Anne Holt - 1222

‘And the dog?’

‘The dog? It growled and stuck its nose through the gap in the door. Because it wanted to get out, I presume.’

‘And you were frightened, of course.’

Geir frowned and looked at him blankly.

‘He was frightened, wasn’t he?’

The doctor turned to Berit. She tried to hide a smile, but said nothing.

‘Well, I mean, it was barking like mad,’ Geir exclaimed. ‘And showing its teeth!’

‘So what did you do next?’

‘Well, I was convinced that that bloody animal… It was covered in blood, for God’s sake! I thought it had gone for Hanson and killed him! I was terrified!’

‘I can totally understand that,’ Magnus nodded reassuringly. ‘But what did you do?’

‘He opened the door,’ Berit said slowly. ‘When the dog tried to get out through the door, he kicked it. Hard. I heard the crunch.’

‘Aha,’ said Magnus, raising his index finger in the air. ‘You reconfigured the monster’s code! With your well-aimed kick you…’

He broke off and looked at Berit.

‘Do we know what the dog was called.’

‘Muffe.’

I must have been overtired, because I laughed. The others looked at me as if I’d lost the plot.

‘Muffe,’ I repeated, and I couldn’t help smiling. ‘A pit bull?’

‘But it was a sweet little doggy,’ said Magnus eagerly. ‘Muffe wasn’t dangerous at all! Not to people, at any rate. Here we have one of the closest relatives of the wolf; it spends several hours locked in a room with a body, and it doesn’t help itself. It licks off the blood, it lies down next to the body and gets covered in more blood, but it doesn’t start eating! A friendly pet when it comes to human beings, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what our little Muffe was!’

‘Maybe he was full,’ said Geir sourly.

‘Maybe. But what happens when you land your doubtless well-aimed kick is that his already short fuse runs out. He is afraid, angry, in pain, terrible pain, but instead of attacking, which is his real instinct, he runs away. Up in the lobby, he spots Hanne. Whether he was completely possessed by that time and wanted to hurl himself at your throat…’

He nodded in my direction before turning back to the flip chart.

‘We simply don’t know. Perhaps Muffe just wanted to be comforted.’ ‘It didn’t look that way,’ I mumbled.

‘Get to the point,’ said Geir, whose mood was deteriorating noticeably.

‘This,’ said Magnus, pressing his marker pen against the red circle on his sketch. ‘This is a wound caused by a murder weapon I have never come across before, to tell the truth. It certainly wasn’t a dog. As you can see, the entry wound is…’

Presumably he suddenly realized that all we could see was a slapdash sketch.

‘… or to put it more accurately: having examined the deceased, I can tell you that the entry wound is relatively large. Seven, eight, nine centimetres, in fact. Then the wound narrows as it goes further into the body. It’s sort of conical. The liver has been penetrated. An organ that contains a great deal of blood, the liver. It’s very critical if it’s ruptured.’

His face creased into a serious expression before he shook his head and regained his enthusiasm.

‘I can’t be absolutely certain, of course, pathology is far from my speciality. It is well known that the internal organs have the troublesome capacity to move around. And yet all the indications are that the murder weapon looks like this.’

He turned to a clean sheet of paper and drew a pyramid.

A pyramid with a very pronounced point.

‘A crowbar?’ said Geir enquiringly.

‘No, no, no. I can say with comparative certainty that the weapon was this shape because I turned the body over. And I discovered…’

Suddenly he tore off the sheet with the outline of a man on it. He held it up in front of him for a moment before handing it to Berit with the blank side uppermost. Through the paper we could still make out the red strokes of the pen and the large, gaping hole he had drawn on the midriff, above and to the right of the navel just below the ribs.

‘So now we are looking at his back,’ Magnus said seriously. ‘I found a lesion. Here.’

The pen was pointing at the exact centre of the circle.

‘So the weapon didn’t go right through the body. But almost. Just a few millimetres short. The bleed on this side indicates that the object was pointed at the end, but slender.’

‘Not to mention sharp,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Sharp. And slender.’

‘But what on earth is it?’ asked Berit, pointing at the drawing of the alleged weapon.

‘I don’t know,’ said Magnus. ‘I do have a theory, but of course I can’t know.’

‘But you said something about Roald Dahl?’

‘Well, it’s definitely not a leg of lamb,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘I know it gets on your nerves,’ said Geir with an air of resignation. ‘But I still have to ask: a leg of lamb ?’

‘It’s a story,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s about a woman who kills her husband by hitting him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The police come, and while they’re looking for the murder weapon, she cooks the leg of lamb and serves it up to them. They simply eat the evidence. She doesn’t get found out. She gets away with it.’

‘But what’s that…’

‘It’s an icicle,’ said Berit slowly, moving her hand towards the drawing.

‘Yes! Yes!’

Magnus raised a fist in the air.

‘Genius! A murder weapon that disappears as it melts !’

‘You can’t know that,’ I said.

‘No, that’s what I said. It’s just a theory. And like other theories, it has to be proved. But like other theories it can also be regarded as probable, if no other explanation can be found and if other circumstances support it. As far as I’m aware, no one has found anything in the hotel that looks exactly like this.’

He punched the drawing.

‘Yes, but we haven’t looked for anything,’ Geir protested, in a foul mood and impatient to bring the meeting to an end. ‘Besides which, I’m bloody starving. And thirsty. And tired.’

Berit sighed and nodded.

It seemed as if no one had the strength to see the seriousness of the situation. Certainly most of what had happened since Wednesday afternoon had been excessively dramatic, and it was possible that some of us were becoming immune. The human psyche has a blessed ability to shut out things it is unable to cope with. However, the murder of Roar Hanson signalled a brutal paradigm shift in the situation at Finse 1222, and I didn’t have the impression that the others realized what had to happen now.

While Berit and Geir were close to collapsing with exhaustion, Magnus appeared to be enjoying himself. Not over Hanson’s death, but over the burlesque details he thought he could see in the murder. I wasn’t at all sure about his icicle theory. Not that it mattered much. Murder number two wouldn’t be all that difficult to clear up either. Quite the reverse, in fact; there were fewer suspects now than when the link between the hotel and the wing still existed.

When the carriage fell, we were relieved of the problem concerning the passengers on the top floor. I no longer had the energy to concern myself with how things were going in the apartments. Judging by what had happened, those of us in the hotel itself were still with Black Pete.

The murderer.

It was highly improbable that Cato Hammer and Roar Hanson had been murdered by two different killers, although there were troublesome differences in the methods and circumstances that might well indicate that I was wrong. However, the links between the two victims were so numerous that I was convinced, at least for the time being, that we were dealing with one and the same perpetrator.