“But?”
“She said that she wanted to discuss something with me.”
“What was that?”
“She didn’t say.”
He could picture the dead Ingrid Tollefsen on the cold metal bench in the basement of the morgue in Rome. Did what she wanted to discuss with Ada Hauge have a connection with the killing?
“Can you think of anything she wanted to talk about? Had she hinted at anything earlier when you talked?”
He could hear her clearing her throat on the other end.
“That’s an awful lot of questions you’re asking. I’m actually the one who should be asking the questions. I’m a journalist, after all,” she said.
“Yes, but you were also her friend. And this may actually be important to the case. Can you recall whether she talked about anything? Relationship trouble? Work problems?”
“I remember she said once that she missed the university.”
“Was she unhappy at work? Did she say anything about that?”
“No. Not directly. Just that she missed the academic world. But she probably wouldn’t have said that if she was a hundred-percent satisfied with her job.”
Milo noted Dissatisfied with work? on a sheet of paper.
“No, perhaps not. What was she like, really? As a person, I mean?” Milo asked.
“A very fine woman. Smart. Tough. Nice.”
“Did she talk much about her brother?”
“At first she didn’t talk about anything else. She reproached herself. You know perhaps that their mother died when he was born?”
“Yes, I heard that.”
“Ingrid was about thirteen or fourteen then. I got the impression that she took on a kind of maternal role. Feeding, diaper changes, going to day care. You get the picture.”
“Yes. But she couldn’t take care of him all the time. So why did she reproach herself for what happened to him?”
“I think she had a kind of counterreaction as she got older. Went away to study. Get a little distance. And that meant she wasn’t there when he started having problems. I think that deep down she thought he wouldn’t have gotten into trouble if she’d been around.”
Milo made further notes on the paper while he listened to what she had to say. He was starting to feel cold after the workout and longed for a warm shower. He looked at the clock and realized that he would be late to dinner with his father.
“I understand that it must have been tough for her,” he said.
“Yes, but it wasn’t true that she buried herself in sorrow. She grieved, yes, but she got back up. That’s what I mean when I say that she was tough. Do you understand?”
“Absolutely. But I’m a little late for an appointment now.”
“That’s fine. I have what I need,” Ada Hauge answered.
“No quotes, right?”
“No quotes. You’re going to see that I’ll handle this case carefully.”
“Good,” said Milo.
“But can I expect to be able to call you again later?”
There it was again. The negotiation. I do something for you and then you can do something for me later.
“Just call, but don’t assume that I can give you anything.”
“I understand that. But the day you actually can say something, I’ll be at the top of your list. Fine?”
“Fine.”
They ended the call.
Twenty minutes later he was done showering and dressed, ready to be introduced to the new woman in his father’s life.
12
It was his father who answered the door, dressed in charcoal-gray suit pants, light-blue shirt and a checkered apron.
“Nice apron, Dad.”
“Emil, come in, come in.”
The nasal, posh voice did not go well with the checkered apron.
They hugged awkwardly, and his father took Milo’s topcoat and hung it up.
“So, where is she?”
“She’s in the living room, but before you go in, there’s something I would really like to say.”
“I see, and what is that?”
His father came toward him.
“I’ve thought about telling you this many times, but it’s been damned touchy, you understand. So I thought it was just a matter of pulling the bandage off quickly, instead of dragging it out.”
Milo sighed.
“I know it’s been tense. I understand that you´re not going to be alone for the rest of your life, that you’ll find someone new.”
“Well, it’s not that simple—”
“Can I just go and say hello to her? Let´s take it from there” said Milo.
Without waiting for an answer he set a course toward the living room with his father limping after.
“Hold on a second, Emil—”
But it was too late.
What the hell! thought Milo.
She was sitting on the couch with her legs crossed, reading a magazine, and was about twenty years younger than he had imagined. Besides that, her attire and appearance were completely unexpected. The dark jeans with a hole on one thigh, the short, stringy hair. And not least the little diamond in one nostril.
“Hi, Milo,” she said, getting up.
She could not be much more than twenty. Slender as a child.
Milo turned toward his father.
“What the hell is going on here? Have you lost your mind?”
“I tried to explain. Emil, this is Sunniva.”
“Hi, Sunniva,” Milo said curtly.
“She’s my daughter. Your half sister,” said his father.
“Oh, shit!” answered Milo.
* * *
Endre Thorkildsen told the story while he stood and tried to make eye contact with his son.
Sunniva was twenty-one years old, and her mother had been his colleague. She was an accountant in the brokerage firm he had been part of founding, and “one thing led to another,” as he explained.
Sunniva came into the world, and there was never any question that her father would not support her. Contact was sporadic as she was growing up, but the past few years they’d had more contact than before. She was studying industrial design, and planned to stay in either Berlin or London at an art school starting in the fall.
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” asked Milo.
His father looked at them both.
“I couldn’t. At first I thought you were too young to understand, and that it was simplest to keep things separate. And later it was hard to talk about it, after Maria … your mother … got so bad,” he answered.
“Did she know about this?”
His father nodded silently.
“And what did she say?”
“That stays between me and her,” he answered firmly.
Milo stood up, pulling his hands through his hair and folding them behind his neck.
“Sorry, Sunniva, I’m sure you’re a nice girl, but this was a bit much. I had prepared myself to meet Dad’s new fiancée.”
She let out a little snort of laughter.
“Do you think this is funny?”
“A little, yes.”
She smiled self-confidently, and Milo could only smile back.
“Yes, maybe it is, but—”
“I have a roast in the oven that I have to take out,” his father interrupted.
“I’m not that hungry,” Milo replied.
“But I am,” said Sunniva.
“For crying out loud, Emil! You’re not leaving now! Can’t we just sit down over a meal? Get acquainted a little. Can that be so bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Emil, she’s your sister, damn it!”
“Half sister!” Sunniva and Milo responded in chorus.
* * *
He stayed. And they had a kind of family dinner. The conversation flowed slow like cement, and at times seemed as if it was an interview. Sunniva and Milo answered each other’s questions, and their father interjected information he found suitabl
e, but that only made the situation even more uneasy. “Is that so? Emil has always liked swimming a lot too. There you have something in common!”
After a couple of hours they left, and Milo offered her a ride. A short time later he was accelerating onto the E18 in the direction of downtown Oslo.
“Did you think it was awkward?”
“I was just surprised. I’m an only child. I’m used to it just being me. Now I suddenly have a half sister. I just have to digest that.”
“Are you mad at Dad because he never said anything?”
For a moment he was taken aback that she called his father Dad. That he was also someone else’s father.
“I’m upset at him because of a lot of things,” he answered.
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.”
She looked up at him.
“I went to see you once.”
He glanced at her.
“What?! When?”
“A couple of years ago. I stood outside your apartment in Briskeby. I wanted to ring the doorbell, but I knew I couldn’t.”
She remained quiet a moment, and Milo did not know what to say.
“I saw you coming out with a girl. Probably your girlfriend. You were holding hands.”
“What did she look like?”
“Shorter than you. Of course. Dark, medium-length curly hair. Almost a little Spanish.”
“Kristin.”
“Are you still together?”
“No. That ended a long time ago.”
“Do you have a girlfriend now?”
“I have a girl in Italy. Theresa.”
“Pretty name. Is it serious?”
“I’m seriously fond of her, yes. But we’ll have to see. What about you? Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Well…”
“What’s his name?”
“Her name is Elisabeth.”
“Okay. I didn’t know that—”
“It’s okay. Before her I was with someone named Howard.”
“Really.”
There was less than ten years between them, but Milo suddenly felt that there was a whole generation’s distance.
“I’m not so preoccupied by gender. I fall in love with people,” she said, drawing figures on the windowpane.
He changed the subject.
“Where do you live?”
“Majorstua. Neuberggata.“
“Okay. Then we’ll drive there.”
They sat silently, and Milo concentrated on driving. He liked to drive fast and, as always, his thoughts flowed freely. He thought about what Ada Hauge from Klassekampen had said. That Ingrid Tollefsen wanted to talk to her about something. What was it she had been doing recently in Rome that had led to such a tragic end to her life?
And what had actually happened in that hotel room? How was someone able to drug her without her having screamed or fought back? Could there have been several people in her room? One who held her still and one who drugged her? Or was there just one person who held her down while he stuck the syringe in? It must have been done by a person with experience in using syringes.
His thoughts went to Forum Healthcare. Ingrid Tollefsen’s employer. He did not count on any of the suit-wearing bean counters he had met there being able to handle a syringe. But there were certainly others in the company who could.
He parked outside her apartment and turned off the engine.
“You wanna come in for a while?” she asked.
He thought about it a moment. His irritation with his father was still there. But at the same time she was family. And family came first, regardless of how inconvenient it was.
He nodded and followed her up. The hall was overflowing with shoes, boots, jackets and coats. They could hear loud talking somewhere in the apartment, and by the doorway to the kitchen was a garbage bag someone had neglected to take down to the courtyard.
“I share with three others. Sorry about the mess,” she said, going ahead of him into her room.
It was big and messy, with a bed, writing desk, wardrobe, and an easel in the corner.
“You paint?” he asked.
“A little. Not much. Trying out some techniques,” she said while she took out a photo album she wanted to show him.
There was a knock on the door, and an attractive woman in her early twenties stuck her head in.
“Oh, I didn’t know you had a visitor,” she said, blushing when she saw Milo.
“Hi, Rannveig. It’s not a problem. This is my brother. Milo.”
He went over to her and shook her hand.
“Milo. A pleasure,” he said.
“Rannveig.”
She had short hair and was tall like a model, and her handshake was both warm and soft.
“Well, I won’t disturb you. Nice to meet you, Milo,” she said and withdrew.
He turned around and looked right at a smiling Sunniva.
“My God, you’re quite the charmer!” she exclaimed.
He smiled, and looked for a place to sit down. He ended half reclining on the bed, with a pile of pillows as support.
They remained sitting and browsed through her collection of photo albums for half an hour and chatted about what they had been up to all these years. Cautious questions while they moved in circles around what they really wondered about.
“When did you find out that Dad was your father?” Milo asked at last.
She thought about it.
“I saw him occasionally when I was little. He was my dad who came for a visit now and then. But it was probably not until I was nine or ten that I started asking questions. About why he didn’t live with us. For a long time I thought Mom and Dad were divorced, but gradually I understood more.”
“So he came to visit you?”
“Yeah. We celebrated my birthdays. Just the three of us. And sometimes he was there when I came home from school. They might be sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, talking.”
And she told about the feeling she got of not wanting to disturb. Just sneak in, make herself unnoticed, and sit in the living room and hear the sound of their voices.
“I didn’t want those moments to stop,” she said.
She smiled absently as she said that. As if now, as an adult, she was feeling like the little girl she had been.
Milo looked down at the pictures from a birthday. Sunniva with a crown on her head, smiling from ear to ear. His father sitting in a chair. Suit and tie. He must have come directly from work. And after the presents and cake he had stood up, said thank you, got in his car and drove home to Milo and his mother.
“Did your friends know who he was?”
“They knew I had a father I saw now and then.”
“So you talked about it? You weren’t told not to talk about him with others?”
“That wasn’t a problem.”
“But he wasn’t afraid that others would find out, and that then I would find out too?”
“Milo, I grew up in Furuset. You grew up in Nesøya. They are worlds apart.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But it must have been frustrating for you.”
“My early teens were the worst,” Sunniva answered.
For a while she had asked and pried about how her mother and father got together. Why they hadn’t moved in together. How her father could have two families.
“And what did she say, your mother?”
“She didn’t like to talk about that in particular. ‘The situation is what it is, Sunniva.’ I understand now that it must have been frustrating for her too. She really liked him. But she was always so bloody … understanding.”
“Understanding?”
“Yes. She always said that it wasn’t easy for Dad. I remember I yelled at her, ‘Why did he have me then?’”
“And what did she say?”
Sunniva shrugged her shoulders.
“She started talking about coincidences. About how she was supposed to start working somewhere else, but quite by accident got an internship with Dad. ‘Life i
s a series of coincidences,’ she always said. ‘If I hadn’t started working there, if I hadn’t moved from Trondheim, if I hadn’t started night school, if Endre hadn’t started that brokerage firm, then you wouldn’t have been born,’ she said.”
“Must have been tough to have thrown in your face.”
“Well, yes, but I think she babbled a lot. I was only concerned about why I didn’t see him more often. She got a little vague when she talked about that. ‘Even that shipwreck in Italy was a coincidence that finally meant that you were born,’ I remember she said. She took her line of reasoning pretty far afield.”
“Shipwreck in Italy? What did that have to do with it?”
“No idea. Some military ship that went down.”
Milo frowned and stared at her. What in the world did a shipwreck in Italy have to do with Sunniva?
“What kind of ship was it? And when?”
She thought a moment.
“Well, let’s see. I was fifteen or sixteen when she mentioned it. She never talked about it again. But I got the impression that it must have been long before I was born. In the 1970s. I guess I really just thought it was a way for her to obscure what I wanted to talk about. Why do you ask?”
Milo thought about Benedetti. He had also mentioned a military vessel that went down with his brother on board. More than thirty years ago, he had said. In other words, sometime in the 1970s.
How many Italian military vessels could actually have sunk at that time?
“I don’t really know. But you’re the second person in a few days who has mentioned a military vessel that sank in Italy,” he answered.
TUESDAY
13
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been four months since my last confession.”
“God have mercy on you so you can repent your sins and believe in His mercy.”
“I don’t know if you remember me?”
“Yes, sure. And now you’re back.”
“Now I’m back, yes.”
“What do you want to talk about, my son?”
“I’ve acquired a sister.”
“I see. But isn’t your mother—”
“Dead?”
“Yes. Dead.”
“Well, yes. She’s gone. But it turns out that I have a half sister.”
“My word!”
(Pause.)
“I’ve had a half sister for over twenty years without knowing it. Then, suddenly, out of the blue, she’s sitting there at home with my father.”
The Oslo Conspiracy Page 8