Scarred: A Novel Read online

  All Henning knows about the Pulli report is that Pulli was sitting in a car outside Henning’s flat at 32 Markveien, on September 11, 2007, and that he had been there several nights in a row. But why was he there? Was he waiting for a meeting? Was he planning to beat someone up? After all, he had previously made his living as one of Oslo’s best-known enforcers. Or was he simply observing?

  Henning has been asking himself those same questions in the last few weeks. Last month Pulli contacted Henning and told him he had information about what happened on the night that Jonas died. But before Pulli was able to tell him, he was murdered in Oslo Prison. Because of what he was about to tell Henning? And what did the original Indicia report say about Pulli’s movements on the night in question? Who might that information have incriminated—unless it was damaging to Pia Nøkleby herself?

  Henning was tempted, of course he was, to confront Nøkleby when he discovered what she had done, but he has since had second thoughts. He decided to protect his source who had told him Nøkleby had edited the report, and to find another way to proceed. There must be others who know something.

  He looks at Nøkleby as she stops on the fourth step from the bottom and surveys the crowd. TV camera lights are switched on. Microphones are stretched out. Mobile telephones switched to recording mode.

  Henning knows the police are not about to disclose anything that he doesn’t already know. They might release a photograph of the victim, tell them a little about her background, and confirm the information that Henning has already included in the article he filed earlier today. But Nøkleby won’t say anything about how the victim was maimed. Instead she will say that the investigation is looking at every aspect, technical as well as tactical, and that they have solid evidence that they are following up. But no one will be told what that solid evidence is, obviously.

  Henning is there mainly to see how Nøkleby behaves, if her face gives anything away. He tries to catch her eye, but her gaze glides across the large room and the reporters assembled there.

  When she has finished her statement and everyone has gone their separate ways, Henning sends her a text message asking politely for a private chat. He sits down on a bench outside the police station from where he has an uninterrupted view of Oslo Prison and waits for her to reply. This is the place they usually meet. Occasionally she invites him to her office, but only when she has information she officially wants the media to know about.

  While he clutches his mobile waiting for her to get back to him, life in Oslo rushes by on the roads below. The sky is just as restless as satellite images played back at high speed. And he wonders how long it will be before another gigantic bucket of water will be tipped over the city.

  He thinks about the murder of Erna Pedersen. Given the number of potential witnesses, it’s odd that no one saw anything. On the other hand—all the patients on Ward 4 were suffering from some form of dementia, so even if they had seen something, there is no guarantee that they would have remembered it. It is even possible that one of them might have killed her and not even know it.

  He tries to visualize Erna Pedersen, old and gray, in her wheelchair when she met her killer. He must have been known to her. No stranger would enter the room of an eighty-three-year-old woman, strangle her, and then proceed to whack knitting needles into her eyes afterward.

  But why do it when the woman was already dead?

  The killer must have suffered an enormous, pent-up rage. Killing her wasn’t enough. This gives Henning an idea. The murder is unlikely to have been planned in advance. Not in detail, at any rate. Then the killer would have used something other than the victim’s own knitting needles—unless he knew that she always had them by her side.

  There can be no doubt that this was a crime of passion. And everyone who commits a crime of passion is affected by it one way or another. It takes time to recover from such raw emotions. How can the killer have found an outlet for such tremendous pressure without anyone noticing a change in him?

  Since no one at the care home saw the killer, they must have been distracted. Or did the killer switch from being Mr. Hyde one moment to Dr. Jekyll the next? In which case they are looking for a killer who is extraordinarily callous.

  Henning ponders the most important question in every murder investigation. Why? Several motives can be eliminated immediately. Jealousy. Desire. Some people kill for the thrill of it, but it’s rare. Neither is there anything to suggest that this murder was committed to cover up another crime. Nor is loss of honor a likely motive, since it mostly occurs between gang members or people with extreme religious convictions. Personal gain? It’s possible, of course, since no information has yet been published about the victim’s financial circumstances, be it anything she might have kept in her room or any money she might have had in her bank account. No more alternatives exist, except the usual one.

  Revenge.

  And, in view of the killer’s unbridled rage, revenge is the most obvious motive. But what could an eighty-three-year-old woman ever have done to anyone? Nothing, probably, in the last few years. Not much happens at a care home. So we need to go further back in time, Henning reasons. But how far back? To the time before she was moved to a care home? Or even further back? Surely there is a limit to how much evil a woman can do after she turns seventy?

  At the police press conference they learned that the victim was originally from Jessheim—where Henning also grew up, incidentally. Perhaps the answer lies there? In which case he knows exactly who to ask for help.

  Henning is so completely lost in thought that he doesn’t hear the footsteps behind him, and when Pia Nøkleby sits down next to him, he spins around so fast that she starts to laugh.

  “I didn’t know you scared so easily.”

  “Oh,” Henning says and blushes. “Occupational hazard.”

  Nøkleby laughs again.

  Henning likes laughter. He especially likes her laughter. And it’s hard to believe that Pia Nøkleby would have been able to sit here with him and act as if nothing had happened unless she had a clear conscience. She knows Henning’s story, knows what happened to Jonas. So could she really have tampered with the Tore Pulli report in Indicia and still sit here joking with him?

  “I should have brought you a strawberry ice cream,” he says.

  Nøkleby smiles and brushes some hair behind her ear.

  “I’m still feeling sick from the last one you gave me.”

  Henning smiles and watches her lips stretch out, moist and perfect, as if she put on fresh lipstick just before she came down to see him.

  “Nice summary you just gave us,” he continues. “Nice and professional, as usual.”

  “Hah,” she snorts. “There wasn’t much for you lot to go on. Or, at least, not for you.”

  He lowers his gaze.

  “Sometimes, Henning, your sources are a little too well informed.”

  “So you don’t fancy becoming one of them?”

  This time they both smile.

  “I thought I was one of your sources.”

  “Yes, but on-the-record sources are boring, Pia. You know that.”

  She laughs again.

  “But I won’t lie—you’re my dream source. No doubt about it.”

  “Oh?”

  “But more than anything, I wish I had a source who could grant me access to the information held in Indicia.”

  Henning looks up at her.

  “Now that would be worth having,” he continues.

  Nøkleby doesn’t reply immediately.

  “Yes, I can imagine that’s every journalist’s wet dream,” she then says.

  “Mm.”

  Henning had expected that her eyes would start to flicker the moment he mentioned the word Indicia, especially if she understood why he was bringing it up. But there was no hint of a change. No quick, nervous glance. Not even a twitch in the
corner of her mouth.

  Perhaps it was too much to hope for. Pia has worked for the police for years; she is used to keeping secrets, to keeping a straight face in front of the media.

  But would she be able to conceal something as big as that?

  “How easy is it for an outsider to gain access to Indicia?”

  Nøkleby turns to him.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Could I, for example, log on to Indicia if I knew your username and password? From the outside?”

  Nøkleby’s mouth starts to open, but she hesitates before she replies.

  “I hope you’re not about to make me an indecent proposal?”

  “You know me better than that, Pia.”

  Her face darkens slightly. Her gaze sharpens.

  “But could I? I mean, purely hypothetically, of course, just to be clear.”

  Nøkleby doesn’t reply. She simply stares at him with searching eyes.

  “I thought you wanted to talk to me about the murder of Erna Pedersen?”

  “That too.”

  Her eyes probe him so hard that her gaze pricks him.

  “The functionality of a program such as Indicia isn’t something we share with the public, Henning. Not even with off-the-record news-hungry journalists.”

  “Sorry,” he says and smiles.

  “Tell me, why do you want to know?”

  He shrugs his shoulders. “I’m just curious.”

  “Yeah, right,” she says, sarcastically. “You always have an agenda.”

  True, Henning thinks and pauses before he replies. Then he holds up his hands in defense.

  “There’s an exception to every rule,” he says and smiles again, hoping that will be enough to lift the veil of skepticism over her eyes.

  He isn’t that lucky.

  “Well, if there’s nothing else, then—”

  Nøkleby stands up.

  “There is.”

  She stops and looks down at him.

  “How far back in time are you going to have to go to find the reason for the revenge killing of Erna Pedersen?”

  Nøkleby looks at him. She shakes her head almost imperceptibly.

  Then she leaves.

  Chapter 17

  Bjarne has only just stepped out of the lift on the third floor at Grünerhjemmet when Emil Hagen sees him and signals for him to wait. Bjarne duly stops halfway between the two corridors that run parallel like an H with the TV lounge to the right and the nursing station to the left. Behind a large glass window a woman is concentrating on a computer screen. Its green glare is reflected in her glasses.

  Hagen, a police officer with short legs and brown spiky hair, ends the call and snaps shut his mobile, then comes toward Bjarne with bouncy steps in his athletic shoes that squeal against the shiny, polished floor. His jeans fit snugly around his thighs. A black leather jacket envelops taut upper-body muscles that strain against a plain white T-shirt.

  Emil Hagen joined the Violent Crimes Unit less than three years ago, straight out of the police academy. At first his youthful enthusiasm and naïveté might give people the impression that he was infatuated with the profession and the status it gave him. But Bjarne soon realized that there was an entirely different reason for Hagen’s dedication.

  Hagen had been brought up in a home without any boundaries, where his parents were rarely present or, if they were there, were rarely sober. Hagen rapidly realized that if he wanted to escape, he had only himself to rely on. He would need to take responsibility for his own life. Work hard at school, look out for himself. And he did it, that wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was his sister, Lise Merethe.

  Boys quickly discovered her; she would often come home drunk late at night and at the age of sixteen she was well on her way to becoming a fully paid up member of the intravenous drug user community. Hagen grew up as he walked the streets of Oslo trying to save his baby sister from ruin. To no avail. One autumn day in 2005 she was found under a bridge near Oslo’s Stock Exchange. Killed by an overdose. But instead of burying himself in grief, Hagen set to work systematically; caring little for the tough guys he encountered in the drug scene or how he spoke to them, he just wanted to find the answer to the question of who had sold Lise Merethe the fatal dose.

  The dealer in question turned out to be a small fish in a big pond, but Hagen realized something about himself: he had a gene or two that made him well suited for investigative work. The course of the rest of his life had been set. Every day he turns up for work with a resilience and a spring in his step that Bjarne envies him for. As if he is still trying to save his sister.

  As far as Bjarne is concerned, the reason for his own choice of career was nowhere near as noble. For him being a police officer made you a tough guy. As did wearing the uniform, being where the action was, speeding away in a car without worrying about losing your license. And it was also about the women. For a while everything was about them. He worked out and knew that he looked good; he had the uniform, the handcuffs, and the gun—three attributes you can never go wrong with when you’re trying to become an alpha male. A test, however, he has yet to pass when it comes to Ella Sandland.

  Now she comes up alongside him while Emil Hagen pushes two pieces of chewing tobacco under his upper lip.

  “The pathologist says the victim was killed sometime between three and six yesterday afternoon,” he begins. “I’ve gone through the visitors’ log and eliminated everyone who came and left before that time. That leaves us with twenty-three potential suspects.”

  “Right,” Bjarne replies.

  “Yes, this is a big care home. If we were to include everyone who worked here during that slot, we’re talking about sixty to seventy people. But I’ve made a list of the twenty-three visitors.”

  Hagen hands Bjarne a sheet of paper.

  “The names of anyone who visited someone in Ward 4 in that three-hour window are in bold.”

  Bjarne studies the list and recognizes the names of several people he spoke to the night before.

  Fridtjof Holby

  Astrid Solberg

  Carl-Severin Lorentzen

  Per Espen Feydt

  Reidun Ruud

  Maria Reymert

  Markus Gjerløw—VS

  Unni Kristine Fagereng—VS

  Remi Gulliksen—VS

  Petra Jørgensen—VS

  Dorthe Arentz—VS

  Ivar Lorentz Løkkeberg

  Knut Bergstrøm

  Signe Marie Godske

  Trond Monsen

  Janne Næss

  Danijela Kaosar

  Per-Aslak Rønneberg

  Egil Skarra

  Ole Edvald Åmås

  Mette Yvonne Smith

  Kristin Tømmerås

  Thea Marie Krogh-Sørensen

  “And the people whose names are followed by VS—they’re the ones from the volunteer service?” Bjarne asks.

  “Yes.”

  “We should also take into account that not everyone signs themselves in,” Ella Sandland interjects. “Especially not frequent visitors.”

  Bjarne nods.

  “It’s also easy to move between floors here, using either the lift or the stairs,” Hagen continues. “But we’re starting with anyone who is known to have been to Ward 4.”

  “And do you have a list of staff members?”

  Hagen nods.

  “Plus the patients, of course.”

  “Okay,” Bjarne says as he visualizes an endless queue of interviewees. “Discovered anything interesting yet?”

  “Might have,” Hagen says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “One of the cleaners told me she heard an argument up here yesterday afternoon. She didn’t know if it was between patients, staff, or relatives, but she thought she heard d
oors slamming. And that it was on this side of the corridor,” Hagen says, taking a step toward the nursing station and pointing down the corridor in the direction of Erna Pedersen’s room.

  “She couldn’t give me the exact time, but she was sure it was in the afternoon. We haven’t spoken to anyone else so far who has seen or heard anything,” Hagen finishes and licks his upper lip.

  “Which might suggest that the killer is known to most people here.”

  “You mean he works here?”

  “Could be. If you pass someone you see every day, you don’t really notice them. Take you, for example, I know that you come to get water from the water cooler outside my office every day. If I asked you if the water cooler was half or a quarter full, would you be able to tell me?”

  Hagen thinks about it for a few moments before he shakes his head.

  “So the killer could have been here so often that people didn’t question his presence.”

  “Or hers,” Sandland says.

  Bjarne raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think that a woman could have done this?”

  “Why not? You don’t have to be especially strong to strangle an old woman who was half dead already.”

  Bjarne quickly rubs the bridge of his nose.

  “Incidentally, the manager was very chatty about a lot of other problems they’re having here,” Hagen continues. “But I don’t know how important they are.”

  Another furrow appears in Bjarne’s brow. “Why do you say that?”

  “The question is how relevant they are,” Hagen muses.

  “Right now everything is relevant. What did he say?”

  “She,” Hagen says, jutting out his chin a little.

  “Eh?”

  “The manager is a woman.”

  “Oh.”