by Anne Holt
It would have been better if Emilie was a boy.
“I’ve got a son,” he said.
“Mmm.”
“He’s younger than you.”
The child looked terrified. He took yet another step closer to the bed. Emilie clung to the wall. Her face was all eyes.
“You smell disgusting,” he said slowly. “Haven’t you learned how to wash yourself? You can’t come up and watch TV if you stink like that.”
She just continued to stare at him. Her face was white now, not skin-colored, not pink. White.
“You’re quite a little madam, you are.”
Emilie’s breathing was hyper fast. He smiled, relaxed.
“Eat,” he said. “It’s best you eat.”
Then he walked backward to the door. The hook felt cold against his skin. He lifted it carefully out of the screw eye. Then he let the door close slowly between him and the child. He put his hand on the light switch and was happy that he’d been smart enough to put it on the outside. He flicked the switch down. There was something peculiarly satisfying about the actual click, a pleasing resistance that made him do it several times. Off on. Off on off.
Finally he left the light on and went upstairs to watch TV.
THIRTY-EIGHT
We’ve got lists of all the people who flew in and out of Tromsø in the time before and after Glenn Hugo’s death. Tromsø Police have done a fantastic job of collecting videos from all the gas stations within a two-hundred-mile radius. The bus companies are trying to draw up passenger lists, but it’s a lot more difficult. The coastal express boat is doing the same and so are the local ferries.”
Sigmund Berli scratched his neck and tugged at his shirt collar.
“And there aren’t really many other ways to get in and out of the Paris of the North. We haven’t approached the hotels yet. Seems unlikely that the guy would stay in a hotel, somehow… having just killed a baby, I mean.”
“There must be… hundreds of names.”
“Several thousand, I’m afraid. The boys are working as quickly as they can to get them onto the computer system. Then they’re checked against…”
Berli looked over at Adam Stubo’s bulletin board, where pictures of Emilie, Kim, Sarah, and Glenn Hugo were pinned up with big blue pushpins. Only Kim was smiling shyly; the other children all stared solemnly at the camera.
“… the parents’ information, who they’ve met and known and been in contact with. Shit… These lists are getting ridiculous, Adam.”
His voice broke and he coughed.
“I know that it’s necessary. It’s just so…”
“Frustrating. A whole lot of names and no connections.”
Adam gave a long yawn and loosened his tie.
“What about the man who was seen in…”
He squeezed his eyes shut in concentration.
“Soltunveien,” he remembered. “The man in gray or blue.”
“No one has come forward,” said Sigmund Berli, his voice a bit stronger now. “Which makes the sighting all the more interesting. And our witness was right; the woman in the red coat was a neighbor; she said herself that she must have turned into the road from Langnesbakken around ten to three. The boy on the bike has also been identified; he came forward with his father this morning and obviously has nothing to hide. Neither of them saw or heard anything suspicious. The man who was rushing without wanting to… show it? He hasn’t come forward. So that could be…”
“Our man.”
Adam Stubo got up.
“He was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Had hair. Anything else?”
He was facing the pictures of the children, his eyes running over the series of photographs, backward and forward.
“Not really, I’m afraid. This witness, can’t remember his name off the top of my head, is evidently very careful not to say too much. He has described the walk and the build, but refuses to help to make an artist’s sketch of the face.”
“Sensible, really, if he doesn’t feel that he saw it properly. Why does he think the man was around thirty?”
“His body. His hair. The way he was walking. Energetic, but not youthful. His clothes. All of that. But between twenty-five and thirty-five is hardly precise.”
Adam Stubo rocked on his heels.
“But if…”
He suddenly turned around to face his colleague.
“If someone doesn’t come forward soon who fits that description and had some legitimate errand there that Sunday afternoon, we are definitely a step closer.”
“A step,” Berli repeated, and nodded. “But not much more. We’ve always assumed that it must be a man. In fact, he could be between twenty and forty-five. There are plenty of men in that age group in Norway. With hair too. But it could easily have been a wig, for all we know.”
The phone rang. It seemed for a second that Adam Stubo was not going to answer. He stared at the machine, then snatched up the receiver.
“Stubo,” he barked.
Sigmund Berli leaned back in the chair. Adam didn’t say much, but listened a lot. His face was empty of expression; only a slight rise of the left eyebrow indicated some surprise at what he was being told. Sigmund Berli ran his fingers over a cigar box on the desk in front of him. The wood was smooth and pleasing to the touch. He suddenly had an empty and uncomfortable feeling of hunger; his stomach hurt even though he didn’t really want any food. Adam finished the conversation.
“Anything new?”
Adam didn’t answer. Instead he let his chair swing halfway around on its axis, so that he could study the faces of the children on the wall again.
“Kim had a mother and a father who live together. Married. The same was true for Glenn Hugo. Sarah’s mother was single, but the girl stayed with her father every other weekend. Emilie’s mother is dead. She lived with her father.”
“Lives,” corrected Berli. “Emilie might still be alive. In other words, these children represent a fair average of children in Norway. Half of them live with both parents and half of them with one parent.”
“Only, Emilie’s father is not really Emilie’s father.”
“What?”
“That was Hermansen at Asker and Bærum,” said Adam, pointing to the phone. “A doctor contacted them. He didn’t know how important… or rather, if what he had to say was of any importance to the investigation. After this weekend’s events, he agreed with his superiors that he should break patient confidentiality and tell us that Emilie’s father is not her biological father.”
“Has Tønnes Selbu ever said anything to that effect?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“He doesn’t know that… he doesn’t know he’s not his daughter’s father?”
They both stared at the photograph of Emilie. The picture was bigger than the others, taken by a professional photographer. The child had a small chin with a hint of a cleft. Her eyes were big and serious. Her mouth was small, with full lips, and she had a crown of coltsfoot in her fair hair. One flower had fallen loose and hung down on her forehead.
“Tønnes Selbu and Grete Harborg were married when Grete got pregnant. Tønnes was automatically registered as the child’s father. No one has ever questioned it. Except perhaps the mother, she must… Anyway. Two years ago, Grete and Tønnes decided to register as bone marrow donors. There was something about a cousin who was ill and the whole family… Well, to the doctor’s great surprise, the tests showed that Tønnes was definitely not the father of his child. It was discovered by accident. The doctor had taken a test of Emilie earlier, in another context, and…”
“But they didn’t tell the man?”
“Why? What’s the point?”
Adam was standing up close to the photo of Emilie. He studied it in detail and drew his finger over the crown of yellow spring flowers.
“Tønnes Selbu is a good father. Better than most, according to the reports. I completely understand the doctors. Why should they foist that news on the man when he
hasn’t asked for it? What good would it do him?”
Sigmund Berli stared in disbelief at the photograph of the nine-year-old.
“I would want to know. Shit, if Sture and Snorre are not mine, then…”
“Then what? Then you wouldn’t want them?”
Berli snapped his mouth shut, audibly. The snap made Adam laugh, a dry laugh.
“Forget it, Sigmund. What’s important is to find out whether the information is relevant to us. For the investigation.”
“And why should it be?” he asked, unfocused.
Snorre was dark like Sigmund Berli. Square. Like peas in a pod, people used to say. And even though he wasn’t usually much good at things like that, even he could see clear similarities between his son now and pictures of himself as a five-year-old.
“Obviously, I’ve got no idea! Get a grip.”
Adam snapped his fingers in front of Sigmund’s face.
“The first thing we should find out is if the same applies to any of the others.”
“You mean whether the other children are in fact their fathers’ children? And we should check that just before the funeral, knock on the door and say excuse me, kind sir, but we have reason to believe that you are not the father of the child you just lost, so please can we have a blood sample? Well? Well? Is that what you mean?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
Adam’s voice was quiet and calm. Sigmund Berli normally envied him that, his older colleague’s ability to control himself, to think clearly at all times, to talk precisely. But now Berli was furious.
“Damn it, Adam! Have you thought of putting the last nail in the coffin for these men or what?”
“No. I thought we would do it discreetly. Very discreetly. I don’t want Tønnes Selbu getting wind of what we’re talking about right now. And as for the other fathers, it’s your job to come up with something, to make taking a blood test seem natural. Pronto.”
Sigmund Berli drew a deep breath. Then he put his fingertips together and twiddled his thumbs.
“Any ideas?”
“No. That’s your problem.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sure,” Adam started, in a conciliatory tone, like a father holding out his hand to an unreasonable son. “No, let’s put it another way: There are two things we have to find out as soon as possible. One is whether the children are their fathers’ children. The other is…”
Sigmund Berli stood up.
“I’m not finished,” said Adam.
“Well, hurry up and finish then, because I’ve got plenty to do.”
“We have to find out how Kim and Sarah died.”
“The doctors say they don’t know.”
“Well, then they will have to look more closely. Run new tests. I don’t know. But we have to know what the children died from and we have to know if they have an unknown father out there.”
“Unknown father?”
Sigmund Berli was calmer now. He had unclenched his fists and was breathing more freely.
“You mean that these children might be… half brothers and sisters?”
“I don’t mean anything,” said Adam Stubo. “You’ll have to find some way of getting the tests run. Good luck.”
Sigmund Berli said something under his breath. Adam Stubo was sensible enough not to ask what it was. Sigmund sometimes said things he didn’t mean. That is, once they had been said. And Adam knew very well what his colleague was thinking. Sigmund Berli’s oldest son was a fair and slight boy. His mother through and through, he used to say to himself with barely disguised pride.
When the door shut behind Sigmund, Adam Stubo dialled Johanne’s number at work. There was no reply. He let it ring for a long time, to no avail. Then he tried her at home. She wasn’t there either, and he discovered that he was annoyed that he didn’t know where she was.
THIRTY-NINE
The building was obviously from the postwar period. The fifties perhaps. A square building with four apartments, no doubt with two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and bathroom. The area was relatively big; lack of space was not a problem for small towns in Norway after World War II. The building had recently been renovated. The walls were painted with thick yellow paint and the roof tiles looked new. Johanne parked on the road, right outside the gate. The fence was also newly painted; the green paint so shiny that she wondered if it was still wet.
It smelled of small town.
The sound of a car, a jumble of voices from a kindergarten behind a high fence, hammering from a construction site across the road, the carpenters slinging obscenities at one another, a sudden peal of female laughter from an open window. The sounds of a small town. The smell of someone baking bread. The feeling that she was being watched as she walked up to the porch by the front door, without knowing who was watching, what they were thinking or whether they were thinking anything other than “Here comes a stranger, someone who doesn’t belong here.”
Johanne had been born and raised in Oslo. She knew very little about small towns and admitted it freely. All the same, there was something about places like this that appealed to her. They were manageable. Transparent. The feeling of being part of something that is not too big and unpredictable. She had often thought recently that with modern technology, she didn’t need to live in Oslo anymore. She could move away, move to the country, to a small village with five shops and a garage, a dilapidated café and a bus station, cheap housing and a school for Kristiane with only fifteen pupils in each class. But of course she couldn’t, not with Isak and her parents in town, not with Kristiane, who needed people around her all the time. But it had crossed her mind. She could feel the eyes trained on her from the first floor of the yellow building, from the bay window in the villa across the road, eyes that watched from behind the blinds and curtains; she had been noticed and was being watched, and the thought made her feel bizarrely safe.
“Lillestrøm. Jesus. Here I am romanticizing about Lillestrøm.”
The housing cooperative’s maintenance fund had obviously run dry when they got to the doorbells. They were hanging from the wall, speckled with yellow paint. Johanne tried to press one of the bells. She had to hold the plate with one hand and press with the other. She heard a horrible ringing sound somewhere in the distance. No one reacted, so she pushed the next one. The lady on the first floor, who had been watching her from the kitchen window, unaware that she was visible from the driveway, stuck her head out.
“Hello?”
“Hi. My name’s Johanne Vik. I wanted to…”
“Wait a moment!”
The woman padded down the stairs. She smiled expectantly at Johanne as she opened the door a crack.
“What can I do for you?”
“My name is Johanne Vik. I work at Oslo University and I’m looking for someone who might know what happened to a lady who lived here before. Many years ago, to be honest.”
“Oh?”
The woman was well over sixty. Her hair was covered with a chiffon scarf. Johanne could see big blue and green hair rollers under the bluish green semitransparent material.
“I moved here in 1967,” she said, without showing any sign of letting Johanne in, “so maybe I can help. Who is it you’re looking for?”
“Agnes Mohaug,” said Johanne.
“She’s dead,” said the woman, smiling broadly, as if she was happy to be able to give this information. “She died the year I moved in. Just after, in fact. She lived there.”
The woman lifted her hand lazily. Johanne assumed she was pointing at the ground floor to the left.
“Did you know her?”
The woman laughed. The roots of her teeth flashed gray against unhealthy pink gums.
“I don’t think there was anyone who knew Agnes Mohaug. She’d lived in the house since it was built. In 1951, I think it was. But still there was no one who really… She had a son. Did you know that?”
“Yes. I’m looking…”
“A… a simpleton, if you know what
I mean. Not that I knew him; he’s dead as well.”
She laughed again, hoarse and hearty, as if she found the extinction of the little Mohaug family immensely funny.
“He wasn’t quite right, so they say. Not right at all. But Agnes Mohaug herself… no one said a word against her. Kept to herself, always. Sad story, about the boy…”
The woman broke off.
“The boy who what?” asked Johanne, carefully.
“No…”
She thought about it. Then she quickly patted her rollers.
“It was such a long time ago. And I don’t remember Mrs. Mohaug that well. She died only a few months after I’d moved in. Her son had been dead for years. A long time, at least.”
“I see.”
“But…”
The woman lightened up. Again she smiled, so that her narrow face looked like it would split in two.
“Go and ask Hansvold in Number 44. Over there!”
She waved in the direction of a green twin building that was a few hundred yards away, separated from Number 45 by a big lawn and hip-high metal fence.
“Hansvold has lived here longest. He must be over eighty, but he’s clear as a bell. If you hold on a moment, I’d be happy to take you over and introduce you…”
She leaned forward to whisper, without opening the door any wider.
“… after all, I know you now. Just one moment.”
“Don’t worry, that’s really not necessary,” said Johanne quickly. “I’ll manage myself. But thank you very much for your help. Thank you.”
Johanne started to stride toward the gate, so that the woman with the chiffon scarf would not have time to change. A child screamed loudly in the kindergarten. The carpenter on the scaffolding over the road swore loudly and threatened to sue a man in a suit who was waving his arms and pointing at a cement mixer that had fallen over. A car rolled over a speed bump as Johanne came out onto the road; she jumped and stepped in a puddle.
The small town was already starting to lose some of its charm.
“But I’m still not entirely clear why you want to know all this.”