by Helene Flood
Two figures came into view behind her, both also in uniform. I saw something flit across Vera’s face with raging speed, but it happened so fast that I was probably the only one who noticed it, because time had started to move so glacially from the moment at which I thought I was going to die. I saw that she reconsidered. She contemplated what she was about to do. Then she let go of Old Torp’s revolver – it bounced on Margrethe’s rug and lay there. Her eyes narrowed unhappily; she squeezed her lips together and cried:
“Oh my God, stop her!”
She turned to Fredly. Took two steps towards her, wanting to throw herself into her arms, it seemed, but Fredly continued to aim her weapon at her.
“Stop right there!” Fredly shouted.
Vera checked herself; she did stop, in the middle of the room. Her arms hung empty and redundant at her sides. She gave two hiccup-like sobs. I stood there, motionless. The two officers behind Fredly came into the room, one of them stepping on my rucksack, which was still lying on the floor. Both of them were armed. They turned their weapons on me.
Fredly split us up. I was sent into Margrethe’s bedroom, with one of her colleagues. He was in his mid-twenties, perhaps, and appeared nervous. He had put me in handcuffs. I let him – not that I could have stopped him, but I didn’t even protest, just held out my arms when he asked me to. His face was covered in moles. They would have been repellent had they been pimples, but were not unattractive once you saw them for what they were. His hands were clammy. Afterwards, he walked about the room, still holding his gun in his hand. He didn’t take his eyes off me, which was uncomfortable for both of us.
I thought: Vera was planning on shooting me. Was she angry? Was she afraid? Could it be that she had been genuine when she shouted to Fredly, “Oh my God, stop her!”? But there had been something about her when she had aimed the gun at me – pure determination – and that sentence, “Today we’re not going to fucking talk.” No. The plan had been to shoot me. It must have been she who threw the key through the glass of my front door, to lure me up here. She hadn’t looked scared. She was angry – but ready. She had a job to do. And had the police not turned up, she would have finished it.
Fredly entered the room.
“How are you doing, Sara?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer turned to the officer with the moles. “You put her in cuffs?”
He mumbled something about an unclear situation.
“Is she armed?” Fredly said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Then check!”
The officer removed the handcuffs, asked me to hold out my arms, and patted me down in a way that made me think of airport security checks. He was thorough. I just stood there. Fredly checked something on her mobile. When the officer had finished, he withdrew to stand beside the window, leaning against the sill. Fredly continued to look at her telephone. I sat down again, waiting for her. The officer waited, too.
“We’re going to get you out of here as soon as we can,” Fredly said to me. “We’re just waiting for backup.”
I nodded. She was efficient, her gaze jumping from one point to the next, looking for unforeseen elements, trying to obtain an overview. I wished she would say something reassuring. “We have her, you’re safe now” – something like that. Or: “We’ve finally solved the case.” But then her mobile vibrated.
“We’ll talk more later,” she said, and left the room.
The officer with the moles returned to pacing around the room, but he kept his handcuffs away from me. Another hour passed before we were able to evacuate the cabin.
The two officers who had burst into the cabin behind Fredly drove me back to the city and accompanied me into the police station. They sat in the front of the vehicle; I sat in the back. Someone else had been detailed to return my hire car. For the entire journey, I did not say a word.
When I arrived, a woman named Janne attended to me. She was wearing plain clothes – I think she was a kind of receptionist. Her name was on a small badge attached to her sweater with a safety pin. She offered me a soft drink and a baguette.
“There’s either roast beef or prawn,” she said. “But I’d have the prawn if I were you.” I did as she suggested.
“Try to eat something,” she said. “There’s no saying how long you’ll be here.”
I am grateful for her concern and eat the baguette – which is dry, but I get it down. For the first hour I comfort myself with the fact that Fredly had reprimanded the officer who had put me in handcuffs.
But after my encounter with the serious-faced investigators I find less comfort in the thought. They were so expressionless. It was impossible to know what they were thinking, and nothing they said was reassuring – nothing along the lines of “Relax, you’ll be home soon.” Wouldn’t that have been a reasonable thing to say to someone who’s almost been killed?
And so the hours pass. There’s nothing to do here. Janne has brought me a stack of old magazines; I browse through them, read about celebrities who have had babies or divorced, but none of it interests me, nothing sticks. I wish Gundersen were here. Wish Fredly would come. Wish somebody could tell me something. Vera’s cry floats at the edges of my awareness, popping up at regular intervals, “Oh my God, stop her!”
Janne brings me a cup of coffee. At around four o’clock she gives me a novel which she heartily recommends, its title in a looping font on the cover. It’s the story of a British noblewoman who falls in love with the stableman, she says, which makes her family furious – and then the First World War breaks out. I take it. I have no desire to read it, and know that I won’t, but I’m just glad someone is being kind to me. I want to ask her straight out – what is my status, how long does she think I’ll have to sit here. Or what – in her experience – the usual outcome is, in cases like these. But I say nothing.
At around five o’clock, Janne is replaced by an older, crabbier woman, who is much less solicitous. I try to interpret this turn of events – am I now under stricter surveillance, one step closer to a cell? But none of it has to mean anything. Breathe and start again. I only partly manage this. At seven-thirty, I begin the novel Janne gave me. It’s actually quite gripping, I have to give her that.
Why would Vera want to kill Sigurd? Why would she spy on us, install cameras, break into the house? Why would she want to shoot me? Gundersen asked me about my patients. Anyone who might hate me, anyone who might be in love with me. I’d responded with a resounding no. But then I had gone back through my list, and although at a stretch I might have had cause to wonder about some of them, it never occurred to me to suggest Vera.
We’ve had maybe eight therapy sessions together. She comes once a week, never cancels. Her reason for coming is that everything feels meaningless to her – and her relationship difficulties. The older, married lover. Was that Sigurd? Was he having an affair? The fact that Vera is young and has dirty blonde hair hasn’t escaped me. Did she decide to seek out the wife for help with the problems she’d encountered as the husband’s lover? I get up, pace around the room. Don’t want to think about it, but am unable to stop myself.
They meet each other at a bar. Vera is in fact too young to be there but has managed to get in – nobody has asked her for I.D. She’s excited, takes a seat at the bar and looks about her, high on her own overconfidence. Sigurd is there with a friend. Passing the time. The friend – probably Jan Erik, yes, surely Jan Erik – wants to go home, and Sigurd says no, stay, just one more beer. He doesn’t want to go home to the unfinished house and everything that needs to be done. Doesn’t want to go home to me. Goes instead to the bar to buy one last beer, and there she is.
He initiates the conversation, I think. Maybe he says something about the room – “Can you believe how dark it is in here? If they knocked down that wall and put some bigger windows in, the light would be so much better.” Something like that. Vera nods, as if Sigurd has said something ex
ceptionally insightful. She agrees. Does he know a lot about that sort of thing? Oh yes, Sigurd says – actually, he’s an architect. He smiles, coy and shy – he’s only a miserable little cog at a small firm right now, but he has his opinions on current trends. He shares his vision for how the room could have been better designed – it’s probably no more than a couple of minutes before he’s spouting airy phrases about creating spaces for effective interactions. Jan Erik comes over, I’m going home, he says. Sigurd nods, Jan Erik leaves, and then it’s just Sigurd and Vera. Sigurd speaking. Vera listening. And is she not a better audience than me? Does she not listen with real enthusiasm, whereas I stopped listening long ago? Does she not ask follow-up questions, whereas I simply hope that he’ll run out of steam? Can he not see it, how she nods with parted lips and attentive eyes, as if she’s still ruminating on what he just said – how easily captivated she is by his words? He thinks that she’s intelligent. Purely because she listens to him. Maybe he tells her this, too – you’re smart, you know. This must hit Vera deep in the chest. She gives him her best smile, yes, thanks, she is indeed pretty smart.
Am I being too mean? Painting them as caricatures – the self-centred man, the naive young woman, the stereotypical encounter? Perhaps it didn’t happen like this at all. Maybe Vera’s parents are friends of Margrethe. Maybe they met at the summer house she rents in Hankø, that one weekend he went out there alone.
But it doesn’t matter how they met. All the scenarios I im-agine are just a prelude to what’s next. They rent a hotel room close to the bar. They lock themselves into the annexe at Hankø. They go up to the bedroom of our house in Kongleveien together, or they can’t keep their hands off each other as they walk the last stretch of the trail up to the cabin in Krokskogen, where they are finally able to throw themselves at each other, tear off each other’s clothes, and my entire body is aflame as I think of it, burning so intensely that I have to increase my pace as I stride from wall to wall in the little room, trying to use up this useless, pounding energy. Why her, Sigurd? Why this – how could you do something like this? How could you have gone behind my back? How could he have met someone else, night after night, every single meeting that was supposedly with Fru Atkinson? Yes, I know, I’m not completely innocent myself – there was that one unfortunate night in Bergen – but Sigurd, that was just a one-off, and I paid for it. I collapse onto the sofa, don’t have the energy to get up again. Lie down. Close my eyes. Just want to sleep, but can’t, it’s too light in here, the sofa is too hard, and my stomach churns, forcing me to lie almost doubled up in pain. Sigurd, Sigurd, what have you done?
At some point around nine, the crabby woman is replaced by a young man. He doesn’t come in and introduce himself, but I see him when I go to get a cup of water from the dispenser beside the reception desk where he’s sitting. He’s reading, only glances up when he sees me come out. Says nothing, gives no indication one way or another – will my waiting soon be over, is anyone coming to get me? He looks down at his book again. But when I open the door to the waiting room to go back in, I turn and see that he’s watching me.
One week ago, on Friday, Vera sat in my office talking about trust. She had ranted at me, “Do you even have any friends at all?” Because she was angry at me, I had thought at the time. At our first ever session, she had taken my hand and squeezed it. Most of my patients look around when they come in, consider the large window and the chairs, the way people do when entering a new space. But not Vera. She had stared at me. Squeezed my hand for longer than is usual. Held it for so long that I had to concentrate on not pulling away, my wedding ring cutting into my crushed fingers.
Had there been the odd moment or two during our sessions in which the discomfort of our first meeting recurred? Once, when the weather was bad, she had come into my office cold and wet. I handed her some tissues and turned up the heater while saying something about the heat making sure she’d dry faster, so she wouldn’t get sick. She had flung the tissues on the table and, voice quivering, said, “That’s bullshit.”
“What is?” I said, but she didn’t answer.
Afterwards, once she had dried off a little, I asked her what she had meant. She only shrugged. I interpreted for her: it’s as if you were angry at me because I showed some concern for you.
“I was just cold and wet,” she said
“You said it was bullshit.”
“I meant the weather.”
Our sessions were demanding, a struggle – this isn’t unusual with patients who are depressed. The weight of the depression, the hopelessness, can be transferred to the therapist, so that both parties end up being left with the feeling that nothing helps. But it wasn’t like that with Vera. It was more that we never seemed to get anywhere. She only wanted to talk about her lover. Or the big questions – love, the meaning of life. She wasn’t interested in talking about anything else – her parents, school, her friends, her actual life. She kept me at a distance. Was she testing me? Was she trying to find out who I was? Or did she want to know things about me, learn something about my life with Sigurd? I try to remember, a little panicked. I tend not to say much about myself to my patients – that kind of information doesn’t belong in therapy – but I sometimes mention the odd thing here and there. What have I told Vera about the life that I live?
And then she had called me this week. The answering machine message: “I need to talk, could you call me?” It was untypical of her. Why would Vera need to talk to me right away, before our next scheduled appointment? Could it be that she was finally taking my advice; seeking support when she was struggling? When I had called her she’d said no, it wasn’t anything important. At the time it had given me pause, but then it got lost among everything else that was going on.
But I can’t think straight when it comes to all this. It’s so painful. And I’m tired, worn out by all the waiting, and I’m afraid. I must have fallen asleep on this sofa at around eleven, must have slept for an hour or so with my neck bent, and now it’s after midnight, and I’m still banished to this room.
Outside the room in which I’m sitting is a corridor consisting of mainly closed doors – to offices, perhaps, or meeting rooms, or maybe more waiting rooms like this one in which other people like me are sitting and wondering how long they’ll have to sit there before someone comes to collect them. Halfway down the corridor is a kind of reception where the young man on night duty is now sitting. I walk up to him. The floor I walk on is curiously frictionless, my shoes don’t make a sound against its soft surface. It makes me wonder whether I’ve been altogether erased.
When I’m standing right in front of him, he looks up. He’s reading – the book open in front of him looks like a textbook of some kind, judging from the binding, although I can’t be sure.
“I’m just going to the bathroom,” I say.
He nods, and points towards the two doors opposite us. As if I haven’t already managed to find the toilet after almost twelve hours here.
Above the basin is my reflection. I’m pale, tired, and there’s something about my eyes. They’re large, the pupils dilated. Maybe it’s down to the garish light in here, but I look as if I’ve seen something truly terrible. After I’ve been to the toilet I splash water on my face, trying to wake myself. It’s the middle of the night, and I haven’t slept properly since the alarm went off at around half past four in the early hours of yesterday morning, but who knows when I’ll have the chance to go to bed?
At the door to the waiting room I meet an officer in uniform. He’s in his forties, with thick, brown hair and round glasses.
“Sara Lathus?” he asks me.
“Yes,” I say.
“Right, we’re ready to let you go now.”
I exhale, my sigh audible.
“Sorry that we’ve had to keep you here so long,” he says as I gather together my few belongings – a sweater, a jacket, my backpack. “There were a few details we needed to clarify, but
everything’s in order now.”
“Good,” I say, wearily. I suddenly feel a little indifferent about the whole thing – all I want is a bed.
He sees me out, shows me the way. I shuffle along after him.
“I know you’ve not been given much information,” he says as we walk, “but you will be filled in, I promise. It’s just that at this stage of the investigation it’s important we keep our cards close to our chest.”
“A critical stage,” I mumble.
“Exactly,” he says. “But you’ll be invited to a meeting at which we’ll explain the course of events to you – in more detail, that is, than you were given at the interview today.”
“O.K.”
We take the lift down to the ground floor in silence. We’re almost at the main entrance when he speaks again.
“Oh – by the way,” he says. “It’s best that you don’t go home for a few days. We need to carry out some investigations there. Do you have somewhere else you can go?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Good. Then we’ll be in touch. I’ll call a taxi for you.”
He turns and goes back inside; I stay standing there. It’s cold, and I pull my jacket tighter around me. It occurs to me that I forgot to ask him where Vera is.
The car arrives moments later. An elderly Pakistani man is sitting behind the wheel. I sink into the shiny leather seats of his car.
“Where to?”
“To Nordstrand,” I say.
Saturday, March 14 – Monday, March 16: Nordstrand
All I want to do is play with my nephews. I don’t want to spend any more time thinking about Sigurd and Vera, about the police investigation or surveillance or revolvers. I want to build Wendy houses; play with Lego and fire engines and pirate ships.