Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven (A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page A

after the murders, and they’ve already acquired some personal photographs. How do they do it? What questions do they ask, when they contact friends and family, before the blood has even congealed at the crime scene? Who hands over such things?
    “My dear Hanna,” Nefis said softly.
    Startled, Hanne whipped her head round. Nefis, stark naked, held out her arms.
    “You always jump! What am I to do? Do I have to wear a gong around my neck?”
    “Bell,” Hanne corrected her. “A gong is huge. Like in an Indian temple and suchlike. You need to get yourself a bell. Hello, by the way.”
    They kissed tenderly. The scent of night still clung to Nefis, and goosebumps formed on her skin as Hanne caressed her back.
    “Don’t walk about like that, though. Mary might come in.”
    “Mary never comes out of her quarters before eight,” Nefis said, but nevertheless plucked an enormous woolen sweater from a chair back and drew it over her head. “Like so? Am I … respectable enough now?”
    Nefis had grappled with a new language with the same enthusiasm that she embraced most aspects of Norwegian life. Although she still refrained from pork and insisted on an unbearably hot bedroom, she had begun to knit with great fascination, become tolerably good at skiing, and in addition displayed an incomprehensible interest in Oslo trams. She wrote angry letters to the editor complaining about the Tramway Company’s constant reductions in public-transport facilities. When Hanne occasionally reminisced about their first meeting, in a piazza in Verona in 1999, it was a completely different woman she pictured, an almost unreal memory. The Nefis of that time was a deep secret, harboring an impenetrable passion. When she encountered Norway, it was as if she were rushing headlong, as if she were desperate to catch up with something she wasn’t clear about, something that had never belonged to her at the time when she, despite her impressive academic career, had first and foremost been the beloved daughter in an enormously wealthy Turkish family.
    Nefis could use words such as “respectability” and “paradigm-shift”. However, she had never learned to pronounce the name of her live-in partner.
    “Hanna,” she said ecstatically, twirling around in a sweater that reached to her knees. “It scratches! Come on, let’s go back to bed.”
    Shaking her head, Hanne drained her cup and refilled it.
    “Is this your case?” Nefis nodded at the newspaper.
    “Yes.”
    “We heard it on the news last night. Mary and I. Hoooorrrible!” She drew out the “o” so much that Hanne simply had to smile.
    “Go back to bed. I’m heading straight for work, once I’ve had a shower.”
    Instead, Nefis pulled a chair over to the table and sat down.
    “Tell me,” she said. “Some sort of famous family? I got that impression from the radio.”
    “Famous …”
    Hanne lingered on the word.
    “Not exactly. But well known to people who read pink newspapers.”
    “Pink newspapers,” Nefis repeated doubtfully, before the penny dropped. “Business papers!”
    “Yes. I’m not really up to speed yet. But the family – that is to say, the father, I think …”
    She pointed at Hermann Stahlberg.
    “… owned a medium-sized shipping company. Not such a huge concern, but pretty lucrative all the same. He’d been smart enough to duck in and out of various tonnages just in advance of cyclical fluctuations. But I don’t think he’s ever been particularly well known. Not outside the trade, anyway. I hadn’t heard of either him or his shipping company until they began to quarrel. The family, that is. That must have been …”
    She pondered.
    “… two years ago? One year? Difficult to say. I don’t know the details. Not at all. I expect I’ll know a great deal more before this day is out, though. But if my recollection’s not entirely mistaken, then it had something to do with one son being preferred over the other.”
    “That’s an old story,