by Anne Holt
‘It’s not true,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘It just can’t be true.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry to have to tell you like this.’
She removed her hands abruptly from her face and slammed them down on the table. She must have smacked the side of the laptop, because the picture shook violently.
‘Let me guess,’ she said, far too loudly. ‘He fell from a tree, eh? Or toppled over on his bike? Crashed down from a bloody fucking staircase or something?’
It crossed Henrik’s mind that, for such an adult person, employed in the education system for that matter, she had quite a coarse manner of speaking.
‘Almost right,’ he said. ‘He fell down from a tall stepladder in his own living room. At home, that is.’
The woman in Australia burst into tears. Once again she covered her face with her hands, and leaned forward so that only the top of her head was visible to Henrik. A bun, he saw now, an old-fashioned grey coil held in place by combs.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, trying to think of something more to say.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
She drew breath and sat up straight all of a sudden.
‘I don’t believe a word of that!’ she yelled.
One comb had loosened and a thick lock of hair fell across her ear.
‘What do you mean?’ Henrik asked.
‘That boy was always coming to school with injuries! If it wasn’t a black eye, then it was a broken arm. A foot he could hardly stand on. Burns on his arms, a swollen wrist... My God! Even though Sander had ADHD, any sensible person had to understand that not everything was as neat and tidy in that palace of theirs in Glads vei as it might have looked!’
‘Now I’m not quite following you.’
‘Sander Mohr wasn’t happy at home, you can be fucking sure of that! All sorts of things went on there that...’
Elin Foss reminded Henrik of an old hippy. Even the peace sign round her neck was in place. He began to calculate how old she had to be, to have been a teenager during the real hippy era. About sixty. That could indeed add up, it struck him. Flowers, peace and cream cake for everyone, love for children and colourful language, to put it mildly. On the other hand, she seemed quite angry. Maybe she was a faded old member of the Workers’ Communist Party who had not yet lost all her convictions.
Now her mouth was open and her breathing laboured. Henrik seized his opportunity to interject: ‘Do you mean he was in any way subject to—’
‘Yes!’ she said, sobbing. ‘That boy was deliberately hurt, I’ll bet everything I own on that! Not that it’s so very much, but all the same. I never thought I’d say that to the cops, but there’s got to be a first time for everything: don’t let the guy get away with it! Don’t let that young lad’s father talk his way out of what he’s—’
‘Wait a minute,’ Henrik interrupted her, raising his right hand. ‘Do you mean you’ve suspected that Sander was mistreated for some time?’
‘Yes. Have you met his father?’
Now at least she was no longer crying.
‘Yes, I have,’ he said, nodding. ‘But I...’
‘Unpleasant character. Glum. Distant. He couldn’t stand me. Even though I’ve a completely OK relationship with Ellen, he’s tried to get rid of me several times.’
‘I’ve spoken to Haldis Grande, and she said nothing about any attempts to remove you. On the contrary, she said that the parents had fought hard to have an assistant appointed for Sander.’
‘To have an assistant, yes! But when they got me, then it was a different story! What’s more...’
She struggled to force the loose strands of hair behind her ear.
‘Haldis Grande,’ she said, discouraged.
‘Yes. What about her?’
‘She thinks too well of people. The kindest person in the world. Amazingly good with the children. They love her. Sander, too. Haldis is big and soft and affectionate. More of a carer than a teacher, really. It’s not a problem, I think, being like that in the early-years classes. It’s good for the children. The trouble with people like Haldis Grande is that they’re... naïve. Far too naïve.’
‘Did you ever speak to her about your suspicions?’
‘There was no point in that. Haldis Grande and I are almost the same age, but quite...different, you could say.’
Henrik nodded, with a gulp.
‘People like Haldis believe in the system,’ Elin Foss continued, with more than a hint of contempt in her voice. ‘She thinks that everything functions well. She believes in the Labour Party and the education hierarchy and our National Day, she believes in...’
She rolled her eyes theatrically and slapped her forehead.
‘Take that terrorist, for example! I’m sure that, deep down, Haldis thinks he’s neither evil nor insane. She doesn’t see that this kind of thing is bound to happen, as long as we allow the worst fucking racists to express themselves, anywhere and everywhere. He just hasn’t had enough love as a child, according to Haldis. Somehow not been given enough attention.’
Henrik had privately harboured some of the same thoughts himself.
‘Wouldn’t it have been natural to talk to her about such serious misgivings, all the same?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘You don’t know her. I do.’
Henrik felt his fascination for the ageing radical dwindle fast. If she was telling the truth and had been convinced there was something wrong in the Mohr family, then it was not merely reprehensible that she had never raised the alarm. It was a downright violation of the law.
‘That’s why I bypassed her,’ Elin Foss said. ‘I went straight to the head teacher.’
Henrik cleared his throat, shaking his head.
‘Eh?’ was all he could say.
‘I went to the head teacher.’
‘With what?’
‘With a written report detailing my concerns. Twice. The first time was about eighteen months ago, around Christmas time in 2009. Then more recently, in the spring. Sander came to school with his arm in plaster. It must have been in April or sometime around then. When I asked him what had happened, he brushed me off with the usual shrug of the shoulders.’
‘What...what did he say?’
‘Don’t remember exactly. Yes, as a matter of fact.’
She licked her lips. The data transfer delayed every movement, making them seem clumsy, and the sight of the slow strokes of her tongue made Henrik unconsciously moisten his own lips.
‘“Only trivial,”’ she said. ‘That was what he often said. “Only trivial.”’
‘And what did the head teacher do?’
‘Nothing. Not a damned thing.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
She shrugged her bare shoulders and tried to tidy the loose locks of hair. When she lifted her elbows, Henrik noticed that she did not shave her armpits. He tried to breathe calmly as he summed up: ‘So the head teacher has received two written expressions of concern from a member of staff, without anything at all being done about it?’
‘The first thing he should have done was speak to me about it! I haven’t heard a cheep. That’s how it goes, you know. The most cowardly head teacher in the world doesn’t go chasing after a man such as Jon Mohr. A man of position. No one runs after a man of position. That’s how the system works. Isn’t that so?’
She gazed challengingly at him, before letting all her hair fall with a soft, sweeping shake of her head. Then she stared in surprise at her own screen. It was blank.
Henrik Holme was already on his way out the door.
*
‘Sander and Kasper were never really friends,’ Marianne Kaspersen said, pouring out more of the tea that smelled so strongly of strawberries that the fragrance filled the entire room. ‘Not sort of proper pals. They were quite different, and didn’t have much in common. There are a lot more boys in the class who are closer to Kasper, but since Ellen and I are old friends, it just turned out that I felt I co
uldn’t say no.’
‘To what?’ Johanne asked.
‘To him being here, from time to time. Not often. Maybe once a month? After all, they were in the same class, and we mothers of the boys do have a lot of contact with one another.’
‘But how often?’
She squinted, as if putting a great deal of thought into her response.
‘Well, about once every four weeks.’
Eight-year-old Kasper Kaspersen smiled down at Johanne from a gigantic photograph on the wall above the settee in the villa in Kapellveien. He was standing beside his two elder sisters, all equally blond and blue-eyed, engaged in some kind of gymnastic game against a white background, with legs and arms sprawled in every direction, and all with their gaze fixed on the camera. A Giant Schnauzer was sitting with its mouth wide open, pink tongue lolling and its head tilted to one side. One of the girls had a black cat poised on her shoulder. Johanne felt a vague dislike for the picture, a posed kind of idyllic tableau that had probably disintegrated into chaos the second after the camera clicked.
‘What do you mean when you say they were quite different?’ she asked.
Marianne sniffed and thrust a napkin under her nose.
‘Mugwort allergy,’ she explained. ‘It gets worse and worse with every year that goes by. My sister – the one who’s married to a Muslim – has a terrible time of it. Yes, with the allergy, I mean. Not with the Muslim!’
She laughed the same laughter she had always employed in response to everything and everyone. Marianne was the least clever girl in the high-school class, bordering on what Johanne (privately and kept entirely to herself) called stupid. However, Marianne had always assumed a central position in the gang around Ellen at the time she had still been called Ellen Krogh and had been happy. Marianne took life as it came. She limped her way through some sort of high-school qualification, mostly through charm, and married a go-ahead electrician at the age of twenty-three. The marriage seemed indestructible, and Thor Kaspersen still treated Marianne as if she were made of crystal. Two daughters were now in their teenage years, while Kasper had come as a delicious dessert to round off their life together, and his arrival had been a cause for rejoicing in the whole family. The boy was charming, smart at school and extremely good-looking. The sisters, too. All three of them were winners in the genetic lottery: their mother’s looks and their father’s quick wits and clever hands.
Marianne Kaspersen continually spoke of her brother-in-law as ‘the Muslim’. From anyone else, this would have incensed Johanne, but now she smiled and shook her head a little.
‘What’s the difference between them?’ she repeated. ‘Between Sander and Kasper?’
‘Ten kilos,’ Marianne sniggered, before suddenly growing serious and widening her eyes in a dramatic grimace. ‘Sorry! I’m only joking. Kasper is fairly small-built, as you know, and Sander was of course quite...big.’
‘Yes,’ Johanne said, nodding. ‘He was a sturdy boy. But I’m not referring to that, exactly.’
‘Kasper is more...subdued. I mean, he’s a boy and all that stuff, good heavens. Far more active than Kjerstin and Karina were at that age. Good at football, fond of boisterous games. But with Sander it seemed to be a bit different.’
Johanne noticed that the entire living room was actually blue. White walls, some touches of pink here and there, such as on a cushion and a candle, but the settees were ice-blue with a glass table between them on a baby-blue rug. On the ceiling above the dining table hung an aquamarine lamp, and the three oil paintings on the walls were in all shades of blue, from midnight to an almost translucent, very pale tone. Even the youngsters’ clothes in the oversized photograph were in every shade of blue. Marianne worked part-time as a nursing auxiliary and obviously had plenty of spare time on her hands.
‘I still don’t understand what it was that was so different about him,’ Johanne said, picking up a glass bottle of Farris mineral water. ‘Children at that age are all very different, aren’t they? In every way. I keep trying to catch hold of what really... characterized the boy. Not that he was noisy. Lots of children are. Not that he was active. He’s not alone in that, either. I’m thinking more of...’
She poured the water into a beautiful blue glass as she mulled it over.
‘It was as if he was testing out the grown-ups all the time,’ Marianne said suddenly, and Johanne looked up.
‘Well?’
‘All children need to be corrected,’ Marianne said. ‘Mine too, of course. Especially Kasper. Everybody talks about how children stretch the boundaries, but I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re really only searching for them. Don’t you think? If the boundaries are quite clear, then children are easy to get along with, in the main. With Sander, it was as if he was getting himself worked up all the time, but always with half an eye to whatever adult or adults were in the vicinity. It seemed as if he never quite knew where the boundaries lay. There was something quite...anxious about him. Do you know what I mean?’
‘That he was scared, do you mean?’
‘If not exactly scared, then at least unsure. As if the boundaries in his life were sometimes here...’
She marked a point in the air with her left hand.
‘...and sometimes there.’
Her left hand drew a line in a totally different spot.
‘I’m honestly not meaning to criticize Ellen and Jon, but it can’t have been easy for Sander. And his behaviour could be quite confusing for other children. At least, it was for Kasper. He simply got tired of Sander’s company.’
Johanne fiddled with one of the settee cushions. It had been ages since she had felt so perplexed. Last week an attempt had been made by Sander’s grandmother to hire her as a detective, with the express aim of proving that the boy had not been killed by his father. Today his other grandmother wanted her to prove the opposite. In addition, someone had sent her an anonymous text to get her sucked into the case. She had no idea who that had been, and had barely given the message any thought until Agnes Krogh left Hauges vei and Johanne felt at long last that she had to do something.
Ever since that fatal Friday ten days earlier, she had tried to put as much distance as possible between herself and Sander Mohr’s fate. Not until today had she realized that this was not feasible. There was no way she could forget the film clip that Agnes had shown her. At least the sound of it. The images had not seemed quite so awful the second time she had watched them. The boy had been completely, abnormally stubborn. He had lain down on the floor, making himself heavy and unmanageable. Picking him up and carrying him off was not necessarily the daftest course of action.
Whereas his screams were unbearable.
Sander was a boy she had known, if not particularly well, and there were too many points of contact between them for her to turn her back on him. The lack of clarity surrounding the accident drew her towards him. And him to her, she somehow felt. Adam and Johanne had found each other more than ten years previously through a police investigation that she had persistently resisted joining. Since then, she had always been reluctant when he – perhaps only by dropping a phrase or two into their evening conversations – from time to time invited her opinion on mysteries she had no wish to know about.
All the same, she never managed to refuse.
This time she was entirely on her own. Her disinclination had been great. It had taken longer.
Talking to Marianne had been an impulse, but perhaps of the kind actually linked to intuition and therefore not at all stupid. Somehow she had to come closer to Sander by becoming better acquainted with him. He was still only a big daredevil of a boy, in her eyes. There was never as little as that to any child, and she had to start somewhere.
‘But he was amazingly good at drawing,’ Marianne said all of a sudden.
‘So I’ve heard.’
‘You must see this. Just a minute.’
Marianne stood up and left the living room. Johanne drained her glass of mineral water and tried to find
a more comfortable position on the settee. She was sore after yesterday’s gardening session, and the niggling ache in the small of her back troubled her.
‘Have a look at this,’ Marianne said, with a smile, sitting down again before she handed a large drawing across the table. ‘Have you ever seen anything so marvellous? Sander drew it last autumn. I should really have given it to Ellen, but it’s just been lying here. You know how it is.’
The sheet of paper was A3 size. Johanne placed it on her lap and adjusted her glasses.
In a large square in the centre of the page Sander had drawn a bedroom. A smiling, fair-haired boy sat on a wide double bed with maroon covers. On either side were bedside tables, very detailed, right down to a digital alarm clock with red numbers, a model boat and two or three books for good measure. On the wall above the bed hung a framed picture of a diving whale, its broad tailfin extended magnificently on top of the water in a splashing cascade.
‘Amazing, don’t you think?’
Marianne leaned forward, smiling with her head canted, as if she could not take in enough of the beautiful sketch.
‘Yes,’ Johanne murmured. ‘It’s...fantastic.’
The boy depicted was holding a soft toy in his arms. It was green and looked most like a pig. Though the image bore unmistakeable signs of being a child’s drawing, there was something entirely out of the ordinary about the perspective. The drawing was not flat and one-dimensional. The books on the bedside table were sketched lying flat, with an eye for three dimensions that Johanne thought impossible for a seven-year-old to possess. The actual bed also had depth; Sander had made it wider in the foreground than where it met the wall.
‘He’s even managed to draw Batman,’ Marianne said, leaning even farther across the table to point it out. ‘He said those were his favourite pyjamas.’
Johanne nodded distractedly.
She was no longer studying the bedroom scene. She was more preoccupied by the frame. Around the vaguely rectangular picture was a black border measuring eight to ten centimetres. In some places, Sander had pressed so hard with the pencil that he had punctured the paper.