Anne Holt - The Blind Goddess

The second book in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series, 2012

Copyright © 1993 by Anne Holt

English language translation copyright © 2012 by Tom Geddes

Originally published in 1993 in Norwegian as Blind gudinne

The man was dead. Conclusively, beyond all reasonable doubt. She could tell instantly. Afterwards she couldn’t really explain her absolute certainty. Maybe it was the way he was lying, his face hidden by the rotting leaves, a dog turd right by his ear. No drunk with any self-respect lies down next to a dog turd.

She rolled him over carefully. His entire face was missing. It was impossible to recognise anything of what must once have been a person with an individual identity. The chest was a man’s, with three holes in it.

She had to turn away and retch violently, bringing up nothing but a bitter taste in her mouth and painful cramps in her stomach, letting the corpse fall forward again. She realised too late that she had moved it just enough for the head to land in the excrement, which was now spread all over the drenched dark-blond hair. That was the sight that finally made her throw up, spattering him with the tomato-coloured contents of her stomach. It seemed almost like a derisive gesture of the living towards the dead. The peas from her dinner weren’t yet digested, and they lay there like toxic-green full stops over the dead man’s back.

Karen Borg started running. She called her dog, and put it on the lead she always carried mostly for the sake of appearances. The dog scampered excitedly alongside her until it realised that its mistress was sobbing and gasping, and then it decided to contribute its own anxious whining and whimpering to a chorus of lamentation.

They ran and ran and ran.

Police headquarters in Oslo, Grønlandsleiret, number 44. An address with no historical resonance; not like 19 Møllergata, the old police headquarters, and very different from Victoria Terrasse, with its grand government buildings. Number 44 Grønlandsleiret had a dreary ring to it, grey and modern, with a hint of public service incompetence and internal wranglings. A huge and slightly curved building, as if the winds had been too strong to withstand, it stood framed by a house of God on one side and a prison on the other, with an area of demolished housing on Enerhaugen at the rear, and only a broad expanse of grass fronting it as protection against the city’s most polluted and trafficky streets. The entrance was cheerless and forbidding, rather small in proportion to the two-hundred-metre length of the façade, squashed in obliquely, almost concealed, as if to make approach difficult, and escape impossible.

At half past nine on Monday morning Karen Borg, a lawyer, came walking up the incline of the paved path to this doorway. The distance was just far enough to make your clothes feel clammy. She was sure the hill must have been constructed deliberately so that everyone would enter Oslo police headquarters in a slight sweat.

She pushed against the heavy metal doors and went into the foyer. If she’d had more time, she’d have noticed the invisible barrier across the floor. Norwegians bound for foreign shores were queueing for their red passports on the sunny side of the enormous room. On the north side, packed in beneath the gallery, were the dark-skinned people, apprehensive, hands damp with perspiration after hours of waiting to be told their fate in the Police Immigration Department.

But Karen Borg was late. She cast a glance up to the gallery round the walls: blue doors and linoleum floor on one side, and yellow on the other, southern, side. On the west side two tunnel-like corridors in red and green disappeared into nothingness. The atrium extended seven floors in height. She would observe later how wasteful the design was: the offices themselves were tiny. When she was more familiar with the building she would discover that the important facilities were on the sixth floor: the commissioner’s office and the canteen. And above that, as invisible from the foyer as the Lord in His heaven, was the Special Branch.

“Like a kindergarten,” Karen Borg thought as she became aware of the colour coding. “It’s to make sure everyone finds their way to the right place.”

She was heading for the second floor, blue zone. The three lifts had conspired simultaneously to make her walk up the stairs. Having watched the floor indicators flash up and down for nearly five minutes without illuminating “Ground,” she had allowed herself to be persuaded.

She had the four-figure room number jotted on a slip of paper. The office was easy to find. The blue door was covered in paste marks where attempts had been made to remove things, but Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had stubbornly resisted and were grinning at her with only half their faces and no legs. It would have looked better if they’d been left alone. Karen Borg knocked. A voice responded and she went in.

Håkon Sand didn’t appear to be in a good mood. There was an aroma of aftershave, and a damp towel lay over the only chair in the room apart from the one occupied by Sand himself. She could see his hair was wet.

He picked up the towel, threw it into a corner, and invited her to sit down. The chair was damp. She sat anyway.

Håkon Sand and Karen Borg were old friends who never saw each other. They always exchanged the customary pleasantries, like How are you, it’s been a long time, we must have dinner one day . A regular routine whenever they happened to meet, in the street or at the homes of mutual friends who were better at keeping in touch.

“I’m glad you came. Very pleased, in fact,” he said suddenly. It didn’t look like it. His smile of welcome was strained and tired after twenty-four hours on duty.

“The guy’s refusing to say anything at all. He just keeps repeating that he wants you as his lawyer.”

Karen Borg lit a cigarette. She defied all the warnings and smoked Prince Originals. The “Now I’m smoking Prince too” type, with maximum tar and nicotine and a frightening scarlet warning label from the Department of Health. No one cadged a smoke from Karen Borg.

“It ought to be easy enough to make him see that’s impossible. For one thing, I’m a witness in the case, since I was the one who found the body, and second, I’m not proficient in criminal law. I haven’t handled criminal cases since my exams. And that was seven years ago.”

“Eight,” he corrected her. “It’s eight years since we took our exams. You came third in our year, out of a hundred and fourteen candidates. I was fifth from the bottom. Of course you’re proficient in criminal law if you want to be.”

He was annoyed, and it was contagious. She was suddenly aware of the atmosphere that used to come between them when they were students. Her consistently glowing results were in stark contrast to his own stumbling progress towards the final degree exam that he would never even have scraped a pass in without her. She had pushed and coaxed and threatened him through it all, as if her own success would be easier to bear with this burden on her shoulders. For some reason which they could never fathom, perhaps because they’d never talked about it, they both felt she was the one who had the debt of gratitude to him, and not the other way round. It had irritated her ever since, this feeling of owing him something. Why they had been so inseparable throughout their student years was something nobody understood. They had never been lovers, never so much as a little necking when drunk, but a mismatched pair of friends, quarrelsome yet bound by a mutual concern that gave them an invulnerability to many of the vicissitudes of student life.