Burned

Chapter 6

It’s not far from Urtegata to Gronland police station, where the press conference is being held. Henning takes his time and strolls through an area which Sture Skipsrud, his editor-in-chief, described as ‘a press Mecca’ when 123news relocated here. Henning thought it was very apt. Nettavisen is there, Dagens N?ringsliv has an ultra-modern office block close by and Mecca features in most flats in the neighbourhood. If you ignore the tarmac and the temperature, you might just as well be in Mogadishu. The aroma of different spices greets him at every corner.

Henning is reminded of the last time he was heading the same way. A man he had interviewed decided to kill himself a few hours later, and both the police and the man’s relatives wanted to know if Henning had said something or had opened old wounds which might have pushed the man over the edge.

Henning remembers him well. Paul Erik Holmen, forty-something. Two million kroner mysteriously went missing from a company Holmen was working for and Henning had more than suggested that the extravagant vacation Holmen had just taken, combined with the renovation of the family’s holiday cabin in Eggedal, might explain the whereabouts of the missing money. His sources were reliable, obviously. Holmen’s guilty conscience and the fear of being locked up got too much for him and consequently Henning found himself in one of the many interview rooms at the police station.

They soon released him, but a couple of jealous reporters thought it was worth a paragraph or two. Fair enough, Henning could appreciate it was newsworthy to some extent even though Holmen would probably have topped himself anyway, but stories like that can be hard to shake off.

Human memory is selective, at best, and plain wrong at worst. When suspicions are raised or planted, it doesn’t take much for speculation to turn into fact and suspicion into a verdict. He has covered many murders where a suspect is brought in for questioning (i.e., arrested), usually from the victim’s close family (i.e., the husband), and all the evidence points to him. Later, the police find the real killer. In the meantime, the media circus has done its utmost to drag up anything in the husband’s past which might cast aspersions on his character. Trial by media.

In the short term, truth is a good friend, but the doubt never goes away. Not among people you don’t know. People remember what they want to remember. Henning suspects someone out there hasn’t forgotten his role in Paul Erik Holmen’s last act, but it doesn’t bother him. He has no problem living with what he did, even though the police gave him a bollocking for trying to do their job.

He is used to that.

Or, at least, he was.