– No, he replied, and felt himself crossing a threshold as he lied to the chief inspector. – I was alone.
29
DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR Hans Magnus Viken piled the takeaway cartons from China Dragon on to the plate and pushed it to one side as he clicked the remote control. There was a debate programme on TV2: Should dangerous animals be allowed close to people’s homes? What are the limits? The murder cases weren’t mentioned, but the programme was fuelled by the general uncertainty in the air. Viken switched to a travel channel. Pictures of a desert sunset. Looked like Morocco. He watched for a while before getting out the DVD he’d brought home from work with him. Only now did he have time to watch the whole of the Monday press conference, not just the few extracts he’d seen on NRK that same evening. It was useful to watch all TV appearances, which was why they were recorded and handed out to everyone taking part. Learning media skills was as important a part of the job as actual policing skills, they were constantly being told.
The Chief Superintendent led the conference, underlining how important the case had become. As usual he was decidedly pompous, sitting there with his dress uniform and his well-groomed hair, which Viken suspected he dyed to hide any traces of grey. He was rather like the smug chief of police in those children’s books about Cardamom Town, and some of the younger officers even referred to him by the fictional chief’s name – Bastian.
It was Finckenhagen who had asked Viken to join them. She was another one who just loved the limelight, he’d realised a long time ago. But this was so big that she obviously felt comfortable sharing it with him on this occasion. She didn’t look too bad, he had to admit as he watched her taking over after the chief’s introduction. Her summary of the case was adequate, and she dealt reasonably well with the questions. On a couple of occasions she handed them over to him. The contrast was evident. He was more concise, and more precise. The way people wanted their police to be, he thought.
The best bit of the press conference came at the end. There were Swedish and Danish journalists there, of course, but also French and Italian, and a team from German TV. No matter how many times they denied that a killer bear was on the rampage in the centre of a European capital, the case continued to attract worldwide attention. The bear prints, and the claw marks on the two dead women, were gefundenes Fressen for everyone who had news as their business, and the pictures had already been spread to all parts of the globe. After Finckenhagen had staggered her way through a couple of sentences in primitive English, Viken took over the show. About ten years earlier, he’d taken part in an exchange project and spent a year with the police force in Manchester, and he answered questions from the foreign media in fluent English. Even permitted himself a joke. Of course, people do call Oslo ‘the city of tigers’, from the days when people thought it was a dangerous place to be wandering about in at night. But let me state categorically, once and for alclass="underline" there are no tigers on the prowl here. He had worked out the joke at the morning briefing, and it turned out to be a hit. Chuckles and grins from the journalists. The chief came up to him afterwards and shook his hand. Good show, Viken. A German journalist approached and asked if he could do an interview. As he sat watching the recording, Viken felt well pleased. One-nil, Finckenhagen, he noted, certain that she would have made the same observation.
He switched to NRK in time to catch the evening news. The bear murders, as they were inaccurately known, had been relegated to item number three. The same pictures from Nordmarka and Frogner Park were shown. Then an interview with the chief. Finckenhagen was being kept off stage after a bad mistake on the news the day before. She’d been naïve enough to respond to the proposal to declare southern Norway a bear-free zone. Everyone knew that the politician who had come up with the idea was an incorrigible drunkard who would do or say anything for another fifteen seconds of media fame. Finckenhagen fell for it, and people were saying the chief was not pleased with her. Two-nil, Viken nodded as he peeled a banana he’d bought from a 7-Eleven. They had a calming effect on the stomach, he’d discovered. Every bit as good as the pills his doctor prescribed for him. Despite saying there was nothing the matter with him, the guy still tried to get Viken to stuff himself full of chemicals. Your stomach is just a touch oversensitive was his idiotic diagnosis. And in an effort to be funny he added, citing a few crime novels he’d read: Don’t all detectives have upset stomachs?
There wasn’t much the chief could tell the press about the investigation, which made the packaging all the more important. They’d been good from the very beginning and so far no newspaper had commented that for such a dramatic case they seemed to have very little to go on. Was that right? They had backing all the way up the system. Top priority when it came to resources; Finckenhagen could pick and choose as she pleased. So far anyway. They had already received so many tips they had someone doing a rough sorting. And Jennifer Plåterud, the best pathologist Viken had worked with, was calling him daily, hardly able to hide her excitement at all the finds she was making on Cecilie Davidsen. She had been more deeply scratched than the first victim, not just on the back but also on her upper body and face. The same marks as of a hypodermic syringe appeared on her arms and legs. And there were no signs of sexual assault on her either.
The telephone rang. It was headquarters. A colleague from somewhere up in Hedmark wanted to get in touch with Viken. He took a note of the number and made the call. The man who answered introduced himself as Kjell Roar Storaker, sheriff in Åsnes county. Yes, Viken knew where that was, very close to the Swedish border.
– Sorry for ringing so late, it’s probably not that important.
– Don’t worry about it, Viken reassured him, without shifting his gaze from the TV screen.
– It’s about these murders… this bear business.
Viken didn’t think it was a very good idea to refer to it as the bear business, but he couldn’t come up with anything better himself.
– We’re getting so many strange calls, you know what people are like.
Viken knew only too well. They’d set up a dedicated phone line for the case. As a joke, he’d suggested they hire a psychiatrist too, since so many of the calls came from people who were clearly in need of that kind of help.
– We sort through them as best we can, the sheriff assured him. – We save you from the worst of it.
– Let’s have it, Storaker.
– We received a letter yesterday. Anonymous. The writer says that he, or she, has reason to believe that people from up here might have caught a bear, driven it down to Oslomarka and released it.
Viken turned off the TV.
– Based on what?
– Hard to say. You know, there’s a lot of talk of bears up here. Tempers can get heated very quickly. People in the countryside get angry when they feel they’re being steamrollered by politicians and so-called environmentalists, the types who tell them they’ve just got to live with predators while they’re miles away from it themselves…
– Do you see any reason to take the letter seriously? Viken interrupted him.
– Hm, there’s a name mentioned, a woman who keeps sheep, along with her husband. We’ve had a look, and he has said things to the papers in a way that… Well, we don’t think this is important. That some kind of activist group has been set up, we can’t really see that.
– Fax it down here, we’ll have a closer look at it.
Viken reached for the twelve-string guitar on its stand next to the sofa. Began playing a riff. The case was completely different from anything else he’d ever been involved in. Confusion had descended on the city. Even the journalists seemed to have given up their usual hunt for those responsible, in other words, for scapegoats. So far. The riff he was playing began more and more to resemble the opening of ‘Paint It Black’. They had been conducting interviews until late in the evening all week. There was a real danger of the wood drowning in trees. Viken was good at sifting stuff. There were a handful of witness statements that were especially interesting. The retired dentist who had found Paulsen turned out to have good powers of observation. The same could not be said of the two junkies who discovered Davidsen in Frogner Park. They couldn’t agree about the vehicle they had seen pulling out of the car park. Was it big or small? Two different answers. Light or dark? A shouting match. Viken recalled what the woman said she’d been doing down the slope by the water. He grimaced at his foot, strummed two chords, the last one in A flat major, and put the guitar away.