– It’s wild, he complained. – Reminds me of the Orderud case.
– We’ve been getting it here too, she consoled him. – If we didn’t have security guards, they would probably have broken into the autopsy room.
For an instant she imagined a horde of bellowing journalists pushing her up against the wall, and photographers sticking their cameras down into the belly of the half-autopsied corpse.
She sighed and suddenly felt a powerful need to talk about something else to him. Nevertheless she said: – Want to hear something from the autopsy? Berger had pancreatic cancer.
She heard an expulsion of breath at the other end. – Well that wasn’t what killed him.
– Of course not. The first results from the blood tests confirm the theory of a heroin overdose.
– But you’re saying he had a fatal condition?
– Exactly. I contacted Ullevål Hospital, spoke to the consultant who was treating him. The tumour was discovered more than six months ago. The hospital gave him three months, and in any event no more than six.
– Did Berger know this? Roar grunted.
– They were completely open about it with him. He’d accepted it, according to the doctor I spoke to.
– So he was waiting to die all the time he made those programmes? Wasn’t he receiving treatment?
– Only painkillers. And he was also treating himself, as you know. He actually expressed a preference for heroin over morphine.
As she ended the call, there was a knock on the office door. A young woman she recognised as a technician at the trace analysis unit put her head round.
– Something here we’d like you to look at, she said, waving a document.
Jennifer took it, unfolded it and sat studying it. After a while she raised her head to the technician, who was still standing there, and peered thoughtfully at her. She had asked about something or other, but Jennifer didn’t hear what it was. She took the receiver off the cradle, and the young woman, realising she wasn’t going to get an answer, disappeared, closing the door behind her.
34
FIVE MINUTES HAD passed since Roar hung up when Jennifer called again. There was still no movement in the queue of traffic, a few hundred metres from Teisen.
– Wish there was some way I could help you, she chirruped.
– Then send a helicopter.
She laughed, sounded as if she were in a good mood.
– I just got a test result delivered to my desk.
He had tried to explain to her that she mustn’t use him as a channel of information; it had already caused him enough trouble as things were. Before he could repeat his warning, she said: – The hairs we found on Mailin Bjerke turn out to be a quite rare form of mitochondrial DNA. It belongs to just one in ten of the population of Norway.
– Berger?
– He has the same variant.
Roar pressed his horn as a motorcyclist threading his way through the queue bumped into a side mirror with his elbow. When he’d finished swearing, he announced in an exasperated tone: – Jenny, you need to tell this to the head of the investigative team, not me.
– I’ve called Viken three times, he’s in a meeting and not answering.
The meeting I should’ve been at, Roar groaned to himself. It occurred to him he ought to hang up and make sure he heard the rest of what Jennifer had to say from Viken. But he couldn’t resist: – Of course that doesn’t make it anything like definite that the hairs come from Berger.
Jennifer confirmed this. – And one other thing, she went on.
The traffic seemed to be freeing up a little. Roar slid forward thirty metres before again coming to a halt.
– Another thing? He could hear how irritable he sounded. – Sorry, Jenny, I’m a bit stressed out here.
– That’s no wonder. You’re for the big stick when you eventually get there, Mihaly Horvath.
He didn’t like her using that name. – Let’s hear it.
– Liss Bjerke called last night.
– Again?
– She still insists she’ll only talk to me.
– Even though we got a female officer to carry out the interview, exactly as she wanted?
The inside lane began to creep forward and Roar swung over into it.
– Berger and her father were old drinking buddies, Jennifer told him.
– They were?
– Liss was at Berger’s on Wednesday. – He tried to put his arms around her and then muttered something about knowing what had happened to Mailin.
– And what was it that he knew?
– She didn’t find out. He was so stoned that she preferred to get out of the place.
Roar moved back into the outer lane. Jennifer had more news. This time about Mailin Bjerke’s mother. Something about how this poor harassed woman was most bothered about the missing wedding ring. And that they should check whether the phone lines were down in parts of Blindern on the evening Mailin went missing.
– Jenny, we don’t know that it was the evening of the eleventh she went missing, because we don’t have any witnesses who saw her that day.
Suddenly he gave a start. – What was that about the ring?
At one of the team’s first morning briefing sessions in December they had heard about a ring that had been removed from Mailin Bjerke’s finger. One of the others was supposed to have checked it out, but Roar had heard no more about it.
– If Mailin Bjerke wore a wedding ring, he said once Jenny had finished explaining, – there was presumably an engraving on it?
Just asking the question felt like casting a line into a lake in which there were hardly any fish at all. When he got the bite, he jumped:
– Your Aage, said Jennifer, and then gave him the date of the wedding.
He was through the junction at Teisen and the end of the queue was in sight when his phone rang yet again. He picked it up and read the display before tapping the answer button: – I’m stuck in a traffic jam, I slept in and haven’t eaten yet, I’m eighteen minutes late for an important meeting, I’ve got complications left, right and centre, so if this is bad news, please leave a message on my voicemail. Or preferably someone else’s voicemail.
– Nice to talk to you too, Dan-Levi replied. – You who always wanted to be where it was happening. Anybody that’s heard the news over the last twenty-four hours knows that you are in clover right now.
Finally the queue of cars started breaking up.
– I’ve given some thought to what you were asking me about at Klimt, his friend went on.
– Did I ask about something?
– About if thy eye offend thee, und so weiter. I’ve unearthed quite a bit of stuff about Berger. Baalzebub, for example. According to the Old Testament, it was the prophet Elijah who exposed that lord of the flies as an impotent god. Our Elijah, alias Berger, urges us in an interview to start worshipping these false gods again. Allow me to quote: I am not godless, but I must worship a god whom I can leave behind here, one I don’t run the risk of meeting on the other side.
– Does this story have a point, Roar groaned. Finally he was able to accelerate past the damaged car that stood pressed up against the crash barrier, its front smashed in.
– Be patient, Roar Horvath, and thou shalt see. Berger was obsessed by the idea of being a prophet. Not to preach the coming of the Messiah, but to rid us all of any belief in salvation. That is, an anti-prophet, in contrast to the Elijah he was named after. I’ve been looking at some of the lyrics he wrote when he was lead singer with his group Baalzebub. Interested?
– Cough it up.
– In the song ‘Revenge’, Berger tells a story from the Bible in which Elijah, God’s prophet, assembled the prophets of the false god Baal on Mount Carmel. Elijah challenged them to show that their god could make fire. When they couldn’t do it, he got God to perform the miracle. So people saw the difference between the true and the fraudulent, and Elijah took Baal’s prophets to a river and had them killed there, four hundred of them, in God’s name. According to Berger’s lyrics, Baal’s prophets return from hell and tear out Elijah’s eyes.