by Anne Holt
Now everything stood still. Utterly, utterly still.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman behind the desk whispered. ‘Marianne Kleive had a ticket to Sydney last Sunday. But this shows …’
The other woman’s expression stabbed her like a knife.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said anyway. ‘She didn’t actually travel. Marianne Kleive never used her ticket. At least not for the return journey to Sydney. Of course, she could have gone somewhere else. With a different ticket, I mean.’
Without saying thank you for the kind and highly irregular service, without saying anything at all, without even picking up the copy of the itinerary which had not been followed, Synnøve Hessel turned away from the information desk and began to run through the deserted departure hall.
She had no idea where she was going.
The Beloved Son
As she stood there with her hand resting on the door handle, Trude Hansen no longer remembered where she was going. She swayed and realized she had already got hold of enough to see her through until tomorrow. The relief was so great that her knees gave way, and she had to lean on the wall when she let go of the door handle.
It still smelled vile in here.
She must do something about it.
Soon, she thought, staggering into the small room. In the alcove a sleeping bag lay on top of an unmade bed. At the bottom of the sleeping bag lay a red toilet bag with a picture of Hello Kitty on it. Someone had given the cat fangs and a patch over one eye. With hands that somehow didn’t want to obey her she eventually managed to pull out the bag and unzip it.
Everything was there.
Untouched. Three fixes.
Just like countless times before, she was intending to take the whole lot at once. Routinely, dully, she considered the chances that it would all be over if she took an overdose on purpose. She always started thinking along these lines on those rare occasions when she had enough heroin even to contemplate suicide, and it was equally inevitable that she would always reject the idea. She probably wouldn’t die. And when she came round, she would have nothing left.
The thought of running out of drugs was worse than the thought of going on living.
She took the toilet bag and staggered the few steps over to a green sofa against the other wall. It was covered with empty beer bottles from yesterday. Someone had dropped a cigarette on one of the cushions during the night, and she stood for a while looking at the big brown circle with a black hole in the middle.
Above the sofa hung a confirmation photo of Runar.
She grabbed it and threw it among the beer bottles.
Runar stared at her from the large picture in its gold frame. His hair was cut in a mullet, and he’d had a perm. His suit was powder blue. The narrow tie was pink. He had looked so smart, she remembered. He was her big brother, and the most stylish person in the entire church that day. Later, when the ceremony was finally over and her mother really wanted to get away before any of the other parents started asking about the party, he had picked up his sister and carried her in one arm all the way to the bus stop. Even though she was nine years old and much too fat.
They had eaten chicken wings.
Mum, Runar and Trude.
Runar hadn’t received a single present, because all the money had gone on his new suit, his hairstyle and the photographer. But they had eaten chicken wings and chips and Runar had been allowed a beer to go with it. He had smiled. She had laughed. Mum had smelled clean and wonderful.
Slowly she took out the spoon and the Bunsen burner Runar had given her. Soon she would feel better. Very soon. If only her hands would obey her a little better.
Her dull brain tried to work out how long it was since Runar died. Nineteen plus nineteen? No. Wrong. From the nineteenth to the nineteenth was thirty-one days. Or thirty. She couldn’t remember how many days there were in November. Nor how many days had passed since then. She couldn’t even remember what day it was today.
The only thing she knew for sure was that Runar died on 19 November.
She had been at home. He was supposed to come. Runar had promised to come. He was just going to get some money. Score some heroin. Get everything she needed. Runar was going to help his little sister, just like he always did.
He was late. He was so fucking late. Then the cops came.
They came here. Rang the bell, at some ridiculous hour of the morning. When she opened the door they told her Runar had been robbed in Sofienberg Park that night. He had severe head injuries when he was found, and was probably already dead. Someone had called an ambulance, and he was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital.
The policewoman was serious, and might possibly have tried to console her.
She didn’t remember anything apart from a piece of paper in her hand. The address and phone number of a funeral director. Five days later she had woken up so late in the day she realized she wasn’t going to make it to the funeral.
Since then the cops had done fuck all.
Nobody had been caught.
She hadn’t heard anything.
As the syringe emptied into a vein at the back of her knee, the blissful warmth spread so quickly that she gasped out loud. Slowly she sank back on the green sofa. She wrapped her stick-thin arms around the photo of Runar. Her last conscious thought before everything became warm clouds of nothingness was that her big brother had given her the last three chicken wings on the day he was confirmed and Mum gave him a beer for the first time.
The cops didn’t care about people like Runar.
People like her and Runar.
*
‘Do you care about this at all?’
For the first time in more than three quarters of an hour, Synnøve Hessel was on the point of losing control. She leaned towards the police officer, both hands gripping the edge of the table as if she were afraid she might hit him otherwise.
‘Of course,’ he said without looking at her. ‘But as I’m sure you understand, we have to ask questions. If you had any idea how many people just leave their normal everyday lives without—’
‘Marianne hasn’t left! When will you understand that she had absolutely no reason to leave?’
The police officer sighed. He leafed through the papers in front of him, then glanced at his watch. The small interview room was becoming unbearably warm. An air-conditioning unit hummed in the ceiling, but there must be something wrong with the thermostat. Synnøve Hessel took off her knitted sweater and flapped her shirt in an attempt to cool down. A damp oval stain was visible between her breasts, and she could feel the sweat trickling down from under her arms. She decided to ignore it. The police officer smelled worse than she did.
At Gardermoen police station they had at least been friendly. Almost kind, in spite of the fact that all they could do was direct her to a normal police station. They had sympathized, of course, and made her a cup of coffee. An older uniformed female officer had tried to console her with the one thing everyone else seemed to know: people go missing all the time. But, sooner or later, they turn up again.
Later was too late for Synnøve Hessel.
The journey home to Sandefjord that same night had been an ordeal.
‘Let’s sum up what we have,’ suggested the police officer, finishing off a bottle of cola.
Synnøve Hessel didn’t reply. They had already summed things up twice, and it hadn’t brought the man any closer to a realistic understanding of the situation.
‘After all, you are …’
He adjusted his glasses and read:
‘… a documentary film-maker.’
‘Producer,’ she corrected him.
‘Exactly. So you know better than most people what reality looks like.’
‘We were supposed to be summing things up.’
‘Yes. So. Marianne Kleive was supposed to be going to Wollogo … Wollongo—’
‘Wollongong. A town not far from Sydney. She was going to visit a relative. Celebrate Christmas there.’
/> ‘Hell of a short stay for such a long journey.’
‘What?’
‘I just mean,’ the man said deliberately, ‘that if I was going all the way to Australia, I’d stay longer than barely a week.’
‘I don’t really see what that’s got to do with anything.’
‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that. Anyway, she left Sandefjord on Saturday 19 December on the train that leaves at—’
‘Twelve thirty-eight.’
‘Mm. And she was going to meet a friend in Oslo …’
‘Which she did. I checked.’
‘Then she spent the night in a hotel before catching the flight to Copenhagen at nine thirty.’
‘And she never arrived there.’
‘She didn’t arrive in Copenhagen?’
‘She didn’t arrive at Gardermoen. At least, it’s possible that she did arrive there, of course, but she wasn’t on the flight to Copenhagen. Which naturally means that she didn’t fly on to Tokyo or Sydney either.’
The police officer didn’t pick up on her sarcasm. He scratched his crotch without embarrassment. Picked up the cola bottle and put it down when he realized it was empty.
‘Why didn’t you find out about this until last night? Hasn’t she got a mobile, this … your girlfriend?’
‘She is not my girlfriend. She is the person I love. The fact is that she’s my wife. My spouse, if you like.’
The man’s sour expression showed very clearly that he didn’t like it at all.
‘And as I have already explained several times,’ said Synnøve, leaning towards him with her mobile in her hand, ‘I received three messages over the course of the week. Everything indicated that Marianne was actually in Australia.’
‘But you haven’t spoken to one another?’
‘No. As I said, I tried to ring a couple of times late on Sunday, but I couldn’t get through. Last night I tried at least ten times. It goes straight to voicemail, so I assume the battery is dead.’
‘Could I have a look at the messages?’
Synnøve brought them up and passed him the phone.
‘Everything OK. Excitting country. Marianne.’
The man couldn’t even read fluently, but made a big thing of the fact that ‘exciting’ was spelt incorrectly.
‘Not particularly …’ he went on, trying to find the right word before he read the next message. ‘Not particularly romantic. Having a good time. Marianne.’
He looked at her over the top of his glasses. The chewing tobacco had formed black crusts at the corners of his mouth, and he constantly sprayed tiny grains into the air.
‘Are you two usually so … concise?’
For the first time, Synnøve was lost for words. She didn’t know what to say. She knew the question was justified, because it was precisely the unusual brevity, the impersonality in the messages that had made her uneasy. She hadn’t given much thought to the first one, which had arrived on the Monday. Marianne might have been in a hurry. Perhaps her great aunt was very demanding. As far as she knew, there could be thousands of reasons why a message didn’t arrive or was very brief. On Christmas Eve the message she received said only Merry Christmas, which hurt Synnøve deeply. The last message, saying that Marianne was having a good time, neither more nor less, had kept her awake for two nights.
‘No,’ she said, when the pause began to get embarrassing. ‘That’s why I don’t think she wrote them. She would never have misspelt “exciting”.’
The police officer’s eyes widened so dramatically that he looked like a clown at some ghastly children’s party. Tufts of hair stuck out behind his ears, his mouth was red and moist and his nose resembled an almost round potato.
‘So now we have a theeeeeory,’ he said, stretching the e for as long as he could. ‘Someone has stolen Marianne’s mobile and sent the messages in her place!’
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ she protested, although that was exactly what she was saying. ‘Don’t you understand that … that if Marianne has been the victim of a crime and someone …’
Crime.
‘… and someone wanted to make it more difficult to discover—’
‘Discover?’
‘Yes. That she’d disappeared, I mean. Or that she’s …’
For the second time in twenty-four hours she was close to bursting into tears with someone else looking on.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Kvam! They’re looking for you on the desk.’
A uniformed man smiled and came into the room. He placed a hand on his somewhat smelly colleague’s shoulder and waved towards the door.
‘I think it’s urgent.’
‘I’m in the middle of—’
‘I can take over.’
Detective Inspector Kvam got to his feet with a sour expression. He started gathering up the papers in front of him.
‘You can leave all that. I’ll finish off here. A missing person, isn’t it?’
Kvam shrugged his shoulders, gave a farewell nod and headed for the door. It slammed shut behind him.
‘Synnøve Hessel,’ said the new officer. ‘It’s been a while.’
She half stood up and took the outstretched hand.
‘Kjetil? Kjetil … Berggren?’
‘The one and only! I saw you in here and I was a bit …’
He held out his hand and wiggled it back and forth.
‘… concerned when I saw that Ola Kvam was dealing with the report. He isn’t … he’s actually retired, but over Christmas we bring in a few people to cover … Anyway. You know. We all have our own way of doing things. I came as soon as I’d finished what I had to do.’
Kjetil Berggren had been a year below her in school. She wouldn’t really have remembered him at all if he hadn’t been the school athletics champion. He set a record for the 3,000 metres in Bugårds Park in the very first heat, and was a member of the national junior team before he gained a place at the Police Training Academy straight from high school.
He still looked as if he could run away from just about anybody.
‘I have actually followed your career!’ He grinned, putting his hands behind his neck and leaning back, tipping his chair. ‘Great programmes. Especially that one you did in—’
‘You have to help me, Kjetil!’
She thought his pupils grew smaller. Perhaps it was because the sun was suddenly in his eyes as he allowed the chair to drop back, and leaned towards her.
‘That’s why I’m here. We. The police. To protect and serve, as they say.’
He tried another smile, but she didn’t respond to that one either.
‘I’m absolutely, totally convinced that something terrible has happened to my partner.’
Kjetil Berggren slowly gathered up the papers in front of him and placed them in a folder, which he pushed to the left on the large desk between them.
‘You’d better tell me everything,’ he said. ‘From the beginning.’
*
He had understood his father in the beginning.
When the police rang the doorbell of the house in Os on Christmas Eve just as everyone was about to go to bed, Lukas Lysgaard’s first thought was for his father. His mother was dead, said the police officer, who seemed genuinely upset at having to deliver the tragic news. They had brought the priest – his mother’s closest colleague – from Fana, but the poor man was in such a state that he just sat in the car while the police took on the heavy burden of telling Lukas Lysgaard that his mother had been murdered three hours earlier.
Lukas had immediately thought about his father.
About his mother, too, of course. He loved his mother. A paralysing grief began to drain away his strength as soon as he grasped what they were telling him. But it was his father that worried him.
Erik Lysgaard was a mild man. Some people found him awkward, while others appreciated his gentle, reserved nature. He didn’t make much of an impact outside the family. Or inside it, come to that. He spoke little, b
ut listened all the more. That was why Erik Lysgaard was a man who improved on closer acquaintance. He had his own friends, of course, some childhood friends and a couple of colleagues from the school where he had worked until his back became so twisted that he was granted early retirement on the grounds of ill health.
But above all he was his wife’s spouse.
He’s nothing alone, was the thought that struck Lukas when he was told that his mother was dead. My father is nothing without my mother.
And in the beginning he had understood him.
That night, that holy, terrible night that Lukas would never forget as long as he lived, the police had driven him to Nubbebakken. The older of the two officers had asked if they wanted company until daylight.
Neither Lukas nor his father wanted anyone there.
His father had shrivelled up into something that was hard to recognize. He was so thin and bent that he hardly even cast a shadow when he opened the door to his son, and without a word turned his back on him and went back into the living room.
The way he cried was terrifying. He cried for a long time, almost silently, then he would emit a low, long-drawn-out howl, without any tears, an animalistic pain that frightened Lukas. He felt more helpless than he had expected, particularly when his father refused all physical contact. Nor did he want to talk. As the day gradually came, a dark Christmas morning heavy with rain, Erik had finally agreed to try and get some sleep. Even then he refused to let his son help him, despite the fact that every single night for more than ten years Eva Karin had taken off her husband’s socks and helped him into bed, then rubbed his bad back with a home-made ointment sent by a faithful parishioner from their years in Stavanger.