Lion's Mouth, The

by Holt, Anne

  It had started raining. Håkon stood up to put a log on the fire. The blue streak of lightning that suddenly illuminated the window overlooking the dark, wet, spring garden was followed immediately by a clap of thunder that startled them all. Huddling closer together, they all leaned in toward the table to create an intimate atmosphere that made them feel like better friends than they actually were. Even Tone-Marit smiled when Billy T. stroked her back in a friendly gesture after she was startled by the deafening crash.

  “I hate thunder,” she said, almost apologetically.

  “But why at a hotel? Little Lettvik lives on her own, surely?” Håkon Sand scratched his head.

  “Lettvik said that, as a matter of principle, she never lets a man step across her threshold,” Severin explained. “After meeting her, that seems entirely convincing.”

  “But if Pharmamed is no longer a useful line of enquiry—” Hanne began.

  “The bottom line is, there is quite simply nothing to build on there,” Severin interrupted. “Which doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t make further enquiries. But I …”

  He gulped, and swallowed.

  “… I don’t believe there’s anything to find there. The gun was at the guard’s apartment – we know that – but how would the guard have come into contact with Pharmamed? If they were behind the murder, it would all have been far more professional. A different gun, and at the very least a different sort of accomplice from that scruffy guy. No, forget about Pharmamed.”

  “Forget the guard as well,” Billy T. broke in. “I’ve been obsessed by him for three weeks, but, think about it – he’s an odd character. He lets his girlfriend, who is fifteen, persuade him to send the gun back to us. He goes on holiday to Tromsø – Tromsø! He’d have fled to Bolivia or somewhere like that if he had really killed Volter. I think the guard was telling the truth, in fact, when he told Kaja what happened. Why would he lie to her? He obviously relied on her so much that he entrusted her with the shawl and the gun. If he had murdered Volter, he would never have sent back the revolver. It sounds quite incredible that he could have pinched it from a dead Prime Minister, but on the other hand … he’s one of the most repulsive characters I’ve ever encountered. If anyone could have done such a thing, it would be him. But he was a fucking coward. Just like that Adonis, Brage. No. Forget the guard. I hate to say it, but it wasn’t him.”

  “But listen to this, everyone.”

  Hanne had switched to Farris, and as she raised the glass to her face, she could feel the bubbles in the mineral water tickling her skin.

  “If we’re going to shelve Benjamin Grinde – and that old hag Ruth-Dorthe Nordgarden, who has kicked up a row, but clearly done nothing else. And Pharmamed. And the guard. And him too, that poor Nazi fucker who’s cooped up down in our backyard, then … then there’s nobody left!”

  “Some personal enemy that we just haven’t discovered yet,” Billy T. said. “It means days and months of hard slog, and probably we’ll never get to the bottom of it. We’re not good enough. Pure and simple. Now I’d like some music. Real music.”

  He stood up to prod Håkon in the back.

  “Opera, Håkon, do you have anything like that? Puccini?”

  “I think we have Tosca over there. You’ll need to look.”

  “Tosca’s fine! She killed for the sake of love. That’s why most people commit murder, I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Is that why you’re so fond of opera?” Tone-Marit asked. “Because they all kill one another? Don’t you get enough of that at work?”

  Billy T. let his fingers run up and down the CD rack at the other end of the room. Eventually he found what he was looking for. When he placed it in the player, he was momentarily moved to tell Håkon what he thought of his inferior stereo system, but decided against it. Instead he stood up with a sigh of satisfaction as the Tosca overture poured out from the loudspeakers.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Tone-Marit.”

  He closed his eyes as he began to conduct the invisible orchestra.

  “Opera,” he yelled. “Opera is actually a load of garbage. But Puccini, you understand, he creates women the way women really should have been. Tosca, Liú, Madame Butterfly, the whole bunch – when they’re faced with the ultimate tragedy, they take their own lives. They make such great demands of life and of themselves that they no longer wish to live once something has gone really wrong.”

  His arm movements became increasingly energetic, and the others sat mesmerized, watching his strange demeanor.

  “They are uncompromising,” Billy T. thundered. “Completely uncompromising!”

  Then, without warning, he stopped, in the middle of a vigorous swoop from floor to ceiling. As his arms dropped to his sides, he opened his eyes and crossed the room quietly to reduce the volume.

  “Just like you, Hanne,” he said as he sat down beside her and gave her a smacker of a kiss on the cheek. “Totally uncompromising. But …”

  He stared at her, and the others had obviously noticed it as well. Chief Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen appeared to be in a trance. Her mouth had fallen open, and she had apparently stopped breathing. Her eyes, big as saucers, were shining and seemed to be peering into something somewhere else entirely, perhaps in another time as well. On her neck, a pulse was beating quite clearly, with a steady rhythm.

  “What’s up with you?” Billy T. asked. “Hanne, are you sick?”

  “I’m thinking about the Volter murder,” she whispered. “We have eliminated all the possible murderers. So we are faced with …”

  The CD began to stutter, the player spitting out three staccato notes, over and over again. But not even Billy T. made a move to do something about it.

  “The truth is, it’s impossible for the murder of Prime Minister Birgitte Volter to have been committed,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said. “Nobody could have done it.”

  Inexplicably and entirely automatically, the CD player pulled itself together. The music gushed once again from the loudspeakers, pure and flowing, filling the house where a newborn baby lay sleeping together with her mother upstairs. Tone-Marit Steen stole a glance at her bare arm and saw that she had goosebumps. It was as though an angel had just flown through the room.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 27

  16.00, OLE BRUMMS VEI 212

  The ray of light that fell like a skittle from the skylight onto the dirty timber floor put him in mind of a seal. The darkness was almost black around the sharp, white gash in all the grayness. The air was distended with dust and old memories, and he stumbled over Per’s first pair of blue-painted skis as he approached the opening ahead of him. He recalled a holiday long ago – before Per. He and Birgitte had gone to Bergen and they had watched the seals in the aquarium there, at Nordnes. As he had looked at them from the window in the pool, down in some kind of basement, the seals had twirled around in the water, round and round, until all of a sudden they shot up toward the light that fanned out from the sky; the seals had veered upward, up toward the light, toward the air.

  Roy Hansen stood in the middle of the attic floor. He had not been up there for three years, and he was thinking about seals. It was about time the place had an airing.

  For several days, he had thought about moving away. After the funeral, when everything had been at a slight distance but the road ahead seemed impossible to travel. He did not want to live there any longer, not with Birgitte’s belongings, her stamp everywhere: a plaster fridge magnet she had made once, before Christmas; the settee that he had not wanted but she had insisted upon – she thought it matched the walls so well, and he had capitulated. Per had cleared out her clothes in private one evening when he had been visiting his mother; she had become so terribly old. When he returned home, Per had said nothing, only given a little smile, and Roy had tried to thank him, but it was impossible. The clothes were gone, and with them something of her scent. He had already thrown out the bed linen in which she had slept on the last night of her life.

&nb
sp; But in recent days these things had gained new meaning. They were no longer a burning, cruel reminder of something he would never regain. Birgitte permeated the walls, the objects, the pictures she had chosen and the books she had read. It was okay. He wanted it to be like that. But he wanted to know what was there.

  That was why he was standing in the attic. Birgitte had not come up here often either. But far more often than he had. When she came downstairs again, there was always something incandescent and dreamy about her, not for long, but it lasted for a day or so. A faraway look in her eyes, something he had never attempted to break through. He had loved her too long to do that. There must be something up here, and he had never been able to muster the strength to come and look, until now.

  It was painful, skirting around things. An old loom with damaged shuttles made him laugh to himself. That had been a phase, too. Birgitte heavily pregnant with Per, wearing hand-woven jackets by Sigrun Berg, and consumed by an irrepressible desire to learn to weave – though she lacked the time to do anything more than take an introductory course at the Workers’ Education Association. He touched the yarn: it was so dusty that it was impossible to make out the color in this dim light. The pattern on the wall hanging, barely begun, was almost invisible, and he ran his finger over its grimy surface, outlining a heart with the letter B inside it. The loom could stay. He would never get rid of that.

  A massive trunk sat at the edge of the beam of light. He groaned as he dragged it all the way across to take a better look. The key was missing. He straightened his back and looked around. The hiding place was obvious; he spotted it at once and it crossed his mind that perhaps Birgitte had wanted him to. He ran his fingers over the joist that divided the attic into two sections. The key – large, heavy and black – was there, where it had to be.

  The lid was heavy but did not creak when he opened it. The trunk was empty, apart from a smallish, round box; a hatbox, he thought – his mother had owned ones like it. The color was ashes of rose, and a large bow was tied around its circumference. Birgitte had knotted that, he thought, as he let the heavy silk slide through his fingers.

  He hesitated before opening the box. A peculiar taste spread through his mouth: iron or blood. His posture was uncomfortable. With great care, he lifted the box, closed the lid of the trunk, and sat down.

  On top lay a pair of baby socks that must at one time have been brilliant white. They were tiny, for a newborn infant, with delicate lace edging around the ankles. He placed the socks on his knees and stroked them gently with his thumb before taking up the photograph. The very first photo of Liv, lying naked with her knees drawn up to her chest and her fists clenched: she was crying. Underneath the picture was a pink book. Opening it, he leafed through it cautiously, afraid the pages would disintegrate in his hands. Birgitte had recorded so much. Birth-weight, length; the little linen bracelet from the maternity unit, inscribed with Birgitte’s name and Liv’s date of birth, glued onto the first sheet of paper. The glue was almost completely desiccated, and when he stroked the bracelet, it fell out; he re-inserted it right at the back, where it was held fast between the pages. The very last entry was dated June 22, 1965: “Liv was given her triple vaccine today. She cried bitterly, and it was painful for both mother and baby, but it was soon over and done with.” After that, there was nothing.

  Roy could not breathe. Abruptly, he put down the box, and the baby socks dropped from his knees onto the dirty floor as he stood up. The skylight was stiff and difficult to budge, but he managed to open it in the end. He remained for a while in the draft of fresh air, with the light dazzling his face.

  Birgitte would not even have pictures on display. Once, a year after Liv’s death, he had put a photo of her on their bedside table, in a silver frame he had just purchased. In a fury, Birgitte had told him to remove it. She would never talk about Liv. She would not keep anything of hers. After Per was born, Roy had tried to raise the issue on a couple of occasions. Per ought to have been told about her. There was an obvious risk that he would find out about his sister from someone else, and that would be so much worse. Again, Birgitte was furious. Eventually it had become impossible. Liv was a no-go subject, and Roy had found it even more difficult to tell Per about her when he became older. And so the baby had simply disappeared, gradually and slowly. He would think of her now and again, it could catch him fiercely, mostly around Midsummer, when the sun shone brightly in the sky and everything had that fresh odor of new, summer life. Liv. Birgitte would not hear of her, or speak of her, or be reminded of her. That was what he had always thought.

  There was only one child in Birgitte’s life: Per. That was the impression she had given. That was what they had all thought. She had accepted Per with gravity and responsibility. That playful, youthful joy that had danced between them when Liv was born had vanished. A constant, anxious concern had replaced it, and had not relinquished its grip until Birgitte had finally come to accept that Per was a robust, healthy ten-year-old.

  He sat down gingerly on the trunk once more, balancing the hatbox on his lap. There was the silver spoon they had bought when she had been christened. And her pacifier: he smiled when he saw how old-fashioned it was, plain and baby pink, the rubber brittle with age. Underneath everything, right at the bottom of the box of memories, lay a letter. It felt substantial, inside the envelope. On the outside, his name was penned in Birgitte’s elegantly flowing handwriting.

  As he opened it, his hands were shaking so violently that the envelope fell to the floor. Straightening up, he turned his face to the light again, and took a deep breath. Then he unfolded the letter and smoothed it out several times with the edge of his hand. It had been written thirty-two years earlier.

  Nesodden, August 2, 1965

  Dearest Roy,

  I’ve thought for a long time about writing this letter, but it’s only now that I think I can manage to do so. If I don’t, I’m afraid I’ll never be able to pluck up the courage. The only way this letter will ever fall into your hands is if I have to leave you. And I don’t think I’ll ever do that. You have lost enough, and I love you, but God knows I’ve barely known how to go on living during these past few weeks. It seems so impossible. I drag myself through one day after another, and all I want to do is sleep. What I have done can never be forgiven. Not by you, and certainly not by me.

  I see that you are carrying just as much pain as I am, but at least you escape the guilt. You are not at fault, but I have done something wrong, and the shame is unendurable. Every time you try to make me talk about Liv and everything that has happened, I feel the guilt and shame overwhelm me completely. The hurt in your eyes when you think I’m angry is just unbearable, that too, and I try, I really try, but it’s all so impossible. Perhaps it would be best to tell you the truth. Then you could hate me and leave me, and I would receive the punishment I deserve. But I don’t have the strength. I don’t dare. I’m too cowardly. Too much of a coward to die, too much of a coward to go on living in an honorable manner.

  And so, tonight, I’m writing this letter.

  These past weeks I have racked my brain continually: how could it have happened?

  I loved her so dearly! Even though she arrived at such an inconvenient time. I remember so well how you reacted when I told you I was pregnant. I had been dreading it for a fortnight, since you had just started at teacher training college and nothing could have been worse than having a baby just at that time. You laughed so heartily! You swung me round and said that everything would be fine, and the next day you had made all the plans and had gone round telling everyone you were going to be a daddy. I’ll never, ever, forget how well you took it.

  I was so scared that something might happen to her. Mum teased me and said that plenty of babies had come into the world before this and managed to survive. Now, tonight, I see that my love for Liv was not worth a button. I thought I was a good mother because I loved and looked after my baby, but I was irresponsible. A sense of responsibility is more important than all
the love in the world; if I had shown responsibility, Liv would still be with us.

  I was supposed to have some time off on Midsummer’s Eve. I was so looking forward to it! At last we would be just Roy and Birgitte, the way we had been before Liv arrived, the way we had been last year, that wonderful summer. Of course I know we should never have left such a little baby in the care of a babysitter, but we were only going down to the jetty, and Benjamin was so good with Liv. I should never have gone, but it was so lovely to have some time off. Mum and Dad were in Oslo, and I think if they had been at home, all those terrible events would never have happened. Mum would not have let me go. Or she would have looked after Liv.

  You were so dashing when I set off for the house around eleven o’clock to breastfeed Liv. You laughed when I waved and made a sign to let you know I would be back soon. You were slightly drunk, but you were so handsome and funny and I was happy as I stumbled back home; I had drunk too much as well. The alcohol went straight to my head that night. You know how seldom I touch liquor, and my head was a bit muddled. That’s my only explanation for what took place: my head was a bit muddled.

  I told both you and all the others that I was tired and fell asleep when I came home. That this was why I did not come back.

  That’s a lie.

  Roy rubbed his nose, and felt the moisture on his fingertips. The next lines on the sheet of paper were crossed out, firmly, in black ink, twice making holes in the paper. He continued to the next page.

  Everything is a big black lie. I can feel how difficult it is, this, just the actual writing of the truth. It’s as if it doesn’t want to be committed to paper.

  Benjamin met me at the door. He was quite flustered, and had been about to run down to fetch me. Liv was restless and making gurgling noises, he said, and she was running a fever: her temperature was nearly forty degrees Celsius. I didn’t realize that this might be dangerous, Roy. She had been feverish a few times before; it came upon her quickly and disappeared just as fast. Right then, I felt quite fed-up with the whole idea of a child. We’d been going to have such an enjoyable evening. I was having some time off! So I told him it probably wasn’t serious, that she just needed some breast milk, and then she’d probably fall asleep again.