by Anne Holt
He looked at Johanne, who nodded. When no one else could be contacted and Adam still had not returned her call, she had phoned the one person in the Oslo Police Force she knew best. Silje turned out to be on holiday in the Bahamas, with no knowledge of what had taken place in Oslo city centre, but she had obviously phoned round all the same.
‘Our officers are, as you understand...’
His fleshy fist briefly indicated the picture window.
‘...busy. Extremely busy.’
‘What’s happened down there?’ Johanne asked softly.
‘Don’t exactly know. Although it’s not normally part of my daily routine to turn out like this, all the same—’
Again he interrupted himself. His eyes flashed around the room and came to rest on the family group on the settee. He blinked, as if having problems with his eyesight.
‘A fall?’ he enquired.
The parents did not answer.
‘Yes,’ Johanne replied, with a nod. ‘As far as I can make out, he fell from a stepladder.’
‘What stepladder?’ Kalle Hovet asked, without taking his eyes off the boy.
‘It’s...it’s been moved.’
‘Moved?’
‘Yes,’ Johanne answered, barely audibly. ‘I’m afraid this scene is...not really... It’s obvious that it was an accident. Sander’s a boy who—’
The burly, middle-aged man raised his hand.
‘Listen here,’ he said, mostly for the benefit of the uniformed officer. ‘We’re not exactly experts, any of us. Not in this kind of thing. I’ll try to get a crime-scene technician to attend sometime this evening. Meanwhile, I want everybody out of here. There must be a basement room, or some such place, in this enormous house.’
He ran his hand over his scalp, where the hairline had receded into a shiny bald patch.
‘And the boy must be taken to hospital,’ he said, sounding despondent. ‘How we’re now going to—’
‘No!’ Ellen shrieked. ‘No! No!’
She got up from the settee, still with the bulky eight-year-old in her arms. She staggered as she walked past the small glass coffee table, across the pale carpet and over the parquet flooring, where she filled her lungs with a deep breath before screaming piercingly one more time: ‘No! Don’t touch my boy!’
Before anyone was sufficiently composed to offer her assistance, the boy slipped slowly from his mother’s grasp.
She could not take it any more.
‘No,’ Johanne whispered, but it was too late.
*
‘What a story,’ Kalle Hovet commented and inhaled deeply on his cigarette.
‘Down there or up here?’ Johanne asked, side-stepping to distance herself from the smouldering roll-up.
The Police Prosecutor held the smoke in his lungs for several seconds before blowing it out lingeringly through his nose.
‘Both of them, you might say. Although I’m somewhat under-informed about what’s actually taken place in the city centre. A real bomb, is what I was told before I came here. They’re talking about a terrorist attack. Outside the Verdens Gang newspaper offices, or something like that. Don’t care much for that rag anyway, but there are limits. I was bloody tempted to switch on the TV in there, but that wouldn’t have looked too good. Do you know anything more?’
It was now twenty minutes to seven. They were standing on a paved patio on the south-east side of the large villa, a few metres from the front door. The young police officer had finally made contact with the funeral directors, for lack of anyone better. When two solemn old men who looked like twins, dressed in dark suits, white shirts and narrow black ties, arrived to convey the disfigured corpse of eight-year-old Sander Mohr to the National Hospital, scenes had played out over which Johanne even now was struggling to draw a veil of forgetfulness. In the end, Ellen had gone with them in the car, crouched over her dead child, who had now lost two front teeth when she had dropped him on the floor. Joachim, whom Johanne had eventually learned was a younger colleague of Jon’s and obviously a friend of the family, had offered to accompany them to the hospital, in order to bring Ellen home again when that time came. If it proved at all possible to tear her apart from the boy, Johanne thought. Jon stared silently out of the kitchen window while the police officer posted himself on the opposite side of the table, waiting for reinforcements. Something that might take some time.
Johanne was aware of a faint, unpleasant sense of her feet not quite being planted firmly on the ground.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea. And now I can probably go.’
‘Do you know them?’ Kalle Hovet nodded at the house.
‘Yes. Ellen and I went to high school together.’
Johanne did not elaborate. Something was bothering her. She closed her eyes and could recall every detail in there with precision, right down to the pattern on the silver cutlery. The sheer curtains and their woven, almost invisible motif of oak leaves. The oil painting above the fireplace, with a tiny crack in the lower left corner, as if it had fallen on the floor at some time. The soap dispenser in the bathroom that had recently been filled to the brim; she had spilled some soap on the basin when she washed her hands and had been overwhelmed by nausea again, because of the heavy floral scent.
Even the hallway, that extensive space where shafts of light fell through rectangular windows facing north-east along the ceiling, and the kitchen, where she had mainly concentrated on contacting someone in the police force, she could re-create in detail in her memory. There was something she should have noticed. Something that had changed, been altered, though it had nothing to do with the stepladder or the torch.
‘Yes,’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘Ellen and I went to high school together. Jon as well, for that matter, but I’ve become better acquainted with him since then. But we’re not...’
She had to think about what they were and what they weren’t.
‘Not really friends. Not now, I mean. We’ve probably seen each other two or three times a year for quite a long time. Maybe not even that. Casual acquaintances, you’d probably call it. I was to come a bit earlier than the others to lend a hand, but also to... Well. Catch up, in a way.’
‘That’s how it is,’ Kalle Hovet said with a smile. ‘Life goes on, and it just snowballs – marriage and children and career, and hey presto!’
He snapped the fingers of his free hand and took another deep draw on his cigarette.
‘Then you’ve hardly any friends left. If you don’t keep an eye on things.’
If you don’t keep an eye on things, thought Johanne.
‘That’s what they were saying the whole time,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ Kalle Hovet asked.
‘They were blaming each other for not keeping an eye on Sander.’
He tossed the cigarette butt on the ground and trampled it emphatically into the gravel between the paving stones.
‘That’s how it goes,’ he answered. ‘When senseless things happen, we blame each other. It gets too hard to take the responsibility alone, I expect. Even harder to appreciate that things just happen, sometimes. That life doesn’t come with any guarantees. Bloody hell!’
The last comment was spoken in a whisper. He stood up straight and stared out across the city.
‘I just can’t imagine what it must be like. To lose your child.’
Suddenly he turned on his heel and caught her gaze. His eyes were yellowish-brown with heavy, dark eyebrows that met above the bridge of his nose.
‘Do you have children?’
‘Yes. Two daughters. A seventeen-year-old and one aged seven and a half. Kristiane and Ragnhild, they’re called.’
A sudden gnawing feeling inside made her gasp for breath.
‘They’re on holiday with their father. The father of the eldest, that is. The father of the younger one’s a different... They get on best when they’re together, the children. Kristiane’s not quite like... like other children, and my ex-husband prefers it if they both—’<
br />
She tucked her hair behind her ears in a nervous gesture. Amazingly enough, she had started to talk to this man about things that had nothing to do with him. There was something about him. Something unusually friendly, tired and maybe even a little worn out. He reminded her of a Danish actor whose name she couldn’t remember.
She wanted to go home. Johanne wanted to go home to Hauges vei, she wanted to phone the children and, besides, she wanted to find out what had become of Adam. He had said he would spend his night off, which was what he called it, irritatingly enough, putting up some new bookshelves in Kristiane’s room and watching a DVD that didn’t remotely interest Johanne.
Besides, there was that explosion.
Marianne had probably been exaggerating enormously, as she always did, but the column of smoke down there was still hovering like an amorphous tube, at a slight angle above the city. An accident, possibly.
Gas. Something like that. It couldn’t be a terrorist attack, as the Police Prosecutor had suggested. Not here. Not in Norway. An accident. There might be extra bulletins on TV all the same, since there was so little news during the summer holidays.
‘You know how it is,’ she said, adjusting her shoulder bag as a sign she wanted to leave.
‘Don’t I know!’ the man exclaimed, smiling. ‘My wife and I have seven children in total. Only one of them together. It’s like a madhouse on the weekends when they’re all together. Not to mention the holidays. By the way, I wonder if it’s going to rain for the whole of this damned summer?’
The man cocked his head and glanced up at the sky. Then he looked at her again with a quizzical expression, as if he really wanted a response to his observations about the weather.
It struck Johanne that this entire situation was inappropriate. Here they were, making small talk as if a party was actually in progress inside. As if the dinner would be ready any minute, and she had simply joined him outside in the garden out of politeness, to give him the opportunity of a semi-forbidden smoke.
‘Relax,’ Kalle Hovet said, unruffled.
His eyes were actually more yellow than brown, she thought.
‘We’re both upset. This is just a way of—’
He flung out his arms expressively, before running both hands over his head.
‘Fucking awful,’ he murmured. ‘In there, that was totally and completely fucking awful. You think you’ve got everything dangerous under control. You install child safety-locks and gates, equip them with helmets and car security seats, and all possible things. Then you turn your back for a couple of minutes and... A stepladder. A bloody stupid stepladder. By the way, are there any other relatives we ought to contact? Someone who could help Ellen and Jon? Parents – that is to say, the child’s grandparents?’
‘His father’s father is dead,’ Johanne said, giving the matter some thought. ‘His father’s mother is called Helga Mohr and, as far as I know, she was close to the boy. As far as Ellen’s parents are concerned...’
Johanne remembered them well. In their teenage years, Agnes and Torbjørn Krogh had been the parents everyone in Ellen’s circle of friends envied. Their door was always open, and they were cheerful, welcoming and fairly youthful themselves, without seeming pathetic. Ellen was an adored only child, and the relationship appeared to be mutual. But something had happened. Something that Johanne had never quite grasped. Three years ago, when Agnes and Torbjørn had not turned up at the traditional summer barbecue in Glads vei, Johanne had asked Ellen whether they were away on holiday. Ellen had not given a direct answer, and had simply mumbled something about them no longer being welcome. Later Johanne had gained the feeling that it all had something to do with Sander’s upbringing. Ellen would not talk about it, and Johanne did not feel close enough to her to delve deeper into something that was really none of her business.
‘I think his mother’s parents are out of the picture.’
Hovet’s mobile phone vibrated almost soundlessly in the inside pocket of his light summer jacket.
‘That’s the tenth time in the past half-hour,’ he said resignedly. ‘At least. With seven children, there can be a lot of bloody hassle. I felt I couldn’t really answer while the boy was lying there and his mother was so—’
Fumbling in his pocket, he extracted a Nokia and opened a text message. Johanne turned to face the wide set of eight steps that led up to Glads vei.
‘What the hell,’ she heard him mutter as she started to leave. ‘What in—’
When she turned to him again, he had grown visibly paler. The hand that held the mobile phone was shaking, and he was obviously reading the message several times over. Or maybe there were several messages. When he finally met her eye, his mouth was open and his expression disbelieving, as if he could not take in what his brain was struggling to process. It reminded Johanne of a roe deer she had once knocked down in the dark: the terrified, confused eyes she glimpsed as they reflected the headlights, before the car struck the animal and it died.
‘What is it?’ she said tentatively, stepping towards him.
Kalle Hovet did not answer. Instead, he took off at full pelt. His shoulder hit her and almost knocked her off-balance as he passed, taking the steps three at a time.
Without uttering a word.
Johanne heard an engine start and tyres screech on the asphalt as the vehicle accelerated down the street and disappeared into the distance.
Perhaps this explosion was worse than she had supposed.
She tried in vain to revive her broken mobile phone. She wanted to check on the Internet what this was in fact all about. The display lit up behind the broken glass, but there were no icons. With a sigh, she stuffed the phone back in her bag and glanced at the kitchen window.
Jon was staring out at her. His face appeared flat and shapeless through the glass, as if someone had tried to erase it, without quite succeeding. Only the thick streak of dried blood between his nose and top lip was clear and distinct. Behind him she could discern the tall, gangly policeman, motionless as he waited for someone it seemed would never come.
She turned abruptly and headed for the paved steps, edged on both sides with low rhododendron bushes that lacked blooms. The steps were wide and deep, and on the top step she spotted a hard plastic fire engine, about thirty centimetres in length. Johanne stopped with one foot on each step.
It was Sulamit.
She picked it up.
Of course it wasn’t Sulamit. The fire engine that Kristiane had owned throughout her childhood and, oddly enough, had referred to and addressed as if it were a deeply loved cat, had died a long time ago. The ladder and wheels had gone first, and after that all the other loose parts, before the paint itself had faded and finally disappeared. When all that was left of the toy engine was a grey scrap of metal, even Kristiane had understood that there was no life left in her sort-of pet cat. Now it was buried in the tulip bed facing Hauges vei, beneath a small wooden cross with ‘RIP Sulamit’ in pink letters that were repainted each spring.
This toy was exactly the same as Kristiane’s one-time dearest possession.
The same eyes were painted on the front headlights; the same silver ladder and the oversized shiny black wheels. Compartments could be opened on either side, but the hoses and the smoke-diver apparatus were things that Johanne had forgotten.
‘Sander,’ she whispered to the fire engine as her eyes filled with tears. Little, big, strange Sander.
She carefully replaced the toy engine on the step, tucked in at one side, half-hidden beneath the thick, dark-green rhododendron leaves. The paint was luxuriant and shiny, and the merry eyes looked diagonally up at her, a toy that had outlived its owner.
She rushed away.
She ran home in her low-heeled shoes, with her umbrella under one arm and a dainty evening bag over her other shoulder. Only when she was worn out, with one shoe threatening to form a blister on her heel, did she slow down and notice how still everything was. No people out of doors. No smell of charred meat from patios
and terraces where barbecue grills sheltered under porch roofs from the rain – the endless rain that would soon stop spoiling the summer of 2011. The children she had seen on bicycles and football pitches on her way to Ellen’s house had vanished. Through the odd window in the apartment blocks in Betzy Kjelsbergs vei, Johanne could see television sets flickering soundlessly in the damp evening light.
Only the dull flapping of a distant helicopter, out of her range of sight, broke the strange silence over Oslo. Maybe there were two of them. Or three.
She broke into a run again.
*
It would soon be four o’clock on 23 July. The day was just dawning outside the windows, with barely half an hour until the sun would rise from behind the cloud cover that was still suspended above the city.
‘Mum,’ Johanne whispered, nudging her mother, who was snoring softly beneath a blue woollen blanket at the other end of the settee. ‘You have to wake up. There’s a press conference.’
Jack, the family’s golden-grey mongrel, got up from the floor and circled three times on arthritic legs before flopping down again with a sigh.
‘Why are you whispering?’ her mother murmured, struggling stiffly into a sitting position. ‘I wasn’t asleep. Just closed my eyes. What did you say?’
Johanne did not reply. Instead, grabbing the remote control, she increased the volume on the TV set and tucked her legs beneath her on the settee. Her mother laid a dry, warm hand on hers.
‘It was so good of you to phone me,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m really pleased you did, sweetheart. After all these dreadful things, I tried to call you at least ten times. I wasn’t to know that your phone was broken, of course. People shouldn’t be alone at times like these. And certainly not when all this about little Simen came on top of all the rest.’
‘Sander. Not Simen.’ Johanne tried to smile.
When she had arrived home the previous evening it had taken a few minutes in front of the television for it to begin to dawn on her what had happened in the government quarter of the city centre, and later on the island of Utøya. She had made a number of fairly desperate fresh attempts to get hold of Adam. He had left an almost illegible note on the dining table, saying that he had to go to work in connection with a terrorist attack and had no idea when he would be back. She could not really understand how a Detective Inspector in the Norwegian Criminal Investigation Service, the NCIS, who mostly sat in an office or an interview room, could be of any use, given the way the catastrophic afternoon and evening had unfolded. He often complained about it himself, especially after a couple of glasses of wine: Adam Stubo was becoming a pen-pusher. At one time he had been considered the best police interviewer in the country. After once again allowing himself to be persuaded to accept a leadership post, a great deal of his job satisfaction had been swallowed up by paperwork, trade-union demands and budgets, and he frequently moaned about it. Johanne had tried to contact him on both his mobile phone and his office number. She had even called five of his colleagues, without reaching any of them.