The Lion's Mouth by Anne Holt Read Free Book Online

really exciting. What’s more, I wouldn’t call them losers. I don’t like the word. No human being is a loser. Some are simply more unfortunate than others, and the prize they have won in the lottery of life is not as substantial as what has come the way of the rest of us. Secondly, it is rewarding. Extremely rewarding, I would say. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t learn something new. In twenty-five years I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a large number of people in the most dreadful situations. Nothing about humanity is foreign to me any longer.”
    “Does it not take a heavy toll, working with violent criminals and killers?”
    “No, I wouldn’t say that. There’s a definite challenge with such clients: acquittal, or a reduced sentence. Where injustice has occurred, but no blame can be allocated, then it is much harder. For example, I am currently helping a couple who lost a baby thirty years ago. In fact it happened in 1965, the same year that my wife and I had our first child. The death seemed both meaningless and unnecessary, and it has tortured this family for all these years. Now I am seeking an ex gratia payment on behalf of the parents. Such matters are difficult. Extremely difficult!”
    The interview went on much longer, but she could not find the second page of the clipping. It did not matter. The date added in slovenly handwriting in the top left-hand corner was September 21, 1996. The article had given rise to an avalanche of requests to the elegant lawyer behind the mahogany desk. An amazingly short time after the interview, he had applied to Parliament for ex gratia payments on behalf of 119 parents. All of them felt that the death of their particular little poppet had been unexpected and totally unnecessary. What all the cases had in common was that there was nothing to indicate malpractice. Most of the death certificates cited “sudden cardiac arrest”.
    The hullabaloo went on and on. The opposition parties in Parliament – apparently paralyzed by their battle against Prime Minister Gro, whom no one yet knew had decided to resign her premiership – had forced the government to set up an investigative commission and this was finally appointed on November 10, 1996. It had become unavoidable, since just a few strokes of the keyboard at Statistics Norway could establish that many more children under the age of one had died in 1965 than in any year before or since.
    Benjamin Grinde was the perfect choice to chair the commission, given his position as a Supreme Court judge, embellished with a bachelor’s degree in medicine like the top tier of a most unusual career wedding cake. The opposition parties in Parliament were still savoring the taste of success after another Supreme Court judge had presented an investigative report concerning the secret services barely six months earlier. Since Grinde’s dissertation had been entitled “Silence and suppression: the patient’s legal protection in health examinations”, he was an obvious candidate, and the integrity associated with his office underlined this.
    Little Lettvik was worn out.
    If she really were to think about it, she wouldn’t be able to explain why, only a few hours after the murder of the country’sPrime Minister, she was sitting reading old newspaper cuttings about a health issue no one discussed any longer and whose outcome was uncertain. Perhaps it was because she had worked on it for too long. These past weeks she had not unearthed anything new, and only her position as undisputed senior journalist ensured that she got away with it. The case concerning the infant deaths interested her. Maybe it was blinding her. But there was no time for that now. She needed to concentrate on the homicide.
    Benjamin Grinde. It was Benjamin Grinde who had grabbed her attention. The mere thought of the man caused jabs of pain in her knee. It was impossible not to be intrigued by the coincidence. For weeks she had been digging to find out