The Writing on the Wall

by Gunnar Staalesen

  ‘He said she’s been missing since the end of last week, and that his wife had engaged you to look for her.’

  ‘Yes, but not till Wednesday, and it wasn’t till yesterday that my investigation really got off the ground.’

  ‘And what did you find out?’

  ‘Not much. I talked to a few of the girls in her class. They were in town together last Thursday, raking about, window-shopping, probably went to a place called Jimmy’s. Know it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘They were seen there, her friend Åsa, herself and an – escort.’

  ‘Åsa…’ His ballpoint was at the ready.

  ‘Furebø. They were old friends and still knocked about together. I don’t think Åsa told me everything she knows. For example, she could definitely give you people the name of that “escort”.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There was another friend, also a girl from her class, Astrid Nikolaisen …’ I paused as he noted down the name and the exact address. ‘That was the one who said she’d seen these three at Jimmy’s, probably last Thursday.’

  ‘And her escort …’

  ‘That’s a loose end I hadn’t even begun to tie up. Now I probably never will –’

  ‘No, probably not.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No!’ He swivelled partway round on his office chair, looked at a place on the wall and pointed with a finger as chubby as a sausage. ‘See that calendar, Veum?’

  ‘Yes.’ A traditional-looking annual calendar hung on the wall; it had no illustrations and was divided up into squares, like a sort of window on the future, which at that point in the year it was in a way. One of the days had been circled by a dark-red felt-tip pen.

  ‘See that date ringed there?’

  ‘March 1st?’

  ‘Exactly.’ He moved the corners of his mouth to one side, baring his teeth in something that just resembled a smile. To me, though, it looked more like the leering grin of a wolf. ‘Liberation day!’

  ‘Isn’t that still May 8th?’

  ‘My liberation day, Veum! The day I reach retirement age!’

  For a moment I seemed to feel the breath of time on my neck like frost smoke on a cold winter’s day. – Life without Muus? Was that possible? And how come I didn’t feel even a momentary surge of joy at the thought of it?

  ‘You mean you’re – sixty?’

  ‘On February 27th!’ He smiled, proud as a six-year-old kid.

  ‘Maybe that should be the retirement age for private investigators too.’

  ‘Sixty?’ said Muus dryly. ‘Most give up at fourteen.’

  ‘And what are you thinking of doing for the next few years? Court usher or town crier?’

  A new look came over his face, a milder and completely different expression from anything I’d ever seen on it before. ‘I’ve always been very fond of flowers, Veum.’

  ‘Oh …?’

  ‘At Easter my wife and I are off to Holland for the bulb season. And later this year I’m going to be out in the garden every hour God sends.’

  ‘Sounds – very nice.’

  He looked at me sharply. Then the dreamy expression on his face was gone, and he returned to what was still the humdrum daily grind. ‘So what I mean, Veum, is this. I’ve no intention of seeing the last few weeks of my life here at the station wrecked by you getting under our feet and playing the big private investigator at the expense of us ordinary overworked civil servants! Is that clear?’

  ‘It never occurred to me to –’

  ‘Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I’m not planning to come to a sticky end like Vegard Vadheim either.’

  ‘No, that I can understand.’

  ‘Just one thing before you go, Veum …’

  ‘I’m not in any hurry.’

  ‘But I am!’ He picked up a large white envelope and put it down again.

  ‘During your investigations … did you come across anything …?’ He hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I mean …’ He looked almost embarrassed. ‘Anything linking her with – you know, these so-called Satanist circles?’

  ‘No, absolutely not, but … why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, just a thought. You see, the place we found her in, it’s not all that far from the old Lysekloster monastery, and … well, it was rumoured that – what do they call them? – black masses were held up there.’

  ‘Yeah, there were certainly goings-on involving people getting togged up, but … is that your only reason for asking me?’

  He looked at a spot a few inches above my head. ‘Yes.’

  As I left his office I still hadn’t quite recovered from the shock. Flowers? Muus? The only plants I could imagine him liking were cacti.

  On the way out, I stuck my head into Eva Jensen’s office. She was on the phone, nodded curtly and turned her back on me to show she’d no time at all for knights errant.

  A new chap had moved into Vegard Vadheim’s office, a great brown-haired bear of a chap in his mid-thirties with a dark beard, a good-natured smile and an apparently optimistic view of life.

  He glanced up through the open door, gave me a one-fingered salute in greeting, and I stopped.

  I noted a sudden look of uncertainty come over his face, as he realised he couldn’t quite place me. ‘We – I don’t think we’ve met properly.’

  ‘No.’ He stood up and came out from behind the desk. ‘Inspector Atle Helleve,’ he said in an unadulterated Voss accent.

  We shook hands. ‘The name’s Veum. Varg Veum.’

  ‘Oh … It was you who … I’ve heard about you.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of. If it wasn’t from Vadheim, then …’

  ‘Er, I …’ His face darkened. ‘I never met him before …’ He made a vague gesture with his hand.

  I sighed, and he regained his composure. ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘No, I – just wanted to say hello as I was passing.’

  ‘Hello.’

  I nodded, gave a wry smile and carried on my way out of the building; and no one came running in hot pursuit to stop me, place me in custody down in the basement or make me some other offer I couldn’t refuse.

  Fourteen

  IT WAS WITH A HEAVY HEART that I parked my car in front of the steep wooded plot in Furudalen. Slowly I walked through the gate and up to the entrance. I hesitated slightly before ringing the bell.

  Holger Skagestøl answered the door himself. His gaunt face was deeply lined now, and there was a grimness about the mouth that had perhaps never been there before. ‘Yes?’ he asked testily before he’d recognised me. ‘Oh, Veum.’

  ‘I hope I’m not intruding.’

  He looked at me without expression.

  ‘I just wanted to say how – sorry I am. It’s so terribly sad when this happens, at such a young age.’

  His mask did not flicker.

  ‘I … Could you tell your wife that I called …?’

  All of sudden he seemed to come back to life. A slight shudder ran through him, he stepped aside, opened the door wide and said: ‘You can tell … just come on in, Veum.’

  I stepped cautiously into the hall. ‘I really don’t want to –’

  He closed the door behind us. ‘No, no, it’s quite all right. Just go on in.’ He nodded in the direction of the sitting room.

  Sidsel Skagestøl was sitting on the same dark-green sofa as the last time I’d been here. She didn’t notice the ash falling from the cigarette in her mouth down onto her white sweater.

  As I went into the room, she looked up at me with the glassy stare of someone who had taken a large dose of tranquillizers and still wanted more.

  I approached her and put out my hand. ‘Mrs Skageststøl …’

  She took the cigarette from her mouth with one hand and gave me the other as though not quite sure where to put it.

  Her hand was cold and damp, and I put both my hands round it. ‘I can’t find words to say how
terrible this news is.’

  I heard Holger Skagestøl make a movement behind me, a little uneasy, as if unsure what she might come out with.

  She opened her mouth. Her lips looked dry, and she ran the tip of her tongue over them before speaking. ‘Torild, she …’

  ‘Yes, it’s all right, Sidsel. Veum knows everything,’ said Skagestøl.

  ‘She’s dead.’ Sidsel Skagestøl went on as if he had not spoken.

  ‘I’d hoped I might find her before – anything like this,’ I said.

  ‘We were too late contacting you, Veum. The damage was already done,’ said Skagestøl.

  I turned partway towards him. ‘Have they given you – the time of death?’

  ‘No, no!’ he said quickly. ‘But … it was a few days ago at any rate. The pathologist was absolutely categorical about that.’

  ‘Well, you went up there yourself and …?’

  I looked down at Sidsel Skagestøl. She sat there dragging heavily on her cigarette, with a sunken expression on her face.

  I moved a few paces away from her and lowered my voice. ‘You saw her …’

  He nodded and moved almost over to the picture window. ‘She didn’t look – a pretty sight. That isn’t how one wants to see one’s …’ His voice broke, and he had to regain control of himself so he could finish the sentence, ‘… daughter.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She …’ He put one hand over his face. ‘Her face was completely bloated and there was bruising on the skin.’

  I looked at him. He was struggling to keep control of his facial muscles. ‘It was horrible! They showed me pictures of the place where she was found … Her clothes … they’d been pulled up … her skirt, her jacket and her pants had been pulled down, and she was na … had nothing on under … Was lying on her stomach facedown and … Here, Veum, just here …’ He placed his hand behind his hip, on the far right-hand side. The look he gave me was a mixture of fear and bitterness. ‘Here, someone had carved a mark into her flesh!’

  A shudder ran through me. ‘A mark?’

  ‘Like a branding mark on a cow!’

  ‘But what … what did it look like?’

  ‘A bit like – an inverted cross.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you, Veum? Do you really?’ He almost hissed the words at me.

  It sounded so sharp that his wife turned to look at us again and said in a pathetic little voice: ‘What are you two talking about?’

  Skagestøl rushed up to her. ‘Nothing, dear, nothing.’

  ‘No – thing?’ she repeated as though it was a word she had never heard before.

  I remained standing by the window and looked out. For a moment I wondered who was looking after the other children. Maybe they hadn’t been told yet. Perhaps they had not yet come home from school.

  I got my answer quicker than expected.

  ‘I want to see it!’ Sidsel Skagestøl exclaimed behind me. ‘I want to, Holger! I want to!’

  ‘There, there, Sidsel,’ he said, trying to calm her. He looked up at me apologetically, as I turned towards them again.

  ‘I want to see the place where she was found!’

  ‘But we have to be here … Vibeke and Stian will be home soon, and we …’

  ‘I don’t want to be here! What shall I tell them?’

  ‘You don’t need to … I’ll –’

  ‘I …’ She stood up abruptly. ‘Get me a taxi!’

  ‘A taxi! But …’

  She tossed back her head. Suddenly she had the look of a woman rather the worse for wear at a very boozy follow-on party suddenly deciding she’s going home. ‘You can’t deny me that, Holger!’

  ‘No, I can’t …’

  ‘We’re no longer even married!’

  ‘Just separated,’ he muttered.

  It was as though it only now dawned on her that I was there too and, looking at me, she said: ‘You can drive me, Veum!’

  ‘Me! But I … Don’t think you should …?’ I looked at her husband. ‘She ought to lie down.’

  He made as if to take her arm gently, but she pulled away from him dramatically. ‘I said no! No, no, no! I’ll scream.’

  ‘It might perhaps be best …’ Holger Skagestøl said softly. ‘It might do her good, and I’ll have a chance to talk to the children alone – first.’

  She looked at me with the same agitated expression, as though she hadn’t heard what he had said at all. ‘Well? Yes or no?’

  I threw up my arms. ‘All right, then. Of course I’ll drive you up there, if you think …’ I lowered my voice. ‘But I’m not at all sure the police are going to like it.’

  ‘The police? What have they got to do with it?’

  ‘Well, in any case it’s become a police matter now, hasn’t it?’

  ‘But she’s our … she’s my daughter, isn’t she?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, of course she is.’

  ‘Shall we go, then?’

  Without waiting for an answer, she turned to the door and set off. I trotted after her as obediently as a little dog, with an apologetic backward glance at the hapless trainer who was staying behind to wait for the children. The other children.

  Fifteen

  I HELD THE CAR DOOR OPEN for her. She got in and had dutifully put on her seatbelt before I’d walked round to the other side and sat behind the wheel.

  As I turned on the ignition, she asked: ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘More or less.’

  Then she said nothing further until we sat waiting for the light to turn green at Paradiskrysset. ‘You’d have thought a crisis like this ought to repair a broken relationship.’

  I shot a sidelong glance at her. ‘Often it does.’

  ‘Hm,’ she said pensively to herself rather than anyone else.

  I turned right at Hopskiftet and took the motorway to Rådalen. The white snowflakes gave the landscape a grey tint like in an old copper engraving.

  She sat quiet as a mouse beside me: her breathing calm and regular. She seemed to have left the pent-up hysteria behind at the house in Furudalen. Now we were more like a couple approaching middle age, with nothing more to say to one another, on the way to some shopping centre or other.

  In Rådalen, the stench from the landfill site suggested it wouldn’t be long before the refuse dump, now almost thirty years old, would be so full that the contents would start spilling out over the sides. Then we were out on the open farmland between Stend and Fanafjell, where the wind from the sea drove the snowflakes obliquely in across the landscape like dramatic flourishes in the copper plate. Fana Church, with its medieval-looking grey stonework, stood there like a reminder of life and death at the foot of Fanafjell, and I changed down so the car would smoothly take the first sharp bends on the way uphill.

  As we neared the highest point on the road, she suddenly placed her hand on my arm and pointed left. ‘Can you drive into the parking place there, Veum?’

  I did as she said.

  She took hold of the door handle. ‘I think I could do with some fresh air before …’

  I nodded and turned off the engine.

  There were no other cars parked there. It was so utterly out of season that the café at Fanaseter was closed, and even if they still had any animals in the enclosures there, there were no kindergarten or other kids visiting them at this time of the year.

  Sidsel Skagestøl walked ahead of me towards the old vantage point, where the base of a panoramic telescope still stood, the view long since obscured by the fast-growing conifers. She walked on over the rocky outcrops facing north until she finally felt she was high enough and paused, her gaze sweeping round in an arc, the wind tugging at her blonde hair, so that she had to gather her dark green coat tight round her to keep out the cold.

  I climbed up and stood beside her, following her gaze. To the south-west Korsfjord cut its way through between Austevoll and Sotra, where the Lia Tower rose up to a height of 1120 feet above sea level. In the north-west, on the other side o
f Nordåsvannet, lay the collection of houses at Bønes like a scar in the landscape along the narrow elongated western side of Løvstakken, and beyond that Lyderhorn’s highest point at 1300 feet. Behind the mountains the horizon could just be made out: a barely perceptible line between grey and white somewhere far out in the maw of the open sea.

  ‘Life is something you lose,’ she said in an undertone. ‘Bit by bit.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Childhood – a distant memory. You’re young and frisky, full of expectations of life, and then – then suddenly that phase is over. You find love, or you don’t find it, in all its various guises. And before you know where you are, that’s gone too. The children you bring into the world …’ She swallowed and blinked back the tears as though the wind had become too biting for her. ‘Suddenly they’ve gone too.’

  ‘But life does go on, Sidsel.’

  She seemed not to hear me. ‘There are those who would say life is something we build stone by stone until by the day we die we have a complete edifice.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘I’d put it differently. The edifice is what is given to you when you’re born: a beautiful edifice into which you are invited. But it’s not long before they start to tear your fine edifice down, bit by bit, until at last there you sit, quite alone, on the empty plot. And some houses,’ she added with sudden vehemence, ‘are not even torn right down! They stand there for ever, like incomplete … lives.’

  She turned abruptly and looked east, where the broad channel on the far side of the Hardangerijord lay like a diminutive duvet between the mountains at Fusa. ‘And there – lies Folgefonna glacier, just as it has for thousands of years. It will never die.’

  ‘Hm, glaciers are like people. They come and go too. They just take a bit longer, that’s all.’

  She started to walk back down. ‘Shall we – carry on, now?’

  ‘It’s up to you.’

  We got back into the car again.

  The valley on the eastern side of Fanafjell is covered in conifers right to the top of Lyshorn, and the road descends in a succession of narrow bends down towards Nordvik and Lysefjord. On a bend a mile or so from the top, two cars were drawn up at the side of the road: a patrol car and a private vehicle. A uniformed policeman stood midway between the cars almost as though he was parked there too.