by Anne Holt
Behind her she heard the gurgle of Nefis’s deep, low laughter.
“Billy T. has been here,” Hanne whispered.
Nefis stopped breathing.
“That’s fantastic,” she said eventually, almost inaudible.
“It was absolutely fine,” Hanne said. She put a bit more intensity into her voice: “I’m just going to give him some help. No more than that. We can’t be friends again.”
Clutching Nefis’s hand, she placed it on her stomach, before twining their fingers.
And fell asleep.
CHAPTER SIX
It was early on Monday morning, April 14, and Oslo was still sleeping off the weekend. Henrik Holme had woken at 3:00 a.m., without knowing why. He thought he had dreamed something. Wide awake, he had tried for a while to hit on what it had been. That proved impossible, and after half an hour, he had decided to get up. This was advice his mother had given him: never lie sleepless in bed. Make use of each and every waking hour—it is a gift. Every single one.
His mother had countless pieces of advice stored up.
He was disobeying one of them right now.
The meteorologists’ predictions of spring weather had never come to pass. The temperature had been around freezing when he had checked the digital thermometer at the kitchen window around four o’clock. Nonetheless, he had gone without mittens or gloves and was now striding along beside the Akerselva River with his hands buried deep inside his pockets, regretting his decision.
He had not heard anything from Hanne since he had left her on Thursday night. He had sent her an email about his meeting with Abid Kahn and had checked his mailbox a number of times over the weekend—without finding anything, apart from a letter from Nigeria, loads of advertising circulars, and a reminder about an online meter reading from the power company.
He was reluctant to pester Hanne.
They had become friends, in a way, he felt, and he did not want to annoy her. Ida had said that her mommy was coming home on Friday evening, and they were probably busy with their own activities, the way families were. The way he and his mother had used to enjoy themselves a bit extra, when they were together at weekends and his father was away hunting as he often was, all year round. If he wasn’t tinkering with the car.
As for Henrik, he had not spoken to anyone all weekend.
A restless uncertainty had been bothering him.
He was bewildered by Karina Knoph’s disappearance. The idea of paying Gunnar Ranvik another visit was out of the question at the moment. In the first place, the man had obviously been unwilling to have anything more to do with Henrik. And second, he did not have a clue what he might ask him.
Abid Kahn had given him two pieces of information that were at least new, even though they did not bring him much further forward in the case: that Karina may possibly have flirted with drugs and that one of the two unknown Norwegian Pakistanis she hung about with that summer was probably called Mohammad. Or Muhammed. Henrik had no idea how many different spellings of the name existed, and looking for a Mohammad in Oslo was like looking for a woman in her fifties called Anne.
Not until Sunday evening had a thought struck him.
Instagram did not exist in 1996. Nor Snapchat. Cell phones were expensive and restricted to adults, and Henrik certainly did not believe they were even equipped with cameras at that time. In 1996 teenagers still used photograph albums, with pictures glued on askew and comments written in felt pen along the sides. He knew that, because he had been eleven years old then and had received a beautiful album from his grandmother at Christmas. He was pleased, he remembered. The problem had not emerged until January, once the family gatherings and Christmas party at his father’s workplace had been put behind him: Henrik had no friends whose pictures he could take.
Karina Knoph had not been friendless.
Restless and rootless, maybe, but she had had friends.
Since her mother’s full personal details were in the case folder, it had been easy to discover where she lived. He had been afraid that it might be outside the city, since her husband moved around a lot. Fortunately they seemed to be divorced. In any case, she lived in the exclusive suburb of Ullevål Hageby, while the football coach resided much farther north in Alta.
It was mothers who took care of their dead children’s possessions.
At least his mother would have done so, if he had died.
At first Henrik had decided to phone.
Make an appointment, as was usual when you wanted to make contact with a stranger. The problem was that he would then have to explain what he was calling about. Phoning on a Sunday evening and ripping open the wounds caused by Ingrid Knoph’s daughter’s disappearance without a trace, one autumn day eighteen years ago, nonetheless seemed overly brutal.
It would be better to meet in person.
Henrik Holme’s peculiar appearance had brought him a lot of pain throughout his life. However, in recent years he had discovered his great strength: he did not scare anyone. Wherever he turned up, no matter what time of day it was, everyone met him with absolutely no apprehension. Many showed curiosity, some reluctance. A few could be downright dismissive when he made contact, but no one at all was afraid.
Henrik was quite simply a person who aroused exceptionally little fear.
He had now been walking for two and a half hours.
He felt calm. Refreshed, paradoxically enough. It was almost half past six, and he crossed the little pedestrian bridge over the river some distance below Solligrenda, swiftly reckoning that it would take another twenty minutes to cross the Tåsen neighborhood and arrive at Ullevål Hageby.
He slackened his pace and tried to come up with a greeting for when he arrived.
Mouthing them in an undertone, he rejected them before they were fully articulated. Then began all over again, mulling each over and again becoming discouraged.
Only as he approached the house where Ingrid Knoph lived, according to the Yellow Pages directory, did he consider that he had hit on a suitable introduction.
The house was located on the outer fringes of the extensive suburb. He could now see that it was actually an apartment rather than the detached house that he, for some reason or other, had envisaged. The nearest entrance door in the distinctive brick building with a pointed roof and white-barred window frames was bright red.
There was only one name on the doorbell. His presumption of a divorce was probably correct.
He repeated his mumbled greeting twice before pressing his finger on the doorbell.
It took only a few seconds before a woman opened the door with a toothbrush in her hand.
“Hello. My name is Henrik Holme. Are you Ingrid Knoph?”
She seemed extremely astonished but nodded all the same. Only now did he notice that her mouth was full of toothpaste and spittle. Seven o’clock might be rather early to pay a visit.
“I’m a police officer who hasn’t given up the idea of finding out what happened to Karina eighteen years ago,” he said quickly by heart. “I’d appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.”
Her astonishment changed to something he interpreted as deep skepticism. She touched her mouth. Henrik hurriedly produced his ID card and held it out to her.
“One moment,” he thought she said, before vanishing out of sight along a narrow corridor.
She had at least not closed the door on him, and a few seconds later she had returned, without her toothbrush and with her mouth emptied.
“Hello,” Henrik repeated, extending his hand. “Henrik Holme, as you can see from my card.”
Only now did she take hold of it. She studied it for a long time, as if suspecting she might be the victim of a terrible joke.
“Karina,” she said softly. “Now I don’t understand anything.”
“Could I come in?”
She peered up at him, still with his ID in her hand.
“But what’s it about? I have to go to work and—”
“Of course I should hav
e phoned first,” Henrik said, hiding his Adam’s apple behind his scarf. “But I thought it would be better to meet you face-to-face. If you’re very busy, I could come back another time. This afternoon, perhaps?”
“You’re freezing,” she said.
“Yes, I am a bit. I’ve walked quite a distance.”
“Did you not come in a . . .”
She leaned forward and looked down at the street.
“I like to walk,” Henrik said with a smile.
“Come in,” she said, taking three hesitant steps back.
“Thanks.”
The corridor was both dark and narrow, but it smelled good. Cozy, like when his mother baked buns. Ingrid Knoph had presumably not been baking buns at the crack of dawn on a Monday morning, he thought, but maybe what he could smell was a pleasant, slightly motherly perfume. She looked like a mother. He flipped off his shoes.
She led the way into a living room far smaller than he had anticipated. The apartments and houses up here were some of the most expensive in Norway, he had read, and he had expected something more along the lines of Frogner. High ceilings. Double doors and maybe even a chandelier. This here was honestly not so very much larger than his own place. In a way, the apartment matched its owner: both were small and colorful.
The petite woman with thick gray hair pointed at a small sitting area by the window and invited him to sit down.
“I have some coffee left,” she said. “Would you like some?”
“Yes, please.”
“I beg your pardon—I should have taken your jacket.”
She stretched out an arm, and, pulling off his jacket, he handed it to her.
“Scarf?” she asked.
“I’ll keep it on,” Henrik said, pushing it well up around his neck.
While she was out in the kitchen, he surveyed the room. He felt at ease there. This was how he would have liked to have things in his own home, but he had never got the hang of interior decoration. There was perhaps too much clutter here, books and CDs and even a huge shelf laden with old-fashioned LPs, but it seemed as if it all combined to create a pleasant atmosphere. The sofa on which he was sitting was deep red with purple and blue and orange cushions. It was almost like sitting in a rainbow. He noticed that the coffee table was identical to the one his grandmother had owned: teak, with a shelf underneath for newspapers and magazines. These tables were from the sixties, he knew, but while his grandmother’s had been shabby and scratched, this one was beautifully restored. The wood was polished and shiny, and there was a small centerpiece with flowers on top.
Finally he spotted the picture of Karina.
Not particularly large, it was approximately the same size as a notebook page. The frame was white, and it sat beside a squat candle on a small table by the door. Karina’s hair was not blue in this photograph. It was reddish-blond, just as he had guessed when he had noticed those pale eyes of hers. She was younger in this picture than in the one kept in police archives. Fifteen, he surmised. It was an enlargement of a family snapshot, not one taken by a professional photographer. He did not imagine Karina as a girl who would normally have gone to a photographer’s, the way he had been commandeered every other year since the time he had been a baby.
She was smiling and looking directly at the photographer. Her eyelashes were almost white, and a sprinkling of freckles formed a broad bridge across her nose. This was an entirely different Karina—the girl in this photo looked happy, confident, and guileless.
“It was taken the day before her confirmation,” Ingrid Knoph said when she returned with a cup in each hand and noticed what he was looking at. “I’ve sent a message to my work to say that I’ve been delayed.”
She put one of the cups down in front of him.
“Thanks,” Henrik said, curling his ice-cold hands around it.
A radio could be heard from the kitchen. He recognized the morning news on the P2 station. This woman was yet another P2 listener. As for himself, he liked P4, with pop music from the charts and cheerful presenters, but during this past week, he had tuned into the culture channel after noticing that was what Hanne Wilhelmsen listened to.
“What do you want from me?” Ingrid Knoph said quietly, looking straight at him.
“I’d like to ask if you still have any of Karina’s photo albums.”
Now she seemed even more confused than when she had opened the door and first set eyes on him.
“Photo albums?”
Something glimmered in her eyes. He could not figure out what it was.
“Photo albums,” she repeated, taking a deep breath. “For three months you tramped around in our lives, without ever coming a single step closer to what happened to Karina. For the following three years, I spent my life complaining, challenging, complaining, and crying to get you police to do more about the case. In the fifteen years that have passed since then, I’ve tried to create some kind of life for myself, where my daughter no longer exists. And then you turn up. A policeman. Asking whether Karina had a photo album.”
She stared furiously at her coffee cup, as if seriously considering smashing it. All of a sudden, she covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
Henrik concentrated on keeping control of his hands.
He ought to have spoken to Hanne first.
He should never have turned up unannounced at this poor woman’s house.
“I’m sorry,” he blurted out as he jumped up from the sofa.
It was not possible to desist—he touched the sides of his nose three times, three times in succession. Fortunately she did not see him.
Ingrid Knoph was weeping in so heartbroken a fashion that it brought tears to Henrik’s eyes. He wanted to leave. He wanted to rush for the door, and that would be the very last time he would do anything whatsoever without first asking Hanne.
“Photo album,” Karina’s mom said, giving a half-smothered sniff behind her hands. “You come here and ask about a fucking photo album.”
“I’m going now,” Henrik said in a loud voice. “I’m really sorry.”
“Going?”
Ingrid Knoph snatched her hands away from her face and stared at him in accusation.
Almost hatred, he felt, and tapped his forehead quite hard.
“If you think for a minute,” she snarled, “that you can come here like this and then just go your own way, then you’ll have to think again. Sit down!”
Henrik sat down on the sofa, with his hands tucked under his thighs.
Ingrid Knoph inhaled, deeply and repeatedly. Henrik did not say a word. Fixing his eyes on an abstract painting beside the kitchen door, he decided to keep them there.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said.
Her tears were still flowing, but at least she was not bawling.
Henrik did not dare even to nod his head.
“When you read about missing persons cases,” Ingrid Knoph continued, “they say it’s always not knowing that’s the worst thing. That—despite everything—it’s better to know. That’s how I felt too, for a long time. I’d have preferred to know that Karina was dead rather than go around like a living corpse myself. A zombie. That’s what you become. That’s how it feels, you see. Or, of course, you don’t see that.”
She let her words hang in the air.
“No,” Henrik piped up.
“But as the years went by, that changed. I had to believe that she was alive. Deep down inside I have known, from the very first night she wasn’t here, that she is dead. But I haven’t been able to live with that. After a few years and a divorce, I realized that the only thing that could make it worthwhile for me to make a fresh start in life was the hope that she had only . . .”
Her frail figure collapsed in on itself.
It was as if she had been punctured. Her back became stooped like an old woman, and her hands lay limp on her lap.
“It’s been my hope that she would come home one day. That one fine day she would ring the doorbell and just be standi
ng there.”
It began to dawn on Henrik why she had opened the door to him after only a few seconds, with her mouth full of white slime and her toothbrush in her hand. His fierce blushing had long ago embarked on its climb from his chest upward, and he yanked off his scarf to catch his breath.
From the kitchen he could hear news of another opinion poll. More than 60 percent of the population now thought there should no longer be any possibility of reuniting families. There had also been an attempt to set the mosque in Furuset on fire during the night. In the “political sphere,” the Prime Minister would answer for the extraordinary security measures.
“I can’t stop hoping,” Ingrid Knoph said, drying her tears. “I can’t allow myself to do that. The thought that Karina might turn up, a grown woman, maybe with a family and a plausible story about what actually happened: that’s what I fall asleep with at night. What I wake up to in the mornings. It’s the thought that she’s alive somewhere that gives me strength to go on living, only just, myself.”
“Then I won’t disturb you.”
“You have already disturbed me. More than anyone should be permitted to disturb any human being.”
Henrik tried to think about Christmas Eve.
It was the best day of the year. Families and presents and good food. Peace and security and only people he already knew.
Swallowing, he cleared his throat and tried to keep his breathing in check.
“But the damage is already done,” Ingrid Knoph said. “And the answer to your question is, as I said, yes. Karina had photo albums. Several, but only one from the last two years she . . . before she disappeared.”
She stood up abruptly and left the living room.
Henrik tried to look at the picture of Karina on the small table, but could not bear to. At breakneck speed, he availed himself of the opportunity to get rid of a whole torrent of tics.
“Here,” Ingrid Knoph said, having returned remarkably quickly. “You can take it with you. I’d like to have it back again, but quite honestly I don’t want to see anything more of you right now.”