The blood was dark on the light wood of the jetty. Inspector Erik Halvorsen knelt and studied the trail that wound its way like a narrow river to the edge of the jetty and disappeared into the black waters of the Geirangerfjord. It was October 12th, and the air smelled of salt and the end of the season. The last tourists had left two weeks ago. The village of Fjordheim lay still like a forgotten painting, in which nothing moved except the smoke from the chimneys.
"When was he last seen?" Halvorsen asked without looking up.
His assistant, Nils Brekke, stood behind him, his collar turned up against the damp wind. "Last night. At the inn. Around 10 p.m. He was drinking alone. Ragnhild says he ordered four aquavits and didn't say a word."
The dead man's name was Anders Moen. Fifty-six years old. A fisherman, like his father and his father before him. He had lived in Fjordheim for thirty years. Unmarried. No children. The body lay four meters below the surface, wedged between the pilings of the jetty, face down, arms outstretched like a man who wanted to fly but couldn't. The divers had recovered him late that morning after old Margit Solvang had spotted the blood on the jetty at 6:15 and screamed, so loudly it could be heard all the way to Olsen's shop.
Halvorsen stood up. He was a tall man with a face that looked as if someone had carved it from granite and then forgotten to round off the edges. Thirty years with the Bergen police, the last five in the homicide division. He had asked for this case because he knew the fjord region. He had grown up here before fleeing to the city at eighteen, as he put it. Now he was back, and the fjord region looked as if it had been waiting for him.
“There are three wounds,” said forensic pathologist Astrid Lien, stepping out of the police boat and removing her gloves. Her hands were still damp from the fjord water. “Two on the back, one on the neck. The one on the neck was fatal. A long, narrow instrument. Not an ordinary kitchen knife. More like a filleting knife. Or a butcher’s knife.”
“So someone who knows how to cut,” said Halvorsen.
“Someone who has learned how. Yes.”
Fjordheim had 312 inhabitants, and every single one of them knew how to fillet a fish.
The interrogations began in the afternoon. Halvorsen sat in the common room of the Fjordheim Hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at all, but an inn with three rooms on the first floor that had been empty since September. The landlady, Ragnhild Dahl, brought coffee so strong that the spoon almost stood upright in it.
The first witness was Gunnar Foss, the deceased man's neighbor. He was a heavyset man with hands like shovels and a gaze that constantly darted sideways. "I didn't hear anything," he said. "I'm sleeping soundly."
"Your house is twenty meters from the jetty."
"I'm sleeping soundly," Foss repeated.
The second witness was Solveig Haugen, the postwoman. She was a thin woman with bright eyes, who saw and knew everything, as was common in small villages. "Anders had a falling out," she said. "With Knut Egeland. About the property by the fjord. Since the summer. It got heated, more than once. In August, Anders said in the inn that he was going to ruin the deal of a lifetime for Knut."
"What property?"
"The one next to the old boathouse. Anders wanted to buy it to build a fish smokehouse. Knut wanted it too, for a boat repair shop. There was only one seller and two interested parties, and neither of them was the type to back down."
Knut Egeland was the third witness. He arrived in work boots and an oil-stained jacket, sat down as if the chair were his own, and said without hesitation: "I didn't kill Anders Moen. But I'm not going to pretend to mourn him." He was a tough man and not a pleasant neighbor.
"That's remarkably honest," Halvorsen said.
"I'm an honest man. That's my problem."
"Where were you last night between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.?"
"At home. Alone. No witnesses. You're not going to like this."
Halvorsen certainly didn't like it. But something else pleased him even less: the filleting knife found an hour later in Egeland's workshop. It was in a drawer under oiled rags. It was clean. Too clean, Astrid Lien said. Cleaned with chlorine. Someone had gone to great lengths.
That evening, Halvorsen sat alone in the pub, staring at his notes. The motive was clear: the property. The dispute was known. The threat documented. The knife fit. Egeland had no alibi. It was, Halvorsen thought, as if someone had written the solution on a piece of paper and nailed it to the door of the town hall.
And that was precisely what worried him.
The next morning, Halvorsen returned to the jetty. The fjord lay motionless, a mirror of dark glass in which the mountains distorted as if in a dream. The mountains rose like sentinels, waiting for millennia for something that never came. Halvorsen stood at the edge of the jetty, lost in thought. The wind had died down, and the silence was so profound he could hear his own pulse.
The problem wasn't that everything pointed to Egeland. The problem was that everything pointed too clearly to Egeland. Too neatly. Too obviously. The trail wasn't a trail at all. It was an invitation. Someone wanted Egeland to be found. And if someone wanted the wrong person found, then there was either the right person—or there was no one at all.
He went back to the village and knocked on the door of Margit Solvang, the old woman who had discovered the blood. She opened it wearing a knitted shawl and invited him in. Her living room smelled of birchwood smoke and of the past.
"Mrs. Solvang," Halvorsen said. "You go to the jetty every morning. Why?"
"I look at the water. I've been doing that ever since my Torbjørn died. Every morning. The water calms me. It's always moving and never changes, and that's a comfort when you're old."
"What time do you usually go?"
"At six. Always at six. For seven years now."
"And everyone in the village knows that?"
“Of course. Everyone knows everything here. That’s the blessing and the curse of a small town.”
Halvorsen nodded slowly. Everyone knew that Margit went to the jetty at six o’clock. Everyone knew she would find the blood. If there was a murderer, he had planned for this. He wanted the body found quickly. He wanted the police to come. He wanted Egeland to be a suspect.
But why?
He asked Nils to check the land registry entries. It took two hours because the administration was located in the county seat and the phone line was bad. When Nils returned, he had a piece of paper in his hand and a face like he’d bitten into a lemon.
“The property,” Nils said. “It belongs to the municipality. And the municipality already decided last week not to sell it. Not to Moen, not to Egeland, not to anyone else. It will be a public bathing area.”
Halvorsen stared at him. “The motive doesn’t exist.”
“The motive doesn’t exist,” Nils confirmed.
Halvorsen went back to the jetty. This time not to read the tracks, but to look at the water, as Margit Solvang did every morning. The fjord didn’t speak. But it didn’t hide anything either. You just had to look closely. You had to see what was there, not what you expected.
He saw it.
At the foot of the jetty, half-submerged, lay a fishing line. It was tied to one of the pilings, taut by the gentle current, and at the end hung not a hook, but a piece of fabric. Halvorsen carefully pulled the line out. The fabric was a sleeve. A piece of a jacket sleeve. Blue, with an oil stain. He recognized the fabric. It was the jacket Moen had worn that evening. Ragnhild had described it.
He went back to Astrid Lien. “The wounds,” he said. “Could they also have been caused by a fall?” "From the metal fittings on the pilings under the jetty?"
Astrid was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "The wounds on the back—yes. Possibly. The pilings have metal fittings, and the edges are sharp. But the wound on the neck—"
"What if a sharp object was attached to the piling? An old filleting blade, for example, that someone had put there years ago to cut fishing lines?"
Astrid looked at him. Then she stood up and went to the jetty.
They found the blade on the third piling. It was attached with two screws, rusty, but still sharp enough to cut a line. Or to open a throat. It had been there for years. Every fisherman in the village knew about it. It wasn't a murder weapon. It was a tool like dozens of others found on jetties along the Norwegian coast. The examination lasted until evening. The result was clear: the blade fit the neck wound perfectly.
Anders Moen had not been murdered.
Anders Moen had been drunk, four aquavits and probably more, had slipped on the wet jetty, gotten tangled in a fishing line he himself had tied there, fallen between the pilings, tore his back open on the metal fittings, and landed with his neck on the filleting board. An accident. A tragic, absurd, improbable accident, the kind no crime writer could have invented because no one would have believed him.
"And the knife in Egeland's workshop?" Nils asked.
Halvorsen chuckled softly. It was a laugh without mockery, more a laugh of relief. "Egeland is a fisherman. He cleaned his knife with chlorine because he always does. Because every fisherman here does. That's how you keep the blade clean and free of bacteria. It has nothing to do with Moen. It never has."
On his last evening in Fjordheim, Halvorsen stood on the jetty and gazed at the water. The fjord lay still, as it almost always did, and the mountains stood there as if they knew everything that had ever happened at their feet, and as if they didn't consider it worth mentioning. The sun set behind the peaks, and the light turned orange and then violet, and the fjord took on every color the sky gave it.
Knut Egeland approached him. His hands were in his pockets, and his chin jutted out, as was his way. He stood beside Halvorsen and said nothing for a long time. Then: "You believed me."
"I believed the evidence," Halvorsen said. "That's different."
"Not for me."
"For me, yes. But in your case, it was enough."
Egeland was silent for a while. Then he said: "I'll take care of the bathing area. The one the community is building there. Voluntarily. I'll paint the benches, mow the lawn, keep the jetty in good repair. So the children can swim in the summer."
"That sounds good," Halvorsen said.
"Anders wouldn't have wanted it. He would have hated the bathing area. He would have said the fjord belonged to the fishermen, not the bathers. But Anders is dead, and the children are alive, and that's the only arithmetic that matters."
Halvorsen smiled. It was a rare smile on his face, a smile that softened the edges of his granite face for a moment, as if someone had finally taken up the chisel. "No," he said quietly. "That doesn't make it wrong."
The next morning, he drove back to Bergen. The road wound through the mountains, and the fjord glittered one last time in the rearview mirror before the curve concealed it. There was no murder in the fjord. There was only a man who had drunk too much and slipped on wet wood, and a village that had nearly torn itself apart over a suspicion that should never have existed. The truth, Halvorsen thought, was sometimes simpler than the crime one thought one had found within it. And sometimes the simple truth was crueler than any murder. Because a murderer could be punished. A wet jetty and one too many glasses of aquavit could only be pitied.
He turned on the radio. Someone was playing Grieg, the morning mood from Peer Gynt, and the music settled over the landscape like a second sky. The mountains receded, the city drew nearer, and Erik Halvorsen drove home.
S.
Your support keeps ideas alive — and stories in motion. 👉 https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5NGG6XB67BZ4N 🙏
🇩🇪 My lyrical thoughts between two book covers: blau pause zimmerlautstärke - lyrik über die zeit - zurzeit
BoD Bookshop: https://buchshop.bod.de/blau-pause-zimmerlautstaerke-stefan-noir-9783695118779
Amazon-Shop: https://amzn.eu/d/1TvOBUO
🇺🇸 / 🏴 / 🏴 My lyrical thoughts between two book covers: blue pause room volume: poetry about time – currently
Amazon (English edition): https://amzn.eu/d/3b3GUF4
Comments