The Consorts of Death

50

Twilight had begun to fall as I got off the Holmenkollen line train at Besserud, and after a bit of a search, but without falling into any traps set for me, I found Jens Langeland’s huge detached house in Dr. Holms vei. A solid brick wall separated the property from the passing peasantry, and the lock mechanism on the gate was so complicated to work that I considered shimmying over instead.

The house stood screened against prying eyes by thick, well-established elm trees. The architectural style was a strange mixture of national romanticism and functionalism, rustic red with vast flat surfaces. From the plot, the view was beyond what money could buy, at least for all those of us who didn’t have millions handy in our inside pockets, a dizzying drop to the fjord below.

I followed the gravel path to the solid, green front door, pressed the bell and announced my arrival.

The woman who opened was small, nimble and of Asian origin. She was wearing a plain turquoise dress of shiny material. She smiled gently and said in a somewhat sing-song voice: ‘Yes? How can I help you?’

‘Is herr Langeland at home?’

‘One moment,’ she said, and tried to close the door, but I had been in fancy areas like this before and already had my foot in the door. I pushed the door firmly and stepped inside; she was powerless to prevent me.

She glared at me, and for a second or two it went through my head that, for all I knew, she could do kung fu and karate, with dreadful consequences. I said quickly: ‘I’ll wait here.’

She stood still for a second. Then she turned her back on me with no other comment than a chill smile. I watched her cross the spacious hallway and start ascending the stairs to the first floor with springy steps and small, firm buttocks.

Not long afterwards she came back down, followed by Jens Langeland. He cast a glance at me from the top of the stairs and frowned, then, still a good distance away, called: ‘Veum?’

‘Correct.’

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he asked, crossing the floor.

‘I’m sure, with a moment’s thought, you know.’

He gave a routine nod, as if in court. ‘Jan Egil.’

‘Jan Egil,’ I said.

‘Let’s go into my study,’ he said, pointing west with a sweep of his hand. ‘Lin can take your coat.’

Lin took my padded jacket with a deep bow, placed it elegantly over her arm and carried it to a wardrobe as if expediting a royal cape.

Before we got as far as the study, we were interrupted by a woman’s voice from the top of the stairs. ‘What’s this about, Jens?’

We both looked in her direction. She was standing on the landing, slim and graceful in a short black skirt and light grey silk blouse with a black print, like the casual brushstrokes of a bewitched artist. She had very nice legs, and her hair was arranged in a studied casual fashion, steel grey with dark streaks.

‘Business, my dear,’ said Langeland. ‘This way,’ he said to me with an imperious gesture.

But it was too late. I had recognised her.

My eyes held hers, even from this distance. ‘Vibecke… Skarnes?’ I said with a conscious pause before her surname.

She continued to descend without speaking.

‘My wife,’ said Jens Langeland, quite superfluously.

It was twenty years since I had last seen her, and the only time close up had been that late afternoon when I had met her at Langeland’s place in Ole Irgens vei.

‘Haven’t we met before?’ she asked, searching my face.

‘Yes, in Bergen the time your first husband… died. I was in social services and…’

‘Oh, yes, I remember you now,’ she interrupted. She shook my hand. ‘Vibecke Langeland.’

‘Varg Veum.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ came the toneless response. She was still something of an everyday beauty, with attractive regular features and a lovely smile. But her eyes were pensive and distant, and time had drawn two bitter furrows on each side of her mouth. She stroked her steely grey hair with a graceful movement. ‘What is it you wish to discuss with my husband?’

‘It’s…’

‘Is it about Johnny boy?’

‘Yes, I can’t…’

‘Then I want to be present as well!’

Langeland threw his hands in the air in frustration. ‘I suggest then that we go up to the living room,’ he said. ‘It’s cosier there after all.’ He turned to the Asian woman who had stood in attendance in the background like a shadow. ‘Lin? Could you brew us up a pot of tea, please?’

‘As you wish, herr Langeland,’ Lin said, swifly withdrawing.

On one wall in the hallway there was a stuffed elk head. ‘Did you shoot it?’ I asked Langeland as we passed beneath.

He shook his head. ‘Came with the house. None of the heirs wanted it.’

Despite being on the losing side in both court cases I had witnessed, Jens Langeland had had a meteoric career in the last decade, which his des res on Holmenkollen Ridge confirmed. His lean figure was unchanged, but his hair had suffered deep inroads and the strains of grey were stronger, and there was an air of fatigue about his face that I could not recall having seen before. Then again he was one of the most popular defence counsels in the country and appeared in the newspapers as often as the Prime Minister.

The living room we entered could have held the whole of my Bergen flat, and I would still have had room for a little garden outside. The parquet floor was only partly covered with very exclusive furniture arranged in a variety of formations. The bookcases were in classic empire style, and behind the glass fronts there was hardly a paperback to be seen. Broad windows revealed a dusk landscape with scattered gleaming lights and Oslo fjord lying like a blue-black silk drape casually discarded between Nesodden and B?rum. Far beneath, we saw an aeroplane taking off from Fornebu, as soundless as in a silent movie. It was only later that the faint echo of jet engines at full throttle reached us.

Vibecke Langeland led us to a small coffee table, also in classical style, burgundy and dark brown, and so polished that we could see our reflections in the wood. ‘Sit down, Veum,’ she said, indicating one of the four high-backed chairs. On the same finger as the thin wedding ring she wore a diamond ring, two distant relatives, one rich and one poor, out promenading. A plain jewel, vaguely triangular-shaped, set in a precious stone at least as exclusive, hung from a gold chain around her neck, from the very spot where her pulse was throbbing.

We sat down; she with her elegant legs slanting to the left, Langeland sitting in a more casual fashion, or as far as it was possible in such a chair, with his long legs sticking out at the side of the table. I felt as if I were being interviewed for the vacant gardener’s post.

‘That was a surprise,’ I said casually, essaying a tiny smile.

Langeland eyed me in silence.

Vibecke said: ‘Oh, you mean us two? I can explain that.’

‘Vibecke,’ Langeland said.

‘Of course, of course… We have nothing to be ashamed of, have we.’ She patted him affectionately on the knee. Then she turned her gaze back to me. ‘Jens and I have known each other, well, ever since university. We were also together for a while then, in fact.’

‘Yes, I seem to remember someone saying.’

‘But then, well, we wandered apart for a few years. I got together with Svein, and then all the disastrous events came at once. But in 1984, when Jens came back from Forde after all the happenings there, and looked me up to tell me everything,…’ She smiled sweetly. ‘Zing went the strings of my heart! Since then it has been just us two.’

I glanced at Langeland. ‘That was how it was?’

He put on an expression of indifference. ‘Does it matter? Has it got anything to do with you? I assume you did not come here, unannounced and uninvited, to delve into our private lives?’

‘No, the cause is of course, yet again… what do you call him? Johnny boy?’

It was Vibecke who answered. ‘For me he will never be anything else. They started calling him… the other name in Sunnfjord.’

‘Have you ever met him?’

She recoiled in surprise. ‘What do you mean?’

‘No, I mean, naturally enough, have you met him since… 1974?’

She slowly shook her head, as though remonstrating to a small child. ‘No. Never. You have to understand. He…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, after what happened at that time. I ended up in jail, Veum, don’t forget that! Had it not been for Jens then…’ Her face had suddenly cracked, it was open now. Sheer despair was written all over it.

‘So…’

‘Veum!’ Langeland sat up erect in his chair. ‘What the hell is all this? She told you she hasn’t seen the boy since he was six and a half years old. Everything that has happened since then is… history to her.’

Lost in thought, I looked at him. ‘That’s just it, Langeland. The roots of this case go way back. A very long way.’

‘This case! Which case?’

‘You know he’s wanted by the police?’

Vibecke’s eyes widened and she looked up at her husband in amazement. He gave a brief nod to her before focusing on me again. ‘And so?’

‘He’s suspected of having committed another murder, this time here in Oslo.’

‘A murder?’ Vibecke almost whispered. ‘Who was it?’

‘Someone by the name of Terje Hammersten. Does that mean anything to you?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing at all! Who is he?’

A clinking sound came from the staircase, and we were interrupted by Lin who came in carrying a silver tray crammed with teacups, saucers, spoons, an elegantly shaped teapot, sugar in a bowl and a plate of fresh lemon slices. As if by a flick of the fingers, Vibecke switched into the perfect hostess, helped Lin put out the cups and saucers, offered me sugar and lemon and told Lin, after she had poured tea for us all, that we could manage fine on our own now, thank you.

When Lin had left, I faced Langeland. ‘But you remember Terje Hammersten, don’t you?’

‘Indeed I do. But we never managed to get anything on him, at least not in connection with the cases that concerned Johnny boy.’

‘No, we drew a blank there, I regret to say.’

‘Probably because there was no connection.’

‘Are you still convinced about that?’

He eyed me with raised eyebrows. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘Did you ever meet him?’

‘Not face to face. I had to attend a police interview with him once, behind a two-way mirror — that was the closest I came. He was never taken to court because of the damned alibi.’

‘Exactly. And now he’s been killed, in all probability by Jan Egil. I don’t suppose he’s contacted you?’

‘Jan Egil? No.’ He shook his head firmly.

‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘Veum… in fact, I’ve been visiting him regularly. Because it was important that he should have contact with… someone. On a private basis, in other words. But of course I had a finger in the pie when he applied for parole this spring. But that was also the last time I saw him. When he was released, I mean. Some time in May.’

‘In other words, you’re ready to help?’

‘I’m still his solicitor, yes, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Which is what you’ve been all his life.’

‘All?’

‘Yes, you were even his mother’s solicitor, before he was born. I think you yourself told me that on one occasion.’

‘Hmm.’ He sent me a dismissive glare.

‘And you definitely lent a helping hand when he was adopted by Vibecke and Skein Skarnes in 1971, didn’t you.’ I glanced at Vibecke, who was nodding agreement.

‘Yes, but that was because I knew them both — from university, as I mentioned. Well, I knew Vibecke better. And, as you yourself said, I assisted his mother with a… spot of bother.’

‘And were you sure he was going to a good home?’

‘As I said, I knew Vibecke, didn’t I!’

I shifted my attention back to her. Her eyes wandered for a moment. Then they were back, shiny and reserved. ‘Yes?’ she said.

‘Was it a good home?’

‘Veum!’ Again Langeland interrupted us. ‘This is none of your or anyone else’s business. This is water under the bridge! Forget it!’ he turned to her. ‘Don’t reply to everything he asks you!’

He continued, facing me now: ‘I didn’t officially become his solicitor until 1984, when I was called to Forde.’

‘Yes, that’s right… but I believe you’d followed his progress, from a distance at any rate, in the meantime, too.’

‘Because I felt responsible for him, yes. Both to… his real mother, and because of what happened in 1974 with Svein and Vibecke.’

‘We can come back to that but…’

‘Yes?’

‘But let’s concentrate on 1984 first.’

‘What are you actually getting at, Veum?’

I ignored him. ‘As you know, it was a dramatic case, and what emerged about his foster parents, or foster father anyway, Klaus Libakk, was hardly trivial.’

He glanced up, resigned. ‘You’re thinking of these rumours about alcohol smuggling?’

‘Yes, and about the police interest in Terje Hammersten eleven years earlier over another brutal murder. Perhaps set up by Klaus Libakk, or someone else from the same ring.’

‘Another?’

‘Yes, and we found that out at the time. But you didn’t make anything of it at the trial. Why not, Langeland?’

‘You’re thinking of…’ He was sitting upright in the chair now, and I could see he was uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking.

‘What are you talking about now?’ Vibecke burst out.

‘You’ve never told her?’ I said.

‘Told me what?’ she asked.

I half-turned to her again. ‘Didn’t you have a clue… didn’t you know that your husband at the time, Svein Skarnes, was one of the main men behind the smuggling racket, mostly in the Sogn and Fjordane district?’

She stared at me in disbelief. ‘What are you talking about? Smuggling?!’

‘Svein Skarnes was the boss. He had contacts in Germany, sorted out the deals with the boats smuggling the goods in, organising the local machinery in Sogn and Fjordane, ably assisted by his office equipment rep, Harald Dale, and he earned big money, of course.’

‘Big money! And what happened to it then? Can you tell me that?’

‘No. But you two were rolling in it, weren’t you.’

‘No more than anyone else. This is completely new to me!’

‘But your husband here, he’s known since 1984.’

She turned on Langeland. ‘Is that right, Jens? Have you known all this without saying a word to me?’

‘I… wanted to spare you, Vibecke. Besides, this was never documented.’

‘Nevertheless…’

‘The whole business was full of uncorroborated claims that…’

Her eyes filled with tears, and her lips were trembling. ‘I just can’t believe it! That you could keep this hidden from me for so many years, Jens! How could you?’

They stared at each other with a distance in their eyes that increased as the seconds passed.

‘There may be more you haven’t told each other,’ I said.

Now they both turned towards me.

‘About things that went on in 1974, for instance.’

I had their undivided attention.