Nemesis

12

Freitod

'Albert Camus said that freitod, suicide, was the one truly serious problem philosophy had,' said Aune, sticking his nose up towards the grey sky above Bogstadveien. 'Because the decision about whether life was worth living or not was the answer to philosophy's fundamental question. Everything else-whether or not the world had three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories-comes later.'

'Mm,' Harry said.

'Many of my colleagues have undertaken research into why people commit suicide. Do you know what they found the most common cause was?'

'That was the sort of thing I was hoping you could answer.' Harry had to slalom between people on the narrow pavement to keep up with the tubby psychologist.

'That they didn't want to live any longer,' Aune said.

'Sounds like someone deserves a Nobel Prize.' Harry had rung Aune the evening before and arranged to pick him up at his office in Sporveisgata at nine. They passed the branch of Nordea Bank and Harry noticed that the green skip was still outside the 7-Eleven on the other side of the street.

'We often forget that the decision to commit suicide tends to be taken by rationally thinking, sane people who no longer consider that life has anything to offer,' Aune said. 'Old people who have lost their life's companion or whose health is failing, for example.'

'This woman was young and energetic. What rational grounds could she have had?'

'First of all, you have to define the meaning of rational. When someone who is depressed opts to escape from pain by taking their own life, you have to assume the distressed party has weighed up both sides. On the other hand, it is difficult to see suicide as rational in the typical scenario where the sufferer is on their way out of the trough, and only then finds the energy to perform the active deed which suicide is.'

'Can suicide be a completely spontaneous act?'

'Of course it can. It is more usual, however, for there to be attempts first, especially among women. In the USA there are calculated to be ten pseudo-suicide attempts among women for every one suicide.'

'Pseudo?'

'Taking five sleeping tablets is a cry for help, serious enough it's true, but I don't include it as a suicide attempt when a half-full bottle of pills is still on the bedside table.'

'This one shot herself.'

'A masculine suicide then.'

'Masculine?'

'One of the reasons men are more successful is that they choose more aggressive, lethal methods than women. Guns and tall buildings, instead of cutting their wrists or taking an overdose. It is very unusual for a woman to shoot herself.'

'Suspiciously unusual?'

Aune regarded Harry closely. 'Have you any reason to believe this wasn't suicide?'

Harry shook his head. 'I just want to be quite sure. We have to turn right here. Her flat is a little way up the street.'

'Sorgenfrigata?' Aune chuckled and squinted up at the ominous clouds moving across the sky. 'Naturally.'

'Naturally?'

'Sorgenfri was the name of the palace belonging to Christophe, the Haitian king who committed suicide when he was taken prisoner by the French, or as they called it Sans Souci. So, carefree. Carefree Street. Sorgenfrigata. He pointed the cannons at the heavens to avenge himself on God, you know.'

'Well…'

'And I suppose you know what the writer, Ola Bauer, said about this street? I moved to Sorgenfrigata, but that didn't help much, either.' Aune was laughing so much his double chin was wobbling.

Halvorsen stood outside the door waiting. 'I met Bjarne Mшller as I was leaving the station,' he said. 'He was under the impression this case was done and dusted.'

'We just need to tie up a few loose ends,' Harry said, unlocking the door with the key the electrician had given him.

The police tape in front of the door had been removed and the body taken away; otherwise nothing had been touched since the evening before. They went into the bedroom. The white sheet on the large bed shone in the half-light.

'What are we looking for then?' Halvorsen asked as Harry drew the curtains.

'A spare key for the flat,' Harry answered.

'Why's that?'

'We presumed she had a spare key, the one she gave to the electrician. I've been doing a bit of checking. System keys can't be cut at any locksmith; they have to be ordered from the manufacturer via an authorised locksmith. Since the key fits the main door and the cellar door, the housing committee with responsibility for the block of flats wants control of them. Therefore flat residents have to apply for written permission from the committee when they order new keys, don't they. According to an agreement with the committee, it is the authorised locksmith's duty to keep a list of the keys issued to every single flat. I rang Lеsesmeden, the locksmith in Vibes gate, last night. Anna Bethsen was issued two spare keys, thus making three in all. We found one in the flat and the electrician had one. But where is the third? Until it has been found, we cannot rule out the possibility that someone was here when she died and locked the door on their way out.'

Halvorsen nodded slowly: 'The third key, mm.'

'The third key. Can you start over here, Halvorsen, and I'll show Aune something in the meantime?'

'OK.'

'Right, and one more thing. Don't be surprised if you find my mobile phone. I think I left it here yesterday afternoon.'

'I thought you said you lost it the day before.'

'I found it again. And lost it again. You know…'

Halvorsen shook his head. Harry led Aune into the corridor towards the reception rooms. 'I asked you because you're the only person I know who paints.'

'Unfortunately, that is a slight exaggeration.' Aune was still out of breath from the stairs.

'Yes, but you know a little about art, so I hope you can make something of this.'

Harry opened the sliding doors to the furthest room, switched on the light and pointed. Instead of looking at the three paintings, Aune sucked in his breath and walked over to the three-headed standard lamp. He took his glasses from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, bent down and read the heavy plinth.

'I say!' he exclaimed with enthusiasm. 'A genuine Grimmer lamp.'

'Grimmer?'

'Bertol Grimmer. World-famous German designer. Among other things, he designed the victory monument which Hitler had erected in Paris in 1941. He could have been one of the greatest artists of our time, but at the zenith of his career it came out that he was three-quarters Romany. He was sent to a concentration camp and his name was erased from several buildings and works of art he had worked on. Grimmer survived, but both his hands had been shattered in the quarry where the gypsies worked. He continued to work after the War although he never attained the same magnificent heights because of his injuries. This must be from the post-War years, though, I would wager.' Aune took off the lampshade.

Harry coughed: 'I was actually thinking more about these portraits.'

'Amateur,' Aune snorted. 'You would do better to concentrate on this elegant statue of a woman. The goddess Nemesis, Bertol Grimmer's favourite motif after the War. The goddess of revenge. Incidentally, revenge is a frequent motive in suicides, you know. They feel it is someone's fault their lives have been unsuccessful, and they want to inflict this guilt on others by committing suicide. Bertol Grimmer also took his own life, after his wife's, because she had a lover. Revenge, revenge, revenge. Did you know that humans are the only living creatures to practise revenge? The interesting thing about revenge-'

'Aune?'

'Oh yes, these pictures, you wanted me to interpret them, didn't you? Hm, they look not too dissimilar to the Rorschach blot.'

'The pictures you give to patients to prompt associations?'

'Correct. The problem here is that if I interpret these pictures, it will probably say more about my inner life than hers. Except that no one believes in the Rorschach blot any more, so why not? Let me see…These pictures are very dark, possibly more angry than depressed. One of them clearly isn't finished, though.'

'Perhaps it's supposed to be like that, perhaps it forms a whole?'

'What makes you say that?'

'I don't know, perhaps because the light from the three individual lamps falls perfectly on its own picture?'

'Hm.' Aune placed an arm over his chest and rested a forefinger on his lips. 'You're right. Of course you're right. And do you know what, Harry?'

'No. What?'

'They mean nothing to me at all-please excuse the expression-absolutely bugger all. Have we finished?'

'Yes. Oh, by the way, there is just one minor detail, since you paint. As you can see, the palette is on the left of the easel. Isn't that extremely impractical?'

'Yes, unless you're left-handed.'

'I see. I'll have to help Halvorsen. I don't know how I can thank you.'

'I know. I'll add an hour to my next invoice.'

Halvorsen had finished in the bedroom.

'She didn't have many possessions,' he said. 'It's a bit like searching a hotel room. Just clothes, toiletries, an iron, towels, bed linen and so on. No picture of the family, no letters or personal papers.'

An hour later, Harry knew exactly what Halvorsen meant. They had gone through the whole flat and were back in the bedroom without having turned up so much as a telephone bill or a bank statement.

'That's the strangest thing I've ever experienced,' Halvorsen said, sitting down opposite Harry at the writing desk. 'She must have cleaned up. Perhaps she wanted to take everything with her, her whole person, when she went, if you know what I mean.'

'I do. You didn't see any signs of a laptop?'

'Laptop?'

'Portable PC.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Can't you see the faded square on the wood here?' Harry pointed to the desk between them. 'Looks like there's been a laptop here and it's been moved.'

'Does it?'

Harry could feel Halvorsen's probing eyes.

In the street, they stood staring up at her windows in the pale yellow facade while Harry smoked a stray concertinaed cigarette he had found lying in the inside pocket of his coat.

'That family business was strange, wasn't it,' Halvorsen said.

'The what?'

'Didn't Mшller tell you? They couldn't find the addresses of her parents, brothers, sisters or anyone, just an uncle in prison. Mшller had to ring the undertaker's himself to have the poor girl taken away. As if dying wasn't lonely enough.'

'Mm. Which undertaker?'

'Sandemann,' Halvorsen said. 'The uncle wanted her to be cremated.'

Harry pulled at his cigarette and watched the smoke rise and disperse. The end of a process which had started when a peasant sowed tobacco seeds in a field in Mexico. The seed became a tobacco plant as tall as a man within four months, and two months later it was harvested, shaken, dried, graded, packed and sent to RJ Reynolds factories in Florida or Texas where it became a filter cigarette in a vacuum-packed, yellow Camel packet in a carton and was shipped to Europe. Eight months after being a leaf on a green sprouting plant under the sun in Mexico, it falls out of a drunken man's coat pocket as he falls down steps or out of a taxi or spreads his coat over himself as a blanket because he cannot or dare not open the door to his bedroom with all the monsters under the bed. And then, when he finally finds the cigarette, crumpled and covered in pocket fluff, he puts one end in his malodorous mouth and lights the other. After the dried, sliced tobacco leaf has been inside this body for a brief moment of enjoyment, it is blown out and is at long last free. Free to dissolve, to turn to nothing. To be forgotten.

Halvorsen cleared his throat twice: 'How did you know she had ordered the keys from the locksmith in Vibes gate?'

Harry threw the end of the cigarette onto the ground and pulled his coat tighter around him. 'Looks like Aune was right,' he said. 'It's going to rain. If you're heading straight to Police HQ, I could use a lift.'

'There must be hundreds of locksmiths in Oslo, Harry.'

'Mm. I rang the deputy chairman of the housing committee, Knut Arne Ringnes. Nice man. They've used the same locksmith for twenty years. Shall we go?'

'Good you've come,' Beate Lшnn said as Harry walked in the House of Pain. 'I discovered something last night. Look at this.' She rewound the video and pressed the PAUSE button. A quivering still of Stine Grette's face turned towards the robber's balaclava filled the screen. 'I've magnified one portion of the video frame. I wanted to have Stine's face as large as possible.'

'Why was that?' Harry asked, flinging himself onto a chair.

'If you look at the counter, you'll see that this is eight seconds before the Expeditor shoots…'

'The Expeditor?'

She smiled bashfully. 'It's just something I've started calling him in private. My grandfather had a farm, so I…yes.'

'Where was that?'

'Valle in the Sete valley.'

'And you saw animals being slaughtered there?'

'Yes.' The intonation didn't invite further questions. Beate pressed the SLOW button and Stine Grette's face became animated. Harry saw her blinking and her lips moving in slow motion. He had begun to dread seeing the shot when Beate suddenly stopped the video.

'Did you see that?' she asked excitedly.

A few seconds passed before Harry clicked.

'She was speaking!' he said. 'She says something seconds before she is shot, but you can't hear anything on the sound recording.'

'That's because she's whispering.'

'How did I miss that? But why? And what does she say?'

'I hope we'll soon find out. I've got hold of a lip-reading specialist from the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb. He's on his way now.'

'Great.'

Beate glanced at her watch. Harry bit his bottom lip, breathed in and said quietly: 'Beate, I once…'

He saw her stiffen when he used her first name. 'I had a colleague called Ellen Gjelten.'

'I know,' she said in a rush. 'She was killed next to the river.'

'Yes. When she and I ground to a halt in a case we had several techniques for activating information trapped in the subconscious. Association games. We wrote down words on scraps of paper, that kind of thing.' Harry, ill at ease, smiled. 'It may sound a bit vague, but occasionally it produced results. I wondered if we could have a go.'

'If you like.' Again it struck Harry how much more confident Beate seemed when they focused on a video or a computer screen. Now she was eyeing him as if he had just suggested playing strip poker.

'I want to know what you feel about this particular case,' he said.

She laughed nervously. 'Feelings, hm.'

'Forget cold facts for a while.' Harry leaned forward in his chair. 'Don't be the clever girl. You don't need to back up what you say. Just say what your gut instinct tells you.'

She stared at the table. Harry waited. Then she raised her gaze and looked him straight in the eyes: 'My money's on a two.'

'Two?'

'Football pools. Away team wins. It's one of the fifty per cent we never solve.'

'Right. And why's that?'

'Simple arithmetic. When you think of all the idiots we don't catch, a man like the Expeditor, who has thought things through and knows a bit about how we work, has pretty good odds.'

'Mm.' Harry rubbed his face. 'So your gut instincts do mental arithmetic?'

'Not exclusively. There's something about the way he functions. So determined. He seems to be driven…'

'What's driving him, Beate? Money?'

'I don't know. According to statistics, the prime motive for robberies is money and the second excitement and-'

'Forget statistics, Beate. You're a detective now. You're analysing not only video images now, but your own subconscious interpretations of what you've seen. Trust me, that's the most important lead a detective has.'

Beate looked at him. Harry was aware he was trying to coax her out of herself. 'Come on!' he urged. 'What drives the Expeditor?'

'Feelings.'

'What kind of feelings?'

'Strong feelings.'

'What kind of strong feelings, Beate?'

She closed her eyes. 'Love or hatred. Hatred. No, love. I don't know.'

'Why does he shoot her?'

'Because he…no.'

'Come on. Why does he shoot her?' Harry had inched his chair towards hers.

'Because he has to. Because it is predetermined…'

'Good! Why is it predetermined?'

There was a knock at the door.

Harry would have preferred it if Fritz Bjelke from the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb had not cycled quite as mercurially through the city to assist them, but now he was standing in the doorway-a gentle, rotund man with round glasses and a pink cycle helmet. Bjelke was not deaf, and definitely not dumb. In order that he could learn as much as possible about Stine Grette's lip positions, they played the first part of the video tape where they could hear what she said. While the tape was running, Bjelke talked non-stop.

'I'm a specialist, but actually we're all lip-readers even though we can hear what people say. That's why it's such an uncomfortable feeling when the dubbing on films is just hundredths of a second out.'

'Really,' Harry said. 'Personally, I can't make anything out of her lip movements.'

'The problem is that only thirty to forty per cent of all words can be read directly from the lips. To understand the rest you have to study the face and body language, and use your own linguistic instincts and logic to insert the missing words. Thinking is as important as seeing.'

'She starts whispering here,' Beate said.

Bjelke immediately shut up and concentrated intently on the minimalist lip movements on the screen. Beate stopped the recording before the shot was fired.

'Right,' Bjelke said. 'Once more.'

And afterwards: 'Again.'

Then: 'One more time please.'

After seven times, he nodded that he had seen enough.

'I don't understand what she means,' Bjelke said. Harry and Beate exchanged glances. 'But I think I know what she says.'

Beate half-ran down the corridor to keep up with Harry.

'He's reckoned to be the country's foremost expert in the field,' she said.

'That doesn't help,' Harry said. 'He said himself he wasn't sure.'

'But what if she did say what Bjelke thought?'

'It doesn't make sense. He must have missed a negative.'

'I don't agree.'

Harry came to a halt and Beate almost ran into him. With an alarmed expression, she looked up at one wide-open eye.

'Good,' he said.

Beate was perplexed. 'What do you mean?'

'Disagreeing is good. Disagreeing means that you've seen or understood something even though you're not exactly sure what. And there's something I haven't understood.' He set off again. 'Let's assume you're right. Then we can consider where this takes us.' He stopped in front of the lift and pressed the button.

'Where are you going now?' Beate asked.

'To check some details. I'll be back in less than an hour.'

The lift doors opened and PAS Ivarsson stepped out.

'Aha!' He beamed. 'The master sleuths on the trail. Anything new to report?'

'The point about parallel groups is that we don't have to report in so often. Isn't it?' Harry said, sidestepping him and walking into the lift. 'If I understood you and the FBI correctly, that is.'

Ivarsson's broad smile and gaze held. 'We obviously have to share key information.'

Harry pressed the button for the first floor, but Ivarsson placed himself between the doors: 'Well?'

Harry shrugged. 'Stine Grette whispers something to the robber before she is shot.'

'Uhuh?'

'We believe she whispers: It's my fault.'

'It's my fault?'

'Yes.'

Ivarsson's brow furrowed. 'That can't be right, can it? It would make more sense if she had said It's not my fault. I mean, it isn't her fault the branch manager took six seconds too long putting the money in the holdall.'

'I don't agree,' Harry said, looking conspicuously at his watch. 'We've received assistance from one of the country's leading experts in the field. Beate can fill you in on the details.'

Ivarsson was leaning against one lift door, which was impatiently pushing at his back. 'So she forgets a negative in her confusion then. Is that all you have? Beate?'

Beate flushed. 'I've just started studying the video of the bank robbery in Kirkeveien.'

'Any conclusions?'

Her eyes wandered from Ivarsson to Harry and back again. 'Not for the time being.'

'Nothing then,' Ivarsson said. 'Perhaps you would be pleased to know that we have identified nine suspects we've brought in for questioning. And we have a strategy for finally getting something out of Raskol.'

'Raskol?' Harry asked.

'Raskol Baxhet, the king of the sewer rats himself,' Ivarsson said, hooking his fingers into his belt loops. He breathed in and hitched his trousers up with a cheery grin: 'But Beate can probably fill you in on the details later.'