7

A woman.

He thought about it as he parked at the courthouse and walked the few meters to Mikkelsen’s address. There could have been two of them. The woman might have been there to entice him out, while the man lurked in the background and did the dirty work. But why?

Erik Børresensgate 6 was a shop that sold bathroom fittings, so he entered the lobby of number 5 and saw there was a J. Mikkelsen on the first floor. He was unemployed and therefore at home, a man in his midtwenties with both knees sticking out of his denim jeans.

“Do you know Egil Einarsson?” Sejer asked, studying the man’s reaction. They were seated on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Mikkelsen pushed a pile of lottery tickets, the salt and pepper cellars, and the latest edition of Esquire out of the way.

“Einarsson? Well, it’s got a familiar ring, but I don’t know why. Einarsson. Sounds like someone from Iceland.”

He didn’t seem to be hiding anything. In that case it was clearly a waste of time sitting here leaning on this checked oilcloth, in the middle of the day, investigating a blind alley.

“He’s dead. He was found in the river a couple of weeks ago.”

“Ah, yes!” He nodded energetically and massaged the thin gold ring he wore in his ear. “I saw it in the paper. Killed with a knife and stuff. Yes, now I’m with you, Einarsson, yes. Soon it’ll be like America here, it’s all these drugs if you ask me.”

He didn’t ask him. He kept quiet and waited, inquisitively watching the young face under the perfectly straight hairline which made his ponytail suit him so well. Some people were lucky enough to look good wearing one, Sejer thought. But there weren’t many of them.

“Well, I didn’t know him.”

“So you don’t know what sort of car he had?”

“Car? Well no, why should I know that?”

“He had an Opel Manta. Eighty-eight model. Exceptionally well maintained. He bought it from you, two years ago.”

“Oh Christ, was that him?” Mikkelsen nodded to himself. “Of course, that was why he seemed familiar. Bloody hell.” He reached for a packet of nicotine gum on the table, stood it on end, gave it a little flick, and stood it up again. “How d’you find that out?”

“Well, the two of you wrote out a purchase agreement, just like people do. Did you advertise in the paper?”

“No, I drove around with a card in the window. Saved the money. It took a couple of days, and then he rang. He was a funny bloke. He’d been saving up since the year dot, and paid cash.”

“Why did you want to sell it?”

“I didn’t want to. I lost my job and couldn’t afford to keep it any longer.”

“So now you haven’t got a car?”

“Yes I have. I’ve got an Escort which I bought at a car auction, an old one. But it just sits there most of the time, I haven’t got the money for petrol while I’m on social security.”

“Well, that’s fine.” Sejer rose.

“No, it’s not at all fine, if you ask me!”

They both chuckled.

“Do they work?” Sejer asked, pointing at the packet of chewing gum.

The younger man thought a bit: “Yeah, they do, but you get totally hooked on them. They’re expensive as well. And they taste disgusting, like chewing a fag.”

Sejer left, crossed Mikkelsen from the top of the list, and put him at the bottom instead. He cut across the street and felt the sun warming him gently through the leather of his jacket. This was the best time, when the anticipation of summer still lay some way in the future, to dream of the cabin on Sandøya, of sun and sea and saltwater, the essence of all previous summers, the good holidays. Occasionally he felt a slight uneasiness, the bitter experience of summers that had been rainy and windy, there had been a number of those, too. But during sunny summers he found peace, he didn’t itch so much then.

He jogged up the shallow steps and pushed open the door, nodded briefly to Mrs. Brenningen in reception. She really was a good-looking woman, Mrs. Brenningen, cheerful and friendly. Not that he chased women, perhaps he ought to, but that would have to wait. For the moment he contented himself with just looking at them.

“Is it exciting?” he enquired, nodding at the book she was reading in between busy periods.

“Not too bad,” she smiled. “Power, lust, and intrigue.”

“Sounds just like the police.”

He chose the stairs, closed the door, and sank down in the chair from Kinnarps, which he’d paid for out of his own pocket. Then he got up again, pulled Maja Durban’s folder from the file, and sat reading. He gazed at the pictures of her, first the one taken while she was alive, a pretty, slightly rounded woman with a chubby face and black eyebrows. Small eyes. Rather close-cropped hair. It suited her well. An attractive woman favored by fortune, the way she was smiling said a lot about who she was, a mischievous, teasing smile that brought small wrinkles to her cheeks. In the other photograph she was stretched out on a bed staring at the ceiling with eyes wide open. The face expressed neither fear nor astonishment. It expressed nothing whatsoever, it resembled a colorless mask.

The folder also contained a number of photos of the apartment. Its rooms were neat, pretty spaces full of beautiful things, feminine, but without frills or pastels, the furniture and carpets were in vivid colors, reds, greens, yellows, colors a strong woman would choose, he thought. Nothing bore any mark of what had happened, nothing had been broken or upset, it was as if everything had happened silently and unobtrusively. And totally unexpectedly. She had known him. Opened the door to him and removed her clothes herself. First they’d made love, and nothing indicated that it had occurred against her will. Then something had happened. A breakdown, a short-circuit. And a strong man could squeeze the life out of a small woman in mere seconds, he knew that, just a few kicks and it would be over. No one can hear your screams if you’ve got a muffler of duck down over your mouth, he thought.

Remnants of sperm which had been found inside the victim had been DNA tested, but as they hadn’t yet got a database, he had nothing to check it against. The submission was with Parliament and would come up this spring. And after that, he thought, anyone who got into trouble would have to take great care with any bodily function. Every kind of human trace could be scraped up and DNA tested, with an error of one in seventeen billion. For a while they had toyed with the idea of getting government permission to summon and test every man in the county borough between the ages of eighteen and fifty, but this would have meant calling in thousands of men. The project would have cost several million kroner and taken as long as two years. The Minister of Justice considered the project, such as it was, in all seriousness, until she began to understand the details of the case and learn a little more about the victim. Maja Durban wasn’t considered worth all that money. He could understand that to some extent.

Occasionally he would fantasize about a future system in which all Norwegian nationals were automatically tested at birth and put on file. This thought conjured up a mind-boggling vista. For a while he sat reading through the interviews, there weren’t many of them, regrettably; three colleagues, five neighbors from the block where she lived, and two male acquaintances who claimed to know her only slightly. And finally, that childhood friend, with her hazy account. Maybe she’d got off too lightly, maybe she knew more than she was saying. A vaguely neurotic sort, but decent enough, at any event he’d never had reason to bring her in. And why would she have killed Durban? A woman doesn’t kill her friend, he thought. Besides, she’d made rather an impression on him, that leggy painter with the lovely hair, Eva Marie Magnus.

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