Thomas Enger: Pierced

‘Good to see you, Henning,’ she says.

‘Likewise. How are you?’

‘I’m not too bad. How about you? I hear you’ve been a busy boy recently.’

‘Yes, there turned out to be a lot of stories to tell,’ he says and smiles reluctantly.

They pass the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and walk down towards the lake. People with prams and men and women in tracksuits stroll up and down past them.

‘I didn’t think that Petter would ever have agreed to talk to the press,’ Nansen says. ‘And, what’s more, to be so open and honest about being in custody, how he thought about what had happened to Tore and dreading that he, too, would be fitted up for something he hadn’t done. You did a great job, Henning.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, blushing. ‘And it wasn’t the only thing he came clean about.’

Henning tells her how the same fear prompted Holte to put his cards on the table and admit to the assault on Iver Gundersen. Kent Harry Hansen was fuming when he returned to Fighting Fit after being interviewed by Iver. Holte went into his office, and Hansen told him what had happened. Later that night, when Iver visited Asgard, he met Holte at the door. Holte decided to take matters into his own hands. He saw an opportunity to protect his friends and increase his status in their eyes. But he never intended to injure Iver quite so severely. He just wasn’t very good at knowing when to stop.

‘That’s so like him,’ Nansen says. ‘What’s going to happen to him as far as that charge is concerned?’

‘I’m not really sure. I asked Iver if he would consider drawing a line under the whole business, and he said he would think about it. But even so, Holte could still be charged.’

Nansen nods and takes Henning’s arm. They turn on to a broad path. Henning kicks a pine cone which jumps up and rolls away. A runner passes them, wheezing and checking his pulse monitor.

‘I heard it was a T-shirt that led you to identify Gunhild as the killer?’

Henning starts to laugh. ‘I think that’s a case of Chinese whispers. But it’s true that I saw a T-shirt in Holte’s flat which I guessed must be hers. It turned out that Gunhild’s washing machine had broken down, and Holte, being the wimp he is, had offered her the use of his.’

‘Poor guy. I bet he thought it might help win her back.’

‘Yes. And I’m sure he believed that he had succeeded when she turned up at his place after killing Robert van Derksen. But she went there purely to return Holte’s gun and his shoes which she had taken earlier. I spoke to one of the officers who arrested Holte and he said that Holte’s face was practically euphoric that morning.’

‘So Gunhild spent the night with him?’

Henning nods. ‘One night probably made no difference to her.’

Nansen shakes her head. ‘I’ve tried to look back,’ she says after a pause. ‘I’ve tried to remember if Gunhild ever did anything that I should have noticed so that some of this might have been avoided. But I haven’t been able to think of a single thing.’

Henning nods while he recalls the book he saw on Petter Holte’s bedside table. A Gentle Axe by R. N. Morris. And he thinks about the T-shirt Gunhild wore the first time he met her. With the logo for Axe men’s deodorant. There was something provocative about the way she pushed her chest up and out, almost as if she wanted him to notice her. It might have been a coincidence. Or it could have been Gunhild’s substitute for heroin surrounding herself with subtle hints of what she had done while believing that nobody would ever be able to expose her. Henning realises that he is inspired to explore not just her wardrobe but her whole life for other references to the murder of Jocke Brolenius. Though this would be purely to satisfy his own curiosity.

‘Don’t beat yourself up, Veronica,’ he says. ‘It won’t make it any easier.’

She looks at him as she attempts a smile. ‘I’ll try not to.’

They walk for a while in silence.

‘How is the investigation into… into what happened to Tore going?’

‘Slowly,’ Henning says. ‘The man they arrested, Orjan Mjones, hasn’t said one word during interviews. But the police have found incriminating evidence on his laptop. Mjones appears to have carried out extensive research about an extremely deadly nerve poison called batrachotoxin. It comes from a frog in Colombia. Choco Indians dip their darts in it. The frog is actually called the poison dart frog, and a single frog contains enough poison to kill anywhere between fifty and one hundred people.’

‘And that was the poison given to Tore?’

‘The Institute of Public Health is still checking it, but it very much looks like it. There will be a story about it in the paper tomorrow. A dose of one hundred micrograms is enough to kill an adult, and all you need to do is scratch their skin.’

Nansen nods pensively. ‘Imagine if they ever came to Norway.’

‘The frogs, you mean? That’s the fascinating bit. They can’t produce their poison anywhere except the western slopes of the Andes because the ants and the insects on which they feed form a unique chemical bond in the frog that creates the poison.’

‘Mjones went to South America?’

‘Most probably. But he isn’t saying anything. Not yet, anyway.’

‘Isn’t that unusual?’

‘Yes, perhaps. But I’m guessing he’s keeping his mouth shut because he’s banking on the evidence against him being purely circumstantial. However, it would take a lot for him not to be convicted. A receptionist at the mountain hotel close to where the body of Thorleif Brenden was found has said that Mjones impersonated a police officer looking for Brenden. A chalet girl in the area also alerted them to a break-in in a cabin where Brenden’s notes were later found. In them he describes Mjones and the events that happened in the days leading up to Tore’s death in considerable detail. That plus the frog poison will weigh heavily against him in court.’

There might be two other reasons, Henning thinks, why Mjones won’t talk. Firstly, he knows that the money he was paid for killing Pulli is waiting for him somewhere when he has served his sentence. Secondly, he might also be scared that what happened to Pulli could happen to him even though he might not know the identity of his employer and so couldn’t give him up even if he wanted to. Most orders for hits are made in code and under fictitious names.

The smell of a barbecue wafts towards them. Soon they reach a gravel path. The sunlight sparkles in the water. In the distance a red kayak slices through the dark-blue surface. Nansen and Henning sit down on a bench overlooking the lake.

‘I need to ask you something,’ he begins. ‘You usually visited Tore once a week while he was inside. During that time did he ever seem… how can I put it?… more tense or nervous than usual?’

She turns to him. ‘His mood varied, but I can’t think of anything in particular. Why do you ask?’

‘Because… ’

Henning looks down and thinks about Pia Nokleby. When he spoke to her a couple of days after the arrest of Gunhild Dokken, he asked again if the police had put in a request for Pulli’s telephone records from the prison. Her reply had been no, they hadn’t prioritised it. And Knut Olav Nordbo from Oslo Prison confirmed the same day that it was now too late.

‘I think Tore was killed because he knew who was behind the fire in my flat,’ Henning says. ‘I don’t think that Tore contacting me was the direct cause, but that he might have been speaking to someone else about it before he called me.’

‘Why would Tore have done that?’

‘I don’t know. Because he thought it might be to his advantage?’

‘How?’