by Anne Holt
‘I want to sit here! I want to sit here until that damned policeman gives me permission to hold my son’s funeral. I want to sit here until...’
Gasping for breath, she swallowed noisily.
‘Sorry,’ escaped from her lips. ‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘You’ve nothing to apologize for,’ Joachim interrupted her. ‘Of course you must do exactly as you wish. I’m glad you have friends who call round.’
It crossed his mind that he was not really a friend of Ellen’s. There were fifteen years between them, nearly a whole generation. When he thought about it, they had hardly spoken about anything other than Sander and trivialities for the well-nigh four years they had known each other. Ellen Mohr was a boring, upper-middle-class woman and, when Sander was gone, they had very little to talk about. Joachim stole a glance around the room. This might be the last time he sat in this kitchen. A certain sadness at the thought occurred to him, before he shook it off.
‘That woman who was here on Friday,’ he said. ‘Johanne, wasn’t it?’
‘Johanne Vik,’ she said mechanically, appearing increasingly uninterested in him as she returned to mauling the newspaper.
‘She’s the one Jon has talked about, isn’t she? The one who’s almost some kind of...detective? Has she been here in the past few days?’
‘No. Although I have asked her to help me.’
Now the tears began to trickle down her face. She did not cry, did not sob, did not wipe away the tears. They simply ran down her cheeks, unstoppable, as if the washer on a tap had fallen apart through wear and tear.
‘What’s she to help with?’ Joachim asked. ‘Maybe I could—’
‘The police think Jon has abused Sander!’ she broke in, her voice rising to a falsetto. ‘I want Johanne to prove that nothing of the sort has happened.’
Joachim stared at her, open-mouthed.
‘But she refuses!’ Ellen almost screamed and began to scratch at her lower right arm. ‘She brushes it all off as nonsense, even though that terrible policeman came right out with it!’
Her nails had drawn angry stripes on her skin, and she changed arm.
‘Ab...abused? Is Jon supposed to have...? Do they think Jon has—’
Joachim was so confused that he stammered. His thoughts in a complete whirl, he pictured Sander, dead on his mother’s lap; Ellen’s hysteria, Jon’s sluggish bemusement. He heard Ellen’s repeated ‘No!’ to everyone and everything, but mostly to Jon, and he saw in a flash Jon’s quiet rage when he lifted Sander up out of his chair by the arm in a restaurant. Because of a drop of spilled milk. For nothing. For nothing at all.
He wanted to ask her.
Every instinct told him to back off. This was none of his business. Not getting mixed up in things that were none of his business had carried him far and spared him shedloads of grief. But nothing was like before. Things had become complicated, and it was his own fault. Now circumstances had saved him from a blunder. Even though Joachim had learned on the football pitch that the most competent players also as a rule had some leeway on their side, he did not dare to rely on sheer luck saving him one more time.
‘I don’t believe for a moment that Jon could do such a thing,’ he said slowly, trying to catch her eye. ‘But Jon could be a bit...violent towards Sander, could he not?’
At least that allowed him to capture Ellen’s attention. Her eyes grew large and round. The pupils so tiny in the bright light, her skin dry and inflamed, and hair that had probably not been brushed since yesterday – there was not much to remind him of the well-groomed, calm and collected woman she had been until a week before. She took a deep breath, and her mouth opened as if to make a ferocious protest.
Not a single sound emerged. Her face was distorted.
‘My God,’ Joachim mumbled. ‘Is there something wrong with you? Hello, have you got...’
He began to rise from his chair.
‘Are you mad?’ she shrieked so loudly that he collapsed back on to the seat. ‘You, one of Jon’s best friends and colleagues... You, who’ve been a guest here for years and who’ve even been allowed to have Sander as much as you wanted! And then you come here and accuse Jon of...abusing our son!’
Joachim raised his hands in a pacifying gesture, shaking his head frantically.
‘No, no, no! I just thought that someone might have seen Jon when he...’
He hesitated, and she screamed back at him: ‘When he what?’
A fine shower of spittle reached all the way across the table, and he had to steel himself to avoid drying his face with his hand.
‘Jon could sometimes be a bit rough with Sander,’ Joachim said. ‘Just a bit violent. Once when we were at a restaurant he pulled Sander by the arm, quite hard, he lifted him out of his chair...’
‘Pulled his arm!’ she snarled with a look of contempt, leaning back and crossing her mutilated arms. ‘Pulled his arm – good grief! Yes, I’d certainly call that abuse! You, of all people, should know that Sander could sometimes try the patience of a saint, and that grabbing an arm is hardly a reason for recrimination.’
He did not answer. He thought. He tried to think. On Tuesday afternoon he had been on the point of asking Jon about Sander’s many injuries. He had left it unsaid, by pure reflex, to avoid complicating anything. Later, when he was trying to sleep, he was overjoyed that he had not fallen for the temptation of getting involved in something that was none of his business. Sander was dead in any case, and no one could do anything about that. Besides, he was probably wrong.
Now it was quite a different matter.
The thought that the police possibly suspected Jon of ill-treating Sander and causing his death made Joachim dizzy, and he stopped himself from gripping the edge of the table. A growing anger was followed by enormous relief, as he picked up the glass of water and drained it slowly.
‘No,’ he eventually said in a whisper. ‘No one can reproach Jon for grabbing Sander’s arm. You’re quite right, as far as that’s concerned. Sorry.’
He got to his feet and delayed for a moment with his hand on the backrest, as if about to say something.
Ellen beat him to it. ‘We won’t see so much of you from now on, then. Now that Sander is gone.’
Her sudden fury had burned out. It was as if this exhausted figure had the strength for no more than one short, intense explosion. She was submissive, almost apathetic again, and did not look his way when he pushed the chair back under the table and headed for the door.
‘Take care of yourself,’ he said.
When she did not reply, he went out into the hallway, closing the door carefully behind him. Even through the solid oak door he could hear the legs of the chair scrape on the floor as she stood up. When he reached the enormous piece of furniture that Jon for some reason called a secretaire, he heard the sound of bottles clinking in the kitchen. He hunkered down. Grimacing at the faint creaking noise, he opened the left cabinet door, where the MacBook lay. Quickly, he stood up and placed the laptop on the leather writing surface, before opening it and switching it on.
Nothing happened. Totally dead.
The machine reeked of dust and ammonia, and the dull metal surface had darkened, almost oxidized. When he stroked his finger over the keyboard, it became grey and sticky, and several of the letters could not be pressed down.
It was totally ruined, and there was no need to take it with him. A hard disk could not possibly withstand the treatment Ellen had described. His problem was solved. At least this one, and when he replaced the computer and closed the door, he felt a fleeting stab of relief.
The kitchen had gone quiet again.
He took the last rapid steps across the floor, opened the front door and dived outside. Summer sunshine hit him like a hammer blow after the dim, cool hallway, and he let the door slide shut behind him as he pulled his sunglasses down in front of his eyes.
One ball down, he thought.
The problem was that there were several more in the air, and he could not tell exactly wher
e they would come from.
*
‘Here,’ Johanne said, out of breath, pointing. ‘It’s so easy to lose your way at this spot!’
Adam Stubo turned off the steep path at the point where it began to plateau. The back of his shirt was dark with sweat, and his breath was rasping and laboured. Johanne ran up the rocky ascent to the viewpoint, while Adam had to use his hands to help him clamber up. Finally they had both reached the summit.
‘I’m in terrible shape,’ he muttered. ‘My God, it’s so steep up here.’
‘You’ve made it,’ Johanne said, smiling. ‘And you were the one who was set on coming this way. Look at the view!’
Adam had surprised her by returning home as early as two o’clock. He had mumbled something about being part of a team after all, and now he really needed a few hours in the fresh air. Johanne thought he meant that figuratively, but quite the reverse, he had insisted on travelling out to Marka. In silence he had packed a bag with a lunch-box, thermos flask and three litres of water, before throwing in a couple of dried pigs’ ears for Jack, and then he was ready. He had not spoken a word on the car journey, either. Johanne had let him be. Partly because she understood that it was difficult for him to talk about trivialities when he neither would nor could say anything about what he was working on. But mostly because she did not entirely recognize him behind this wall of silence, and therefore did not know what to say herself.
Nonetheless, it had been good to walk beside him up the ravine from Movassbekken, where they had parked. He let her hold his hand. When, after a couple of kilometres, they had to turn off the forest track on to a rugged path, she let go and allowed him to walk in front to set the pace.
‘To Gaupekollen’ – that’s what he had announced when they left home in the car. Johanne had not protested, even though she doubted whether he would manage the strenuous walk. It was not particularly long, around six kilometres each way, but precipitous and gruelling for an unfit man weighing 117 kilos. Especially when you took the detour round Hansakollen. There was an old wartime German plane-wreck that Adam had never seen, and which for some reason he insisted on locating this very day. In order to cut across to the western side and back to the narrow cart-track leading to Gaupekollen, they had scrambled up and over the shady eastern ridge, leaving the path and slogging along an unnecessarily circuitous route.
‘This view is certainly worth the walk,’ Adam said, moving further forward on the bare hillside. ‘I’d like to sit here for a while.’
He opened the bag, tossed a pig’s ear to Jack and settled on a rocky ledge with the rucksack between his feet. He laid a seat pad beside him, patting it gently to encourage Johanne to sit down.
‘How old is Jack now?’ he asked as he made fumbling attempts to open a bottle of water.
His face was glistening.
‘Eleven, I think. He’ll be twelve at Christmas, or something like that.’
‘Seven times eleven plus an extra seven for the first year,’ Adam calculated and put the bottle to his mouth.
‘Eighty-four,’ Johanne said.
Adam drank half the contents of the bottle and then replaced the stopper, shaking his head.
‘The dog’s eighty-four and sprightlier than me,’ he said.
‘He goes walking every day,’ she said with a smile. ‘With me. You could come with us sometimes.’
Adam did not answer. He poured coffee into two plastic mugs, handed her one and surveyed the landscape, looking south. Far down there they could see Skar, the deserted, abandoned military camp that nobody seemed able to decide on a use for. Farther south, the lake at Maridalsvannet lay like a gleaming, wide, steel-grey gash in the green landscape. The plateau at Grefsen broadened out after that, descending to the centre even farther south, to the city and the fjord where even the passenger liners looked tiny from this distance. The vista stretched out endlessly to the west as well, with the expanse of blue sweeping across to the horizon and a peak Johanne thought might be Gaustatoppen. They remained seated there in the summer heat, in the midst of an ant trail, silent, with the late-afternoon sun in their eyes, until their coffee cups were empty and Jack sat up, whining for another of the pigs’ ear treats.
Adam threw him the last one and offered Johanne a pink lunch-box with a Hello Kitty decal on the lid. She helped herself to a slice of bread with brown cheese and ate it slowly. Before she was finished, Adam had gobbled down the two other slices. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, drank the rest of the water from the bottle and returned everything tidily to the rucksack.
‘Shall we move on?’ Johanne asked, smiling.
When he neither answered nor stood up to leave, she leaned towards him. He smelled of fresh perspiration and an almost imperceptible scent of aftershave as he put his arm around her and drew her close.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘What?’
He did not look at her, but she gazed at him, at his face, obliquely from the crook of his arm, where he held her so tightly that she felt a trace of anxiety. He was so handsome, even now, with the excess kilos that made his chin even broader, and the hollow at the point of his chin so deep that there was room for her whole finger inside it. Adam still had plenty of hair, for his age. It had grown a bit too long over the summer, and at the temples there were dark, damp curls. The sides of his nose quivered a little, as they did only when he was upset.
‘I love you and the children,’ he said, screwing up his eyes in the sunshine. ‘And that daughter I only got to keep for twenty-one years. I still love Elisabeth, even though she’s dead and I have you now. And Amund. And my parents. When they were alive, I was loved by them.’
There was nothing Johanne could say. Adam was not finished, she realized that from the barely discernible pressure when he pulled her even closer to him.
‘I am the sum of all that love,’ he said softly. ‘That is who I am. It’s within that sense of belonging that I exist.’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘That is who you are.’
Johanne cast her eyes down and followed the ants as they trotted over their shoes, round the rucksack, up Adam’s bare, hairy legs, over the grey-furrowed mountainside, some with a single fir sprig on their backs, all of them fast and focused as if following strict orders in which they were each allotted their own task, their place in the sun.
‘These interviews you’re conducting,’ she finally ventured to whisper.
‘Shh,’ he said gently, touching her mouth with his finger.
‘I don’t want them to destroy you.’
‘They’re not destroying me. On the contrary.’
Slowly he let her go and stood up, stiff and sore like an old man.
‘What do you think about having more children, Adam?’
He canted his head and looked her in the eye, chuckling, as if she had told him something really funny.
‘Not on your life! Just because I had a wee moment right now, that doesn’t mean—’
‘But Ragnhild’s getting big,’ she interrupted him. ‘Kristiane’s almost grown up. I’m only forty-three and really healthy. Lots of women have late babies nowadays. It would be so lovely, I think. Maybe a boy?’
‘Out of the question,’ he said firmly, though still smiling, as if he did not take her seriously. ‘The older I get, the more unsure I am about most things. But not that.’
He leaned across to her and kissed her lightly, before straightening his back.
‘That’s something I’m quite sure of: we’ve got the children we’re going to have.’
He slung the rucksack on to his back and looked at her encouragingly as he began to trek towards the slope leading to the path that had once been a cart-track for hauling timber.
Johanne couldn’t muster the strength to stand up. She should really say something, but had no idea what. Inevitably, she touched her flat stomach.
‘Are you coming?’ he shouted.
Her mobile phone gave a brief tinkle. Mainly to play for time, she sl
ipped the phone out of her Fjällräven shirt’s breast pocket and opened the text message. Withheld number, said the display. An ex-directory number. Or from abroad.
If you don’t believe that Jon Mohr could have abused his son, then you should investigate more closely. Sander deserves your attention.
‘What was it?’ Adam called, waving at her to make a move.
‘Nothing,’ Johanne replied after a moment’s hesitation. ‘I’m just coming.’
She read the message one more time before deleting it. It would not be so easy to forget it, but she would certainly give it a try.
*
On a barge moored at Aker Brygge, an old wharf in Oslo city centre now transformed into an upmarket area of shops and restaurants, swarming with tourists, Joachim Boyer sat with a half-litre of beer on the table in front of him, with one of Norway’s best-paid football players by his side. The man’s name was Christopher Robin. His mother was Norwegian, his father a South African doctor who had come to Norway as a refugee in the sixties and had died of old age before his son reached the age of nine. Christopher was tall and drop-dead gorgeous, with European features and his father’s dark complexion. Also, he was endowed with a left foot among the best in the Premier League, but unfortunately not a head to match the fortune he had amassed during the nine years he had spent in England. A couple of years earlier he had got mixed up in a major property project that had gone in the wrong direction. That is to say, in the direction of the tabloids, which gorged themselves on details about gambling joints, sex clubs, the Eastern European mafia and the black market. Once the story had been splashed on the front pages for three days running, Joachim Boyer had been brought in by the footballer’s increasingly desperate agent. It took the media strategist ten hours to draw up a plan, twenty-four hours to see it through, and all at once Christopher Robin had returned to his place as the affable, kind, and popular darling that his name would suggest. The guy had had the wool pulled over his eyes – that was what people said thereafter. He was completely innocent. His gratitude had manifested itself in both an unusually fat fee and an unfailing friendship.