Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) (26 page)

“I am holding the thought,” he said in a tired voice at the other end. “I’m holding the thought as tight as I bloody can.”

“Honor,” she reiterated slowly, and blinked: something was moving beside the delivery van. “And then we must be talking about a real loss of honor. An absolutely horrendous humiliation. Which has to be avoided. By killing four people.”

Billy T. gave a noisy, long-drawn-out yawn down the receiver.

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” he pleaded feebly. “I’m completely zonked.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“Don’t keep saying sorry all the time. I get so—”

She clicked him off, before withdrawing slowly from the window. There was no sign of life underneath the trees now. The delivery van remained just as still, and only now did she notice that it had a puncture and rust marks on the left rear fender. Damp snowflakes had started to fall again, vanishing into nothingness as soon as they touched the ground. She peeped out from behind the curtain with one eye, as if she were taking aim at something she could not quite identify.

People killed wives, children, and then themselves for the sake of honor. Because someone wanted to leave. There were men who countered a divorce petition with mass-murder. Tragically, it was increasingly common. They did it for the sake of honor, it was said. Subsequently, by others.

For the sake of shame, she thought.

Honor and shame. The same concept, the right side and the wrong side. Short stubs of words that actually dealt with the great fear of falling, of losing something that might be greater than life itself: the frames around that, and all the fragments that held existence in place and defined a person’s position in relation to others.

No one could bear to fall, if the fall was great enough. Some chose to take their own lives: captains of industry and other celebrities, for seemingly trivial things, circumstances that after a number of years would be relegated to mere parentheses in their lives. They did it to escape from the shame. To avoid losing honor. Some took their children’s lives as well.

“Some take the lives of their children,” she whispered. “When the fall becomes too great.”

A figure came into sight down below, a person. A man. He stepped out from the shadows behind the rusty vehicle. For a second or two he stood facing her, his face nevertheless kept hidden by the cap. Then he dipped his head and began to walk on slowly.

In a flash she was struck by a totally unfamiliar anxiety. She gripped her throat and stumbled back into the room. Her pulse hammered on her eardrums. Gulping, she sat down, gulped again, and noticed all of a sudden that her bare toes were bleeding, though she couldn’t recall injuring them. The pain made her breathe more freely, filling her lungs with air and then forcing it back out again.

At first she could not understand what had frightened her so. She was safe in her own apartment. It was at least forty meters down to the stranger walking in the street, and there was nothing to indicate that he had a gun. When she closed her eyes and tried to reconstruct the incident, she was not even certain that he had looked up at her. Maybe he had just taken a leak behind the van. He was out for a walk. With his dog, even though she had not seen any animal. Dogs had to be walked, even in the early hours of Christmas morning.

It took an hour for it finally to sink in that she was merely overtired.

WEDNESDAY
DECEMBER
25

H
enrik Backe woke early. He was confused between day and night at midwinter. There was no morning light to tell him what time it was. He fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table, where the alarm clock showed eleven minutes to six. Too early to get up, but at the same time he knew there was no point in sleeping on. Wearing only his pajama trousers, he headed for the bathroom to press piss past his swollen, bothersome prostate gland. Then he brought a bottle of cognac and a sizable glass, before sinking heavily back into bed.

It was Christmas Day, but that made no difference. This was no real Christmas. Unn had died six weeks ago. Without her, Christmas was nothing. They had never had children. Without Unn, there was no meaning in anything. Christmas should be allowed to drift by, like every other day, just as hollow as the empty bottles that filled the kitchen.

He filled the glass almost to the brim.

The book he was reading was no use.

His sight sometimes failed him. It was just a matter of closing his eyes for a few seconds, and then it passed. His memory was not what it used to be, either. That scared him more. In the beginning, a year or so ago, it was only small practical things that slipped his mind. Sometimes he might find himself in the kitchen with no idea what he had intended to do there. Just ordinary distraction, but it eventually grew worse. Now he sometimes had problems remembering the contents of a book he had just read. After a while, he began to mark them: a red cross on the last page meant he had finished reading it. It made him nervous about opening books. The fear of finding the red cross in a book he thought he had not read made him look for different strategies. He divided literature into bundles, constantly arranging them in different ways that slipped his mind immediately afterwards. The coffee table had become a kind of archive, and the effort involved in keeping order and oversight made him edgy and frustrated.

The house was quiet. The oaf in the apartment above, a young lad who held parties until far into the wee small hours and didn’t even open the door when someone came to complain, was away. Backe had seen him load his luggage into his car the day before Christmas Eve. Or yesterday. He wasn’t sure and it made no odds.

The neighbors across the landing were dead.

He drank, and coughed.

Anyway, they had been disagreeable and arrogant. Maybe not Mrs. Stahlberg. She had actually seemed quite browbeaten. Henrik Backe had always felt a kind of vague contempt for the woman, she was so servile. Her servility irritated him; her servility reminded him of his own burden, his own submissiveness, and the treachery that could never be forgotten. Not even through alcohol, that damn liquor.

Turid Stahlberg was servile and he did not like her. That little smile of hers, for example, when she drew into the wall if anyone passed her on the stairs: detestable.

Anyway, Hermann Stahlberg was far from obsequious.

Henrik Backe sniggered in contempt, and took another drink.

Unn was dead and life was over. It was merely a matter of waiting. The drinking that he had fought with such determination – a useless battle over far too many years – could curtail the waiting time. So he drank.

Now there was no one left for him to take care of. All of a sudden, he burst into shrill laughter.

Unn was gone and there was no longer anyone who needed to be protected. From him and his treachery.

But now there was no one who wanted to hear about it.

Mystified, Henrik Backe stared at the book he was holding in his hands. It was a novel by Sigrid Undset. He must have read it before, then. With stiff fingers, he leafed through to the last page. No red cross. That could not be. He must have read it before, when the system of red crosses had not yet been devised, before everything had become mixed up and he could not remember what
Kristin Lavransdatter
was all about.

The clock on the bedside table soon showed ten past six. It was dark outside.

He did not quite understand why he was wearing his pajamas; after all, it was well past dinnertime. He would open a can of asparagus soup. That’s what he would like most of all.

It was so strangely silent everywhere, but of course the neighbors were dead.

Sølvi Jotun shuffled her too-big winter boots through the snow, cursing that they had not taken the car.

“Some fresh air will do you good,” Billy T. said. “It’ll be good for both of us.”

She pulled the fake-fur coat more tightly around her and blew on her hands. Billy T. took off his mittens.

“Here. You can borrow mine.”

“They’re a bit big for me, you know.”

She studied them skeptically, but put them on when he insisted.

“Good of you to let me go home,” she mumbled, instead of thanking him. “I couldn’t have put up with an hour in a remand cell today. It was bad enough in that bloody hospital.”

“Of course you can go home,” Billy T. said, slapping her lightly on the back. “You haven’t done anything wrong, after all. And as soon as you’ve answered my questions, I’ll leave you in peace as well. That’s a lovely apartment you’ve got, by the way.”

“The local authority,” she said tersely. “It’s good that tax money goes on something sensible.”

My tax money, Billy T. thought, suddenly remembering the betting slip still untouched in his breast pocket. Last night he had speculated about how long a winning betting slip like that was actually valid.

“Agreed,” he said to push the thought away. “But why do you keep the kitchen locked?”

“That’s none of your business.”

They crossed the Nordre Gravlund cemetery. The snow lay deep between the graves, with here and there nothing but a nameless stone sickle jutting out from the snowdrifts. Some of the graves were beautifully decorated, with candles in little lanterns and spruce branches with red bows. Sølvi Jotun obviously felt uncomfortable. She pulled her cap down over her forehead, grumbling indistinctly and bitterly. They walked in silence until they emerged into Uelands gate and began to intersect Sagene, between brick apartment blocks from the 1930s and snowed-in vehicles.

“For fuck’s sake. Couldn’t we have come by car?”

Sølvi was obviously exhausted now. The distance from Ullevål Hospital and Mor Go’hjertas vei was barely more than a couple of kilometers, and they were no farther than halfway. All the same, she was breathing heavily, and she had a hacking, unhealthy cough, so bad that she suddenly had to stop entirely.

“Come on,” Billy T. said, without slackening his pace. “You live just right up here, you know!”

“Get lost,” she snapped. “I’m not going home.”

“Listen to me …”

He stopped and retraced his steps. Sølvi Jotun really was in lamentable shape. Billy T. began to wonder what they had actually done for her at the hospital. Probably nothing more than offering a clean bed. The whistling from her lungs might indicate an infection, or maybe severe asthma. In any case, she ought to have been given help.

“There isn’t a fucking pub in the whole of Oslo open now,” he said despairingly. “Not even Sagene Lunsjbar. It’s Christmas Day, Sølvi. And it’s only half past nine in the morning. You have to go home now. I switched on the heating yesterday. It’s probably fine there now.”

“The heating!”

She stamped on the ground.

“Do you know how much heating costs these days, eh?”

Billy T. grasped her arm and tried to take her with him.

“Come on now.”

“You’re
not
coming home with me!”

Her feet were firmly planted on the sidewalk, and she showed amazing strength when he took a better grip and began to pull. It was like bringing Jenny with you, when she refused to budge at nursery. The difference was simply that the screaming child could be carried off. That was not so easy with Sølvi Jotun.

“Okay, then,” he said, letting go. “But then you’ll have to answer whatever I ask you. Now.”

Something flashed in her eyes. Sølvi Jotun had turned thirty in an environment most people would not have been able to withstand for a month. She was not stupid, and tolerated drug-induced intoxication better than most. Yesterday’s collapse must have been accidental. Or bad dope. Now she tilted her head and looked up at Billy T., who towered almost half a meter above her.

“Why on earth should I answer anything at all?” she said. “I don’t want to, and I can’t see any reason to take part in a police interrogation in the middle of the street, in the middle of Christmas, without even having been hauled in. I haven’t done anything wrong; you said so yourself.”

Billy T. scrutinized her. It struck him that perhaps he might be able to carry her after all, since she couldn’t weigh more than forty kilos.

“Sølvi,” he began to say, before clearing his throat. “You and I are going to make a little deal. An exchange, you might say. What do I get from you? Well, I get to know whether you have anything to do with Hermine Stahlberg …”

He let the words hang in the air, but could not decipher anything from her expressionless face. She did not even blink when he mentioned Hermine’s name.

“… and in particular whether you saw her at two specific points in November. What you get in return is that I don’t arrest you on the spot.”

“
Arrest me?
”

She started screaming and grabbed at her cheek histrionically, as if he had slapped her. An elderly man on the opposite side of the street looked ready to cross the narrow road to come to her rescue. However, when he took a closer look at Billy T., he marched on, studying the terrain in front of him.

“You can’t haul me in now! You promised! Besides … what the fuck have I done?”

“Shh,” Billy T. said, looking around swiftly. “Of course I can just break down your kitchen door. There are definitely piles of reasons to let you stew in a cell for a while. But …”