The doctor had taken time to talk to him. He had comforted him by saying that it had been quick and his mother would hardly have known that anything was wrong before she collapsed. She had been found by another walker, he told him, but unfortunately the old woman had died before she got to hospital. The doctor’s smile was warm and open and he said something to the effect that he hoped he would die in much the same way, in the forest one May day, as a healthy eighty-year-old with an alert mind.
Eighty years and five days, thought the son, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. No one could complain about getting to that age.
He put the bag down on the dining table. In a way it seemed undignified to unpack it. He tried to win over his reluctance to go through his mother’s belongings; it felt like breaking his childhood rule number one: don’t poke your nose in other people’s business.
The rucksack lay on top. He opened it gingerly. A tin lunch box was the first thing he saw. He took it out. The lid had once sported a picture of the Geiranger Fjord in brilliant sunshine, and an old-fashioned luxury steamship. Now all that remained of it was some dirty blue water and grey sky. He had given her a new bright red plastic lunch box a couple of years ago. She immediately went and exchanged it for a hand whisk, as there was no point in replacing a perfectly usable lunch box.
He emptied the rest of the contents of the rucksack on to the table, and smiled at the thought of his mother’s grim face every time he tried to force something new on her. A worn map of Nordmarka. A compass that certainly didn’t point north; the red arrow wavered back and forth as if it had drunk some of the alcohol it lay in.
Under the rucksack was her walking jacket. He lifted it up and held it to his cheek. The smell of the old woman and the forest brought tears to his eyes again. He held the jacket out and carefully brushed away the leaves and twigs that were caught on one of the arms.
Something fell out of the pocket.
He folded the jacket and put it down beside the contents of the rucksack. Then he bent down to pick up whatever it was that had fallen to the floor.
A wallet?
It was made of leather, and was quite small. But it was unexpectedly heavy. He opened it and caught himself laughing out loud.
He mustn’t laugh, so he gulped and sniffed and opened his eyes wide to stop the tears.
But he couldn’t stop laughing and had problems breathing.
His obstinate eighty-year-old mother had met her death with a Secret Service ID card in her pocket.
The wallet could be opened like a small book. The right side was adorned with a gold-coloured metal badge with an eagle on it, spreading its wings over a shield with a star in the middle. It reminded him of the sheriff’s badge he’d got from his father for Christmas when he was eight, and now he was no longer laughing.
On the left-hand side, in a plastic pocket, was an ID card. It belonged to a man called Jeffrey William Hunter. A good-looking man, judging by the photo. He had short, thick hair and a serious expression in his big eyes.
The middle-aged man, who had just lost his only remaining parent, was a taxi driver. His shift had long since started, but his car stood idle outside. He had not sent a message to say that he couldn’t work. In fact, he had thought that driving around in town would be just as good as sitting here at home, alone with his grief. Now he was no longer so sure. He examined the painstakingly made badge. He could not for the life of him fathom why his mother was in possession of something like that. The only answer that he could come up with was that she had found it in the forest. Someone must have lost it there.
There were plenty of Secret Service agents in town right now. He had seen them himself, around Akershus Fort, when there was that official dinner there the other night.
He studied the unknown man’s face again.
It was so serious that it almost looked sad.
The taxi driver suddenly stood up. He left his mother’s belongings lying on the table and grabbed his keys from the hook just inside the front door.
A Secret Service badge was not something you could send in the post. It might be important. He would drive straight to the police.
Now.
XXIII
‘You are truly unbelievable,’ Adam Stubo said.
Gerhard Skrøder was lying more than sitting in his chair. His legs were wide apart and his head was laid back, his eyes fixed on something on the ceiling. The dark bags under his eyes were in stark contrast to his white skin, and made his nose seem even larger. The man whose nickname was the Chancellor had not touched the coffee or the bottle of mineral water that Adam Stubo had given him. ‘I wonder,’ the detective chief inspector continued, pulling his ear, ‘whether you boys actually realise how idiotic that advice actually is. Don’t tip your chair!’
The legs of the chair crashed to the floor.
‘What advice?’ the man asked reluctantly. He crossed his arms over his chest and scowled at the floor. The two had not had any eye contact yet.
‘The rubbish that your lawyers feed you about keeping your mouth shut when you’re being questioned by the police. Can’t you see how stupid it is?’
‘It’s worked before.’ The man laughed and shrugged without sitting up in the chair. ‘And in any case, I haven’t done anyhing wrong. It’s not illegal to drive around in Norway.’
‘There you go!’ Adam chuckled. For the first time he glimpsed something that looked like interest in Gerhard Skrøder’s eyes.
‘What the fuck do you mean?’ Skrøder asked and grabbed the bottle of water. He was looking straight at Adam Stubo now.
‘You always keep your mouth shut. And then we know you’re guilty. But that’s just a red rag to a bull, you see. We don’t get anything for free from you boys, so we’re even more focused on making sure that we do. And you see…’ he leant over the old, worn table that separated them, ‘in cases like this, where you actually think you’ve done nothing illegal, you can’t help yourself. Not in the long run. Let’s see, it took…’ he looked up at the clock, ‘twenty-three minutes before you were tempted to speak. Don’t you realise that we broke that stupid code of yours years ago? A person who is innocent always talks. A person who talks is often guilty. A person who is silent is always guilty. I know what strategy I would have chosen, put it that way.’
Gerhard Skrøder ran a dirty index finger down the ridge of his nose. The nail was black and bitten to the quick. He started tipping his chair again, backwards and forwards. He was more uneasy now, and pulled his cap down over his eyes. Adam reached over for a pad of A4 paper, picked up a felt tip and started to scribble something down without saying a word.
Gerhard Skrøder had not been difficult to find. He had been enjoying himself with a whore from Lithuania, in a tenement in Grünerløkka. The flat was one of many in the extensive police register of places where criminals hung out. The patrol that had been sent out to find him hit bull’s eye on the third attempt. Only a few hours after he had been identified by Adam on a grainy CCTV recording from a twenty-four-hour petrol station, he was in a cell. He had stewed there for an hour or two and had sworn out loud at the sight of Adam Stubo, when he came to collect him.
Since then, he had said nothing. Until now.
Silence was obviously harder to deal with than all Adam’s questions and accusations and references to photographic evidence. Gerhard Skrøder chewed at the remains of his thumbnail. One of his thighs was shaking. He coughed and opened the bottle of water. Adam carried on drawing, a psychedelic pattern of blood-red stripes and stars.
‘I’ll wait for my lawyer, that’s for sure,’ Gerhard said eventually and sat up in the chair. ‘And I have the right to know what you’re accusing me of doing. I was just driving around with a couple of people in the car. Since when’s that been illegal, eh?’