by Anne Holt
Now everything had gone quiet.
Admittedly some flowers had arrived, enormous bouquets accompanied by stilted condolences, but no one had phoned since Saturday. No one visited. Not even Johanne had been in touch since Saturday evening.
If only they could get the funeral over and done with. People would come. Of course they would show up, friends and acquaintances down through the years; they would break off their holidays and travel long distances to take their leave of the beloved, longed-for boy who had only reached the age of eight. Friends would congregate to be present at Sander’s final journey, and to let Ellen and Jon embark on their arduous voyage back to life.
It struck her that she should draft a death notice. She had to do something to avoid desolation depleting her entirely. The clothes she had worn yesterday lay in a heap inside the door, and she pulled them on as quickly as she could with her damaged hand. Her own laptop had been ruined after Sander had let it fall into the swimming pool when they were in Tuscany, but Jon had a MacBook. He did not know that she sometimes borrowed it, but he was not at home in the mornings and she had quite simply not been able to pull herself together sufficiently to be able to buy herself a new computer.
Ellen wanted to prepare a death notice and contact the dark-suited men who had discreetly left a brochure on the chest of drawers in the hallway, when they came to collect Sander. She would compose a beautiful death notice, with a dove at the top, or an angel. If that was possible. An angel or a dove of peace, it did not matter, the most important thing was for the death notice to be printed and the funeral gone through with. Writing the message about Sander’s death was something tangible and real, a lifebuoy that, for a few moments at least, made her feel incredibly relieved.
In the hallway it crossed her mind that they needed a date in order to print the notice. A date for the funeral, or more correctly the cremation. Ellen had never been able to understand why anyone would want to lie under six feet of earth, with body intact, eventually defenceless against the depredations of worms and insects. Sander would be cremated, in a white coffin covered with flowers that Ellen would arrange personally.
The funeral directors would probably be able to help. They could contact the police with the authority she lacked. They could plead her case, plead Sander’s case: that poor body of his should not have to lie in a refrigerator at the National Hospital for any longer than absolutely necessary.
All the same, she could draft a rough copy of the death notice, even without the date. She would write it and email it to the two solemn men. In her memory she could not tell one from the other.
Jon did not like her going into his office. Sander had been totally forbidden to go there, and even the Polish home help seemed uneasy every Friday when she whizzed round the floor in there with the vacuum cleaner. The office was Jon’s domain, his sanctuary inside the house, and Ellen privately suspected him of sometimes locking himself in there to watch TV in peace and quiet, play chess on the computer or quite simply take a nap on the soft leather settee that extended along the gable wall.
In any case, the door was not locked.
She opened it gingerly, as if she could not be entirely certain there was no one there. A male odour hung in the air in here, aftershave and an occasional cigar. The iMac sat on the massive desk, surrounded by four bundles of folders and ring-binders. The settee was piled high with even more documents, some loose and others in binders. A picture of Ellen was displayed on the windowsill: Ellen when she was still named Krogh, from the time when she was still a dentist, weighed twelve kilos more than she did now and laughed all the time. The shelves beside the door were crammed with books, mainly American books on management and Swedish crime novels.
There was no laptop to be seen.
For a moment she wondered whether she should take a better look, but dropped the idea. Jon had the memory of an elephant, and if she moved anything, he would immediately notice it. She closed the door just as slowly as she had opened it.
When she turned round, she tried to avoid looking in the direction of Sander’s room. Instead, her gaze fell on to the chest of drawers in the hallway. Actually it was an enormous, old-fashioned secretaire, a valuable heirloom in the Mohr family. On either side of the leather-covered writing surface – these days only used for sorting incoming mail – there was a bank of five drawers. The lower part comprised cabinets containing three shelves and doors that opened from the centre with decorative brass handles. She saw that one door was ajar. The woodwork had become slightly warped, making it sometimes difficult to close, especially in damp weather. When Ellen crouched down to push the door shut properly, she noticed a silvery reflection and pulled the door towards her instead.
The MacBook was lying there, as it so often did.
She had forgotten that. It was as though parts of her brain were switched off; she could not remember even the most mundane things, she might be going mad.
She picked up the computer and closed the doors carefully, before crossing to the kitchen. A faint aroma of home-baked bread she could not recall making caused her to feel a gnawing in her abdomen reminiscent of hunger. She was so exhausted that the thought of food was repellent, and instead she drank a big glass of water.
After refilling the glass once more, she switched on the machine. Because they all used it, Jon had removed the password function. The Aftenposten news website came up automatically. The mass murderer smiled inscrutably at her, wearing a burlesque uniform that he must have cobbled together himself.
Ellen did not want to look at him. Had no desire to hear about him; she had continually refused to follow the news coverage since Sander died. The terrorist attack had nothing to do with her. The outside world could become unhinged over the devastation caused by a crazy extremist, but Ellen had enough on her plate with her own personal catastrophe.
Her own personal catastrophe that no one else was bothered about.
No one except that brat of a policeman, who ought to have better things to keep him occupied than preventing her from holding a funeral for her only child.
Increasingly agitated, she tried to get rid of the newspaper headlines. The bulky bandage on her right hand made it difficult to use the mouse, and the cursor touched the little book symbol that opened the bookmarks menu on the screen.
Ellen did not want to surf the Net. She wanted to access Word.
Her annoyance morphed into rage: ‘Word, for fuck’s sake! Bloody hell!’
She was more used to her own PC and could not actually remember where the program was located on a Mac. Her eyes wandered across the screen, trailing the cursor. She struggled to decipher all the icons in the long line at the foot of the display. The menu was still on the screen.
‘Where the bloody, shitty hell is Word on this...’
Despairingly, she tried to hold back tears. They had begun to trickle down her cheeks, but her strength was long gone. Her stomach muscles were stiff, her back was tender, her eyes were sore and she would not, could not, shed any more tears. Letting go of the mouse, she placed her hands on her abdomen and tried to breathe properly. Held her mouth open to inhale, forming a big O with her lips as she exhaled, squeezing her hands firmly against her stomach to hold the rhythm.
Suddenly she could not breathe at all.
Without moving a muscle, she stared at the list of bookmarks.
For what seemed an eternity, she stared at three entries on the menu. In the end she had to release the breath from her lungs. There must be some mistake here. The words must mean something else. Anyway she had to breathe, force herself to think. Out and in.
There must be some mistake.
She wanted most of all to shut down the computer and sketch out a draft of the death notice, using pen and paper. Forget this. Forget everything. There were so many secrets, far too many things that could not be spoken, and this was worse than any of the things that bound Jon and Ellen in their silent, unbreakable alliance.
She did not switch off. On the
contrary, she clicked her way into three websites. One was locked with a code. She was able to gain entry to the others. When she had seen enough, she went systematically through all the documents and images saved on the MacBook. It took forty minutes to go through it all and she was able to finish drinking the water in her glass.
Jon’s computer was full of child pornography.
The most grotesque images, beyond anything she could ever have imagined, were stored on her own husband’s laptop.
The wound in her thumb was no longer aching. Her tears had stopped. She felt light-headed, her head felt almost empty, with only one single thought, clear as crystal: This has to go. The police must never find this. Ellen followed events well enough to know that the very first action the police took in criminal cases was to confiscate computers. Almost regardless of what their suspicions were centred on – that was her impression.
The young man in the baggy uniform, far too big for his skinny frame, thought that Jon had killed Sander. Ellen was sure he would be back. His tone yesterday, when she phoned about the funeral, removed all doubt. He had got it into his head that Sander had been mistreated before his death, and he would not give up on that. Her mother-in-law had once said that the most dangerous creature in the whole world was a policeman certain of his facts. A computer full of absurd pictures of sexual abuse would in itself constitute a crime, and in addition would obviously reinforce the policeman’s strong suspicions of Jon.
Jon must not be arrested. Not for anything whatsoever.
Her first thought was to delete it all. Then she would destroy the computer and throw it away at a recycling depot, well hidden in the huge containers for electronic waste between old, heavy monitors and antiquated vacuum cleaners. Her fingers, the ones she could still use, raced across the keyboard to delete all the contents of the computer. Halfway through the task, it suddenly struck her that the laptop was probably registered somewhere or other. If nowhere else, at least in the accounts of Mohr & Westberg AS. It would look suspicious if she just got rid of it.
Finished.
Everything was gone. Nevertheless, the deadly dangerous documents still lurked somewhere inside. There were programs to retrieve deleted files, Ellen knew that. She would have to destroy the actual innards, the electronics; she would have to make sure it was impossible to read, or see, any of the unmentionable things she had already begun to repress. At the same time, the computer would have to be accessible to the police if they ever asked for it.
Sander had ruined her own computer by taking it with him into the swimming pool.
Water was probably not sufficient. Only the computer, not the files, would be destroyed. But it would be a start.
Ellen crossed to the sink and inserted the plug. As the water level rose, she fetched a bottle of household ammonia from the utility room. Without hesitation, she opened the lid of the laptop and poured the ammonia over the keyboard. The liquid, slow and sticky, flowed over and around the letters. The strong smell burned her nose, and when she turned off the tap and placed the laptop in the sink, she had to rush across to the window. The top catch was tricky, but in the end she managed to open it. She took deep breaths of the fresh, sun-filled air and, after a few minutes, went to fish the machine out of the water. Then she calibrated the oven to sixty degrees Celsius and pushed the MacBook on to the top shelf.
She would have to check the iMac as well.
Without a sound, she entered Jon’s office and switched on the computer. It asked for a password. Closing her eyes, she tried to concentrate. Not long ago Jon had derided the simple passwords people chose, and asked if they couldn’t come up with some variations on the usual names of dogs, children and their good lady wives? Write them backwards, for example?
REDNAS, she keyed in. The tiny icon in the middle of the screen shook its head dismissively.
She tried NELLE.
Wrong, it said again.
NOJ.
No.
NOJNELLEREDNAS, she tried in desperation, her family’s hierarchical structure written backwards, and pressed the shift key.
The machine gave her a hearty welcome. Her breathing was fast and shallow as she located the bookmarks list and studied it, entry by entry. She opened image folders, document folders; within ten minutes she had searched through most of the contents.
Nothing of interest. No dreadful pictures, no chat-room pages describing activities she could barely envisage. She gasped in relief, logged off and went to the trouble of leaving the mouse exactly as she had found it.
When she closed the door behind her, she felt nothing.
She sat waiting at the kitchen table for twenty minutes while a strange, dusty odour combined with the dwindling smell of the ammonia. The wound in her thumb had bled through the bandage again, but she felt no pain. Ellen was alone in the vast house, entirely emotionless, with no thoughts other than one single, overriding idea: she and Jon were bound together in a way that no one else could understand.
She had to take care of Jon, as he had always taken care of her.
And so the shocking fact that he had a predilection for pornographic images of young children was something she had to forget as quickly as possible. The pictures were already vanishing from her consciousness. They were disappearing into a blessed haze that she was able to conjure up when most needed, the way she had so often had to suppress everything unbearable in her life in recent years.
The auto-timer on the oven pinged.
The MacBook was well and truly cooked.
*
Communications company Mohr & Westberg AS had recently moved into new premises on Tjuvholm. With its five partners and twenty-two staff, it had long since outgrown the old office behind the Royal Palace. It was as though the transition from an old, gloomy, venerable apartment block to a brand-new building fashioned of glass, steel and concrete had not only literally brought the firm into modern times. In the sixteen years the company had existed, it had grown steadily to become one of Norway’s largest, some time earlier. After the move just six months previously, its portfolio had seemed to mushroom. Of course that was not only connected to the new bright offices by the sea. In a short time Mohr & Westberg AS had attached itself to three former prime ministers, a top-drawer celebrity lawyer, one of national broadcaster NRK’s most-experienced debate hosts over a period of twenty years, in addition to a music producer who at the age of thirty-two had three seasons as a judge on Pop Idol under his belt. Its high-profile new associates immediately attracted additional clients, and at the last management meeting it was decided that the time was ripe for a change of name. Mohr & Westberg AS sounded like an ancient accountancy firm, the new partners felt, and they were supported by their younger colleagues. The name also no longer reflected the current ownership arrangements. From 1 January 2012 its entire graphic profile was to be changed, and the name of the company would become CommuniCare. Most of them agreed this was ingenious; the Latin word for ‘communication’ could also, through a simple emphasis of the letter C, evoke associations of concern.
Jon Mohr sat in his spacious new office, peering in the direction of Dyna lighthouse. Light from the afternoon sun cascaded on to the fjord, which took on the appearance of a length of aluminium foil that someone had taken great pains to smoothe out again. It was teeming with activity out there, with lots of small boats, and the Danish ferry seemed embarrassed by its own size as it stubbornly eased out into deeper waters.
‘I quite simply can’t fathom what this is all about,’ Jon said, not looking at Joachim, who sat on a dark sofa tossing an orange from one hand to the other. ‘We’ve gone through the whole folder of material to do with the Klevstrand–Shatter merger. And all the papers relating to the transport agreement with HeliCore. All the emails. All the texts. All the discussions, notes – everything! Can’t find any indication, not a single fucking indication...’ He sat up straight and thumped his fist on the table. It was his sore hand, and his face twisted in a grimace as he continued: ‘...what
soever that anything could have leaked out!’
‘Jon,’ Joachim answered, sighing as he replaced the orange in a fruit bowl on the table in front of him. ‘It’s in the nature of the beast that you won’t find an answer in the paperwork. If anyone in this office has been involved in any illegalities, they certainly wouldn’t have left information about it in any of the papers!’
Jon stared at him for a second or two, rubbing his face with his hands. He said something inaudible and then, suddenly relaxing, grabbed a glass of cola and knocked it back in one gulp.
‘If the police could only tell me what it’s all about,’ he said dully, stifling a belch.
‘They don’t even know you’re aware of being a suspect. You don’t have a right to know shit, until you’re called for interview.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Looked it up on the Internet. You have rights, if they interview you. Not before that.’
‘Looked it up on the Internet,’ Jon repeated contemptuously. ‘That makes you a legal expert, does it?’
Joachim rolled his eyes.
‘You always cross your bridges before you come to them, Jon. Always. Being tipped the wink by an old classmate in Shatter that the police are sniffing around in—’
‘Bridges before I come to them? Bridges?’
Jon leaned forward abruptly.
‘You don’t seem to realize that I’ve enough sorrows to cope with right here and now, do you? Do you? And you should appreciate that if it wasn’t for my ability to look ahead and plan for all eventualities, then you...’
His finger punched holes in the air above the desk.
‘...certainly wouldn’t have a job where you earn three times the average for your age. And have the arrogance, over and above that, to complain it’s too little! If it hadn’t been for my willingness to cross my bridges before I come to them, damn and blast, then every single one of you would be without a job!’