Anne Holt - Fear Not

But now he was furious.

‘This is just hysteria! The man who was talking to Kristiane was a perfectly ordinary guy who had obviously noticed what kind of… what kind of child she is. He was very kind, and Kristiane smiled and waved to him as we left. She’s standing here now and…’

Johanne could hear Kristiane’s usual dam-di-rum-ram in the background. She started to cry. Silently, so that she wouldn’t upset Ragnhild any more than she already had.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘I’m sorry, Isak. I mean it. I was just really, really scared.’

‘I think we both were,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation, his voice back to normal. ‘But everything’s worked out fine. I assume you’d prefer it if I brought her straight home today? What do you think?’

‘Thank you. Thank you so much, Isak. It would be wonderful to have her back home.’

‘I’ll make up my time with her another weekend or something.’

‘Perhaps you could stay as well,’ Johanne heard herself saying.

‘Stay over with you? Great!’

In her mind’s eye she could see a glint in those dark blue eyes that narrowed to slits in his always unshaven face when he smiled that crooked, sweet smile that she had once been so in love with.

‘I’ll be there in half an hour,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to pick up any shopping while we’re here?’

‘No thanks. Just bring yourselves. Just come.’

She ended the call, overwhelmed by an immense weariness. She rested her arms on the roof of the car. The metal was so cold that her skin contracted. Perhaps she could tell Isak about the man in the garden on Christmas Day. If she explained that her fear hadn’t come from nowhere, that she had a good reason to be anxious, that the man had known Kristiane’s name although neither of the children knew him, if she…

No.

Slowly she straightened up and dried her tears with the back of her hand.

‘Out you come,’ she said, bending down to Ragnhild with a smile. ‘We’re not going to Sandvika after all. Isak and Kristiane are coming here instead.’

‘But we were going to watch a film and pretend we were at the cinema!’ Ragnhild complained loudly. ‘Just you and me!’

‘Well, we can do that with the others. It’ll be brilliant. Come on, out you get.’

Raghnild slid reluctantly from her child seat and climbed out of the car. As they walked back across the gravel, she suddenly stopped and put her hands on her hips.

‘Mummy,’ she said severely. ‘First of all we were in a big hurry to get to Storvika Sandsenter. Now we’re going back inside. We were going to pretend we were at the cinema, just you and me, and now suddenly Isak and Kristiane are coming. Daddy’s quite right.’

‘About what?’ said Johanne with a smile, stroking her youngest daughter’s hair.

‘Sometimes you just can’t make up your mind. But you’re still the best mummy in the world. The very best supermummy in the whole wide world, with bells on.’

Detective Inspector Silje Sørensen of the violent crime division in Oslo had drunk two cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream and was feeling sick.

The photographs in front of her didn’t help.

This year Christmas Eve had fallen on a weekday, which was perfect for those who wanted to have the longest possible time off work. The twenty-third of December, when some people also held celebrations, was on a Tuesday, so most people had also taken the Monday off, even though it was a normal working day, and stayed away on Tuesday. Christmas Day and Boxing Day were bank holidays anyway, and today, the day after Boxing Day, it was Saturday, and therefore a working day for those within the public sector, but for the less conscientious Christmas 2008 was an opportunity to take two weeks off work, since there was no point in going in when New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day fell in the middle of the following week.

Norway was working at a quarter speed, but not Silje Sørensen.

The sight of her full in-tray had put her in a foul mood. In the end it was easy to convince the family it would be best for all of them if she put in an extra day at work.

Or perhaps it was the thought of Hawre Ghani that distracted her, whatever she tried to do.

She flicked quickly through the photographs of the body, took out the picture of the boy when he was alive, plus a new document, and closed the file.

On the afternoon of Christmas Day she had phoned DCI Harald Bull, as he had requested. He wasn’t all that interested in discussing work in the middle of the holiday. When he wrote ‘as soon as possible’, he meant 5 January. Despite the fact that the overtime budget had been blown long ago, they agreed to give DC Knut Bork the job of checking the Kurdish asylum seeker’s background. Bork was young, single and ambitious, and Silje Sørensen was impressed by the report he had completed that morning and left in her office.

She glanced through the pages.

Hawre Ghani had come to Norway eighteen months ago, allegedly at the age of fifteen. No parents. Since he had no ID papers, the Norwegian authorities quickly became suspicious of his age.

Despite doubts about the boy’s date of birth, he was placed in an asylum centre in Ringebu. There were several others like him in the centre, asylum seekers who were alone and under the age of eighteen. He ran away after three days. Since then he had been more or less permanently on the run, apart from a few days in custody every time the street-smart youngster wasn’t quite smart enough.

A year ago he turned to prostitution.

According to the report he sold himself at a high price, often to just about anybody. On at least one occasion Hawre Ghani had robbed a punter, something which had been discovered by chance. He had stolen a pair of Nike Shocks from Sportshuset in Storo. A security guard had overpowered him, got him down on the floor and sat on him until the police arrived three quarters of an hour later. When he was searched they found a beige Mont Blanc wallet containing credit cards, papers and receipts bearing the name of a well-known male sports journalist. He wasn’t interested in pressing charges, DC Bork’s report stated matter-of-factly, but several colleagues who had some knowledge of prostitution were able to confirm that both the boy and the robbery victim were known to them.

On one occasion an attempt had been made to link Hawre up with a Kurd from northern Iraq who had a temporary residence permit, but without any right to bring in his family. The man, who had been allowed to stay on in Norway for more than ten years and spoke fluent Norwegian, had been working part-time as a youth leader in Gamlebyn. So far his projects working with difficult refugee children had been very successful. Things didn’t go so well with Hawre. After three weeks the boy had persuaded four mates from the club to help him break into some basement offices; they also tried to empty an ATM with a crowbar, and stole and smashed up a four-year-old Audi TT.

Silje Sørensen stared at the picture of the immature young man with the big nose. His lips looked as if they belonged to a ten-year-old. His skin was smooth.

Perhaps she was naive.

Of course she was naive, even after all these years in the force, where her illusions burst like bubbles as she rose through the ranks.

But this boy was young. Of course it was impossible to say whether he was fifteen or seventeen, but the photograph had been taken after his arrival in Norway, and she could swear that at that point it would be quite some time before he came of age.

However, that didn’t matter now.

Slowly she put the photograph down right on the edge of the desk. It would stay there until she had solved this case. If it was true that someone had taken Hawre Ghani’s life – as the information gathered so far indicated – then she was going to find out who that person was.