He glanced up, resigned. ‘You’re thinking of these rumours about alcohol smuggling?’
‘Yes, and about the police interest in Terje Hammersten eleven years earlier over another brutal murder. Perhaps set up by Klaus Libakk, or someone else from the same ring.’
‘Another?’
‘Yes, and we found that out at the time. But you didn’t make anything of it at the trial. Why not, Langeland?’
‘You’re thinking of…’ He was sitting upright in the chair now, and I could see he was uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking.
‘What are you talking about now?’ Vibecke burst out.
‘You’ve never told her?’ I said.
‘Told me what?’ she asked.
I half-turned to her again. ‘Didn’t you have a clue… didn’t you know that your husband at the time, Svein Skarnes, was one of the main men behind the smuggling racket, mostly in the Sogn and Fjordane district?’
She stared at me in disbelief. ‘What are you talking about? Smuggling?!’
‘Svein Skarnes was the boss. He had contacts in Germany, sorted out the deals with the boats smuggling the goods in, organising the local machinery in Sogn and Fjordane, ably assisted by his office equipment rep, Harald Dale, and he earned big money, of course.’
‘Big money! And what happened to it then? Can you tell me that?’
‘No. But you two were rolling in it, weren’t you.’
‘No more than anyone else. This is completely new to me!’
‘But your husband here, he’s known since 1984.’
She turned on Langeland. ‘Is that right, Jens? Have you known all this without saying a word to me?’
‘I… wanted to spare you, Vibecke. Besides, this was never documented.’
‘Nevertheless…’
‘The whole business was full of uncorroborated claims that…’
Her eyes filled with tears, and her lips were trembling. ‘I just can’t believe it! That you could keep this hidden from me for so many years, Jens! How could you?’
They stared at each other with a distance in their eyes that increased as the seconds passed.
‘There may be more you haven’t told each other,’ I said.
Now they both turned towards me.
‘About things that went on in 1974, for instance.’
I had their undivided attention.
51
‘What are you blathering on about now, Veum?’ Langeland exclaimed with annoyance. ‘Haven’t you caused enough trouble yet?’
‘Trouble! All I’m asking is for people to stop lying. And to stop taking the blame for other people’s misdeeds, however honest it may seem.’
I held her eyes with mine. ‘I assume Langeland took this up with you back in 1984, but nevertheless I feel obliged to remind you of what Jan said when I was talking with him at Forde police station at that time. Of what he remembered from the day Svein Skarnes was murdered.’
Langeland stood up. ‘Veum! I think you should go now!’ I didn’t move. Nor did Vibecke. She raised an arm to her husband and said, in a quivering voice. ‘Don’t… Jens. I want to hear what he has to say.’
Langeland remained on his feet.
I said: ‘He did tell you this when he came back from Forde, didn’t he? To me he even said it was a basis for re-assessing the case. We’re talking about your case now.’
‘Yes, he did, but I said that… that I couldn’t remember… all the details any more. And Jan must have made a mistake.’
‘And that… was perhaps not quite the whole truth?’ I said warily.
She hesitated. Then she said, so quietly that it was barely audible: ‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘What!’ Now it was Langeland’s turn to be amazed. With an incredulous expression in his eyes he fell back in his chair while staring at his wife. ‘But you’ve always…’
‘It was you who insisted that I should confess, Jens. You said I would receive more lenient treatment from the court if we could convince them that it was involuntary manslaughter.’
‘And you did! But, my God, I didn’t expect you to confess if you hadn’t done it!’
She swallowed hard. As she spoke, she was having trouble finding the right words, and what she said came in slow staccato: ‘T-tell me again… what did Jan say?’
‘It’s so long ago now that I can’t remember the precise wording, but the main gist was that he had been alone with his father, well, your husband. The foster father. He was sitting and playing with his train. Then he heard the doorbell ring. Your husband went to open the door and he heard a loud altercation with someone. A man, please note. Then everything went still. Later he went into the hall and… in fact I don’t know whether he found him or that happened when you came home. I don’t recall whether he told me that or not. The main point, however, was this: someone came in, argued with your husband, and left again. Who?’
She did not look at either of us, but somewhere in-between. ‘You… both of you know why I did it.’
I leaned forward. ‘Did what?’
‘Confessed.’
‘I’ve always had my suspicions…’
‘Because I was sure Jan had done it. To protect him against… this monstrous act.’
‘But there was one thing he said to me that day. And it was this: Mummy did it!’
‘Yes?’ For a moment her eyes seemed to be flashing sparks. ‘I said that to him when he was standing by the cellar stairs, as stiff as a poker. I crouched down in front of him, looked him straight in the eye and repeated several times: ‘Don’t feel sorry, Johnny boy! Mummy did it…’
‘Mummy did it,’ I repeated, the way the sentence had resounded in my head for all the years that had passed since that February day in
1974
She looked at her husband with tearstained eyes while nodding in silence.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘But then the question is… Can you tell me what really happened?’
‘No. No more than anyone else can.’
Both Langeland and I waited for her to go on.
‘I… had been out. At the doctor’s. When I came home, I unlocked the door and… the first thing I saw was Jan standing in the hall, in front of the open cellar door. He was standing with his back to the wall, on the opposite side of the door, and there was something strange, something lifeless and apathetic about his face, as though he had lost all form of expression. Because he had done something terrible.’
‘Done, or seen?’
‘My perception was… he had once done something similar, in blind fury. Gone for Svein and bitten his hand so hard that he drew blood. Svein went ballistic and gave him a belting afterwards… but Jan refused to say anything. He didn’t say a word to me, neither that day nor…’ Again tears flowed, and she looked straight at me. ‘That was the last time I saw him! Do you understand? I could never take him in my arms again, never try to help him with all the rest, all the pain in his life which had made him what he was. I lost him that day. Lost him!’
‘You unlocked the door, you said?’
‘Yes, I did! I didn’t ring the bell. Or if I did, no one opened up. And I didn’t have a row with Svein, either. Not that day. I did not do it. There was never a clash between us which resulted in him falling down the stairs.’
‘You just made that up to make the death sound credible, is that it?’
She nodded mutely.
‘He hadn’t been brutal to you, either? All the character witnesses refused to believe that.’
She whispered: ‘No, that was lies, too. A pretext.’
‘Lie after lie after lie,’ I mumbled. ‘And your solicitor… what did he think?’
Langeland exclaimed: ‘I took her at her word. I always trust my clients!’
I turned back to him. ‘But you and Vibecke had been on intimate terms since university. Are you asking me to believe that she didn’t tell you what really happened, not even you? Or did you choose to trust her blindly, out of consideration for Jan? You too?’
‘Out of consideration for…?’
‘Yes? After all, he was your son. Was he not?’