The Lion's Mouth (36 page)

There were also a couple of comments about Ruth-Dorthe Nordgarden’s role in all this. Not that she was singled out as the killer, far from it – in 1965 she had been twelve years old and a Girl Guide – but nevertheless
Kveldsavisen
,
Dagbladet
and
Aftenposten
all went so far as to set a question mark against Nordgarden’s handling of the issue. It was particularly galling that they had “reliable sources” who maintained that she had refused to meet Benjamin Grinde only days before he visited Birgitte Volter. The speculations about why she had not been willing to meet him were as fantastic as they were crazy.

“I simply didn’t have time,” she muttered to herself. “I couldn’t fit it in.”

Many MPs had also stuck their oars in, some lamely and hesitantly, others rushing in with no other target in sight than the
election, now only five months off. As usual, to a greater or lesser degree, they all prefaced their remarks with meaningless provisos. Meaningless, because they then went on to express themselves with the greatest confidence about absolutely everything: the Labor Party’s relationship to the Eastern bloc in the sixties, the role of politics in the investigation of Volter’s homicide, the work and composition of the Grinde Commission. The opposition also made one hell of a racket about what the murder had done to Norwegian society in general, and Norwegian politics in particular. The closed season was definitely over, and it was time for the opposition to ensure that the Labor Party would not benefit from too powerful a Palme effect during the early summer polls.

“As if the murder is an indication of how incompetent the Labor Party is.” Ruth-Dorthe Nordgarden sighed, touching her forehead as she squeezed her eyes shut. “As if the murder says anything at all about the Labor Party. Six months ago we were accused of persecuting communists in the sixties. Now we stand accused of being in cahoots with them.”

Furious and dejected, she used the newspaper to clobber an audacious fly, dizzy with spring and crawling in the direction of the marmalade spoon.

“I’m off, Mum,” said a head of tousled blonde hair that suddenly appeared round the doorframe.

“Have you had breakfast?”

“Bye!”

“Breakfast!”

Sighing histrionically, she leaned back in her chair. Outside the window, the massive larch had really started to put on its summer clothing: it would be vibrant green by 17 May, Norway’s Constitution Day.

“Has Astrid
gone
?”

Another, if possible even more rumpled, head stared crossly at her.

“You’re
not
going until you’ve eaten some breakfast!”

“But I just
have to
run.”

Bang.

The front door left a vacuum of silence she was not sure she liked, or wanted to fill with something else. She did not need to consider this for long. Her cell phone sitting in its charger was glaring at her with an evil green eye, as though it knew what a trial it was for her to use it.

She had memorized the number by heart.

“I hope you slept well,” she said petulantly when someone at the other end eventually picked up.

“Thanks, the same to you,” came the saccharine reply. “I have slept the sleep of the just.”

“You can’t
write
all that stuff,” Ruth-Dorthe exploded. “To think
you
could write such things about me, after—”

“After what? After being given so much help, do you mean? But wasn’t that in the service of freedom of expression, Ruth-Dorthe?”

“You know
perfectly
well what I mean!”

“No, honestly, I don’t. You sent me the commission’s document. Entirely voluntarily. There were no promises from me involved in that.”

“But you have … You have
destroyed
me! And not only me, but also perhaps the whole government. Just look at what
Aftenposten
wrote today. To think …”

She made an angry, rustling noise with the newspapers.

“Here. ‘It is regrettable that it does not seem possible to eradicate the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” culture that exists within our largest political party. The only difference here is that the back-scratching seems to have extended to former GDR leader Walter Ulbricht. We honestly do not know which is worse.’”

She threw the newspaper away.

“In the editorial! What have you done, Little Lettvik? We had an
agreement
!”

“Wrong. We did not have an agreement. I have helped you when it has been expedient. You have helped me. If it is no longer possible to return favors, we’ll just have to put that down to the free press and a vibrant democracy. We both support that, don’t we?”

“I …”

She had to compose herself, and be restrained. Her headache was back, pounding mercilessly, and she felt nauseous.

“I will never, ever, speak to you again,” Ruth-Dorthe whispered into the receiver.

But there was only a dial tone, and that seemed completely uninterested in her promises, given far too late.

The phone rang, startling her.

“Hello?”

Though the cell phone was stone dead, the ringing continued.

Bewildered, she looked around the living room, keeping her cheek pressed to the cell phone as if it were a security blanket bringing comfort in difficult times.

It was the ordinary cordless phone that was ringing.

“Hello,” she ventured again, this time into the right phone. “No, hello, Tryggve. I was just about to call you. I need to talk to you about this health … okay?”

She began to chew the nail on her left pinkie.

“I understand. Four o’clock on Monday. At your office. But then I’ll be … Never mind. I’ll be there. Four o’clock.”

She had bitten her nail down to the quick, and a jag of pain passed through her finger. A little drop of blood trickled out, and she put her fingertip into her mouth, before traipsing off to find a Band-Aid.

14.27,
SECURITY SERVICE SECTION
,
OSLO POLICE STATION

“Look at this, look at this,” Severin Heger said jauntily, his voice conveying a hint of satisfaction.

He tried to make eye contact with the prisoner facing him, but the young man was staring down at his own hands, muttering something impossible to catch.

“What did you say?” the police officer asked.

“Surely these aren’t necessary?” the man repeated, lifting his wrists toward him. “Handcuffs in here!”

“If you hadn’t tried to run off umpteen times between your cabin and the station, then we could have discussed it. But not now.”

Smiling broadly, he served Brage Håkonsen a cola.

“How will I manage to drink this with these on?” the young man complained, now almost sniveling.

“It’s quite easy,” Severin Heger said. “I’ve tried it myself. So, what have we here?”

The pages he was reading were sheathed in plastic wraps, every one of them. They were typewritten, in fairly pompous language peppered with spelling mistakes that might have led one to assume that the author was rather elderly. Perhaps they were merely typos.

“You wrote this, did you?”

The police officer was still smiling, and his tone was friendly, bordering on cheerful.

“None of your fucking business,” the prisoner murmured softly.

“What was that?”

Severin Heger was no longer smiling. He leaned unceremoniously across the desk and grabbed hold of Brage’s flannel shirt.

“One more word of that kind, and this will become
very
much harder for you,” he snarled. “Just you sit up straight and answer all my questions politely.
Understood?”

“I want to speak to a lawyer,” Brage said. “I’m saying nothing until I get to speak to an attorney!”

Severin Heger stood up and remained there staring at Brage Håkonsen for such a long time that the young man began to squirm in his seat.

“Of course,” the police officer said finally. “Of course you can speak to a lawyer. That’s your right. It’ll take some time, and I can assure you that in a few hours I’ll be considerably less amiable and patient than I am now. We’ve a great deal here, you know. These papers. And those guns. Enough to let you roast for a really long time. But okay, you’re the one to decide. It goes without saying that a quick, easy round with me now would be best for you, but of course … You can have an attorney if you want one. They’re usually off at weekends, you know, but by tomorrow morning we should probably have organized something.”

Brage Håkonsen gazed at his glass of cola, and attempted to raise it to his mouth using both hands.

“See! It’s quite easy after all. Now I’ll send you back to your cell, so that we can wait for that attorney of yours.”

“No,” Brage said quietly.

“What was that?”

“No. We can just talk for a bit now. If I can have an attorney later, I mean.”

“Quite sure? No whining afterward that you didn’t know your rights and so on?”

The young man shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“Very wise,” Severin Heger commented, sitting down again. “Born March 19, 1975, is that right?”

Brage nodded.

“Warehouse worker and unmarried, living at 11c Vidars gate?”

Another nod.

“So can you tell me something about these papers, then?”

Brage Håkonsen cleared his throat and sat upright.

“What’s the penalty for this sort of thing?” he asked quietly.

Severin Heger waved his left hand dismissively.

“Forget that for the moment. You are charged with contravening Criminal Code paragraph 104a: Anyone who blah blah organization of military character blah blah has as its purpose the use of sabotage, force, or other unlawful means to disrupt the established order blah blah.’ You ought to know it quite well. You’re so well read.”

He peered down at the inventory of books, nodding in acknowledgement.

“From two to six years. Depends a little,” Severin Heger explained, having realized that Brage Håkonsen would not say anything further until he had an answer. “But don’t worry about that now. Just answer my questions. Are you the person who wrote this stuff?”

Ashen, Brage Håkonsen stared straight ahead. His eyes, which didn’t look blue any more, stared colorlessly into the room; they had stopped blinking.

“Six years,” he whispered. “Six years!”

“But,” the police officer insisted, “aren’t you running ahead of yourself now?”

“They are my papers,” Brage interrupted. “I was the one who wrote them. Just me and me alone.”

“That was stupid, then,” Severin Heger said dryly, then added immediately, “But it’s quite smart of you to admit everything. Extremely smart, I would say. Killing the President of the Parliament?
That
would not have been so smart, on the other hand.”

He leafed through another three pages.

“Even more unfortunate, this here,” he said, placing the paper in front of Brage. “A cut-and-dried plan on how to kill Prime Minister Volter. At the supermarket checkout!”

“She shops there. Shopped, I mean.”

Brage Håkonsen stared straight ahead in a way that reminded Severin Heger of a B-movie he had seen in a hotel room in England when he couldn’t sleep:
The Plague of the Zombies
. It was obvious that the young man did not want to cry; on the contrary, he seemed relaxed, almost like a sleepwalker, sitting there. If his hands had not been reluctantly held together by the handcuffs, they would probably have dangled at his sides like pendulums, conscious of nothing, just registering the passage of time.

“But it didn’t happen at the supermarket,” Severin Heger said. “She was murdered at her office.”

“And it wasn’t me who did it, either,” Brage Håkonsen said evenly. “It was someone else.”

Severin Heger could hear the blood rushing to his brain, as if his entire body understood this was the crucial moment. The noise in his ears was so loud that he involuntarily tipped his head to one side so that he could hear better. Then he asked, “And you know who it was?”

“Yes.”

He heard someone outside the door, and regretted for one terrible second that he had forgotten to display the “Interview – Do Not Disturb” sign. He breathed a sigh of relief when the steps passed by and disappeared along the corridor.

“And who was that, then?”

He tried to make his question sound low-key. He took hold of his own glass of cola, as if to emphasize how mundane all this was. As if he routinely sat there listening to right-wing extremists with information on people who had killed prominent members of society. The soft drink fizzed over when he tried to top up his tumbler.

For the first time, something resembling a smile crossed Brage Håkonsen’s face.

“I know who did it. I also know who sent the gun back to you. In a large, brown envelope, isn’t that right, with black letters and
no stamp? It was slipped into a mailbox at the central post office, wasn’t it? What I can tell you right now is that these two actions were carried out by two different people.”

This information had not been made public. There were very few people in the police station who knew about it. They all knew the gun had been returned; there had been huge headlines in the newspapers about it. But not that it had been mailed at the central post office. And certainly not that it had arrived in a brown envelope with no stamp.

“And have you thought about giving me some names?”

“No.”

Brage was smiling properly now, and Severin Heger had to clutch the edge of the table to avoid punching him.

“No. I know who killed Volter. And who sent the gun. I have two names to offer. But you’ll get nothing out of me until we’ve cut a deal.”

“You’ve watched too many movies,” Severin Heger hissed. “We don’t make deals of that kind in Norway!”

“Well,” Brage Håkonsen said, “there’s a first time for everything. And
now
I’d really like to speak to that attorney.”

19.00,
STOLMAKERGATA
15

B
illy T.’s four sons, Alexander, Nicolay, Peter and Truls, were charming when they were in their pajamas. And asleep. But only then. The rest of the time, they were lively and entertaining, cocky and inventive, but extremely boisterous. Hanne Wilhelmsen touched her forehead discreetly, swiftly and imperceptibly, or so she thought.