I almost felt embarrassed by the creak of the plum-coloured leather chair as I sat down, while she sat on the far side of a little round table with an inlaid, hand-worked brass plate in the centre, covered in some sort of hieroglyphs.
Sidsel Skagestøl was wearing a mixed grey, long-sleeved acrylic top with loose-fitting black trousers. With a quick sideways glance she took a cigarette from the edge of an ashtray, checked it was still alight and inhaled so slowly that her eyes almost seemed to take on the colour of the smoke.
With a sad smile she said: ‘We think we have them forever. But it’s a lesson we have to learn. We don’t.’
‘No.’
‘There’s something special about the oldest. She who was the only one for a while. I can still remember … I stood there watching her while she slept. Stood there listening to her breathing. Saw the little bump under the eiderdown with teddy bears on it.’ Her voice rose in intensity. ‘So innocent! So unblemished by – anything at all! And now, sixteen years later, here I sit, and she … She is …’ She made a vague movement of the hand holding the cigarette, making a kind of smoke ring, as though her daughter was somewhere in the room, invisible to us, but still present.
‘This must have been a very difficult time. I mean, even more difficult maybe, because of the press reports.’
She gave me a strangely distant look. ‘Oh, those … It was probably worse for Holger. Me, I’ve shut all that out in a way. But Holger …’
‘Did he take it hard?’
‘When the first report was published, I don’t know if you saw it, the one with the photo … he started to weep. And I mean weep, really weep. I hadn’t seen him do that since his father died, and that’s nearly twenty years ago now. He couldn’t even bring himself to weep over Torild, but that report shocked him so deeply that … Afterwards he talked about sorting them out then all he did was put me in a taxi and go off himself – to the paper, I assume. When he came back, he was ashen-faced. He looked ten years older as though it was only then that it had really hit him?
‘Where is he now?’
She shrugged. ‘Back at work. With the police. I don’t know.’
‘But he’s offered to help you, I mean, the last few days, hasn’t he?’
‘He offered to sleep here, yes. But what good would that do? That’s all over anyway.’
‘For good?’
She nodded silently, leaned forward and tapped the ash from her cigarette.
‘A situation like this can often patch up that type of conflict.’
‘Not this one.’
It was not the right moment to ask why. Besides, strictly speaking, it was no business of mine. Instead I said: ‘Anyway, the police have detained – a witness.’
‘Yes, Helge … Hagavik, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. I haven’t yet found out … Does it ring any bells?’
‘No.’ She shifted her gaze out through the large picture window, where we could see the western side of Gulfjellet Mountain, the new housing developments in Sandalen and the slightly more established one in Midttun and Øvsttun. ‘But I’m starting to see that my daughter … that Torild had a life, outside home – one I knew nothing about.’
‘Has somebody said something?’
She made a vague movement of the head. ‘Said anything about – what?’
‘Erm, I was thinking of … that young man. It was apparently someone she knew, wasn’t it?’
‘Apparently.’ She sighed. ‘Now, afterwards, you think of all the times you didn’t show up. You think that – maybe that’s why it happened – that if only you’d gone to that handball match, taken part in that cake raffle, in the election for the parent teachers committee at school, everything would have been different.’
‘Like when you didn’t go to visit her at Guides camp in Radøy last year?’
She looked at me puzzled, frowning in thought. ‘Radøy … But I was ill then, wasn’t I?’ She placed her hand on her stomach as though she could still feel the discomfort there.
‘Yes …’
She was suddenly more focused now. ‘What on earth made you bring that up now?’
‘Oh, er … nothing.’
‘On the contrary, I’m asking you for an answer!’ she said sharply. ‘This is no time to beat about the bush.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s just something that came up, I had a word with the Guides leader, Sigrun Søvik, and she happened to mention that it was just your husband and Randi Furebø who came to visit them.’
‘Oh yes? And with that dirty private investigator’s mind of yours, you immediately spied a – source of conflict?’
‘Oh no, I –’
Suddenly she laughed. But it was not genuine laughter. ‘To be honest, you look as though you’ve been caught with your pants down! Now I really regret having contacted you. If this is the result, then … I can assure you that if Randi and Holger had been up to something – inappropriate during that trip to Radøy, something I couldn’t imagine in my wildest dreams, the chemistry between those two has always been so good, I can promise you at any rate that that wouldn’t have been enough to tip me over the edge. The reasons why Holger and I are drifting apart go much deeper than that …’ She touched her temple with her finger ‘The whole way we think, our entire personalities, do you see? And that’s all I have to say about the matter. All!’
She stood up. ‘Now I think it’s time you were going.’
I threw up my arms as I rose from the leather chair. ‘You must believe me when I say that I had no intention of –’
‘Don’t bother to come back, Veum. I hope this is the last time I see you, is that clear?’
My face seemed to freeze and instead of an apologetic smile all I managed was a grotesque grimace.
In the outer hall I turned to face her again for the last time. ‘In that case, I wish you all the best for the future …’
‘Sincere thanks from all the family,’ she said with biting sarcasm and closed the door ostentatiously behind me.
As I walked down the short garden path I heard a sound I couldn’t quite make out behind me: as though she was banging her fists against the wall, stamping on the floor or writhing about in convulsions.
Then a door slammed so hard that the whole outer wall shook.
She could not have emphasised it more clearly. Partir, c’est mourir un peu, as the French say. But this was a full-blown execution.
When I got into the car it was with a feeling that something absolute and irrevocable had happened. It was just that I hadn’t grasped what it was yet.
Twenty-six
ONCE BACK IN THE OFFICE, I tried to call Evy Berge again. But she was in a meeting, they said, for the rest of the day.
I made a note to remind myself to try and call her at home a little later.
My answerphone was in hibernation. No one had tried to call me, not even to record some melodious funeral music.
I opened the drawer containing the homemade death notice. Again I turned the envelope over and looked at the back as though the sender’s name had been written in invisible ink and might only become legible a day or two later.
The postmark was Bergen and the date February 17th. If I took it along to the police station and asked them to put it under the microscope, they might find some prints on it: mine, the postman’s and those of the person or persons who had handled the letter in the postal service. Whether they would also find a further, hitherto unknown, fingerprint I was not at all sure.
With a shrug I put the letter back in the desk.
The bottle was in the drawer below.
I took it out, unscrewed the cork, held the neck of the bottle to my nose and breathed in that incomparable smell of aniseed and caraway.
I couldn’t resist the temptation but stood up, went over to the sink to fetch the beaker, came back and poured myself a couple of fingers of aquavit, the water of life.
– Does the condemned prisoner have a last wish?
– One last
glass, Mr Executioner. Granted. (Glugglug)
– I raise my glass to all who are still alive here on earth; I raise my glass to the children whose lives are before them and to the adults who have stuck it out so long. I raise my glass to priests and firemen, presidents and plumbers; to all those who –’
– It was supposed to be a glass, not a lecture.
– Oh, I’m sorry… (Glugglug)
The rest is cunning. Blessed are the simple, for on earth they are fleeced. Victorious are the unscrupulous.
I banged my glass down on the desk. As hard as Sidsel Skagestøl had slammed the door to the rest of her life on me. As hard as someone had torn their daughter from the soil she had been planted in and hung her up like a hunting trophy, somewhere on the dark side of a star where you can search for her till kingdom come and never find her. As hard as they stamp a misdirected letter: Return to sender. Address unknown.
I talked to Karin on the phone.
‘Got anything lined up for this evening?’ she asked.
‘Have to go to a demo at eleven o’clock – people who use prostitutes.’ As she didn’t immediately say anything, I added: ‘A demonstration against them, of course …’
‘I got that.’
‘I’m meeting a lady who probably has some information on the case I’m – well, doing some background work on at the moment … Want to come?’
‘Do you mean it?’
‘You know I don’t like involving you in the practical side of the way I earn my living, but … They might find it easier to talk to me if you were there.’
‘Shall we have dinner first, then?’
I pushed my glass away firmly. ‘Sure. When can I meet you?’
We fixed a time.
Before I left the office Sigrun Søvik rang. Her voice was hesitant and nervous, as if she was not sure she was doing the right thing.
‘If you’re trying to recruit me into the Scouts, you’re a bit late,’ I said, trying to strike a lighter note.
It fell flat. In a hollow voice she said: ‘It’s about the two girls.’
‘Oh? Torild and Asa?’
‘Yes, it’s something I thought of that perhaps – that you ought perhaps to know, but I don’t want to rub salt into the wounds … of the family, I mean, so …’
‘Do you want to tell me now over the phone, or – ?’
‘Could we meet tomorrow sometime, over a cup of coffee?’ she said quickly.
‘Sure, why not?’
We agreed a time and place, she hung up, and I made a note of the details.
Be prepared: wasn’t that their motto? But for what? Maybe that was the question. To be or not to be – prepared?
I shook off these speculations and carefully locked the door as I left for dinner with my lady friend from the Population Register Department.
Twenty-seven
THE EAST SIDE OF NORDNES is not exactly the warmest place you can spend a Monday evening in what is already a chilly February.
A handful of demonstrators had gathered on Sunnhordlandskes Quay and were huddled close together, as if guarding their banner, but probably just trying to keep warm.
They viewed us with suspicion to begin with. But when they saw we were walking hand-in-hand, and as there were also a few people I was on nodding terms with from my Child Welfare days, they became friendlier and admitted us to the circle.
The banners they were carrying bore such obvious slogans as: NO TO PORN! RECLAIM THE NIGHT!, END SEX AND BODY TRADE – ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! and PORN = THEORY – RAPE = PRACTICE.
A couple of girls with spiky punk hair and rings in their noses and various other places were holding banners with the much more eye-catching slogan, FREE BLOWJOBS!, which no one appeared to take offence at.
There were very few men. I counted three besides myself. One of them looked a bit like a hired bodyguard. The other two looked as if they’d been tamed in the early seventies and were only allowed out alone on very special occasions.
The women covered the whole spectrum. Some would not have had so much as a finger laid on them even if they’d turned up stark naked at a Hell’s Angels midnight mass in deepest Norway. Others would have been lucky to get away from a morning meeting of the Priests’ Association without being groped. The ages ranged from secondary school kids to grandmothers. Yet all of them stood out by their burning commitment to the cause of their sex, with an absence of make-up bordering on self-effacement.
In the cold north wind they shook clenched fists at the occasional cars driving down C Sundts Street, heart of the red light district, that Monday evening, chanting ‘No to whoremongers! No to the sale of women’s bodies! No to whoremongers! No to the sale of women’s bodies!’
Evy Berge turned out to be a large woman, an inch or two taller than me, with broad, almost Slavic features and short-cropped fair hair. She was in her late thirties, and the look she directed at me was steely blue, with a hint of violet.
‘Laila Mongstad suggested I should contact you. I’ve tried to get hold of you all day.’
‘We’re terribly short-staffed in our department. There’s never a break.’ She nodded at Karin as though they were fellow conspirators. ‘The lot of women’s professions, right?’
Karin nodded. ‘You can say that again.’
‘I know you can. Just take a look around you! Who’s under ever-growing pressure with ever-shrinking budgets? Nurses, teachers, postal workers –’
‘The police,’ I interjected.
‘OK, but that’s the only one! And who do you think it is who spends Monday evenings driving about in cars rounding up prostitutes?’
‘Nurses, teachers and postal workers?!’ I said.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Karin started to say.
‘Directors …’
‘It’s just the way he –’
‘Shop managers and heads of departments …’
‘– talks.’
‘Chief surgeons and politicians. Male …’
I nodded. ‘I know.’
‘In other words, the power apparatus! The people who occupy positions of power in society at large also have to be in a position of power when they buy sex too. They have to feel secure and feel they’re on top, literally, so they won’t be challenged just where they feel most vulnerable, if you get my drift.’
‘You speak with exemplary clarity. No room for misunderstanding there. That’s exactly why I need to talk to you.’
She glanced round. ‘Here? Now?’
‘There’s not much going on, is there? It’ll pass the time.’
‘OK, I suppose so.’ She shrugged her shoulders, and we went a few yards away from the others, like a little breakaway group of three who perhaps didn’t do it for nothing, after all.
‘What is it you’re after, actually?’
‘To come straight to the point: I’ve worked in Child Welfare, and I’ve also been a private investigator for nearly twenty years now. So I have a fair idea of the traditional profile of prostitution in this city. But I’ve just been working on a case that has updated it again … The girl who was found murdered up on Fanafjell …’
She nodded. ‘I see.’
‘So I’m trying to find out whether there are any new elements in this business, new places where people meet and violins are not exactly playing, yet somebody rakes in money from it. For example, I’ve come across a place called Jimmy’s …’
‘The amusement arcade?’
‘Yes. And Laila Mongstad is looking into it as the basis of a major newspaper report.’
She smiled. ‘Great! Brilliant!’ She lowered her voice. ‘Of course, we don’t find out much ourselves on our own. But people contact us, some of the prostitutes themselves, actually.’
‘So, what’s the market like at the moment?’
‘Well, you obviously know why we’re out here this particular evening, don’t you?’
I nodded. ‘It’s common knowledge. The street prostitution of the fifties that has now moved over here from
Strandkaien. The girls from Ole Bulls Plass who have now moved over here.’
‘Up to a point, yes. What’s new, of course, is the recruitment from among drug addicts, often really young girls, operating in completely new places. The area round the central station, for instance, and sometimes in the middle of Torgalmenningen Square, in summer at least.’
‘The school holidays?’
‘A tough time for a lot of kids.’
A van with a large company name emblazoned on the side drove slowly past the group, whose numbers had now swelled to about thirty. The driver leaned over and aggressively gave us two fingers.
The voices rose in a slow, ragged chant: ‘Kerb crawlers! Kerb crawlers!’
He put his foot down, sending out a cloud of exhaust fumes from his rusty rear end, screeched his back tyres and vanished in the direction of the next block without so much as a backward glance.
‘That’s the crudest form of prostitution, of course – and the most visible one. Folk who take an hour longer to get home from work, or just “pop out for a little drive” while the kids watch Children’s TV.’
‘As early as that?’ asked Karin, surprised.
‘Oh yes. Business is brisk on the girlie market at that time in the evening, dear,’ said Evy Berge. ‘A quick drive out to Tollbodkaien and the car parks round there, the quick relief of a hand-job,’ she made a few telling gestures ‘or …’ she raised her hand to her mouth, ‘maybe even a quick one in the back seat, if they really want to push the boat out.’ She pulled a disgusted face as she looked at me. ‘Men!’
‘Not all of them,’ I said.
‘Course not, sweetheart. Not all of them!’
Karin looked as though she was about to say something, but I beat her to it. ‘OK, but the girls who are hired in other places often end up in a hotel room, right?’
She looked suddenly tired. Then she held her hand out and, in the teacherly style that was no doubt typical of her, counted on her fingers. ‘There are the following main types of prostitution in
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