‘We don’t think so.’
‘In that case, can I just smash him over the head with a fire extinguisher?’
‘Unfortunately, no,’ the shapeless mass answers in a voice much like Petter’s.
‘We didn’t shoot him in some struggle, did we?’
‘Again, unfortunately, no.’
‘We should interrogate him.’
‘We should open the box.’
‘What box?’
‘The pink box. The one on your desk. That you think belongs to the dead woman.’
‘Yes. That’s a good idea. I can use my gun. Where’s my gun?’
‘No,’ says the someone, who is evidently Petter. ‘We want to use the key. We don’t just want to open the box. We want to know whether it belonged to the woman. So we want to use her key.’
‘Right. And if the key fits the lock on the box, it’ll establish the connection between the key, the box, and the woman.’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘And it might explain something about the murder.’
‘Yes, it might. We’re hoping it will give us the legal grounds to arrest the father.’
‘Legal.’
‘We’re upholding the law.’
‘Which is how we fight crime.’
Petter smiles. ‘You’re feeling better.’
‘Burn after reading.’
‘No, we don’t want to burn anything.’
‘George Clooney shot Brad Pitt in
‘He probably didn’t see that one.’
Changing the subject: ‘Norwegian law isn’t good enough. Not for this case.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Between throbs last night, I was looking at their records. None of them, not one, is in the Schengen database.’
‘Not so surprising. If there’s no criminal record…’
‘Well, see, that’s the thing about war crimes. No able-or-functioning courts in a war-torn country means no trials and no convictions, and so no record in the SIS, which means almost no grounds for rejecting their immigrant status. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was supposed to fill some of that gap, but it’s a big, big gap.’
‘There are many things to fix in the world. Can we open the box now?’
‘What box?’
‘Here’s the key.’
Petter hands her a very small silver key. It is less than two centimetres long, with a small tooth that splits into two. It is extremely rudimentary, designed to do little more than deter siblings and parents. The lock is intended to hold off the perpetrator just long enough for him to be arrested by his own sense of guilt.
Sigrid takes the key.
‘The problem is that all the things that aren’t fixed allow the flotsam and jetsam of Europe to flow into our little Norwegian boat here. The politicians are so excited about uniting Europe that they set the little boat to sea before its hull was patched up and ready for the voyage. And that means the water just starts coming in and we sink before we set off. And we sink because of the unfounded optimism of a bunch of people we elected to office and don’t get rid of, and don’t educate, and don’t hold accountable, who make feel-good policies that in the end wash all the problems up onto the deck as we sink. And the ones who have to bail them out are us. The cops. Want to know what’s wrong with Norway? Ask us. We know.’
‘That’s very lucid of you. Can we please open the box?’
Sigrid holds up the key and moves it towards the lock on the box.
‘It’s awfully small.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Petter takes the key and rotates the box around so it faces him. He places it in the lock, looks up at Sigrid, and then twists it.
It opens.
‘OK, then.’
Petter flips open the lid and looks in.
‘What are those?’ he asks.
Sigrid isn’t sure.
She opens the drawer of her desk, and takes out a pair of latex gloves. She puts them on, and takes out the contents of the box.
‘Letters and photos.’
‘Of what?’
She doesn’t know. The letters are written in a foreign language. Serbo-Croatian, perhaps — when it was still the same language. Maybe Albanian. The photos are of a village. Or what once was a village.
They are carefully ordered. On top of each photograph there is a small piece of paper with the name of a person, a place, and then other information she can’t discern. The top photo shows the person in some everyday snapshot. At a table, waving. By a car, carrying groceries. Lifting a child. Raking leaves. These are all typical events captured on 35mm film, and usually placed in albums so we can remember who we and our loved ones used to be.
Under each of these are photos of that person’s murder.
The images are gruesome. Some have been shot. Others have been sliced open. Throats have been cut. Children have been shot in the backs of their heads. Some have been shot in the front. Children too young to even fear their killers.
Sigrid is holding evidence of a massacre that someone has courageously documented and hidden, and possibly fought to the death to protect.
‘We need to contact Interpol, Europol, the Foreign Ministry, and the Ministry of Justice and Police. We need to photograph all of this immediately, so there is a copy of everything. I am beginning to see what might have happened here.
‘Let’s call everyone together. I want the briefing on what happened around Oslo yesterday. Anything out of the ordinary. We need to find these people.’
Gathered in a circle again, Sigrid sips a cup of coffee despite the instructions of her medic, who insists it is a diuretic and will increase dehydration, which is not what she wants to be doing right now.
Evidently he is wrong.
‘Anything,’ she says. ‘Anything at all. Did anyone phone in?’
A few calls did come in — domestic abuse, drunks, an attempted rape. Nothing that seems entirely connected.
‘So you’re telling me that we received no calls of any kind about an old American accompanied by a young boy from the Balkans. We issued a very clear description. I want to be sure I’m hearing this correctly.
‘Fine. Start calling around. If the information isn’t coming to us, we start asking for it.’
As Sigrid returns to her office, a junior police officer comes to her with a young woman in civilian clothes.
‘Inspector, I think you need to hear this,’ says the officer.
‘Hear what?’
‘Inspector Odegard? My name is Adrijana Rasmussen.’ She hesitates and then adds, ‘But I was born Adriana Stojkovi. In Serbia. There are some very bad people looking for a small boy and an old man. And I think they’re in trouble.’
Adrijana speaks Norwegian with an upper-class, west-end accent. Everything about her, other than her
