Jørgen Jæger
The Concealment A Crime Novel
Sample Translation
©2017 Translated from the Norwegian by Becky L. Crook
Prologue THREE MEN, ONE with a pistol concealed beneath his jacket. They head toward the riverbank. One of them doesn't want to go but the pistol is aimed at him. He would like to shout in protest but he must stay silent or be shot. He would like to scream for help but can't do that either, because the pistol has a silencer and no one would hear the shot. He stays silent. As long as there is life, there may be hope. But there is no hope. At the edge of the water he is poked in the back and as he falls down, strong hands grab hold of his legs and lift them upwards. They hold tightly to him so that his head stays below water.
The man's body writhes. He is desperate now, tries to lift his head above the surface but does not succeed. His hands grasp for the bank, but he can't grab hold. He holds his breath, thinks that soon they are going to let go, but he is wrong because the hands that are holding him are strong. He must have air, can't hold his breath any longer, so he is forced to inhale and his lungs fill with water. Soon he is no longer writhing. His body turns limp and lifeless. His breathing comes to a halt and life ebbs out. The grip on his legs is released and his body floats out into the river current and vanishes in the dark.
A fourth man stands looking on. He cries. They climb into the car and drive off.
Chapter 1 On Thursday, October 27, the first snowflakes of winter settled like a fleeting silk carpet over the runway at Gardermoen, like the front lines of a white army preparing for invasion by sending out their scouts. Although the snow would melt soon enough, Widerøe WF 158 from Borg was forced to circle the air as ground crews began their first snow ploughing task of the year and an announcement was made that the airplane would land at five minutes past one thirty, a quarter of an hour late.
Reclining in a row toward the very front of the small Dash-8 plane was Police Chief Cecilie Hopen from Fjellberghaven, attempting to doze as the airplane orbited in large spirals over Gardermoen. She had a sleepless night behind her following the news she'd received the previous day. Once the plane landed, she would take the airport train on to Drammen and meet with her colleagues in the Southern Buskerud police district. It was they who had determined that her boyfriend had taken his life by drowning in Drammen river.
Cecilie peered through the window as the airplane dipped in and out of the cloud covering, exposing the agricultural region below in flickering glimpses, as though someone was turning the view on and off with a switch. It was hypnotic, she thought, a type of artificial blinking of the eye, and she was unspeakably tired. She had received news of the death directly after completing her investigations on an unusually tragic murder case. And then the sleepless night had followed to top it all off. But sleep evaded Cecilie now as well — it was impossible. She felt perplexingly alone where she sat in her seat shutting out the surrounding world. Her boyfriend no longer existed. Which meant that she would never again see him, hear his warm words nor feel his soft touch. The realization had begun sinking in heavily now and it felt as though someone had ripped the soul out of her chest and replaced it with a corrosive fire. And in the midst of everything were the questions. It was all unbelievable from the very first moment. Bernhard had simply left without telling her ahead of time. "I'm going to Drammen to arrange something, I'll probably be back on Thursday evening. Love you! Hugs!" said the note that she'd found on the countertop five days ago. That was the last she'd heard from him. Because his departure had come as a surprise, she tried calling him but each time went directly to his voicemail box. She should have reacted already then, since she knew that he tended to make himself available around the clock for his job. But the murder case that she had been working on at the time involved an entire family whose life
hung in the balance, and she had been forced to push all other distractions aside. Besides, he was certainly able to take care of himself. Still, the questions plagued her: Why was he going to Drammen when he had sold everything he'd owned there and no longer maintained any ties to the city? Where did he stay while he was there? Why had he left so abruptly? Hadn't he recently gone there and come back? Who was he going to meet? Why didn't he come home on Tuesday as he planned? She learned of his death on Wednesday, not from the Drammen police but from her former boss, Ole Vik, who had almost coincidentally been informed that Bernhard was found drowned on Tuesday evening. Then new questions began to haunt her. Why hadn't she been informed formally of the death? As the girlfriend and cohabitant of the deceased, wasn't she the next of kin? And why had the police in Drammen insisted that Bernhard's next of kin really had been informed? It was incomprehensible. In much the same way that it was incomprehensible to believe Bernhard had been suicidal. She knew him well enough not to believe it, a conviction which she intended to share with her colleagues in Drammen. But she knew something else as well, that things aren't always what they seem.