The Lion's Mouth (14 page)

“Hanne,” he whispered. “It can’t be true!
Hanne!”

“It’s me all right,” she said as he stepped over the duffel bag to put his arms around her in a bear hug, lifting her off her feet and walking backward with her into the apartment.

He dropped her into the winged armchair, flung out his arms and roared, “Hanne! Why in the world are you here? When did you arrive? Are you staying long?”

“Bring in my bag, won’t you?”

Billy T. collected the bag and switched off the opera.

“Do you want anything? Something to drink?”

He felt like a teenager, and could feel himself blushing with pleasure; a totally unfamiliar sensation, but for some reason not entirely unpleasant. Hanne Wilhelmsen was back. She had come home again. She was going to stay with him. In the fridge, he had half a home-made pizza from Friday and five cans of Ringnes lager. Grabbing two, he switched on the oven, and tossed one of the cans to the seated woman.

“Tell me,” he said, sitting on the floor close by her, his arms hugging her knees, and staring directly into her eyes, “when did you get here?”

“Just now. Lots of delays and that sort of thing, and I’m dead tired. What is the time, actually?”

Without waiting for an answer, she suddenly caressed his bare head.

“It’s so
good
to see you, Billy T.! How
are
you?”

“Fine, just fine,” he said impatiently. “Are you starting back at work? At once?”

“No, I’m on sabbatical until Christmas, and I’m going back to California. In a while. But I just couldn’t stay away. Cecilia understood. She realized that I would go crazy over there with all this …”

She swept the beer can around in a semi-circle, making it slosh about.

“I just couldn’t leave you on your own with this case. I can help you as a sort of … freelancer? So you’re not alone.”

“Alone?”

He dug his head into her lap, clutching her legs tightly, and shook himself: shook them both.

“There are about two hundred of us, you know!”

“But nobody like me,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, laughing.

Her laughter. He sucked it in; it rippled, softly, genially, creeping inside his ears, into his brain and spreading delightfully down his spine. Chief Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen was back. In Norway. In Oslo. She was going to help him.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he whispered. “I’ve …”

He stopped, and scratched his back.

“You’ve missed me, have you? Likewise. Where shall I sleep? We’ve rented out our apartment, so I hope it’s okay for me to move in here.”

“That depends,” said Billy T. “Will you take the risk of sharing the double bed with me, or do you want to take one of the boys’ bunk beds?”

“The latter would be safest, I think,” she said, yawning emphatically.

“But first we’ll crack open some wine, eh?”

Hanne Wilhelmsen glanced at the almost untouched can of lager.

“There’s nothing I’d rather do right now than share a bottle of wine with you. Nothing.”

“And some pizza.” Billy T. grinned. “That I made myself.”

The clock on the bedside cabinet glowed green, telling her that the new day was four hours and five minutes old. Billy T. had
thrown off the quilt, and was lying diagonally across the specially built bed. Wearing boxer shorts and a soccer shirt, a present from Cecilie, San Francisco 49ers in size XXXL, he was snoring lightly with his mouth open. Hanne stood looking at him, and for a moment she nearly changed her mind. Then she sneaked over to him and snuggled down beside his huge body.

“I’m having such terrible nightmares,” she whispered. “And the bed in there is so hard.”

He smacked his lips slightly, and stretched out closer to one side of the double bed. Then he rolled his left arm over her, as he mumbled, “I knew I could get you into bed with me.”

Hanne giggled into the darkness before they both fell fast asleep.

MONDAY, APRIL 7

09.15,
SUPREME COURT

B
enjamin Grinde stared at the Chief Justice and shook his head faintly.

“I honestly do not know what to say. As I told you on the phone yesterday, the police have admitted that this was all a huge mistake. I have simply no idea how the press got hold of it.”

The Chief Justice raised the newspaper to eye level. His reading glasses were very strong and made his eyes appear so tiny that they virtually disappeared; now he was also squinting.

“Not good,” the Chief Justice muttered. “Not good at all.”

Benjamin Grinde stared at the table in front of him, fixing his gaze on a well-thumbed red statute book. The lion on the national coat of arms leered at him, arrogant and gloating, and Grinde blinked.

“It is not difficult to agree with that,” he said softly. “What do you want me to do? Abstain from judicial activity until further notice?”

Putting down the newspaper, the Chief Justice rose and skirted the massive oak table in the judicial chambers before crossing to the window, which was framed by dark green velvet curtains. He peered at the façade directly opposite, where the opening words of the national anthem were carved into the stonework. Perhaps the Ministry of Finance wished to assure the outside world of their nationalistic inclinations, at a time when everything was being done to hoard the fortune gushing in an uncontrollable, inexhaustible supply from the North Sea.

“Good photograph,” he mumbled, placing his palm on the windowpane.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a really good photo of you. In the newspaper.”

He wheeled around and sat down again quietly. For a while it looked as though he were on a journey, far away, but Benjamin Grinde knew that the Chief Justice was a man who thought before he spoke, and he ignored the lengthy pause.

“That would be unfair,” the Chief Justice said at last. “The arrest warrant was obviously not genuine, and it would mean yielding to speculation if you were to relinquish your position. However, to be on the safe side, that ought to be raised with the advocates.”

He stood up and held the door open for the four other Supreme Court judges, who were waiting outside in their black caps and purple velvet trim. He drew the eldest aside, and they conversed in subdued voices so that the others could not hear. As the Chief Justice opened the door to leave them, the Registrar stood in the doorway to make his ritual announcement: “Advocates stand at the bar!”

The eldest judge nodded to the other Supreme Court judges, who reacted by lining up behind him, in a predetermined order with Benjamin Grinde, the last to be appointed, at the rear.

The President of the Court sat down, and after a brief formal nod to the advocates, Grinde followed suit. But the sense of solemnity that normally suffused him on these occasions had deserted him. The high-backed chair felt uncomfortable, and his cap felt too warm.

“The court is in session. Today we shall consider appeal case number …”

Benjamin Grinde felt seriously unwell. He reached out for a glass of water, but his hands were shaking and he stopped in his tracks.

“Are there any objections to the composition of the court?”

The President of the Court gazed from one advocate to the other, as the two of them stood erect behind the bar directly opposite the horseshoe-shaped judges’ table. The Adam’s apple of the advocate whose first test case this was bobbed up and down like a
yoyo, preventing him from uttering a word. Instead he scratched his head feverishly, while his adversary, a female advocate aged about sixty, answered in a steady, clear voice: “No.”

“I am aware that we are facing a special situation here today,” the President of the Court continued, leafing fruitlessly through the papers in front of him, bundles of judicial abstracts of varying quality, for something he had spotted earlier. “I expect that the advocates are familiar with the substantial coverage in one of this morning’s newspapers in which Judge Grinde …”

He nodded briefly to his left.

“… was mentioned. He seems to have been charged in connection with this tragic murder case we are all familiar with. Well. For our part, we have made investigations and have received assurances from the Director General of Public Prosecutions that the entire situation was due to a misapprehension. I therefore cannot see that a speculative article in a … a tabloid newspaper …”

He looked as though he had sunk his teeth into a lemon.

“ … should lead to a Supreme Court judge relinquishing his position. However, as I said, this is a special situation, and I leave it to the advocates to express their viewpoints with regard to the extent to which Judge Grinde continues to enjoy the necessary confidence. I therefore repeat my question, and as I said, simply as a matter of form: are there any objections to the composition of the court?”

“No!”

Now the two advocates replied in chorus, and the younger of them leaned toward the heavy teak bar. Swallowing repeatedly, he abruptly drew himself up to his full height again when the President of the Court called on him to speak.

A pause ensued; a lengthy pause. The man swayed. The view from the judges’ table was restricted, so the judges did not see his
female adversary make an encouraging gesture with her fist clenched and thumb pointing upward; she did this discreetly, hidden by the bar, but the man beside her was so lost that he did not notice it.

Benjamin Grinde was overcome by an uncontrollable urge to laugh. He stroked his fingers across his mouth, attempting to thrust the laughter back down where it had come from. This had never happened to him before; he had always had the greatest respect for the deference and gravity upon which the country’s highest court depended; it had to be solemn. He knew why the advocate was struggling.

The face of the advocate presenting the test case was chalk white, and his mouth was gaping like a fish out of water. Eventually he began. “Most peculiar court …”

The President of the Court cleared his throat, loudly and theatrically, and the advocate stopped abruptly. Now he looked as if he were on the brink of tears. The President of the Court knew the continuation of this string of words all too well: “… the richest judges in the realm”. He raised his hand discreetly toward the Registrar, who swiftly jotted down a few words on a yellow Post-it note and placed it before the unfortunate man; the man was now bright red in the face, his top lip lathered in a moustache of perspiration.

“Most honorable court, supreme judges of the realm,” he commenced anew, and it seemed as though the entire room exhaled in relief, the dark walls no longer appearing so severe, not quite so overwrought.

Four of the judges smiled faintly, and began to make notes.

Benjamin Grinde no longer felt the slightest inclination to laugh.

Nor did he notice Little Lettvik as she rose from the extreme rear of the public benches and left the chamber.

12.00,
OSLO POLICE STATION

E
ven the soft Kristiansand accent could not mask his fury. Chief of Police Hans Christian Mykland pounded on the table in front of him, and almost one hundred and fifty police officers straightened up in their seats.

“I regard this matter
extremely
seriously.
Extremely
seriously. I thought I made myself clear when I addressed all of you here on Saturday. No leaks to the press. I was
crystal clear!”

He thumped the table with the flat of his hand, and the room was so quiet that Billy T. did not dare even to breathe; his stomach was sore.

“That arrest warrant was a mistake. We all know that. Now we risk a juicy lawsuit for compensation for unjustifiable prosecution. Do you realize what it means to offend the judiciary, the third arm of government?”

No one felt called upon to answer; most of them were examining their own knees, in considerable detail.

“This will be followed up. Investigated. I will personally ensure that the person who leaked this warrant gets a through dressing-down.
From me!”

The Police Chief had at last found time to shave, and there was something about him that indicated a new sense of determination; he seemed to have grown in stature in the course of the weekend.

“So. For the moment, we’ll draw a line under that matter. At the next press conference, I shall …”

He glanced across at the public relations manager, and corrected himself.

“… At the next press briefing, I mean, I’ll make it as clear as I possibly can that Benjamin Grinde cooperated with us as a witness. Then we’ll see how big the fire actually is, and whether it is feasible to extinguish it. Now I’ll hand over to the Head of CID.”

The Head of CID looked startled, as though he had not been following the reprimand, since it did not apply to him. “It would be useful to have a short summary,” he began, as he placed an acetate on the overhead projector.