Cnut - Past Present

By Stig Larssen

His fishing trip blown out of the water by an exploding Ferrari, Cnut is faced with having to try to bring to justice Henrik Lund, whose public face is that of a respected entrepreneur and government minister, but whose private life includes every crime in the book, from paedophilia to murder. Hanna Auge, whose teenage daughter was raped and murdered, is positive that Lund was the rapist and killer, and Cnut is swayed enough by her conviction to re-investigate the case, but Colonel Olssen, Cnut's long-time friend, and head of the Secret Service, warns Cnut to refrain from investigating Lund too deeply. He has men undercover in Lund's organisation, who have found out that Lund intends a coup to take over the country, and does not want Lund spooked, effectively tying Cnut's hands, but when Ilse is kidnapped by Lund's men, all bets are off.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TONY NASH
• Release date: Nov 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393683087

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

I summon up remembrance of things Past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail

Shakespeare - Sonnet

Copyright © Tony Nash 2018

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

The John Hunter/Metropolitan cop thrillers:

Carve Up

Single to Infinity

The Most Unkindest Cut

The Iago Factor

Blockbuster

Bloodlines

Beyond Another Curtain

Historical sagas - The Norfolk Trilogy:

A Handful of Destiny

A Handful of Salt

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:

CNUT – The Isiaih Prophesies

CNUT – Paid in Spades

CNUT – The Sin Debt

CNUT – They Tumble Headlong

CNUT – Night Prowler

CNUT -  The Man Who Did It Doggy Fashion

CNUT -  When the Pie was Opened

CNUT -  Nemesis

CNUT -  Past Present

CNUT -  Cry Wolf

CNUT -  The Bottom of the Pot

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)

PROLOGUE

Bergen 12th August 2008

Mia Aalsson looked at her wristwatch for the sixteenth time in as many minutes. They should have been back long before now. For God’s sake, how long did it take to smoke weed and have sex? From what she’d been told, the sex was all over in less than a minute with boys, not that she knew from personal experience, and a cannabis cigarette took no longer to smoke than a regular one, did it?

Both were so-called pleasures she’d always fought shy of, unlike her friends, Bea Lanvik and Hege Auge, who had both lost their virginities on the same day – Bea’s fifteenth birthday, five months earlier, and had been indulging in sex almost daily since, trying, without success, to convince her that she should try it too. She was scared stiff of pregnancy – a fear instilled into her by her mother, who had given birth to Mia at the tender age of thirteen, after a hot petting session with an older boy, been thrown out of the family home, endured beatings and abuse at the hands of foster parents and ended up in a home for wayward girls. Her life, after she became pregnant, had been nothing short of hell.

She was determined that her daughter should not suffer as she had and hammered the message home to Mia every day.

All around Mia, her peers were enjoying themselves, dancing energetically to the live band.

The end of year hop had been looked forward to for months, and half an hour earlier she too had been dancing with one or other of the boys she liked and who treated her with respect, not trying to touch her up on the dance floor, like some of the others, but her friends’ non-reappearance had made her turn down further offers, and she had been standing on the sidelines for more than twenty minutes.

They’d told her where they were going: to the group of trees and thick bushes on the slight rise about two hundred metres from the hall.

Should she go and see if they were all right?

It took only seconds to decide that such an action was a no-no, and immediately scrapped the idea. It would not be appreciated, she knew, and might even lose her their friendship. Besides, she might see the boys’ naked flesh – the very last thing she wanted.

Jan Engen and Geir Solberg - the two boys the girls were with, were nice types; not the sort to hurt a girl, and it was a lovely warm night. Maybe they’d just curled up and gone to sleep after the sex. Mia knew so little about those things.

No, she couldn’t go and see them, but she could go outside and look over to where they were.

She pushed her way through the gyrating dancers, trod down the corridor to the front doors, shoved one of them open and stepped outside.

Just as she did so, three senior-year boys she hated and went out of her way to avoid at school, because of her fear of them – Henrik Lund, whose father owned the local factory and most of the town, and his two hangers-on, Tore Blant and Karl Karlsson, were about to climb the steps; coming, she thought, from the direction of the trees.

They were laughing, sharing some secret joke. She could tell from their voices that they’d been drinking.

Before she could turn and escape, they saw her, charged up the stairs and grabbed her, whooping with glee. Tore Blant, holding her from behind and lifting her off her feet with his left arm, moved his right hand over her breasts, pinching the nipples hard and hurting her; Karl Karlsson took hold of her ankles and lifted her legs, yanking them open and pulling them tightly round each side of his waist, so that her body was almost parallel in the air and vulnerable

Henrik Lund smirked as he pushed his hand under her skirt, felt his way with his fingers under the elastic of her panties and roughly shoved a finger into her, moving it in and out quickly, laughing at her struggles.

She was sobbing loudly, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Lund chuckled, ‘She’s a good one - tight as a duck’s arse, but she won’t be when we’ve finished with her. Bring her...’

There were sudden loud sounds of people in the corridor, close to the door, and he rapidly changed his mind.

To Mia he whispered, ‘If you say a word to anyone, ever, you’re dead, bitch. You haven’t seen us and we haven’t touched you.’

His two cohorts dropped her unceremoniously onto the top step, hurting her back and legs, then pushed open the doors, and the three of them went through into the corridor, passing half a dozen couples who were leaving, greeting them loudly as they passed.

Mia dragged herself to her feet and staggered down the steps, heading home. Hot tears of anger and disgust ran down her cheeks. She hurt inside and out and felt deeply violated.

I

Signe Lund applied another slight touch of blusher to her cheeks, checked the final result of her fifty-three minutes in front of the dressing table mirror, removed her four carat diamond engagement ring and Cartier white gold wedding ring, placing them in the antique Meissen porcelain dish on the surface in front of her, and smiled.

‘Not bad for thirty-nine, girl.’ She murmured low – too low for the hidden microphones to pick it up, ‘Let’s hope that bastard Per appreciates the amount of effort I put in for his benefit. Huh! Fat chance – he’s only interested in what lies below.’

She knew he would not even notice, beyond the fact that she looked and smelled good. He would be too busy ripping the clothes off her and throwing her onto the bed, if he even bothered to get as far as the bedroom – twice it had been a frantic knee-trembler up against the entrance hall wall - and her make-up would soon be ruined.

Her sixth lover since her marriage, he was the strangest yet – and by far the ugliest.

Always finished in record time – like a teenager on a first date, she thought, his après-coitus habit if they were on the bed was to hold her tightly, moaning gently with his eyes closed – and go to sleep.

Twenty minutes later – she could set her watch by him – his eyes would open and he would grab her and start again, as desperately as the first time.

After another wham-bam, he’d slap her backside hard, mutter, ‘Back to the grind’, and disappear into the bathroom.

The first time, she’d stayed naked on the bed, legs wide open, displaying her wares lewdly, expecting him to want her again, or maybe get her a drink or make conversation – whatever.

He came out of the bathroom, gave her a truly filthy look and snarled, ‘You still here? Fuck off! I’ve got work to do. Same time tomorrow.’

It made her feel like a paid whore – and, strangely, she liked it - liked it so much that she seriously considered becoming one – not for the money, of course, but for revenge. She’d even discussed it with her girls’ group, but they convinced her it was not a good idea; Henrik would take measures – highly unpleasant measures.

Per had not once come anywhere near satisfying her, but she’d accepted that, along with his other quirks and unbecoming looks. Each time with him   was like being raped, and she had experienced that the hard way twice in her teenage years. There were other ways of solving that particular problem – she had a whole drawer full of sophisticated toys. She didn’t even like him particularly, but the main object was achieved – she was successfully cheating on Henrik again, not that it was likely to last long – it never did.

The poor sap didn’t realise that he was playing with fire. Two of her lovers had died suddenly, another had disappeared off the grid, the fourth left to take up a wonderful new job offered to him out of the blue up in Finnmark, and the fifth one refused to answer her calls or come to his door when she rang the bell.

She’d always known that Henrik was a dangerous man – a fellow actress had warned her about him when he first made advances - but didn’t want to believe that he could have been responsible for the deaths of her lovers – a hit-and-run traffic accident and a heart attack – or for the problems with the others.

He’d kept tabs on everything she did from the moment he’d proposed to her, and probably long before that – he had one of his many goons follow her everywhere until she learned how to lose her tail; had her car, her cellphone, her computer and every room in the house bugged.

She’d not wondered why he married her – she knew perfectly well: she was well on her way to the top in her acting career – had managed to screw her way out of porn films into the mainstream Scandi film industry, and he wanted a beauty for arm candy at all the functions he had to attend and the outward respectability of marriage as he entered the political arena. He also had her sign hundreds of official papers over the four years they’d been married, without letting her read any of them.

Less than a fortnight after the honeymoon, he’d stopped taking her to bed and treating her other than as one of his paid minions.

She’d learnt to ignore the stream of young fillies – very young fillies - who came into the house every evening, sometimes escorted by political or business acquaintances, but more often by his two close buddies, Karl Karlsson and Tore Blant. They disappeared into what he called his ‘play rooms’ in the cellars - rooms he’d forbidden her to enter.

He could afford it all – had just reached his sixth billion.

At first she’d been unaware of his close control of her, but when he seemed to be omniscient regarding her doings, she’d become suspicious and had the car and phone checked by an expert, who told her that someone with a great deal of talent had installed bugs in them. She passed over the handbag she had with her and asked, ‘What about this?’

The bug killer pressed a switch on a small, hand-held device, and it emitted a piercing whistle.

‘You could say so. I recommend that if you’re going anywhere you don’t want anyone to know about, don’t carry anything with you or wear shoes with heels, a belt or any jewellery.

She got the message: every little thing she or anyone with her did or said was recorded.

Asked if she wanted the bugs and cameras removed from the bag, car and phone she’d said no. They would only have been replaced, and knowing they were there she was able to work her way around them, leaving false trails in the hope of annoying Henrik.

One day when she felt particularly low she thought of asking for a divorce, but quickly disabused herself of the idea. She knew Henrik would never allow it, and it wasn’t a bad life, she reasoned – she had a massive spending allowance, and apart from being monitored she led life much as she wanted.

Still, very occasionally, he needed her to stand by his side at a function, but those performances were becoming rare. The botox and the boob job had kept her looking good, but she knew the writing was on the wall, and for some time had been expecting him to tell her they were divorcing, not realising that he would never want to divorce her, for the simple reason that legally she owned a great deal of his empire, and all the criminal side of it.

She decided on the black and gold Louis Vuitton Saint-Placide handbag, which would be left in the car, to go with the simple, easily removed, Dolce & Gabbana little black number, added the sunglasses from the same company, checked herself once more in the mirror and rose from the stool. She left off the underwear – it was a waste of time wearing it.

She saw only one of the servants on the way down – Bette Kramer, a young German girl, who was polishing one of the full size statuettes in the hall.

Going through to the eight-car garage, she was about to get into her Porsche when she noticed that one of the tyres was pancake flat.

‘Faen!’ She swore and looked at her gold Patek Philippe wristwatch.

If she waited while one of the men changed the wheel she would be late, and Per would be angry.

On a mad impulse, she opened the driver’s door of Henrik’s favourite penis extension – his fire-red Ferrari 812 Superfast.

She’d never dared to sit in it before, but the seat seemed to wrap itself around her, as if in invitation, and she felt so much a part of the car that she just had to drive it, knowing that Henrik would be livid when he found out, but for once not caring. He was up in Kirkenes for two days, and he had with him his full bodyguard.

She started the engine, pushed the gear lever forward, released the handbrake and carefully drove out of the garage and down the long drive, keeping the revs low, hoping that the staff would not hear it, but at the same time wishing Henrik could see her and start tearing his hair out.

The car handled superbly, and with confidence building she turned out onto Vaerkerøveien and accelerated.

For around sixty metres, as she accelerated hard, she felt a wonderful euphoria, as if she were flying, and split seconds later spots of her instantly melted flesh were doing just that. When the speedometer needle touched fifty kilometres per hour, the beautiful car metamorphosed instantly into a white hot ball of flame that incinerated most of her body far more effectively than in any crematorium.

The gigantic pressure wave lifted high three cars and a supermarket lorry that were passing her in the other direction, ripped trees and bushes out of the ground, threw every pedestrian for over a hundred metres hurtling high into the air - twenty-three of them, smashing their bodies into buildings, vehicles, trees and finally the ground; blew out every window for six blocks and rattled others as far away as Majorstua. When the vehicles crashed to the ground again, four of their passengers and drivers died. Five others were seriously injured. Including pedestrians, the death total would reach eleven.

~~~oOo~~~

Sheriff Cnut, smiling as he packed his trout rods and landing net into the back of his old Volvo, was already thinking of the tasty boned fillets he’d be lifting off the barbecue that evening.

Ilse came out of the house with the picnic hamper in her hand, placed it on the ground as she turned and locked the door, bent to pick the hamper up again and stopped as her telephone beeped, at almost the same instant as Cnut’s ringtone – the intro to Beethoven’s Fifth – stopped his motion towards the driver’s seat.

‘Fuck!’ They swore simultaneously, both preferring the English word, which seemed to have so much more feeling than the Norwegian, knowing that calls to both of them that close in time meant only one thing: a serious crime.

Cnut had waited months for the opportunity to go fishing, as one after another murder or abduction kept him busy detecting. Since the huge influx of migrants, serious crime had soared, until no atrocity surprised him any more. Though it could never come back, he often wished the death penalty had never been done away with.

It might just possibly have stopped a few of the horrendous crimes that the population now accepted as a normal part of everyday Scandinavian life.

Groaning inside, he pulled out his cell phone and growled, ‘Cnut.’

Inspector Sigurd Kvindstrom’s dulcet tones greeted him with, ‘Did you hear it, boss?’

‘Hear what – that aircraft going through the sound barrier?’

‘That was no aircraft. It was a car explosion on Vaerkerøveien. God knows how many casualties. We’re close to the scene and we’ll be there in a couple of minutes. Forensics and pathology should be close behind us.’

‘Bloody hell! We’re on our way.’

The traffic was as heavy as usual at that time of the day, but with siren going and lights flashing, plus the judicious use of the sidewalk on four occasions, Cnut covered the three kilometres in six minutes.

The scene was bedlam – smoke rising from vehicles and vegetation; flashing lights everywhere on fire trucks, ambulances and law enforcement vehicles; civilian vehicles that had arrived on the street before the police began to divert traffic away from both sides of the incident; fire crews still dowsing down the ruin of the Ferrari, the vegetation on both sides of the road, and the supermarket lorry, which had been closest to the explosion and ignited by it.

Uniformed officers were trying, but finding it difficult, to keep back a