Anne Holt - The Blind Goddess

He was dressed now. Karen Borg was sitting with him in an office on the second floor. They weren’t exactly having a conversation, more a monologue with intermittent mumbles from the other party.

“Peter Strup phoned me at the beginning of the week. He said he knew a friend of yours, and wanted to help you.”

No reaction, just a darker and sulkier look around his eyes.

“Do you know Strup, the lawyer? Do you know what friend he’s talking about?”

“Yes. I want you.”

“Fine.”

Her patience was nearly at an end. After a quarter of an hour of endeavouring to get something more out of him, she was on the point of giving up. Then the Dutchman unexpectedly slumped forward in his chair and in a gesture of despair sank his head in his hands, resting his elbows on his knees. He rubbed his scalp, raised his eyes, and began to talk.

“I can see you’re confused. I’m bloody confused myself. I made the biggest mistake of my life last Friday. It was a cold, premeditated, and cruel murder. I got money for it. Or rather, I was promised money for it. I haven’t seen a penny yet, and will probably have my own creditors on my back for years to come. I’ve been in this overheated cell for a week now thinking about what could have come over me.”

Suddenly he burst into tears. It was so abrupt and unforeseen that Karen Borg was taken completely by surprise. The boy-for now he looked more like a teenager-was leaning over with his head in his lap as if he were bracing himself for a crash landing in an aeroplane, and his back was heaving. After a few moments he straightened up to get more air, and she could see that his face was already blotchy. His nose was running, and, being quite unable to think of anything to say, Karen pulled out a pack of tissues from her briefcase and passed it to him. He dried his nose and eyes, but didn’t stop sobbing. Karen had no idea how to console a remorseful murderer, but nevertheless pulled her chair closer and took his hand.

They stayed sitting in that position for over ten minutes. It felt more like an hour-probably for both of them, Karen thought. At last the young man’s breathing became somewhat less ragged. She let go of his hand and soundlessly pushed back her chair, as if to erase the short period of intimacy and trust.

“Perhaps you could tell me a bit more now,” she said in a quiet voice, offering him a fresh cigarette. He took it with a trembling hand, like a bad actor. She knew it was genuine, and gave him a light.

“I don’t know what to say,” he stammered. “The fact is that I’ve killed a man. But I’ve done a lot of other things too, and I don’t want to talk myself into a life sentence. And I don’t know how to speak about one thing without revealing others.”

Karen was in some perplexity. She was accustomed to treating information with the greatest discretion and confidentiality. She wouldn’t have had many clients had she not possessed that quality. But confidentiality up till now had been about finance, industrial secrets, and business tactics. She had never received a confidence about anything unequivocally criminal, and was in a quandary about what she could keep to herself without falling foul of the law. But before she’d even thought through the problem, she decided to put the Dutchman’s mind at rest.

“Whatever you say to me will be between the two of us. I’m your lawyer, and bound by the rules of professional confidentiality.”

After a few final sighs he blew his nose vigorously into a wet tissue and began to tell her all about it.

“I was in a sort of syndicate. I say ‘sort of,’ because quite honestly I don’t know very much about it. I know of two others in it, but they’re people at my own level: we collect and deliver, and sell a little now and then. My contact runs a secondhand car business north of the city centre, up in Sagene. But it’s pretty big, the whole operation. I think. There’ve never been any problems getting paid for the jobs I’ve done. A bloke like myself can travel to the Netherlands as often as he wants without arousing any suspicion. I visited my mother every time.”

At the thought of his mother he broke down again.

“I’ve never been in trouble with the police before, neither here nor back home,” he sniffed. “Oh hell, how long do you think I’ll get?”

Karen knew very well what a murderer could expect. And maybe even a drug courier. But she said nothing, just shrugged her shoulders.

“I’ve probably made about ten to fifteen runs in all,” he went on. “Unbelievably easy job, in fact. I would be given a rendezvous in Amsterdam in advance, always a different place. The goods would be completely sealed. In rubber. I would swallow the packets, without actually knowing what was in them.”

He paused for a moment before correcting himself.

“Well, I guessed it was heroin. Must have known it was, really. About a hundred grams each time. That’s more than two thousand fixes. Everything went okay, and I got my twenty thousand on delivery. Plus all expenses paid.”

His voice was thick, but he was explaining himself clearly enough. He sat tearing at the tissues, which were just about shredded to pieces already. He stared at his hands throughout, as if he couldn’t believe they had so brutally killed another person exactly a week before.

“There must be quite a lot of people involved. Even if I don’t know more than a couple myself. The whole thing’s too big. One scruffy spiv in Sagene couldn’t run it on his own. He doesn’t look bright enough. But I haven’t asked any questions. I did the job, got my money, and kept my mouth shut. Until ten days ago.”

Karen Borg felt exhausted. She was caught up in a situation over which she had no control whatsoever. Her brain registered the information she was receiving, while she simultaneously made febrile attempts to work out what she might do with it. She could feel her cheeks reddening and perspiration beginning to dampen her armpits. She knew she was going to hear about Ludvig Sandersen now, the man she’d found last Friday, a discovery that had haunted her at night and tormented her by day ever since. She clutched her chair tightly.

“I was up with the garage guy last Thursday,” Han van der Kerch went on. He was calmer now, and had finally relinquished the remnants of the tissues and dropped them in the bin on the floor by his side. He looked at her for the first time that day. “I hadn’t done a job for several months. I was expecting to hear something any moment. I’ve had a phone put in my room, so that I’m not dependent on the communal one in the corridor. I never pick up the receiver before it’s rung four times. If it rings twice and then stops, and then rings twice more, I know that I have to meet him at two o’clock in the morning. Smart system. Not a single call is ever registered between us on my phone, yet he can contact me. Well, I turned up last Thursday. But this time it wasn’t about drugs. There was someone in the syndicate who’d got a bit too big for his boots. Had begun to demand money from one of the guys at the top. Something like that. I didn’t get to know much, just that he was a threat to all of us. I was terrified.”

He smiled, a wry, self-deprecating smile.

“In the two years I’ve been doing this, I’d never really thought about the possibility of getting caught. In a way I felt invulnerable. Hell, I was shit scared when I thought someone might step out of line. It had never occurred to me that anyone from within might be a threat. It was actually the fear of being caught that made me say yes to the job. I’d get two hundred thousand kroner for it. Bloody tempting. The idea was not simply that he should die. It was also to act as a warning to all the others in the organisation. That was why I smashed in his face.”