Thomas Enger: Scarred

Bjarne goes inside and doesn’t meet anyone until he gets out of the lift on the third floor. He stops at the red and white police tape outside Erna Pedersen’s room and hears the crackling and beeping of a police radio nearby while he slips bright blue plastic covers over his shoes.

He pauses before he enters. As always he hopes the walls will talk to him, that the chaotic landscape that awaits him will show him which path to follow. And he knows that he mustn’t look at the victim immediately, but concentrate on the other information in the room. He also tries as far as that’s possible to ignore smells, but it’s hard to block out the scent of death. He often wakes up in the middle of the night with a sense of being surrounded by this very smell.

Bjarne nods to Ann-Mari Sara, the crime scene technician, as he comes in. She is squatting on her haunches at the feet of the dead woman, her face hidden behind a camera. She lowers it and nods in return.

It took a while before Bjarne learned to appreciate Ann-Mari Sara. She is petite, barely more than 1.58 metres tall. Short, messy hair. Never wears make-up. He doesn’t recall ever seeing her smile and he has noticed that she doesn’t seem particularly bothered about personal hygiene. She is also immune to any attempt at charm or small talk. She rarely replies to questions that aren’t work-related.

But she is undoubtedly one of the best crime scene technicians Bjarne knows. Always thorough, always alert. Always respectful. He has never seen her chew gum or try to lighten up the tense atmosphere at a crime scene with a snide remark about the victim’s appearance or lifestyle. She is the most dedicated colleague Bjarne has ever come across and she is especially good at putting herself in the mind of a criminal and imagining what might have happened. If she hadn’t been so brilliant at analysing a crime scene, he would have liked to recruit her as part of his own investigation team.

Now she gets up, raises the camera to her face again and presses the shutter release. Then she points to a Bible on the floor.

‘I think he started with this one,’ she says. ‘Used it to bang… ’

Bjarne raises his hand to stop her.

‘I haven’t examined it fully yet,’ Sara continues. ‘But it would appear to have thirteen dents on it.’

Thirteen dents , Bjarne mutters to himself. The killer must have been very angry. And he thinks that this particular book is responsible for many deaths, but never quite like this.

The room is exactly as he had imagined. Small, oppressive and cold. A bed neatly made-up, anonymous yellow curtains, speckled lino on the floor and soulless furniture. Withered flowers on the table. A TV magazine with a programme circled in red, others crossed out. Red wool. Knitting needles, some big, some small. A shot glass, unused. A glass of water on the bedside table.

The place reminds Bjarne of a prison cell. And he realises how much he dreads old age. Squashing his whole life into a room measuring three metres by three metres.

There is something oddly pleasant about the victim in the chair. She is sitting on a cushion; Bjarne can just make out a pattern of yellow and green flowers. In her lap lies the start of a sock. A small, red sock.

Bjarne leans towards her. Although he has prepared himself for the sight, he still feels a prickling sensation behind his forehead. From behind the smeared glasses, trails of congealed blood have spread across the wrinkled, eighty-three-year-old face like the branches of a tree. And where her pupils should have been, he can see something shiny; something that just about sticks out.

Two of Erna Pedersen’s own knitting needles.

‘Did you see the marks on her throat?’

Bjarne leans closer, moves some hair out of the way with a pen he takes from his jacket pocket.

‘You’re joking,’ he says.

Sara raises one offended eyebrow.

‘As there’s not much blood at the scene, her heart must have stopped beating before the killer forced the knitting needles into her eyes.’

‘So he strangled her first,’ Bjarne concludes.

Sara nods.

‘But there are another couple of interesting things.’

Bjarne turns to her.

‘We haven’t got a murder weapon,’ Sara says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can’t force knitting needles through someone’s eyes just by hitting them with a book. The nasal bone gets in the way, as does the forehead. He must have used something else. Something heavier. Take a look at this.’

Bjarne follows Sara’s index finger, which stops at the victim’s brown, knitted cardigan. A fine layer of white powder has settled on her shoulders.

‘I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m sure that the knitting needles dented whatever it was the killer used to bash them into her head.’

‘Did they go right through her skull?’

‘No, that requires more force,’ she says, tapping her own head with her knuckles. ‘The skull is thick. And it gets thicker with age, especially in women. But it looks as if he tried.’

Bjarne pulls a face.

‘Is there anything else I need to know?’

‘Yes.’

She steps past him and goes over to the wall behind the chest of drawers. Points to a picture frame lying on the floor. The glass is smashed and the picture is unclear, but Bjarne can still make out a seemingly happy and contented family of four.

He asks who they are.

‘Don’t know,’ Sara replies. ‘But the odds are they’re the victim’s son or daughter and his or her family. I’m more interested in why the picture is on the floor and why the picture hook on the wall is bent.’

Bjarne looks up.

‘If you take a look at the floor, you’ll see that it’s clean. You can almost see your own reflection in it.’

‘So the picture was torn off the wall,’ Bjarne concludes. ‘Possibly today.’

Sara nods.

‘If I were you, I’d ask myself why.’

It takes him only ten minutes to walk from Dælenenga Sports Park to Grünerhjemmet, the care home at the bottom of Markveien. It’s a redbrick building that blends in effortlessly with the rest of the architecture in Grünerløkka. Few people walking past it would know that many of the neighbourhood’s most vulnerable residents live here. The exceptions are on 17 May, Norway’s Constitution Day, when schoolchildren stand outside to sing the national anthem, Ja, vi elsker dette landet , or otherwise when an ambulance or hearse is called.

A small crowd has gathered outside the main entrance, a subspecies of Homo sapiens that Henning would recognise anywhere, any time. And it takes him only a moment before he spots her among the other journalists.

Nora.

The woman he once loved with every fibre of his being. The woman he failed to love like she should have been loved. The woman who was ill on the day his flat burned down and who will never forgive herself for asking Henning to look after Jonas that very night, even though it wasn’t his turn. The woman who finalised their divorce shortly after that fatal night when he needed her most.

To say that being around Nora since he returned to work has been awkward would be an understatement. Their shared past as parents and the fact that they work for rival newspapers is just for starters. Another complication is that she is now dating Iver Gundersen, Henning’s closest colleague at 123news .

Nora waves and slowly makes her way towards him; she stops a metre in front of him and says ‘hi’. Henning nods and smiles, sensing immediately how a protective bubble forms around them where the wind, the air, the care home – the whole world – cease to exist.

‘How are you?’ she asks.

Henning tilts his head towards his shoulder, first to one side, then the other.