Authors: Anne Holt
“Håkon Sand. Who’s calling?”
“Hello, Sand. It’s Myhreng here. Sorry to . . .”
“
Sorry?!
What the hell do you mean by ringing me at seven in the morning—no,
before
seven on a Saturday morning? Who do you think you are?”
Crash!
He couldn’t make the receiver stay on its rest, so in a savage temper he got up and wrenched the contact out of the wall. Then he fell back into bed bristling with
indignation until sleep overcame him as heavily as before. For an hour and a half. Then there was a furious and determined ringing at the door.
Half past eight was an acceptable hour to wake up. Nevertheless he didn’t hurry himself, in the hope that whoever was there would lose patience before he got to the door. As he was
cleaning his teeth it rang again. Even more aggressively. But Håkon took his time washing his face, and felt a sense of relaxed and demonstrative freedom as he wrapped his dressing gown round
him and put on the kettle before going to the entry phone.
“Yes?”
“Hello, it’s Myhreng here. Can I talk to you?”
This bloke didn’t give up. But nor did Håkon Sand.
“No,” he said, replacing the receiver firmly.
But a second later the raucous noise was reverberating again through the flat like an enraged hornet. Håkon pondered for a moment before picking up the entry phone again.
“Go and buy some fresh rolls from the 7-Eleven round the corner. And fruit juice. The sort with real fruit in. And newspapers. All three.”
He meant
Aftenposten, Dagbladet,
and
VG
. Myhreng brought
Arbeiderbladet
and the latter two. He also forgot the bit about the real fruit.
“Damn fine flat,” he declared, taking a long look into the bedroom.
As inquisitive as a policeman, thought Håkon, closing the door.
He ushered Myhreng into the living room, and went to the bathroom and put out an extra toothbrush and a very feminine bottle of perfume left behind after a relationship a year ago. It was as
well not to appear too pathetic.
Fredrick Myhreng hadn’t come just for a chat. The coffee hadn’t even brewed before he was in full flood.
“Have you brought him in, or what? I can’t find him anywhere. The woman in his office tells me he’s out of the country, but at home there’s just a young boy who says his
father can’t come to the telephone. Nor his mother. Wondered whether I should ring the child care people when I got nothing but a five-year-old or whatever on the line half a dozen
times.”
Håkon shook his head, fetched the coffee, and sat down.
“Are you some kind of child abuser? If it occurred to you that we’d arrested Lavik, shouldn’t it have dawned on you that it wasn’t particularly pleasant for the boy or
the rest of the family to be harrassed by you on the telephone?”
“Journalists can’t afford to be too considerate,” Myhreng retorted, seizing an unopened can of mackerel in tomato sauce.
“Yes, fine, you can open it,” said Håkon sarcastically, after half the contents of the can were already on Myhreng’s roll.
“Mackerel burger! Brilliant!”
With his mouth full of food and tomato sauce dripping onto the white tablecloth he babbled on.
“Admit it, you’ve brought him in. I can see it in your face. Thought there was something funny about that guy all along. I’ve worked out quite a lot, you know.”
The look in his eyes above his ridiculously small glasses was challenging but not entirely confident. Håkon allowed himself a smile, and didn’t hurry with the margarine.
“Give me one good reason why I should tell you anything at all.”
“I can give you several. For a start, good information is the best protection against misinformation. Secondly, the newspapers will be full of it tomorrow anyway. And you can be bloody
sure that the other papers won’t let the arrest of a lawyer go unnoticed for more than a day. And thirdly . . .”
He interrupted himself, wiped the tomato off his chin with his fingers, and leant across the table ingratiatingly.
“And thirdly, we’ve worked well together in the past. It would be to our mutual advantage to carry on.”
Håkon Sand gave the impression that he’d been persuaded. Fredrick Myhreng took more credit for this than was his due. Fired by the promise of exciting information, he sat waiting as
obediently as a schoolboy, while Håkon took a long and invigorating shower. The file that he’d sat up with until late into the night went with him to the bathroom.
The shower took almost a quarter of an hour, and in that time Håkon had sketched out in his mind a newspaper story that would instil terror in the person or persons out there in the
November gloom nervously biting their fingernails. For he was convinced there was someone. It was simply a question of luring—or rather, frightening—them out.
MONDAY 23 NOVEMBER
I
t was like some outlandish circus. Three television cameras, countless press photographers, at least twenty journalists, and a huge crowd of
curious onlookers had assembled in the entrance hall on the ground floor of the courthouse. The Sunday papers had tried to outdo one another, but on closer analysis they had little more to say than
that a thirty-five-year-old Oslo lawyer had been arrested on suspicion of being the organiser of a drugs syndicate. That was all the journalists knew, but they’d certainly filled up enough
space. They’d made a sumptuous repast of the scanty ingredients, and been greatly assisted by Lavik’s colleagues who, in lengthy interviews, were highly critical of the monstrous action
of the police in arresting a popular and respected fellow lawyer. The fact that these honourable colleagues knew absolutely nothing about the matter did not deter them from availing themselves of
the widest possible range of expression to articulate their concern. The only one who remained silent was the one who actually knew something: Christian Bloch-Hansen.
It was difficult to carve a path through the crowd obstructing the entrance to Court 17. Even though no more than two or three of the journalists present could have recognised him, the crowd
reacted like a flock of pigeons when a TV reporter held out a microphone to him. The reporter was attached by a cable from his microphone to the photographer, a man over six feet tall who lost
control of his legs when the interviewer suddenly whipped the flex taut. He struggled for some seconds to keep his balance and was momentarily held upright by the throng around him. But only
briefly before overbalancing and bringing down several others with him, giving Bloch-Hansen the opportunity to slip into Court 17 in the ensuing chaos.
Håkon Sand and Hanne Wilhelmsen hadn’t even tried. They sat behind the dark-tinted windows of the Black Maria until Lavik had been taken into the entrance at one side of the main
door, with the customary jacket over his head. Hardly anyone bothered about poor old Roger from Sagene, looking rather comical with his beige parka pulled up round his ears. The whole crowd had
swarmed into the court after them, and Hanne and Håkon were able to sneak in through the back door reserved for the police. They came directly up into the courtroom from the basement.
A frail court attendant was having his work cut out endeavouring to keep order in the room. It could be no more than an attempt: the elderly uniformed man hadn’t the slightest chance of
holding out against the crush from the multitude outside. Håkon saw the consternation in his face and used the phone on the magistrate’s bench to call for reinforcements from below.
Four constables soon succeeded in ejecting everyone for whom there was no space on the single public bench.
The magistrate was delayed; the session was meant to start at one o’clock sharp. He arrived at four minutes past, without so much as a glance at anybody. He placed his file in front of
him; it was marginally thicker than the one Bloch-Hansen had been provided with three days previously. Håkon stood up and gave the defence counsel some additional documents. It had taken him
seven hours to sort out what he wanted to present to the Court, which was not allowed to have more documents than were given to the defence.
Turning to Håkon, the magistrate asked for the defendant. Håkon nodded towards the counsel for the defence, who rose.
“My client has nothing to hide,” he said in a loud voice, to make certain that all the journalists heard him, “but his arrest has obviously had a devastating effect, both on
himself and on his family. I would ask that the committal proceedings be conducted in camera.”
A sigh of disappointment, of resignation even, passed through the little group of spectators. Not because of their dashed hopes for open proceedings, but because they had expected it to be the
police closing the doors against them, as more often happened. This laconic, discreet defence lawyer did not augur well. The only one to react with a smirk was Fredrick Myhreng, who felt sure he
would be furnished with a continuing flow of information anyway. The
Dagbladet
had been fuller yesterday than its competitors. He had enjoyed the hour before the court session, exulting in
the fact that older colleagues were sidling up to him with enquiring looks and oblique questions, reluctant to admit to their own inadequacies but with a transparent desire for information that
boosted his feelings of self-importance.
The magistrate struck his gavel on the desk and cleared the court for discussion with counsel. The court attendant stepped out triumphantly behind the last reluctant journalist and hung up the
black sign with white lettering:
In Camera
.
There was of course no discussion. With a whimsical glint in his eye the magistrate stood up, walked the few paces to the adjoining office, and returned with a ready-prepared ruling.
“I assumed as much,” he said, signing the paper. Then he leafed through the case file for a couple of minutes before picking up the ruling again and going out to announce to the
crowd outside what they already knew. When he came back in he removed his jacket and hung it over the bar. He sharpened three pencils with the utmost concentration before leaning over to the
intercom.
“Bring Lavik up,” he ordered, loosening his tie and smiling at the woman sitting rigidly erect at the computer.
“It’s going to be a long day, Elsa!”
Even though Hanne had warned him in advance, Håkon was shocked at Lavik’s appearance when he entered through the door at the back of the court. If it weren’t a physical
impossibility, he could have sworn that Jørgen Lavik had lost ten kilos over the weekend. His suit hung baggily and he had a sunken look about him. His face was alarmingly ashen and his eyes
were red-rimmed and swollen. He had the air of a man on the way to his own funeral, and for all Håkon knew that might be closer than anyone dared to suppose.
“Has he been given anything to eat and drink?” he whispered in a concerned tone to Hanne, who gave him a dispirited nod.
“But all he would take was some Coke. He hasn’t eaten a scrap of food since Friday,” she said in an undertone. “It’s not our fault, he’s been given special
treatment.”
Even the magistrate seemed worried about the defendant’s condition. He scrutinised him several times before telling the two police guards to remove him from the witness box and bring a
chair. The stern computer operator relaxed her image momentarily to emerge from her enclosure and offer Lavik a plastic cup of water and a paper napkin.
When the magistrate had satisfied himself that Lavik wasn’t as close to death as his appearance suggested, the proceedings finally commenced. Håkon was to speak first, and received
an encouraging slap on the thigh from Hanne as he stood up. It was harder than intended and the pain made him want to pee.
Four hours later both prosecuting and defence counsel had followed the magistrate’s example and discarded their jackets. Hanne Wilhelmsen had taken off her sweater, but
Lavik looked as if he were freezing. Only the lady at the computer appeared to be unaffected. They’d had a short break an hour ago, but none of them had risked showing themselves to the
wolves in the corridor. Whenever the courtroom went quiet they could hear there was still a considerable crowd outside.
Lavik was willing to speak in his own defence, at excruciating length because every word was weighed so carefully. There was nothing new in his story—he denied everything and stuck to the
statement he had made to the police. He even had an explanation of sorts for the fingerprints: his client had simply asked him for a small loan, which Lavik maintained was not unusual. In response
to a caustic question from Håkon as to whether he was in the business of handing out cash to all his more indigent clients he replied in the affirmative. He could even provide witnesses to
the fact. He couldn’t of course explain how a lawfully acquired thousand-kroner note came to be in a plastic envelope with drugs money under a floorboard on Mosseveien, but equally they
couldn’t hold it against him if his client did strange things. The connection with Roger had been explained perfectly clearly before: he happened to have assisted the chap with a few minor
matters, income tax returns and three or four traffic offences. Håkon’s problem was that Roger had said exactly the same.
The explanation for the thousand-kroner note rang rather more hollow, however. Even though it was impossible to read anything in the magistrate’s impassive face, Håkon felt certain
that this element in the indictment would hold up. Whether it would be sufficient in itself was another question, which would be resolved in an hour or so; the case would stand or fall by it.
Håkon began his summing up.
The money and the fingerprints were the vital elements; after that he went over the mysterious relationship between Roger Strømsjord and Lavik and the encoded telephone numbers. Towards
the end he spent twenty-five minutes on Han van der Kerch’s statement to Karen Borg, before concluding with a pessimistic tirade about the likelihood of destruction of evidence and the risk
of disappearance.
That was all he had. His final thrust. Not a word about any links to Hans Olsen through the murdered and faceless Ludvig Sandersen. Nor about the lists of codes they had found. Nothing
whatsoever about Lavik’s presence at the time of Van der Kerch’s derangement or Frøstrup’s fatal overdose.