48
Hypothesis
The head of Crime Squad, Sydney South, Neil McCormack, ran a hand through his thinning mop of hair while studying the bespectacled woman across the table in the interview room. She had come straight from the publishing house where she worked. Her suit was plain and creased, but there was nevertheless something about Iska Peller that made him presume it was expensive, it wasn’t just meant to impress simple souls like himself. But her address suggested that she was not particularly well off. Bristol was not the most fashionable area of Sydney. She seemed adult and sensible. Definitely not the type to dramatise, exaggerate, attract attention for attention’s sake. Besides, they were the ones who had called her in; she hadn’t come to Sydney Police of her own accord. He looked at his watch. McCormack had arranged to go sailing with his son this afternoon; they were due to meet in Watson Bay where the boat was moored. That’s why he hoped this wouldn’t take long. And everything had been fine until the last snippet of information.
‘Miss Peller,’ McCormack said, leaning back and folding his hands over his impressive pot belly, ‘why didn’t you tell anyone about this before?’
She hunched her shoulders. ‘Why should I? No one asked, and I can’t see it has any relevance to Charlotte’s murder. I’m telling you now because you’ve asked me in such detail. I thought what happened in the cabin was what you were interested in, not the kind of… incident that took place afterwards. And that was what it was. A tiny incident, soon over, soon forgotten. You find idiots like him everywhere. As an individual you can’t take on the task of reporting every single creep.’
McCormack growled. Of course she was right. And he didn’t feel like following up the matter, either. There was always so much more trouble, unpleasantness and, not least, work when the person in question had a professional handle that either started or finished with the word police. He gazed out of the window. The sun was glittering on the sea by Port Jackson and on the Manly side where smoke was still rising despite it being a week since the season’s last bush fire had been extinguished. The smoke was drifting south. A fine, warm northerly. Perfect for sailing. McCormack had liked Hole. Or Holy as he called the Norwegian. He had done a brilliant job when he’d helped them with the clown murder. But the lofty, fair-haired Norwegian had sounded weary on the phone. McCormack genuinely hoped that Holy wasn’t going to keel over again.
‘Let’s take it from the start, shall we, Miss Peller?’
Mikael Bellman entered the Odin conference room and heard the conversations stop at once. He strode over to the speaker’s chair, put down his notes, connected his laptop to the USB port and stood in the middle of the floor with his legs anchored. The investigation unit numbered thirty-six officers, three times what was normal for murder cases. They had been working for so long without results that he had had to boost morale a couple of times, but generally speaking they had stuck to it like heroes. That was why Bellman had allowed not only himself but his staff to enjoy what had seemed like their great triumph: the arrest of Tony Leike.
‘You will have read the papers today,’ he opened, surveying the assembly.
He had saved their hides. The front pages of two of the three biggest newspapers bore the same photograph: Tony Leike getting into a car outside Police HQ. The third had a picture of Harry Hole, an archive photo from a talk show where he had been discussing the Snowman.
‘As you can see, Inspector Hole has assumed responsibility. Which is only right and proper.’
His words bounced back to him off the walls, and he met the silent officers’ morning-weary gazes. Or was it a different kind of tiredness? In which case, it would have to be opposed. Because things were coming to a head now. The Kripos boss had dropped by to say that the Ministry of Justice had rung and was asking questions. The sands of time were running out.
‘We don’t have a prime suspect any more,’ he said. ‘But the good news is we have fresh leads. And they all take us from the Havass cabin to Ustaoset.’
He went to the laptop, tapped a key and the first page of a PowerPoint presentation he had prepared came to life.
Half an hour later he had been through all the facts they possessed, with names, times and assumed routes.
‘The question’, he said, switching off the computer, ‘is what kind of murders we are dealing with here. I think we can exclude the typical serial killer. The victims have not been chosen at random inside a demographic group; they are tied to a specific place and a specific time. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that we are also talking about a specific motive which may even be perceived as rational. If so, that makes the task considerably easier for us: find the motive and we have the killer.’
Bellman saw several detectives nod.
‘The problem is that there are no witnesses to tell us anything. The only one we know to be alive, Iska Peller, was ill in bed, alone. The others are either dead or have not come forward. We know, for example, that Adele Vetlesen was with a man she had met recently, but no one in her circle of acquaintances seems to know anything about him, so we have to assume it was a short-lived relationship. We’re looking at the men she contacted by phone or on the Net, but it will take time to work our way through them. And in the absence of witnesses we will have to find our own starting point. We need hypotheses for the motive. What is the motive for killing at least four people?’
‘Jealousy or hearing voices,’ someone from the back replied.
‘All our experience tells us that.’
‘Agreed. Who might hear voices commanding them to kill?’
‘Anyone with a psychiatric record,’ came a sing-song response from Finnmark.
‘And anyone without one,’ said someone else.
‘Good. Who might be jealous?’
‘Partner or spouse of someone there.’
‘And who might that be?’
‘But we’ve checked the victims’ partners’ alibis and potential motives,’ another said. ‘That’s the first thing we do. And either they didn’t have partners or we eliminated them from our inquiries.’
Mikael Bellman knew all too well they were just putting their foot on the accelerator while the wheels spun round in the same rut they had been in for a while, but the important point now was that they were ready to do exactly that: to put their foot down. For he was in no doubt that the Havass cabin was a plank that could be levered under the wheel to get them out of the rut.
‘We didn’t eliminate all the partners and spouses,’ Bellman said, rocking on his heels. ‘We just didn’t think every one was a suspect. Who didn’t have an alibi for the time his wife was killed?’
‘Rasmus Olsen!’
‘Correct. And when I went to Stortinget and spoke to Rasmus Olsen he admitted that there had been what he called a little “jealous patch” some months ago. A woman Rasmus had been flirting with. And Marit Olsen went to the Havass cabin for a couple of days to think things over. The days may match. Perhaps she did more than think. Perhaps she got her own back. And here’s a thought. On the night in question, when the victims were at the Havass cabin, Rasmus Olsen was not in Oslo; he was booked into a hotel in Ustaoset. What was Rasmus doing in the area if his wife was in Havass? And did he spend the night in the hotel or did he go for a longish skiing trip?’
The eyes in front of him were no longer heavy-lidded or tired, quite the opposite, he was igniting a spark in them. He waited for an answer. Such a large investigative group was not normally the most efficient way to organise this kind of improvised brainstorming, but they had worked on the case for so long that everyone in the room had had their slants, their sure-fire hunches and fanciful hypotheses rejected and their egos flattened.
A young detective took a punt. ‘He may have arrived at the cabin in the evening unannounced and caught her in the act. The guy saw and sneaked off again. Then planned the whole thing at his leisure.’
‘Maybe,’ Bellman said, going over to the speaker’s chair and holding up a note. ‘Argument one in favour of such a theory: I’ve just been given this by Telenor. It shows that Rasmus Olsen spoke to his wife on the phone some time that morning. So let’s assume he knew which cabin she was going to. Argument two in favour of this hypothesis is the weather report, which shows there was a moon and clear visibility all evening and night, so he could easily have skied there, as Tony Leike did. Argument one against the hypothesis: why kill anyone apart from
