Scarred: A Novel

by Thomas Enger

  “What’s happened?” Bjarne asks.

  Hagen stuffs a piece of chewing tobacco under his lip.

  “Woman in her mid-thirties, strangled. There appears to have been a struggle.”

  Bjarne looks up to get an impression of the building. Gray walls. Black gunk from spray cans on the walls. The windows overlook the city, but they are dark as if there is nothing behind them. The whole building has been cordoned off. Blue lights are flashing all around them. It’s a grim day in Oslo.

  “The victim’s name is Johanne Klingenberg,” Hagen continues.

  “Who found her?” Bjarne asks.

  “A neighbor, her landlady, heard the cat whimper,” Hagen explains. “I believe it’s been a problem before and she knocked on the door to ask her to put a stop to the noise. When there was no reply, she tried the door. And found it was open.”

  “Had she heard anything leading up to that point?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone else see or hear anything?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Hagen says. “I’ve only just arrived myself.”

  Bjarne takes another look around. “I think I’ll go upstairs and view the crime scene.”

  “Okay,” Hagen replies. “I’ll find Sandland and start speaking to the other neighbors while you do that.”

  Bjarne can smell mold as he climbs the stairs. A wall lamp is askew. No lightbulb. The rent is probably in the same league as Daniel Nielsen’s, he thinks, even though the burlap wallpaper is a little more faded and grimier.

  The door to the victim’s second-floor flat is open. He enters and nods to familiar faces. Ann-Mari Sara, the crime scene technician, is already there.

  “Always working,” he says.

  “As long as people keep dying in this city, then—”

  Sara takes a photograph as Bjarne steps inside the living room. There are definite signs of a struggle. There is a cushion on the floor. The glass coffee table has been knocked over, but not damaged. The remote controls lie scattered; the batteries from one of them have fallen out. The rug under the coffee table, brown and threadbare, is bunched up as if someone quickly pushed the table away. Shards from a broken mug are smeared with thin and sticky brown dregs. Bjarne thinks it must be tea, he can see black flecks in it. Tea leaves, possibly. Or cigarette ash.

  The victim is lying on her back on the sofa. Her long hair spills out in a wreath around her head. A hairband from a ponytail lies next to her, brown just like the sofa. One leg hangs over the front. She is still wearing her trousers and her blouse, white, but wet. Sweat, possibly. The upholstery under her is also damp.

  Bjarne detests the thought that the bladder empties itself at the moment of death. The loss of dignity at the end of life. One of nature’s little cruelties. But at least she’s dressed, he thinks, which makes it unlikely that the motive is sexual, if the struggle is related to her death. And the fact that there has been some kind of fight in the living room gives him some encouragement. The chance of finding DNA evidence is considerable. And God knows they need an open-and-shut case right now.

  “Did she live alone?” he asks.

  “Looks like it,” Sara remarks. “Only one toothbrush in the bathroom.”

  More flashlights go off, which blind Bjarne for a second before he can see properly again and take another look around. There is a candle stuck in a red-wine bottle on the windowsill. He would have expected a woman in her thirties to have had flowers here and there, but all he sees are lamps and candlesticks. Pictures on the wall.

  Sara’s camera flashes again and it’s as if the sharp, artificial light makes the pictures stand out more clearly. Bjarne goes over to the wall and looks at one of the framed photographs.

  The glass has been smashed.

  He takes a step closer as a chill runs down his spine. Even the broken glass can’t hide the smile of a boy who can’t be more than two years old.

  Chapter 48

  He doesn’t come here often. But now that Henning has unlocked the door to the attic room and looked inside, he wishes he hadn’t come at all. There are so many memories stored up there, in everything he sees. Boxes of clothing, toys, shoes that would have been too small for Jonas today. An old scooter, a pair of skates. He can’t bear to let them go. It’s as if Jonas will be even further away from him if he were to throw out his things. Just thinking about it feels like a violation.

  Even so, he enters the attic room and finds the box he is looking for; he carries it down to his flat and wipes off the dust before he opens the lid. He stares at the piles of photos and photo albums. He deliberately avoids looking at pictures of Jonas. What he is interested in right now are photographs of Trine and him, the identical collages their mother made for them the Christmas when they were ten and twelve years old respectively.

  The idea came to him when he saw an old photograph of Jonas, Nora, and himself on the mantelpiece in his mother’s flat. It made him realize there is so much about Trine he has forgotten. He blows hard into the box and the dust whirls back in his face. He instinctively recoils before he starts rifling through the photographs. It doesn’t take long before he finds the album he is looking for.

  He opens it so that the light and the air can reach it. The first page is blank. Then—a photo of Trine and him as babies, eighteen months apart. They are lying on the same blanket, with the same open gaze aimed at the camera. Henning can see how much they looked like each other as babies.

  He turns the page and sees more baby pictures of them together on the floor. Henning’s back is ramrod straight and his hand reaches out to Trine, who is lying on her back with her legs in the air. They play. They smile. There are pictures of them in their cots, pictures of them lying under a duvet on the sofa with dull eyes and feverish foreheads. Pictures of them growing bigger. Pictures from birthday parties, Christmases, from the pebble beach near their cabin in Stavern of them trying to skim stones. Two “1” candles on a birthday cake the year Trine turned eleven. Trine puffing up her cheeks ready to blow out the candles.

  I wonder what I did, Henning thinks to himself. What did I do that made Mum hate me and worship Trine?

  Henning looks at the photo album again, the pebble beach, the rocks, the ships in the Skagerrak. He can’t remember when he last visited the cabin, but it must be many years ago. He remembers how the small community and the holiday resort seemed to die every year in mid-August. Their sun-loving cabin neighbors would disappear before the schools started again. When Henning’s family came back in September to shut down the cabin for the winter, their neighbors would already have left. The sea could carry on gamboling without an audience. And it occurs to him that if Trine has gone somewhere to be alone right now, then that has to be the place.

  * * *

  It has started to rain again when Bjarne comes back outside, a cold shower with big, heavy drops. But neither the wet nor the cool autumn air has any effect on him. An uneasy gut feeling has brought on a fever that is spreading to the rest of his body.

  Two crime scenes in the space of just a few days presenting with very similar evidence. Is that a coincidence? he asks himself, and answers his own question immediately. Photographs can easily get broken in the heat of a struggle. Murder by strangulation is not uncommon. And only Erna Pedersen was mutilated after her death.

  But even so.

  Shortly afterward Bjarne sees Emil Hagen outside the entrance to the apartment block. Because of the heavy rain they get into one of the patrol cars, but don’t start the engine. The raindrops batter the windscreen. Big curtains of water are blown across the bodywork.

  “I checked with the emergency services,” Bjarne says. “There were no calls to them from the victim’s mobile.”

  Hagen runs a hand over his wet face and wipes it on his trousers.

  “I’ve spoken to those neighbors who were at home,” he says. “Nobody heard anything.”
r />   Bjarne tries looking out through the windscreen. It’s starting to mist up. Outside two police officers walk past, chatting to each other, but their words can’t be heard inside the car.

  “But there was one interesting thing,” Hagen says. “The victim reported a break-in two weeks ago.”

  Bjarne turns his head to his colleague, whose jaw looks even more tightly clenched than usual.

  “Nothing was taken, but she said—if I’ve understood this correctly—that someone had been bleeding in her flat.”

  “Bleeding?”

  “Yes. She found a bloodstain right next to the cat basket, I believe. And someone had smashed a photo on the wall.”

  Bjarne looks at him.

  “Two weeks ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same picture hanging there now or a different one?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it was the same one. It’s possible she hadn’t replaced the frame. Or the glass yet.”

  “And left broken glass on the floor?”

  Bjarne shakes his head.

  “I highly doubt that.”

  Hagen doesn’t reply. A smell of wet leather rises from his jacket.

  How bizarre, Bjarne thinks. Someone broke a picture in the victim’s home two weeks ago and the same thing happens again today?

  This is definitely not a coincidence. And it bears witness to a deep-seated rage.

  “Who handled the investigation?” Bjarne asks.

  Hagen looks at him.

  “It was low priority. Nothing was stolen. And nobody got hurt.”

  “Except, possibly, the man who broke in.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But what about the blood? Can that help us?”

  “I don’t know,” Hagen says. “I guess it’s at the back of the queue at the lab, like everything else.”

  Bjarne shakes his head and sighs.

  “What kind of blood was it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are we talking drops, blood spurts—what was it?”

  “A smear. Like if you have a cut but you don’t know it and then you accidentally touch—”

  “I know what a smear is, Emil.”

  The investigators sit in pensive silence for a few seconds while the rain lashes the windshield. Bjarne puts his hand on the door handle.

  “Well,” he says, “I guess we’ll have to do what we always do.”

  “I guess so.”

  Chapter 49

  Henning loves autumn. In the summer only the copper beeches and the bright yellow rapeseed fields stand out from all the lush shades of green. But in the autumn nearly every tree and bush changes color. It’s as if the year has matured. And yes, the color palette warns of darker times, and yes, there is something sad about the dying plants and withering leaves. But even so, Henning has always welcomed it.

  Nora could never understand why halfway through Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Henning would sit there with tears in his eyes and yet expect her to believe that the salt water was a sign that he was enjoying himself.

  Now autumn rushes past outside the car window. The fields lie shorn and dormant, like a memorial to bright, warm summer evenings.

  Henning remembers that the drive to Stavern used to take two and a half hours, but that was going from Kløfta. It was also in a different car, in another age. They would pack the small, blue VW Beetle to the rafters and, had they been spotted today, the police would have pulled them over for careless driving. Just being back on the same road—or almost the same road, because motorways have been built since—reminds Henning how he used to be squashed on the backseat, barely able to reach out to undo the small latch that opened a window to get rid of the cigarette smoke in the car.

  His mobile rings when he is almost halfway there. It is the 123news national news editor. He is tempted to ignore the call, but capitulates in the end.

  “Hello, Heidi.”

  “Where are you?”

  As usual, his boss skips the small talk.

  “I’m in the car.”

  “A woman has been found murdered in a flat in Bislett. I want you to go there right away.”

  “Sorry, but that’s going to be difficult. I’m on my way to—”

  Henning stops himself; he doesn’t want to reveal his destination.

  “On your way to where?”

  “I’ve almost gotten to Tønsberg.”

  “What on earth are you doing in Tønsberg?”

  “There’s just something I need to check.”

  Heidi sighs heavily into the telephone.

  “So when do you think you’ll be back?”

  “Don’t know. Later tonight, hopefully.”

  Another sigh.

  “Okay.”

  She hangs up without saying goodbye.

  * * *

  For the next hour Henning concentrates on the road. All he has to do is remember to turn off at the crazy golf course at Anvikstranda Camping, which they were allowed to visit once every summer, and he’ll be there. It’s a trip down memory lane.

  He remembers too small hands trying to grip too big golf clubs. He remembers the bumpy road, which hasn’t grown less bumpy over the years, how they practically had to drive off-road to make way for any cars coming toward them. But he doesn’t need those memories now.

  Past the grove a large grassy area opens out. This is where they used to play soccer in the summer. Where they tried to fly kites. Where they would practice cartwheels, throw Frisbees, and forget to eat because they were having so much fun. And on the horizon lies the sea, big, blue, and beautiful.

  Henning drives past the rubbish bins and continues until the road stops at the end of Donavall Camping with rows of trailers with picket fences, decking, and locked plastic crates containing garden furniture. Everything is exactly as he remembers it.

  The parking space allocated to their cabin appears a short distance ahead of him. But there is no car in sight. Trine isn’t there. No one is.

  So he was wrong after all.

  A little farther along the gravel track he spots tire tracks. Fresh. As if a car, or two, drove halfway into the space before turning around again.

  Whenever Henning’s family went to the cabin, they would park as near the footpath as they could to unload the car. Then there would be the strenuous hike through the forest laden down with knapsacks, bags, and food shopping. Trine and Henning were always made to carry something, even when they were little, and they would walk through the trees, whose viperlike roots snaked down toward the footpath where they were. And every time there was a noise in the thicket, they would jump a mile, spooked as only children can be.

  But it was also an incredibly beautiful landscape where the trees grew close, vines wound their way around them, and white anemones, almost luminous in the spring, covered the forest floor like a duvet. And the view when they reached the top of the hill, when the sea opened out before them, and they could see ships draw white trails in their wake on the mirrored, blue surface of the Skagerrak.

  He remembers everything now.

  And seeing that he has driven all this way, he decides he might as well go down to the shore. Henning loves the sea. He has always loved throwing stones at the rocks to see if he could hit them. He loved snorkeling, looking for flounders on the seabed, the way the seaweed and bulrushes wafted around him in slow motion when he went swimming.

  Henning parks the car and walks down the footpath, where everything has changed, while at the same time nothing has. He still looks out for snakes, just in case. And the feeling when he reaches the top of the hill and the sea spreads out in front of him hasn’t changed, either. It’s as if something in him lets go. He stops and looks across the water; the distant sky has acquired a pink evening glow, which in a few places is reflected in the almo
st motionless surface of the sea.

  He remembers how they used to play on the pebble beach, he and Trine, how they would pick bog whortleberries and crowberries that looked like blueberries and which Trine insisted on calling blueberries for years. Trine would always boss him around, like the know-it-all she was. This is how he remembers her, even though she is eighteen months younger than he, her constantly wagging finger and a tone of voice that would frighten most people into doing what she told them. This extended to when the family played cards. She learned new games and strategies very quickly. Their mother, however, never played to win; she always let her children beat her. And Trine hated that.

  Henning inhales the sea air deep into his lungs before he starts walking down toward the row of blue cabins. He remembers the mound where he used to go to pee because the cabin only had an outside toilet and no power on earth could make him step inside the tiny cubicle that was riddled with flies, spiders, and cobwebs. And he remembers the seagulls they fed with prawn shells and fish waste. Cormorants, oystercatchers, and swans that always caused a stir whenever they flapped past. The eider ducks.

  Tvistein Lighthouse stands just as staunchly on the horizon as it always did. On clear summer evenings they could see all the way out to the island of Jomfruland. If he tries really hard, he is sure that he can conjure up the smell of his father’s cigar smoke, the smell of holiday. And nowhere in the world do the stars twinkle more brightly.

  Henning comes to a standstill when he sees that the door to the cabin is open. At first he thinks there must have been a break-in; he has read countless newspaper articles over the years about cabins closed down for the winter that have had uninvited, light-fingered guests, but his initial concern soon gives way to profound relief when he notices a plate and a glass in the sink outside.

  So he was right after all.

  Trine hasn’t scattered bread crumbs for the wagtails with which they always used to share their breakfast, but the washing-up bowl is still there. Square and made from faded red plastic. And he sees the old gulley in the hillside that their father dug to divert rainwater away from their cabin. Their mother always took great care to weed around it. He can’t imagine that anyone has done any weeding here for years.