Free Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel by Anne Holt Page B

Wilhelmsen felt a strong impulse to put an end to it all by taking the boy to another room without spectators, but Billy T., realizing what she was about to say, made a dismissive gesture.
    “He said that a few times. When we were going to bed, for instance. I didn’t bother to answer, the new ones are always so angry about everything and everybody.”
    Now he was smiling for the first time. Beneath his wispy hair and scarred face, he was actually good-looking, with even, white teeth and dark eyes.
    “I was like that too, in the beginning. But with Olav it seemed kinda worse. He seemed absolutely deadly serious. He even told me how he was going to do it. He was going to use a knife, he said. I remember that well, because I thought it was so strange he wasn’t going to use a shotgun or a machine gun, like I used to talk about. Of course, a knife’s easier to get hold of. There’s piles of them lying in the kitchen. So if I was a cop, I wouldn’t look any further than that boy. He ran off too, you know.”
    He had obviously said his piece. Yawning, he made to turn and retreat to the living room. However, Billy T. stopped him.
    “But the knife that was used to kill Agnes wasn’t from here,” he said quietly. “You don’t buy your knives from Ikea.”
    Clearly totally uninterested, the boy shrugged his shouldersand continued on his way out the door. “Whatever you say,” he muttered, almost inaudibly. “But I’d bet a hundred note on Olav.”
     • • • 
    Olav was extremely bored with canned food. Moreover, his thumb was painfully swollen. They didn’t have an ordinary can opener there, at least not like the one his mum used. The one he had finally found was much smaller, and using it hurt his hand. Mostly he had eaten the canned food cold, and he was fed up with that. Struggling to half open the lid on a can of meatballs, he cut himself.
    “Fucking hell!”
    He stuck his finger in his mouth to suck the blood and whimpered when his thumb touched the wound on his tongue. Some of the blood had ended up in the sauce, creating a red filigree pattern in the pale brown gravy.
    “Bloody lid.”
    Pouring the contents into an oversized saucepan, he gingerly turned one of the knobs on the cooker. The numbers and symbols showing which burner they belonged to were completely worn away, but he guessed right this time too. After a few minutes, the food began to bubble, and he stirred energetically a couple of times, scraping the base of the pan. Before the food was properly cooked through, he put the whole shebang down on the tabletop and ate from the saucepan.
    By now he had spent one night and one day here, without leaving the kitchen. He slept there and ate there. The remainder of the time he sat on the floor, thinking. Once he had peered into the living room but became frightened by the huge curtainless panorama windows with their view over the entire city. For a moment he had considered moving the television set carefully into the kitchen but quickly discovered that the aerial cable would not reach.
    Agnes was dead. That was something at least he was quitecertain about, although he had never seen anyone dead before. She had such a strange expression on her face, and her eyes were open. He had always imagined that people closed their eyes when they died.
    If only he could phone Mum . . . There was a telephone in the hallway, secure and with no windows in sight. It even had a dial tone, for he had checked it out. But Mum’s house was probably crawling with policemen. On the television it always showed them going to people’s homes when they had done something wrong. They lurked in the bushes and then bang! they pounced when the person arrived. They were probably tapping the phone as well.
    For a while he sat musing on where they had located the tape recorder they always used, with someone sitting wearing earphones listening in beside it. At the neighbor’s house perhaps. She was a real cow. Or in the basement.