there, even if Hanne did have to be transferred to three other numbers before she eventually got the woman on the line. Hanne introduced herself.
“I’m glad you phoned,” chirped the woman at the other end. “I’m a nurse in the psychiatric department.”
Hanne breathed a sigh of relief. At least her own head wasn’t the problem.
“We had a patient here, a prisoner on remand,” the nurse continued. “A Dutchman, I think he was. I was told you were in charge of the case. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“He was in a psychotic state when he was admitted, and went to Neurology for several days before we saw any improvement,” the nurse explained. “We got his mental condition into some sort of order eventually, even if we don’t know how long it will last. We put incontinence pads on him at first; it would have been too labour-intensive otherwise, you see.”
The soft southern voice sounded apologetic, as if it was she alone who was responsible for the lamentable state of resources in the health service.
“It’s normally the nursing auxiliaries who change the pads, you know. But he was thoroughly constipated until I happened to be on night duty. We take a turn too, with the patients, I mean. So I changed this man’s pads. It’s really the auxiliaries’ job, you know.”
Hanne knew.
“Well, I noticed a white, undigested lump in his stool. I wondered what it was, so I picked it out. We wear plastic gloves, you see.”
A slight giggle came down the line.
“And?”
Hanne was getting impatient. She ran her finger rapidly to and fro over the stubble at her temple. Her hair was growing back, and it itched.
“It was a piece of paper. The size of a postcard, folded up, but the writing was still legible. Even after a little wash. I thought it might be of interest, you see, so I rang you. To be on the safe side.”
Hanne praised her profusely and hoped she would soon get to the point.
At long last she learnt what the message on the paper had been.
“I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes,” was Hanne’s immediate response.
They had finally set up an incident room. That sounded pretentious, until you entered it. Twenty square metres had been left over at the furthest end of the northwest corridor after A.2.11 had been partitioned into rooms. It was impersonal and almost unusable. For bigger cases they called it the incident room, gathering both documents and personnel together in the one place. Quite functional, in a way. Two telephones, one on each of a pair of desks placed back to back beneath the window, with the same thin metal legs as in the rest of the building; the desktops sloping in opposite directions like a pitched roof. On the ridge was balanced a narrow board full of nibbled pencils, rubbers, and cheap pens. Behind each desk the walls were covered in shelves. They were empty, a reminder to everyone of how little they had on the case. A constant tiring hum emanated from an old photocopier in a small adjoining room.
Chief Inspector Kaldbakken was chairing the meeting. He was a slim man whose dialect contrived to make half his words stick in his throat in an indecipherable mumble. It could have been worse: at least they were all used to him, and could guess at what he was saying. Which wasn’t much.
Detective Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen was reporting. She was going over everything they had, separating fact from speculation, solid information from hearsay. Unfortunately most of it was speculation and hearsay. But it made an impact of sorts. There was little physical evidence, scarcely enough to convince anybody.
“Let’s arrest Lavik,” exhorted a young constable with a snub nose and freckles. “Stake everything on a single card. He’ll crack!”
You could have heard a pin drop, and in the embarrassing silence the redheaded officer realised he’d made a fool of himself. He began to bite his nails in shame.
“What do you say, Hakon? What have we actually got to go on?”
It was Hanne who was asking. She looked better now, and had bowed to the inevitable and cut her hair short. It was a distinct improvement: the lopsided style of the past week had been rather comical. Hakon seemed somewhat distracted, but refocused his attention.
“If we could get Lavik to make a voluntary statement, it might possibly give us a lead. The problem is that from a tactical point of view we have to be certain the interrogation will be effective. We know…”
He broke off, and started the sentence again.
“We believe the man to be guilty: there are too many coincidences. The meeting in the middle of the night with the armed fugitive, the initials on the banknote, the visit to the cells the day the warning note scared the shit out of Han van der Kerch. And another fact: he was visiting Jacob Frostrup only a few hours before the poor chap did himself in.”
“That doesn’t actually prove anything,” said Hanne. “We all know that prisons are full of drugs. The warders, for instance, can go in and out quite freely without any check whatsoever, directly from outside to an individual cell if they want to.
“Quite unbelievable,” she added, after a moment’s thought. “It’s absurd that the staff of a department store like Steen and Strom have to subject themselves to searches to prevent shoplifting, while prison staff have no inspection for drug-smuggling into prisons!”
“Unions, trade unions,” muttered Kaldbakken.
“And Han van der Kerch’s dread of the prison may have something to do with that. Perhaps he suspects people within the prison system,” Hanne went on, not rising to the chief inspector’s political views. “It seems unlikely to me that Lavik would take the risk of being stopped with a case full of drugs. Frostrup’s death is more an indication that Van der Kerch’s fear of prison was justified.
“But this note here is Lavik’s work. That much I’m certain of,” she said, holding up a plastic envelope containing the undigested warning.
The writing was faint and half-obliterated, but no one had any difficulty reading the message.
“It looks like a poor joke,” the redheaded man ventured again. “Bits of paper like that belong in crime novels, not in real life.” He laughed. He was the only one who did.
“Could a person really be driven into a psychotic state by such a note?” asked Kaldbakken sceptically. In thirty years he’d never come across anything like it.
“Yes, it literally frightened him out of his wits,” said Hanne. “He wasn’t in very good condition before, of course; a note like this could have been the last straw. He’s better now, anyway, and back in a cell. Well, better doesn’t mean much, he’s sitting in a corner and refusing to say anything at all. Karen Borg can’t get anything out of him either, as far as I know. He ought to be in hospital, if you ask me. But they’ll throw him back at the prison service as soon as he can remember his name.”
They were all very well aware of that. Prison psychiatry was a
“How about asking Lavik in for a chat?” Hakon proposed. “We could take a chance on his not refusing, and see how it holds up. It might be the most stupid thing we could do; but on the other hand, does anyone have a more feasible suggestion?”
“What about Peter Strup?” It was the superintendent’s first contribution to the discussion.
Hanne replied, “We’ve got nothing on him at the moment; in my notes he’s just a big question mark.”
“Don’t leave him aside forever,” the superintendent advised, closing the meeting. “Bring Lavik in, but don’t push him too far. We don’t want the whole legal profession on our backs. At least not yet. In the meantime, you”-he pointed at the young lad with the snub nose, and moved his finger along-“and you… and you… can do all the dirty work. Come with me and get your duties. There’s a lot to be checked. I want to know everything about our two lawyers. Eating habits and deodorants. Political affiliations and women. Look out especially for common factors.”
The superintendent departed, accompanied by the red-haired lad and the other two, roughly the same age, who’d had the sense to keep quiet during the meeting. It hadn’t made any difference-the youngest always got the
