Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel by Anne Holt Read Free Book Online

me.”
    Her voice smooth as silk, she leaned toward him across the desk.
    “To think I’m going to experience that. Being Billy T.’s boss. Every boss’s nightmare. I’m looking forward to it!”
    He contentedly stretched out his six-and-a-half-foot-tall body, folding his hands at the back of his neck.
    “If I could ever adapt to having a boss, then it would have to be a lovely lady. And if I could ever adapt to a lovely lady, then it would have to be you. This will go well.”
    Billy T. had become a detective again. After many years as a cop in denims in Oslo Police Station’s drug intervention unit, he had allowed himself to be persuaded by Hanne Wilhelmsen,who had even written his transfer application for him. It had cost her many bottles of red wine and a pricey dinner before he had signed up, at two o’clock one Saturday night. At nine o’clock the next morning he had phoned her in desperation, attempting to have the application form ripped to shreds, but she had laughed. It was out of the question. Now he was sitting here, obviously looking forward to it himself too.
    “And the first thing you have to tackle is this.”
    She handed him three green folders, not too voluminous. A knife attack from the previous Saturday, a suspicious infant death that probably was a case of sudden infant death syndrome, and another death at the other end of the life span that would quite possibly turn out to be alcohol poisoning.
    “These are child’s play,” she said.
    Then she produced another folder.
    “And this is the real work. A murder. Old-fashioned stabbing, right out of a cheap thriller. In a foster home! It happened last night. Talk to the crime scene team. Good luck. I’d prefer to have a load of people on the case, but with this double murder in Smestad last week, this is how it has to be. Four detectives max. Anyway, you’ll be the lead investigator.”
    “Fuck, is that already decided?”
    “Yes.” She smiled ingratiatingly. “You’ll work with Erik and Tone-Marit in the meantime.”
    Billy T. stood up and gathered his belongings with a heavy sigh.
    “I should’ve been down there,” he groaned.
    “I’m glad you’re not.” Hanne Wilhelmsen’s smile was saccharine sweet as she added, “T-shirts like that won’t do here. Go and change it at once! And at the very least before you set off for the foster home!”
    “We’ll see about that,” he muttered, deciding to wear the same shirt all week, before trudging out the door with spurs clinking.
     • • • 
    Billy T. had changed his T-shirt all the same. On further reflection he had decided that the message was not suitable for children in a foster home, and now he was wearing a neutral white button-down shirt beneath an enormous well-worn sheepskin coat. He bumped his head on the doorframe as he clambered out of the undersized unmarked police car, making a futile attempt to rub away the pain on his way up the garden path. It was cold after a period of mild weather, and the gravel, dry and frosty, crunched under his pointed boots. Hanne Wilhelmsen had accompanied him. Billy T.’s strides were so long that she was forced to jog beside him.
    “I ought to have danger money for driving these cars,” Billy T. commented bitterly. “Am I bleeding?”
    Bending over, he turned the crown of his head toward his colleague. The scalp was visible under the stubble of hair, with cuts and scars from a multitude of earlier collisions, but he was not bleeding.
    “Wimp,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, kissing it better and opening a blue entrance door on which a half-moon-shaped window was divided into three at face height. A little flowery curtain prevented them from seeing inside.
    They entered a porch, with cloakroom hooks along the wall on one side and a three-shelf wooden shoe rack on the other. A cheerful chaos of shoes in sizes from 32 to 44 was piled both on and around the shelves, but before Hanne Wilhelmsen had made up her mind whether to remove her