Lethal Investments (7 page)

Frank yawned. It was morning. Somewhere between six and half past. Weather grey and cold. The damp mist engulfed houses, trees and cars. The moisture in the air could be morning mist and could be more stubborn fog. Too early to tell as yet. It could be a nice, mild day or downcast and rainy.

Two lines of cars were parked bumper to bumper across the street. It was so early there were few gaps. Most people were sitting at the breakfast table with newspapers spread out and drinking coffee.

The thought of coffee depressed him. No breakfast, no coffee, no shops open anywhere and probably hours of futile waiting on the horizon.

Gunnarstranda had woken him with a telephone call three-quarters of an hour ago. Ordered him up to Lambertseter pronto! Not by car. That was why he was walking along Mellombølgen to locate his boss’s position. He was tired. Never got enough sleep. Which, in fact, often affected him until about mid-morning.

Further down the street he could see small smoke clouds escaping from the window of a dark civilian car parked untidily and protruding half a metre into the carriageway. The windows were steamed up and tiny wisps of bluish-white smoke rose skywards. Gunnarstranda had left a crack open. Frank opened the passenger door and stepped in.

‘I haven’t had any breakfast yet,’ he grumbled in an accusatory tone. No greeting.

‘Here you are,’ said Gunnarstranda, passing him an old-fashioned, shiny Thermos flask. Frank twisted the cap, which sprang open with a pop. And the wonderful aroma of strong, black coffee filled the car. He took a yellow plastic cup with a grubby rim from the dashboard and poured.

‘You haven’t eaten. I haven’t slept.’

Gunnarstranda stubbed out the cigarette in the overfilled ashtray.

‘I’ll give them twenty minutes, then I’m going in.’

He looked at his watch. Then focused on the middle entrance in a low block ahead of them. A flagstone path stretched twenty metres from the pavement to the entrance. Three entrances to the block in all. The greeny-brown spikes of some large berberis bushes partially concealed the doors. Along the three sections ran parallel lines of verandas. All with raised awnings in a loud yellow colour.

‘Who are we waiting for?’ Frank asked.

‘The man. Sigurd Klavestad primarily, and a woman.’

Gunnarstranda’s eyes did not deviate from the front door. ‘Jack rang me at half past ten last night, at my cabin! He refused to take responsibility since the man had a woman with him, so I had to come back here. It took me three hours to get to Grønland to change the car. There’s something up with the Skoda; it keeps misfiring and dying on me.’

He paused, flicked some ash from the cigarette and continued:

‘So I’ve been sitting here alone all night ensuring that the woman up there is still alive. You don’t know a cheap car mechanic, do you, by any chance?’

Frank spared his boss one of the many jokes about Skodas. ‘I know of a guy in Kampen,’ he said blowing on the coffee and slurping a sip straight afterwards. ‘Lives in a collective with a girl I know. Works freelance.’

‘No questions asked, know what I mean?’

Frank dismissed his boss’s sarcastic tone with a shrug. ‘You asked if I knew someone cheap.’

The man at the wheel stroked his chin with a rasp; patchy bristles scraped against his palm. ‘Klavestad left the Software Partners building at half past three. With this woman, Kristin Sommerstedt.’

Frank carefully rotated his head. A bit more awake. Remembered her. The long hair and the office outfit, the receptionist.

Gunnarstranda tossed his head. ‘That’s her flat.’

‘Kristin Sommerstedt was supposed to have been friends with Reidun Rosendal.’

‘Is that so? Well, they caught the local train to the National Theatre. Went to the restaurant and sat drinking wine for a couple of hours, knocked back quite a bit. Spent most of the time crying and intertwining fingers. Afterwards walked round Aker Brygge, nipped up into town and down to the underground, came here half past seven last night, switched off the light at eleven and that was when Jack phoned me.’

They both stared at the broad, brown front door.

‘The man’s probably been dipping his wick while I’ve got one hell of a headache and I’m in a bad mood.’

Gunnarstranda yawned and banged his hands on the wheel.

Frank poured more coffee. Watched his boss check his watch.

‘At a quarter to we’re going in,’ Gunnarstranda repeated, licking his lips. His eyes were red-rimmed.

The door opened. They gave a start, but then relaxed. An unknown man in a brown jacket with cropped hair walked on to the pavement. Unlocked the Opel in front of them.

Gunnarstranda twisted his watch strap as the car drove off.

‘They may have decided to have a lie-in,’ Frank said in consolation. Feeling the coffee had lit a spark of life somewhere behind his eyes.

‘It’s only half an hour since the light came on up there, in one window.’

Yet again the door opened. A middle-aged lady stood for a second under the little porch and took a deep breath. Slowly put on a pair of gloves and walked calmly down the road towards the underground.

The windows misted up. It had been bad before, but now it was worse because of the steam from the coffee in the yellow cup. Frank pulled the sleeve of his sweater over his hand and rubbed away the condensation.

This time. The door opened again and Sigurd Klavestad stood there alone. Gunnarstranda already had his mobile phone at the ready, tapped in a number without taking his eyes off the young man on the flagstone.

Sigurd Klavestad was paler than before. The area around his eyes had gone an unhealthy dark colour. This contrasted with his white complexion and gave his face a concave appearance. His long hair was still collected in a pony tail.

Frank heard the mobile phone struggling to find a connection. At last! It rang. The man with the pony tail moved slowly down the road. Calmly, without any undue haste. No one picked up. Frank opened the car door a crack. The phone was still ringing.

‘Hello?’

A sleepy woman’s gentle voice could now be heard from the inspector’s hand. She was alive.

Gunnarstranda carefully rang off. Sigurd Klavestad was quite some way down the street now.

‘See you!’ Frank said briefly and hauled himself out of the narrow seat and was gone.

Gunnarstranda sat staring after them. The mist had lifted enough for Klavestad to be still visible. A slightly built young man in a black reefer jacket with a stiff, somewhat awkward gait. Frølich a way behind. Large, legs astride, rolling gait with both hands in his jacket pockets.

Soon Klavestad was carried along in the stream of passengers hurrying towards the underground. And when the long red worm of a train finally pulled into the station not even Frølich’s big body could be distinguished from the others in the throng.

Gunnarstranda waited. The train would have left by now. He got out of the car, went to the front door and up the stairs.

When he rang her doorbell nothing happened. The anger rose to his temples. The exhaustion after hours without sleep provoked him into a terrible rage which he took out on the bell. The bell ding-donged like a pinball flipper. When he finally let go of the button small steps could clearly be heard from indoors.

‘Open the door,’ he barked with irritation, banging his fist.

‘Who is it?’

The voice didn’t carry well through the woodwork.

‘Police! Open up!’

Again total silence. The policeman, glaring impatiently at the brown wood in front of him, sighed. Raised his hand to pound the door. Refrained. Breathed out with relief as the lock clicked and the door opened a fraction.

‘What is it?’

Her face was pale and her skin twitched. The policeman brandished his ID. ‘Let me in,’ he barked, pushing the door open.

She stepped back, dressed in only her underwear.

‘Go and get some clothes on,’ he ordered and marched ahead into the flat.

His glare took in the room. Noted lots of little objects, ornaments and figurines in cases and on shelves. Subdued colours. Woven tapestries on the walls. A closed door, presumably to a bedroom. A large loom took up half the sitting room, and a sofa-bed underneath an impressively large weeping fig was unmade. The air was quite stale. The room had obviously been slept in.

She came in, having pulled on some jeans and a short-sleeved jersey, still barefoot but no longer confused.

‘Sit down!’

She obeyed. Stared up at him in expectation, no longer afraid. Gunnarstranda’s eyes bored into her.

‘Who slept here?’

‘A friend.’

He seized her arm. Her eyes widened.

‘I’m not dangerous,’ he assured her in a gentler, husky voice. The words fell on deaf ears.

His headache announced its return, worse than before. The pain made him grimace, then he asked in a gentle voice: ‘How well do you know this man you had staying here last night?’

‘Know?’

Jesus! He was not in the mood for this. He sat down with a bump on the unmade sofa-bed. ‘Sigurd Klavestad. He was with you last night. Are you aware of his involvement in the murder of Reidun Rosendal?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘How long have you known him?’

‘Since yesterday.’

Good-looking girl. Tall and slim. But eyes a bit bovine. Large, brown and very moist. He remembered the chubby stomach around her navel when she jumped back from the door. Caught himself staring at the black birthmark on her face. Her lips moved. ‘He needed someone to talk to. I needed someone to talk to. We . . . talked about . . . Reidun.’

Calm voice. Intense gaze, he assumed she was being honest.

Gunnarstranda bent forwards. ‘We cannot rule him out as a suspect.’

She stared back, still calm. ‘I know.’

‘Yet you bring him back here and let him sleep over?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

A new gleam took its place in her cow-like expression. Now she was eyeballing him effortlessly.

Gunnarstranda chanced to observe that there were two pillows next to each other on the sofa. Two pillows but only one duvet.

‘And you had never met him before yesterday afternoon,’ he remarked sarcastically.

She gave a nod of defiance and he felt his headache return.

‘This guest of yours must be a Casanova.’

She held her tongue. But she was on her guard; she had picked up the intonation.

The policeman noted that he liked her decision to remain silent.

‘How did you react when you saw him yesterday?’

‘React?’

Gunnarstranda tightened his lips in a show of cynicism. ‘It must have made some impression on you that the man who was with your deceased friend until minutes before she was murdered was suddenly standing in front of you.’

‘I wasn’t fazed.’

Her face was pale, expression committed. ‘It was nice to be able to talk about her!’

He patted the pillow. ‘You must have been very happy,’ he said with a cold smile.

She was tight-lipped, but her eyes mocked him.

So that’s where you are,
he thought. There. In the brown eyes. Condescending disdain for his pathetic attempts to draw her out. He liked that. Liked the strength in her as she appraised him. They glared at each other. She had almost made up her mind to come clean. The pursed lips made her face very beautiful.

‘I believe you,’ he declared with a hand to his brow. ‘Why haven’t you gone to work?’

‘I didn’t feel like it.’

Didn’t you, he thought, with a nod. ‘You got on with her?’

‘I was probably the person she had most in common with, yes.’

‘Why were you afraid to open the door just now?’

‘I thought someone was there. The telephone rang. Like at Reidun’s, and then they put down the phone, and then there was a ring this morning, so early . . .’

‘Like at Reidun’s?’

‘The phone. Sigurd told me someone called her just before he left, someone who rang off on her.’

Gunnarstranda’s face went contemplative and he chewed his lower lip. ‘Do you know where she lived?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever been there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she like it there?’

‘Yes and no.’

He scented something. ‘What was wrong?’

She hesitated.

‘Come on.’

‘A guy with binoculars.’

The detective nodded. ‘Older man? Neighbour?’

‘Yes. An old grunter, a peeping tom, so she was forever keeping an eye on the curtains.’

Kristin Sommerstedt paused. Considered. ‘I think it tormented her at first. But then she decided she would ignore it.’

‘In what way?’

The woman paused again. As if the answer would be hard for him to grasp.

‘Go for it,’ he urged and winked at the decision-maker in her eyes.

Kristin Sommerstedt lifted her legs on to the chair and crossed them. Red toenails.

‘This might sound weird. But she was so fed up with the old pig. Really pissed off.’

The woman searched for words. ‘I think she decided this bastard was not going to make her live according to his rules! All the time checking the curtains and what he could see and so on. She had made up her mind to ignore him.’

‘In what way?’

The woman shrugged. ‘By ignoring him. Letting him peep as much as he liked, to incite him. Opening the curtains every so often. Provoking him, and it must have driven him mad, by all accounts.’

She went into herself again. ‘Once he had stood up in the window and . . .’

She studied the floor. ‘He had stood masturbating in the window. Reidun had taken a few clothes off . . . and then . . . well . . . opened the curtains after a while.’

Gunnarstranda nodded, his mind elsewhere.

‘That was last week. He had rung her up afterwards. Threatening her and being obscene.’

‘How did she take that?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘His call.’

‘She just laughed.’

Gunnarstranda frowned, puzzled.

‘She did,’ the woman on the sofa assured him. ‘The old boy oozed with filth. Drivelling on about how he would rape her and cut her into chunks, and he was pretty coarse. But she just laughed at it. I think it had become a kind of war. She was always in an aggressive mood when she talked about it. In fact, it was quite . . . awful.’

‘How do you mean awful?’

She flung her arms in the air. ‘Maybe wild is a better word. It was all a bit . . . wild listening to the latest in the peeping tom war!’

‘She wasn’t at all frightened?’

‘Nope.’

‘And this was last week?’

‘Yes. I think she talked to me on Thursday. Yes, it was Thursday.’ This was such crucial information that the woman must have known. He studied her features. The sensitive lips and the brown eyes.

She went on: ‘We didn’t talk about this a lot. But we did talk about our accommodation in general. She didn’t have much room and she wanted something more spacious, there were things she wanted to do. And that was when the conversation came back to the war.’

Gunnarstranda listened to Kristin Sommerstedt talking about Reidun’s private war. She touched on personal development and awakening. The right to be a woman and dress how you wanted, to live your own life even though you had an old pig living in the adjacent block. ‘In a way she felt affronted!’

Kristin Sommerstedt’s brown eyes flashed with emotion. ‘Affronted by not being allowed to live her life in peace.’

Gunnarstranda nodded. He tried to imagine a long-limbed buxom blonde struggling to rid herself of Arvid Johansen’s harassment by opening the curtains and making love all night with this long-haired lad. Listening to her, the detective felt old. So when the woman paused, he said with a cool smile: ‘She didn’t get any kind of pleasure out of this, did she? It wasn’t just that she liked to get the old pig going, was it?’

Her eyes met his. With undisguised disappointment.

‘Is that even a remote possibility? That she would get any kind of pleasure from it?’

She stared down at the floor. Her mind boiling with anger.

He waited.

‘I should have kept my mouth shut,’ she burst out, getting up and pacing to and fro. This was no posturing.

He leaned back. The sofa was unpleasantly soft. It was impossible to sit there and relax. ‘Calm down,’ he said, clearing his throat and leaning forward. Gave a resigned sigh. ‘I asked you if she got any pleasure from inciting the old pig because I consider you sharp-minded enough to answer me if this was the case. Don’t trip over your bottom lip! Tell me if she was happy at work.’

Something glinted in her eyes. A connection. Ironic smile above the birthmark. A sigh. Unarticulated ‘All right then’. She sat down.

‘Did Reidun have a steady boyfriend?’ he asked.

‘Not that I knew of.’

He waited.

‘I think there were a few who had a soft spot for her,’ she mumbled.

‘But you don’t know of anyone in particular?’

She replied with a shrug. ‘No one I can think of.’

‘She didn’t talk about any other neighbours?’

Kristin pondered. ‘Don’t recall any.’

‘A couple with a small child?’

‘No.’

‘No other men nearby who helped her with odd jobs, starting the car when temperatures dropped?’

‘’Fraid not.’

Kristin smiled.

‘Was she happy at work?’

‘We-ell . . .’

She drew out the pause. ‘Have you met them?’ she asked

‘No.’

‘The boss is a bit special.’

‘Engelsviken?’

She nodded. ‘Over forty. Behaves like twenty-five. Whizzes round in an open sports car, wearing a silk suit and sunglasses. Never acknowledges you. Swears a lot and uses loads of jargon in his speech. Tries to play the millionaire type people find exotic. But he’s just a fat adolescent fixated on tits and ass. Short chubby fingers and a smile full of teeth.’

She shuddered and her shoulders contorted. It wasn’t feigned.

‘His wife’s just the opposite. The fine lady. Bit virtuous like girls in fairy tales. Absolutely amazing that they’re married to each other.’

‘Amazing?’

She bided her time. ‘In fact, I don’t think she’s very happy,’ she said in a quiet voice.

He waited. The woman stared into middle distance. ‘Sonja’s been through quite a bit. It can’t be easy always having to clear up after that shit. Keeping a front.’

‘Should they have got divorced?’ Gunnarstranda asked. Adding when he saw her expression: ‘Perhaps they’ve got kids who keep them together?’

‘Don’t know. I don’t think they have any children.’

Kristin continued: ‘Still I find it hard to imagine Sonja Hager giving up the house on the ridge. Or going out on the town alone. Or . . .’

She grinned. ‘To be frank, I don’t understand how she sticks it. Ask her.’

He could not sit still any longer. It was his turn to get up and pace the floor.

‘The Finance Manager?’

‘Hunting-mad fitness junkie.’

‘Hunting-mad?’

She nodded. ‘Drives round with this big box on the roof of his car. Whole year round. Keeps a rifle in it twenty-four-seven.’

Gunnarstranda scowled.

‘It’s true. He’s shown me. Suppose he wanted to impress me. He’s like that. Shows off his muscles and boasts he sleeps under the stars. Told me he drives to the woods at night to shoot a hare or suchlike. Loves to go on about how easy it is to clean dead animals.’

‘To gut.’

‘What?’

‘It’s called gutting an animal when you remove their intestines,’ Gunnarstranda said in a low, slightly remote voice. ‘He likes going on about that, did you say?’

‘Loves making girls recoil with horror. So that he can put his rough arms around them and let them feel his muscles.’ She sneered.

‘Have you often seen this rifle of his?’

‘Once. But everyone knows Bregård drives around with a rifle on the roof.’

‘What kind of rifle?’

‘Don’t know. I’m not very well up on that sort of thing.’

‘How many barrels, one or two?’

‘Two.’

The police officer held back, and she confirmed with a nod. ‘Two,’ she repeated.

Gunnarstranda stroked his chin. ‘A rifle on the roof,’ he muttered.

She peered up at him. ‘You seem like an intelligent man,’ she said, out of the blue.

He stopped. Their eyes met. This was more difficult.

Kristin Sommerstedt talked about what it was like to be a woman. Playing roles all the time. Gunnarstranda thought of the dead girl who had worked at the Post Office, on the supermarket till and selling computer equipment.
What dreadful roles had she gone around playing,
he mused with a sudden anger. Looking at the attractive woman on the sofa. Full red lips and a fascinating birthmark by her chin. Her lips spoke of what it was like to be a woman among men. Especially if you were smart. Smarter than the men. ‘Reidun was smart,’ she explained. ‘Smarter than most. But she was never acknowledged. Reidun was one of those who adapted to circumstances. Played the dumb blonde, assumed a role, not to stand out, to be accepted.’