An elderly woman out walking her dog suddenly caught a glimpse of the blue and white shoe among the stones. She phoned from the telephone box near the bridge, just as Eva had done. When the police arrived, she was standing somewhat self-consciously by the bank with her back to the corpse. One of the officers, whose name was Karlsen, was first out of the car. He smiled politely when he caught sight of the woman and glanced inquisitively at her dog.
“He’s a Chinese crested,” she said.
It really was an intriguing creature, tiny, wrinkled, and very pink. It had a thick tuft of dirty yellow hair on the crown of its head, but was otherwise entirely bald.
“What’s his name?” he asked amicably.
“Adam,” she replied. He nodded and smiled, diving into the car’s trunk for the case of equipment. The policemen struggled with the dead man for a while, but eventually got him up on the bank where they placed him on a tarpaulin. He wasn’t a big man, he just looked that way after his sojourn in the water. The woman with the dog retreated a little. The team worked quietly and precisely, the photographer took pictures, a forensic pathologist knelt by the tarpaulin and made notes. Most deaths had trivial causes and they weren’t expecting anything unusual. Perhaps a drunk who’d toppled into the water, there were gangs of them under the bridge and along the footpaths in the evenings. This one was somewhere between twenty and forty, slim, but with a beer belly, blond, not particularly tall. Karlsen pulled a rubber glove on to his right hand and carefully raised the dead man’s clothing.
“Stab wounds,” he said tersely. “Several of them. Let’s turn him over.” They fell silent. The only sound was that of rubber gloves being put on and pulled off, the quiet click of the camera, the breath of one or another of them, and the crackling of the plastic sheeting which they spread out by the side of the body.
“I wonder,” Karlsen muttered, “if we haven’t found Einarsson at long last.”
The man’s wallet had gone, if he’d ever had one. But his wristwatch was there, a gaudy affair with a lot of extras, like the time in New York and Tokyo and London. Its black strap had dug into his swollen wrist. The corpse had been in the water a long time and had presumably been carried by the current from further upstream, and so the location of the find wasn’t of special interest. Even so, they inspected it a bit, searching the bank for possible footprints, but found only a plastic can which had once contained antifreeze and an empty cigarette packet. A number of people had gathered up on the path, mostly youngsters; now they were craning their necks to steal a glance at the body on the tarpaulin. Decomposition was well under way. The skin had loosened from the body, especially on the hands, as if he were wearing oversize gloves. It was very discolored. His eyes, which had once been green, were transparent and pale, his hair was falling out in great tufts, his face had puffed up and made his features indistinct. The fauna of the river, crayfish, insects, and fish, had all tucked in greedily. The stab wounds in his side were great gaping gashes in the ashen white flesh.
“I used to fish here,” said one of the boys on the path. He’d never seen a dead body in all his seventeen years. He didn’t really believe in death, just as he didn’t believe in God, because he’d never seen either of them. He hunched his chin into the collar of his jacket and shivered. From now on anything was possible.
The postmortem report arrived a fortnight later. Inspector Konrad Sejer had called five people to a conference room situated in one of the trailers behind the courthouse. They’d been erected there in more recent times owing to lack of space, a row of offices hidden from the public and which most people had never seen, apart from the unhappy souls who came into more intimate contact with the police. Some things had already been established. They knew the man’s identity, they’d got that right away because the name Jorun was engraved on his wedding ring. A file from the previous October contained all the information about the missing Egil Einarsson, aged thirty-eight, address: Rosenkrantzgate 16, last seen on October 4 at nine in the evening. He left a wife and a six-year-old son. The file was thin, but would soon get thicker. The new photographs fattened it up well, and they weren’t pretty. A number of people had been interviewed when he’d disappeared. His wife, coworkers, and relations, friends, and neighbors. None of them had much to say. He wasn’t exactly whiter than white, but he had no enemies, at least, none that they knew of. He had a regular job at the brewery, went home to his dinner every day, and spent most of his spare time in his garage, tinkering with his beloved car, or with his mates at a pub on the south side. The pub was called the King’s Arms. Einarsson was either a poor sod who’d been the victim of some desperado wanting money — heroin had taken a firm grip, seeing the potential in this cold, windswept town — or he had a secret. Perhaps he was in debt.
Sejer peered down at the report and rubbed his neck. It always impressed him the way criminal pathologists managed to pull together a semi-rotten mass of skin and hair, bones and muscles, and turn it into a complete human being with age and weight and physical attributes, condition, previous complaints and operations, dental hygiene and hereditary disposition.
“Remnants of cheese, meat, paprika, and onion in the stomach,” he said aloud. “Sounds like pizza.”
“Can they be sure after six months?”
“Yes, of course. When the fish haven’t eaten it all. That sometimes happens.”
The man called Sejer was made of solid stuff. He was in his forty-ninth year, his forearms were already reasonably tanned, he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves and the blood vessels and sinews were conspicuous beneath the skin, making them look like seasoned wood. His face was well defined and a little sharp, his shoulders straight and broad, his good overall color gave the impression of something that was well used, but which would also endure. His hair was spiky and steel-colored, almost metallic, and very short. His eyes were large and clear, their irises the color of wet slate. That was how his wife Elise had once described them years before. He’d found her description charming.
Karlsen was ten years his junior and slight by comparison. At first glance he could give the impression of being a dandy, without solidity or weight: he had a waxed mustache and a high, impressively bouffant head of hair. The youngest and sprightliest of them, Gøran Soot, was struggling to open a bag of jelly babies without making too much of a rustling noise. Soot had thick, wavy hair, a compact, muscular body, and a fresh complexion. Taken on its own, each part of his body was a feast for the eye, but all together they were rather too much of a good thing. He, however, was unaware of this interesting fact. Seated by the door was Chief Inspector Holthemann, taciturn and gray, and behind him a female officer with close-cropped fair hair. At the window, with one arm propped on the sill, sat Jacob Skarre.
“How are things with Mrs. Einarsson?” Sejer asked. He cared about people, knew that she had a young son.
Karlsen shook his head. “She seemed a bit bewildered. She asked if this meant she’d get the life insurance money at last, and then broke down in despair because the first thing she’d thought about was the cash.”
“Why hasn’t she had anything?”
“We had no body.”
“I’ll take that up with the appropriate person,” said Sejer. “What have they been living on these past six months?”
“Social security.”
Sejer shook his head and flipped through the report. Soot stuffed a green jelly baby into his mouth, only its legs protruding.
“The car,” Sejer went on, “was found at the municipal dump. We rooted through the rubbish for days. In fact he was killed in a completely different location, possibly by the river. Then the killer got into the car and drove it to the rubbish tip. It’s extraordinary if Einarsson really has been in the water for six months and hasn’t turned up until now. That’s quite some time the murderer has been clinging to the hope that he would never surface again. Well, now he’s had a reality check. I imagine it’ll be quite a hard one, too.”
“Did he get caught up on something?” Karlsen wondered out loud.
“Don’t know. It’s a bit strange, that, the riverbed is pure gravel, it’s not long since it was dredged. He may have been swept in toward the bank and got caught up on something there. His appearance was roughly what we’d have anticipated, anyway.”
“The car had been cleaned and vacuumed inside,” said Karlsen, “the dashboard had been polished. Wax and cleaning stuff everywhere. He left home to sell it.”
“And his wife didn’t know who the prospective purchaser was,” Sejer recalled.
“She knew nothing at all, but that was par for the course in that household.”
“No one phoned asking for him?”
“No. He told her quite suddenly that he had a purchaser. She thought it was strange. He’d scraped and saved to get that car, tinkered with it for months, treated it like his baby.”
“Maybe he needed money,” said Sejer urgently, rising. He began to pace. “We’ve got to find that buyer. I wonder what happened between them. According to his wife he had a hundred kroner in his wallet. We ought to go through the car again, someone sat in it and drove it several kilometers, a murderer. He must have left something behind!”
“The car’s been sold,” Karlsen put in.
“Wouldn’t you just know it.”
“Nine P.M.’s pretty late to go showing off a car,” said Skarre, a curly-haired man with an open face. “It’s damn dark in October at nine in the evening. If I were going to buy a car I’d want to see it in daylight. It could have been planned. A kind of trap.”
“Yes. And if you want to test drive a car, you head out of town. Away from people.” Sejer scratched his chin with well-clipped nails. “If he was stabbed on the fourth of October, he’s been in the river six months,” he said. “Is that consistent with the state of the body?”
“The pathologists are being difficult about that,” said Karlsen. “Impossible to date that sort of thing, they say. Snorrasson told of a woman who was found after seven years, and she was as good as new. Some lake in Ireland. Seven years! The water was freezing cold, pure preservation. But we can assume it happened on the fourth of October. It must have been quite a strong person, I should have thought, judging by the results.”
“Let’s look at the stab wounds.”
He selected a photograph from the folder, went to the board, and clipped it in position. The picture showed Einarsson’s back and bottom; the skin had been thoroughly washed and the stab wounds left craterlike depressions.
“They do look rather strange, fifteen stab wounds, half of which are to the lower back, bottom, and abdomen, and the remainder in the victim’s right side, directly above the hip, delivered with great force by a right-handed person, striking from above and slicing downwards. The knife had a long, thin blade, very thin, in fact. Perhaps a fishing knife. Altogether a strange way to attack a man. But you remember what the car looked like, don’t you?”
All at once he strode over and hauled Soot out of his chair. His bag of goodies fell to the floor.
“I need a victim,” Sejer said. “Come here!” He pushed the officer over to the desk, took up position behind him, and grabbed the plastic ruler. “It could have happened something like this. This is Einarsson’s car,” he said, pushing the young policeman over onto the desktop. His chin just reached the far edge. “The bonnet is up, because they’re busy looking over the engine. The killer pushes the victim onto the engine and holds him down with his left arm while he stabs him fifteen times with his right. Fifteen times.” He wielded the ruler and prodded Soot’s bottom as he counted aloud: “One, two, three, four,” he moved his hand and stabbed him in the side, Soot squirmed a bit, as if he was ticklish, “five, six, seven — and then he stabs him in the nether regions...”
“No!” Soot leapt up in horror and crossed his legs.
Sejer stopped, gave his victim a small push and sent him back to his chair as he fought to suppress a smile.
“It’s a lot of times to strike with a knife. Fifteen stabs and a whole lot of blood. It must have spurted out everywhere, over the killer’s clothes, face, and hands, over the car and the ground. It’s a bugger that he moved the car.”
“At any rate, it must have been done in the heat of the moment,” Karlsen maintained. “It’s no normal execution. Must have been an argument.”
“Perhaps they couldn’t agree on a price,” quipped Skarre.
“People who decide to kill using a knife often get a nasty shock,” said Sejer. “It’s a lot harder than they think. But let’s assume it actually was premeditated, and at the opportune moment he pulls out his knife, for example just as Einarsson is standing with his back to him, bending over the engine.”
He narrowed his eyes as if conjuring up the scene. “The killer had to strike from behind, so he couldn’t easily get at what he wanted. It’s much harder to reach vital organs from behind. And maybe it took quite a number of stabs before Einarsson finally collapsed. It must have been a terrifying experience, he’s stabbing and stabbing, his victim goes on screaming, that makes him panic and he’s unable to stop. That’s what happens. In his imagination it’ll be one or two lunges. But how often has the killer been content with that in all the many knife murders we’ve dealt with? Off the top of my head I can recall one instance with seventeen stab wounds, and another with thirty-three.”
“But they knew each other, do we agree on that?”
“Knew and knew. They had some kind of relationship, yes.” Sejer seated himself and put the ruler away in the drawer. “Well, we’ll have to begin at the beginning again. We must find out who wanted to buy that car. Use the list from October and begin at the top. It might be one of his coworkers.”
“The same people?” Soot looked at him dubiously. “Are we going to ask the same questions all over again?”
“What do you mean?” Sejer raised an eyebrow.
“I mean that we ought to be finding new people. The answers will be the same as last time. I mean, nothing’s really changed.”
“Hasn’t it? Perhaps you’ve not been listening all that carefully, but we’ve actually found the victim now. Stuck like a pig. And you say nothing’s changed?”
He fought to hold back a note of arrogance. “I mean, we’re not going to get different answers because of that.”
“That,” said Sejer, holding back an even larger one, “remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”
Karlsen closed the file with a little snap.
Sejer replaced Einarsson’s folder in the filing cabinet. He filed it next to the Durban case, and thought that now they could keep each other company. Maja Durban and Egil Einarsson. Both were dead, but no one knew why. Then he leaned back in his chair and placed his long legs on the desk, patted his backside, and fished out his wallet. Jammed in between his driving and skydiving licenses he found the picture of his grandson, Matteus. He had just turned four, he could recognize most makes of cars, and had already had his first fight, which he’d lost grievously. It had been a bit of a surprise, that time he’d gone to Fornebu Airport to pick up his daughter Ingrid and son-in-law Erik, who’d been in Somalia for three years. She as a nurse, he as a Red Cross doctor. She’d been standing at the top of the aircraft steps, tanned golden all over and with her hair bleached by the sun. For one wild second it had been like seeing Elise, that first time they’d met. She carried the little boy on her arm. He was four months old at the time, chocolate brown, with crinkly hair and the darkest eyes he’d ever seen. The Somalis were a beautiful race, he thought. And he gazed at the photo for a while before replacing it. It was quiet in the trailers now, and in most of the large adjacent building. He pushed two fingers into his shirtsleeve and scratched his elbow. The skin flaked off. Underneath there was new, pink skin, which also flaked off. He pulled his jacket off the chair back and locked up, then he paid a lightning visit to Mrs. Brenningen at the reception desk. She put down her book immediately. In any case, she’d reached a promising love scene and wanted to save it for when she was under the bedclothes. They exchanged a few words, then he nodded briefly and headed for Rosenkrantzgate and Egil Einarsson’s widow.