Scarred (2 page)

Inspector Bjarne Brogeland parks near the entrance to the care home and steps out into the autumn evening. He slams the car door shut and takes a look around.

A narrow one-way street winds its way through towering buildings with dark windows that reach for the sky above Grünerløkka. The streetlights reflect on the wet tarmac. The road has been closed off to traffic, but curious onlookers walk slowly past on the pavement.

It’s the same everywhere. People like to rubberneck, catch a glimpse of death, a hint of tomorrow’s headlines so they can boast that they were there, that they saw it. Death in a body bag. Death in the eyes of a crime scene investigator dressed in white coveralls.

Bjarne has never understood the fascination with gore and wrecked cars, the desire to deliberately inflict trauma on yourself. People don’t know that the image of a broken body or the smell of a crushed skull doesn’t just disappear while you get on with your life, go to the cinema, to the café or drink yourself senseless. Such memories can return without warning. And once they’re in your head, they’ll stay there for a long time.

Bjarne’s father, who was an engineer, once told him that his team killed a female polar bear when he was working on a research project near ESRO, the European Space Research Organisation, in Ny-Ålesund in the sixties. They enticed the polar bear with food and as she stuck her head inside the wooden box where the bait was lying, she triggered a mechanism that fired the fatal shot from a sawn-off 12 bore shotgun. The polar bear had two small cubs, which were running helplessly around their mother when the team came to pick her up, Bjarne’s father said. He never forgot their screams. ‘They sounded just like human children, Bjarne. It might as well have been you screaming.’

It’s a little over half an hour since Bjarne got the call. He had just put his five-year-old daughter Alisha to bed and sat down on the sofa with his wife. The message made him shudder and the feeling returns as he approaches the care home. There’s something about the murder of old women.

Bjarne glances at the clouds and pulls his collar up tighter around his neck. Darker and colder times are coming.

A sign to the left of the main entrance warns potential intruders that the area has CCTV.
Good
, Bjarne thinks. Perhaps the killer was caught on camera. He turns around and looks up at the buildings opposite. Closed curtains in the flats. Closed shops and a hairdresser at street level. A café called Sound of Mu also appears to be empty though a dim light seeps out from inside. Sunday is the big day for café visits and walks in Grünerløkka so several people might have seen the killer as he left – if he left through the main entrance.

Bjarne goes inside and doesn’t meet anyone until he gets out of the lift on the third floor. He stops at the red and white police tape outside Erna Pedersen’s room and hears the crackling and beeping of a police radio nearby while he slips bright blue plastic covers over his shoes.

He pauses before he enters. As always he hopes the walls will talk to him, that the chaotic landscape that awaits him will show him which path to follow. And he knows that he mustn’t look at the victim immediately, but concentrate on the other information in the room. He also tries as far as that’s possible to ignore smells, but it’s hard to block out the scent of death. He often wakes up in the middle of the night with a sense of being surrounded by this very smell.

Bjarne nods to Ann-Mari Sara, the crime scene technician, as he comes in. She is squatting on her haunches at the feet of the dead woman, her face hidden behind a camera. She lowers it and nods in return.

It took a while before Bjarne learned to appreciate Ann-Mari Sara. She is petite, barely more than 1.58 metres tall. Short, messy hair. Never wears make-up. He doesn’t recall ever seeing her smile and he has noticed that she doesn’t seem particularly bothered about personal hygiene. She is also immune to any attempt at charm or small talk. She rarely replies to questions that aren’t work-related.

But she is undoubtedly one of the best crime scene technicians Bjarne knows. Always thorough, always alert. Always respectful. He has never seen her chew gum or try to lighten up the tense atmosphere at a crime scene with a snide remark about the victim’s appearance or lifestyle. She is the most dedicated colleague Bjarne has ever come across and she is especially good at putting herself in the mind of a criminal and imagining what might have happened. If she hadn’t been so brilliant at analysing a crime scene, he would have liked to recruit her as part of his own investigation team.

Now she gets up, raises the camera to her face again and presses the shutter release. Then she points to a Bible on the floor.

‘I think he started with this one,’ she says. ‘Used it to bang . . . ’

Bjarne raises his hand to stop her.

‘I haven’t examined it fully yet,’ Sara continues. ‘But it would appear to have thirteen dents on it.’

Thirteen dents
, Bjarne mutters to himself. The killer must have been very angry. And he thinks that this particular book is responsible for many deaths, but never quite like this.

The room is exactly as he had imagined. Small, oppressive and cold. A bed neatly made-up, anonymous yellow curtains, speckled lino on the floor and soulless furniture. Withered flowers on the table. A TV magazine with a programme circled in red, others crossed out. Red wool. Knitting needles, some big, some small. A shot glass, unused. A glass of water on the bedside table.

The place reminds Bjarne of a prison cell. And he realises how much he dreads old age. Squashing his whole life into a room measuring three metres by three metres.

There is something oddly pleasant about the victim in the chair. She is sitting on a cushion; Bjarne can just make out a pattern of yellow and green flowers. In her lap lies the start of a sock. A small, red sock.

Bjarne leans towards her. Although he has prepared himself for the sight, he still feels a prickling sensation behind his forehead. From behind the smeared glasses, trails of congealed blood have spread across the wrinkled, eighty-three-year-old face like the branches of a tree. And where her pupils should have been, he can see something shiny; something that just about sticks out.

Two of Erna Pedersen’s own knitting needles.

‘Did you see the marks on her throat?’

Bjarne leans closer, moves some hair out of the way with a pen he takes from his jacket pocket.

‘You’re joking,’ he says.

Sara raises one offended eyebrow.

‘As there’s not much blood at the scene, her heart must have stopped beating before the killer forced the knitting needles into her eyes.’

‘So he strangled her first,’ Bjarne concludes.

Sara nods.

‘But there are another couple of interesting things.’

Bjarne turns to her.

‘We haven’t got a murder weapon,’ Sara says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can’t force knitting needles through someone’s eyes just by hitting them with a book. The nasal bone gets in the way, as does the forehead. He must have used something else. Something heavier. Take a look at this.’

Bjarne follows Sara’s index finger, which stops at the victim’s brown, knitted cardigan. A fine layer of white powder has settled on her shoulders.

‘I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m sure that the knitting needles dented whatever it was the killer used to bash them into her head.’

‘Did they go right through her skull?’

‘No, that requires more force,’ she says, tapping her own head with her knuckles. ‘The skull is thick. And it gets thicker with age, especially in women. But it looks as if he tried.’

Bjarne pulls a face.

‘Is there anything else I need to know?’

‘Yes.’

She steps past him and goes over to the wall behind the chest of drawers. Points to a picture frame lying on the floor. The glass is smashed and the picture is unclear, but Bjarne can still make out a seemingly happy and contented family of four.

He asks who they are.

‘Don’t know,’ Sara replies. ‘But the odds are they’re the victim’s son or daughter and his or her family. I’m more interested in why the picture is on the floor and why the picture hook on the wall is bent.’

Bjarne looks up.

‘If you take a look at the floor, you’ll see that it’s clean. You can almost see your own reflection in it.’

‘So the picture was torn off the wall,’ Bjarne concludes. ‘Possibly today.’

Sara nods.

‘If I were you, I’d ask myself why.’

It takes him only ten minutes to walk from Dælenenga Sports Park to Grünerhjemmet, the care home at the bottom of Markveien. It’s a redbrick building that blends in effortlessly with the rest of the architecture in Grünerløkka. Few people walking past it would know that many of the neighbourhood’s most vulnerable residents live here. The exceptions are on 17 May, Norway’s Constitution Day, when schoolchildren stand outside to sing the national anthem,
Ja, vi elsker dette landet
, or otherwise when an ambulance or hearse is called.

A small crowd has gathered outside the main entrance, a subspecies of
Homo sapiens
that Henning would recognise anywhere, any time. And it takes him only a moment before he spots her among the other journalists.

Nora.

The woman he once loved with every fibre of his being. The woman he failed to love like she should have been loved. The woman who was ill on the day his flat burned down and who will never forgive herself for asking Henning to look after Jonas that very night, even though it wasn’t his turn. The woman who finalised their divorce shortly after that fatal night when he needed her most.

To say that being around Nora since he returned to work has been awkward would be an understatement. Their shared past as parents and the fact that they work for rival newspapers is just for starters. Another complication is that she is now dating Iver Gundersen, Henning’s closest colleague at
123news
.

Nora waves and slowly makes her way towards him; she stops a metre in front of him and says ‘hi’. Henning nods and smiles, sensing immediately how a protective bubble forms around them where the wind, the air, the care home – the whole world – cease to exist.

‘How are you?’ she asks.

Henning tilts his head towards his shoulder, first to one side, then the other.

‘Not too bad,’ he says.

Henning hasn’t seen Nora since the end of the Tore Pulli case, but she sent him an email a couple of days ago after reading an article he had written about how and why Pulli was killed. It wasn’t a long email, just two sentences, but it has been on his mind ever since.

He should have replied and thanked her for her kind words, of course he should, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. What he definitely ought to have done was to thank her for saving his life as he lay unconscious in that grave, hovering between life and death just over one week ago. Nora had realised that something was wrong when she called at his flat and got no reply. She contacted Bjarne Brogeland who took action so that Henning was eventually found and saved.

He hasn’t managed to thank her for that, either.

It doesn’t make things any less awkward that her voice is gentler than it used to be and that he can detect genuine concern.

‘My head still hurts a bit, but I’m all right,’ he adds. ‘How is Iver?’

Nora imitates Henning’s shrug.

‘He says hi,’ is all she says.

‘Is he out of hospital yet?’

‘Mm,’ she says and nods. ‘Bored rigid on the sofa.’

Nora’s skin is still smooth. Her dark, shoulder-length hair falls in waves down her blue anorak, an anorak Henning has seen her wear before. He can even remember when. Between Gjendesheim and Memurubu when they hiked Besseggen Ridge on a day that started as summer, but ended in full-blown winter. The wind gusting towards them now holds some of the same promise.

‘So what’s happened here?’ he asks.

Nora turns to the redbrick building. Again she shrugs her shoulders.

‘We don’t know very much yet other than the victim is an old lady.’

Nearby a journalist bursts out laughing. Henning glares at him.

‘No statements yet?’

Nora shakes her head.

‘I imagine the police will hold a press conference tomorrow morning,’ she says with a sigh.

‘Yes, I suppose they will.’

Press conferences, however, are open to everyone and tomorrow is too far away. So Henning takes out his mobile and texts Bjarne Brogeland asking him for a quick chat about the case. The reply comes in a couple of minutes later:

Just as I thought
, Henning thinks. In other words: no reason to hang around.

He looks about him. It’s getting late. The deadline for printed newspapers is imminent, which means that duty editors everywhere are now screaming for copy. But there is a limit to what field reporters can write tonight. The investigation has only just begun and no one knows the name of the victim or how she died, so it’s still possible to be the first reporter to break the story tomorrow. All he needs is a detail or two that no one else knows yet.

Henning uses his mobile to check out the online competition and sees that none of them is reporting anything other than the obvious. Nor is anyone going to let him into the care home this late in the evening and possibly not tomorrow, either. The residents and the investigation take priority. Standing here watching police officers come and go is a waste of time.

And that gives him an idea. What about the staff? And the visitors? How will they get out of the building tonight?

Henning catches Nora’s eye and he signals that he’s off.

But going home is the last thing on his mind.

A care worker in a white uniform sits on a chair outside the television lounge picking his nails. He flicks away a bit of skin that lands on the floor. Then he jumps up as though the seat has suddenly got hot.

Bjarne Brogeland is standing in front of him.

‘Ole Christian Sund?’

The man nods and rubs his neck with his right hand. Sund has a sparse, blond moustache on his acne-scarred face. His eyebrows meet in the middle. His thin arms stick out from the loose-fitting sleeves.

‘How is your son?’ Bjarne says, finding himself a chair and indicating to Sund to sit down again.

‘I don’t know,’ the care worker says, looking glum. ‘He’s with his mum now, but she’s not replying to my texts. But I’m sure he’s fine with her.’

‘Yes, mums are great at that sort of thing,’ Bjarne says, smiling sympathetically. ‘I presume you’ve been offered counselling?’

Bjarne takes out his notebook and pen.

‘We have. But Martine, Ulrik’s mum, is a psychologist and no one knows Ulrik better than her, so—’

‘I understand,’ Bjarne says. ‘But we’ll want to talk to him as soon as possible. He might have seen something important.’

Sund nods and rakes a hand through his long, blond fringe.

‘I’ve never seen him like that,’ he whispers. ‘He seemed almost in a trance.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He just sat there. Rocking back and forth. His eyes were all glazed and distant.’

Sund’s face takes on a sad, anxious expression.

‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘Not straightaway. But when I came back out from Erna Pedersen’s room, he muttered something about fractions.’

‘Fractions?’

‘Yes. He kept repeating it. Fractions, fractions, fractions.’

Bjarne notes down the word in capital letters.

‘Now he’s been very excited about his maths homework recently so it might have something to do with that. What do I know?’

‘How old is he?’

‘He’s nine.’

Bjarne nods.

‘I won’t keep you for very much longer,’ he says. ‘But do you have any idea who might have done this?’

Sund heaves a sigh.

‘No.’

‘Can you think of anyone who didn’t like her?’

Sund mulls it over.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Have there been any disagreements here recently? Did someone get angry or upset with her?’

Again Sund racks his brains.

‘Sometimes our residents get agitated and their discussions heated. But I really don’t think that anyone would hurt Erna Pedersen. She never made a fuss; she was quite frail and unwell. And if she hadn’t died like . . . like this, she would have died soon, anyway.’

Bjarne scratches his head with the pen. A female care worker walks past them. Sund takes out his mobile and checks for new messages. Then he turns it off and puts it away.

‘Did you notice if anyone went to her room today?’

Sund shifts slightly on the chair.

‘I was working mainly at the other end of the corridor. A lot of staff are off sick at the moment.’

Bjarne nods again.

‘I can see from the visitors’ log that no one visited her today. Do you know what it was usually like? Did she have a lot of visitors?’

‘You’re better off asking Daniel, Daniel Nielsen. He was her primary care worker. But, no, I don’t think they were queuing round the block, to be honest.’

Bjarne writes down Nielsen’s name and circles it.

‘Are you aware of any relatives who might have visited her from time to time?’

‘If they did, it can’t have been very often. I barely know what her son looks like.’

‘So she has a son?’

Sund nods.

Bjarne writes ‘son’s family in broken photograph?’ on his notepad.

‘The camera outside the main entrance,’ he continues. ‘Do you happen to know if it records?’

Sund shakes his head.

‘It’s only there so we can see who rings the bell outside regular visiting hours.’

‘So people can come and go as they please?’

‘They can.’

Bjarne nods again.

‘Did something unusual happen here today? Anything out of the ordinary?’

Sund thinks about it.

‘The Volunteer Service people were here in the afternoon to play and sing for the residents.’

‘Go on?’

‘They come once a fortnight.’

‘I see. Are they popular?’

‘Yes, very.’

‘Did Erna Pedersen usually join in?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think I saw her there today.’

Bjarne makes another note.

‘How many people usually come from the Volunteer Service?’

‘Five or six, I think.’

Bjarne has met members of the Volunteer Service before, people of all ages who help others in return for no money at all. They’re unlikely to be the type to force knitting needles into the head of an old lady, Bjarne thinks, but he still makes a note of the name of the service in capital letters with an arrow pointing to it.

‘Okay,’ he says, getting up. ‘I can imagine that you want to get home and check on your son. But please think about what you saw here today, especially if something strikes you as a little odd or unusual. Anything that might be of interest.’

‘Will do,’ Sund says, taking the card Bjarne hands him. Then he hurries towards the lift while switching on his mobile to check for new messages. It doesn’t even have time to beep before he shakes his head in despair.