Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel Page 11

  “True enough, but investigate it anyway. And one more thing: What about the children’s parents? Is there anything to investigate there?”

  “Most of them are entirely out of the picture. But we’ll have a closer look at that, of course. The one who looks most interesting is the mother of the boy who’s run off. ”

  Tone-Marit paged through a neat loose-leaf binder perched on her knee.

  “Birgitte Håkonsen,” she read aloud. “The boy had only been living there for three weeks, but she had already managed to scare the pants off most of the staff. Not that she said very much. She just stood there, apparently, an enormous silent figure with a strange look in her eyes.”

  “Humph,” Hanne Wilhelmsen muttered.

  “What?”

  “Forget it. Was the boy placed there voluntarily?”

  “No, far from it. The mother has fought the child welfare service with tooth and claw. And that in itself is quite curious. All the other children are voluntary placements. Only Olav was forced to go there.”

  “Have we interviewed her?”

  “Honestly, Hanne,” Billy T. protested. “Do you think the mother of a boy, three weeks after his being placed there, is going to sneak into a foster home and kill somebody?”

  “Certainly not. But we do have to talk to her.”

  “We’ve actually done that already,” Erik Henriksen said. “That is to say, the guy who’s dealing with the boy’s disappearance has spoken to her. Several times. A proper interview, and he’s been checking in with her every day to find out if she’s heard anything from him.”

  “All right. Get me copies of those interviews. And the boy’s still missing?”

  “Yes. They’re now starting to think that something may have happened to him. How long can a twelve-year-old remain in hiding?”

  “Hanne, are you serious?” Billy T. said in annoyance. “Are we really going to waste time on this woman?”

  “One thing’s for sure,” Hanne Wilhelmsen responded. “And that is, as far as children are concerned, passionate emotions are brought into play.”

  Billy T. shrugged his shoulders, and the other two tried not to look at either of them. They all realized the meeting was over.

  Before leaving, Billy T. pointed out the possibility of finding something of interest in the telephone directory sitting on the cheap desk belonging to the foster home director. Having decided to check that out, his most striking discovery was two yellow Post-it notes recently attached to the metal directory. One had turned out to be the number for Diakonhjemmet University College’s School of Social Work, the other he had quite simply not yet managed to check. But there might be something of significance there.

  “I doubt it,” Hanne said indifferently. She remained lost in her own confused thoughts long after the door slammed shut behind her three ill-tempered police officers.

  • • •

  He was smirking again only two hours later. As usual, he burst into her office without knocking, and as usual, she jumped out of her skin. However, there was no point in reprimanding him. He leaned toward her with outstretched arms, resting his hands on the desktop, and inclining his head toward hers. His scalp shone, but he jerked it away before Hanne Wilhelmsen could admire her reflection.

  “Good old hairstyle,” he declared, sounding satisfied. “Feel it!”

  She stroked his crown, warm, clean, and pleasurable against the palm of her hand.

  “Like silk, isn’t it?”

  Gratified, he straightened up to his full height and assured himself with his own hands that his scalp was still baby soft.

  “Finest skull in the station. In the whole of Oslo! But I have to shave it twice a day. Twice a day!”

  Hanne smiled, shaking her head.

  “Sometimes your ego gets totally out of hand,” she said. “Have you come here to show me that? Besides, I thought you were suited to having some hair on your head. Not quite so desperately macho, somehow.”

  He remained standing, a look of triumph in his intense eyes, as though her comments about his macho image were construed as a compliment rather than criticism. She was never going to understand him entirely. His towering figure was both terrifying and attractive. His proportions were so well balanced it took some of the edge off his awe-inspiring size. Stripped of his jewelry—an inverse cross on one ear, a chunky, long gold chain around his neck, and a broad bracelet of hammered metal encircling his left wrist—he could be clad in an SS uniform and present the perfect prototype of Goebbels’s PR machine at the end of the thirties. His straight, well-shaped nose, his narrow but nevertheless sensual lips, his coloring, his fierce blue eyes—everything accorded with Hitler’s distorted caricature of the authentic Aryan. Billy T. was kind. But first and foremost, he was incredibly loyal and possessed an instinct she never once considered to be surpassed by her own.

  “Have you come here to praise yourself, or to tell me something important?”

  “Something important,” he roared. “A man’s appearance is important, you know!”

  “You wouldn’t think so to look at you,” she said, waving her hands in a gesture indicating he ought to come to the point.

  “Our boy has apparently been in Grefsen for a few days,” he said, perching himself on the edge of her desk. “Olav, that is. The runaway boy.”

  “What? Has he been found?”

  “No. But a family who had been on holiday in Austria got a fairly unpleasant surprise when they returned home. Someone had been there eating their porridge, so to speak. Half their store of canned food has gone, all their toilet paper used up, the wallpaper’s been torn off half the kitchen walls, but the house is almost undisturbed.”

  Hanne stubbed out her cigarette in a shower of ash.

  “Grefsen? That must be more than ten kilometers from the foster home, isn’t it?”

  “Sixteen, to be precise. He has walked all the way on those thick legs of his, if they’re not mistaken about him having no money on him. Although a taxi driver would have alerted us by now, with all those news reports and such. The worst thing is he’s gone in totally the wrong direction if he was attempting to make his way home.”

  Hanne noticed a faint smell of aftershave lotion, just a tiny whiff under her nose. Did he use aftershave on his head?

  “Well,” Billy T. concluded as he stood up to leave, “he has at least set off on another stage of his journey, and his mother hasn’t heard a peep, she says. But it sounds fairly definite that he’s the one who’s been there; they’re checking out fingerprints as we speak. It’ll be easy to sort out the boy’s prints at the foster home, so we’ve had a bit of luck there.”

  Stretching himself, he touched the ceiling with the palms of his hands. A moment later, he dropped them, and Hanne could see two faint impressions of his hands on the pale gray painted surface.

  When he left, she sat there staring at the marks with a sense of enjoyment she could not for the life of her explain.

  • • •

  Terje Welby was sweating in the stuffy and clammy little two-room apartment he had moved into a year earlier, after a divorce that had cost him two children, a terraced house, and two and a half thousand kroner a month. He had backed the wrong horse when Eva, a snazzy young summer worker at the foster home, had taken him by storm. She was only nineteen years old and looked Finnish. At least the way he imagined Finnish women to look. She laughed constantly and appealed to the best and worst in him. His astonishment that she had allowed herself to be seduced so easily had progressed all too quickly into an exaggerated belief in his own merit. She promised him nothing, but he had taken it for granted that they would become a couple. Six hectic, fantastic months afterward, he was in the process of moving in with her when he was supplanted by a broad-shouldered twenty-one-year-old suffering from acne. With his tail between his legs, Terje had begged his wife, a woman of his own age, for a second chance. However, she had used those six months to emerge from a catastrophe into a contented belief in an existence
without the tomcat who had caused her so much pain. He now saw his sons every other weekend, but they seemed increasingly uninterested, complaining about having to share a room with their father.

  Financial problems had increased his depression. He performed his job, drank a few beers at the neighborhood bar every Saturday and Wednesday, and discovered to his chagrin that his wife had appropriated all their mutual friends.

  Now his hands were shaking, and the papers confronting him rustled threateningly every time he touched them. Igniting a lighter, he drew the flickering flame over to the corner of the first sheet and held it in his outstretched arm over the kitchen sink, where it burst into flames more rapidly than he had expected. He burned his fingers and issued a timid oath before placing his hand underneath the cold running water. A short time later, all the papers had been reduced to a mess of ashes and water.

  Opening the window did not help. The room became chilly, but he was still sweating.

  • • •

  Hanne Wilhelmsen did not quite know where she was heading, though she had an address on a yellow Post-it note attached to the air bag on her steering wheel. Birgitte Håkonsen’s address. Olav’s mother. But for some time Hanne Wilhelmsen was driving in the opposite direction.

  She lingered at the interchange beside the Postgiro building, and after circumnavigating three times to the accompaniment of increasingly loud honking from irritated fellow motorists, she allowed the vehicle to choose its own route.

  Twenty-five minutes later she was in one of Oslo’s oldest suburbs, a monument to misguided housing policy that gave her the shivers. Low-rise gray apartment blocks stood like diffuse, haphazard, discolored building bricks adorned with sad little curtains from the Hansen & Dysvik store, lending the houses the appearance of lying prostrate with their eyes closed. The occasional jungle gym had been erected at some time in the distant past, with no thought of any need for future maintenance. Every surface that could possibly be reached by adolescent boys was covered in tags, illegible, bold lettering—a cryptic code only those under the age of twenty could understand. Trash cans, the few green ones graciously bestowed upon them by the council, were sitting askew with their open mouths stuffed with dog-shit bags. A gray and muggy haze hung over this area of the city.

  A shopping center was located slap-bang in the middle. A huge Lego brick that had perhaps once been white but now more or less blended into its surroundings. It had obviously been built on the principle of the greatest possible floor space for the least possible financial outlay. Inside this enormous brick you could trudge from an argument with the child welfare service to collect money from the social services office and then travel on to spend it in a dirty, smoky café on the ground floor. It must be where everybody was hanging out, since the neighborhood outside was deserted.

  The chief inspector parked her car, bringing the yellow sticky with her. Double-checking that the vehicle was locked, she strode across the parking lot onto a little walkway marked with a square sign showing the well-known pictogram of adult and child walking hand in hand, barely visible beneath all the tags. It was askew and dog-eared. The walkway was asphalted and strewn with gravel.

  Apartment 14b, first floor.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen’s head was a tumult of noise: all her alarm bells were ringing, since this action of hers was highly irregular. In order to muffle the racket, she struggled to think whether she had ever done anything similar in the past. Visiting a witness for an interview outside the police station.

  Never.

  It didn’t make matters any better that she was entirely on her own.

  For a second she considered the possibility of simply not presenting her police ID. Making it a private visit, a visit from one woman to another. Insane. She was from the police.

  Some attempt had been made to protect the entrance door with a small roof constructed from tar paper with a little gutter running along the edge, to no great effect. The door was worn and unpainted, decorated with the ubiquitous initials in red and black, and the doorbells were situated on the right-hand side of the door, though no one had bothered to insert their nameplates underneath the glass. A few names were stuck on with Scotch tape, while others had used masking tape without even going to the effort of trimming the corners. Four doorbells were blank.

  B. Håkonsen had at least tried to do it properly. A card adorned with her name written in clear, elegant script was neatly taped in place. Just before Hanne Wilhelmsen pressed the doorbell, she took several steps back, beyond the little roof, staring up at the building’s façade.

  The apartment block was four stories high and there seemed to be two apartments on each floor. She tried to guess which side belonged to the Håkonsens, but it was impossible to judge. She made up her mind to return home. Then, stepping resolutely forward, she placed her finger on the button.

  Since it was remarkably peaceful in the neighborhood—the only sound to be heard was the distant drone of motorway traffic and a monotonous dunk-dunk from a building site nearby—she could actually hear the bell chiming somewhere inside the building. Extremely faintly, but all the same a distinct ringing. She felt relieved when no one responded and was just about to admit defeat when a voice crackled from the loudspeaker.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, it’s . . . My name’s Hanne Wilhelmsen. I’m from the police. Could I come in?”

  “Hello?”

  Hanne leaned closer to the gray metal plate that functioned as both loudspeaker and microphone.

  “My name is Hanne Wilhelmsen,” she shouted in an exaggeratedly distinct voice. “I’m from the police. Could I . . .”

  A click inside the wall startled Hanne Wilhelmsen, but the sound was not accompanied by a buzz from the door-release mechanism. Fairly irritated now, she rang the doorbell one more time.

  This time nobody answered, and after a minute, she pressed the button again, holding it down for ten seconds, angrily and tenaciously.

  Still no voice materialized, but before she could jab the button once more, the door release sounded. Tentatively grabbing hold of the cold metal door handle, she wrenched the door toward her. It was open.

  No welcome committee waiting to greet her here. The usual apartment block odor in the entrance hall, a conglomeration of all sorts of dinners and washing powders mixed with a faint smell of garbage. As she traversed the ground floor, she recognized the stink of babies’ diapers from a securely tied plastic bag sitting on the doormat. She walked up the stairs to the first floor.

  Looking around, she saw a little floral-edged card with handwriting identical to that next to the bell downstairs. Sighing, she rang the doorbell, and the door immediately opened.

  The woman standing in the doorway was a sorry sight, wearing an enormous jogging suit that nevertheless failed to disguise her peculiar body shape. She was almost as broad in the hips as she was tall, and on her feet the little pair of sealskin slippers provided more than an indication that the size of her feet bore no relation to the bulk of her body. Her black, straight hair framed a round face with a dark red mouth.

  Oddest of all, however, were her eyes. They appeared tiny but so deeply set that they were difficult to distinguish, with long eyelashes curling almost a centimeter around her pudgy eye sockets and looking as though they had sprouted from two narrow, empty slits in her head.

  She did nothing, said nothing. Hanne Wilhelmsen took a step forward, hoping the woman would move aside, but it was to no avail.

  “Could I come in for a moment? Is it convenient?”

  Instead of answering, the woman turned her back and padded through the hallway. Since she had left the door open, Hanne interpreted this as some kind of permission to enter and hesitantly followed her inside. The oblong hallway was dim, making the off-white rectangle of the living room door looming at one end difficult to see. She nearly stumbled on a slippery rag rug.

  The sparsely furnished living room was tidy, and the windows shone, smelling freshly cleaned. The most striking as
pect of the room was all the light. Above a small dining table with a flowery centerpiece fashioned from fabric and paper hung a pendant reminiscent of a carpenter’s workshop lamp but with a more attractive shade. Its bulb had to be at least two hundred watts. On the longest wall, there were no fewer than six wall lamps, each with two lights. In addition, the room contained four standard lamps and three long, unshaded fluorescent tubes along the window. It was a dazzling array.

  The old sofa was upholstered in blue check material and appeared to have been well used at one end, where one cushion was lower than the others and where Hanne noticed that even the frame had begun to sag. A coffee table of varnished pine was adorned with several issues of the Se og Hør gossip magazine. Apart from those, there was no reading material in the entire room, except a few brochures on a dark shelf. Hanne could not ascertain what they were about.

  Sitting down in her usual seat, the woman signaled Hanne toward an armchair from the sixties, covered in red nubbly fabric with oval teak inserts on each of the armrests. Hanne Wilhelmsen accepted the invitation.

  “Can I offer you some coffee?”

  Her voice was unexpectedly deep, with a lovely singsong intonation that might indicate some kind of hidden dialect. Since fetching coffee would necessitate the woman going to the bother of standing up and leaving the room, Hanne declined, but when she sensed disappointment on the otherwise impassive face, she changed her mind.

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Perhaps a small cup.”

  Despite her unwieldy body shape, she moved smoothly, almost gracefully, walking like a cat, the sealskin slippers soundless on the linoleum on her way to the kitchen. She soon returned carrying a red metal enameled tray, with two coffee cups, a plate of plain biscuits, and a thermos jug. Pouring the coffee, she then pushed the biscuits invitingly across to Hanne’s side of the table.

  “Go ahead, help yourself,” she encouraged her, taking a sip of her own coffee.