Thomas Enger - Scarred

Trine sits down; she takes a sip from her water bottle and feels the soreness in her legs and the blisters on her heel. Even the soles of her feet hurt. She’s in need of a shower. She would have gone for a swim in the sea, except that the water temperature is probably only thirteen or fourteen degrees in September. What she ought to have done was jump in the sea and drown herself. But she couldn’t step off the cliff when the thought occurred to her on the coastal path. She just couldn’t make herself do it.

Perhaps she didn’t want it enough. Or perhaps she was still clinging to the hope that a brilliant solution would present itself during her long walk.

Trine takes out her mobile and reads the last text message she got from Katarina Hatlem almost an hour ago, a message Trine has yet to reply to.

You can’t hide any longer, Trine. Clear message from the PM’s office: ‘She needs to come out and kill this story or she has to resign.’ Can you think of any other solution?

Again Trine weighs up her options. She can either confront the allegations, reveal where she was and what she was doing that night and then wait for the public outcry that will exile her from politics for good. Or she can roll over, play dead and resign quietly out of fear of losing the best and finest person in her life.

You’ll lose him anyway , she thinks, if you don’t tell him . Both options are equally impossible.

Once again she rages at herself because she wasn’t brave enough to end her problems at the bottom of the sea or at the foot of a cliff while she still had the chance. You’re a coward , she reproaches herself.

But running away is also the act of a coward, fleeing your problems as she is doing now. It’s not her style, it never was. Yes, it has been necessary to bury certain things from the past, but that was different. Piling earth on top of something that stinks to make the smell go away. And so far the press hasn’t managed to uncover what is rotting underneath.

But what guarantee does she have that her accusers would tell the truth once they get what they want?

None.

Trine shakes her head. No matter what she does, it’ll be wrong.

The incident room on the fifth floor of Oslo Police Station is busy as always with uniformed and plainclothes officers whose attention is directed at the end of the boardroom table where Arild Gjerstad raises a coffee cup to his mouth. The table is covered with files, coffee cups and half-full water bottles. On the smart board on the wall the name JOHANNE KLINGENBERG appears in capital letters. Preliminary forensic evidence is listed in bullet points under her name.

Gjerstad puts down his cup and walks up to the smart board.

‘The killer is likely to be known to the victim,’ he says. ‘Do we have a list of everyone she knew?’

Gjerstad looks across the assembly. Fredrik Stang, who has dark hair in a crew cut and a face whose expression is always grave and tense, speaks up.

‘If the calendar on her laptop was up-to-date, she had lunch with someone called Emilie earlier today at twelve noon. The victim had a public profile on Facebook and according to her friends list she has only one friend called Emilie. Emilie Blomvik.’

‘We need to talk to her,’ Gjerstad says. ‘Today.’

‘I can do that,’ Bjarne volunteers.

‘Good,’ Gjerstad replies.

Stang runs his hand down his tanned, muscular arm before he continues.

‘The victim was a mature student at Oslo University’s College of Applied Sciences; she was quite active on the online dating scene with profiles on both match.com and sukker.no as well as various other sites. We’ll check out anyone she has been or is in contact with to see if some of the relationships were more serious than others. But I’m not sure that’s the lead we should be prioritising since the victim was found fully clothed. There were no signs of sexual assault.’

‘Even so,’ Gjerstad says, ‘check it out.’

Stang nods.

‘Talking about friends, she had over 1,800 Facebook friends. In the last two days alone she made more status updates than I have in a whole year.’

‘That might explain how the killer knew that she wouldn’t be at home two weeks ago,’ Bjarne says. ‘And when he would be able to break into her flat.’

‘In that case the killer has to be one of her Facebook friends,’ Sandland concludes. ‘That narrows down the list of suspects.’

Stang nods and puts down his notepad. Silence descends on the table. Bjarne picks up the pen in front of him and clicks it on and off in a quick rhythm.

‘I have a theory I’d like to try out on you,’ he says when he has given it some thought. ‘Last Sunday eighty-three-year-old Erna Pedersen was murdered. She was strangled before being mutilated with her own knitting needles. Her killer smashed a photo on her wall and took another picture with him. A picture that hadn’t been there for very long. None of the people we’ve interviewed at the care home can explain how it came to be on the wall in the first place. In which case it’s possible that the killer put it there himself. This would mean that he had been to the care home before and that he knew the victim.’

Bjarne pauses briefly to make sure that everyone can follow him.

‘And today Johanne Klingenberg was found dead in her flat. She, too, was strangled and again someone had smashed a picture on her wall – the same picture, incidentally, that was smashed two weeks ago when someone broke into her flat. I think it’s likely that she was strangled by the same person who broke into her flat.’

‘Are you saying that the killings are connected?’ Gjerstad asks.

Bjarne pauses briefly.

‘I think there’s evidence to suggest it, yes. Not only were both victims strangled, but it seems as if the killer in both cases has a particular obsession with photographs. They mean something to him and they trigger a rage in him. And this particular obsession is something I’ve seen much too much of in murder inquiries in recent years.’

‘It’s just a random coincidence,’ Pia Nøkleby objects. ‘The pictures, I mean. Anything could happen in the heat of a struggle.’

Bjarne is about to continue putting forward his theory, but Ella Sandland looks up from her documents and beats him to it.

‘There’s actually another coincidence,’ she says. ‘Both victims are originally from Jessheim.’

Silence descends on the water bottles and the coffee cups. Bjarne lets his gaze wander from investigator to investigator and sees that his theory has stirred their interest.

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ Nøkleby insists. ‘I’m sure many people from Jessheim move to Oslo. We’re only talking about a distance of – what is it – fifty kilometres?’

‘Forty,’ Bjarne says. ‘But three coincidences mean we have to examine if the two cases are connected.’

Bjarne sees Hagen and Sandland nod in agreement.

‘And there’s one more point that I think is worth noting,’ he continues. ‘In both murders the killer appears to have planned his approach in advance.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Emil Hagen says.

‘Why break into someone’s home when they’re not there – if you don’t intend to steal anything or harm them?’

Bjarne looks around. There is no reply.

‘Because you’re doing research,’ he says. ‘You’re doing the groundwork. The killer must have been to Erna Pedersen’s room at least once before he killed her – if we surmise that he put up the missing picture. When it comes to Johanne Klingenberg, then, I think that the killer checked out her flat, looked at what opportunities there were for him and what difficulties might arise, and came back when he had finalised his plan.’