The Consorts of Death

54

‘Nice to see you again, Hansie!’ I shouted.

‘I think I’m the one who should say that, Varg,’ he replied with a tight-lipped smile. He kept a wary eye on Jan Egil and his gun. He whispered something to the two others.

‘So it was you they rang!’

‘Who else?’

I moved to the side, around the open car door and a few steps forward. From the corner of my eye I saw Jan Egil twitch.

‘Varg! What are you doin’?’ he said.

‘Take it easy, Jan Egil. We’re out in open countryside now.’

‘Open countryside! What the hell d’you mean by that?’

A gun belonging to one of the men twitched, too, but Hans raised an authoritative hand and gave a brief command.

‘Stay where you are!’ he shouted to me.

‘OK,’ I said and stopped. ‘Does that mean we can talk?’

‘What about?’

‘You know every well. About everything.’

He eyed me with a stony face, mute.

‘I should have known in Forde, eleven years ago, when you were telling me about your childhood with such passion, about poverty and how you never wanted to experience the same again.’

‘Should have known what, Varg?’

‘How ruthless you’d been to avoid winding up in a similar situation again.’

‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about! This is a local score we have to settle, between Jan Egil and us.’

‘Between…?’

‘Between two groups. It was foolish of you to get involved in this. Now we’ll have to — ’

‘Gang warfare, is that what you’re trying to make me believe? Don’t give me that bollocks! You’re petrified you’re on his blacklist, and you should be higher up on the bloody list than I am.’

‘You talk too much, Varg. But you’ve always been like that. Waffling on about all those brainless ideas of yours.’

‘Oh, shut up, Hans! Do you want me to extract all your lies from you, one by one? I suppose that was what Hammersten threatened to do as well, being the born-again Christian he was. He wanted to do penance and renounce all his sins. Especially with regard to Jan Egil, who had to pay for them. The snag was that it wasn’t only his sins he would have to do penance for. He had an accomplice. No, wrong. Not even an accomplice. You were the Mr Big, Hans, right from the very outset.’

He took a couple of steps closer. I did the same. Our eyes were locked; we were like two cowboys in the final scene of a western.

‘You talk too much, Varg! This is rubbish. You must be able to hear that yourself.’

‘Listen to my reasoning then!’

‘I don’t have the bloody time to — ’

‘We can start from a few days ago. Hammersten told you he could no longer keep all he knew to himself. And, worst of all, he wanted to tell Jan Egil. You beat him to death with a baseball bat, and when Jan Egil legged it, you took the opportunity to put the bat in his room. Yet again, damning evidence.’

‘Yet again?’

‘I’m thinking of the rifle in Angedalen.’

‘For Christ’s sake, I had nothing to do with the murder of Kari and Klaus.’

‘No?’

‘I think the turnip on your shoulders is beginning to go rotten, Varg. You might recall that I was in Bergen when it all happened.’

‘We-ell. In theory, on your way to Bergen perhaps, but…’

‘Which Terje Hammersten was able to corroborate, unless you’ve forgotten.’

‘Not any more, and besides… very convenient that was. You and Hammersten giving each other an alibi in a kind of mutual alliance, since you were both in Angedalen that night.’

‘You can prove that, can you?’ The sarcasm lay thick on his vocal cords.

‘A little detail that has always buzzed around my head is the key to the Libakk farmhouse. The spare key hanging in the hallway cupboard. No one broke in that night the murders took place, and that was part of the circumstantial evidence that pointed to Jan Egil. But you… you’d left the house, according to your statement, a few hours earlier and could have taken the key with you. Later that night you went back, either alone or most probably with Hammersten, you unlocked the door and committed the atrocity.’

‘Oh yes!’ he jeered. ‘And what on earth would my motive have been?’

‘You would inherit the farm afterwards.’

‘Right, and what benefit was that to me?’

‘Enough money to establish yourself here in Oslo! But that was not the whole reason. The keyword here is booze — and the much talked about seventies smuggling racket, with Klaus Libakk as one of the central distributors. Klaus owed you money. Big money. And you knew where he kept it, hidden somewhere on the farm. Ultimately, there was only one way to get at it, and it meant killing both of them, Klaus as the main victim, Kari because she was unlucky enough to be married to him.’

‘Really? You can see yourself how thin your arguments are, Varg. To be frank, I…’

I interrupted him. ‘You couldn’t foresee that Jan Egil with his lack of self-control would end up in such a mess, but you certainly knew how to fan the flames with even greater zeal. You had used Hammersten before, to kill Ansgar Tveiten in 1973, and he must have been your and Svein Skarnes’s well-remunerated henchman since the mid sixties, I would guess, when you hatched up the scheme.’

‘The scheme?’

‘You and Svein Skarnes, one of you desperate never to be poor again, the other desperate to earn quick money. It started with hash. Later it was booze. The only problem you had was that a woman stood between you. Vibecke Storset.’

‘Vibecke was never a problem!’

‘No? Never? What about that February day in 1974 when you paid a call on Svein Skarnes, got into a fight and pushed him down the stairs, breaking his neck? Wasn’t it Vibecke you were quarrelling about?’

‘No, it wasn’t! That was about money, too.’

With a half-hearted sense of triumph, qualified by the situation we found ourselves in, I left his last statement hanging in the air between us. I could see how much he would have liked to retract the words. Now they were out, though, he was forced to continue: ‘He also owed me money. Everyone owed me money! It was hell.’

‘Exactly. Because when it came to the crunch, it was you who had started the whole thing. You were alone when you began. Your old university pal, Svein Skarnes, didn’t pop up until later, and he provided a perfect network with Harald Dale as the agent. It was a perfect cover, too. But when things started going awry in Sogn and Fjordane because Ansgar Tveiten had gone to the police, it was you who sent Hammersten in. Perhaps you had Hammersten with you on that February day in 1974, too? I think I can almost visualise it! Hammersten hanging around outside the gate while you drag Skarnes to the window and point: Look who’s outside waiting, Svein. Shall we invite him in perhaps? But you didn’t get your money after all. Because you acted hastily and pushed your old pal down the stairs.’

‘It was an accident, for Christ’s sake! The heat of the moment, just as…’

‘Yes, what was that you were about to say? Just as Vibecke said? Vibeke who had to serve a sentence on your account?’

‘Is it my fault that she chose to take the blame for this?’

‘No, it isn’t. But you know very well why she did it, and you could have given yourself in at any point, if you had had the backbone. And she wasn’t the only one unfortunately. The other scapegoat is here.’ I vaguely indicated behind me.

His eyes wandered to Jan Egil and back again.

‘But I suspect your guilt regarding Jan Egil is of a much higher order, Hans.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘In fact, he can thank you for becoming the person he is. You were the one who ruined his mother’s life, Mette Olsen.’

He sent me a wan look. ‘Me? Ruined her life! What the hell are you talking about now?’

‘It’s no wonder your sense of guilt was so heavy that you were climbing the wall on the last evening in Forde eleven years ago.’

‘I still don’t understand…’

‘You told me yourself you’d met her in Copenhagen that year. She’d always had a suspicion a rejected suitor had blown the whistle on them. But wasn’t it competition in the hash market that you feared most? Because the telephone call that betrayed them did not come from Copenhagen, but from Bergen in August, 1966. You said yourself you had dabbled with drugs, and the step from dabbling to dealing is not so large. Especially not for someone who was on the lookout for a way to secure his finances.’

His eyes narrowed, and I didn’t like what I read there. I knew that every word I said was sealing my fate. But it was too late to stop now. I had to see the whole thing through. ‘Mette Olsen got off thanks to her solicitors, but her boyfriend David Pettersen killed himself in prison. The year after, Mette Olsen had a child. And the boy who was born, under an extremely unlucky star, was… Jan Egil. From even before he was born you’d shaped his destiny, Hans. Three times he has paid the price for your actions. The first time while in his crucial first years with an unstable mother. The second time when you deprived him of both the new parents he had been given. And the third time when he was blamed for the double murder that you committed. But now it’s over, Hans! He won’t pay any more.’

He fixed me with heavy eyes. ‘And how are you going to prevent that?’ He tossed back his head. ‘You can see the guys there. They obey my every order. They get paid well to do that.’

I looked over at the two armed men who had been standing too far away to catch all of what we had been discussing. ‘Yes, they’re good, I’ll give you that. You put them on my tail from the moment I left your hospice in Eiriks gate. But it wasn’t me you were really after, it was Jan Egil.’

He suddenly raised his head. I did the same. We could both hear it now. Another car was on its way into the area.

We looked at the gate where a white car with a taxi sign on the roof came into view. When the driver spotted us, he jumped on the brakes, causing the tyres to squeal. The two armed men instantly turned in that direction.

Behind me I heard Jan Egil. ‘You bastard! You’re to blame for everythin’. Now I’ll fuckin’ give…’

And then all hell broke loose.