Lethal Investments

50

He stood staring at the brown front door. The silence lay like a suffocating blanket over the whole area. Soon the sirens would be switched off. Thereafter, only the sound of 4x4 diesel engines snarling their way up the road. Stopped. Doors banging. Silence.

He thought of Reidun. She had opened the door and let Sonja in. Tired, so tired. Had probably told Sonja to go to hell. She would talk about her marriage when she was in a better frame of mind.

Until she lay on the floor with a knife in her chest.

After that Sonja Hager had sliced up Sigurd Klavestad and in all probability despatched Arvid Johansen in the end. She had dealt with them one by one. All those who could have brought her down. The maid must have heard her that night. The last witness. Was she dead already?

The silence roared. Frank remembered Sonja Hager’s unbecoming smile that was not a smile. What could it have been? Shock? Because Frølich had told her that Bregård had had a relationship with a woman she had just killed? Or had she just realized the gravity of what she had done? Had she realized that this meeting with the police meant that moves were under way to arrest her, have her charged?

He went up the stairs. Felt the door. It was open. At that moment he heard running footsteps. He turned. Kampenhaug and two others in full regalia. Who else but Kampenhaug. Mug painted green. Machine guns and helmets. They stopped.

‘Frølich!’

Kampenhaug’s voice.

Open mouth and moist sheen to the green cheek. Jesus, Kampenhaug standing at the back of the queue. No public to watch him scratching his bollocks here then?

Frank calmly smiled down at them and walked through the unlocked door. Stared across towards Nesodden. The large window in the living room was a picture postcard of Oslo fjord. The islands lay brown in the glittering water.

Kampenhaug’s team took up positions in the room. One of them opened the large veranda door and showed himself to the others. Machine gun raised in the air. Helmet, not a balaclava. The scene was like a snapshot of the Olympic Games in Munich.

Frank looked around. Heavy English-style leather furniture. A natural stone fireplace that threatened to capsize the room. Bookcase with metres of red books behind the glass. Oil on unframed canvas and quite a large aquarium with some unusually well grown fringetails that pressed their flat fish mouths against the pleasingly clean glass.

The bubbles from the aquarium were the only sound in the room. The air bubbling up and the tiny taps against the glass as the fish ate something on the inside. Frølich turned to the soldiers. Impressed that they could be so quiet.

The floor creaked as he set off, crossing the room to a partly open door.

‘Frølich!’

Kampenhaug again.

Frank stopped, turned and met the man’s eyes. Kampenhaug with one hand on the door frame to the veranda. The other on his gun. Silent, breathing through an open mouth. Frølich smiled. What was there to say? Was the woman dangerous? Of course she was. She is desperate and she has nothing to lose. So don’t bloody ask me how this is going to end!

Best not to speak. Don’t burden this ape with such complicated matters. Your arms are too hairy for you to be able to understand anything, he thought calmly, turned and carefully nudged the door open and peeped, before opening it wide.

Engelsviken was on the floor. Naked. Quite a plump man. But the fat was around his stomach and chest. The legs were unusually thin. He was strangely well-endowed in the groin area. The man had been shot in the head and was as dead as a doornail.

She, on the other hand, was alive. Sitting in bed. No badly buttoned blouse this time. No clothes at all. As naked as the sin she had been committing with her employer. Knees hunched up against her body, right in the corner, she had no sense of anything around her; she didn’t see him. The intense eyes were directed towards the door. But she was alive. Two pink nipples peered out from behind her knees.

Frank stood still in the doorway. Sonja must have caught them in the act.

He raised his arm and indicated to the nearest soldier standing behind him with machine gun at the ready. Frank went into the room. Stepped over the dead man and knelt in front of her squeezed up in a corner of the bed.

Her oriental face was transfixed into a grimace he was unable to read. Two brown eyes stared into the air above a weeping mouth. Looking past him, still at the bloody door; she must have been in shock.

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

No reaction.

‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ he whispered and stroked her cheek. Her skin was cold. She was like a wax doll, in another world.

‘Where is she?’ he tried in English.

‘Here!’

The moment he heard her voice he became conscious he was sitting with his back to the door. A fraction of a second passed.

He didn’t have time to yell. Only time to turn his head and see her. Then to close his eyes to protect himself. An image burned on his retina. Sonja Hager’s insane marble eyes. The rifle barrels swung upwards. The mouth open, above the double muzzle; the fingers that fired both barrels at once.

At that moment, or perhaps it was straight afterwards, at any rate the shots echoed and Frølich felt lots of tiny, tiny bits of something or other stinging his face.