. That’s the one place in the whole world where it’s totally impossible to find out anything about who purchased such an item. They sell millions of knives. As far as the footprints are concerned . . .”

He shifted position in his seat.

“. . . they’re unclear and of minimal value. You saw for yourself what it was like out there. But they’re carrying out further work on checking them. Probably it’ll turn out that they all originate from the children and adults at the home. In other words—”

Hanne interrupted him again. “In other words we’re facing the most enjoyable and classical of all police work!”

She leaned forward, smiling. Billy T. did likewise, and with their faces only twenty centimeters apart, they chorused, “Tactical investigation!”

They laughed, and Hanne pushed a small bundle of typed papers toward him.

“This is the list of all the children and staff at the home. Maren Kalsvik compiled it.”

“Then we have to take it for what it’s worth, then, since she’s also one of those under most suspicion.”

“They all are,” said Hanne curtly. “But look here.”

The list contained a short CV of all the staff members. The youngest was Christian, who was twenty. The eldest was someone called Synnøve Danielsen, who had been there since the home opened in 1967. Like Christian, she had no professional qualifications, but in contrast to him, oceans of experience. Moreover, three of the staff were social workers, two were male nurses, three child welfare officers, one a kindergarten teacher, and one an auto mechanic. The final person on the list, Terje Welby, was a high school teacher with qualifications in history, education, and literature.

Spring Sunshine Foster Home was run by the Salvation Army, but the operational budget was predominantly met by the public purse. They had been allocated eleven and a half posts, filled by the fourteen members of staff, some part time.

“There are thirteen now,” Billy T. commented laconically. “Who has taken over the director’s post?”

“As far as I understand, it’s Terje Welby, who is the assistant director, at least on paper. But he put his back out during the fire drill and was signed off sick today. Maren’s probably running the show now.”

“Hmm. Convenient.”

“How so?”

“That sick leave.”

“We’ll have to check that out.”

“That should be very simple. It’ll be harder to find some motives among this lot here.”

“There are always motives. The problem is just to find the person who has the strong enough motive. Besides, it could have been someone from outside, it could have been one of the children. Doesn’t sound plausible, but we can’t rule anything out. Have the children been interviewed?”

“Barely. It seems completely unlikely to me. The person on night duty had been on his rounds when he found the body,
and he ought to have training to know whether children are really sleeping or just playacting. He swears they were all sleeping like logs. You would have to be a bit of a devil to have murdered your foster-carer and then fallen into a deep dreamless sleep.”

He rubbed his hands over his face.

“No, the only possibility is of course the one who disappeared. He’s a hard nut, apparently. Brand-new, only been there for three weeks. Bloody strange and difficult too.”

Hanne Wilhelmsen leafed through the papers.

“A twelve-year-old? A twelve-year-old would hardly be able to stab with such force that the knife goes right through skin and bone to pierce the heart of a well-built woman!”

She stubbed out her cigarette determinedly in a tasteless brown glass ashtray.

“Well, he’s said to be big, you know,” Billy T. insisted. “Really abnormally large.”