Henning makes himself comfortable in the chair. ‘Gunhild Dokken went to the factory before Jocke and Tore. She went inside the building but left the door open so that Jocke would think that Pulli had already arrived. He was famous for his punctuality. And Jocke swallowed the bait. Dokken was waiting for him behind a pillar. As he walked past her, she attacked him quick as lightning, hitting him with the axe on the side of his neck, here, roughly,’ Henning says, demonstrating on himself. ‘The first whack nearly took his head off. The rest was easy. She hit him thirteen times in total. Back, shoulders, arms and another blow to the neck.’
‘Good God,’ Iver says. ‘That’s a lot of anger. And afterwards she broke his jaw?’
‘Yes. But she needed something more to link Pulli to the killing, and this is where the knuckle-duster comes in.’
‘I still don’t get it. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just shoot Jocke like she did with Robert van whatshisname?’
‘It might have been safer, yes. Dokken has, as far as I know, not said anything about her choice of weapon yet, but I’ve a theory about that. Have you heard about Forsete, the Norse god?’
‘No, but I prefer two-seaters, anyway. Much cooler.’
They both laugh.
‘Through his father, Vidar Fjell had developed a passion for Norse mythology, a world he probably introduced Dokken to during the years they knew each other. Remember, she designed Asgard’s decor where everyone is having Norse sex all over the place. Dokken’s plan was to avenge the murder of Vidar Fjell — she wanted justice for him. Forsete was the god of justice in Norse mythology. And he had an axe.’
‘What about the knuckle-duster? How did she get hold of that?’
Henning scratches his forehead. ‘When Tore Pulli quit debt-collecting, he hung the knuckle-duster on the wall of his study at home as a symbolic gesture. I believe he made a big deal of it, and it was something that everyone who knew Tore would know about. One night when the Fighting Fit gang was back at Pulli’s discussing what to do about Jocke Brolenius, Dokken stole it. She used to live on the streets and had nicked plenty of things in her lifetime.’
Iver nods. He is impressed. They sit for a while in silence.
‘However,’ Henning says, and gets up. ‘I haven’t come all this way just to make small talk to an invalid like you.’
‘No, I didn’t think so.’
‘I have a question for you. From Petter Holte.’
Chapter 117
A week after Gunhild Dokken’s arrest, Henning meets Veronica Nansen outside Sognsvann Station. She gives him a long, warm embrace.
‘Good to see you, Henning,’ she says.
‘Likewise. How are you?’
‘I’m not too bad. How about you? I hear you’ve been a busy boy recently.’
‘Yes, there turned out to be a lot of stories to tell,’ he says and smiles reluctantly.
They pass the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and walk down towards the lake. People with prams and men and women in tracksuits stroll up and down past them.
‘I didn’t think that Petter would ever have agreed to talk to the press,’ Nansen says. ‘And, what’s more, to be so open and honest about being in custody, how he thought about what had happened to Tore and dreading that he, too, would be fitted up for something he hadn’t done. You did a great job, Henning.’
‘Thank you,’ he says, blushing. ‘And it wasn’t the only thing he came clean about.’
Henning tells her how the same fear prompted Holte to put his cards on the table and admit to the assault on Iver Gundersen. Kent Harry Hansen was fuming when he returned to Fighting Fit after being interviewed by Iver. Holte went into his office, and Hansen told him what had happened. Later that night, when Iver visited Asgard, he met Holte at the door. Holte decided to take matters into his own hands. He saw an opportunity to protect his friends and increase his status in their eyes. But he never intended to injure Iver quite so severely. He just wasn’t very good at knowing when to stop.
‘That’s so like him,’ Nansen says. ‘What’s going to happen to him as far as that charge is concerned?’
‘I’m not really sure. I asked Iver if he would consider drawing a line under the whole business, and he said he would think about it. But even so, Holte could still be charged.’
Nansen nods and takes Henning’s arm. They turn on to a broad path. Henning kicks a pine cone which jumps up and rolls away. A runner passes them, wheezing and checking his pulse monitor.
‘I heard it was a T-shirt that led you to identify Gunhild as the killer?’
Henning starts to laugh. ‘I think that’s a case of Chinese whispers. But it’s true that I saw a T-shirt in Holte’s flat which I guessed must be hers. It turned out that Gunhild’s washing machine had broken down, and Holte, being the wimp he is, had offered her the use of his.’
‘Poor guy. I bet he thought it might help win her back.’
‘Yes. And I’m sure he believed that he had succeeded when she turned up at his place after killing Robert van Derksen. But she went there purely to return Holte’s gun and his shoes which she had taken earlier. I spoke to one of the officers who arrested Holte and he said that Holte’s face was practically euphoric that morning.’
‘So Gunhild spent the night with him?’
Henning nods. ‘One night probably made no difference to her.’
Nansen shakes her head. ‘I’ve tried to look back,’ she says after a pause. ‘I’ve tried to remember if Gunhild ever did anything that I should have noticed so that some of this might have been avoided. But I haven’t been able to think of a single thing.’
Henning nods while he recalls the book he saw on Petter Holte’s bedside table. A Gentle Axe by R. N. Morris. And he thinks about the T-shirt Gunhild wore the first time he met her. With the logo for Axe men’s deodorant. There was something provocative about the way she pushed her chest up and out, almost as if she wanted him to notice her. It might have been a coincidence. Or it could have been Gunhild’s substitute for heroin surrounding herself with subtle hints of what she had done while believing that nobody would ever be able to expose her. Henning realises that he is inspired to explore not just her wardrobe but her whole life for other references to the murder of Jocke Brolenius. Though this would be purely to satisfy his own curiosity.
‘Don’t beat yourself up, Veronica,’ he says. ‘It won’t make it any easier.’
She looks at him as she attempts a smile. ‘I’ll try not to.’
They walk for a while in silence.
‘How is the investigation into… into what happened to Tore going?’
‘Slowly,’ Henning says. ‘The man they arrested, Orjan Mjones, hasn’t said one word during interviews. But the police have found incriminating evidence on his laptop. Mjones appears to have carried out extensive research about an extremely deadly nerve poison called batrachotoxin. It comes from a frog in Colombia. Choco Indians dip their darts in it. The frog is actually called the poison dart frog, and a single frog contains enough poison to kill anywhere between fifty and one hundred people.’
‘And that was the poison given to Tore?’
‘The Institute of Public Health is still checking it, but it very much looks like it. There will be a story about it in the paper tomorrow. A dose of one hundred micrograms is enough to kill an adult, and all you need to do is scratch their skin.’
Nansen nods pensively. ‘Imagine if they ever came to Norway.’
‘The frogs, you mean? That’s the fascinating bit. They can’t produce their poison anywhere except the western slopes of the Andes because the ants and the insects on which they feed form a unique chemical bond in the frog that creates the poison.’
‘Mjones went to South America?’
‘Most probably. But he isn’t saying anything. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Isn’t that unusual?’
‘Yes, perhaps. But I’m guessing he’s keeping his mouth shut because he’s banking on the evidence against him being purely circumstantial. However, it would take a lot for him not to be convicted. A receptionist at the mountain hotel close to where the body of Thorleif Brenden was found has said that Mjones impersonated a police officer looking for Brenden. A chalet girl in the area also alerted them to a break-in in a cabin where Brenden’s notes were later found. In them he describes Mjones and the events that happened in the days leading up to Tore’s death in considerable detail. That plus the frog poison will weigh heavily against him in court.’