The Last Fix (54 page)

    Frank
remained on his knees brushing down his trousers and watching Haugom's Mercedes
brake into the bend and turn into the ramp leading upwards. The idiot had even
managed to drive the wrong way.

    He
sighed and got to his feet, then strolled in the direction the car had just
taken. This was a subterranean car park and it differed from all of the others
in Oslo. This one you had to drive down to exit.

    Frank
jogged around the narrow bend Haugom had driven. On the floor above there was
the shriek of brakes again. Screaming tyres. Now it was a case of getting to
the top before the guy slalomed down at a hundred. He was beginning to pant. He
was sprinting. His legs were leaden. The screech of brakes again above him.
Frank could see the next level approaching. The opening was ten metres away.
The tyres on the car above him were spinning. The engine was roaring. Inside
his head, Frank imagined a coke-grey Mercedes hitting him at full speed. He saw
his body - spine broken and hips crushed - landing on the car bonnet, rolling
out of control towards the front windscreen and on to the roof from which it
smacked down on to the floor with the dead weight of all his kilos, banging his
skull and smashing it on the concrete.

    Five
metres to go. Frank had the taste of blood in his mouth. The sudden sound of a
loud crash.

    A
collision.

    As
Frank reached the top a car door slammed. He stopped and his lungs gasped for
air. His pounding heart sounded like thunder in his ears. He tried to regulate
his breathing, but could not. The first thing he noticed was a woman standing
by the lift. She was holding the hands of two small boys in short trousers. One
of them was picking his nose. Sixty metres in front of him he saw Haugom's
coke-grey Mercedes. The bonnet had almost carved a parked, small VW Golf into
two. A man was staggering along the central aisle. It was Haugom. But there was
something wrong. Haugom stood with his knees bent and a surprised expression on
his face. He was holding his thigh.

    Frølich
set off. 'Stop,' he shouted to Haugom. 'Stand still!'

    He
was running. From the corner of his eye he could see the woman with the two
children shooing them into the stair well. Haugom's knees gave way. Frank
slowed down against his will.

    Erik
Haugom was rocking on his knees. 'Stop.' Frølich repeated, gentler this
time, and continued walking towards the man who now had a distant, almost
dreamy expression on his face. The bent figure fighting to remain upright
resembled a spaced- out needle addict. Frølich ground to a halt as the
man fell to his knees.

    There
were five metres between them as the man let go of his thigh. He was a strange
sight. His jacket seemed to be glued to his right thigh.

    'Help
me,' whispered Erik Haugom, rolling gently down on to the concrete floor.

    'What's
up?' Frølich asked, bending over him. 'Have you been hurt?'

    Haugom's
breathing was a strained wheeze. He was fighting for air. His mouth moved.
Frank stooped over him. 'In my jacket pocket,' Haugom whispered with a gurgle.

    'What
have you got in your jacket?'

    'A
hypodermic needle. Take it out.'

    'You've
got a syringe in your pocket?'

    Haugom
didn't answer. He fell on to his back and tried to straighten up. His face was
scarlet; his breathing a barely audible rasp.

    'Well,
well, doctor,' Frølich mumbled to the figure on the floor. 'I think you
need a medic.' He stood thinking, and alternated between looking at his mobile
telephone and Haugom, who was now lying on his side, his fingers shuddering
with spasms. 'Where are the medics when you need them?' Frølich asked
himself in a low voice.

    They
were sitting in Cafe Justisen. They had taken seats at a table in the corner
under a photograph of Oslo-born artist Hermansen. Gunnarstranda had just eaten
a meatball and fried egg smorgasbord. Now he was washing it down with a cup of
black coffee. Fristad and Frølich each had a draught beer.

    'So
now at last we can do what we should have done a long time ago,' Fristad said
with a tiny smile followed by a broad grin. 'We shelve the case for lack of
evidence. What did he have in the syringe by the way?'

    Gunnarstranda
glanced up from his coffee. 'A Norwegian killer nurse special. He had left his
briefcase in a dirty laundry basket in Bueng's room. The original packaging was
in it. Big dose.'

    'Curacit?'
Fristad gave a nod of acknowledgement. 'That's what I call suicide with style.'

    'Bad
luck I would call it.' Gunnarstranda turned to the other two. 'He didn't have a
snowball's hope in hell. The dose of curacit would have paralysed his
respiratory organs pretty quickly. The idea had been to kill Bueng. When you
turned up at the home I suppose he had the syringe primed and ready in his
pocket. It lay there then like an undetonated bomb until the collision in the
multi-storey car park. He must have got the whole syringe in his thigh when he
smashed into the car. The pathologist had to cut the needle out it was stuck in
so far.'

    'Typical,'
Frølich said. 'Bloody typical.'

    'What
was?'

    'That
he was out to paralyse Bueng's respiratory organs. Haugom must have been hooked
on asphyxiation. Even the medication he used ended in asphyxiation.'

    Fristad
drank his beer and smacked his lips. 'I gather his wife has confessed to the
murder of Helene Lockert. Why would the husband set out on this trail of
murders?'

    Police
Inspector Gunnarstranda took his time. 'It seems he never believed she would
confess,' he said at length. 'The truth about the Lockert woman's death had
bound them together for good or ill for years. He had a hold over her. She
claims he abused her, but she didn't dare to report him because he threatened
he would tell all he knew about her killing of Helene

    Lockert.
That Saturday… Sigrid Haugom had barely finished listening to what Katrine had
told her before she told her husband about the phone conversation. Neither of
them knew what to do. Not until Katrine fell ill at the party. Haugom's motive
for killing Katrine was to prevent the Lockert case from being solved.'

    Gunnarstranda
chewed, swallowed and went on: 'As soon as Katrine knew who her biological
mother was, it was just a question of time before she would start digging up
the past. Sigrid's name would have popped up sooner or later. According to
Sigrid, her husband feared her reprisals and was concerned about his own
status. Sigrid's defence in a court case would have been to go for mitigating
circumstances, in other words, to embroider on what a psychopathic animal of a
husband she had tolerated. With her inside, he would have lost the hold he had
over her. She would have reported him for abuse and nothing would have stopped
her. In this way she would have had her revenge for all the humiliations to
which he had subjected her over the years.

    'Sigrid's
role in Katrine's murder boils down to her call to her husband when Katrine
fell ill at the party. He drove over and saw her walking in the middle of the road.
He saw her jump into Henning Kramer's car. We will never know what his thoughts
were at that time - whether he had already decided to throttle her, I mean. In
any case, he followed them. He had claimed to his wife that he had followed
them to talk to Katrine. Whether she believed that, I don't know.'

    'But
he must have been spying on them for several hours,' Fristad said. 'He can't
have been intending to talk if he had stalked them for such a long, long time.'

    'At
any rate he can't have been intending to talk when he struck,' Frølich
said. 'His upper body is covered in scratch marks. So he must have taken his
clothes off before he attacked her. And so the murder must have been
premeditated. He approached her naked so as not to leave clues on her body.'

    'Did
he go straight up and strangle her?'

    'Yes,
he did,' Frølich said.

    'How
come he didn't get any scratches on his face?'

    'We
found a mask in the car boot,' Frølich said. 'A kind of SM leather
thing, with a zip in front of the mouth and so on. He must have looked a
terrible sight - no clothes and a face like Hannibal the Cannibal.'

    'Poor
girl,' Fristad gasped.

    'Girls,'
Gunnarstranda amended. 'Poor girls. The mask was not unknown to his wife,
either.' They sat staring into middle distance. Gunnarstranda unwrapped a sugar
lump and put it in his mouth. He sipped coffee and sucked the sugar lump.
'Sigrid said she felt Henning Kramer was watching her,' he continued. 'But she
didn't know why. She didn't know that Henning had seen Haugom in
Voksenkollveien. Henning couldn't figure out why Sigrid had been picked up at
four in the morning by her husband, but he had seen the man in his car when he
went to collect Katrine.'

    'She
might be an accessory,' Fristad concluded. 'She ought to be charged.'

    Gunnarstranda
shrugged and drank more coffee. 'I don't think so. Sigrid maintains she didn't
tell her husband any of this. She visited Bueng on Sunday, of course, before
she knew that Katrine was dead. She visited Bueng because she feared Katrine
would discover his existence and thereby find out the truth about the murder of
her mother. Haugom, for his part, posted Katrine's jewellery to Skau in an
attempt to pin the blame on him. What happened afterwards was that Henning
phoned their house and asked to meet Haugom. On Wednesday. After the funeral,
after Frølich had questioned Haugom in the office.'

    'Haugom
did meet Henning,' Frølich said laconically. 'The guy is the dutiful
type.'

    'We
don't know if Haugom drugged Henning, but it's very likely, anyway. Then he
hanged him from the ceiling.'

    'Helluva
guy,' Fristad said with a brief nod to two solicitors on their way out.

    'Yes,
it was clever. The so-called suicide almost made us decide to shelve the case.'

    'Us?'
Fristad laughed aloud. 'You, Gunnarstranda, you almost shelved the case. Unless
I am much mistaken, I urged you to keep going.'

    Gunnarstranda
put another sugar lump on his tongue and sipped coffee in silence.

    Fristad
was still grinning and grimacing.

    Gunnarstranda
watched him from beneath heavy eyelids until the man's convulsions were over.
Then he said: 'Sigrid had suspected her husband for a long time, but only
understood the precise circumstances when Henning died. That led to some
terrible fights between them. Which led to her taking sick leave and in the end
telling her husband that she had visited Bueng at the nursing home.'

    They
sat looking into the air again. Frølich raised his arm and signalled the
waitress with two fingers. She immediately brought two more beers on a tray.

    'So
Bueng was the final threat,' Fristad said in an earnest voice. 'The motive for
killing the girl was to prevent the Lockert case from being solved. Henning was
killed to cover up the first crime. The same motive triggered the attempt on
Bueng's life.'

    Gunnarstranda
nodded. He turned to Frølich. 'At some point you could…' He bent down
for a brown leather briefcase and put it on the table. He undid two zips and
opened the briefcase to take out a green notebook. '… take this to Katrine
Bratterud's mother,' he said, passing it to Frølich. 'I'm sure she would
be happy to have it.'

    'What
is it?' Frølich asked, examining the notebook with interest.

    'Her
daughter,' Gunnarstranda said with a weary smile. 'The daughter she lost when
her husband died.'