4

He was asleep and back in the woods. It was the same night. The body was still lying at his feet.

The heavens had cleared. He could see the huge moon. Clouds scudded past, and for one bizarre moment, it felt as if they were the ones standing still as the moon tumbled out of control across the sky. He felt as small as a snowflake. At first he thought it was a cloud formation. But it wasn’t. It was a man. He was moving across the sky with a big rolled-up sheet of paper in his hands. And it might be the ballad he was holding. It was almost certainly the ballad. The man’s face was in shadow beneath a dark hood.

And behind him came the man with the violin.

Then came the men carrying the coffin.

He could hear the melody, the music they were marching to. Step by step by step they traversed the sky. Giants bearing a burden on their shoulders, keeping pace, moving slowly, like time itself. Father is inside that coffin, he thought.

Then he awoke and stared up at the filthy ceiling. He lay there with a nagging feeling that the dream should have lasted longer.

But what does it matter? he thought. I dreamed. For the first time in weeks, I dreamed. But it wasn’t her song that had made him fall asleep. The song hadn’t worked the way he’d expected.

It was 6:45. Strictly speaking, it was early, but Singsaker was no longer struggling to wake up. He felt strangely clearheaded, even though he hadn’t yet had his daily shot of aquavit. Or maybe that was precisely the reason.

They were assembled in the conference room of the Violent Crimes and Sexual Assault team of the Trondheim police, with as much coffee as they’d been able to scrounge up. With them was the head of the department, Gro Brattberg. Also present was Inspector Thorvald Jensen, the only colleague Singsaker ever socialized with. He did his best to share Jensen’s enthusiasm for hunting and ice bathing, but in his heart he knew that it was really his colleague’s inner calm that appealed to him most. Jensen reminded Singsaker of who he himself might have been if his mind could have been toned down a notch, if he hadn’t had the brain surgery, didn’t indulge himself with a shot of aquavit every morning, and hadn’t gotten divorced, only to fall in love with a young American woman. In short, if he was not the person he was, he could have been Jensen. Singsaker wondered if that wasn’t, in fact, a good basis for a friendship. Jensen was rocking his chair back and forth, his hands clasped on his stomach, as he fixed his sleepy eyes on the ceiling. Next to him sat Mona Gran. She was the youngest of the detectives in the unit. Grongstad and Singsaker sat at either end of the table. The meeting began with the two of them, since they’d been at the crime scene.

Grongstad went first, meticulous as always. Singsaker had little to add except to pose a few questions related to what Grongstad had told them. In his opinion, they needed to clarify three things: How had the killer and the victim arrived at the scene of the crime, and how had the murderer left? Was it possible to come up with any motive for the murder, based on the evidence discovered so far? Most noteworthy was the music box, which looked like an antique, and the fact that the victim’s larynx had been cut out. But the last question was the most important: Who was the victim?

Brattberg started in after Singsaker finished. “Our first priority has to be identifying this woman without a throat.”

Singsaker appreciated Brattberg’s precise descriptions, which were often specific and thought-provoking. The woman without a throat, he thought to himself. That means something. There’s something significant about that. No one in the room disagreed with the priorities of the head of the Violent Crimes team. They all knew that in most homicide cases, the killer has some sort of connection to the victim, and so the more they found out about the deceased, the closer they would conceivably get to the perpetrator.

“Gran, I want you to go through all the missing person reports. From the whole country. Look at the most recent first and then work your way back,” said Brattberg.

Mona Gran nodded and made a note in her iPad.

“Singsaker, you need to find out more about the music box. Where’s it from? Is it old? Where was it made? And what about the tune it plays? I’d say that music museum at Ringve Manor would be the place to start. Don’t they have a good collection of music boxes out there?”

“Jonas Røed,” said Gran. “Talk to Jonas Røed. He’s probably the foremost expert on music boxes in Norway. He works at the museum.”

Everyone turned to look at their young colleague, impressed. She shrugged.

“I go out to Ringve a lot. The best museum in the city, in my opinion,” she explained. “Singsaker, you’ll like Røed. A real nerd and kind of reserved. But he knows everything about musical instruments.”

Singsaker wondered why that would be a reason to like someone, but he didn’t voice his puzzlement.

“Jensen, have a talk with Kittelsen as soon as he has anything to tell us. Has the body been delivered to him yet?” Brattberg looked from Jensen to Grongstad.

“It was taken over to the St. Olav lab half an hour ago, but if I know Kittelsen, you won’t get anything out of him until he’s had his coffee break. Which is at noon,” said the crime tech.

Everyone chuckled. They were all familiar with Kittelsen and his moods.

“From what I saw,” Grongstad went on, “it wouldn’t surprise me if he says that she was severely beaten before she was killed. Her body was covered in bruises. But as I mentioned to Singsaker earlier, it’s unlikely that it happened where she was found.”

“So you think she was moved there after she was dead?”

“It’s too early to say for sure. Although I do think that her throat was cut in the woods. So the question is, What killed her? The beating, which came first, or the knife, which came later?”

“We need to get Kittelsen to move quickly on this,” Brattberg said without much hope. “In the meantime, the rest of us have to get to work and start collecting information. It’s going to be a busy day.”

The meeting was over. Gro Brattberg handled things clearly and in a straightforward way. And that boosted everyone’s confidence. Singsaker felt a mild headache fade almost before he noticed it. None of them wanted another chaotic investigation like the one they’d been through while investigating the grisly murders the previous fall.

Singsaker happened to know quite a bit about Ringve Manor. As he drove out to Lade, he refreshed his memory, in case it would prove to be useful to the case.

The manor had been separated from the Lade estate in the seventeenth century. It had had numerous different owners and had undergone several phases of construction. Like most people who lived in Trondheim, Singsaker associated the estate most closely with Victoria Bachke and the museum.

In 1919, the young Victoria, then twenty-one years old, visited Ringve for the first time. Several months later she married the owner of the estate, Christian Ancker Bachke. She and her husband then made plans for the founding of Ringve Museum, although their vision was not realized until after Christian’s death. A museum honoring the naval hero Peter Wessel Tordenskiold was first established in 1950. Two years later the present-day museum opened, devoted to musical instruments, based on the extensive and diverse collection owned by the Bachkes. Ringve is today Norway’s National Museum for Musical Instruments, and the collection includes approximately two thousand audio exhibits. It was also the country’s only professional workshop for conserving instruments.

Singsaker trudged across the cobblestone courtyard between the nicely restored mansions. Ringve did seem like the right place to start. The woman without a throat, he thought. Maybe that was significant; maybe it wasn’t. The killer had removed the human body’s own musical instrument and replaced it with a mechanical one: the music box. It was possible that everything he knew about Ringve was just filler in his brain. He often wondered why his memory loss from the brain tumor operation a year ago hadn’t erased any of the the haphazard knowledge he had. An absurd and yet frightening thought occurred to him. What if those random thoughts were the ones that fed the tumors?

Then he went inside and asked to see Jonas Røed.

“Well, this is certainly interesting. A music box made with remarkable skill. We rarely ever see one of such good quality. Especially not with such an exquisite ballerina on the lid.”

Jonas Røed’s voice was slightly shrill and intense. It sounded like an untuned instrument that Singsaker had never heard before, but one that could undoubtedly be found in the museum. Røed gestured vigorously with one hand as he talked, emphasizing his words. His hair was equally energetic and oddly enough matched his last name, Norwegian for “red.” His hair was cut short in back, and in front his bangs partially obscuring his eyes. Singsaker wasn’t quite sure what to make of this man. Like anyone with a passion for something the detective didn’t understand, Røed seemed inscrutable.

“So it’s not an ordinary music box?” he asked.

Singsaker looked at the back of Røed’s T-shirt as he bent over the instrument in the cramped office out in the barn. It was an old, faded Metallica concert shirt with a list of the cities they’d played during a tour in the 1990s. The T-shirt, once black, had now faded to gray.

“No, it’s definitely not ordinary.” Røed had opened the music box and used a loupe to examine the cylinder inside. “Somebody changed the cylinder recently,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“A music box consists of three main components. First, the comb, which is usually made of finely tuned metal teeth, although some music boxes have strings. Player pianos, for example. Each tooth vibrates at a certain frequency and produces a specific tone. So they can only play the tones of the particular number of teeth. This music box can play both major and minor notes. To strike the teeth, the music box usually has a set of pins that are affixed to cylinders or drums, which can be permanently attached or sometimes are removable. The pins move toward the teeth, and that’s how the music is produced. Finally, something has to make the pins move. In the case of some music boxes, this is done manually, by turning a crank. On others, such as this one, a spring has to be wound. The tune that it plays is programmed onto the cylinder, while the musical scale is in the teeth. I believe that the music box and teeth, which appear to be original, are old. But the cylinder has recently been replaced with one that’s homemade. And it was done by an amateur, judging by the soldering. But whoever put it in the music box knew what he was doing.”

“Would you say that he had a good knowledge of music?”

“Yes, absolutely,” said Røed.

“A musician?”

“There are many ways to become a music expert. Music can be seen purely theoretically. Some people compare music to mathematics. Making a new tune for a music box requires some theoretical expertise in music. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to know how to play an instrument. Because that also demands dexterity and talent.”

“So theoretically somebody who isn’t a musician could have done it?”

“That’s for you to figure out. I can only tell you about the mechanical device. In terms of the container itself, I’m almost positive it was made in Europe, most likely in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland, which was the major manufacturing site for music boxes and clocks. In my opinion, it was made sometime in the early 1800s. There is no maker’s mark, which wasn’t unusual prior to the industrial age. This would be a real collector’s item if the cylinder had been original. But I’d guess that it’s not one of a kind, even though I’ve never seen this exact model before. Music boxes like this were sold as toys to children of wealthy families here in Norway, and you can still find similar ones stored away in attics.”

“What about the tune it plays?”

“Quite a melancholy tune, in the minor key. It makes me think of a rather sad lullaby. I’ve never heard this particular melody before. But it’s suitable for a music box, which has a sound all its own. I love tunes played in the minor key on old music boxes with plenty of resonance, like this one. Those fragile, sad tones seem to fill the whole room. Doesn’t it sound almost magical?”

Jonas Røed let the music box play the whole song, and Singsaker had to admit that it gave him goose bumps.

“Isn’t it odd that you don’t recognize the song?” he asked.

“Why do you say that?” replied Røed.

“Because this is what you work with. I’d guess you’ve listened to hundreds of music boxes, and have a keen interest in all kinds of music.”

He couldn’t help glancing again at Røed’s T-shirt.

“You’re right. But that may be the point. Perhaps whoever replaced the cylinder did it because he couldn’t find an original music box with this obscure tune. If you want to find out more about it, there are other people who know a lot more about music than I do.”

“Could you suggest a few names?”

“If this is really a lullaby, I’d talk to Professor Jan Høybråten at the Institute for Music at NTNU. He’s the foremost expert on our Nordic ballad tradition.”

Singsaker thanked Røed, who handed the music box back, giving the device an odd look as he did so. Singsaker couldn’t decipher what that look meant. Maybe Røed would have liked to keep it for a while to study it further.

Mona Gran turned down the volume of the music she was listening to through her earbuds. She seldom asked herself whether it was appropriate for a policewoman to be listening to death metal, and she hadn’t shared her taste in music with everyone in the department. Jensen knew about her music taste, and he used to tease her by giving her the sign of the horns. She marveled at how childish men could be. One day she had asked Jensen if he knew what that sign meant if made behind the back of an Italian.

“No clue,” he replied.

“It means his wife is being unfaithful.” Then she had stood behind his back and held up the little finger and index finger on her right hand as she laughed. After that, she lectured him about the different meanings the sign had had in history. Did he know it had once been used as protection against evil spirits, much like the way Catholics used the sign of the cross?

After that, Jensen stopped teasing her.

Singsaker, on the other hand, had no idea what sort of music she listened to. He just thought she was the nicest young woman in the department. And that actually might be true. But she couldn’t figure him out. He treated her like he was her father, and she let him, maybe even enjoyed it. She didn’t feel the need to keep her musical tastes secret; it was just something they’d never discussed. She suspected he might not even know what death metal was.

Music helped her concentrate. She needed all the help she could get, now that the real work was about to start. It was ten-thirty in the morning, and the Trondheim police still hadn’t received a report of anyone who had gone missing during the past twenty-four hours. That wasn’t necessarily significant, since it could take a while before people were actually missed. The woman they were trying to identify might have lived alone. Or maybe she was a student with few friends in town. She might have met the killer on her way home from a late-night party, and her friends might think that she was still sleeping it off in someone else’s bed. But the police couldn’t sit and wait for someone to discover that she hadn’t come home. Gro Brattberg had decided to release a description of the woman. But it wasn’t a particularly distinctive description: dark blond hair, blue eyes, average height, somewhere between twenty and thirty, attractive but without any distinguishing marks. Most likely this would bring in too many tips and a ton of extra work. But this was often what helped them solve a case. Breakthroughs in an investigation seldom came from flashes of brilliance; instead, they came from the methodical and thorough examination of a seemingly endless string of unrelated information.

While they waited for tips to come in, Gran had to consider the possibility that the victim might have come from somewhere else, or that she might have been missing for a long time.

Every year, more than a thousand people were reported missing in the various police districts in Norway. Most were young, like this victim. They usually disappeared from some kind of institution and turned up in crime-riddled areas, especially in the big cities. Only rarely was a missing person found murdered, like this woman without a throat.

Gran studied the photo that Grongstad had given her, trying to come up with key words to send to other police districts, and to use in a search of the databases. Her first search attempt was not successful. There were too many hits. She stared at the small grainy pictures of young women, wondering what had happened to all of them. None of them bore any resemblance to their corpse.

She turned her music up and leaned back in her chair. Either we get lucky and find a match soon, she thought, or else this is going to take a really long time. She stretched her back and then closed her eyes and let her thoughts drift. As she sat there, one hand had come to rest on her stomach, just below her navel. This had become a habit of hers. Maybe she was hoping that her hands had healing powers that she wasn’t aware of. She was twenty-seven years old, and several months had passed since her worst suspicions had been confirmed. They’d been trying for two years to have a baby, but she’d gotten her period each month, like clockwork. So it hadn’t been a shock to learn that something was wrong. She was the one with the problem—constricted Fallopian tubes from an infection that she never knew she had. After more attempts and tests, the doctor had reached the conclusion that it might not be impossible for her to conceive naturally, although it was very unlikely, and that she was a good candidate for IVF. Two days ago she’d received a referral to the fertility clinic at St. Olav Hospital.

Mona Gran smiled. She took out her earbuds and began making calls.

“Professor Høybråten?”

Singsaker cleared his throat. He’d knocked on the office door and heard someone tell him to come in. But the older gentleman hadn’t looked up when the door opened, nor when Singsaker went over to the desk where the man was sitting. He was leaning so far over that it almost looked as if he were asleep.

“Professor Høybråten?” Singsaker repeated.

Only then did the man react. He sat up straight and stared at the detective, his gaze both distant and piercing. It was obvious that he’d been deeply immersed in his own thoughts, and that he wasn’t pleased by this interruption.

“Excuse me,” he said. “How may I help you?”

Jan Høybråten was older than Singsaker. His white hair stuck out in all directions. He would have been retired if he’d been anything other than a professor.

“My name is Odd Singsaker. I’m from the police. We’re investigating a murder that was committed last night in the Rosenborg district.”

He assumed that Høybråten wouldn’t have heard about the murder, since the news had been released too late to be included in the morning edition of the paper. The professor didn’t seem like someone who got his news online, or listened to the radio while he worked.

“Yes, one of my colleagues told me about it,” he said, as if he’d read Singsaker’s mind. “But what does it have to do with me?”

Singsaker tried to determine whether it was surprise or something else he heard in the man’s voice. Annoyance? Nervousness? He wasn’t sure. An old man’s voice could be so capricious.

“I’m here to ask for your help with a specific detail of the case,” he said. “Your expert advice.”

He took out the music box and wound it up.

“This was found near the body, and we have no idea what the tune is.”

Then he let go of the key and set the mechanical device on the professor’s desk.

Høybråten listened to the melody. Halfway through he closed his eyes, looking as if he were trying hard to concentrate. When the notes finally stopped, he opened his eyes and shook his head.

“No, strangely enough, I’ve never heard it,” he said.

“And that surprises you?”

“Yes, it does. There’s something oddly familiar about the melody. But I’m positive I’ve never heard it before. A minor key in six/ eight time, slow tempo. Mostly likely a lullaby. It could be a ballad by Bellman. But it’s not.”

“Bellman?”

“Yes. Carl Michael Bellman. You don’t know who he is?”

“I’ve heard his name. A Swedish composer, right?”

“The greatest of all ballad composers. He lived in Stockholm in the 1700s.”

Høybråten looked at Singsaker, his expression no longer remote. He seemed to consider whether he should launch into a lengthy lecture about the Swedish musician, but apparently he realized it would be casting pearls before swine.

“I’m giving a concert of Bellman’s ballads at the Ringve Museum next week” was all he said.

“Really? You’re going to sing?”

The professor didn’t answer for a moment, as if deciding how to respond.

“No, unfortunately, I no longer sing. I’m afraid my vocal cords aren’t what they used to be. Nodules. I’m an old man now.”

Again Singsaker sensed there were emotions behind the professor’s words that were not being conveyed by his tone of voice.

“It’s a small group of specially selected girls from the Nidaros Cathedral girls choir,” the professor went on. “I’ll be directing. Actually, I was just sitting here going over the repertoire when you came in. But to get back to the matter at hand: This is not a Bellman ballad. I have no idea who might have written it.”

“Do you think it could be a Nordic lullaby?” asked Singsaker.

“I can’t claim to be familiar with every lullaby ever written. And much of the folk music that was composed here in the north before the 1800s has been lost, quite simply because it was never written down. So it’s possible. Could you play it one more time?”

Singsaker wound up the music box again while the professor got out pencil and paper. This time he made notes as the music played. By the time the song was over, he had a sequence of notes on the page.

“I’ll do some research for you,” he said. “If I find anything, I’ll get in touch.”

Singsaker nodded and picked up the music box. As he left the office, the professor got up and went over to open the window as he fumbled for a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. Many of the employees at the university were still fighting the no-smoking regulations.

Singsaker got into his car, which was parked in the big lot outside the university area on Dragvoll. Parts of the city’s university were located out here in the country, near what had previously been a farm. From the parking lot there was a magnificent view of the city.

He searched his pockets for his notebook and found it at last. Then he put it on his lap and let his finger glide over the black leather cover. It was a Moleskine notebook, a welcome-back gift from his colleagues in the department, given to him last summer after his brain surgery. He’d always used this type of notebook, so it was an especially thoughtful gift. Yet it had taken him a long time to start using this one. At first he didn’t know why. But after a while he’d realized that jotting down notes now meant something different from what it had in the past. It was the same as realizing that his memory was not the same as before the operation, and it that might never be the same. That was something he had to accept. He’d become a forgetful man who could no longer get by without a notebook. But as soon as he became reconciled to this fact, his relationship to his notebook had changed. Only then did he understand what a wonderful gift it was. He’d started calling the notebook “the better half of my brain,” and he didn’t use it just for police work. He also jotted down notes about everything in his personal life that he thought was important to remember.

He turned to the last page he’d written on. He was surprised that he’d made love to Felicia twice last night. Could that be correct? He smiled and felt an urge to drive home and see her. But instead, he took a pencil stub out of his breast pocket and wrote, “Høybråten seemed nervous. Why?”

At 1:05 P.M. the phone rang in Mona Gran’s office.

“Hi, Officer Jonas Borten here. I’m phoning from Greenland,” he said. Then he added, without a trace of humor, “The police department in the Greenland district of Oslo. I’m at work.”

“How can I help you?” asked Gran.

Borten didn’t reply for a moment, as if caught off guard by her willingness to help.

“I’m calling because I think I can help you,” he said finally.

“That sounds good. We could use some help.”

“It’s regarding the murder victim you found last night. I might have something for you.”

“Yes? What is it?” she said, trying to hide her impatience.

“We don’t have any new missing person reports that match your description, but something made me think about a case I worked on a few weeks back. I think it was the address that caught my attention. When I was a kid I lived in Bakkaunet, not far from Kuhaugen, so I know the area well. Ludvig Daaes Gate was on my way to school. And that’s one of the reasons why I remember the case. We got a missing person report about three weeks ago. A woman from Oslo. She shared an apartment with another woman, who filed the report. But after only twenty-four hours, the missing woman called her friend from the train station in Trondheim and said she was on her way to meet a former lover who had moved there. We dropped the case, but just to make sure, I did a search on this lover of hers. He lived not far from Kuhaugen, and it turned out that the purportedly missing woman had previously filed a police report charging him with domestic violence. A stabbing. I didn’t give any more thought to the matter. Just another thoughtless young woman going back to her abusive lover, and there was nothing we could do about that. But then I hear about this homicide, and it happens close to the place where her lover lives, and there’s a knife involved, and the description fits the woman, so I thought that—”

“The description also fits about ten thousand other Norwegian women of the same age,” Gran said, interrupting. “But we can’t leave any stone unturned. Do you have a photo of this woman?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I have. Of course, this could just be a shot in the dark, but that’s what happens so often. We shoot and shoot until we finally hit the mark. Give me your e-mail address, and I’ll send over the picture right now.”

She gave him the address.

Then she put down the phone.

Two minutes later she clicked on the e-mail that he’d sent. A picture popped up on her screen. It showed a smiling young woman wearing a little too much makeup.

“Jabba the Hutt,” Gran muttered to herself. “It’s her.”