Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) Read Free

using her hand to shield her eyes. It did not help much, until she walked all the way to the opposite side of the street.
    “What are you looking for?” Silje Sørensen asked, following in her footsteps.
    Silje always asked questions. Pestered. What are you looking for? What are you doing? What are you thinking? Like a child. A smart but slightly annoying child.
    “Nothing. Just looking around.”
    The apartment block was antique-rose in color, with broad cornices. Above each window was a statue of a man battling a hideous fabled creature. The front garden was tiny, but a broad paved footpath snaking around the western corner of the building might indicate a more impressive back yard concealed at the rear. The building seemed to contain only four apartments. The one on the top left-hand side was in darkness. Frugal lamplight shone from the ground and first floors on the right of the building, leaving little doubt about where the crime had taken place. Through three of the windows down on the left she could see figures in white overalls and hairnets moving to and fro, precise and apparently purposeful. Someone drew a curtain.
    Suddenly Hanne was embraced from behind and lifted off her feet.
    “Bloody hell,” Billy T. yelled. “You’ve put on weight!”
    She kicked him on the shin with the heel of her boot.
    “Ouch! You could just have said something.”
    “I have done,” Hanne told him. “Don’t lift me every time you see me. I’ve said that a thousand times.”
    “You just say that because you’re getting fatter and fatter,” he grinned, brushing her shoulders. “You never mentioned it before. Never. You used to like it.”
    Snow was falling more thickly now, light, bone-dry flakes.
    “I don’t think you’re any fatter,” Silje was quick to say, though Hanne was already halfway across the street.
    “Let’s go inside,” she murmured, noticing how dread had made her feel queasy.
    The eldest of the three murder victims bore a resemblance to the famous portrait of Albert Einstein. The corpse lay in the hallway with one hand tucked under his head as if he had made himself comfortable on the floor, his hair forming a voluminous garland around his crown, with a bushy mop in the middle. His tongue also dangled from his mouth, extended to a bizarre length, and his eyes were wide open.
    “That guy looks as if he’s had a shock. An electric shock!”
    Billy T. leaned inquisitively over the old man.
    “If it hadn’t been for this here, eh?”
    He used a pen to point to an entry wound just below his left eye. Not particularly large, it appeared black rather than blood-red.
    “And this. And this.”
    The doctor, obviously responsible for the cadaver’s shirt front being carefully folded to one side, waved Billy T. aside. Between the sparse gray chest hairs, Hanne could see two further wounds.
    “How many shots are we actually dealing with?” she asked.
    “Too early to say,” the physician answered tersely. “Quite a number. You ought to have had a pathologist here, if you ask me. It’s about time you had a workable rota system sorted out with the Forensics Institute. All I can say is that these people are dead. Pretty grotesque, in my opinion. That man over there’s the worst, I believe.”
    Hanne Wilhelmsen did not want to look at “that man over there”. She had to steel herself to step around the old man and take a closer look at the body in the overcoat. An ill-tempered grunt sounded from one of the technicians, who could not bear having police investigators tramping around the crime scene.
    Hanne ignored him. When she leaned over the corpse nearest to the front door and noticed how the exit wound in the skull had been licked clean of blood, her nausea increased. Swiftly straightening her back, she swallowed and pointed at the body of the third man, whose age she estimated at about forty.
    “Preben,” Billy T. introduced him. “The elder son of the father, Hermann, over there. That much we know,