Authors: Jorgen Brekke
“Wait a minute, Grongstad. What do you mean, ‘afterward’?” Singsaker suddenly shivered. He was reminded of a case he’d investigated last fall, the so-called Palimpsest murders. Several flayed corpses had been involved.
“He removed something from inside her throat. At first we thought he’d simply slashed her neck. But then we found this.” Grongstad opened the briefcase at his feet and took out a plastic bag. Inside was a short pipe-shaped lump of cartilage. Someone had cut it to bits. “We think this is her larynx,” Grongstad went on, “or what’s left of it. Looks like he removed something else. But this is Kittelsen’s domain, of course.”
“Kittelsen. Right,” said Singsaker absentmindedly, pausing to think and chew gently on his tongue. Kittelsen worked in the main lab in the Department of Pathology and Medical Genetics at St. Olav Hospital. He was one of Norway’s grumpiest forensic doctors, but also one of the most meticulous.
“I’m sure Kittelsen will be able to tell us what happened here,” he said. “But not why. What do you make of it all, Grongstad?”
“I’m not sure. We also found this music box. It was on the victim’s stomach. That was why the witness discovered the body. If it hadn’t been playing a tune, she would have walked right past, and the body would now be lying under two feet of snow. Was this a blunder, or was it deliberate? And what does the music box have to do with it?” Grongstad took it out of the briefcase.
Singsaker studied the little ballerina, noticing at once that this was no cheap mass-produced figure. Her hair looked like genuine human hair, and her facial features had been hand-painted, giving the doll personality. A tiny, shy, and yet haughty-looking woman.
“I’ve never heard this tune before,” said Grongstad, winding up the music box. “Do you know it?”
He let go of the key, and the two policemen listened to the melody in silence. Finally, Singsaker shrugged.
“You know me and music, Grongstad,” he said, smiling apologetically.
He was asleep
and back in the woods. It was the same night. The body was still lying at his feet.
The heavens had cleared. He could see the huge moon. Clouds scudded past, and for one bizarre moment, it felt as if they were the ones standing still as the moon tumbled out of control across the sky. He felt as small as a snowflake. At first he thought it was a cloud formation. But it wasn’t. It was a man. He was moving across the sky with a big rolled-up sheet of paper in his hands. And it might be the ballad he was holding. It was almost certainly the ballad. The man’s face was in shadow beneath a dark hood.
And behind him came the man with the violin.
Then came the men carrying the coffin.
He could hear the melody, the music they were marching to. Step by step by step they traversed the sky. Giants bearing a burden on their shoulders, keeping pace, moving slowly, like time itself. Father is inside that coffin, he thought.
Then he awoke and stared up at the filthy ceiling. He lay there with a nagging feeling that the dream should have lasted longer.
But what does it matter? he thought. I dreamed. For the first time in weeks, I dreamed. But it wasn’t her song that had made him fall asleep. The song hadn’t worked the way he’d expected.
* * *
It was 6:45. Strictly speaking, it was early, but Singsaker was no longer struggling to wake up. He felt strangely clearheaded, even though he hadn’t yet had his daily shot of aquavit. Or maybe that was precisely the reason.
They were assembled in the conference room of the Violent Crimes and Sexual Assault team of the Trondheim police, with as much coffee as they’d been able to scrounge up. With them was the head of the department, Gro Brattberg. Also present was Inspector Thorvald Jensen, the only colleague Singsaker ever socialized with. He did his best to share Jensen’s enthusiasm for hunting and ice bathing, but in his heart he knew that it was really his colleague’s inner calm that appealed to him most. Jensen reminded Singsaker of who he himself might have been if his mind could have been toned down a notch, if he hadn’t had the brain surgery, didn’t indulge himself with a shot of aquavit every morning, and hadn’t gotten divorced, only to fall in love with a young American woman. In short, if he was not the person he was, he could have been Jensen. Singsaker wondered if that wasn’t, in fact, a good basis for a friendship. Jensen was rocking his chair back and forth, his hands clasped on his stomach, as he fixed his sleepy eyes on the ceiling. Next to him sat Mona Gran. She was the youngest of the detectives in the unit. Grongstad and Singsaker sat at either end of the table. The meeting began with the two of them, since they’d been at the crime scene.
Grongstad went first, meticulous as always. Singsaker had little to add except to pose a few questions related to what Grongstad had told them. In his opinion, they needed to clarify three things: How had the killer and the victim arrived at the scene of the crime, and how had the murderer left? Was it possible to come up with any motive for the murder, based on the evidence discovered so far? Most noteworthy was the music box, which looked like an antique, and the fact that the victim’s larynx had been cut out. But the last question was the most important: Who was the victim?
Brattberg started in after Singsaker finished. “Our first priority has to be identifying this woman without a throat.”
Singsaker appreciated Brattberg’s precise descriptions, which were often specific and thought-provoking. The woman without a throat, he thought to himself. That means something. There’s something significant about that. No one in the room disagreed with the priorities of the head of the Violent Crimes team. They all knew that in most homicide cases, the killer has some sort of connection to the victim, and so the more they found out about the deceased, the closer they would conceivably get to the perpetrator.
“Gran, I want you to go through all the missing person reports. From the whole country. Look at the most recent first and then work your way back,” said Brattberg.
Mona Gran nodded and made a note in her iPad.
“Singsaker, you need to find out more about the music box. Where’s it from? Is it old? Where was it made? And what about the tune it plays? I’d say that music museum at Ringve Manor would be the place to start. Don’t they have a good collection of music boxes out there?”
“Jonas Røed,” said Gran. “Talk to Jonas Røed. He’s probably the foremost expert on music boxes in Norway. He works at the museum.”
Everyone turned to look at their young colleague, impressed. She shrugged.
“I go out to Ringve a lot. The best museum in the city, in my opinion,” she explained. “Singsaker, you’ll like Røed. A real nerd and kind of reserved. But he knows everything about musical instruments.”
Singsaker wondered why that would be a reason to like someone, but he didn’t voice his puzzlement.
“Jensen, have a talk with Kittelsen as soon as he has anything to tell us. Has the body been delivered to him yet?” Brattberg looked from Jensen to Grongstad.
“It was taken over to the St. Olav lab half an hour ago, but if I know Kittelsen, you won’t get anything out of him until he’s had his coffee break. Which is at noon,” said the crime tech.
Everyone chuckled. They were all familiar with Kittelsen and his moods.
“From what I saw,” Grongstad went on, “it wouldn’t surprise me if he says that she was severely beaten before she was killed. Her body was covered in bruises. But as I mentioned to Singsaker earlier, it’s unlikely that it happened where she was found.”
“So you think she was moved there after she was dead?”
“It’s too early to say for sure. Although I do think that her throat was cut in the woods. So the question is, What killed her? The beating, which came first, or the knife, which came later?”
“We need to get Kittelsen to move quickly on this,” Brattberg said without much hope. “In the meantime, the rest of us have to get to work and start collecting information. It’s going to be a busy day.”
The meeting was over. Gro Brattberg handled things clearly and in a straightforward way. And that boosted everyone’s confidence. Singsaker felt a mild headache fade almost before he noticed it. None of them wanted another chaotic investigation like the one they’d been through while investigating the grisly murders the previous fall.
* * *
Singsaker happened to know quite a bit about Ringve Manor. As he drove out to Lade, he refreshed his memory, in case it would prove to be useful to the case.
The manor had been separated from the Lade estate in the seventeenth century. It had had numerous different owners and had undergone several phases of construction. Like most people who lived in Trondheim, Singsaker associated the estate most closely with Victoria Bachke and the museum.
In 1919, the young Victoria, then twenty-one years old, visited Ringve for the first time. Several months later she married the owner of the estate, Christian Ancker Bachke. She and her husband then made plans for the founding of Ringve Museum, although their vision was not realized until after Christian’s death. A museum honoring the naval hero Peter Wessel Tordenskiold was first established in 1950. Two years later the present-day museum opened, devoted to musical instruments, based on the extensive and diverse collection owned by the Bachkes. Ringve is today Norway’s National Museum for Musical Instruments, and the collection includes approximately two thousand audio exhibits. It was also the country’s only professional workshop for conserving instruments.
Singsaker trudged across the cobblestone courtyard between the nicely restored mansions. Ringve did seem like the right place to start. The woman without a throat, he thought. Maybe that was significant; maybe it wasn’t. The killer had removed the human body’s own musical instrument and replaced it with a mechanical one: the music box. It was possible that everything he knew about Ringve was just filler in his brain. He often wondered why his memory loss from the brain tumor operation a year ago hadn’t erased any of the the haphazard knowledge he had. An absurd and yet frightening thought occurred to him. What if those random thoughts were the ones that fed the tumors?
Then he went inside and asked to see Jonas Røed.
* * *
“Well, this is certainly interesting. A music box made with remarkable skill. We rarely ever see one of such good quality. Especially not with such an exquisite ballerina on the lid.”
Jonas Røed’s voice was slightly shrill and intense. It sounded like an untuned instrument that Singsaker had never heard before, but one that could undoubtedly be found in the museum. Røed gestured vigorously with one hand as he talked, emphasizing his words. His hair was equally energetic and oddly enough matched his last name, Norwegian for “red.” His hair was cut short in back, and in front his bangs partially obscuring his eyes. Singsaker wasn’t quite sure what to make of this man. Like anyone with a passion for something the detective didn’t understand, Røed seemed inscrutable.
“So it’s not an ordinary music box?” he asked.
Singsaker looked at the back of Røed’s T-shirt as he bent over the instrument in the cramped office out in the barn. It was an old, faded Metallica concert shirt with a list of the cities they’d played during a tour in the 1990s. The T-shirt, once black, had now faded to gray.
“No, it’s definitely not ordinary.” Røed had opened the music box and used a loupe to examine the cylinder inside. “Somebody changed the cylinder recently,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“A music box consists of three main components. First, the comb, which is usually made of finely tuned metal teeth, although some music boxes have strings. Player pianos, for example. Each tooth vibrates at a certain frequency and produces a specific tone. So they can only play the tones of the particular number of teeth. This music box can play both major and minor notes. To strike the teeth, the music box usually has a set of pins that are affixed to cylinders or drums, which can be permanently attached or sometimes are removable. The pins move toward the teeth, and that’s how the music is produced. Finally, something has to make the pins move. In the case of some music boxes, this is done manually, by turning a crank. On others, such as this one, a spring has to be wound. The tune that it plays is programmed onto the cylinder, while the musical scale is in the teeth. I believe that the music box and teeth, which appear to be original, are old. But the cylinder has recently been replaced with one that’s homemade. And it was done by an amateur, judging by the soldering. But whoever put it in the music box knew what he was doing.”
“Would you say that he had a good knowledge of music?”
“Yes, absolutely,” said Røed.
“A musician?”
“There are many ways to become a music expert. Music can be seen purely theoretically. Some people compare music to mathematics. Making a new tune for a music box requires some theoretical expertise in music. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to know how to play an instrument. Because that also demands dexterity and talent.”
“So theoretically somebody who isn’t a musician could have done it?”
“That’s for you to figure out. I can only tell you about the mechanical device. In terms of the container itself, I’m almost positive it was made in Europe, most likely in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland, which was the major manufacturing site for music boxes and clocks. In my opinion, it was made sometime in the early 1800s. There is no maker’s mark, which wasn’t unusual prior to the industrial age. This would be a real collector’s item if the cylinder had been original. But I’d guess that it’s not one of a kind, even though I’ve never seen this exact model before. Music boxes like this were sold as toys to children of wealthy families here in Norway, and you can still find similar ones stored away in attics.”
“What about the tune it plays?”
“Quite a melancholy tune, in the minor key. It makes me think of a rather sad lullaby. I’ve never heard this particular melody before. But it’s suitable for a music box, which has a sound all its own. I love tunes played in the minor key on old music boxes with plenty of resonance, like this one. Those fragile, sad tones seem to fill the whole room. Doesn’t it sound almost magical?”