The Lion's Mouth (13 page)

The warrant.

Konrad Storskog had kept his promise.

She was not entirely sure whether she would keep hers.

16.30,
OSLO POLICE STATION

“I
’m starting to get bloody tired of these press conferences,” Assistant Chief of Police Håkon Sand mumbled.

The public relations manager at the station had come from a well-paid post at
Dagbladet
newspaper, and had surprised them all by taking on the thankless task of keeping society informed about everything the police were unable to achieve.

“Press
briefing
, Håkon. Not press conference,” he said, holding open the door to the Police Chief’s outer office.

“But four times a day? Is that really necessary?”

“It’s the best way of avoiding speculation. You made a good job of it, by the way. The uniform suits you! And now there are four hours until the next one. You can look forward to that.”

“And meanwhile, we’ve still nothing new to report,” Håkon Sand commented, tugging at his infernal collar, whose synthetic material made his neck red and sore.

There were six men in the Police Chief’s office: one was setting up a slide projector while another was trying to find out how the venetian blinds worked. They had no success, and in the end the secretary had to be called in. She darkened the room in thirty seconds, and switched on the light before closing the door again behind her.

“We’ve received a provisional autopsy report,” the Chief of Police announced; by now his bluish shadow was in the process of becoming a full beard. “And it is in fact fairly specific. We were right as far as the time of the murder was concerned. Between half past five and seven. We cannot be more precise than that yet, since there were such extreme fluctuations in the temperature of the room, making it difficult to say.”

He made a sign to Håkon Sand, who stood up and flicked the light switch.

An image appeared on the wall. A close-up of Prime Minister Birgitte Volter’s head. In the blonde hair, you could clearly see a hole, quite small, rather round, with black edges and a streak of dried blood in the strands. The Police Chief nodded to the Head of CID, who stepped into the projector beam and produced a folding pointer.

“As you see, the entrance wound is small. The bullet stopped here …”

He clicked the remote control, and a new image came into view. Underneath the hair you could clearly perceive a tiny bulge, almost like a painful, nasty pimple.

“It had entered the temple, passed through the brain and cranium on the other side, and in fact ended up across here, just under the skin. Birgitte Volter died instantly.”

He clicked yet again.

“This is the bullet.”

It looked modest, even though it was greatly enlarged: a black-and-white tape measure beside it indicated that the ammunition was small-caliber.

“And the strange thing is …” he said, then interrupted himself. “No, let us first of all have the technicians’ conclusions.”

One more click brought up a drawing. A woman sat in an office chair with her hands on the desk. Behind her stood a faceless man, with a gun in his hand; a revolver directed at the woman’s temple.

“It must have happened something like this. It’s quite obvious the gun must have touched the temple as the shot was fired. That can be deduced from the burn marks around the entrance wound. Which tells us that the perpetrator must have been standing behind her. There’s certainly no room in front of her.”

The pointer smacked the office desk in the picture.

“We won’t speculate, of course, but it might be that—”

“A blackmail scenario,” Håkon Sand declared.

The other men looked at him. The Security Service Chief, who was now wearing a charcoal suit and red tie, closed his eyes and took such a deep breath through his nose that it made a whistling noise.

The Head of CID continued. “Yes. It might well look like that. And in addition …”

He produced a new image, and now the wound in the Prime Minister’s head was gaping at them, enlarged a thousand times.

“… we see here fragments of material. Woolen fibers, it seems. We assume that they are from the shawl she was wearing, the one we have still not found. Black and red wool fibers. Which means that—”

“Was she shot
through
her own scarf?” Håkon Sand asked. “Was she wearing it on her head?”

The Head of CID seemed annoyed at the interruptions.

“I suggest we open this up for discussion afterward,” he said truculently, swinging the pointer around until it suddenly became caught in a picture hook belonging to a painting that had been taken down for the occasion. “No, she was not wearing the shawl on her head, she was wearing it over her shoulder. But she may have had it over her head just then, almost as a—”

“A hood,” Håkon Sand muttered. “She was blindfolded. By the perpetrator.”

“Exactly,” the Security Service Chief interjected, adjusting the knot of his tie as he leaned forward. “The man may have placed the shawl over her head to frighten her even more. That’s a well-known tactic, to prevent the victim from seeing anything at all. It makes people feel confused. Darkness, I mean.”

“And then we come to the thing that strikes me as the most remarkable aspect of this case.”

The Head of CID had obviously decided not to allow himself to be put off by the ill-timed interruptions.

“The caliber.”

Again the photo of the bullet appeared on the wall.

“It’s too small.”

The Police Chief was now on his feet, standing at the window, gazing into the room as he rubbed the small of his back.

“What do you mean by too small?”

“It’s 7.62 millimeters. Small. By far the most common caliber for a handgun is 9 millimeters. Or .38 as they say in the USA. With small-caliber ammunition like this, it can’t be guaranteed…” Scratching his forehead, he hesitated just a touch too long.

“Can’t be guaranteed that the lady would die!” Håkon Sand leaned forward eagerly in his seat.

“Exactly,” the Head of CID mumbled despondently, looking up at the ceiling.

“I came across that once before,” Håkon Sand continued. “A guy who had shot himself in the head twice. Twice! The first shot had entered his brain without doing much damage, at least not enough to kill him right away. But why …”

Now he was the one to hesitate, and the Head of CID took over.

“Yes, just so. Why should a person whose intention was to kill the Prime Minister and who was cunning enough to enter what is probably the most carefully guarded office in all of Norway, bring with him a gun that, strictly speaking, was not suitable for the job? And as if that was not enough …”

He let the red tip of the pointer outline the bullet.

“This is an extremely
rare
caliber. In this country, at least. You can’t buy it over the counter; although they can be specially ordered, of course.”

“However, if …” the Chief of Police began, crossing over to the wall that served as a screen, “… if you are conducting some kind of extortion … I mean, if he came to blackmail her, and not to kill
her … what was it he was after? And why did he kill her, if that was not his intention from the beginning?”

The room was silent, and the atmosphere stuffy. The Police Chief pressed a button on the telephone.

“Coffee,” he said tersely, depressing the button again.

Two minutes later the six men around the Police Chief’s conference table were slurping coffee. Eventually the Security Service Chief put down his white mug and cleared his throat.

“The King of Jordan was supposed to arrive here next Wednesday. Incognito.”

The others looked at one another, and the Police Chief stared intently at the Head of the Criminal Intelligence Section, a magnanimous red-haired man who, unusually for him, had not uttered a word during the entire proceedings.

“An attempt to rescue the last vestiges of the Oslo Agreement,” continued Ole Henrik Hermansen, the Security Service Chief, after a brief pause during which he peered around, obviously searching for something. “Are we allowed to smoke in here?”

“Not really,” the Chief of Police said, rubbing his head. “But we can make an exception today.”

He produced a glass ashtray from the desk drawer and placed it in front of Hermansen, who had already lit a cigarette.

“Because of Prime Minister Volter’s death, the visit will not now take place, of course. That
could
be a lead. On the other hand, there would be other far less dramatic ways of stopping the King of Jordan’s visit. If details of his trip had been leaked, a telephone threat to us would have been sufficient.”

Smoke rings formed a chain of haloes above his head.

“Then there are the right-wing extremists, of course. As you know, they’ve started to stir. The newspapers exaggerate, admittedly, but we know that at least two or three of the groups are committed enough in their beliefs to actually plan an
assassination. Until now, we’ve regarded them as insignificant, not fanatical enough. It looks as though that’s no longer the case.”

“But …”

Håkon Sand waved his forefinger like an over-enthusiastic exam candidate.

“… if they’re the ones behind it, why haven’t they … claimed responsibility for the murder? Wouldn’t a great deal of the point in committing the murder be lost if none of us got to know that they’re the ones who did it?”

“You’ve got a point,” Ole Henrik Hermansen conceded, without looking in Håkon Sand’s direction.

“We had expected a message. There hasn’t been one. But if it’s
true
that one or several of these groups are responsible for the killing, then we have a huge problem. On Friday.”

“The funeral,” the Police Chief said, with a note of fatigue in his voice.

“Exactly. The Prime Minister is at the very top of their so-called death lists. All the others on those lists, and I mean
every single one
of them, will be at the funeral.”

“And that’ll be hell on earth,” commented the Head of the Anti-Terror Squad, a thickset, dark-haired giant of a man.

“You could be right there,” the Security Service Chief responded, stubbing out his cigarette with a crushing, resolute movement. “That may be why they have not yet issued any declaration. They’re waiting. It’s entirely possible, of course. Most definitely, entirely possible.”

21.39,
STOLMAKERGATA
15

Billy T. stood in a little bedroom that seemed even smaller because of the bunk beds on either side, with the distance between them only about half a meter. He took a break from making up the beds, and held his head in his hands as he supported himself on the top bunk. The music blasted through the whole apartment: he had loudspeakers in every room. Even in the boys’ room, though his persistent attempts to teach four young lads aged between six and eight to love opera had fallen on stony ground so far.

Sister Angelica cried over the loss of her dead son in the middle of the second part of Puccini’s
Il trittico
, The Triptych, and Billy T. lifted the bedclothes up to his face, closing his eyes. There was a smarting sensation behind his eyelids. Since Friday morning, he had slept for only five hours and that had been a restless sleep, during which he’d tossed from side to side and had woken feeling even more exhausted than when he had gone to bed. Soon he would have to capitulate to the Rohypnol tablets lying in the bathroom closet as a second lifebelt; he had not touched them for the past year.

He rubbed the bedclothes against his face. His eyes ached unrelentingly. The boys had been meant to stay the weekend. Demonstrating patience and a mature understanding beyond their years, the four half-brothers had found themselves being returned home to their respective mothers on Saturday morning, after Billy T.’s sister had stepped in at short notice on Friday evening.

“Daddy is going to find the murderer,” the eldest, Alexander, had explained to his youngest brother. “Daddy’s going to find him. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

Now Daddy was tired. And sorry. He padded his way into the living room, and threw himself down on the only good chair: a gigantic English winged armchair in worn leather. He balanced his feet on the coffee table, an old, damaged piece of furniture
from a second-hand store, and used the remote control to turn the volume on the enormous stereo system even higher.

He sat with the libretto booklet in front of him, although he knew most of the words by heart. The little book almost disappeared in his huge hands, and he sat there inertly, staring into space.

He only just heard it ring. Irritated, he tried to ascertain the time; his eyes finally spotted the clock on the cooker as he turned down the music.

“Okay, okay,” he said as it rang once again before he reached the front door.

Fumbling with the security chain, he heard it ring yet again.

“Okay,
okay
,” he snarled and opened the door wide.

The first thing he noticed was the enormous duffel bag, not properly closed at the top, with a big woolen sweater trying to push its way out. Then he spotted a pair of boots, beautiful boots, unusual, made of snakeskin and with real silver spurs. And then he lifted his eyes.

The woman standing before him smiled. She had mid-length brown hair and bright blue eyes with a distinctive black ring around the iris. Her pale leather jacket was new, with short fringes across the chest and Native American embroidery on the pockets. The woman was tanned, a matte, golden color with no trace of redness, as though she had spent a long time in sunny climes. Above her eyes, a white line ran across each temple. She began to laugh.

“You look like a crazy loon! Can I come and stay with you?”