Medusa (10 page)

– Marlen said,
This is the best birthday party in my whole life
, imitating her daughter’s common-sense delivery, making Axel laugh. –
Not to say the best
day
of my life.

– Fortunately she says that every time, said Axel and sat down.

Bie poured him a glass of wine.

– You’ve always been good at playing. Unlike me. She’s lucky, Axel. She couldn’t have wished for a better father.

He looked up at the ceiling. He experienced a sudden and almost irresistible urge to tell her about Miriam. About being in her flat. At that moment, Marlen called out.

– You stay there, said Bie and stood up. As she passed him, she stroked his hair, then leaned over and kissed his ear.

It was 10.30. Tom was still not home. Axel had sent him a text but got no answer, and it struck him that it was his son he should have spent the evening with. Taken him to the cinema, or a coffee bar.

Bie came back up.

– She wants to talk to you. No one else will do. She just won’t give up.

Marlen lay with her head beneath the duvet. He pretended he couldn’t find her, felt around on the bed until he came across a foot, which he tickled under the toes.

– Can’t you sleep? he asked as she emerged.

– I daren’t.

He sat on the edge of the bed.

– What are you afraid of?

– That monster, she whispered. – Medusa. I’m never going to look up into the sky again.

Marlen had a tendency to overdramatise things, but he could hear now that she was genuinely afraid. He’d been too successful in bringing the story of Perseus alive; he hoped her classmates weren’t all lying awake in bed too.

– All this about Medusa is just a fairy tale, Marlen. I’ll tell you why that star winks at us. Actually there are two stars there. When the weaker one passes in front of the strong one, the light gets cut off.

He demonstrated with his hands how the two stars orbited around each other.

– After a few days, the strong one appears again, and from down here it looks like it’s flaring up. The two stars make us believe they are one and the same.

He had to repeat the explanation several times to convince Marlen that it wasn’t an evil eye up there looking down at the earth and winking. Eventually she calmed down and went to sleep. The myth of Medusa had released her from its hold.

I
T IS THE
sixth of October. Not when you hear this but now when I’m speaking to you, it is the sixth of October. I’ve killed today. I think about it and it makes me feel calm. Then I think of how I’m saying this into the Dictaphone so that you’ll hear it and I feel a thrill of expectation. You’ll be lying here where I’m sitting now and hearing my voice saying this. You can’t move and you can’t interrupt me. For the first time you realise it’s going to happen to you too.

I didn’t plan to kill. Not even when I saw her walking along the forest path towards me. It was nine days ago. I stopped and talked to her. She liked to talk. In the end I had to tell her to shut up. She went rigid and stared at me. Suddenly she turned and began to run back along the track. Then I knew she would die. I caught up with her and grabbed hold of that skinny neck. She started screaming. I was angry as fuck and I closed her shrieking mug. But it wasn’t going to happen just yet. She had to know about it for a while first. Same way you’ll know about it. I dragged her in among the trees. Had to tape her mouth shut. Tape her hands that kept trying to scratch my face. Found somewhere to tie her up to wait until I could come back and fetch her. It took a couple of hours and by then she was all screamed out. She’d messed herself like a baby in nappies. Didn’t weigh much more either, stinking old bag.

I couldn’t face taking her clothes off the way I’d planned. But I like to change plans. The best plans are the ones that just come along. Like the way I’m sitting here talking to you. I don’t know how it’ll be. Nor what’ll happen to you. All sorts of eventualities can crop up and get in the way. As I’m recording this, you still don’t know that this whole thing is about you. You’ve done everything you can to forget. But we are joined together. That’s what you were trying to say that time you told me about the twins that no one could part. No matter how much you have let me die in your thoughts. You said once that everyone has his own animal. You read that somewhere and wanted me to think about it. We were sitting in the classroom then too, but we weren’t alone there. It was just before the lesson began. And when I couldn’t think of anything, you said a bear, that was my animal.

D
ETECTIVE
C
HIEF
I
NSPECTOR
Hans Magnus Viken was standing high above the gully. He’d been there for several minutes. Below him the crime scene was bathed in light from the two large lamps the technicians had rigged up.

He had still not been down there. Not because he dreaded getting a closer look at the deceased, but because first impressions were important. He raised his eyes and looked into the darkness between the pine trees. The actual location in which a body was found always had something to tell. It was usually not possible to describe exactly what it was at first, but it might be useful later, perhaps even crucial. He referred to this to himself as
intuition
, but called it
a gut feeling
in conversation with colleagues. He was convinced that this power to think intuitively was what distinguished an unusually skilled detective from one who was merely competent.

Viken remained standing up there another couple of minutes before climbing down and nodding to the three guys in white coveralls who had completed the first round of examinations of the body and were now searching the surrounding forest floor.

One look at the dead person was enough. The DI was certain this was the missing woman. She was wearing walking gear, Gore-Tex jacket and trousers in some rough fabric. The jacket had been pulled up over the back. She lay with her legs curled under her, in a foetal position. He bent closer, switched on his torch. A gaping wound ran across one side of her neck and up on to her face. It looked almost like deep claw marks, five furrows in the same direction. When he carefully lifted up part of the ripped jacket, a second, similar gash appeared, diagonally down across the back. He peered towards the top of the gorge, where he’d just been standing. A fall on to the stones at the bottom could cause a lot of damage. But these gashes were different. It looked like something done by an animal. Ten days had passed since the woman had been reported missing; she must have been lying there exposed to the elements, and a natural target for scavengers.

One of the technicians shouted. He was standing doubled over at the end of the gorge, where it emerged on to a slope. The others joined him. Viken heard them talking loudly together and climbed closer.

– Found something?

One of them, a raw-boned, grey-haired man he’d known since police college days, beckoned to him.

– Better come and see this for yourself.

Viken shone his torch beam on to the ground, where the moss had been scratched up. Shone it further away; in several places there were similar marks on the forest floor. On a muddy patch of ground distinct tracks were visible. They looked like claw marks.

– Shit, Viken muttered. – They don’t exactly look like a dog’s prints.

He straightened up.

– How much longer do you need here?

The grey-haired man measured the gully with his gaze.

– Five, six hours to begin with.

Viken thought it over. It was now 8.45. It looked highly unlikely that this was a case for his Violent Crimes section. He had come up here on his own initiative when he heard about the discovery. He was well aware of the fact that not everybody in the Crime Response Unit would be equally pleased at his presence, but having seen the dead woman, he was confident that it had been time well spent. He had seen body parts fished up from the sea. He had entered flats in which corpses had lain rotting and putrefied in the summer heat for weeks. He had seen them disfigured with Sami knives, shot at close range with shotguns. But he had never seen anything resembling these gashes. Carefully he picked his way down the slope, shining the torch on the ground in front of him. A few metres further down he came across two new tracks.

He climbed up above the gully again, pulled the plastic coverings off his shoes and removed a cloth from his pocket. Even when working in terrain like this, he disliked seeing muddy spots on them. Afterwards he stood looking down at the brightly lit scene with the white-clad figures crawling around as they examined the ground around the body. He pulled out his mobile phone, called a number from the address book. A sergeant in the section had at one time been a member of the Hunting and Fishing Regulations committee in the area he came from, somewhere away up in darkest Hedmark. The type of guy who devoted two weeks of his holiday to elk hunting every time autumn came around.

– Hi, Arve, he said when his call was answered. – I know this is a holiday weekend for you, but there’s something I want you to see. Are you in town? Good, how quickly can you make it up to Ullevålseter?

Viken stood on the grass with a cup of hot coffee in his hands. The people at Ullevålseter were more than accommodating. The café had closed several hours ago, but they’d offered him something to eat as well. He said coffee was fine, even though his stomach was acid and complaining. In the distance he heard the sound of an engine, and a couple of minutes later a small, light car came up the slope. Sergeant Arve Norbakk, the man he was waiting for, usually drove a big four-by-four, and Viken immediately had a pretty good idea of what was happening.

His hunch turned out to be right. A blond woman he recognised at once jumped out of the passenger door even before the car had come to a halt.

– Well let me tell you, Fredvold, said Viken. –
VG
are usually on the scene long before I’ve even got my shoes on. I’ve been here for hours now and not seen hide nor hair of a journalist. No wonder the tabloids are struggling.

The woman was in her thirties, with a jutting lower jaw, and was about a head taller than the detective chief inspector. She wore a leather jacket and boots with heels that gave her another couple of centimetres on him. Tall women always made him feel uneasy.

– Well we’ll see about that, she answered. – But finding you here is good news.

Viken grimaced.

– It isn’t murder every time I show my face, you know that perfectly well. Did you get permission to drive up here?

– I didn’t reckon on meeting any traffic wardens in the middle of the forest, the journalist smiled. Cute as a pike, Viken thought.

A fat little man with an enormous photographer’s bag over one shoulder squeezed his way out of the car. The detective chief inspector hadn’t seen him before, and when the man approached, clearly intending to shake hands, he turned his back on him, trudged back into the café and refilled his cup. An hour had passed since he’d called Norbakk. He wanted to finish up here and get back down into town as quickly as possible.

Kaja Fredvold and the photographer followed him inside.

– Are you still serving coffee? the journalist exclaimed happily when she saw the steaming pot standing on the counter.

She helped herself and walked over to the table where Viken was now sitting.

– Is the body you’ve found Hilde Paulsen?

– Looks pretty much like it.

– What happened to her?

Viken drummed on the edge of the table.

– She’s lying in a gully, been lying there for a week and a half. Fell, I expect.

– Where?

– Not too far away. Couple of kilometres.

– But this area has been thoroughly combed for days. Dogs and helicopters and an army of volunteers.

– Give us a day or two, Fredvold.

– Us? You mean Violent Crimes?

Viken heard a car outside and stood up.

– Don’t try it on. That’s all you’re getting for now.

They drove up the forest road in Norbakk’s SUV, the journalist following them in the little Japanese car.

– Let’s hope they get stuck, said Viken.

Arve Norbakk chuckled. He was not much more than thirty, at least twenty years younger than his colleague. He’d joined straight from college and been in the section for eighteen months. Viken, who every semester led a course in investigatory tactics for the students, had personally recommended him to the head of the section. The gut feeling that stood him in such good stead as a detective was every bit as useful when it came to assessing a colleague’s personality and qualities. It enabled him to make quick judgements of their weaknesses and strengths, and he had not been mistaken in his opinion of Norbakk. The sergeant might not have been all that quick, but he was thorough and dependable, and smart enough when given the time. And he was someone who thought about what he was going to say before saying it, not the type to shoot his mouth off about anything and everything. The section had enough chattering magpies – an issue on which Viken’s tolerance was severely limited.

– You could have forbidden them to drive on any further, Norbakk suggested.

Viken fumbled out a paper hanky and blew into it. Not because he had a cold, but because the smell of the corpse he had been bending over still seemed to be in his nostrils.

– They would have been up there whatever. You know, when the mongrels pick up the scent of blood … Apropos mongrels, it was a dog that found the body. A few hundred metres off the track.

Norbakk glanced over at him.

– They’ve had search lines going across this area several times.

– I know. Our people with tracker dogs, and the army and the Red Cross, with hundreds of volunteers trawling every square inch. No one finds a damned shit. But a retired dentist out walking with his Gordon setter comes across it straight away.