The Last Fix (49 page)

    Frølich
was already by the door. 'Should Gerhardsen be arrested or just brought in for
questioning?' he asked in a formal tone.

    The
inspector gave an impatient shrug and turned away. As soon as he concentrated
on the telephone the features of his lean face softened. He sat down and
listened with a big smile on his lips. 'And that,' he said with sympathy, 'that's
usually a fertilizer problem…'

    He
drove in the vague direction of the city centre. He needed to find a
multi-storey car park. It wasn't so important where he put the car. The main
thing was that the place should be anonymous. A place where he would be given a
receipt. It was at such moments, when there was no doubt about what had to be
done, that all the tiny events put together acquired new meaning - that tiny
events became a comprehensible whole. In a way he was back at square one;
finally he was where he should have begun. Of course this was a weakness on his
part - not starting at the beginning. However, perhaps it is humanity's
greatest weakness: a tendency to walk around the target until there is no way
back. It's always like that: it isn't until you stand by the quarry that you
can see the shortest route - it's only then you know where you should have
started.

    He
grinned. He knew where he should have started. After so much trouble he now
knew. Because of the most common weakness in existence: not facing up to the
real truth. You shrink from seeing small signs and signals of the illness until
these same symptoms have grown so large that the illness keeping the symptoms
alive can no longer be denied.

    In
all these years there had only been one real threat. He had accepted the
threat. Not because he was stupid, not because he was weak, but because he had
allowed himself to be duped by the symptoms when the malignant tumour began to stir.

    But
was it in vain?

    Nothing
is in vain. He turned the car radio up louder. It was the wrong question.
That's why nothing is in vain. The car radio began to hiss as he drove down the
hills in Fjellinjen. Cars whizzed by on both sides, young people racing by
without knowing what it was they were racing after. Urban traffic is a study in
impatience. He slowed down and turned off before he was through the tunnel and
reappeared in daylight just before Filipstad. He turned right and drove slowly
into the entrance of the multi-storey car park. The crackling in the speakers
disturbed his thinking. He had to switch off the radio. The bends led him
gently downwards. Nothing is in vain. It is the endeavour and the exertion that
afford insight, that reveal the truth. The others did not die in vain.

    They
had helped him to point out the real tumour. When the tumour can no longer be
concealed there is only one solution: you get rid of it. He left the spiral
ramp and drove into the parking area. Out of the darkness; into the darkness.

    The
sun was baking the policeman's back as he closed the wrought-iron gate behind
him and slowly made his way up the garden path alongside a beautiful row of
weigela plants whose bell-like flowers were coming to an end now. He stopped
and took a spray of fragile, wax-like bells that were still in blossom. He
could sense his dread. While he was standing there he heard the rustle of a
newspaper from somewhere behind the hedge. So someone was at home. He moved
away and walked the last few metres to the broad front door and rang the bell.
Not a sound could be heard from inside. Either the bell didn't work or they
didn't hear, he thought, and he raised his hand to ring again. At that moment
the door opened a crack.

    'Gunnarstranda?'
Sigrid Haugom said in surprise. 'What brings you here this time?'

    The
inspector put both hands in his jacket pockets and tried to formulate an answer
in his head. 'A sucker,' he said after a pause.

    Sigrid
Haugom opened the door wide and led the way. She was wearing a flowery dress.
It looked as though she had just put it on. As if to underline the correctness
of his assumption she stopped in front of a mirror and smoothed a few kinks
over her bosom. 'Is that what you think?' she asked.

    'About
what?'

    She
glanced over her shoulder. 'That Katrine was a sucker?'

    'I
was thinking of a different kind of sucker,' the policeman said without further
explanation, glancing to the left as he passed a veranda door. There was a sun
lounger on the terrace, an open newspaper on the lounger, a pile of newspapers
across the floor and a half-eaten apple on a plate beside the newspapers.

    She
sat down where she had done the previous time, by the oval table with her legs
tucked underneath her on the sofa. Gunnarstranda walked over to the window and
looked out at the sun bed. 'Have I disturbed you?' he asked, taking hold of the
pot with the bonsai tree on the window sill.

    'I'm
off sick,' she said.

    'Anything
serious?'

    'Just
exhaustion.'

    'Has
it anything to do with the murder - Katrine?'

    'It's
a contributory factor.'

    'You
were good… I mean… you were close, weren't you?'

    'That's
putting it mildly, yes.'

    The
policeman was still holding the pot as he turned to her. 'This tree's dying,'
he stated.

    'If
you've got green fingers,' Sigrid Haugom sighed, 'perhaps you can save it for
me.'

    'A
bonsai tree,' Gunnarstranda said, lifting the pot. 'A Japanese work of art. It
can't have been cheap.'

    'It
was a present,' the woman on the sofa said. 'I never ask what presents cost.'

    'I
would guess it's more than a hundred years old,' the policeman surmised. 'Trees
like this one can grow to be five hundred years old, I've heard. I've seen a
few and this one seems to be very, very old.'

    'We
all have to die some time,' Sigrid Haugom said in a soft voice, breathing in
deep. 'I apologize, but I can't get Katrine out of my head. I try, but I can't
do it.'

    'Imagine
if this tree was really old,' Gunnarstranda said, humbled. 'Imagine it was two
hundred years old. If so, it would have been tended by six, seven, maybe eight
generations of gardeners.'

    'Fantastic,'
Sigrid said, uninterested.

    The
policeman shrank back. 'Seven generations of gardening knowledge,' he said
bitterly. 'Two hundred years of care, right from the French Revolution until
today, a plant which as a result of careful nursing has managed to outlive
Montesquieu, Napoleon, George Washington, Wedel Jarlsberg, Bjornstjerne
Bjornson, Mussolini and Chairman Mao.' He put the plant back with a bang and
said with emphasis: 'Until you were given it as a present and let it dry out on
the window sill!'

    Sigrid
Haugom looked at him in silence with raised eyebrows.

    'I
saw the tree last time I was here,' the policeman said, crossing the floor and
taking a seat opposite her on the sofa. 'It was the one thing in this house
that didn't fit. The only unexpected artefact in this museum of lamps, signed
by Louis Comfort Tiffany in person I have no doubt, of antiques, of Swiss
bells, old tables and Italian designer sofas. The rug on the floor over there,
from my knowledge of rugs, I would guess was woven by Kashmiri children. I
noticed the cups you served the coffee in were made of Meissner china.' He
pointed to the left. 'Even down to the charming hammer shaft you or your
husband placed next to the stove as an adornment. But in this conglomerate mass
of undefined taste and aspiring snobbery neither you nor your husband is capable
of keeping an eye on what is happening on the window sill.'

    'I
suppose not,' Sigrid Haugom said gently, perplexed by the policeman's outburst.
'But then by a happy chance you have an eye for this kind of thing.'

    'The
sight of that poor tree in the dried-out pot told me all I needed to know about
your character.'

    'Oh
yes?' Sigrid's voice had assumed a sharp edge of patrician arrogance.

    'The
sucker that has brought me here today grows in the garden of a nursing home. A
sucker on an otherwise very attractive ornamental rose, a sucker that resembles
a pale green spear planted in the ground in the middle of the lawn. Am I making
myself clear?'

    'Loud
and clear,' Sigrid said with a dry voice, 'but I have no idea what you are
talking about.'

    Gunnarstranda
smiled and stretched out his legs. He said, 'Isn't it the Chinese who have an
expression for everything?'

    'Bound
to be.'

    'The
Chinese would, I assume, have said something like: Though your eyes may have
rested on the rose sucker you were unable to see.'

    'As I
said, I have no idea what you're talking about.'

    'I
may not be that sure myself. The only thing I want is some answers to one
question.'

    'Then
I think you should ask it,' Sigrid said with a sigh.

    'On
Friday, ten days or so ago, Katrine Bratterud called on a flat in
Uranienborgveien,' Gunnarstranda said. 'The flat is owned by a pensioner called
Stamnes. In his time this man worked for child welfare. Once he had been
employed by Nedre Eiker council where he handled casework including, amongst
other things, the relocation of children. The reason Katrine visited him was
that Stamnes knew details about her own adoption case more than twenty years
ago. Does that ring a bell, fru Haugom?'

    'Hardly,'
she said in a chilly tone.

    'This
Stamnes still felt constrained by professional vows of client confidentiality,
but in the end yielded to Katrine's questioning. The likelihood that he would
be able to help her was minimal. There were far too many relocations for that. However,
he did remember her case. The reason he remembered hers in particular was that
it was connected with the very tragic circumstances that necessitated adoption.
The child's mother had been strangled by an unknown assailant and the child's
father was an absent sailor who was neither married to the child's mother nor
considered himself in a position to take care of the child. The little girl Was
therefore referred and given up for adoption. Stamnes told Katrine this. He
couldn't remember the name of her father, just the name of her mother because
it was all over the newspapers for ages at the time: Helene Lockert.'

    The
policeman paused. In the silence that followed all that could be heard in the
room was the ticking of the antique clock.

    'Katrine
was in a very special situation that night,' the policeman said in a low voice.
'She was on the trail of her past, of where she belonged, where she came from.
She was on the trail of understanding why she and the world were not in
harmony. And what do you do in a situation like that? What is the logical thing
to do or, perhaps better: What does it
feel
right to do? Would you try
to trace your father or your mother's family? I have no idea what Katrine
wanted to do first, but I know she was doing something.

    'Later
that evening Katrine and Ole Eidesen met outside Saga cinema to see an action
film. This was to Ole's taste, but he told us Katrine was noticeably distant
and unapproachable all evening. The day after, she went to work. Still she
hadn't said anything to Ole about her big news. Why not? I wondered. I don't
know the answer, but I think it was because Katrine had a lot to think about, a
flood of thoughts swirling through her brain. One of the thoughts that bothered
her was that she had bought information about Stamnes off an ex-boyfriend. This
man, Raymond Skau, claims Katrine owed him ten thousand kroner in cash for the
information. She didn't have the money. She still owed him ten thousand kroner
and the money should have been paid the day before. I don't know what concerned
her most: her biological mother's tragic fate or the sum of money she didn't
have. What we do know for certain is that at one o'clock Raymond Skau entered
her workplace to demand payment. She said, quite truthfully, that she couldn't
pay, which caused him to become violent and threaten her. He left the shop
shortly afterwards. What we now know is that Katrine left at two o'clock and
went back to her flat where Ole Eidesen was waiting for her. He has since told
us she was still unapproachable and irritable. She wanted to be alone and spent
hours in the bathroom. Until five or six in the afternoon. Then she rang
around. She made several calls, here too.'