by Anne Holt
‘We’re dealing with a brutal murder here! We’re much safer if we split up! I have the right to choose who I —’
Geir had climbed up onto the opposite end of the table. He ran towards her, bent his head just a hair’s breadth from the lamps suspended from the ceiling, and without a second’s hesitation he flung his arms around the skinny woman and locked her down. Her little rucksack was crushed between his stomach and her back, but Geir didn’t even seem to notice.
‘Calm down. And shut your mouth!’
In order to stress the seriousness of his words, he gave her an extra squeeze and lifted her bodily off the table.
‘Do you understand?’ he yelled, before whispering something in her ear. I have no idea what he said, but it worked.
Kari Thue collapsed like a rag doll in his arms. Carefully he made sure her feet were touching the surface of the table before he slowly let go. She didn’t lash out. She didn’t scream. And neither did anyone else. Even Mikkel’s gang moved back imperceptibly, as if they had realized with sudden embarrassment that they could have hurt someone.
‘Get down,’ I said loudly. ‘Get down from the table and we will decide what we are going to do.’
Suddenly I was looking into fifty faces, all of whom seemed more surprised that I had said something than if I had got to my feet and walked. To tell the truth, I was equally surprised myself.
‘First of all, Berit Tverre is the person in charge here,’ I said. ‘And secondly, there is no reason whatsoever to split into two groups.’
Since I had actually opened my mouth, I should have said something less obvious. My voice sounded strange. It was a long time since I had had any reason to speak loudly. On the other hand, what was actually being said didn’t seem to be the most important thing; it was the way it was said that mattered. Kari Thue allowed herself to be helped down from the table. Geir was already down. People slowly started moving closer to me. I held up my hands and they stopped like obedient dogs. Only Kari Thue, Geir and Berit pushed through the wall of people who were now standing four metres away from me. The South African was the only one who no longer wanted to be involved. He marched angrily towards the stairs and disappeared. I also noticed the Kurd on the fringe of the group, a little distance away from the rest. He was the only one who had already stopped looking at me. Instead he was examining a stuffed raven in a glass case on the reception desk. He was staring into the shiny eyes, apparently uninterested in anything apart from the black bird. The woman in the headscarf, whom I had assumed to be his wife, was standing next to him. Until now she had seemed unusually reserved, a shy creature who shunned any attempt at contact from other people. Now she was looking straight at me. Her eyes were large and green with brown flecks. It struck me that I hadn’t really looked at her before. The headscarf drew attention away from everything else. Which was no doubt the intention. Her face was broad without appearing masculine, extremely and surprisingly open, with symmetrical features and an expression around her mouth that I could not interpret.
‘Carry on,’ whispered Geir; I hadn’t even noticed that he had come right up to me.
‘Who the hell gave you the right to decide?’
Mikkel got there before me. Even when he smiled he looked discontented. He was standing next to Kari Thue with his arms folded. His head was tipped back in order to underline my status as a cripple.
‘I’m not making any decisions,’ I said. ‘Berit Tverre is the person who will make decisions.’
‘And who decided that?’
I have to admit that I do have a number of prejudices.
In the past I thought it was worth trying to do something about them. In recent years I’ve stopped bothering. I’ve given in, so to speak. Since I spend most of my time at home, I don’t really see the point in wasting my energy on trying to be a better person. It’s probably too late, anyway. I’m rapidly approaching fifty. In three years I will pass the meridian, and I prefer to expend my energy on other things, rather than dealing with rich daddy’s boys from Bærum who suffer from an excess of self-confidence. He must have been fifteen years younger than Kari Thue, yet he was allowing himself to be devoured by her eyes, while she was clearly having to restrain herself from touching him.
‘I have decided,’ I said. ‘And so has everybody else whose intelligence is more or less intact. We are Berit Tverre’s guests. Start acting that way.’
‘We live in a democracy,’ Kari Thue said in her loud, grating voice. ‘A democracy that does not cease to exist simply because we are cut off. If the majority of people here agree with me that it would be safer to —’
‘You’re never going to find that out,’ said Berit, walking into the middle of the floor. ‘Because there isn’t going to be a vote. Hanne Wilhelmsen is absolutely right. You are my guests. I make the decisions. And right now my decision is —’
The crash that interrupted her came from a different world.
As time went by we had all more or less grown accustomed to the roar of the storm outside, the thuds and blows against the walls and the intense whining of the wind as it swept around the hotel and its outbuildings. It was as if the howl of the storm had become a carpet of sound that we recognized, just like the lapping of waves on the coast or the constant rush of the waterfall at some old mill.
This was something completely different.
At first I thought it was a massive explosion. My ears were singing and the walls shook. Powerful vibrations in the floor made my wheelchair move. The sound of clinking glass came from the Millibar. The setter, which was the only dog I could see at the time, leapt up with a high-pitched howl before flattening itself against the rough floorboards. It was as if it thought the ceiling was about to come down. It wasn’t the only one. People sought shelter underneath the table. A few ran towards the side wing, which might have been a wise move; the deafening crash came from the opposite side of the lobby. Geir and Berit were running against the tide of people, and had already reached the stairs. I lost sight of them as Mikkel and his gang rushed past me and down to St Paal’s Bar. Only Kari Thue remained completely motionless. She was sobbing, with her face in her hands. Her shoulders were narrow and so bony that they almost sliced through the thin fabric of her blouse. She was expecting to die, and in a different situation I might have felt sorry for her.
Right now I had neither the time nor the opportunity to do so.
The terrible noise was still going on. The first crash was followed by a piercing, high-pitched noise interspersed with a series of short bangs and thuds that were much worse than anything the storm had come up with in almost twenty-four hours. Even the sound of screaming people searching for refuge wherever they could find it was drowned out by the noise that couldn’t possibly be an explosion.
Explosions are brief. They pass.
This went on and on.
And the temperature was dropping.
I didn’t notice it at first. Only when I had gained some kind of overview and noticed who was running where, and where people were trying to hide, did I realize how cold it had become.
It was getting even colder, and it was happening fast.
The sound of whatever it was that couldn’t be an explosion was dying away. Instead it was as if the howling of the storm had moved indoors. A biting wind swept across the floor, picked up a chocolate bar wrapper and carried it off towards the kitchen in a wild dance.
Suddenly Adrian was standing in front of me. He was holding Veronica by the hand. They looked like a big sister dragging her little brother along. Her face was pale and expressionless, but she slowly let go of his hand and put her arm around the weeping boy’s shoulders. He sobbed:
‘Are we going to die, Hanne?’
I wished I could give him an answer. I had no idea what had happened, or what lay before us. Despite the noise I could hear my own heart pounding beneath my breastbone. I felt sick with fear. But something was happening. I no longer felt incapable of doing anything. The adrenalin, which continued
to course through my body with every bang and gust of wind, had sharpened my senses instead of leaving them dulled. I was noticing everything. I had noticed everything. Now, several months later, when I close my eyes to recapture the events of those seconds and minutes at Finse 1222, it’s like watching a film in slow motion. I can recall every detail. But at that precise moment, there and then, as my teeth began to chatter with shock and cold, there was actually only one detail that was worth noting.
When the racket started and total chaos ensued, the Kurd opened his grey-brown jacket and reached for a gun he was carrying in a shoulder holster. With lightning speed he dropped down behind the pillar by the reception desk in the firing position – one knee on the floor, the other foot in front. Shocking in itself. However, the biggest surprise, and something that I couldn’t understand at all, possibly as a result of my own prejudices, was that the Kurdish woman did the same thing. In contrast to the man she took her gun out of its holster and aimed it at an imaginary foe by the stairs. Her loose, shapeless dress was obviously specially made, and did not hinder her from drawing her gun or moving at lightning speed. Only when the cold from the stairs reached her and it was clear that nothing else appeared to be threatening us did she slip the revolver back in its holster.
During the minutes that followed I was able to establish that no one apart from me had noticed this peculiar behaviour. At first this struck me as rather strange. However, on closer consideration it seemed logical; everybody had either been on the move, or had sought protection in a reflex action with their faces covered. The two Kurds hadn’t seen me, and quickly reverted to their roles as the over-protective immigrant and his terrified, weeping wife.
I decided to leave it at that for the time being.
Perhaps they weren’t Kurds at all.
Perhaps they weren’t even married.
i
For some reason I was thinking of Cato Hammer.
The murder of the controversial priest was actually the least of our problems. I was sitting in my chair by the kitchen door, where I had more or less helplessly witnessed rather too much in the course of just about half an hour. Kari Thue’s attempt at mutiny had been quite threatening. Nor was it easy to digest the idea that two apparently typical representatives of our new underclass had behaved like highly trained agents. However, the violent event that had taken place somewhere near the western wall was the worst thing. As I tried to suppress my fear by sorting out all the thoughts I had had about the murder of Cato Hammer during the past few hours, I had serious doubts that the western wall was still standing. The temperature in the hotel was dropping at an alarming rate. During the past twenty-four hours we had lived in an atmosphere of coffee, food, sweat, and dog. Now all the smells were gone. Only a dry, menacing cold seared my nostrils. Outside it was still almost minus thirty, a fact I couldn’t quite manage to assimilate. I had put on my padded jacket and wrapped a blanket around my crippled legs. That was when I discovered that the wound in my thigh had opened up. A red flower was growing on the chalk-white bandage, and had already spread to the ragged edges where my trouser leg had been cut open. I looked around for another blanket.
And I was still thinking about Cato Hammer.
The remarkable thing was that so many people had known him. I don’t mean they’d heard of him, most of us had. As I struggled with my anxiety over what could have caused the temperature to drop so sharply, it struck me that almost everyone I had encountered after the accident had willingly admitted to some kind of link to Hammer. He had been Magnus’s patient. Geir knew him from the board at Brann football club. I’m absolutely certain Berit Tverre blushed when she mentioned the priest’s earlier visits to the mountains. There was nothing odd about the fact that Roar Hanson knew Hammer, of course; they had known each other at college, and worked together.
Adrian had just been furious.
Furious and foul-mouthed. He had behaved quite differently towards Cato Hammer than to anyone else from the train.
‘The carriage!’
Geir was standing in front of me. I recognized him only when I saw the yellow ski goggles. They covered virtually his entire face before he pulled them off and leaned on my chair, panting.
‘The carriage has fallen down!’
The carriage.
I had of course noticed it when we were in the station, unaware that just a few minutes later we would be sitting in a derailed wreck. The hotel and the wing containing the apartments, both of which were so close to the railway that they looked like part of the station complex, were joined together by an old railway carriage. It was suspended some three or four metres above the ground, and made it possible to move between the buildings without going outside. It looked like a big toy train, a rusty red reminder that Finse was the country’s only genuine station community; you could get here only by train. The carriage didn’t even fight with the architecture. The whole complex was just one big piece of patchwork in any case, and the suspended carriage was an amusing salute from the residents of Finse to Norwegian State Railways. From all the conversations I had listened to over the past twenty-four hours, I had gathered that the carriage was filling up with snow. The fixings were old, and gaps had appeared by the wall of the wing. Not large gaps, but more than enough to make some people anxious early this morning. Quite rightly, as it turned out.
‘There are huge amounts of snow packed tight between the buildings,’ said Geir, gasping for breath. ‘So the carriage didn’t fall all that far. It’s lying at an angle on the snow. The other end is still attached to the wall, and it looks as if the only damage is that the door leading into the carriage is still on the wall. On our side a whole chunk of the wall has been torn away, taking the door with it. Thank goodness nobody was inside the carriage when it fell.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We certainly have been incredibly lucky on this trip.’
He looked at me.
‘Everything all right with you?’
I nodded and said: ‘I just need Dr Streng to have a look at my leg. It’s started bleeding again. I’m sure it’s nothing serious. How are you?’
He was a little surprised; he frowned and straightened his back. He took his time inserting a sizeable plug of snuff, and smiled.
‘This stuff is good for you!’
‘What are you going to do about the hole?’ I asked.
‘Johan’s fetching the Poles. We’ve got enough material in the cellar. I should think we’ll get —’
‘Fetching the Poles? The joiners? In this weather? From up in ...’
Geir started tucking the blanket more tightly around me. His breath turned into a light mist, hitting my face in warm puffs and making me feel even colder. As far as I knew, the four joiners were in one of the buildings several hundred metres away.
‘Johan can drive a snowmobile at the South Pole in June,’ said Geir with a smile. ‘It’s winter down there when it’s —’
‘I know,’ I interrupted him. ‘When it’s summer here. But I had the distinct impression that nobody could get away from here. That nobody could be outside at all.’
‘Well, Johan can. He wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been essential. But he can. When he has to.’
I pushed him away when he started lifting my feet so that he could tuck the blanket around them.
‘Tell me about this Johan.’
‘He was born up here. One of the few. According to the local mythology he was born outdoors in a winter storm and grew up in a snow cave at Klemsbu, but of course that’s just nonsense. His father was the stationmaster, and they lived very well. But it’s true that he could ride before he was five years old. His older brother fixed up a snowmobile for him so that it was physically possible for such a little scrap to reach the accelerator and the brakes on the handlebars. Nowadays Johan lives at Ustaoset and owns a wilderness centre. He attracts filthy rich Americans and scares them to death out in the wilds. There’s money in that kind of thing. But he’s often here. Fortunately he was here when t
he crash happened. There are some fairly rigid restrictions when it comes to driving snowmobiles, so he’s a member of the Red Cross, which allows him to drive often enough. Anyway, you’ve met him. Don’t you remember? He was the one who brought you here.’
‘But ... in this weather!’
‘As I said: Johan is probably the only person in Norway, in the whole world for all I know, who can cope with any kind of weather. If the snowmobile can do it, then Johan can do it. He’s as bowlegged as a cowboy. It’s just that his horse is called Yamaha.’
There was snow in the air.
The door with slender panels of glass that had separated the stairs from the grotesque hole in the wall had been torn open and smashed by the wind.
Although I was still sitting over by the kitchen door, separated from the hole in the wall by the entire lobby, a flight of stairs and half a floor, I could clearly feel and see the snowflakes dancing in the moving air. So far they were melting as soon as they hit the floor.
‘Perhaps he ought to get a move on,’ I said, thinking about Cato Hammer once again. ‘I have a feeling time is short.’
Geir clapped his gloved hands together. Then he leaned towards me once again with one hand on each wheel. Fortunately, the brakes were on.
‘It might not look like it, but we have actually got this under control. I can promise you one thing: as long as people stay indoors’ – the feeling of being indoors wasn’t actually all that palpable at the moment – ‘then nobody will freeze to death at Finse 1222. You have my word on that.’
I almost dared to believe the man.
ii
And I had good reason to do so, as it turned out.
It was four thirty. It was still unpleasantly cold, but at least it had stopped snowing in the lobby. As I quickly calculated that we would soon be on our second day at Finse, I almost couldn’t believe it. For many years I have lived according to a slow routine that suits me. Nothing happens and nothing is going to happen. Everything is predictable and can take its own time. I have more than enough time, and I am happy to fritter it away. However, the past twenty-five hours had been so eventful that for long periods of time I had forgotten how tired I was.