Where Roses Never Die

by Staalesen, Gunnar

  ‘How small?’

  A painful expression crossed her face. ‘Between six and ten, I would guess…’

  ‘Great. I’ll definitely talk to him. So that just leaves this house here.’

  ‘Yes, Randi Hagenberg lived there, who helped me to look for Mette that day. But that relationship ended in divorce as well, and a new family’s living there now. In fact, it’s the second since … then, so that house has been through the most changes.’

  Randi Hagenberg, I wrote. ‘And where are they now? The Hagenberg family, I mean.’

  ‘Well, now they’re not called … She was using her maiden name even then. But I don’t really know what’s happened to her. And Nils … he died.’

  ‘Nils?’

  ‘Nils Bringeland,’ she said a little impatiently, as if I wasn’t following.

  ‘Bringeland…?’

  ‘Yes. They had two children as well. Janne, who was the same age as Mette, and a boy called Joachim. He was a couple of years older than Håkon, but they were good pals anyway.’ Her expression changed. ‘Things didn’t go so well for Joachim.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘He started on drugs very young. That might have been what caused the break-up. I know from my own … yes. Today you’ll find him among the regular clientele in Nygårdsparken.’

  Another note re: the Hagenberg/Bringelands. ‘And all of them were at home when Mette disappeared?’

  ‘You mean…?’

  ‘The architect and his wife; Bringeland.’

  ‘Yes, Terje was at home. Vibeke was at the theatre. They were rehearsing a new play. And Nils was at home. I remember Randi shouting to him. I don’t know where Joachim was. I don’t remember.’

  ‘Well, his parents probably will. But you said Nils was dead, didn’t you?’

  Again she looked at me as though I wasn’t following. ‘I told you! It was one of the reasons for me coming to you. It was vital to try again before everyone who could remember anything was gone.’

  ‘And by that you meant Nils Bringeland?’

  ‘You must remember that. He was the man who was shot in the street during the robbery in Bryggen before Christmas last year.’

  ‘I thought I’d heard the name before.’

  ‘Really?’

  I sat looking at her. But she had no more to give me, and I couldn’t see how the murder of a casual passer-by during a robbery three months ago could have anything to do with a disappearance twenty-five years earlier.

  ‘One last detail, Maja. Your husband … Does he still live in Bergen?’

  Her eyes flickered. ‘No, he … they moved a few years ago. Him and his new wife, Gudrun. To Oslo.’

  ‘So he re-married?’

  ‘Yes, he did, quite early on.’

  ‘Right. Too early, you mean?’

  She shrugged. ‘It was his decision and she’s nice enough, Gudrun is. I’ve only met her a few times. At Håkon’s confirmation and I think there was one birthday.’

  ‘I suppose you have his address?’

  ‘No, but…’

  ‘I can find it myself. It’s easy.’

  Her eyes filled with tears. Her lips trembled unchecked as she exclaimed: ‘Can you imagine what happens to you when you go through something like this? When you lose a child?’

  ‘Yes, I really can…’

  ‘You blame yourself! What could I have done? Was it my fault this happened? What did I do wrong?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I should have paid more attention, of course I should. I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight for a second.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Yes, it is! But that’s how you think. I can tell you that, Veum. Not a day has passed since that Saturday in 1977 when I haven’t thought about it. What did we do wrong? What could we have done differently?’

  At the back of my mind I noted that she had changed the pronoun from I to we as she repeated her appeal, but I wasn’t going to go there. It was probably no more than a way of speaking, an unconscious need to have someone to share the blame with.

  She sat gazing into the air as though I was no longer present. When finally I coughed gently she looked up at once, wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and got to her feet with a perplexed expression, barely aware of where she was.

  I took her précis with me as I left. If nothing else, it gave me more than enough to do in the coming days. And I had to start somewhere. I felt like a cat chasing a mouse in a refrigeration plant where all the doors had been hermetically sealed years ago. Without a hope, in other words.

  8

  I stood in the yard looking around. I tried to summarise what she had told me.

  Nils Bringeland and Randi Hagenberg next door. New family there now.

  Opposite Maja, the Fylling family then. Fru Fylling has a new husband now.

  Next door to them, the Stangeland family then. Stangeland parents now.

  And, like a transverse connecting roof between the two terraced houses on each side: Terje Torbeinsvik – then with Vibeke Waaler, now with Britt and two kids.

  Relatively simple so long as I didn’t include those who no longer lived there: divorced partners, children who had grown up, other possible acquaintances of the various families.

  I stared at Torbeinsvik’s house. If anyone could tell me anything in general about the others it had to be him.

  I met his gaze through one of the first-floor windows. He was standing at the back of the room as though he didn’t want to be seen, but the reflection was not so strong that I couldn’t see him. I pointed at him with one hand and then back at myself as a sign that I would like to speak to him. He didn’t react, but he left the room.

  I crossed the yard and waited in front of his door. When no one opened up I rang the bell. After a while I heard vague noises inside. Then the door opened and Terje Torbeinsvik stood before me.

  In many ways he resembled a stereotypical architect from the 1970s, from the smock-like shirt, the leather waistcoat and the worn jeans, to the slightly over-large beard, shaggy hair and the classic I’ve-been-sitting-at-the-drawing-board gut, rounded like a well-fed farmed salmon. Originally his hair had been fair, but now there were flecks of grey and his beard was almost white with some dark tufts under his lower lip. His mouth was full and not without sensuality, his gaze sharp and alert beneath the bushy eyebrows, and when he finally said something it was in a dark, resonant voice that would have become a precentor at any funeral. ‘Yes, how can I help you?’

  ‘My name’s Veum. Varg Veum. And you’re Terje Torbeinsvik, I believe?’

  ‘That’s me, yes.’

  ‘You probably saw where I came from.’

  ‘I did happen to see you coming out of Maja’s house, yes.’ He said this with an undertone, as though I had done something illegal, or at least unseemly.

  ‘Yes. So you can imagine what this is about.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t.’

  ‘No? OK. I must have forgotten to say. I’m a private investigator.’

  ‘I see.’ That was all he said, but my understanding was that now he knew what this was about.

  ‘May I come in for a moment?’

  He eyed me doubtfully, as though unsure what purpose this would serve. Then he shrugged. ‘By all means. You’re stopping me from working my first shift of the day, but…’

  ‘You work from home?’

  ‘Two days a week.’

  ‘You didn’t seem that busy just before.’

  ‘Really? And on what do you base that assumption?’

  ‘Well…’ It was my turn to shrug. ‘Nothing in particular. Just a feeling I had.’

  He sniffed in contempt without any further elucidation. ‘We can go in here.’

  From the long, rectangular hallway he showed me in through a side door to what turned out to be his office. It was simply furnished with a large drawing board, shelves of professional literature, but mostly files, and some contour-less pencil sketches on the walls
– several variants of the view of Nordåsvatnet – and a couple of new children’s pictures pinned to empty spaces between the shelves and the framed pictures.

  He indicated a wicker chair beside the drawing board and took a seat himself on the high-backed swivel chair. When he swung round he was outlined against the window looking on to the yard. The daylight hit me in the face. This made me feel uncomfortable, as though I had been summoned to an interview somewhere and I didn’t have a clear conscience.

  To counteract this I went on the offensive. ‘This co-op is your project, I believe.’

  ‘Yes, you could say that.’

  ‘Maja said you knew everything about this area.’

  ‘Mm, yes … If not everything, most things. I presume you don’t mean the genesis. We live in Nordås, which was the neighbouring farm to Sørås. Originally there was only one farm here and its name, as you can perhaps imagine, was Ås.’ He half-turned to the window and glanced outside. ‘You can still see the hill.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the Middle Ages Nonneseter Convent owned the farm, and when all the convents were transferred to Vincens Lunge in 1528, Ås went with them. The farm known as Nordås belonged to famous Bergensians, such as the Krohn and Reimers families, until the nineteenth century, when it was partitioned into smaller farms. That was when Fana was still an agricultural village. They were turned into housing estates in the 1970s, and that’s when we – by which I mean me and my company – came into the picture, early that decade. We were in a position to choose the best plots…’ He motioned towards the other side of the house. ‘With, amongst other things, a splendid view of Nordåsvatnet. And then we got stuck in.’

  ‘Maja said it was a sort of idealistic project.’

  ‘Well…’ He hesitated. ‘This was the 1970s, as I said. We were all young and idealistic. Not exactly flower-power types, but some of us had slightly alternative views on housing and lifestyles. We tried to develop a community here. We made a communal function room in this house, where we could meet when we were free, in the evening or afternoon, at the weekend, have a beer or a glass of wine, bring along an instrument and jam together, organise recital programmes, amusements for the children according to how they felt, in short, to try to create a community we might otherwise have missed in society at that time. Occasionally we had communal meals, bring-along parties, where we sat round a long table and shared food. A kind of modern, Nordic variant of the Mediterranean extended family.

  ‘Semi-hippie colony, semi-mafia.’

  He smiled acidly. ‘More a Norse skytningsstove, if you know what that is.’

  ‘A schøttstue.’

  ‘Yes, if you prefer the German version.’

  ‘Well, a canteen at any rate. And how did you recruit the inhabitants?’

  He stared evasively into the middle distance. ‘Erm, that depended. Some of us knew one another from before. Which was the case with me and Tor Fylling, who lived over there.’ He nodded to the house Maja called house number one. ‘We were old school pals. As indeed was Nils Bringeland.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Then they knew other people. In brief … We never did any advertising or the like. By and large Nils and I attended to the meetings with interested parties to try and have the most harmonious group of people possible. Then we met all the candidates, as it were, and drew up some common guidelines before we even started building.’

  ‘That early?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But this would mean you all knew one another well?’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. Better than many others in a similar situation.’

  ‘But the project can’t have been a hundred percent successful after all.’

  ‘Really?’ He arched his eyebrows.

  ‘Yes, if you consider the number of divorces in the co-op. Slightly above average, even for our times, wouldn’t you say?’

  He gave me a scornful glare. ‘Monogamy’s antiquated, Veum. I thought you knew. We only reflect modern society. Nothing very remarkable about that.’

  ‘Mhm.’ I shrugged to signal that I understood what he was saying, but I didn’t necessarily agree. ‘Serial monogamy is fashionable at any rate, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes indeed. But I don’t suppose you wanted to speak to me to discuss this.’

  ‘No. As you clearly realise, this is about the Mette Case.’

  He sighed. ‘Yes, that was a sad business. In many ways what happened cast a shadow over the whole of our project. What was supposed to have been a modern idyll became … something else. We were all drawn into the case for good or ill. It was impossible not to be involved. We knew Mette of course. Many of the families had children. We became suspicious. If an unfamiliar car or a walker appeared in the locality you were on your toes immediately. And when it gradually emerged that the case would never be cleared up … well…’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘That destroyed a lot for us. It was never quite the same again.’

  ‘Yes, would you say … the high divorce rate, could it have had anything to do with it?’

  ‘You’re the one calling it abnormally high, but … No, I don’t think so. Or maybe yes, in some of the families.’

  ‘Are you thinking of someone in particular?’

  He hesitated, as though deliberating. ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Not really?’

  ‘The answer’s no, Veum, if you need to have it spelled out.’

  ‘And you … do you have any theory as to what could have happened to Mette?’

  ‘Me? Why should I?’

  ‘You were at home that day.’

  ‘Yes, and so what? Vibeke, to whom I was married at the time, was an actress. She was at the theatre rehearsing that morning. A leading role, probably. She was one of the best in town at the time.’

  ‘Yes, I remember her.’

  He gave me a mocking look. ‘You’re not the only one.’

  ‘But you were at home,’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes, I was probably here in my office working. There was a lot of work in those years, early in the morning and late at night, and a Saturday morning was an oasis of peace – for those of us who didn’t have children.’

  I nodded towards the window. ‘So you could see Mette playing.’

  He met my gaze with an expression that suggested he was talking to a complete moron. ‘Yes, I could, Veum. And don’t you think I told the police that – countless times? My drawing board has always stood where it is now, because of the light. If you use your head and your eyes you will see that the way I sit – and draw – I am facing a completely different direction, and if I had turned round I’d have seen the house opposite the Misvær family’s.’

  ‘Yes. You would have seen, for example, Tor Fylling going out.’

  ‘Correct, Veum. I would. But I didn’t. I didn’t see Mette playing and I didn’t see Tor going out. Everyone can tell you what I saw. To be precise: this. I saw Maja ringing the doorbell at Tor’s and asking him something. Afterwards she broke into a run. She never came here though. But I went out after a while to see what all the fuss was about, and then I joined the search party, like everyone else.’

  ‘Well … I’m not sure I’ve got any more questions to ask you, this time round. How did you react to the news of Nils Bringeland being killed in the winter?’

  ‘How did I react? What do you think? With shock, of course. Shot down like that, in broad daylight. You never think anything like that can happen, at least not to someone you know.’

  ‘Did you maintain contact after he left here?’

  ‘Not really. My circumstances have changed, as you perhaps know. New wife, small children. Not much time to keep up with old school friends.’

  ‘The same applied to Tor Fylling?’

  ‘The same applies to everyone. Was there anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think then I should accompany you to the door so that I can return to my work.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Nothing t
o thank me for,’ he said, and almost swept me out of the office towards the front door.

  Once outside, I was reminded of what Cecilie Lyngmo had said when I phoned her. There was something about that co-op, she had said, she’d had a feeling that something was out of kilter there. Now I had that self-same feeling. They were holding something back from me, both Maja Misvær and Terje Torbeinsvik, some information that might not have had anything to do with Mette, yet still made me hesitant. As was my wont, I decided I wasn’t going to give in until I found out what it was.

  With my back to Terje Torbeinsvik’s house, and with Maja’s house on my left, I contemplated my surroundings. I looked at the gate, tried to picture little Mette playing in the sandpit on the left, twenty-five years ago. What would have made her leave the sandpit? Another child? An animal? Someone standing by the gate and showing her something exciting? Someone she knew and wasn’t afraid of … or someone else? And whoever it was, how could he – or she – be so sure they wouldn’t be seen? Why had no one seen anything? How was it possible for the small girl just to disappear – into thin air – and so completely that not even the massive police investigation in 1977 and all the years afterwards had led to her being found?

  So many questions and, thus far, no answers. Once again I felt the assignment was beyond me. What could I find out that the police had not already unearthed?

  I left through the gate, the same way Mette had gone that time, to all appearances. Again my mouth felt dry. I ran my tongue over my lips, as if the aftertaste of yesterday’s aquavit was still there, but in vain. All I tasted was my most bitter defeat. The taste of sorrow and loss, and the eternal craving in your stomach that only aquavit could assuage, for a brief moment or two. With trembling hands I unlocked the car, got in behind the wheel, inserted the key in the ignition and started up.

  I had to begin somewhere. It might as well be at the police station.

  9

  Nothing was as it had once been. You used to be able to walk straight into the police station in Allehelgens gate, take the lift up and find the officers you were looking for, with little resistance, apart from the sceptical glares from people who knew who you were and those who didn’t. Those who knew me were often more sceptical.