Authors: Jorgen Brekke
Slowly he walked out of the inn, holding the sword. Behind him came Sir Erik’s man, with all the customers from the Golden Peace in tow. Once outside, he bowed to his opponent and took up the proper stance as he glanced around. Then he threw the sword to the ground and turned on his heel. With his back turned, he dropped his trousers around his knees and bent forward, exposing his pale backside.
“Here you have my honest opinion of your Sir Erik’s daughter. Give him my greetings,” he said and then turned again to face his challenger.
The man was momentarily stunned, his mouth falling open. Then he raised his sword.
Wingmark thumbed his nose at him and heard the laughter swell from the crowd that had gathered. Then he took off running. He shoved his way between two half-drunk spectators and broke free from the throng. After taking two steps forward, he stumbled on a loose cobblestone and fell to his knees, but he quickly got back on his feet before anyone managed to stop him. Then he sped off in earnest, and no one could catch him. He ran inside the wretched garret he had rented to fetch his lute, his notebook, and a much too meager cache of money.
After that, Wingmark disappeared from Stockholm for good. He knew what he had done. No one insulted Sir Erik or his daughter or his servant without paying a price. If he ever set foot in the city again, he was a dead man.
He found a little-used bridle path and followed it away from the city, heading in a northwesterly direction. Only a few times did he turn to look back at Stockholm. It was a beautiful city, filled with dreams and songs. The narrow lanes might seem perfect for dancing during the long summer nights. But in the winter they were cold and filled with snow. He’d spent his best and worst years there. Watched his youth disappear. In spite of years of misery, trouble with women, and drunkenness, he remembered that his real name was not Christian Wingmark, and that he’d learned to play his first lute in a different city, in another country, where he had once been happy.
When he could no longer see the city behind him, he was surrounded by forest on all sides, and he had acquired the company of countless flies. Their early appearance this spring was a torment. People said that it was because of the unusually warm temperatures at night. But right now the flies didn’t bother him. He listened to their buzzing and imagined it was a melody.
Then he began to compose a new ballad.
Grälmakar Löfberg was not
really his name; it was just something he called himself. He was being buffeted by a gusty wind coming from the street, so he stopped. It was an unreliable wind, constantly shifting. Through the trees he could see the Ludvig Daaes Gate as snowflakes blew past the streetlights like swarms of soundless insects in the night. The cars had disappeared, leaving Trondheim in silence. The gusts slowly subsided, and few thoughts crossed his mind. Only the memory of a dream. It was weeks ago that he’d dreamed of anything at all, but old dreams still whirled in his thoughts like withered leaves. He’d met the devil over on Nonnegata, right outside the kiosk where he went every day to buy his cigarettes.
Satan was a polite man with a black coat and a hollow gaze.
“Have you finally come to get me?” Löfberg asked.
“No,” said the devil gloomily. “You’ve been here a long time.”
When he asked what that meant, he received no reply. Only after awaking did he understand the meaning: Hell is having to keep doing what you’ve always done.
Slowly he allowed this phantom of a dream to disappear into the dark of night. He took the music box out of his pocket and wound it up. The music began as soon as he let go of the key. He turned around, took two steps back, and set the music box on top of her. That was when he heard footsteps on the deserted street.
* * *
It felt like the wind was following her, poking her in the back the whole way, as if the icy gusts were trying to hurry her through her nightly walk, back to the bed where she should have been with her snoring husband. For once, Evy Saupstad hadn’t fallen asleep before he started his loud sawing, and then it was too late. Now she was paying for how soundly she’d slept on the plane home from Tenerife. She envied her husband, who had waited until they got home to sleep. At the corner of Ludvig Daaes Gate and Bernhard Getz’ Gate, in the Rosenborg district where she lived, she stopped to let her dog do his business.
She looked at her watch. It was three-thirty in the morning. She was glad she was still on vacation for a few days yet, so she could sleep late.
Her side of the street was lined with trees. This green oasis in the neighborhood was a wooded hill that rose steeply for several hundred yards.
She was about to straighten up when she heard the melody. It came from somewhere among the trees. A slow, rolling tune, bright and clear. She walked toward the music.
She was less than ten steps from the street when she saw something in the pale shimmer that filtered through the bare wintry branches of the trees. It was a lovely little thing, a cylinder-shaped box with a ballerina twirling on the lid as the music played. The ballerina seemed to be trying to shake off the snow that had settled on her hair. As soon as Evy Saupstad caught sight of the music box, it abruptly stopped. Silence descended over the trees, and she thought about how quiet it was at this time of night. The lonely hours. If someone really wanted to be alone in a city like Trondheim, this was the time to go outside.
The dog started barking, and that was when she saw it. The music box was not sitting on the ground. The snow had spread a white blanket over the figure underneath, a lifeless human body. As she moved closer, she saw that the snow was red near the neck. Blood had gushed out of the slit throat and congealed in the cold. A metallic smell wafted past her nose, then disappeared with the snowflakes and the wind gusting past.
Evy couldn’t help gasping. She looked around anxiously. Footprints led away from the corpse and into the woods before veering toward the entrance to a motorcycle club. The driveway to the club was approximately fifty yards farther along Ludvig Daaes Gate, toward Rosenborg School. The footprints were starting to disappear under the snow. She turned on her heel and ran the few yards out of the woods. The dog stopped barking as soon as they reached the street. The little creature made her feel safer, even though she realized that a one-year-old miniature dachshund would be no match for the monster who was responsible for what she’d just seen.
Then she pulled out her cell phone and called the police.
* * *
He headed toward the bomb shelter. He could see her from where he was standing. She leaned down to pet the dog, and fortunately it stopped barking. He couldn’t stand the barking. It made his head spin. He took a deep breath.
The woman took a cell phone out of her pocket and tapped in a number.
He stood and watched as she talked. He could hear the shrill tone of her voice but not the words she said. His footprints were starting to be erased from the ground, but the body had been found before it vanished completely under the mantle of white. Did it matter? He took a roundabout way back to the car and then drove home, to the yellowish brown ceiling over the bed and the hours of sleepless agitation.
Chief Inspector Odd Singsaker realized
that he’d been too pessimistic when he bought a new bed after his divorce. For some reason he’d assumed he’d be sleeping alone for the rest of his life, so he’d chosen a single bed. It was relatively wide for just one person, but much too narrow to share it with someone else, especially an American homicide detective who slept like a restless snake. This was intolerable if the intention of spending time in bed was to sleep, which was occasionally the case.
It was 2:00
A.M.
He’d been awakened by Felicia’s hand on his shoulder. He moved it away, placing it carefully on the duvet. He lay there, listening to her breathing as he thought about the dream that he’d been yanked out of. He’d been arguing with her, the sort of stupid argument that happens only in a dream. He told her that he never listened to music, at least not if he could help it. This had made her unaccountably upset, and she had threatened to leave him and go back to the States. What could he possibly say to that? His clothes were suddenly soaking wet. Sweat dripped from his shirtsleeves.
At exactly that moment Felicia had put her hand on his shoulder and he’d awakened. Relieved. As much because she was not going anywhere as because he was not sweating. His skin felt refreshingly dry. He wondered if this dream held some hidden meaning, but he couldn’t decide what it might be. Long ago, he had admitted to Felicia that he hated music, and she had merely laughed when he explained that music disturbed his thoughts.
“Does that mean that you need to be thinking all the time?” she had asked.
“Yes, I think I do,” he’d replied.
He stared into the dark. Next to him, Felicia turned over, smacking her lips.
I’m afraid of losing her, he thought. That was what the dream meant, nothing more. It was his fear of being abandoned. The thing was that he didn’t yet fully understand why Felicia Stone had stayed in Trondheim after the events of last fall. Why had she chosen him?
It took a long time for him to fall asleep again. And when he did, he was awakened by the phone ringing. He grabbed it from the nightstand.
The alarm clock told him it was 4:03. For a moment he lay still, staring at the bright little display of his cell phone, which was trembling like a lemming in his hand. He saw the name of his boss, Gro Brattberg, who was the head of the Violent Crimes division of the Trondheim police.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, Odd Singsaker was standing outside in the snowstorm on Ludvig Daaes Gate, suddenly aware that he was still wearing his pajama top under his coat. The process of getting dressed had gone a bit too swiftly for a distracted chief inspector this morning. Strangely enough, these pajamas were the last Christmas present that he’d gotten from his ex-wife, Anniken, before they’d separated. They were made of heavy flannel and were warm under his winter clothes. He fastened the top button of his coat, hoping that Grongstad, the crime tech who was now approaching from the grove, wouldn’t notice the pajama collar sticking up. Slowly and methodically a team of white-clad techs worked among the trees. They seemed to almost merge with the falling snow as they muttered to one another. The surrounding area had already been secured by uniformed officers.
Grongstad was a self-possessed man who seldom wasted words, never bothering Singsaker or the other detectives with anything they didn’t need to hear. But at the moment he was unusually upset.
“This fucking snowstorm!” he said. “It’s contaminating the whole crime scene. All the good footprints are gone. Such rotten luck that it’s snowing tonight.”
“It often snows this time of year,” said Singsaker drily.
“But why tonight? It’s so rare to have such a fresh crime scene. The body is still warm. And then everything is ruined by the heaviest snowfall of the year.”
“Look at the bright side. If that woman hadn’t been out walking her dog in the middle of the night, we probably wouldn’t have found anything at all until spring. I’m sure you’ll find something.” Then Singsaker added, “But maybe you’ve already found something?”
“Well, yes,” Grongstad replied. “As a matter of fact, a couple of things have caught my attention.” Now he was back in his usual mode. “The footprints have been totally wrecked as far as providing us with any evidence, but they haven’t been completely erased. I’m guessing that we’re talking about a size eight and a half shoe or larger, which makes it highly likely that our perp is a man. We can see where he came from and in which direction he left. It looks like he made a few circuits of the grove before he moved on. What’s interesting is that it seems he entered the grove from the street, where we’re standing, and then left by way of the motorcycle club.” Grongstad pointed toward an opening in the trees about ten yards away from where they stood.
Singsaker was trying hard to get his brain working. It took him a lot longer to wake up in the morning since he’d had brain surgery a year ago.
“So that means he didn’t go back to a parked car,” he said.
“Exactly. Of course he could have arrived by car, but as you point out, he may not have parked it at the edge of the woods, which would seem to be the natural thing to do if you wanted to dump a body.”
“I’m not sure the words
natural
and
dump a body
really belong in the same sentence, Grongstad,” said Singsaker. “But I get what you mean.”
“The theory that he arrived on foot is supported by the tire tracks. Or rather, the lack of them. A couple of vehicles have driven by here in the past few hours, and their tracks have also been nearly covered by the snow. But there is no indication that anyone pulled over and parked here around the time that the footprints were made in the woods. If anyone had been trying not to draw attention to themselves, it would have been most natural to pull into the driveway to the motorcycle club, since it’s partially hidden from the road. But there aren’t any tire tracks. Not even old ones. So, we’re not able to ascertain anything definite based on the snow-covered footprints. We don’t even know whether the same person made all the prints. It looks like the perp wandered around in the area. Plus, we have the footprints from our witness. She entered at about the same spot as the perp, and then exited the same way she’d come in. It’s possible that a third person could have been on the scene as well.”
“So theoretically the victim could have come here alone or even with the murderer, and then been killed right here?”
“It’s possible. But in that case, it happened quickly and without much of a fight. So far we haven’t found anything in the blood spatter that can tell us much. They’ve also been largely wrecked by the snow, and we’ve found only small amounts of blood around her throat. The blood could have come from the fatal blow, but it’s also possible that he cut her throat afterward.”