‘Unauthorised!’ boomed Bjørn Brevik’s voice. ‘This is a news case, and it happened within this paper’s very walls. Here we say what goes!’
‘Over my dead body,’ snapped Isachsen.
‘Just wait till Muus gets here,’ muttered Helleve. ‘He’ll eat him alive.’
Trond Furebø cleared his throat. ‘I’ll have a word with him.’
‘Do you need me any more?’ asked Holger Skagestøl.
‘No,’ said Helleve curtly. ‘But don’t leave the premises until we’ve registered who was here when it happened.’
‘But is there really any need…?’ Skagestøl glanced at the window and the back courtyard.
‘Yes,’ said Helleve even more curtly.
Holger Skagestøl glowered in my direction before he went, as if to suggest that everything was surely my fault.
‘Well, he certainly didn’t do it personally,’ I said.
Helleve looked at me. ‘Who?’
‘Bjelland! He always gets somebody to do his dirty work. But if you lot find out who did it, you can nail him good and proper this time.’
He stood there, notebook in hand. ‘Want to wait till Muus gets here, or have you said all you have to say for now, Veum?’
‘Have you got it all down?’
‘Yep.’
I glanced at the window. I could hear the distant beat of war drums. Mother headache was coming on. ‘In that case, I think I’ll go home. You know where to find me if anything crops up.’
‘OK. Dismissed,’ said Helleve and turned back to Laila Mongstad.
I took a last long look at her. But that wasn’t how I wanted to remember her. I wanted to remember her as the promise I’d once held in my arms, the warm eyes, the big smile, the soft lips. I wanted to remember her as she was when alive, not as an empty shell. I wanted to remember her.
But I didn’t get off scot-free, after all.
I met Muus in the corridor with the police doctor at his heels.
‘Veum,’ he growled from a few yards away.
‘Why don’t you slow down a bit? Wait till I’ve retired, for God’s sake! Don’t find us any more of them! How many times do I have to ask you?’
‘This is something I’d rather not have found, Muus.’
‘Give this man a shot of embalming fluid,’ he said to the doctor as they passed.
‘Is it any good for headaches?’ I asked, but neither of them bothered to answer.
I took the lift down, handed in my visitor’s badge at reception and was duly checked out under the beady eye of a zealous officer.
Once outside I stood and filled my lungs with one deep breath after another.
It had stopped snowing. On the other side of the road, the Grieg Concert Hall looked more than ever like a ship that had run aground. Behind the Concert Hall, Fløifjellet, Vidden and Ulriken rose up like peaks of meringue dusted with icing sugar. The television mast up on Ulriken belonged to the same family as the Concert Halclass="underline" a rocket that had never been launched, a monument to a space programme no one could afford to carry through.
New snow with fresh tracks.
I wondered…
But not long enough to stop me walking up the hill, getting into the car, swallowing two headache tablets and driving home.
I parked on the steepest part of Blekeveien, lucky to have found a space between two other vehicles.
Outside the main entrance I stood fumbling a bit with the keys. Perhaps that was why I didn’t notice them until they were right behind me. Kenneth Persen grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back in a police grip. Fred held something sharp and cold against my neck, growling: ‘Bit bloody late aren’t you, Veum? We were starting to think you wouldn’t turn up.’
‘What do you want?’
‘To invite you for a drive,’ said Fred.
‘Your last trip,’ Kenneth Persen added, giving my arm an extra twist for luck and making me wince with pain.
Forty-eight
‘WELCOME TO The Short Stay Hotel, Veum,’ I heard Birger Bjelland’s voice say, as his two henchmen released their grip on me and sent me flying headlong onto the dusty concrete floor. The bright torch he had pointed straight in my face had blinded me so it was impossible to see anything more than his silhouette.
I turned partway round.
Fred and Kenneth Persen shone their own torches into my eyes. One was standing on either side behind me, so that I found myself in the middle of something like an equilateral triangle. There was no doubt about who was in control of the situation.
They had put me on the floor in the back of the car, but we hadn’t driven far, and when they led me from the car over to the derelict factory building, I’d seen where we were. We were on an industrial site in Sandviken, right on the edge of the sea, behind a tall wire fence and on something that looked like a building site, apart from the rusty remains of pulleys, cranes and signal towers. The ground-floor windows of the large, greyish-white building were securely boarded up. Higher up, dark holes gaped where the windows had been smashed.
‘Have you checked whether he’s wired?’ asked Birger Bjelland. ‘No bugs anywhere?’
‘No,’ Fred muttered behind me.
‘Get to it, then!’
Kenneth Persen kept his distance, while Fred searched me with a zeal that suggested it turned him on.
‘Pack it in,’ I mumbled ‘You’ve no chance with me, you know.’
‘Shut it or I’ll pull it right off!’ he hissed back. Aloud, he said: ‘He’s clean, Birger!’ Then he moved away.
The adrenaline pumping through my veins was like a tidal flow inside, a kind of dizziness, exhilaration almost. I felt the slight aftertaste of the headache tablets mingle with something new and sour, straight from the stomach.
I turned my face slowly in the direction of Birger Bjelland. ‘What is it you want?’
‘I thought you were interested in hearing about my plans, Veum.’ Although still sounding as sanctimonious as ever, this was nevertheless the voice of someone about to either excommunicate me or banish me straight to hell.
‘Which plans?’
He swung the torch around. The beam swept over the walls, the concrete staircase leading up the building and the marks left on the floor by dismantled machinery, before ending up on my face again.
‘My hotel plans. I thought you’d heard about them. “Hotel Seaside” I thought we might call it, and it’s going to be quite some hotel, I promise you. A view over Byfjorden, an indoor swimming pool on the top floor with sliding glass doors that can open out to form a classy sun terrace when the weather’s right…’
‘Just for a day?’
‘Deluxe suites and ordinary tourist rooms, a restaurant with a dance floor and gourmet corner, a gambling area in the basement, all within the law of course…’
‘Of course.’
‘But we’re not going to start work until we’ve got the finance sorted out, an alcohol licence and full backing from all the local bodies.’
‘No problem for you when you can pay under the counter.’
‘It’s getting harder and harder with your sort going round town every blessed day, spreading shit about me!’
‘Oh, so that’s what you wanted to talk about.’
The cone of light bobbed about again. ‘Every single day this godforsaken dump stands empty I lose money on it!’
‘Most people make duff investments now and again. Some more than others, of course.’
He moved closer, and the light became harsher. ‘Each time you badmouth me to the law, it makes it that bit harder for them to recommend issuing an alcohol licence; and I do get to know when you’ve been down there, Veum, don’t worry!’
‘Isn’t Isachsen one of your poker gang?’
‘Each time there’s some shit about me in the papers, it becomes harder to get credit from government loan bodies.’
‘But you can get rid of reporters, can’t you?’ When there was no reaction from him, I added: ‘Anyway, I thought you were into loans yourself, with an interest rate well above the knees you’ve capped when the loans aren’t paid back.’