Fear Not (8 page)

On the wall between the cupboard and the bed there was a painting in strong shades of red, and a number of clothes hung on the back of a wooden chair at the foot of the bed. The curtains were thick, dark, and closed.

That was it.

‘Excuse me! Not in there!’

Adam stepped back into the hallway. Lukas Lysgaard came quickly towards him, hands spread wide. ‘What are you doing? Snooping around the house? Who gave you permission to … ?’

‘Along the hallway, second on the right, you said! I just wanted to—’

‘Second on the
left
. Here!’

Lukas pointed crossly at the door opposite.

‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

‘Could you get a move on, please? I’d like to be alone with my father.’

Lukas Lysgaard must be around thirty-five. A man with an ordinary appearance and unusually broad shoulders. His hair was dark with deep waves, and his eyes were presumably blue. It was difficult to tell; they were narrow and hidden behind glasses reflecting the glow of the ceiling light.

‘My mother had problems sleeping sometimes,’ he said as Adam opened the correct door. ‘When that happened she liked to read. She didn’t want to disturb my father, so …’ He nodded towards the small bedroom.

‘I understand,’ said Adam, smiling before he went into the toilet. He took his time.

He would give a great deal to have another look in that bedroom. It annoyed him that he hadn’t been more alert. Noticed more. For example, he couldn’t remember what kind of clothes had been hanging over the chair: dressy clothes for Christmas Eve, or ordinary everyday clothes. Nor had he noticed the titles of the books on the bedside table. There was no reason to assume that anyone in this family had anything whatsoever to do with the murder of a wife and mother who was obviously loved. But Adam Stubo knew better than most that the solution to a murder was usually to be found with the victim. It could be something the family knew nothing about. Or it could be a detail, something neither the victim nor anyone else had picked up.

But it could be important all the same.

At any rate, one thing was certain, he thought as he zipped up his trousers and flushed the toilet. Eva Karin Lysgaard must have had serious problems when it came to sleeping if she sought refuge in that little bedroom every time she had a bad night. A better explanation was that husband and wife slept in separate rooms.

He washed his hands, dried them thoroughly and went back into the hallway.

Lukas Lysgaard was waiting for him. Without a word he opened the front door.

‘No doubt you’ll be in touch,’ he said, without offering his hand.

‘Of course.’

Adam pulled on his coat and stepped into the small porch. He was about to say Merry Christmas, but stopped himself just in time.

‘A
ll the best!’

Detective Inspector Silje Sørensen ran up the steps, waving goodbye to a colleague who had stopped for a chat after leaving the police headquarters, which was now virtually empty. All the public departments were closed apart from the main desk, where a yawning officer had nodded to her through the glass wall as she dashed in through the entrance to Grønlandsleiret 44.

‘I’ve got the kids in the car!’ she shouted by way of explanation. ‘Just going to fetch my skis, I left them in the office and …’

Silje Sørensen ran up to her floor. She was out of breath as she rounded the corner and set off along the corridor, then slowed down as she approached the door of her office. She fumbled with her keys. They were ice cold after lying in the car for a whole day. Besides which she had far too many keys on the bunch; she had no idea what half of them were for. Eventually, she found the right one and unlocked the door.

Once upon a time the architect had won an award for this building. It was hard to understand why. Once you were inside the narrow entrance, you were fooled into thinking that light and space were key. The vast foyer extended several floors up, surrounded by galleries in an angular horseshoe formation. The offices, however, were little cubes linked to long, claustrophobic corridors. Silje always felt it was cramped and stuffy, however much she opened the windows.

From the outside, police headquarters looked as if it had not withstood the changing seasons well, but simply clung on at an odd angle to the hill between Oslo’s main prison and Grønland Church. During her fifteen years with the police service, Silje Sørensen had seen the community, the state and optimistic city enthusiasts slowly attempt to
upgrade the area. But the beautiful Middelalder Park lay much too far away to cast its glow over the battered building housing police headquarters. The Opera House was no more than a slanting white roof, just visible from her office beyond seedy areas beneath a lid of exhaust fumes.

She would have liked to open the window, but she didn’t have much time.

Her eyes swept over the desk. She was pedantically tidy when it came to her office, unlike every other area of her life. The overfilled in-tray at the edge of the desk had pricked her conscience when she left on the Friday before Christmas. Her out-tray was empty, and she shuddered at the thought of the stress that was waiting for her on the first day back after the holiday.

In the middle of the desk lay a file she didn’t recognize. She leaned over and read the yellow Post-it note stuck to the front.

DI Sørensen

Enclosed please find documentation relating to Hawre Ghani, presumed date of birth 16.12.1991. Please contact me asap.

DCI Harald Bull tel. 937***** / 231*****

The kids would be bad-tempered and impossible if she was away too long. On the other hand, they were sitting quietly, each with their Nintendo DS when she left them in the back of the car, illegally parked and with the engine running. They had received the games yesterday and were still fascinated by something new, so she thought she might be OK for a while.

She sat down, still wearing her coat, and opened the file.

The first thing she saw was a photograph. It was black and white and grainy, with pronounced shadows. It looked like an enlargement of a picture from some kind of ID document, but didn’t exactly fulfil the new criteria for passport photographs. The boy – because this was definitely a boy rather than a grown man – had his eyes half-closed. His mouth was open. Sometimes people who had been taken into custody pulled faces when they had their photo taken in order to make
themselves unrecognizable. For some reason she didn’t think this boy had been playing up. It struck her that the picture had been taken in a rush, and that the photographer simply couldn’t be bothered to take another one.

Hawre Ghani was of no significance.

He hadn’t been important enough.

The photograph moved her.

The boy’s lips were shining, as if he had licked them. There was something childish and vulnerable about the full upper lip with its pronounced Cupid’s bow. The skin around his eyes was smooth, and there was no sign of stubble on his cheeks. The shadow of a moustache beneath a nose that was so large it almost obscured the rest of his face was the only indication that this was a boy well on his way through puberty. In general there was something youthfully disproportionate about the face. Something puppyish. A quick calculation told her that Hawre Ghani had just turned seventeen.

As she looked through the papers she realized he hadn’t, in fact, lived long enough to do so.

Despite the fact that Silje Sørensen had worked in the violent crime and sexual offences unit for many years, and had seen more than she could have ever imagined when she was a young police cadet, the next picture came as a shock. Something that must be a face lay inside a hood made of dark fabric. All the features had been smoothed out, the skin was discoloured and badly swollen. One eye socket was distended and empty, the other barely visible. The corpse’s upper lip was partially missing in a ragged tear, revealing four white teeth and one made of silver. At least she assumed it was silver; in the photograph it was more like a black, illogical contrast to the rest of the chalk-white teeth.

She moved on quickly.

The penultimate sheet in the thin file was a report written by an officer from the immigration squad. She had never heard of him. The report was dated 23 December 2008.

Two days ago.

I was at police headquarters this morning in order to transfer two illegal immigrants to the detention centre in Trandum. During the arrest I
happened to hear two colleagues discussing an unidentified body which had been found in the harbour early on Sunday 20 December. One of them mentioned that the corpse, which had partially disintegrated, had a silver tooth in the upper jaw. I reacted immediately, because for the past six weeks I have been trying without success to track down Hawre Ghani, a Kurdish asylum seeker below the age of consent, in connection with his application to remain in Norway. During a fight between gangs in Oslo City in September (see my report number 98*****37/08), the right front tooth in Hawre Ghani’s upper jaw was knocked out. He was brought in after this incident, and I accompanied him to the dentist’s the following day. He requested a silver tooth instead of a porcelain crown, and as far as I am aware this was arranged in collaboration with social services, the asylum seekers’ council and the aforementioned dentist.

Since no registered enquiries have come to light regarding a missing person who might correspond to the body found in the harbour, I would suggest that the officer leading the investigation should contact the dentist, Dag Brå, Tåsensenteret, tel. 2229****, in order to compare the dead man’s teeth with his X-rays / records.

Silje Sørensen turned to the final page in the file. It was a copy of a handwritten document addressed to Harald Bull.

Hi Harald!

Due to the Christmas holiday I ran a quick and highly unscientific check today, Christmas Eve, based on the tip from the immigration squad. Dag Brå agreed to meet me at his surgery this morning. I showed him some pictures of the deceased’s teeth which I took myself (I took a few shots on Aker Brygge on Sunday morning, not brilliant quality but worth a try). He compared these with his own
notes and X-rays, and we can assume until further notice that the deceased probably is the underage Kurdish asylum seeker as indicated. All documents have been copied to forensics. I presume that a formal identification will take place immediately after New Year – or perhaps between Christmas and New Year if the gods are on our side. I’ll write a report as soon as I’m back in the office. But now I need a HOLIDAY!

Merry Christmas!

Bengt

P.S. I spoke to forensics yesterday. There are indications that the deceased was killed using something resembling a garrotte. The guy I spoke to said it was a miracle the head was still attached. Perhaps we should consider sending the case over to the violent crimes squad straight away.

B

Silje Sørensen closed the file and leaned back in her chair. She was sweating. The good mood she had been in on her way to work had been swept away, and she wished she had left the damned file alone.

Now she felt a strong urge to open it again, just to look at the young man: this rootless, homeless Kurdish boy without any parents, with his silver tooth and smooth cheeks. Regardless of how many times she came across these children – and God knows it happened all too often – she just couldn’t distance herself. Sometimes in the evenings, when she looked in on her own two sons who had now decided they were too old for goodnight kisses, but who still couldn’t get to sleep until she had tucked them in, she experienced something that resembled guilt.

Perhaps even shame.

The sound of a car horn shattered the silence, making her heart miss a beat. She opened the window and looked down at the turning area in front of the entrance and the main desk.

‘Mum! Mum, will you be much longer?’

Her youngest son was hanging out of the car window, yelling. Silje immediately felt cross. Quickly she placed Hawre Ghani’s file on top of her in tray, pulled off the Post-it note with Harald Bull’s number and tucked it in her pocket.

As she locked the door behind her and ran towards the foyer in the hope of reaching the car in time to stop her son sounding the horn again, she had completely forgotten why she had gone to the office early on the afternoon of Christmas Day on the way to dinner with her in-laws.

The skis.

They were still behind the door of her office. By the time she eventually remembered them, it was too late.

*

It wasn’t too late yet, the duty editor established. The bulletin was going out in two minutes, but since this was anything but a lead story, they could easily put together a short item from the studio with a picture of the Bishop towards the end of the broadcast. He quickly rattled off a message to the producer.

‘Get something written for Christian right away,’ he ordered the young temp. ‘Just a short piece. And double check with NTB that it’s correct, of course. We can do without announcing someone has died when they haven’t, even on a slow news day.’

‘What’s going on here?’ said Mark Holden, one of NRK’s heavyweights on home affairs. ‘Who’s died?’

He grabbed the piece of paper from the temp, read it in one and a half seconds and shoved it back in the young woman’s hand. She didn’t really have time to realize he’d taken it.

‘Tragic,’ said Mark Holden, without a scrap of empathy. ‘She can’t have been all that old. Sixty? Sixty-two? What did she die of ?’

‘It doesn’t say,’ the news editor replied absently. ‘I hadn’t heard she was ill. But right now I need to concentrate on this broadcast. If you could …’

He waved away the much older reporter, his gaze fixed on one of the many monitors in the large room. The brief news headlines were shown, with all the captions as agreed. The presenters were more smartly dressed than usual, in honour of Christmas.