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

footwear, Billy T. had already headed through the next door, and she followed after him with her shoes on. To their right, a staircase led to another floor, and the room facing them was a kind of sitting room. The place was deserted and silent.
    “Cozy, really,” Billy T. mumbled to himself as he lowered hishead to avoid a mobile made of colorful cardboard witches decorated with crepe paper and dead birch rods. “This isn’t quite how I had envisioned it.”
    “Did you picture it more like something out of Dickens? Or what did you imagine?” Hanne Wilhelmsen asked, standing still and listening. “It’s so incredibly quiet here!”
    In answer, a woman came running down the stairs. Somewhere in her late twenties, with long blonde hair in a French braid, she wore an embroidered quilted vest and flared denim jeans that were either bang up-to-date or heirlooms from the seventies.
    “Sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I was on the phone! Maren Kalsvik.”
    Her handshake was firm, but her eyes were red ringed and bloodshot. Her face was bare, with no hint of makeup, but her eyelashes were dark and unusually long. It must be her hair that was bleached, although it did not appear to be.
    “All the youngsters have been transferred elsewhere. Just for the next twenty-four hours. It was the police . . .”
    She stopped, somewhat bewildered.
    “That is to say, the ones who were here during the night and early this morning, your colleagues . . . They were the ones who said so. That the children shouldn’t be here while they were inspecting the place. The crime scene, I mean.”
    Running a slim hand with short nails over her fringe, she appeared even more exhausted.
    “You’ll probably want to see it as well.”
    Without waiting for a reply, she turned on her heel and walked upstairs again, the two police officers following her. The corridor they reached had a window at either end; the gable walls of the house and the corridor itself probably were about two meters wide, with doors on either side. They turned right, obviously heading for the room that lay farthest in, on the left-hand side.Maren Kalsvik paused at the doorway and drew back, her eyelashes glittering with tears.
    “We’ve been told not to go inside.”
    That did not apply to Hanne Wilhelmsen, who crept underneath the red-and-white plastic tape draped across with a warning not to enter the room. Pulling the tape down, Billy T. stepped across.
    “She was sitting there,” Hanne said, nodding in the direction of a desk chair upholstered in red woolen fabric while she leafed through a folder she had produced from a large shoulder bag. “With her back to the window. Facing the door.”
    For a moment she stood staring at the desk as Billy T. approached the window.
    “Odd position, as a matter of fact,” she added, directing herself to Maren Kalsvik, who was still standing at a respectful distance from the doorway. “Desks are usually placed facing a wall.”
    “It was her way of saying that everybody was welcome to come in,” Maren replied. “She would never sit with her back turned.”
    Billy T. opened the window and cold, fresh air blasted into the room. Maren Kalsvik came closer to the plastic tape but jumped back when she discovered it was about to loosen at one end.
    “The window was locked from inside,” she informed them. “At least that’s what the police said this morning. The catches were closed.”
    Billy T. tugged at a substantial spiral hook screwed into the wall right beside the windowsill.
    “Fire rope fastener?”
    He did not wait for a response but instead leaned out and peered downward. The ground below the window was covered by a thin layer of old snow, with no prints. As he let his eye run over the house wall, he noticed an obvious trail underneath the other four large windows on the upper floor. The snow had been trampled away entirely, and dozens of footprints crisscrossed the earth. Pulling his head back inside, he rubbed his