Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (14 page)

“… be killed because he was delivering something to the Stahlberg family,” Erik broke in. “Or was telling them something. But then we’re probably back to Carl-Christian and Co., are we not? As suspects, I mean?”

Hanne shrugged.

“Possibly. But in any case … you must at least agree with me in my provisional conclusions!”

“Which are what, then?” Billy T. said, genuinely discouraged. “I think you’re jumping all over the place! What are you actually driving at?”

“Two things. If it’s family members who are behind it, then it was an impulsive affair. Not planned. At least not well, or over a period of time. Moreover, it’s not just an obsession of mine to say I believe that we ought to find out far more about this guy Sidensvans. About what on earth he was doing at Hermann and Tutta’s house.”

“Maybe he had brought something with him,” Erik suggested again. “Something that the perpetrator removed when he left?”

“Maybe so,” Hanne said, nodding. “Or maybe he
didn’t
have anything with him. Maybe that’s why his keys have never been found. Or maybe he never … What if he quite simply didn’t …”

She became absorbed in thought.

“This theory of yours about it being so impulsive—” Billy T. was more enthusiastic now and gesticulated as he said, “it doesn’t wash. You don’t get hold of two guns just like that! The perpetrator or perpetrators, whether family or outsider, must have spent some time acquiring them. Do you really mean someone is supposed to have had that sort of thing lying around, just in case the need to execute a person ever arose?”

Hanne did not reply. She sat with her head tilted, deep in concentration, as if listening to something, or not quite sure about what she had actually heard.

“Hello,” Billy T. said. “Do you agree?”

“What?”

Hanne looked momentarily mystified, before smiling apologetically. “It just struck me that Sidensvans maybe wasn’t … It’s not certain that he should … No. There have to be limits to speculation. Even for me.”

“Is anybody staying for dinner?”

Mary’s hacking cough was heard in the doorway.

“It’s the lady of the house who’s taking care of the cooking today, just to let you know. But it might be edible, for all that. You need to make a start, Hanne. We eat at three o’clock on a Sunday. We’re not like those dagos that eat at night.”

She slapped an enormous bag of lamb cutlets on the kitchen worktop.

“Who’s staying?”

“I’d love to,” Erik said.

“Okay, then,” Billy T. said. “If Mary insists.”

“She doesn’t, in actual fact,” Hanne said, starting to peel potatoes.

A man was trying to pick up his change and eat a hotdog at the same time. The female cashier felt disgusted. The front of the customer’s hoodie was spattered with stains beneath an open, tattered pilot jacket. His face, pinched and with several open, weeping sores, bore signs of heavy drug misuse. She placed the money on the counter. Angrily, he swore with his mouth full of food: “For fuck’s sake! Put the money in my hand, I said! I’m not a bloody octopus! Can’t you see that I’m eating?”

Shuddering, he had to shift his foot to one side to keep his balance. His elbow hit a child held in its mother’s arms, and a substantial blob of ketchup dropped on to the young woman’s coat. The youngster screamed like crazy. Cursing, the man in the hoodie made an effort to pick up the money. The girl behind the counter was obviously afraid now: she drew back and looked around for help.

“You! You over there!”

A hefty man in his thirties poked a finger into the junkie’s back.

“Calm down, okay?”

The hotdog-eater turned around slowly. It seemed that he was struggling to focus properly. All of a sudden, he thrust what remained of his food into the intruder’s jacket front.

“Butt out,” he slurred, and made to leave.

The answer he received was a punch in the mouth. Two teeth broke. As he fell, he pulled down three boxes of chocolate and a display stand of
Se og Hør
magazines.

The child yelled more loudly than ever and his mother sobbed in terror.

The assistant had rung the police long before it reached that stage.

Mabelle Stahlberg was in the process of creating a new version of the truth for herself. She lay on the floor of the apartment in Odins gate listening to music as she fashioned an alternative reality, a story she could make both herself and others believe.

She had practiced meditation earlier, before Carl-Christian, before life with the Stahlberg family, at a time when everything and everyone was against her and nothing was going her way. Admittedly, she was pretty, and that sort of thing could go some distance toward helping, in a world that idolized the superficial.

She had been only fourteen when she obtained her first modeling assignment. Not major stuff, a tiny advertising job for a mail-order company, but overwhelming for a young girl who suddenly realized that an attractive appearance could be her ticket away from a poky apartment, where a disabled mother was slowly smoking herself to death and left May Anita and her three small siblings to fend for themselves.

The young girl was barely seventeen when she discovered that she had to lose increasingly more of her clothes to find work. In a sleazy joint in Sagene, with covered windows and a grubby bathtub in the corner, she finally said stop. May Anita was desperate to become Mabelle. She had no idea how. She had nowhere to stay. Her siblings were spread out in three different foster homes by now, but the child welfare service had fortunately not allocated many resources to supporting her, since she would be eighteen in four months’ time. May Anita lacked everything, but understood for the first time in her young life that she had some kind of intelligence. Intuitive and ignorant it may have been but, despite everything, it had kept her away from intoxicating substances and forced her to draw the line at undisguised pornography. For the next six years she lived from hand to mouth. A casual job here, an assignment there, for an old acquaintance perhaps, who might be pressed into generosity by a poor young girl who, despite it all, had beautiful eyes and a very attractive body.

May Anita never quite succeeded in getting it together. But she learned a great deal.

Then one night she met Carl-Christian: he was plastered. She was sober, as always. There was something weak about the man, something sweet and genuinely helpless. He stood with his head in a garbage can outside the 7-Eleven store in Bogstadveien.

May Anita had taken the stranger home and to bed. She found no need to abandon him when he collapsed into the wide divan with silk sheets. On the contrary, she set to work. Seventy-two hours later, she became Carl-Christian’s mistress.

With CC’s help, she transformed herself into Mabelle. She had her nose straightened, as so many photographers had encouraged her to do. Her lips increased in size at the same time, and in the end he had proposed.

Mabelle was fond of him, in her own way. He worshiped her. His fear, his anxiety that she might leave him, made her feel secure. There was a certain satisfaction in the imbalance between them, this lopsidedness in their relationship. She was dependent on what he owned. He, on the other hand, was dependent on her.

Naturally, her life had to be embellished when she met Carl-Christian. Eventually they became true, the stories she had served up so many times, with ever-increasing precision and richness of detail. It was the same as it was with make-up, she had sometimes thought, like a tiny cosmetic operation: if well executed, then no one could discern its original state.

She did not tell lies. She created reality.

As early as her childhood, Mabelle Stahlberg had appreciated that if you simply entered into the deception, kept firm hold of it, and never let it overpower you, then lies could become utterly true. In actual fact, truth was only for people who could afford it, and Mabelle Stahlberg certainly had no intention of reverting to being May Anita Olsen.

Hermann and Tutta deserved to die. They had asked for it. Hermann was wicked, he was egotistical and wicked through and through. He was vindictive. Obstinate and willful. Hermann was a thief who had intended to steal their life from them. From Carl-Christian – Hermann’s own flesh and blood – who had slogged and worked his fingers to the bone for years, entirely at the mercy of his father’s moods and whims. Tutta was nothing more than a foolish hanger-on, a spineless puppet. She had to take responsibility for not speaking up about the unfairness, about the raw deal they’d been given. Hermann and Tutta were responsible for their own deaths.

Preben, too.

Mabelle closed her eyes and tried to relax. She was worn out now, almost prostrate. She did not want to think about Preben.

They had not done anything wrong.

It was almost true already.

“My goodness, if it isn’t Kluten himself, eh? Thought you’d headed off long ago.”

Billy T. slapped the flat of his hand on the prisoner’s back.

“Don’t you realize, I’ve had my teeth knocked out,” the man in the hoodie lisped, baring his gums. “That wasn’t much fun, you know!”

“You didn’t have many left anyway, so it doesn’t make much difference,” Billy T. said, taking a seat opposite him in the interview room. “But it doesn’t look as if you’re getting much to chew on, either. My God, you’ve grown so skinny.”

“Sick,” Kluten mumbled, stroking his swollen top lip. “Really bloody sick. I can smell wine off you.”

“I’m off duty today,” Billy T. said mildly. “I’ve just had dinner with a nice family. Certainly hadn’t intended to come here. But then somebody phoned, you know. And said you insisted on talking to me. And it had better …”

His voice was raised to a roar.

“…
be important!
”

Kluten jumped so violently that his head cracked off the wall.

“I’m sick, I tell you. And you know fine well my mouth’s bleeding!”

“Keep that filth away from me, I tell you. I hear you kicked up a commotion in a kiosk up in Vogts gate. Spilled blood on other customers, and that sort of stuff. Little children and nice women. What’s all that about, Kluten? Is that the kind of behavior you’ve turned to?”

“It was ketchup,” Kluten complained. “I just wanted my money!”

“And then you didn’t have the common sense to get rid of this, before our guys turned up.”

Billy T. clicked his tongue as he held up a small plastic bag with unmistakable contents.

“Three grams?” Three and a half? Kluten, for heaven’s sake. You’re getting old.”

Billy T. squinted and pretended to examine it thoroughly.

“I have something!”

“Had,” Billy T. said sternly. “You had four grams of heroin. Now they’re mine.”

“I have information, Billy T.! I know something!”

Now he was whispering loudly, whistling through the hole in his upper jaw. Billy T. assumed a dismissive air. He knew Kluten well from his years in the drug intervention unit. The guy was totally unable to speak coherently and truthfully for more than three minutes.

“It’s true! I swear, Billy T. I know something about that there …”

He suddenly stopped speaking and, paranoid, stared all around.

“That there who?” Billy T. asked.

“I want immunity,” Kluten said, his eyes still darting around the room, as if expecting someone to emerge out of the walls. “I’m saying nothing until I get immunity.”

“Kluten, Kluten, Kluten.”

Beaming, Billy T. ran both hands over his head.

“That’s not how it works in this country, you know. Where is it you watch TV? At the Blue Cross center? Seen too many American movies, I think. Spit it out, now. What is it you know?”

“Saying nothing.”

Kluten clammed up, quite literally. He drew his hood over his head, folded his arms, and hunched his shoulders. Then he sank his face on to his chest. He was reminiscent of a fasting monk from the Middle Ages and smelled just as foul.

“Cut that out. Come on, spit it out!”

Kluten sat like a pillar of salt. Billy T. abruptly rose to his feet.

“Fine,” he said brusquely. “Sit there then. This stuff here will give you some time behind bars anyway.”

He tucked the heroin into his breast pocket as he headed for the door.

“Help me a bit, then!”

Kluten was whimpering now. Billy T. thought for a moment that he had started to cry.

“I just can’t go to jail right now. Not right now, Billy T. Give me some help, please!”

Billy T. stopped, but did not turn around.

“Let me hear,” he said, facing the door. “If what you have is of any worth whatsoever, then I can see to it that this bag shrinks a bit.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Is that okay?”

“Okay then—”

Billy T. looked pointedly at the wall clock as he sat down again.

“But it will have to be something substantial, Kluten. No shit. Okay?”

“Okay, I’m telling you. Listen up now.”

Eleven minutes later, Billy T. began to feel hot. Sometimes he interrupted the prisoner with a question. He had produced a notepad and was using it frequently. When Kluten finally slumped in his chair and declared that he was finished, Billy T. fell silent. Kluten bared his toothless gums in some sort of smile. The corners of his mouth were red with dried blood that cracked with his grimace.