Cnut - Cut and Come Again

By Stig Larssen

Cnut's dictionary: Hospital – a place to die.

For the second time in his career, Cnut finds himself locked in a mental battle with a serial killer in a hospital, with hundreds of potential perpetrators. At first, the intimate trophies the killer removes from his victims leads the team to believe that the motive is sexual; then it seems that the murders could be racially motivated. Both theories are soon disproved, when different body parts are taken, and other nationalities are involved. Cnut realises that he is being led up the garden path deliberately, and looks in a different direction – the right one – but one that brings both him and Ilse into deadly danger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TONY NASH
• Release date: Jan 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393688921

Stig Larssen

Stig Larssen is the Norwegian pen name of Tony Nash – acclaimed author of over thirty detective, historical and war novels, who began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, later re-training at Bletchley Park to become an electronic spy, intercepting Russian and East German agent transmissions, during which time he studied many languages and achieved a BA Honours Degree from London University. Diverse occupations followed: Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school, ocean yacht skipper, deep sea fisher, fly tyer, antique dealer, bespoke furniture maker, restorer and French polisher, professional deer stalker and creative writer.

Book preview

This is a work of pure fiction, and any similarity between any character in it and any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional. Where actual places, buildings and locations are named, they are used fictionally.

Other works by this author:

THE TONY DYCE/NORFOLK THRILLERS:

Murder by Proxy

Murder on the Back Burner

Murder on the Chess Board

Murder on the High ‘C’

Murder on Tiptoes

Bled and Breakfast

MET POLICE THRILLERS:

Carve Up

Single to Infinity

The Most Unkindest Cut

The Iago Factor

Blockbuster

Bloodlines

Beyond Another Curtain

HISTORICAL THRILLERS

A Handful of Destiny

A Handful of Salt

WWI EPIC:

A Handful of Courage

WWII EPIC:

No Tears For Tomorrow

THE HARRY PAGE  

THRILLERS

Tripled Exposure

Unseemly Exposure

So Dark, The Spiral

THE NORWEGIAN SERIES:

LOOT

CNUT – The Isiaih Prophesies

CNUT – Paid in Spades

CNUT – The Sin Debt

CNUT – They Tumble

Headlong

CNUT – Night Prowler

CNUT – Past Present

CNUT – Mind Games

CNUT -  Nemesis

CNUT -  When the Pie was Opened

CNUT  -  The Man Who did it Doggy Fashion

OTHER NOVELS:

The Devil Deals Death 

The Makepeace Manifesto

Panic

The Last Laugh

The Sinister Side of the Moon

Hell and High Water

Hardrada’s Hoard (with Richard Downing)

The Thursday Syndrome

ESPIONAGE:

‘Y’ OH ‘Y;

This was the most unkindest cut of all

Shakespeare: Julius Caesar Act 3. Sc 2

"The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part"

T.S. Eliot ‘Four quartets.

CHAPTER ONE

Rolf Lensen waved goodbye to his best friend, Sven, who’d given him his usual lift home from the night shift at the factory, and ran through the light drizzle to the front door of his two-up, two-down terraced house in the Sankt Hanshaugen district of Oslo. He opened the Borg lock with his key and walked in, just in time for Maya to give her husband a long lingering kiss in the hall, before leaving to start the morning slog in Sankt Osbecks Oncology Department. As she kissed him, her hand fondled his crotch, noting with pleasure that, even as tired as he was, there was an instant response.

‘Keep it warm for me, Rolf.’ She whispered in his ear.

He grinned like a two-year-old kid given a second helping of ice cream, ‘You bet your boots, sweetheart.’

She pulled away reluctantly, and gave a little wave as she went out of the door, pulling up the hood of her blue rainproof jacket with the other hand, smiling happily at her good fortune, and blissfully unaware that she would never pass that way again.

Rolf was smiling too as he watched her go, thanking his lucky stars for the ten thousandth time that he’d answered the advertisement:

"Filipino lady, pretty twenty-seven year old, seeks Norwegian husband, any age. Your every desire fulfilled. No Norwegian, but willing to learn. Fluent English."

After thirty-two years of marriage to a frigid misery of a woman, whose idea of marital relations extended to once a month if he was lucky, and if he had done every little thing she’d asked during the whole of that time, in the missionary position only, while she lay back and thought of Christmas, with no effort to join in, her face stuck in a vicious scowl, punctuated by repeated tightening of the lips and eyelids with each thrust, as she pretended that every one was hurting her.

Even with a spermicidal cream that she hated him using, she was always dry, and nine times out of ten he gave it up as a bad job before ejaculating. In his mind, he likened it to screwing a dry sponge, and found no joy in the act.

Afterwards she always said the same thing, as if the record was stuck, ‘I hope that you’re sufficiently grateful. You’ll have to be especially nice to me from now on.’

His life was a bore - he’d felt dead inside, and had to make up spectacular stories to compete with the guys at work, when they discussed their love lives.

It seemed that it would be his lot for the rest of his life, until the eve of his fifty-seventh birthday, when she gave him the most magnificent present possible, by stepping off the pavement in front of a fast moving bus. He was so grateful that he bought shares in the company, thinking that any firm that could work miracles must be good value. As an unexpected bonus, the bus company had been taken over two days after he’d bought the shares and they had almost trebled in value.

For a month he was in a daze, unable to believe his good luck, going almost every day to the cemetery to look at the grave, not in mourning, but to make sure she was still there, and that he wasn’t dreaming. Work aside, he felt at a loose end, wandering from room to room round the empty house, with an urgent desire to shout, ‘Whoopee!’ every few seconds. When Sven picked him up one evening, for the trip to work, he gave Rolf the opportunity to put the icing on the cake, when he thrust the magazine in front of him, open at the adverts page, urging, ‘Get in there, big knob – it’s your birthday!’ It wasn’t, but Rolf got the message.

There were more than two dozen ads by Filipino women for Norwegian husbands, but somehow the one he wrote to appealed to him, almost as if he knew there was a hidden story. Quite apart from that, the ‘every desire’ bit had his imagination turning somersaults.

He paid for Maya to come on a visit, and she had given him the most exciting day and night of his life, doing things he had only dreamt of, bringing him to a climax three times in less than eighteen hours, which he guessed for a man of his age must be some kind of record. He had not expected her to be pretty, knowing how exaggerated most dating adverts were, but she was just that – so pretty, in fact, that she was verging on beautiful. At one metre sixty, just two centimetres shorter than he was, with silky, long blond hair, which he knew was dyed, beautiful hazel eyes with green flecks, and a nicely rounded, but well kept, slim figure, she was his idea of perfection. Her musical Filipino accent entranced him, and he just couldn’t get enough of her breasts – so unlike his wife’s sagging dugs. Maya’s were taut - each one just a nice handful, with dark brown aureoles, and uptilted nipples a man could die happy suckling.

Over breakfast the next day she told him her life story, leaving nothing out. Sexually abused almost from birth, and repeatedly raped from the age of seven, she had grown up in a hellhole, where the only ways of getting enough money to live on were thieving, murder or prostitution. She had gone for the latter. She told him truthfully of the hundreds of dirty old men she had had to service, and how much she hated it. She showed him photos of her six-year-old son, Pete, and her seven-year-old daughter, Jennie, back home, looked after by her mother, to whom she wanted to send money, and she told him how much she wanted just one good man that she could love and cherish, and do so much for that he would never leave her. She promised utter faithfulness, and he told her he believed her, hoping desperately that she was sincere.

Rolf was horrified by her story, but so impressed by her honesty that he asked her to stay. Two months later, they married, and he’d never regretted it for one instant. Before she came, the most exotic thing he’d ever eaten was a chicken tikka marsala from the takeaway, but Maya was a terrific cook, and introduced him to new and exotic, wonderfully spicy recipes that he’d come to love. She made him sit down so that she could put his slippers on, cuddled and made a fuss of him all day long, and told him he could do anything he liked with her.

After days of worry, following the devastating typhoon, whose worst area of destruction had been Tacloban, where her mother lived, they’d heard word that the woman and Maya’s two children had evacuated the area in time and were alive and well, although living in a tent. Rolf had immediately instigated arrangements for the children to come to Norway, and they were awaiting approval from Immigration.

Maya just made the eight-sixteen bus, and signed in early at her workstation at fourteen minutes to nine.

Her first job, as always, was to check that Theatre Number Two – the one used by Oncology - was stocked up with all the disposables required during operations.

After chatting to her friend, Anni Vendessen, for a couple of minutes, she entered the theatre, which at that time, as always when not in use, had only suppressed back-lighting, and she was surprised to see a gowned and masked doctor standing by the stainless steel wall cabinet, looking down at something. Though unusual, it was not without precedent, and she said, ‘Good morning’.

As she passed close behind the figure, an arm was thrust quickly round her neck and a hand clamped over her mouth. She was pulled into the other body tightly.

She felt the prick of the hypodermic as it entered the artery just below her right ear and her body went into spasm.

What she did not feel was her scrubs trousers and panties pulled down and her clitoris, held firmly between a finger and thumb, quickly and surgically removed, before a gauze pad was applied over the wound and the garments were pulled up again.

It was thirty-eight minutes later when Carla Engsel, the scrubs nurse, entered to check the trolleys.

She thought Maya must have fainted, and turned her onto her back, before feeling for a pulse. She couldn’t find one, and tried again, frantically, one wrist, then the other, the neck arteries and inside the elbow, finally realising the woman was dead. She rushed out into the corridor, shouting for a doctor, and almost knocked over Doctor Bjørn Fredricksen, who happened to be passing, although he worked in the Ophthalmic Department on the next floor up. He followed Carla in and, after checking carefully, agreed that Maya was dead.

The sister in charge of the Oncology Department, Silje Kramer, had heard the shouting and came running, followed by three other members of staff. They watched as the doctor pronounced death, and Kramer arranged for the body to be taken down to the morgue in the basement. She and everyone else in the department at the time assumed Maya had had a heart attack and were stunned – the woman had seemed so healthy, and looked perfectly well when she arrived for work.

Her records were checked, and a telephone call made to Rolf, who, crawling out of bed from a deep sleep to answer the call, felt as if he had been hit by an express train. He threw on the clothes he’d worn during his night shift, and rushed out of the door.

After almost two hours of form filling and interminable waits, he was allowed down into the morgue, and identified the body, weeping copious tears the whole time – devastated that she had been taken from him.

There being no urgency about checking on a heart attack, with many more serious cases to be autopsied, Maya’s body was pushed into one of the coolers, awaiting a slack time in the department.

It was not until five twenty the next morning, near the end of a long, harrowing nightshift, that Elsa Bakker, the duty pathologist, had the body pulled out and placed on the stainless steel autopsy table for what was expected to be a routine post mortem, to check that she had, indeed, died from an infarction.

One of Elsa’s dieners, Per Pederssen, removed the clothes from the body, wondering for the ten thousandth time how he could still get it up with a live woman, after seeing so many dead ones stripped naked. He saw the gauze strip between Maya’s legs and assumed she must have placed it there herself, after being caught out without a sanitary towel at the start of a period. He removed the gauze, noticing the blood, and, thinking it confirmed his first thought, threw it into the contaminated waste bin. With the legs of the corpse closed, he did not notice the wound.

Since the death was not seen as suspicious, the usual X-rays had not been taken and no samples saved before the washing began.

It was only when Per opened the deceased’s legs to wash between them that he noticed the damage and jumped back, astonished, exclaiming, ‘Fuck me!’

Elsa, tired and not in the best of moods, groaned, ‘Not in a million years, Per.’

He stood speechless for several seconds before he recovered and urged, ‘For God’s sake, Elsa, come over here and look at this.’

Elsa ambled over and stopped dead, suddenly fully awake. She uttered, ‘For once I agree with you, Per. I think I might have said the same.’

He grinned, ‘You’d have got a different response from me.’

‘Not that it would ever do you any good. Now how the devil did that happen?’

‘Do you think she had it done deliberately – you know, as a religious thing?’

‘Just possible, I suppose, but I don’t think so. Not at her age, and if she had, she wouldn’t be at work like that. Was it covered in any way? Was there any blood?’

‘Just a gauze pad with a few spots on it.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the bin.’

‘Well, get it out –with tweezers, and don’t handle it any more. Put it in a plastic bag and seal it.’

‘Why? You don’t think...’

‘I don’t think anything, Per, but I’m not taking any chances. She is dead, and that wound is very, very recent. I’d say, looking at the traces of blood still around the wound, that it was done within the last twenty-four hours. I’m not touching that body until the police forensic team has checked it over.’

He laughed, ‘Oh, come on, Elsa. You aren’t suggesting she was murdered?’

Elsa had spent six months of her long training working with a police pathologist, and had assisted in four autopsies of victims whose deaths had been cleverly made to look like accidents or suicides. She had made a vow then that she would never overlook the slightest detail that looked out of the ordinary. ‘I’m not suggesting it, but her death is beginning to look suspicious. I’ll let the day staff deal with it. Put her back in the drawer, and be careful.’

She went over to the diary to write it up for the pathologist who would relieve her at eight.

CHAPTER TWO

Sheriff Cnut, veteran investigator with the Oslo Police Serious Crimes Division, typed the full stop at the end of the last line of a report on the murder investigation he had just completed, sighed with relief and looked lovingly across the desk at his beautiful partner and fellow detective, Ilse Karnweg.

‘At last we can put our feet up for a while, Ilse. Just look at that, will you? Nothing whatsoever on the white boards. That’s unheard of. It’s never happened before in all the years I’ve sat at this desk. All the killers must be on holiday on the Costa del Sol. We’ll be able to set up that poker school we keep talking about.’

Ilse shook her head firmly, ‘I don’t think so, lover. Skopvik will have something to say about that. You’d better find something to occupy your time. He’ll have you helping with the monthly stats if you look unemployed.’

Skopvik, they both knew, would never interfere with the running of the department. He was a terrific boss, and both Cnut and Ilse would have bent over backwards to please him.

He stayed in his office on the upper floor of headquarters, bored stiff with paperwork.

The phone rang.

Ilse grinned, ‘Think that might be something for us?’

Cnut grimaced, ‘Don’t talk it up, sweetheart. I was just psyching myself up to get used to la dolce vita.’

‘In all those long years you’ve spent here detecting, have you ever had the chance?’

He laughed, ‘You always have to go for the balls, don’t you?’

She reciprocated, ‘You know you would have it no other way, darling.’

He picked up the phone and listened, making notes on the pad in front of him.

Before replacing the receiver, he told his correspondent, ‘We’ll be there in about a quarter of an hour.

Ilse grinned at him, ‘See what I mean?’

‘It’s strange one. One of the nursing auxiliaries at Sankt Osbeck was found dead yesterday morning on the floor of one of the theatres. There were no obvious marks on her body, and they assumed it was a heart attack. When they took her clothes off, they found that her clitoris had been surgically removed, probably immediately after death. Viv Blenke has collected the body, and we’ll be doing a full investigation. It seems likely that someone in that hospital murdered her. The big problem is that because they weren’t suspicious, the theatre where she was found was used all the rest of that day for operations, so it would be a waste of time for Ari Blank and his SOCOs to go in and do a sweep.’

He grimaced. A corpse in a hospital; no scene of crime or visual evidence; hundreds of possible killers - what a job. Where it wasn’t ‘No comment’, from the interviewees,  it would be, ‘I don’t know’, or ‘I was somewhere else.’ The wards, the corridors and the theatres were always like Frogner Plass at the rush hour, at all times of the day and night, and if ‘Casualty’ and ‘Holby City’ were anything to go by, any Tom, Dick or Harry could wander anywhere they liked. There was about as much chance of solving this murder, if it was a murder, as winning the lottery. Unless they could find someone with a clear motive, they’d be on a hiding to nothing.

Ilse asked, ‘Was the woman married?’

‘Yes, quite recently, to a Rolf Lensen. Here’s his address and telephone number.’

‘As we well know, when it comes to murder, it’s more often than not down to the husband, but with this one, in a hospital operating theatre...probably not.’

‘Viv says she’ll wait until we get there before she does the autopsy. We’d better get over there now.’

Viv and he went back a long way, to the time just after his first wife, Astrid, had been abducted and murdered. They had come close to an affair, but then Ilse had entered the scene, and he had fallen instantly in love with her. Viv still carried a torch for him, and liked to show it, particularly when Ilse was with him. Oh, well, what had to be endured, had to be endured. He just hoped Viv wouldn’t be too bloody obvious this time.

Ilse was already slipping her jacket on, and he collected his own, which was hanging on the back of his chair.

Ilse was grinning, ‘Where to, Kimo Sabe?’

‘You know where - autopsy.’

‘Ah, your old girlfriend again. She always starts panting and opening her legs as soon as she sees you. It should be fun.’

Cnut frowned – did Viv really do that? He