Anne Holt - Fear Not

‘That’s nothing to do with you.’

‘What?’ Somewhat inappropriately, Adam started to laugh. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said that’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Right. Well, I think we’ll have to…’

Silence fell once more.

‘We can talk about this later,’ he added eventually, raising a hand in Erik’s direction as he left the room.

The surprising and absurd answer had made him forget for a moment how much he needed the bathroom. As he closed the door behind him he could feel that it was urgent.

Along the hallway, second on the right.

He mumbled to himself, placed his hand on the knob and opened the door.

A bedroom. Not large, maybe ten square metres. Rectangular, with the window on the short wall facing the door. Under the window stood a neatly made single bed with lilac bed linen. On the pillow lay a folded item of clothing. A nightdress, Adam assumed, inhaling deeply through his nose.

Definitely not a guest room.

The sweet smell of sleep mingled with a faint, almost imperceptible perfume.

It wasn’t possible to open the door fully, it bumped against a cupboard on the other side.

He ought to close the door and find the toilet.

There was no desk in the little room, just a fairly large bedside table with a pile of books and a lamp beneath a shelf containing four framed family portraits. He recognized Erik and Lukas straight away, plus an old black-and-white photograph which presumably showed the little family many years ago, when Lukas was small, on a boat in the summer.

On the wall between the cupboard and the bed there was a painting in strong shades of red, and a number of clothes hung on the back of a wooden chair at the foot of the bed. The curtains were thick, dark, and closed.

That was it.

‘Excuse me! Not in there!’

Adam stepped back into the hallway. Lukas Lysgaard came quickly towards him, hands spread wide. ‘What are you doing? Snooping around the house? Who gave you permission to…?’

‘Along the hallway, second on the right, you said! I just wanted to-’

‘Second on the left . Here!’

Lukas pointed crossly at the door opposite.

‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to-’

‘Could you get a move on, please? I’d like to be alone with my father.’

Lukas Lysgaard must be around thirty-five. A man with an ordinary appearance and unusually broad shoulders. His hair was dark with deep waves, and his eyes were presumably blue. It was difficult to tell; they were narrow and hidden behind glasses reflecting the glow of the ceiling light.

‘My mother had problems sleeping sometimes,’ he said as Adam opened the correct door. ‘When that happened she liked to read. She didn’t want to disturb my father, so…’ He nodded towards the small bedroom.

‘I understand,’ said Adam, smiling before he went into the toilet. He took his time.

He would give a great deal to have another look in that bedroom. It annoyed him that he hadn’t been more alert. Noticed more. For example, he couldn’t remember what kind of clothes had been hanging over the chair: dressy clothes for Christmas Eve, or ordinary everyday clothes. Nor had he noticed the titles of the books on the bedside table. There was no reason to assume that anyone in this family had anything whatsoever to do with the murder of a wife and mother who was obviously loved. But Adam Stubo knew better than most that the solution to a murder was usually to be found with the victim. It could be something the family knew nothing about. Or it could be a detail, something neither the victim nor anyone else had picked up.

But it could be important all the same.

At any rate, one thing was certain, he thought as he zipped up his trousers and flushed the toilet. Eva Karin Lysgaard must have had serious problems when it came to sleeping if she sought refuge in that little bedroom every time she had a bad night. A better explanation was that husband and wife slept in separate rooms.

He washed his hands, dried them thoroughly and went back into the hallway.

Lukas Lysgaard was waiting for him. Without a word he opened the front door.

‘No doubt you’ll be in touch,’ he said, without offering his hand.

‘Of course.’

Adam pulled on his coat and stepped into the small porch. He was about to say Merry Christmas, but stopped himself just in time.

‘All the best!’

Detective Inspector Silje Sørensen ran up the steps, waving goodbye to a colleague who had stopped for a chat after leaving the police headquarters, which was now virtually empty. All the public departments were closed apart from the main desk, where a yawning officer had nodded to her through the glass wall as she dashed in through the entrance to Grønlandsleiret 44.

‘I’ve got the kids in the car!’ she shouted by way of explanation. ‘Just going to fetch my skis, I left them in the office and…’

Silje Sørensen ran up to her floor. She was out of breath as she rounded the corner and set off along the corridor, then slowed down as she approached the door of her office. She fumbled with her keys. They were ice cold after lying in the car for a whole day. Besides which she had far too many keys on the bunch; she had no idea what half of them were for. Eventually, she found the right one and unlocked the door.

Once upon a time the architect had won an award for this building. It was hard to understand why. Once you were inside the narrow entrance, you were fooled into thinking that light and space were key. The vast foyer extended several floors up, surrounded by galleries in an angular horseshoe formation. The offices, however, were little cubes linked to long, claustrophobic corridors. Silje always felt it was cramped and stuffy, however much she opened the windows.

From the outside, police headquarters looked as if it had not withstood the changing seasons well, but simply clung on at an odd angle to the hill between Oslo’s main prison and Grønland Church. During her fifteen years with the police service, Silje Sørensen had seen the community, the state and optimistic city enthusiasts slowly attempt to upgrade the area. But the beautiful Middelalder Park lay much too far away to cast its glow over the battered building housing police headquarters. The Opera House was no more than a slanting white roof, just visible from her office beyond seedy areas beneath a lid of exhaust fumes.

She would have liked to open the window, but she didn’t have much time.

Her eyes swept over the desk. She was pedantically tidy when it came to her office, unlike every other area of her life. The overfilled in-tray at the edge of the desk had pricked her conscience when she left on the Friday before Christmas. Her out-tray was empty, and she shuddered at the thought of the stress that was waiting for her on the first day back after the holiday.

In the middle of the desk lay a file she didn’t recognize. She leaned over and read the yellow Post-it note stuck to the front.

DI Sørensen

Enclosed please find documentation relating to Hawre Ghani, presumed date of birth 16.12.1991. Please contact me asap.

DCI Harald Bull tel. 937***** / 231*****

The kids would be bad-tempered and impossible if she was away too long. On the other hand, they were sitting quietly, each with their Nintendo DS when she left them in the back of the car, illegally parked and with the engine running. They had received the games yesterday and were still fascinated by something new, so she thought she might be OK for a while.

She sat down, still wearing her coat, and opened the file.

The first thing she saw was a photograph. It was black and white and grainy, with pronounced shadows. It looked like an enlargement of a picture from some kind of ID document, but didn’t exactly fulfil the new criteria for passport photographs. The boy – because this was definitely a boy rather than a grown man – had his eyes half-closed. His mouth was open. Sometimes people who had been taken into custody pulled faces when they had their photo taken in order to make themselves unrecognizable. For some reason she didn’t think this boy had been playing up. It struck her that the picture had been taken in a rush, and that the photographer simply couldn’t be bothered to take another one.