The Writing on the Wall

Twenty-one

ON MONDAY EVENING I reported to the police station. I had come of my own free will, and no one threw me out before hearing what I wanted.

The Sunday papers had been much more sensationalistic in their reports, not least because they had more details to go on than the authors of Saturday’s report. ANOTHER SATANIST MURDER? one of them asked. SACRIFICED TO THE DEVIL? asked another. Neither of them had any pictures of Sidsel and Holger Skagestøl on the front page, but both had got hold of a photo of Torild from a class picture and given it a prominent place.

It was the mark cut into her flesh and the fact that the body had been discovered near Lysekloster monastery that formed the main grounds for this speculation. The papers had dug up old rumours about black masses and sacrilegious orgies in the hallowed ruins of the monastery. These were stirred into a somewhat speculative brew with not many ingredients, judging by what I already knew about the case myself.

The Monday papers focused on another angle: CASE SOLVED? said one of the headlines. ‘WITNESS’ BEING QUESTIONED, said Holger Skagestøl’s own paper with prominent quotation marks. SLAIN BY LOVER? asked Paul Finckel in his newspaper. (Had he tried to get in touch with me during the weekend? I wondered) Surprisingly, none of the papers gave the name or age of the much discussed ‘witness’ or any photos of him, merely saying that he was apparently a young man from among the victim’s closest friends.

Muus was not in his office, but when I looked in on Atle Helleve, there he sat with a selection of the same newspapers spread out on his desk.

I knocked on the doorframe. He looked up, recognised me and gestured towards the headlines. ‘Seen these? You’d not find wilder improvisation at the Voss Jazz Festival!’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Take a pew before someone else does.’

‘How much is there to what they’re writing about?’

‘Not a lot, I can promise you that.’ He scratched his beard. ‘Why

do you ask?’

‘It could be I have a bit of – additional information. Something I’ve turned up.’

‘Oh?’ He looked at me with natural scepticism in his eyes.

‘But I can’t see how this so-called jogger fits into the picture.’

‘Can’t you?’

We sat there looking at one another for a few seconds, but he wouldn’t take the bait.

‘You first.’

‘Well… when Judge Brandt died last Friday, was there a post-mortem?’

He sat up in his chair. ‘There’s a padlock on that case, Veum! If a single word gets out to the pre -’

‘The press already know most of what there is to know about this case, Helleve. Since they haven’t given us any descriptions of the judge in black silk underwear yet, they’re hardly going to do so later, are they?’

‘But how in -’

‘Not all bulkheads are watertight in this office either. Rumours about this have been circulating for so long that this case is actually already dead. Unless they’re given something new…’

‘Something new? What do you mean?’

‘Well, was there a post-mortem?’

‘Yes, there was. A massive heart attack, from which he died.’

‘A heart attack caused by…’

‘At the judge’s age, you know, and considering what he seems to have been up to at the time… I’ll say no more, I’ll say no more.’

‘And the writing on the wall, was it investigated?’

‘The writing… The sign or whatever he’d tried to make…’ He shook his head. ‘There was nothing to suggest anything criminal had gone on there, Veum. What people do in their free time -’

‘Wasn’t it in office time though?’

‘- and what clothes they choose to wear is their affair. It’s not a police matter at any rate.’

‘Wasn’t it a large “T”? The letter he’d scrawled with his lipstick?’

‘Could have been.’

‘“T” for Torild, for example.’

He mulled it over for a few seconds. ‘Are you trying to suggest that the girl… that she could have been…?’

‘Maybe… I don’t know, Helleve, to be honest, but I’m sorry to say I have a few clues indicating that could have been the case.’

‘That she and Brandt… That he was simply her client?’

‘Could have been.’

‘In that case, we… we need to look into it a bit closer. And it mustn’t get out to that bloody pack of wolves, Veum!’ He pointed, superfluously, at the newspapers spread out in front of him.

‘The bottle of tablets that was found in his room…’

‘Where did you get that from?’

I shrugged. ‘A reliable source. Have you found out what was in it?’

‘I don’t think we’ve got the results of the analysis yet. It wasn’t seen as all that important. I mean we know he had a visit from a prostitute, and we know they often take tablets. Which tablets exactly isn’t all that important.’

I nodded towards the newspapers. ‘This Satanist angle, is there anything in it?’

He threw up his arms. ‘She has a sort of mark, behind here, on one of her thighs, but…’

‘No other marks?’

‘No.’

‘And the cause of death?’

‘She was suffocated. Everything points to the fact that someone held a pillow or something like that against her face. Sure as we are that Judge Brandt died a natural death, if you can speak of “natural” in a get-up like that, we’re just as certain that we’re dealing with a regular murder here.’

‘Any sign of sexual assault?’

Helleve glanced at the door and leaned forward. ‘Muus says you’re a dicey bugger. Other people here say you’re straight up.’

‘So, in other words…’

He sighed. ‘No. There’s no sign of rape. But…’

‘Yes?’

‘Semen was found in her, after recent intercourse.’

‘Enough for a DNA analysis?’

‘More than.’

‘How long will it be before you guys get the results?’

‘No idea, really. It’s a very time-consuming procedure.’

‘But in this case the person whose semen it is doesn’t necessarily need to be the perpetrator. I mean, if it really was Torild Skagestøl who was with Brandt -’

‘You’re jumping to some very hasty conclusions there,’ he cut in. ‘For starters, we don’t know if Brandt did have intercourse; we don’t even know if it was Torild Skagestøl he was with -’

‘I’ll come back to that!’

‘We don’t even know if Torild Skagestøl was a – prostitute, or whatever we should call it at her age.’

‘Is there a nicer word?’

‘No, but frankly, Veum, I have a daughter of my own. It’s only two or three years since she was in the Guides…’

‘Yes, so I heard, But she dropped out.’

‘Most of them do in the end.’

‘She didn’t have any needle marks?’

‘Not as far as we could see.’

‘But a blood test would certainly show whether she’d taken anything from the bottle of tablets.’

‘We haven’t got that yet either!’

‘But I didn’t finish setting out my hypothesis, Helleve. Because if she’d had sex with Brandt, and this boyfriend of hers had somehow found out about it… then the idea of a crime of passion provoked by jealousy or just pure rage isn’t all that outlandish, is it?’

‘Know anything about this boyfriend, Veum?’

‘This much,’ I said, indicating a tiny amount with my thumb and index finger. ‘I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. How did you lot find out about him?’

‘One of her girlfriends gave us his name.’

‘Åsa Furebø?’

He shrugged. ‘The rest was just peanuts. He’d sort of put himself in the limelight anyway.’

‘I hope you lot had the same reaction as I did up where the body was found?’

‘Which was…?’

‘Well, if he wanted to answer a call of nature while out jogging, why would he clamber all the way down a rough slope to a place with hardly any trees, when he could just have walked over to the other side of the road and gone in between the dense conifers?’

‘Exactly. But that’s what he says… that he wanted to avoid the headlights of any passing cars.’

‘Do you mean…? Does he deny it?’

‘Sure he does! The fellow’s a hard nut, I’ll say! Why do you think he’s still only a “witness”?’

‘Hm. Is there anyone I could talk to, do you think? Åsa? Anyone else? Sometimes people find it easier to talk to a – layman… than to you people.’

He scowled at me. ‘Well, there’s only… No, I don’t think you ought to do anything else, except… This prostitution angle, how did you turn that up?’

I told him all I knew both about Jimmy’s and the traffic in young girls to cars and hotel rooms, with a nod to sources in the press I couldn’t name and chambermaids I did think I could reveal.

‘This girl, then, who you got to say far too much, was she sure it was Torild Skagestøl who was with Brandt that day?’

‘As good as…’

‘I think we’re going to have to have a word with her in connection with this too. The last time it seems to have been a bit too cursory.’

‘This place called Jimmy’s,’ I said, ‘reminds you a bit of those places in the fifties or sixties that were exposed as procuring joints. Know who’s behind it?’

‘No.’

‘Birger Bjelland.’

‘That hypocritical Stavanger creep! If only we could get something on him…’

‘It’s not that easy, evidently.’

‘He walks a very fine line between his legal activities and what we’re all quite sure is the illegal stuff he’s got his fingers in.’

‘He’s crossed my path often enough in the past few years.’

‘But without your being able to link him with anything illegal, right? I mean in the sense of something that would stand up in court.’

‘No, alas. But what about… Al Capone was caught on a tax matter in the end, wasn’t he?’

‘Waste of time. He has a first-rate accountant and sends in immaculate tax returns and annual accounts on time every single year.’

‘But one of these days he’s going to make a slip, Helleve, and then…’

‘Then we’ll stand at the door here and wish him a pleasant stay at His Majesty’s Pleasure, you can bet on that, Veum!’

‘Is it OK if I see what I can dig up on what you call the prostitution angle, working on my own?’

‘Provided you keep strictly to that, and I don’t mean as a client, Veum. But if you start to get close to the murder, even by half an inch, then that’s it. Then you’re under an absolute obligation to report it right away – either to me or the nearest police authority.!s that clear?’

‘Message received. Over and out.’

‘And not a word in the paper, Veum!’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die, Scout’s Honour,’ I said and left.