Anne Holt - Fear Not

Clever bastard, thought Silje with a sigh.

Marianne Kleive , she wrote on the last sheet of paper.

19/12/08 .

She put the cap back on the pen and took two steps back. She felt the edge of the desk behind her legs and sat down.

Three murders. All unsolved.

Runar Hansen was her guilty conscience. She couldn’t even bring herself to look through the thin file. Instead, she stared at the name, the anonymous name of a drug addict who had been beaten and abused in Sofienberg Park, apparently without anyone taking much notice. All Runar Hansen had merited was a quick examination of the crime scene some hours after his body had been found, a post-mortem report, and a brief mention in the evening paper. Plus two interviews with witnesses, whose only contribution was that Runar Hansen had no fixed abode and was unemployed, and that he had a sister called Trude.

At least something was happening in the investigation into the murder of Hawre Ghani. The sketch by the police artist had been distributed internally. It had been decided not to make it public yet, because experience indicated this would lead to a flood of calls. The man’s appearance was so ordinary that there would be a deluge of callers insisting that they recognized him. Instead, Knut Bork was still working on the prostitution angle. Silje had ordered a new and extensive investigation into the boy’s life since he came to Norway. If possible, she was hoping to obtain a clearer picture of Hawre Ghani’s tragic fate.

Work on the Marianne Kleive case was proceeding at full throttle.

The murder of the 42-year-old nursery school teacher had all the ingredients of a juicy media story. The private pictures obtained by Verdens Gang just two hours after the murder was made public showed an unusually attractive woman. Thick, wavy blonde hair, a slim figure with long legs and an athletic appearance. Exactly the kind of lesbian the media loved. There was something of Gro Hammerseng about her, Silje thought, as she pinned up the front page she had torn out of VG a few days earlier. And even if her wife, Synnøve Hessel, wasn’t exactly a celebrity, she occupied such a central position in the Norwegian film world that the papers were able to use their favourite phrase ‘the noted and award-winning’ when writing about the victim’s grieving widow – who also looked pretty good, incidentally, even wearing a padded jacket with her hair blowing all over the place at a height of 5,208 metres at North Base Camp in Nepal.

The fact that the murder had taken place in the respectable Hotel Continental also helped. Two days after the body had been found, VG dedicated an entire page to an ‘at home with’ report on a man named Fritiof Hansen, an insignificant individual who was some kind of caretaker at the hotel. He had found the body, and thanks to his passion for the TV series CSI he had managed to keep everyone away from the scene until the police arrived to secure any evidence. In the picture he was sitting in his best armchair with a glass of beer and a small packet of crisps, looking as if all the cares of the world were resting on his shoulders.

Sometimes Silje Sørensen wished the mass media didn’t exist. Sometimes she would have liked to abolish the freedom of the press.

She reached for her coffee cup.

It was empty.

She frowned and looked from one name to the other. She groped for the felt-tip without taking her eyes off the noticeboard. Quickly, she pulled the cap off with her teeth, went over and wrote SOFIENBERG PARK beneath Runar Hansen’s name and the date of his death. Under Hawre’s name she wrote UNDERAGE MALE PROSTITUTION , and finally – across the top of the photo of Marianne Kleive on Gaustatoppen Mountain in the sunshine, wearing a bikini top, cut-off jeans and sturdy walking boots – she wrote CIVIL PARTNERSHIP .

As she was settling back on her desk, there was a knock on the door. She took the cap of the pen out of her mouth and shouted: ‘Come in!’

Knut Bork did as he was told.

‘Hi,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I thought I’d just-’

‘Stand here,’ said Silje Sørensen. ‘Come and stand next to me.’

DC Bork shrugged his shoulders and obliged.

‘What are you up to? What’s that?’ He nodded in the direction of the noticeboard.

‘Those are the three murders I’m dealing with at the moment,’ said Silje.

‘Three is too many.’

‘I had four. I turned one down. Does anything strike you about those three?’

‘Does anything strike me? Well, I’d need to look through the files and-’

‘No. You’re familiar with the cases, Knut. Just look at what’s up on the board.’

He frowned without saying anything.

‘Look at what I’ve written underneath the names!’

‘ Sofienberg Park ,’ he read. ‘ Underage male prostitution . Civil partnership .’

He still couldn’t see any connection.

‘What’s Sofienberg Park famous for?’ she asked.

‘Well… I know! Those ambulance drivers who-’

‘No. Well, that too, but what else? I’m not thinking about the area to the west of Sofienberg Church, but the part behind it. On the eastern side.’

‘Gay sex,’ he said immediately. ‘Buying and selling and mutual exchanges. Not a place I’d want to go in the dark.’

‘Exactly,’ said Silje with a wan smile. ‘That’s where Runar Hansen was found. He was murdered on a raw, wet November night at some point between midnight and half past. That’s about all we’ve managed to accomplish in his case. Establishing when he was killed, I mean.’

‘Was he gay?’

‘No idea. But for the time being, just focus on the reputation of the place. Do you see where I’m going with this?’

She looked at him. A shadow of surprise passed over his eyes as he suddenly got the point.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, running a hand over his fair stubble. ‘It’s strange that LHH haven’t started shouting the odds!’

For a long time, LHH – the gay and lesbian movement – had been trying to get the justice department to take violence against homosexuals seriously. The problem, Silje Sørensen had always thought, was that attacks on homosexuals rarely differed significantly from all the other attacks that happened when people had been drinking. Attacks on women. On men. On heterosexuals and homosexuals. People drank. Became aggressive. Fought, stabbed, raped and murdered. For every homosexual victim, Silje could come up with a hundred heterosexuals. She couldn’t understand why they made such a fuss about it.

But this was striking.

‘Runar Hansen is in a park where it’s well known that homosexual services are bought, sold and exchanged,’ she said slowly. ‘Hawre Ghani disappears with a male punter. Marianne Kleive is married to a woman. They were all murdered in different ways, in different places, and none of them had any connection with each other while they were alive. As far as we know, that is. But…’

Her eyes narrowed.

‘I’m responsible for three completely independent murder investigations, and each one has a possible link to homosexuality. What are the odds on that?’

‘Bloody long,’ said Knut Bork, starting to chew on a thumbnail. ‘What the fuck is going on? And seriously, Silje, why hasn’t anybody noticed a possible link before?’

She didn’t reply. They stood in silence gazing at the noticeboard. For a long time.

‘Nobody cares about the first case,’ she said suddenly. ‘Nobody knows anything about the second case. People might have read in the paper about a body being found in the harbour, and there might have been a few lines saying that the dead man turned out to be a young asylum seeker. But that’s all. As far as Marianne Kleive is concerned, that case is…’