Scarred: A Novel

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Scarred: A Novel Page 20

by Thomas Enger


  But the officer gives her no answer.

  “You were at school together, you and Johanne?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was this?”

  “The whole time, we grew up together.”

  “So when did Erna Pedersen teach you? Do you remember?”

  Emilie thinks about it.

  “Toward the end of primary school, I think it was. The last two or three years, possibly.”

  “Did you have any school photos taken?”

  Emilie tries to remember.

  “I’m not sure. I think we might have had one taken in sixth year.”

  There is a moment of silence.

  “Do you still happen to have that photo, Emilie?”

  She thinks about it.

  “Yes, I think so. Somewhere.”

  “Do you think you could find it?”

  Emilie hesitates for a second.

  “I can try looking for it, of course, but—”

  Then she realizes why the officer wants to know.

  “Was it . . . was it Erna Pedersen, who was—” Emilie clasps her hand over her mouth. “I read something in the newspaper about an Erna Pedersen who had been—” She is unable to complete the sentence.

  “Yes, that was her,” the policeman says. “And we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t investigate the possibility that there might be a connection between the two deaths. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there is. But can you think of anyone you went to school with who had unfinished business with Johanne and Erna Pedersen?”

  Emilie doesn’t reply at once. She is thinking, or trying to think, but too many questions are hurling themselves at her at the same time.

  “Teachers are never very popular,” she says. “But I can’t imagine that—” She stops again.

  “No,” she says quietly. “I don’t know of any.”

  “If you do think of any, please call. You have my number?”

  Emilie checks the display on her mobile.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I think that’s it for now. Please try to find that school photo. It might be important.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Good. Thank you. And once again, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Emilie smiles a feeble smile. “Thank you,” she replies.

  Chapter 55

  Henning hasn’t driven far before he pulls over in a lay-by. He is thinking about the map he saw on Trine’s laptop. The date in the top right-hand corner.

  It did say “October 9,” didn’t it? The day when she, according to every newspaper in Norway, allegedly made the biggest blunder of her life. What kind of map was it? And why had she looked it up on her laptop?

  Henning starts the car again and drives on. He stops at a gas station in the center of Stavern and helps himself to a handful of paper towels without buying anything. He finds a pen in the car’s glove compartment and clicks it ready while he tries to remember what he saw.

  When he was at school, his friends used to tease him about his photographic memory. To some extent they were right, even though he always corrected them and said that it wasn’t about memory. He took a screen dump with his eyes and later he would note down what he had seen—a skill he has often found useful as a reporter.

  Henning makes himself comfortable in the car, closes his eyes, and summons up the image from the laptop, concentrating on its major features. First the parks and the lakes. Then he starts to draw. When he was little, he loved drawing city maps. It gave him a satisfying sense of order. Seeing the big picture. He sketches in any other streets that he remembers and the thick line that represented a kind of running profile—it looked like a malign virus under a microscope. When the sketch is done, he starts the car and drives on, pleased with the likeness he has managed to re-create.

  When he gets home, he takes a long shower. While soap and shampoo settle in a foaming circle around the drain, he ponders his unfortunate tendency to irritate every woman he meets. In the past he could usually charm his way out of awkward situations, but there is very little left of that side of him. These days he is surrounded by women with problems, women who create problems, women who are the problem. Nora, Trine, Pia, Heidi.

  Is that all his fault?

  Now that he thinks about it, it’s not only the women. He has managed to fall out with everyone he knows; he couldn’t honestly say that he has a single friend left. Not a real one. No one came to visit him while he was in Sunnaas Rehabilitation Center, though there might be a perfectly good reason for that. Before Jonas died, he might have gone for a drink or two with colleagues, but he never let anyone get close. He never felt the need to tell anyone about himself. Sometimes they would ask how things were with him and Nora, and every time he would say that they were fine, even though they weren’t.

  Friendships and acquaintances are fleeting. You get close to people you see every day, and when your studies are over, when you move or get a new job, you say goodbye with every intention of keeping in touch. But new people take their place, time passes, and it becomes harder to remain a central part of each other’s lives. It’s not because you don’t care anymore. It’s just the way it goes.

  The closest Henning has to a friend right now—and he is struggling to name even one—is Iver Gundersen. Even though Henning is loath to admit it.

  Half naked, he walks into the living room. He stands there staring at all the photographs that are spread out on the floor. The thought of tidying up fills him with dismay, and since he intends to work on the map he sketched in the car, he decides that clearing up will just have to wait. But then he spots a picture of Jonas, a big picture where his son is smiling. Henning bends down and picks it up.

  It’s a lovely picture.

  And though he tries as hard as he can, he can’t stop the pain from welling up inside him. Usually he can suppress it by trying to think of something else, looking at something else or forcing another image to appear in its place. But it’s not working now. Jonas is inside him, inside all of him, his eyes bore into him like a laser sight. His knees start to wobble.

  I should have tried harder to cover myself up, he thinks. I should have thought about it for one more second, just one, then perhaps the flames would have burned me in a different place. It might have made all the difference. My eyes wouldn’t have glued themselves together and I would have been able to see properly before I got ready to jump off the railing and not slip just as I was about to escape. Everything could have been different. And Jonas would still have been alive.

  Henning strangles a sob while he looks at the picture. You should be on the wall, he says to his son. You should have been on my wall all this time. But I can’t bear to have you there. I’m so sorry, my darling boy, but I just can’t bear it.

  A rumble outside his window makes him take a step to one side. He looks for something familiar, something to fix his eyes on as the storm draws near. The sweat trickles down between his shoulder blades and he imagines tasting salt water as he breaks through the surface of a shimmering, dark pink sea. Sinking like a sounding lead. He turns into a shadow and a dry noise is forced out of him. But the only part of him that gets wet is his eyes.

  Chapter 56

  His legs feel strangely jellylike as he walks down the road, which he can barely see in the darkness. The headlights of an oncoming car sweep toward him and he steps on to the verge and bows his head as the car passes him. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he has been back home.

  Home.

  Where is his real home now? He is about to be evicted from his flat. And given what he has just done to his father, he can never go home to his mother again.

  How strange, he thinks, that you can do something and not see it. It wasn’t until the display cabinet got knocked over that his sight returned and he realized what he had done.

&nb
sp; Smoke is coming from a chimney on one of the houses he passes. The smell drifts down toward him, even though the smoke itself is rising. He is reminded of something he learned at school. After a forest fire everything regenerates. New plants and flowers will grow from under the ash as if the flames have pressed a reset button that makes everything default to the start position.

  And, as he stands on the platform at Nordby Station, he wonders if anything will rise from his ashes when the time comes. If he has a reset button.

  Fortunately there is no one around, so he takes a step closer to the edge of the platform and looks at the thick, rough-hewn stones between the railway sleepers and the tracks. It is very quiet. He closes his eyes and recognizes the buzz he used to get as a child though no trains are approaching. And he doesn’t know how long he has been standing there, how long it takes before the rail tracks start humming, charging him up and preparing him for what comes next. The alarm bells start to ring, the lights on the plate change from white to red, and the barriers hesitate for a second before they begin to lower. The ringing that was steady to begin with ends up out of time, just like when he was little and it takes maybe thirty seconds before the barriers at the level crossing have come down and the ringing stops.

  But it doesn’t stop inside him; he can feel it in his head. And then a light appears; a glow deep inside the forest, as if the trees are the walls of a tunnel that gradually comes alive. And standing here now, so many years later, it feels even better; he can see the rail tracks glisten in the darkness. They look like shiny, white ski tracks.

  Then the eyes appear, fierce and beckoning, huge like the eyes of a troll. And the train doesn’t slow down, the tracks become even more alive, they hiss, they snarl, they make themselves look sinister and dangerous, and he takes another step forward, feels his foot touch the edge of the concrete. The train is coming and the driver sounds his horn, perhaps he has seen him. But it doesn’t stop him from sticking out his foot. He lets it dangle over the edge; the gleaming rail tracks are just one meter below him, as is the light in the lovely, big eyes that will devour him.

  * * *

  Henning shakes off his distressing thoughts and finds the paper towel with the sketch he drew in the car. He copies out the map on paper, paying more attention to the details this time, and before long a clearer image emerges in front of him.

  He has seen this map before.

  He goes to the kitchen, opens his laptop, and starts a search engine. Types in the name of the city and clicks on the first map that comes up. And as he sees the characteristic canals, bridges, and parks, he realizes that his memory was correct.

  It’s a map of Copenhagen.

  Henning thinks about Trine’s watch that told her how far she had walked along the coastal path. He has heard of fitness fanatics who log their exercise efforts, who wear pulse and distance counters and God knows what. The fat line that looked like a worm on her laptop was the route she had run and walked. In Copenhagen. At 8:17 p.m.. The same evening she was supposed to be at a party conference in Kristiansand sexually assaulting a young man. The same evening no one remembers seeing her during dinner.

  Bloody hell.

  The young politician’s statement is false. And Henning starts to get an inkling of what is going on. The reason why the politician doesn’t want to be named, but chose to write an unconvincing account of a “sexual assault” and sent it anonymously by fax.

  Because it never happened.

  Because that person doesn’t exist.

  And since the media appear to have accepted that they will never be able to interview him, they have turned their attention to all the other stories being written about Trine instead. The sex scandal was the perfect detonator. The character assassination destroying her reputation was only the beginning.

  This is the work of someone who is an expert in media manipulation, who knows which buttons to press to trigger an avalanche of negative publicity about a minister who has made too many enemies along the way.

  But there is one thing Henning can’t understand. Why doesn’t Trine speak up? And since she was studying her running profile on her laptop, she would appear to be aware of the evidence that would clear her name. So why doesn’t she defend herself? Why doesn’t she fight?

  There must be more to this than meets the eye, Henning thinks. And the only thing that makes any sense to him is that Trine is protecting someone or something. Herself, possibly, from anything else that the media might uncover. That could also explain the nature of the attack. Her enemy knows that she knows. He knows her secret, knows that she can’t defend herself because then the truth of what she was really doing that day will come to light.

  So the question is: who else knows? And what on earth was Trine doing in Denmark?

  WEDNESDAY

  Chapter 57

  Henning falls asleep around three o’clock in the morning, slumped over the kitchen table, but he wakes again three and a half hours later. The first thing he does is make himself a cup of coffee. Then he sits down with the printout of the map of Copenhagen.

  If the fat lines he saw on Trine’s laptop match the lines he has just drawn on the printout, it would mean that Trine’s run on the evening of October 9 started in Nørre Søgade, a long, wide street that runs parallel with Peblinge Lake.

  Henning opens his own laptop, retrieves the map, and zooms in on the area. More details appear. Bridges, parks, buildings. What was Trine doing there? he wonders again. Apart from going for an evening run?

  Kristiansand isn’t that far from Copenhagen. Flying from Kjevik Airport would probably take forty-five minutes, possibly less. She could have been at the party conference until the afternoon and then left.

  But surely someone would have seen her?

  Of course they would. Unless she took steps to avoid being seen. But why would she do that? Because no one must know. It’s the only explanation Henning can come up with.

  Right. What is so important about Nørre Søgade or its surroundings?

  Henning does a quick Internet search and finds only one hotel in the same street. Kong Arthur, four stars. She probably stayed there. He finds a nearby spa. Hardly the reason she would leave Norway. The Catholic Apostolic church. No. Belldent Dental Lab? Unlikely.

  Then he sees it.

  StorkKlinik.

  The fertility clinic. The place you go if you have tried and failed to get pregnant. Henning knows that Trine wanted children. He remembers seeing a feature about her in Se og Hør magazine in his mother’s flat once where Trine gave childlessness a face. He knows that more and more Norwegian women travel to Denmark for fertility treatment. It’s usually not something people broadcast to the world. Trine could have gone to Denmark in secret to remain anonymous. And the procedure could have taken place the day after the conference. Perhaps she went for a run when she arrived the night before to release some of her tension.

  Even so, something doesn’t ring true. How likely is it that someone had found out what Trine was doing in Denmark and then—almost a year later—thrown her to the wolves? Why the delay? Didn’t they know until now? And what’s so terrible about traveling to Denmark to try to get pregnant?

  Henning doesn’t think it adds up. Nor can her trip to Denmark have been particularly successful, because Trine is still childless. Though that in itself is not unusual. Fertility clinics don’t offer guaranteed success.

  Henning tries to work out who would stand to gain the most if Trine were to leave politics. It’s a long list. It could be a rival in the Labor Party, someone in her department, or someone who quite simply doesn’t like her. Someone is pulling the strings here, Henning thinks. Someone who has it in for his sister.

  But who?

  Chapter 58

  Once Bjarne had repeated to the team his conversation with Emilie Blomvik, his theory of just one killer was elevated from “possible” to “highly likely.” Ev
en Pia Nøkleby had to admit that the similarities could no longer be ignored and the investigation was reorganized on that basis. The job of identifying Erna Pedersen’s former pupils was prioritized and their names cross-referenced with anyone the police had been in contact with in the investigations of both murders. In addition, covert protection was arranged for Pedersen’s son and family, and the family of Emilie Blomvik—especially for two-and-a-half-year-old Sebastian.

  Bjarne Brogeland, however, has no intention of sharing this information with Emilie Blomvik when he goes down to meet her. It’s already ten o’clock in the morning and he gets her a visitor’s sticker, which she puts on her dark blue jacket before he escorts her through security and up to his office on the fifth floor.

  “How are you?” he asks when they have sat down.

  It takes a while before Blomvik answers.

  “I didn’t sleep much last night, to be honest.”

  She smiles feebly. Her cheeks are drained of color.

  “So perhaps you did some thinking instead?” Bjarne asks to encourage her.

  “I did little else,” she says and brushes aside a strand of hair that has fallen down in front of her eyes. “But my mind is completely blank. I haven’t got a clue who could have done this.”

  “There’s no ex-boyfriend who might have cause to be mad at Johanne because of something she said or did a long time ago?”

  Blomvik turns down the corners of her mouth.

  “Well, Johanne has had hundreds of boyfriends. I mean, not literally, but it’s possible that some of them were more interested in her than she was in them. But I find it hard to believe someone might be upset with her now. As I told you yesterday, it’s been a long time since Johanne saw anyone.”

  Bjarne nods and moves a little closer to the table. The ensuing silence prompts Blomvik to put her hand into her shoulder bag.

  “This is all I could find,” she says, placing a photograph in front of Bjarne. “It’s from sixth year at Jessheim School.”

 

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