‘Right. Well, at least there’s some light in the tunnel, if I can call it that.’
We sat for a while in a somewhat uneasy silence. I noticed her scrutinising me. ‘You look troubled. Is there something bothering you?’ she said.
‘Nothing apart from the fact that I have a son myself, thirteen years old, who I might not have been a hundred per cent present for in the first years of his life. I don’t know if you remember, but we… split up when he was two years old.’
She smiled gently. ‘Have you had any problems with him?’
‘Not that I’ve been aware of, no.’
‘So why the concern? My God, with all the divorces we have nowadays… and all the children of divorced parents! We would’ve had an avalanche of psychopaths if they’d all had reactive attachment disorders. I’m talking about relatively few unhappy souls, Varg, and we must not forget that some of this is genetically determined.’ She laid her hand on mine and patted it comfortingly. ‘So you can relax. Your son will be absolutely fine.’
‘But I’m not only concerned about him. I can’t get Jan Egil out of my mind, either. I’ve met him at three stages of his life. As a helpless little child, as an apathetic and aggressive six-year-old, and now as an unbalanced and somewhat complicated teenager. The period in 1974 when Cecilie, Hans and I looked after him like… well, like a married couple and an uncle, we were all of the same opinion… that he could have been our own child, Marianne! Our common foster child.’
‘But then remember what I said. The reactive disorders emerge during the first years of life. An adopted child you know nothing about can be a time bomb. We see this most clearly with foreign adoptions, children from slum areas or — even worse — a war zone. But then you know the child’s background and you know it’s bad news. If the mother was on drugs during the pregnancy, it means he will be born with withdrawal symptoms, if I can phrase it like that. Suddenly he no longer has access to what the tiny body was used to in the mother’s womb. There is no father at hand, and he has a mother who either isn’t there — because he’s in a clinic for infants — or when she is there, she’s barely capable of looking after him properly.’ She leaned forward and locked her intense eyes on mine. ‘Neither Cecilie, Hans nor you could have done anything for Jan Egil, Varg!’
‘That is a terribly defeatist view of life, Marianne.’
She looked at me sadly. ‘I’m afraid not. It’s statistics. And experience.’
‘Hans feels the same way. He told me… I don’t want to be indiscreet, but he’s decided to give up. He can no longer face all these failures, all these never-ending projects, all this work that appears to be in vain.’
‘But there are lots of successful treatments, too.’
‘That’s what I said. But he’s given up, as I said. He wants a total break.’
‘Well…’ She threw up her hands. ‘We all feel like that at some point. How’s your business going, by the way?’
‘As a private eye?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m into my tenth year now. And I haven’t gone bust yet, even though it’s been a close thing a couple of times.’
She smiled again and nodded with sympathy. Then she stood up. ‘Should you need me again, you know where to find me.’
We gave each other a friendly hug, and I left. On the way downstairs I wondered how she was, actually. But that was probably one more of those questions I would never find an answer to.
44
We were getting nowhere.
For a week or two I played detective at the state’s expense. I paid a call on the grocer who had given Hammersten the alibi in 1973. He had become a pensioner in the meantime and pretended he didn’t remember a thing, neither about Hammersten, nor about what he had said or hadn’t said eleven years ago. I tried to trace the prostitute who had also given him an alibi, but she had vanished off the face of the earth a few years afterwards, without anyone worrying too much on her account. ‘One of those deaths that receive scant scrutiny and are then shelved,’ Vadheim confided. ‘Christ, Vadheim! She was one of the key witnesses in the Hammersten investigation.’ ‘I doubt if anyone made the connection in 1976, Veum…’ Finding the drinking pals from that time proved to be just as fruitless. Some of them were dead; others had decimated their remaining brain cells with persistent over-indulgence over a long, wasted life. The only one I managed to get to speak to me, a dried-out alcoholic by the name of Peder Jansen, was so frightened when I mentioned Terje Hammersten’s name that he sat trembling for the rest of the conversation, as if afflicted by unbearable withdrawal symptoms. Casting doubt on his alibi at this time proved, not unsurprisingly, to be impossible.
Jens Langeland’s telephone feedback on the police interview with Hammersten, first of all in Forde, later in Bergen, was even less uplifting. Hans Haavik’s confirmation that he had had a confrontation with Hammersten in Bergen early in the morning after the night of the Angedalen murders gave Hammersten an alibi that while not a hundred per cent watertight did, however, based on the ferry companies’ night routes, make it in practice impossible for him to have travelled from Forde to Bergen for that time. ‘Unless you have any better cards up your sleeve, Veum.’ ‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’ ‘Hmm, that was what I feared…’
When Hammersten was back in town, a week and a half later, I made an attempt to make him talk. All that produced was a black eye, which took a further two weeks to heal. By way of a parting shot, he had said that if I continued to stick my big nose into what he was doing, he would give me such a thorough pasting that I would never stand on two legs again. I gave Ansgar Tveiten a thought and took him at his word.
At length, I ate humble pie, phoned Langeland and said I had reached the end of the road. There didn’t seem to be any fresh leads anywhere. He took note without giving any kind of audible reaction. ‘How’s Jan Egil?’ I asked. ‘Not too good. It’s all we can do to get him to talk. Even to me,’ he added, before concluding the conversation and with that the commission. I sent him an invoice, which was paid promptly, unlike most other invoices I sent.
In the winter and spring of 1985 I followed the case, first of all at Gulating, the West Norway law court, and then — in late May that year — in the newspapers, after both sides had asked for the High Court to deliver the sentence.
While the trial was on at Gulating, I visited the courthouse as often I was able. I followed attentively when one of the police weapons experts was in the witness box. He held the weapon Klaus and Kari Libakk had been shot with in his hand. It was a 1938 Mauser, 7.62 calibre, and there were five bullets in the magazine. The forensic examination of the bullets and cartridges left no room for doubt that it was this weapon that had been used at the Angedalen double killing. All the bullets had been fired. It gave you a special feeling of horror to watch the dispassionate police officer stand there with the rifle in his hand and demonstrate how the safety catch was released, the bolt was pulled back with the handle and the rifle was loaded with cartridges, one by one. ‘Does it have to be loaded after each shot?’ Langeland wanted to know. The policeman nodded. ‘We think that Klaus Libakk was shot first, in the chest, and that his wife woke up and tried to escape. She was shot twice in the back, then the gunman turned on Libakk and shot him once again, also in the chest. Finally Kari Libakk was also given the coup de grace, through the back of the head.’ There was a deathly hush in the heavy air of the vast courtroom as the brutal actions were presented in such a down-to-earth, factual fashion. Only a few weak, nervous coughs could be heard from the gallery as the most gruesome details were stated. The atmosphere was not lightened when the policeman concluded his presentation by showing a series of slides based on the same crime scene photographs I had been shown in Forde. The powerful pictures caused a shock wave to surge through the courtroom, and when the court took a break afterwards, there was a noticeably gloomy mood among the spectators collecting outside in the corridor and the internal galleries overlooking the courthouse’s central lobby. I made small talk with a court reporter from one of the town’s newspapers. He was convinced that this had been the kiss of death for Jan Egil Skarnes. I couldn’t produce any cogent counter-arguments. For once in my life I kept my mouth shut.