Scarred: A Novel

by Thomas Enger

  Their plot is relatively inaccessible from the surrounding footpaths, so people rarely walked straight past their front door—even in the summer. It meant that they hardly ever had to lock the cabin, a tradition Henning notes to his satisfaction that Trine has upheld.

  He enters the cabin tentatively.

  “Trine?”

  It feels strange to say her name out loud and there is no response. The cabin is silent. But he sees a laptop on the table. Clothing thrown over the dark blue sofa. The curtains are still the same blue-and-white ones, in case anyone should forget that they are by the seaside. He looks across the juniper bushes that cover the hillside in front of the cabin; the thicket below. The irregularities in the terrain. And he remembers the cream buns they used to eat, radio plays on Saturdays, the television that never worked.

  He remembers everything.

  He leaves the cabin and walks up to the small mound and it feels as if the whole world is spread out in front of him. All he has to do is reach out his hand to touch it. And the wind, he hadn’t noticed it until now. Or the smell from Firsbukta, either—a smell he hated when he was little—of seaweed and rubbish that the sea has washed up and which has been rotting in the sun.

  He wonders if that’s what makes him take a step back to stop himself from falling over. How can all this have been buried inside him, all these lovely memories that are now coming back to him? He closes his eyes and lets them in. He stands like this for a long time.

  Then he walks back inside the cabin and sits down at the table where Trine’s laptop is open. He bumps into a table leg, and as he does so he causes the screen to wake up. A detailed city map appears. Blue, yellow, white, and beige colors dotted across the page. A slightly thicker line runs through the streets along some water. He is about to read the street names when a shadow flits across the window. His gaze darts to the door frame, where his sister is staring at him with frightened eyes.

  “Henning? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Chapter 50

  Trine is wearing muddy walking boots and a green, white, and red anorak. A baseball cap covers her hair.

  All he can do is stare at her. She has their mother’s features around her mouth and her eyes; nothing about her has changed except that she has aged a little. She is Trine, his sister. To whom he hasn’t spoken for God knows how many years.

  “Hi,” he says at last.

  Two men, whom Henning presumes to be Trine’s bodyguards, appear either side of her. He can see that they are about to rush inside, but Trine stops them with a gesture and mutters—with her face turned away from him—that it’s only her brother.

  Then she turns to him again. And he doesn’t know how to interpret the look in her eyes. Whether it’s anger, fear, or something else. But there is definitely something. Hostility, possibly.

  “Have you come here to gloat?” she asks.

  “Gloat? No. I’m here to—”

  Henning stops and thinks about it. “I came because I was worried about you.”

  Trine starts to laugh.

  “A lot of people are worried about you, Trine. No one has been able to contact you for thirty-six hours.”

  “So you decided to come here? To find out if this was where I was hiding?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s just like you,” she mutters to herself. Henning is about to ask her what she means by that remark, but Trine interrupts him.

  “So what’s the deal now? Were you hoping to interview me?”

  “The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.”

  “So why—”

  Trine swallows the rest of the sentence. Henning looks at her for a long time before he says, “I’ve come to see if I can help you.”

  “I don’t need your help.” She pouts.

  Henning continues to look at her, at her fingers that fidget, at fingernails that haven’t been left alone for one minute. If he knows anything about her at all, she has been biting them right down to the quick. When she was little she used to get scolded for it all the time.

  She still refuses to look at him. If he hadn’t known better, he would almost have believed that she was scared of him.

  “I didn’t see your car in the driveway,” he says. It’s both a question and a statement.

  “No, you don’t think I’m that stupid, do you? I parked elsewhere. And I didn’t come in my own car, either.”

  Trine turns her head slightly and, for a brief moment, Henning makes eye contact with her, enough to see his mother in them. The same anger. The same contempt. As if she finds it loathsome even to be in the same room with him.

  “Neither did I. But then again, I don’t have a car of my own,” he says, trying to laugh. Trine is not even close to being mollified.

  “Have you been out for a walk?”

  Trine glances at her watch, then she shifts her gaze toward the sea.

  “Did you find the blue dots?”

  Henning smiles at the memory, how they used to compete to be the first to spot the blue dots placed along the coastal path for guidance. At that time they cared little about nature, the point of the game was winning. And Trine always wanted to win. Always.

  “How far did you walk?” he asks. Trine turns to him again.

  “To Stavern,” she says in a low voice.

  “Stavern?” Henning exclaims. “You walked all the way there? And back again?”

  She nods, but only just.

  “That must be miles.”

  Trine automatically checks her watch.

  “Twelve point two-one kilometers,” she says. “Each way.”

  “So you’ve walked—”

  Her impatience gets the better of her and she sighs.

  “What do you want, Henning?”

  He looks at her. Some of her hair, wet and dark, has come loose under her baseball cap. The wind takes hold of it and blows it in front of her eyes.

  “Please, can we just talk, Trine?”

  “No.” The reply is firm. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  Henning searches her eyes for an explanation, but finds only hostility. Again, she looks out at the sea before she steps inside the cabin. And that’s when she notices that her laptop is on.

  “Have you been snooping on my computer?”

  “No, I—”

  Trine marches up to the table and slams shut the laptop.

  “Get out,” she demands.

  Henning is about to protest, but he sees that it will serve no purpose.

  “Get out,” she orders him again.

  Henning gets up and holds up his palms. He starts to walk, but stops and turns around; he looks at her windswept, ruddy cheeks. He tries to think of something to say, but the right words refuse to come.

  “Please, just let the world know that you’re still alive,” he says. “People are worried about you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “No, I mean it, Trine.”

  Trine laughs again. “Yes, I guess you all feel really bad now.”

  Henning still can’t think of anything to say.

  “You’ve seen for yourself that I’m alive,” she says, pointing to the door. “Now you can go home.”

  “But—”

  “Please, Henning. Just go.”

  Suddenly he can see the hurt in her eyes; it’s only for a second or two, but it’s long enough for him to notice. Trine walks back to the doorway and stands facing the sea with her back to him. Henning watches her for a few seconds before he does as she asks. He walks around the cabin and past his father’s overgrown gully. Once he gets to the top of the mound he stops and turns around again. He looks across the roof of the cabin and out at the sea, now just as black as the approaching night. He hears seagulls screech, sees a ship in the distance, tiny against the endless background. And he thinks that t
he big, open sea contains as many questions as answers.

  Chapter 51

  Trine watches Henning disappear up the mound. She waits. Listens out until everything is quiet again. Then she waits even longer, until she is absolutely sure that he has gone.

  Henning.

  She knew that he had returned to work, of course. She has even read some of his articles, the most recent one only last week, about Tore Pulli and how he was killed. She always gets a lump in her throat when she reads his stories and sees the small byline picture of him with the scars. But this time she can’t just click a button to make it go away.

  Now that she has seen him again, in person, she is unable to block out the images that pop up in her head even though she is awake and should be able to suppress them. It’s the middle of the night and she is woken up by noises coming from nearby. A low sound repeating like a rhythm. Something squeaks. Mild scraping from a chair. Followed by more squeaking.

  Trine gets out of bed and goes to the door; she sees a soft light spill out from Henning’s room. The noises grow louder and she hears breathing that quickens. She tiptoes closer to Henning’s room. And the sight that meets her when she peeks inside—

  Trine closes her eyes.

  She could never look at her father or Henning afterward. She had hoped that it might get easier in time, but it was just as difficult today as it always was.

  Trine tries to shake off the images and the memories. Now she regrets that she didn’t ask Henning to keep his mouth shut about having found her and get him to promise not to reveal the location where she has been hiding for the last thirty-six hours. But something tells her that Henning won’t say anything. He understands.

  Trine sits down; she takes a sip from her water bottle and feels the soreness in her legs and the blisters on her heel. Even the soles of her feet hurt. She’s in need of a shower. She would have gone for a swim in the sea, except that the water temperature is probably only about 55 degrees Fahrenheit in September. What she ought to have done was jump in the sea and drown herself. But she couldn’t step off the cliff when the thought occurred to her on the coastal path. She just couldn’t make herself do it.

  Perhaps she didn’t want it enough. Or perhaps she was still clinging to the hope that a brilliant solution would present itself during her long walk.

  Trine takes out her mobile and reads the last text message she got from Katarina Hatlem almost an hour ago, a message Trine has yet to reply to.

  You can’t hide any longer, Trine. Clear message from the PM’s office: “She needs to come out and kill this story or she has to resign.” Can you think of any other solution?

  Again Trine weighs up her options. She can either confront the allegations, reveal where she was and what she was doing that night, and then wait for the public outcry that will exile her from politics for good. Or she can roll over, play dead, and resign quietly out of fear of losing the best and finest person in her life.

  You’ll lose him anyway, she thinks, if you don’t tell him. Both options are equally impossible.

  Once again she rages at herself because she wasn’t brave enough to end her problems at the bottom of the sea or at the foot of a cliff while she still had the chance. You’re a coward, she reproaches herself.

  But running away is also the act of a coward, fleeing your problems as she is doing now. It’s not her style, it never was. Yes, it has been necessary to bury certain things from the past, but that was different. Piling earth on top of something that stinks to make the smell go away. And so far the press hasn’t managed to uncover what is rotting underneath.

  But what guarantee does she have that her accusers would tell the truth once they get what they want?

  None.

  Trine shakes her head. No matter what she does, it’ll be wrong.

  Chapter 52

  The incident room on the fifth floor of Oslo Police Station is busy as always with uniformed and plainclothes officers whose attention is directed at the end of the boardroom table, where Arild Gjerstad raises a coffee cup to his mouth. The table is covered with files, coffee cups, and half-full water bottles. On the whiteboard on the wall is written JOHANNE KLINGENBERG. Preliminary forensic evidence is listed in bullet points under her name.

  Gjerstad puts down his cup and walks up to the whiteboard.

  “The killer is likely to be known to the victim,” he says. “Do we have a list of everyone she knew?”

  Gjerstad looks across the assembly. Fredrik Stang, who has dark hair in a crew cut and a face whose expression is always grave and tense, speaks up. “If the calendar on her laptop was up-to-date, she had lunch with someone called Emilie earlier today at twelve noon. The victim had a public profile on Facebook, and according to her friends list she has only one friend called Emilie. Emilie Blomvik.”

  “We need to talk to her,” Gjerstad says. “Today.”

  “I can do that,” Bjarne volunteers.

  “Good,” Gjerstad replies.

  Stang runs his hand down his tanned, muscular arm before he continues. “The victim was a mature student at Oslo University’s College of Applied Sciences; she was quite active on the online dating scene with profiles on both match.com and sukker.no as well as various other sites. We’ll check out anyone she has been or is in contact with to see if some of the relationships were more serious than others. But I’m not sure that’s the lead we should be prioritizing since the victim was found fully clothed. There were no signs of sexual assault.”

  “Even so,” Gjerstad says, “check it out.”

  Stang nods.

  “Talking about friends, she had over eighteen hundred Facebook friends. In the last two days alone she made more status updates than I have in a whole year.”

  “That might explain how the killer knew that she wouldn’t be at home two weeks ago,” Bjarne says. “And when he would be able to break into her flat.”

  “In that case the killer has to be one of her Facebook friends,” Sandland concludes. “That narrows down the list of suspects.”

  Stang nods and puts down his notepad. Silence descends on the table. Bjarne picks up the pen in front of him and clicks it on and off in a quick rhythm.

  “I have a theory I’d like to try out on you,” he says when he has given it some thought. “Last Sunday eighty-three-year-old Erna Pedersen was murdered. She was strangled before being mutilated with her own knitting needles. Her killer smashed a photo on her wall and took another picture with him. A picture that hadn’t been there for very long. None of the people we’ve interviewed at the care home can explain how it came to be on the wall in the first place. In which case it’s possible that the killer put it there himself. This would mean that he had been to the care home before and that he knew the victim.”

  Bjarne pauses briefly to make sure that everyone can follow him.

  “And today Johanne Klingenberg was found dead in her flat. She, too, was strangled and again someone had smashed a picture on her wall—the same picture, incidentally, that was smashed two weeks ago when someone broke into her flat. I think it’s likely that she was strangled by the same person who broke into her flat.”

  “Are you saying that the killings are connected?” Gjerstad asks.

  Bjarne pauses briefly.

  “I think there’s evidence to suggest it, yes. Not only were both victims strangled, but it seems as if the killer in both cases has a particular obsession with photographs. They mean something to him and they trigger a rage in him. And this particular obsession is something I’ve seen much too much of in murder inquiries in recent years.”

  “It’s just a random coincidence,” Pia Nøkleby objects. “The pictures, I mean. Anything could happen in the heat of a struggle.”

  Bjarne is about to continue putting forward his theory, but Ella Sandland looks up from her documents and beats him to it. “There’s actually another coincidence,�
�� she says. “Both victims are originally from Jessheim.”

  Silence descends on the water bottles and the coffee cups. Bjarne lets his gaze wander from investigator to investigator and sees that his theory has stirred their interest.

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Nøkleby insists. “I’m sure many people from Jessheim move to Oslo. We’re only talking about a distance of—what is it—fifty kilometers?”

  “Forty,” Bjarne says. “But three coincidences mean we have to examine if the two cases are connected.”

  Bjarne sees Hagen and Sandland nod in agreement.

  “And there’s one more point that I think is worth noting,” he continues. “In both murders the killer appears to have planned his approach in advance.”

  “What makes you say that?” Emil Hagen says.

  “Why break into someone’s home when they’re not there—if you don’t intend to steal anything or harm them?”

  Bjarne looks around. There is no reply.

  “Because you’re doing research,” he says. “You’re doing the groundwork. The killer must have been to Erna Pedersen’s room at least once before he killed her—if we surmise that he put up the missing picture. When it comes to Johanne Klingenberg, then, I think that the killer checked out her flat, looked at what opportunities there were for him and what difficulties might arise, and came back when he had finalized his plan.”

  “He could have been stalking her?” Sandland suggests.

  Bjarne fixes his gaze on her.

  “Why would he then have smashed a picture of a toddler on her wall? Twice?”

  “Because he thought the child was hers?”

  Bjarne shakes his head.

  “If he had been stalking her, he would have known that she had no children. And then we would probably also have found evidence of a sexual assault at the crime scene.”