The Lion's Mouth (2 page)

All of a sudden, Wenche Andersen was seized with a decisiveness that had eluded her for several hours, and she threw the door open wide.

“Excuse me,” she said loudly. “Sorry for disturbing you, but—”

There was no point in saying anything further.

Prime Minister Birgitte Volter was sitting in her office chair, her upper body slumped across the desk. She looked like a student in a luxurious reading room, late one evening during the run-up to exams, just taking a little nap, forty winks. Wenche Andersen stood in the doorway a good six meters away, but she could see it all the same. The blood was clearly visible: it had formed a large, stagnant pool on a draft of the proposal concerning the Schengen agreement. So visible that Wenche Andersen did not even cross over to her dead boss to see if she could possibly help her, fetch a glass of water perhaps, or provide her with a handkerchief to wipe away the mess.

Instead, she carefully – but this time very determinedly – closed the doors of the Prime Minister’s office, skirted around her own desk and grabbed the phone with the direct line to the central switchboard of Oslo police headquarters. It rang only once before a man’s voice answered.

“You have to come right away,” Wenche Andersen said, her voice trembling only ever so slightly. “The Prime Minister is
dead. She’s been shot. Birgitte Volter has been killed. You must come.”

Then she put down the receiver, moved her hand to another telephone, and this time got the security switchboard on the line.

“This is the Prime Minister’s office,” she said, more calmly now. “Shut the building. No one in, no one out. Only the police. Remember the garage.”

Without waiting for a response, she disconnected the call in order to dial another four-digit number.

“Fourteenth floor,” answered the man on the floor below, from within a cage of bulletproof glass, the chamber that allowed access up into the holy of holies, the offices of the head of government of the Kingdom of Norway.

“This is the Prime Minister’s office,” she said yet again. “The Prime Minister is dead. Activate the emergency plan.”

And so Wenche Andersen continued her duties as she always did: systematically and faultlessly. The only clues that this was a quite extraordinary Friday evening were the two expanding lilac patches on her cheeks.

They soon spread across her whole face.

19.50,
KVELDSAVISEN EDITORIAL OFFICE

W
hen “Little” Lettvik’s parents christened their blonde-haired baby girl Lise Annette, they failed to anticipate that her sister – older by one year – would naturally nickname her “Little”, or that fifty-four years later Little would weigh ninety-two kilos and smoke twenty cigarillos a day. Nor could they have predicted that she would push her exhausted liver to the limits by drinking a daily dram of whisky. Her entire body invited ridicule: she still adhered to the 1970s rule about going bra-less, and her stringy gray hair framed a face that bore signs of almost thirty years in
Akersgata, the street where both the country’s government and Oslo’s newspapers had their headquarters. But no one cracked a joke about Little Lettvik. At least not in her company.

“What the fuck’s a Supreme Court judge doing at the Prime Minister’s office late on a Friday afternoon?” she muttered to herself as she hoisted up her breasts, which were spilling out in the direction of her armpits, finally finding support on her well-upholstered pelvic bone.

“What did you say?”

The young lad facing her was her lapdog. He was six foot four, emaciated and still suffered from acne. Little Lettvik despised people like Knut Fagerborg: boys with six-month temporary contracts at
Kveldsavisen
. They were the most dangerous journalists in the world – Little Lettvik knew that. She had once been in that position herself, and although it was a long time ago and circumstances in the Norwegian press had completely altered since then, she recognized him. But Knut was useful. Like all the others, he admired her without reservation. He thought she would make sure his contract was extended. In that, he was totally mistaken. However, for the moment, he had his uses.

“Strange,” she murmured again, really more to herself than in reply to Knut Fagerborg. “I phoned Grinde at the Supreme Court this afternoon. It’s so bloody difficult to find out anything about what that commission of his is up to. A young chick in his office chirped that he was with the Prime Minister. Why in hell was he there?”

Raising her arms above her head, she stretched, and Knut recognized the scent of Poison. Not so long ago, he had been forced to pay a visit to the emergency doctor for anti-histamines after a one-night stand with a lady who had the same taste.

“What do you want?” she said suddenly, as though she had just noticed him.

“There’s something going on. The police radio went berserk at first, and now it’s totally silent. I’ve never known anything like it.”

Truth to tell, twenty-year-old Knut Fagerborg had not experienced very much in his short life. However, Little was in agreement: it did seem odd.

“Heard anything on the street?” she asked.

“No, but—”

“Guys!”

A man in his forties, wearing a gray tweed jacket, came shuffling into the editorial office.

“Something’s going on in the government tower block. A great commotion and lots of vehicles, and they’re cordoning off the entire place. Is the Prime Minister expecting some hotshot from abroad?”

“At night? On a Friday night?”

Little Lettvik’s left knee was aching.

She had experienced pain in her left knee two hours before the Kielland oil-rig disaster in the North Sea. Her knee had also been excruciating the day before the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Not to mention how she had limped to the Accident and Emergency unit the evening after the Gulf Crisis erupted, surprised that it had come upon her so late, until that night she had received news that King Olav had died.

“Pop out and investigate.”

Knut popped out.

“By the way, does anybody know anybody who had a child in 1965?”

As Little Lettvik rubbed her tender knee, she panted and puffed, bringing her stomach into a clinch with the edge of the desk.

“I was born in 65,” yelled a snazzy woman in a mauve dress who entered carrying two archive folders.

“That’s no help at all,” Little Lettvik said. “You’re alive.”

20.15,
PMO

B
illy T. felt something he could only interpret as longing. It hit him somewhere in his solar plexus, and he was forced to take several deep breaths in order to clear his head.

The Norwegian Prime Minister’s office would have been quite tasteful if it had not been for her lying there stone dead with her head on the papers in front of her; a literally bloody affront to the interior designer who had carefully chosen the massive desk with its bow-shaped outer edge. The same undulating contours were echoed in a number of places throughout the room, including on a bookcase which admittedly was quite decorative, but its lack of straight lines made it seem totally unfit for purpose. And sure enough there were not many books in it. The room itself was rectangular: at one end the furniture was arranged for meetings and at the other end was the desk plus two visitors’ chairs. It contained nothing that could truly be called luxurious. The picture on the wall behind the desk was large, but not particularly attractive, and Billy T. could not immediately identify the artist. The first thought that struck him as he looked around was that he had seen far more exclusive offices in other places in the country. This space was social democracy through and through, a sober prime-ministerial office that would make Norwegian visitors nod in appreciation, but which foreign heads of state would probably find conspicuously lacking in flamboyance. There was a door at either end; Billy T. had just entered through one of them, and the other led into a restroom containing a shower and toilet.

The pale physician had bloodstains on his gray jacket. He was struggling to remove his latex gloves, and Billy T. detected a hint of solemnity in his strained voice.

“I believe the Prime Minister died between two and three hours
ago. However, that’s only a provisional estimate. Extremely provisional. I am assuming that the temperature in this room has remained constant, at least until our arrival.”

Finally, as the gloves capitulated, saying farewell to his fingers with a sucking sound, they were stuffed into the pocket of his tweed jacket. The doctor straightened up.

“She was shot in the head.”

“Can see that,” Billy T. mumbled.

The Superintendent sent him a warning look.

Billy T. registered it. He turned to face the three men from the crime scene division, who had already set to work doing what they had to do, what they had done many times before: they photographed, measured, and brushed their fingerprint powder, moving around the huge office with a grace that would have amazed anyone who had not seen it before. They behaved as though they were used to this sort of thing, as though this was simply routine practice. But there was something approaching the sacred in the room, an absence of the usual gallows humor, an uneasy atmosphere that was exacerbated by the rising temperature. A dead Prime Minister did not invite frivolity.

As always when he found himself in close proximity to a corpse, it struck Billy T. that nothing was as naked as death. Seeing this woman who had ruled the country until three hours ago, this woman whom he had never seen in the flesh but had encountered every single day on TV, in the newspapers, and on the radio; seeing Birgitte Volter, the human being behind the public persona, lying dead on her own desk, this was worse, more embarrassing, and made him feel more self-conscious than seeing her without any clothes. Billy T. turned away and walked across to the window.

The Ministry of Finance was situated to the left, far below. The building seemed to cower in leaden resentment at the newly
and very expensively refurbished Supreme Court by its side. Further to the southwest, Billy T. could just discern the roof of the Parliament Building, which appeared rather reticent from where he stood on the second-to-top floor of the government tower block, a wispy, impotent pennant flying from the flagpole atop its cupola. The executive, the judiciary and the legislature, observed from a somewhat skewed angle.

And the national newspaper offices of Akersgata winding through it all, Billy T. thought, turning to face the room again.

“Weapon?” he enquired of a young police officer who had stepped toward the door for a moment.

The officer drank some water from a plastic mug, then conscientiously returned the beaker to a uniformed female officer in the outer office. He shook his head. “No.”

“No?”

“Not yet. No weapon.” He wiped his mouth with his jacket sleeve. “We’ll find it soon enough,” he continued. “We have to search further. Toilets, hallways, corridors. Dammit, this building’s a mammoth. But it’s probably not in here. The weapon, that is.”

“And this mammoth is actually filled with loads of people, even on a Friday evening,” the Superintendent said with some surprise. “They’re starting to gather in the canteen downstairs. At least sixty or seventy people so far.”

Billy T. swore under his breath. “There must be at least four hundred fucking offices in this building. Do I dare to ask for reinforcements?” He said this with a tense smile, rubbing his hand over his smooth-shaven skull.

“Of course,” said the Superintendent. “We need to find that weapon.”

“So much for the bleeding obvious,” Billy T. said, just quietly enough that no one could hear.

He wanted to leave. There was no need for him to be there. He knew that the days, the weeks, yes, perhaps even the months that followed would be hellish. There would be a lengthy state of emergency. No days off, and definitely no vacations. No time for the boys. Four children who should at least be entitled to see him at weekends. However, there was no need for him to be here, not now, not in this rectangular office with its fantastic view over the lights of Oslo and a dead woman lying across her desk.

The sense of loneliness seized him again. That was what it was: loneliness and longing. For her, his partner and only confidante. She ought to have been there. Together, they were invincible; alone, he felt that neither his height – six foot seven in his stocking feet – nor the inverted cross he wore in his ear were of any use whatsoever. For the last time, he averted his eyes from the pool of blood underneath the woman’s shattered head.

He turned around and touched his chest.

Hanne Wilhelmsen was in the USA, and would not be back until Christmas.

“Shit, Billy T.,” whispered the police officer who had drunk the water. “I’m feeling really sick. That’s never happened to me before. At a crime scene, I mean. Not since I was a rookie.”

Without replying, Billy T. simply glanced at the man and flashed a grimace that, with a certain degree of indulgence, might be taken for a smile.

He felt really awful himself.

20.30,
KVELDSAVISEN EDITORIAL OFFICE

“T
his must be something colossal,” Knut Fagerborg gasped, flinging off his fleece-lined denim jacket. “Crawling with people, crawling with cars, cordoned off everywhere, and everything so silent! Fuck, everybody’s so bloody serious!”

He collapsed into an office chair that was far too low, his legs flailing about all over the place, making him look like a spider.

Little Lettvik’s left knee was smarting intensely. She stood up and warily set her foot down on the floor, increasing the pressure with extreme caution.

“I want to see for myself,” she said, fishing out a box of small cigars.

Slowly and solicitously, with Knut Fagerborg jogging on the spot, impatient to sprint ahead of her the few meters across to the government tower block, she lit her cigar.

“I think you’re right,” she said, smiling. “This is definitely something colossal.”

She limped her way out of the editorial office.

20.34,
SKAUGUM ESTATE IN ASKER