Just then she remembered something else from the evening they met.
– You know him, she exclaimed.
He looked at her in surprise.
– You know that guy who grabbed me by the throat. I saw you talking to him just before. When he was standing in the doorway dealing dope.
He took a swig of Coke.
– Why didn’t you say so before? she persisted.
The slanting eyes narrowed even more. – Did you ask me?
She hadn’t. He could have no way of knowing why she was looking for the guy.
– I don’t give a shit if he’s your dealer, or whatever else you do. I just want to know who he is.
– Dealer? You think I’m into stuff like that? I know him from the sports academy.
– Oh yeah, right.
– It’s true, Jomar assured her. – He was a student there a few years ago. Started at the same time as me.
– What’s his name?
– Jim Harris. He had a real talent as a middle-distance runner. Great at the four hundred, even better at the eight hundred. Could have been a top athlete if only his head wasn’t so screwed.
– Screwed what way?
– He can never finish anything. Makes a mess of everything. Ends up on the slide. To begin with he had people round him to help get him back on his feet, but they’ve all given up now.
– He was a patient of Mailin’s.
– Was he?
She described the encounter in Mailin’s office.
Jomar said: – If Jimbo found the office door open, then he probably went in there to see if there was any loose cash lying about in the drawers. He owes money to every dealer in town. That’s why he’s started dealing himself. I tried to help him for a while. Lent him money. Let him sleep it off at my place.
– I’m convinced he was after something else, said Liss.
– What makes you think that?
She told him what had happened the evening he came across her in the park.
– Ah, shit. Jomar’s face took on a strange expression.
– Did you know about that?
He shook his head. – Of course not. But Jimbo rang me a few days ago. He said he’d seen you at that party in Sinsen and wanted to know if I knew you. I was stupid enough to tell him you were the sister of that … I don’t think he had any intention of harming you. He’s not like that.
– Didn’t you realise it was him who grabbed me by the throat down in the stairwell?
Again Jomar swore. – I asked you to tell me what had happened.
She ignored him. – When he was holding me there in the park, something suddenly occurred to him. He ran off. Jim Harris, was that his name? Those were the initials in Mailin’s appointments book. He must have seen Mailin that afternoon. Perhaps someone was with her. You understand what this means? This guy saw what happened … Where can I get hold of him?
– You don’t want to be wandering about in the kinds of places where he hangs out, Jomar warned her.
She sat there looking down at the table. – I want you to help, she said suddenly.
In the days following the discovery of Mailin’s body, she could face almost nothing. Thought as little as possible. Now she was seized by a need to do something, anything. In a rush she began telling him everything she had found out. Showed him the times from Mailin’s call list. Told him about the videos.
– Mailin was filmed the morning after she went missing. Liss flipped through her notebook. – Those video clips were dated Friday the twelfth at 05.35.
It helped her to be speaking about all these details, as though for a brief moment they were no longer about Mailin but someone else altogether.
He listened without interrupting. She didn’t know him. But he was outside it all, had never met Mailin, and for that reason it was possible to share it with him. Even what had happened at the cabin, the footprints in the snow, the printout she’d found in the sofa cushion.
Afterwards she looked across at him. Reluctantly she began to understand why Therese had been so angry with her. She liked his looks, but even more she liked how relaxed and almost modest he seemed. She hadn’t intended to stay, just to hand the jacket back and offer some kind of apology. Now she’d been sitting there for almost an hour.
She stood up. – I must have a ciggy.
– I’ll come out with you, he said.
She blew smoke out in the direction of the light above the doorway and studied the way the lead-blue formations gathered and then at once dissolved.
– When can I see you again? Jomar wanted to know.
She felt his look like prickling on her skin. Didn’t mind at all that he never seemed to tire of looking at her. Just couldn’t face all the explanations she would have to give. Why she couldn’t meet him. Why she wasn’t interested. Why she was who she was. Why she could never again face the thought of being with someone. Felt a sudden longing to be at the cabin. Sitting by the window looking down towards Morr Water in the dusk. The darkness gathering around her, thicker and thicker. The silence.
20
Sunday 4 January
IT WAS CLOSE to one a.m. when she heard Viljam. He was moving about in the kitchen, then flushing the toilet and running the tap in the bathroom. This was how Mailin had lain at night. Hearing her boyfriend come home. Waiting for the footsteps on the staircase, for him to open the door, crawl in under the duvet, body close up to her. Didn’t need to have her, or speak. Just lie there and sleep like that. Feel his arms around her in her sleep …
They’re sitting in the boat. Mailin’s rowing. She’s wearing a large grey coat. Her hair is grey too and hangs down her back in long strings. The wind lifts them. Not the wind, because the wisps of hair move by themselves. Long white worms that cover her whole head and eat it. They’ve suctioned themselves to her head, and Liss can’t seem to raise her hand to pull them away. But Mailin doesn’t seem bothered in the least; she rows for land, in towards the tiny beach. They’re going to pick something up there. But they don’t get any closer to the man standing and waiting, because one oar is missing, and the boat goes round in circles. Don’t look behind you, Mailin, I mustn’t see your face. But Mailin doesn’t hear and turns towards her.
Liss woke to a scream. She felt it inside herself, didn’t know if it had come from her. Feren, she. She twisted round, picked up her phone. It was twenty to two. She opened her address list, found the name, pressed call.
– Dahlstrøm.
She could hear from his voice that he had been pulled up out of deep sleep. Imagined the bedroom he was lying in. Wife beside him in bed, awake too, half irritated, half anxious. Liss knew that Tormod Dahlstrøm had got married for a second time a few years earlier. His second wife was a writer and almost twenty years younger than him.
– Sorry for waking you, stupid of me.
– Is that you, Liss? He didn’t sound surprised. Probably used to being called at night. Patients who were in trouble. Someone who needed to hear his voice just to make it through until the next morning.
– Sorry, she repeated.
– For what?
– It’s the middle of the night.
He breathed in and out a few times. – Did you wake me up to say sorry for waking me up?
Even now he was able to joke with her.
– I had a dream, she said. – About Mailin.
He made a sound that might have been a half-quelled yawn.
– When I was at your place, on Christmas Eve … we talked about her research, into abuse. That psychologist she was so interested in. He was Hungarian, wasn’t he?
– That’s right. Ferenczi. He was a psychiatrist.
– Is that the way you say his name? she went on. – Feren-she?
– Roughly, yes.
– What are his other names?
– First name, you mean? Sándor. His name is Sándor Ferenczi.
Liss had got out of bed and was now standing naked on the cold floor. She walked over to the window, pul
led open the curtain and looked out into the brown night sky above Rodeløkka. Sand-oar Feren-she, she murmured to herself, without even noticing that she had ended the call.
The time was approaching 2.30 as she punched in the code on the gate in Welhavens Street. She remembered that Jennifer Plåterud had said she could call her any time at all, even at night. Liss thought about it, but decided not to. She let herself in, didn’t turn on the light in the stairwell. The smell of damp grew stronger with each floor she climbed, she noticed. In the room used as a waiting room the curtains were closed. It was pitch dark and she didn’t know where the light switch was. She fumbled her way along to Mailin’s office door, opened it. No longer Mailin’s office. Someone else would be using it, as soon as her things were cleared out.
She closed the door behind her, turned on the light. Someone had been there, the police maybe, several of the folders lay on the desk. She started looking through the bookshelves, found the Sándor Ferenczi book she had seen the first time she was there, Selected Writings was the title. She pulled it out and began to leaf through it. Here and there Mailin had made underlinings in the text, along with small notes and comments in the margins. The corner of one page was turned over. Liss opened it to Chapter 33: ‘Confusion of tongues between Adults and the Child. The language of Tenderness and of Passion.’ There was something written in red at the foot of the page. Liss recognised Mailin’s hand: ‘Death by water – Jacket’s language.’
At that same instant, the lights went out. She heard a sound out in the waiting room. A door opening. She jumped up. For a few seconds the neon light strip in the ceiling pulsed with a grey glimmer, then twice in quick succession, before going out completely. You’re not afraid, Liss Bjerke, a voice shouted inside her. You’re never afraid any more. She groped her way across the floor, put her ear to the door. Heard nothing. Or perhaps a faint scraping sound. She laid a hand on the doorknob. It moved. It took two seconds for her to realise that someone was entering from the other side. She jumped back, pressed herself against the wall. The door slid open. She could make out a figure in the darkness. A torch was switched on, the beam swept around the room and stopped on her face.
– Liss Bjerke … The name sounded from the darkness in front of her and at the same time inside her. As though it had left her and was now speaking to her from the doorway behind the torch beam. But the voice wasn’t hers, it was light and slightly hoarse, and still had that American accent that was once so exciting but now seemed fake and showy.
– What are you doing here, she said.
She heard his low laughter.
– You’ve always been such a cheeky little minx, Liss. Breaking into people’s property in the middle of the night and then asking them what they are doing there.
Pål Øvreby came a step closer. – Okay, I’ll explain. Sometimes when I have an evening out and it gets late, instead of taking a taxi home I come here and get a few hours’ sleep at the office. As you discovered a long time ago, I rent here. Five thousand two hundred and fifty every fucking month. So now I’ve answered your question, please tell me what you are doing here.
She couldn’t see his face properly, but could smell him. Tobacco and beer, and clothes that hadn’t been properly dried after washing. The smell forced its way into her and took the lid off containers with things she had hidden away. They were full of little animals. Now they began to crawl around inside her, from her head and all the way down her body.
– This is Mailin’s office. No one can stop me from coming here. She tried to sound angry. If her voice sounded angry, she might manage to feel anger.
– You came to me before, Liss, you didn’t suppose I’d forgotten? It wouldn’t surprise me if you knew that I was sleeping in the office at the moment. My home life is shot to pieces.
He was standing right up close to her.
– And it’s partly because of you, Liss Bjerke, he whispered. – It has a lot more to do with you than you realise.
He put his hand under her chin, lifted it, as if she was a child refusing to look him in the eye. – We had a good time together, Liss. You don’t expect me to have forgotten that, do you?
He let his finger glide around her ear, the back of her neck, pulled her towards him.
She grabbed the torch from his hand, shone it into his face.
– Do you suppose, Pål Øvreby, that I’m afraid to kill? she hissed, and heard how her own voice sounded like a steel string. – If you touch me one more time, you will never feel safe again, not for one second. I’ll kill you the instant you fall asleep.
He dropped his hand. She drove the torch into his stomach, slipped around him, out into the waiting room and down the steps. He didn’t follow.
21
JENNIFER PLÅTERUD SAT shivering with cold in the Bingfoss Hall. Over five years and she still hadn’t quite understood what you could and couldn’t do in handball, but it didn’t matter that much. She celebrated when her younger son Sigurd’s team scored, and agreed with the views of the parents who seemed to understand what was going on. She liked the sport, although not enough to bother to learn all the rules. It made the boys tough to go banging into each other and get knocked about. They were pushed to the ground and had to get up again without moaning. Very different from football, which Trym, her older boy, had played. There they learned to lie there writhing about as soon as anyone touched them. It looked as if getting knocked about a bit was all part of handball, and Sigurd was anyway a tougher lad than his big brother. The toughness was something he’d inherited from his mother, but in Trym, who was two years older, she recognised his father’s laziness and evasiveness, and a bit more too.
During the break she went outside and took out her phone. For the second time in the course of the last twenty-four hours she called Detective Chief Inspector Viken, enjoying the suppressed irritation in his voice once she’d told him what the call was about.
– And you’re still doing everything you can to persuade Liss Bjerke to come to us directly with her information, he said sourly.
– I’m not going to answer that, she replied. – It’s not my fault if she has zero confidence in you.
How on earth did you manage to handle her so clumsily? she felt like adding, but didn’t want to get into an open quarrel with the DCI.
– Isn’t it better if she gets in touch with me rather than keeps what she knows to herself? she said instead.
In the final analysis Viken probably agreed that she had a point. – It sounds as though she might have managed to work out what her sister is saying in that video, he continued in a more composed tone. – Had you ever heard of this Ferenczi?
Jennifer couldn’t suppress a little laugh. No specialist branch of medicine was more remote to her than psychiatry, which she associated with waffle, a lack of method, and absolutely no demand for results. But she’d googled Sándor Ferenczi in the morning after Liss’s call and got over 112,000 hits.
– He’s written a lot about children who have been abused, she informed him. – According to Liss, her sister was using his theories in her PhD studies. If I might be so bold as to make a suggestion, it would be to take a closer look at that thesis. Mailin Bjerke interviewed and apparently treated young men who had been the subject of abuse.
Midway through the second half of the game, Roar Horvath called. For some reason or other she knew it would be him even before she looked at the display.
– Just a moment, she said, and made her way out towards the exit.
– Need to talk to you, Jenny, he said, and standing out in the cold grey mist drifting up from the River Glomma, she felt herself blushing. – I was in Bergen yesterday. Was going to call you but it was past midnight by the time I got home.
If it was just about this trip to Bergen, he could have rung someone else.
– You don’t need fancy excuses if you want to meet me, she said with a glance at her watch. She could be in Manglerud in a couple of hours, but then had a sudden thought that was immediate
ly very hard to resist. Ivar was at an agricultural conference with his brother-in-law for the weekend, and she’d be able to farm the two boys out with friends for the night.
She sat, leaning back in the kitchen chair and drinking beer, watching as Roar whisked egg and milk, fried bacon, seasoned and chopped tomatoes and cucumber. She’d borrowed one of his shirts;it was the size of a maternity smock and she could pull her knees up under it.
– Have you heard anyone say your name in English? she said, interrupting his account of the trip to Bergen.
He moved the frying pan off the heat. – Sure, whenever I’ve been in England they’ve always got a big laugh out of calling me Shout.
– Rory’s good, Jennifer said. – Maybe that’s what I should call you. Or do you have a middle name?
He hesitated a moment. – Mihaly.
– Mihaly Horvath? That’s about as un-Norwegian as you can get.
He poked his head into the fridge and took out a few packets of ready-chopped cured meat. – Mihaly was my old man’s name. Roar was the best my mother could come up with. She didn’t want me getting bullied at school because people thought I was a gypsy kid or something.
– So your middle name never got used?
He began spooning scrambled egg on to a dish. – My old man sometimes called me Miska.
– That’s cute. I’ve been imaging this remote and very strict father. But he wasn’t?
Roar gave a slight smile. – He came to Norway when he was eighteen years old. His parents were vanished by the Stalinists. He didn’t know anyone here, had to start from scratch. With nothing but his own two hands and a will of steel, as my mother used to say when she wanted to boast about him.
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