4. The Steward's Confession

The morning bus to Tarnby smelled of stale cigarettes and wet wool, a combination Viktor Halvorsen had come to associate with the quieter corners of Valdorian civic life. He sat near the back, his satchel on his lap, watching the coastal flatlands give way to the low, forested hills of the eastern district. The sky was a uniform gray, the kind of sky that promised nothing and delivered rain in thin, persistent sheets.

Tarnby was a town that had once been important, back when Valdoria’s eastern coast was a hub of shipbuilding and maritime trade. The shipyards had closed decades ago, and the town had settled into a slow decline, its population dwindling, its streets increasingly populated by retirees and those who had nowhere else to go. It was, Viktor reflected, an appropriate place for a man who had been promoted into obscurity.

He found the police station on the main square, a squat concrete building wedged between a pharmacy and a boarded-up travel agency. The front door was heavy glass reinforced with wire mesh, and the reception area smelled of floor wax and burnt coffee. A young officer sat behind a high counter, her uniform crisp and her expression already weary despite the early hour.

Viktor gave her his name and asked for Chief Inspector Aas. She blinked at him with the slow recognition of someone who had been warned about this moment.

“The Chief Inspector is not in the office this morning,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “He’s been called away on departmental business.”

“Where?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

Viktor leaned against the counter and let the silence stretch. He had interrogated enough bureaucrats in his time to know that silence was a more effective tool than any question. The officer shifted in her chair, her eyes drifting to a closed door at the back of the reception area.

“He’s at his home,” she said finally, lowering her voice. “He hasn’t been coming into the office much lately. Health reasons, they say. But I think it’s more than that.”

“Where does he live?”

She hesitated, then scribbled an address on a slip of paper and slid it across the counter. “If anyone asks, you didn’t get this from me.”

Viktor pocketed the paper and stepped back into the rain. The address led him to the northern edge of town, where the streets grew narrower and the houses smaller, their paint peeling in long strips that curled like dried leaves. Chief Inspector Rolf Aas lived in a bungalow at the end of a dead-end lane, its front yard overgrown with brambles and its windows dark despite the hour.

The doorbell was broken. Viktor knocked, waited, knocked again. He was about to try the handle when the door swung open, revealing a man who looked nothing like the eager young constable Viktor remembered from the observation room five years ago.

Rolf Aas had aged badly. His face was bloated, the skin slack and gray, his eyes sunk deep in sockets that looked bruised even in the dim light. He wore a stained undershirt and trousers held up by suspenders that had lost their elasticity. The smell of whiskey rolled off him in waves.

“You,” Aas said. It was not a question.

“Chief Inspector.”

Aas laughed, a wet, humorless sound. “Chief Inspector. You hear that? They made me a Chief Inspector. Do you know why they made me a Chief Inspector, Halvorsen?”

“I assume it had something to do with your handling of the Elina Saar interview.”

Aas stepped back and gestured for Viktor to enter. The inside of the bungalow was worse than the outside. Empty bottles lined the hallway, and the air was thick with the smell of unwashed clothes and old food. The living room was dominated by a large television, its screen dark, and a leather armchair that had molded itself to the shape of its occupant over years of solitary drinking.

“Sit down,” Aas said. “You came all this way. You might as well hear it.”

Viktor chose a straight-backed wooden chair near the window. Aas collapsed into the leather armchair and reached for a half-empty bottle on the side table. He did not offer Viktor a drink.

“I’ve thought about this moment,” Aas said. “For five years, I’ve thought about it. Someone showing up at my door, asking about witness number four. I thought it would be a journalist. Or a prosecutor. Or someone from the Ministry, coming to tie up the last loose end.” He took a long swallow from the bottle. “I didn’t think it would be you.”

“Who sent me the transcript?” Viktor asked.

Aas stared at him, then shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. But I don’t know. I didn’t even know it still existed. I thought they’d burned everything.”

“Tell me about the interview.”

Aas closed his eyes. For a moment, Viktor thought he had fallen asleep. Then he began to speak, his voice low and rough, as if the words were being dragged out of him by force.

“I was twenty-six years old. I’d been a constable for three years. I’d never handled anything bigger than a drunk-and-disorderly. Then the stadium disaster happened, and suddenly every officer in the capital was working sixteen-hour shifts, processing witness statements, trying to make sense of a pile of bodies that didn’t make any sense at all.”

He paused to drink again.

“Elina Saar was my fourth interview of the night. She was terrified, shaking so hard she could barely hold the pen when I asked her to sign the statement form. But her story was clear. She told me exactly what she had seen. A man in a steward’s vest pushing another man over the railing. She described his face. She described his uniform. She drew a sketch that was good enough to use on a wanted poster.”

“And you believed her.”

“I believed her completely.” Aas opened his eyes and looked directly at Viktor for the first time. “That was my mistake.”

“What happened?”

“I filed the statement through proper channels. I attached the sketch, I noted the safety registration number, I recommended immediate follow-up with the stadium’s staffing office. I did everything a good constable is supposed to do.” His voice cracked on the last word. “And two hours later, my shift commander called me into his office and told me to go home and get some sleep. He said the statement would be reviewed in the morning.”

“But it wasn’t reviewed,” Viktor said.

“No. When I came back the next day, the statement was gone. Not just from the active case file—from the system entirely. The audio recording had been logged as corrupted. The sketch had been removed from the evidence locker. And my shift commander told me, very calmly, that I had done a good job but that witness number four had been determined to be unreliable. The crowd dynamics, he said. Made observation impossible. I should forget the whole thing.”

Aas took another drink, his hand trembling so badly the whiskey sloshed over the rim of the bottle.

“I tried to argue. I was young and stupid. I told him I believed her. I told him the sketch was too detailed to be a fabrication. He listened to me for about thirty seconds, and then he said something I have never forgotten. He said, ‘Constable Aas, do you want to spend the rest of your career investigating bicycle thefts in a fishing village, or do you want to be a Chief Inspector someday?’”

The room fell silent. Viktor could hear the rain against the window, a soft, insistent tapping that seemed to count out the seconds.

“You made a choice,” Viktor said.

“I made a choice,” Aas agreed. “I went home. I slept. I came back the next day and never mentioned Elina Saar again. Six months later, the independent inquiry published its report. No criminal negligence. No suspicious circumstances. Forty-seven accidental deaths. And six months after that, I received my first promotion.”

“And the sketch?”

Aas set the bottle down on the side table with exaggerated care. “I kept it.”

Viktor felt the air shift in the room. “You kept it.”

“It was the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to destroy. They told me to destroy everything, all my personal notes, any copies I might have made. I told them I had. But I lied. I made a copy of the sketch, and I hid it.” He looked at Viktor with eyes that held equal measures of guilt and defiance. “I’ve been waiting five years for someone to come and ask for it.”

“Where is it?”

Aas pushed himself out of the armchair and shuffled to a bookshelf in the corner. He removed a heavy volume—a history of Valdorian maritime law, Viktor noted, a book no one had opened in decades—and from its hollowed-out interior withdrew a folded piece of paper. He handed it to Viktor with the solemnity of a priest passing a relic to a successor.

Viktor unfolded it. It was a photocopy, but sharper than the one Elina had shown him. The steward’s face was unmistakable: the square jaw, the thin scar across the left eyebrow, the missing right earlobe. And on the chest of the vest, the safety registration number, written in clear block digits.

Beneath the sketch, in Constable Aas’s own handwriting, were three lines:

Subject described as approximately forty-five years of age. Height: 180-185 cm. Build: muscular, military bearing. Scar appears surgical in origin. Earlobe loss consistent with trauma, not congenital.

“You did a thorough job,” Viktor said.

“I did the job I was trained to do. And then I buried it.”

Viktor refolded the sketch and placed it carefully in his satchel. “The safety registration number. Did you ever try to trace it?”

Aas laughed again, the same wet, bitter sound. “Of course I tried. I was a constable, Halvorsen. I still believed in procedure. I called the stadium staffing office the morning after the interview. They told me the number didn’t exist in their system. I called the Building Safety Authority. Same answer. I called the Interior Ministry’s personnel database, and that’s when things got strange.”

“How?”

“Twenty minutes after I made that call, my shift commander walked into my office and told me to stop making inquiries. He said the number had been traced to a temporary worker who had left the country before the disaster. The case was closed. I was to move on.”

“And you believed him?”

“I believed that if I didn’t stop asking questions, my career would end. And I was right.” He gestured at the bungalow around him, the empty bottles, the dark television. “You call this a career? Chief Inspector of a town where the biggest crime is someone stealing crabs from a fisherman’s trap. This is what they gave me for my silence. A comfortable grave.”

Viktor looked at the man in the armchair and felt something he had not expected: pity. Rolf Aas had been a good constable once, a young man who had done his job correctly and had been systematically punished for it. The Ministry had not destroyed him. It had simply redirected him, the way a river is redirected by a dam, until his natural course was nothing but a dry bed and a memory of water.

“The number,” Viktor said. “The one you couldn’t trace. Do you remember it?”

“I remember it the way some men remember the face of the first person they killed.” Aas closed his eyes again. “It was a Directorate registration code. Not Building Safety Authority, not stadium staff. Interior Ministry. Events Safety Directorate. That was your department, wasn’t it?”

Viktor felt a coldness spread through his chest. The Events Safety Directorate. His own department. The department that had approved the stadium’s occupancy permit, that had certified the crowd management protocols, that had signed off on the very safety measures that had failed so catastrophically on the night of the disaster.

“Are you certain?”

“I’m certain. I wrote it down before they made me stop looking. The number belonged to a safety officer registered with the Directorate’s Special Events Division. A division that, as far as I could tell, didn’t exist on any public organizational chart.”

Viktor’s mind was racing now, making connections he did not want to make. The Special Events Division had been a rumor in the Directorate, a ghost office whispered about in the break rooms but never acknowledged in official communications. It was said to handle sensitive assignments—state funerals, diplomatic visits, events where the security requirements went beyond standard crowd control. Viktor had heard the rumors for years and dismissed them as bureaucratic folklore.

But if the man in the steward’s vest had been a Directorate operative, then the murder of Martti Koskela was not an act of random violence. It was an internal matter. And the cover-up that followed was not damage control. It was housekeeping.

“I need to know something else,” Viktor said. “The night you interviewed Elina Saar. Was I in the observation room?”

Aas opened his eyes and looked at Viktor with an expression that was almost sad. “Yes. You were there. I remember you. You sat behind the glass with your arms crossed, watching. You didn’t say anything. You just watched.”

“And when the interview was over?”

“You left. And the next day, my shift commander told me the statement had been deleted.” Aas paused. “I always assumed you were part of it. That you were there to make sure I didn’t write down anything they didn’t want written.”

Viktor shook his head slowly. “I was there because I didn’t trust the process. I wanted to see the witness for myself. And when I saw her, I believed her. I wrote a memo. I recommended further investigation. And my supervisor told me to strike the testimony from the record.”

The two men sat in silence, two survivors of the same shipwreck, each discovering for the first time that the other had not been the enemy. The rain continued to fall outside, steady and indifferent.

“There’s one more thing,” Aas said. He reached into the hollowed-out book and withdrew another piece of paper, smaller than the first, yellowed and fragile. “I found this three years ago, tucked into an old case file that had been misfiled in the archives. I don’t think anyone else knows it exists.”

He handed it to Viktor. It was a memo, printed on Interior Ministry letterhead, dated two days before the disaster. The subject line read: Special Assignment Authorization — Krona Stadium Event. The body of the memo was brief, almost terse.

Operative designation Gamma-7 is authorized to deploy in civilian attire at the Krona Stadium event. Operative will report directly to the Special Events Division liaison. Standard protocols apply. All documentation of this assignment is to be classified at Level Delta and retained in the Directorate secure archive only.

The memo was signed with a name Viktor recognized instantly. Brynjar Krog.

“Your supervisor,” Aas said. “The man who told you to delete the testimony.”

Viktor stared at the signature, the neat, small script that he had seen on dozens of documents during his years at the Directorate. Brynjar Krog had not been acting on orders from above. He had been giving them. The deployment of an operative at the stadium, two days before the disaster, had been authorized by the very man who had later insisted that no such operative existed.

“Why are you giving this to me?” Viktor asked.

Aas drained the last of the whiskey and set the bottle on the floor with a finality that suggested he would not be picking it up again. “Because I’m tired, Halvorsen. I’m tired of being buried alive in this town, in this house, in this chair. I’m tired of knowing what I know and having no one to tell. And I’m tired of being afraid.” He looked up at Viktor, and for a moment, beneath the bloated skin and the bloodshot eyes, Viktor could see the young constable he had been. “Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re planning—I want to help.”

Viktor folded the memo and placed it in his satchel with the sketch. He stood, his joints protesting the movement, and Aas rose with him, unsteady but determined.

“There’s something I need you to do,” Viktor said. “It’s not safe, and it may not work. But if you want to make up for five years of silence, this is how you start.”

“Tell me.”

“I need you to go back through your old case files. Anything connected to the disaster. Anything that was misfiled, misdated, or misattributed. Someone in the Ministry has been cleaning house for five years, but they may have missed something. A name, a date, a connection. Anything that can tell us who Operative Gamma-7 really is.”

Aas nodded slowly. “And what will you be doing?”

“I’m going to find Brynjar Krog,” Viktor said. “And I’m going to ask him why he authorized an operative to be at the stadium two days before forty-seven people died.”

“He won’t tell you.”

“No,” Viktor agreed. “But he’ll know that someone is asking. And that might be enough to make him make a mistake.”

He walked to the door and paused, his hand on the frame. Outside, the rain was letting up, the clouds thinning to reveal a pale, watery light.

“One more question,” Viktor said. “The night you interviewed Elina Saar. Do you remember anyone else being in the observation room? Anyone besides me?”

Aas frowned, thinking. “There was a man. I only saw him for a moment, when they were escorting the girl out. He was standing at the back, near the door. Dark coat, hat pulled low. He didn’t say anything. He just watched.”

Viktor felt the coldness return to his chest. The second man. The one from Elina’s journal. The one who had nodded while the steward pushed Martti Koskela to his death.

“Did you see his face?”

“No. Just the coat, and the hat, and the way he stood. Very still. Like he was waiting for something.”

Viktor nodded. He did not need to ask anything more. The second man was real, and he had been in the observation room, watching the witness who had seen too much. He was still out there, somewhere in the machinery of the state, waiting for the next loose thread to appear.

“Be careful, Halvorsen,” Aas said from the doorway. “Whoever he is, he’s been doing this for a long time. Longer than either of us has been alive, maybe. And he’s very good at it.”

Viktor stepped out into the gray afternoon. The street was empty, the houses silent, the whole town holding its breath. He walked back toward the bus station, the satchel heavy against his side, and he did not look back.

Behind him, in the bungalow at the end of the dead-end lane, Chief Inspector Rolf Aas poured the last of his whiskey down the drain and began, for the first time in five years, to remember how to be a policeman.