‘I had to go to work, darling, but I’ll be home soon. Would you like Mummy to sing a little?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, then you have to close your eyes.’
‘Yeah.’
‘“Blueman”?’
‘Yeah.’
Katrine began singing the melancholy song in a low, deep voice. Blueman, Blueman, my buck, think of your small boy.
She had no idea why children had, for over a century, felt happy to be lulled to sleep by the story of an angst-ridden boy who wonders why Blueman, his favourite goat, hasn’t returned home from grazing, and who fears it’s been taken by a bear and now lies mutilated and dead somewhere in the mountains.
Still, after just one verse she could hear Gert’s breathing become more regular and deep, and after the next verse she heard her mother-in-law’s whispered voice on the phone.
‘He’s asleep now.’
‘Thanks,’ said Katrine, who had been squatting on her haunches so long she had to put her hand on the ground. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Take all the time you need, dear. And I’m the one who should be thanking you for wanting us here. You know, he looks so much like Bjørn when he’s asleep.’
Katrine swallowed. Unable, as usual, to respond when she said that. Not because she didn’t miss Bjørn, not because she wasn’t happy that Bjørn’s parents saw him in Gert. But because it simply wasn’t true.
She concentrated on what lay in front of her.
‘Intense lullaby,’ said Sung-min Larsen, who had come and crouched down next to her. ‘“Maybe now you lay dead”?’
‘I know, but it’s the only one he wants to hear,’ Katrine said.
‘Well, then that’s what he gets.’ Her colleague smiled.
Katrine nodded. ‘Have you ever thought about how as children we expect unconditional love from our parents, without giving anything in return? That we are actually parasites? But then we grow up and things change completely. When exactly do you think we stop believing that we can be loved unconditionally just for being who we are?’
‘When did she stop, you mean?’
‘Yeah.’
They looked down at the body of the young woman lying on the forest floor. Her trousers and knickers were pulled down to her ankles, but the zip on the thin down jacket was pulled up. Her face — which was turned to the starry skies above — appeared chalk-white in the glare of the Crime Scene Unit’s floodlights, which were positioned among the trees. Her make-up was streaked, and looked like it had run and dried out several times. Her hair — bombed blonde by chemicals — was sticking to one side of her face. Her lips were stuffed with silicon, and false eyelashes protruded like the eaves of a roof over one eye, which was sunken down in its socket, staring glassily up and past them, and also over the other eye, which was not there, only an empty socket. Perhaps all the barely degradable synthetic materials were the reason the body had remained in as good condition as it had.
‘I’m guessing this is Susanne Andersen?’ Sung-min said.
‘I’m guessing the same,’ Katrine replied.
The detectives were from two different departments, she was with Crime Squad at the Oslo Police and he was with Kripos. Susanne Andersen, twenty-six years old, had been missing for seventeen days and was last spotted on a security camera at Skullerud metro station around a twenty-minute walk from where they were now. The only lead on the other missing woman, Bertine Bertilsen, twenty-seven years old, was her car, which was found abandoned in a car park in Grefsenkollen, a hiking area in another part of the city. The hair colour of the woman in front of them tallied with the security camera footage of Susanne, while Bertine was, according to family and friends, currently a brunette. Besides, the body had no tattoos on the naked lower body, while Bertine was supposed to have one — a Louis Vuitton logo — on her ankle.
So far, it had been a relatively cool and dry September, and the discoloration on the corpse’s skin — blue, purple, yellow, brown — might be consistent with it lying outdoors for close to three weeks. The same went for the smell, owing to the body’s production of gas, which gradually seeped out from all orifices. Katrine had also noted the white area of thin hair-like filaments below the nostrils: fungus. In the large wound on the throat, yellowish-white, blind maggots crawled. Katrine had seen it so often she no longer had any particular reaction. After all, blowflies were — in Harry’s words — as loyal as Liverpool fans. Turning up at a moment’s notice no matter the time or place, rain or shine, attracted by the smell of dimethyl trisulfide which the body begins to excrete from the moment of expiration. The females lay their eggs, and a few days later the larvae hatch and begin gorging on the rotting flesh. They pupate, turning into flies, which look for bodies to lay their own eggs in, and after a month they have lived their life to the end and die. That’s their life cycle. Not so different to ours, Katrine thought. Or rather, not so different to mine.
Katrine looked around. White-clad members of Krimteknisk, the Forensics Unit, moved like soundless ghosts among the trees, casting eerie shadows every time the flashes on their cameras lit up. The forest was large. Østmarka continued on, for mile after mile, virtually all the way to Sweden. A jogger had found the body. Or rather, the jogger’s dog, which had been allowed off the lead and had disappeared from the narrow gravel road and into the woods. It was already getting dark. The jogger — running with a headlamp — had followed after while calling out to the dog and had eventually found it, next to the body, wagging its tail. Well, no wagging had been mentioned, it was something Katrine had pictured.
‘Susanne Andersen,’ she whispered, not knowing quite to whom. Perhaps to the deceased, as comfort and assurance that she had finally been found and identified.
The cause of death appeared obvious. The cut that had been made across her throat, running like a smile over Susanne Andersen’s narrow neck. The fly larvae, various forms of insects and perhaps other animals had probably helped themselves to most of the blood; however, Katrine still saw traces of blood spatter in the heather and on the trunk of one tree.
‘Killed here in situ,’ she said.
‘Looks that way,’ Sung-min replied. ‘Do you think she was raped? Or just sexually assaulted after he killed her?’
‘After,’ Katrine said, shining the torch on Susanne’s hands. ‘No broken nails, no signs of a struggle. But I’ll try and have them undertake a forensic post-mortem over the weekend and we’ll see what they think.’
‘And a clinical autopsy?’
‘We won’t get that until Monday at the earliest.’
Sung-min sighed. ‘Well, I guess it’s only a question of time before we find Bertine Bertilsen raped and with her throat slit somewhere in Grefsenkollen.’
Katrine nodded. She and Sung-min had become better acquainted over the past year, and he had confirmed his reputation as one of Kripos’s best detectives. There were many who believed he would take over as Senior Inspector the day Ole Winter stepped down, and that from then on the department would have a far better boss. Possibly. But there were also those who voiced reservations about the country’s foremost investigative body being led by an adopted South Korean and homosexual who dressed like a member of the British aristocracy. His classic tweed hunting jacket and suede-and-leather country boots stood in stark contrast to Katrine’s thin Patagonia down jacket and Gore-Tex trainers. When Bjørn was alive, he had called her style ‘gorpcore’, which, she had been given to understand, was an international term for people who went to the pub dressed as though they were headed up the mountains. She had called it adapting to life as the mother of a small child. But she had to admit that this more subdued, practical style of dress was also owing to the fact that she was no longer a young, rebellious investigative talent but the head of Crime Squad.