Authors: Jorgen Brekke
“But maybe not enough to remove her larynx?”
“Hardly.”
“Still, this might be significant. Where does Olin live?” Singsaker asked.
“He lives in Skyåsvegen, at the top, on Kuhaugen.”
“So if someone heads over that way on foot from town, let’s say from the train station, wouldn’t the crime scene be out of the way?”
“Well, it’s not totally out in the sticks. Olin also confirmed that Silje Rolfsen had phoned him a couple of times after he moved to Trondheim and he came out. She had mentioned that she might come to see him. She may have decided to surprise him, maybe in an attempt to salvage a hopeless relationship that she refused to let go. Young Mr. Olin says he got a call from her that he didn’t pick up, around the time she arrived in Trondheim, but he can’t remember the exact date. He has voluntarily given us access to his phone records, so eventually we’ll be able to confirm the precise time and date. But let’s assume that she tried to call him from the station and couldn’t get hold of him. So she started walking, maybe singing a song, attracting attention like that, and on the way something happened to her. The question is, What? And nothing explains the real mystery, if we believe her ex-boyfriend’s claim that she wasn’t staying with him.”
Jensen let this thought hover in the air for a moment, and then Singsaker asked the next question.
“So, where was she those three weeks before the murder?” The minute he voiced the question, he realized there would be no pleasant answer.
* * *
A fly was living inside his skull, a diligent little insect that ambled around inside on those light, tickling insect limbs, but now it had stopped moving altogether. Could it be dead?
He’d taken good care of the vocal cords, placing them in an alcohol-filled jar, which now stood on the table in front of him. He rested his eyes on the pink membranes in the bottom of the jar. They looked like an as-yet-undiscovered sea creature, a deep-sea coral. Now and then he imagined that they stirred, as if preparing to sing. When he looked at them, he couldn’t understand why her song had not been the one he’d hoped for. He sat there thinking about his wife. She’d been sleeping so soundly lately. He envied her. Would he ever be able to sleep like that?
When he finished his cigarette, he lit another one and read what it said on the pack:
SMOKING KILLS
.
Trondheim, 1767
Flies. There were
far too many of them this summer. They crawled and buzzed over everything, on his hands and face and in his ears. They had even infiltrated his dreams. In one dream he’d eaten an entire meal that consisted only of flies. At this much too early hour of the morning, it took for Chief Inspector Nils Bayer a long time to realize that he was not dreaming. He grabbed at the fly that landed on his nose, catching it in his hand.
The festivities at the Hoppa last night had nearly done him in. As usual, he’d thrown up everything he’d eaten and drunk during the evening. He didn’t feel nearly clearheaded enough to be wakened before the cockcrow. His back and all of his joints ached as if he’d crawled home on all fours from the inn, with someone beating him with a cane the whole way. He lit the oil lamp on the nightstand. Through the fog of sleep, the pale face leaning over his bed looked like a phantom.
Bayer wiped his forehead, sat up, and placed both hands on his enormous paunch. The hound of hell that lived inside his stomach woke up and issued a threatening growl. He belched and fixed a fierce gaze on the night watchman who had just stormed into his bedchamber to wake him so rudely.
“Pull yourself together, man,” Bayer said. “You’d think you’d seen the Devil himself.”
The watchman, a slight young boy with a reedy voice, was too easily frightened for the job he held, but even then, Chief Inspector Bayer had seldom seen him look as pale as he did now.
“I may not have seen the Devil himself,” stammered the boy, “but I’ve seen his handiwork.”
“The Devil’s handiwork,” muttered the inspector pensively. “Why can’t the Devil do his work at more Christian hours of the day?”
Nils Bayer got out of bed, but he knew better than to try to stretch. He could see traces of vomit on his nightshirt.
“Wait downstairs. I’m coming,” he said. “Get out, go, this minute! Who ever heard of a watchman afraid to wait alone on the street at night?”
When the watchman had reluctantly left the room, Bayer pulled the chamber pot from under the bed and threw up again. Then he took off his nightshirt and got dressed. He left his cloak behind and went out clad only in shirt, waistcoat, and trousers. He gripped his cane, which was new. The top was adorned with the Trondheim police chief’s own emblem, the hand holding the city’s coat of arms. It had been cast and wrought only a few weeks ago.
It was June, when the sun awoke before the rooster. A thick morning mist filled the streets, reaching over the walls of the buildings, making the prison on Kalvskinnet look like a hazy memory. The tentative bluish light from the morning sun settled over the marketplace rooftops down toward Skansen, the town fortress. Outside his front door, in the dawning light and fog, stood the young watchman, still looking only half-alive.
“Lead the way, boy,” grumbled Bayer, scratching his belly under the tight waistcoat.
“But wouldn’t the chief inspector wish to—” stammered the watchman.
“Wish to what?” Bayer brusquely interrupted him.
“Doesn’t the chief inspector wish to hear my report before we go? I mean, wouldn’t it be best to be prepared for—”
“Tell me, young man. Can I see this diabolical sight from where I’m standing right now?”
“No. You can’t. We have to go beyond Skansen.”
“Then let’s not waste time with words. You ought to know the chief inspector well enough by now to realize that he believes only things he sees with his own eyes. Lead the way.”
They walked in silence toward the city gate, which the watchman unlocked with one of the keys attached to a ring on his belt.
* * *
Morning was without a doubt the calmest time of day or night at Ila. By then peace had finally settled over this teetering, putrid row of buildings outside the city gate. The last tankards had been emptied, and the whores could at last take a rest. The only people in sight were a few incurable drunks lying in the gutter, a rattling sound issuing from their throats but not disturbing anyone. Chief Inspector Bayer might well have ended up in a similar position countless times if it hadn’t been for her. He glanced up at the window of her room as he passed, knowing she was asleep. She always slept heavily after a long night.
After they’d gone past the stinking buildings of Ila, they followed the road that people used to transport drinking water from Ila Creek to the city. A bridge took them over the creek to below the sawmills. Then they continued along a narrow path to the edge of the sea. Heading westward, they came to the body that was lying on the beach.
Nils Bayer stopped in his tracks and looked at it.
These are new times we are living in, he thought. Dead bodies don’t look the way they used to. Though he’d been chief inspector in Trondheim for only three years, he’d seen numerous corpses—people who had suffered unnatural death long before disease, accident, or old age would have robbed them of life. In Trondheim, not many weeks passed between murders or suicides. The homicides usually resulted from brawls involving knives and clubs. Occasionally a vicious devil would beat his woman one time too many. And then there were the gangs of boys that fought outside the city walls. Sometimes these fights would escalate into outright battles between the gangs from Ila and Bakklandet. Early one morning in Småbergan, Bayer and a watchman had found two bodies, their faces beaten to a pulp with clubs. But the chief inspector rarely encountered a case of cold-blooded murder.
Still, this corpse was different. Bayer couldn’t yet identify a motive. But he was quite sure that strong emotions lay behind it, and that this case was without a doubt something entirely new. The man’s lifeless body had been stripped naked. He lay on his back with his arms at his sides. His long red hair seemed well groomed. Bayer studied the man’s face and thought that he might have seen it before, but if so, it had been after far too many glasses of spirits. A big red gash stretched from the groin all the way up to the sternum. The lower half of his belly was smeared with blood. Through the wound the man’s intestines were visible. Flies crawled around the edges of the gash.
“What a fate,” said the watchman, standing behind him.
Bayer turned around and saw that the young man was gazing out across the fjord, affected by its deep silence.
“Imagine dying so brutally. And in this place,” continued the watchman, lost in reverie.
“Death is brutal. But that fact does not concern us,” said the inspector with annoyance. “The only question we need to ask is, How did this happen? And you are mistaken regarding one crucial point. The victim did not die in this place.”
“How do you know?”
“Look at all the blood on his belly.”
“What does that say about where he died?”
“Look at the stones, young man.”
“The stones? What about them?”
“Do you see any blood on the stones?”
The young watchman studied the ground close to the body.
“There is no blood on the stones, Chief Inspector,” he remarked at last.
“Good observation. So what does that tell us?”
“That he didn’t bleed on the stones.”
“Quite right. And since we can ascertain that he did indeed bleed, what conclusion can we draw?”
“That he bled somewhere else?”
“Precisely. And if we add this fact to the way he’s lying, with his arms neatly placed at his sides and his hair draped over his shoulders, we can conclude that someone must have carefully placed him in this position after he was dead and no longer bleeding.”
They stood there for a moment, considering this possibility.
Then the young watchman said, “It must have taken a great deal of strength to drag a dead man all the way to the shore.”
“Now you’re using your head. But you haven’t completed your thought,” said the inspector.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve examined the stones around the corpse, right?”
“Yes, I have.”
“And besides the absence of blood, did you notice anything else?”
“No, not really. The stones are just lying here as if nothing happened.”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head!” The poor watchman now looked even more bewildered. “And what is it that has not happened?”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at.”
“Think about what you just said, my young friend.”
“You mean the part about how it must have taken strength to drag him here?”
“Exactly. Take another look at the stones from the end of the path and over to where he’s lying.”
The watchman stared intently at the ground. He looked at the undulating rows of rotting seaweed and the cobbles that covered the beach all the way up to the embankment along the shore.
“No traces on the ground,” the watchman said at last. “He wasn’t dragged here.”
“Excellent!” said Bayer. “He wasn’t dragged, nor has a heavy cart rolled across the sand in the last few hours. And besides, the path here from Ila cannot be traversed by cart.”
“But how do we know that he has only been here a few hours? The fisherman who found the body had been at sea for two days. Few other people use this section of the beach. He could have been here for a long time without being seen. The drag marks and the blood could have been washed away by high tide. The body could even have come ashore from somewhere else.”
“This body has not been in the water,” the chief inspector said firmly. “I’ve seen bodies that have come out of the fjord. Neptune always leaves his mark. But there’s one thing that tells us for certain that this body was put here only
after
the last high tide. If I’m not mistaken, that was two or three hours ago.”
“How can you tell?”
“For God’s sake, man! Here I was just thinking I could make a policeman out of you! There’s fresh seaweed above the body, which tells us that the water from the previous tide would have submerged him where he’s lying. Can’t you see that his hair is dry?”
The watchman shamefully lowered his eyes.
“Of course,” he murmured. “But if he didn’t wash ashore here, and he wasn’t dragged to this spot or brought by cart, how did he end up here?”
“Well, he could have been brought on a horse, which wouldn’t have left as deep a track on the beach as a cart. But it undoubtedly would have left prints in the damp soil where the path passes along the creek farther up.”
“Did you really notice that the path we were walking along had no trace of hoofprints?” asked the watchman with admiration in his voice.
“The job of the police is to reconstruct, to tell a story. And all stories leave a mark. An officer who doesn’t use his eyes is useless indeed.”
Again the watchman looked ashamed .
“We’re left with what must be the most plausible explanation,” he said, looking at the watchman, who paused to consider what that might be.
“He could have been carried here from the road,” he concluded.
“Precisely! He could have been carried here. And that tells us something very important. Unless the killer possessed superhuman strength, there must have been more than one man who carried out this crime.”
“And you can tell all of this simply by using your eyes?” asked the watchman.
“We. We have understood all of this,” said Bayer, aware that such modesty didn’t really suit him. Then he said, “But I think there’s more to learn. I am going to stay here for a while. Go and fetch reinforcements. The body must be conveyed to the priest. But first I want Fredrici, the town physician, to take a look at it. Bring him back here at once.”
“A physician? I’m afraid there is little a doctor can do for this fellow now.”
“Do as I say. No one knows more about death than those who save lives,” he grumbled crossly. Without further ado, the watchman took his leave and hurried up the path toward Ila. The chief inspector watched until he was out of sight. Then he began retching. He bent over three times but nothing came out.