Where Roses Never Die

by Staalesen, Gunnar

  ‘September…?’ He thrust his eyes open. ‘When she disappeared, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘N-n-nothing. I know nothing about it. I told you that last time we spoke … didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, but you were lying.’

  ‘Eh? Lying? Me? About what?’

  ‘I could reel off all the things you didn’t tell me. What you and Håkon saw on New Year’s Eve 1976, for example.’

  ‘Ha! So Håkon cracked, did he? Where the hell did you find the twat? On FC Brann’s rubbish heap?’

  ‘Somewhere else. And he also told me how you went into the woods with Mette one summer’s day that year to try it yourself, as you put it.’

  ‘He’s got a memory like an elephant, hasn’t he? I can barely remember where I was this morning.’

  ‘A different place from here?’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  I followed his advice, for a while. He sat staring angrily into the air with the empty mug between his hands.

  ‘More coffee?’

  He nodded and passed me the mug. I took it to the hotplate, poured instant coffee and more hot water in, repeated the ritual with my cup and returned to the table. I gave him the mug, he nodded thank you, raised it to his mouth and drank a mouthful, which must have made the skin inside flinch with pain. But he didn’t turn a hair.

  He had gone into the woods with Mette. She held his hand, as though he were her father. He felt almost proud, but at the same time he had a feeling in his stomach – of tension, excitement, which he couldn’t yet give a name…

  She was wearing a blue jumper and light-blue trousers with braces, and her blonde hair shone in the summer sun. They hadn’t got very far before she asked for the chocolate he had promised her. ‘Just a bit farther,’ he said. ‘Over here.’

  He had decided on the place earlier. Through the woods, down into a hollow with moss on the ground, and there … there he would do exactly what the architect man had done to his mother that night six months before.

  ‘Here, Mette…’

  She looked up at him in hope.

  ‘But it’s got to be a secret.’

  She nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lie down on your back first. And close your eyes!’

  She looked at him slyly, as though she liked such secrets. And she did exactly what he said, lay down on her back and screwed her eyes shut. He crept over to her, loosened the belt on his trousers and opened them at the front. He pulled her braces down over her shoulders and was placing his hands on her trousers to pull them down when it happened.

  A steely hand grabbed him by the neck, squeezed and lifted him until he was hanging and wriggling in the air above the terrified girl, who had now opened her eyes and was watching what was going on, her mouth agape.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, boy?’ he heard a man’s voice say in his ears, but he didn’t dare turn around to see who it was.

  He just whimpered in protest. ‘I wasn’t going to!’

  Then he was hurled to the side, so hard that he fell against a tree trunk, hit his shoulder so hard he had bruises for more than a week afterwards, and fell to the ground. When he did finally dare to raise his eyes he saw the adult man bend down, pick Mette up and brush off all the debris from the forest floor. While he patted her softly on the head with one hand he took out something wrapped in pale-yellow paper and held it in front of her.

  Mette looked up at him and the corners of her lips curled. Then she stretched out a hand and said: ‘Chocolate!’ She put one piece in her mouth and munched while looking up at the tall man and grinning with brown chocolate on her front teeth.

  The man turned to Joachim, who was still sitting against the tree root where he had fallen, stunned and resting. The man glared at him and his eyes flashed as he said: ‘Don’t you ever do this again! If I catch you one more time I’ll take you to the police and you’ll be put in prison for the rest of your life, do you understand me?’

  When he didn’t answer, the man repeated himself, in an even firmer tone: ‘Do you understand me?’

  Then he nodded. ‘Yes. I’ll never do it again…’

  ‘Good. So let’s forget all about this, shall we?’ The man turned to Mette again and stretched out a hand. ‘Come on!’

  Just as she had innocently followed Joachim here, she walked back hand in hand with the tall man.

  Joachim sat where he was, as quiet as a mouse, until long after they had gone. When he returned to the yard a bit later and carefully opened the gate, Mette was in the sandpit playing with Janne, as though nothing had happened.

  Finished with telling his story, Joachim sat with the cup of coffee to his mouth, perhaps wishing he could hide behind it. Nevertheless, a calmer expression had spread across his face now, as if getting the story off his chest after so many years had given him peace of mind.

  Then he turned to me. ‘But this was mid-summer. This was long before the day she disappeared. That day I was in my room all the time. I swear to you!’

  I nodded thoughtfully. ‘And this adult man, have you seen him since?’

  ‘Both before and after!’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It was Langemann!’

  ‘Langemann?’

  ‘We called him that because he was so long. He was the pedo who used to visit Eivind and Else.’

  ‘Jesper Janevik?’

  ‘Yes…’

  43

  Jesper Janevik started to close the door the moment he recognised me on the step, but I was as fast with my foot as I had been on the previous occasion and placed it in the door opening. He stared at it, furious, as if intending to push it off, but from his mouth came only a deep groan of despair.

  ‘Janevik … This time we have to have a proper conversation. Let me in!’

  ‘We had one last time, didn’t we? Stop harassing me!’

  ‘We didn’t talk enough. There have been some fresh developments since then.’

  We stood staring at each other. He was wearing the same dark-blue jeans as before, or at least the same brand, but his shirt was white and his vest, visible at the neck, black. There was a silvery glitter in his dark hair and his eyes were shiny and feverish. He looked as if he had slept badly since I last visited him, in which case it was not without good reason.

  ‘It’s too cold to stand outside. Either you let me in or I’ll ring the police and ask them to get a search warrant.’ I looked around and motioned towards the flowerbeds around his house. ‘They’ll dig up every bloody bed you’ve got!’

  ‘No!’ he whimpered, as though this was the worst calamity that could befall him. ‘Not that, please! Come in then, if you absolutely have to.’

  He hung back in the dark hallway. I pushed the door and followed him in. The air inside was cold and the morning light from outside showed me the way. He pointed to an open door, which led into a rather old-fashioned sitting room, in which the flower pots on the windowsill were the sole sign of life. A radio cabinet from the 1950s and a television from the 1970s, an inheritance from his parents, judging by the sight of them, occupied one wall and a corner. An empty coffee table, a sofa and three chairs, upholstered in the same grey-brown material with red patches under the arm rests, made up the remainder of the furniture. On the cabinet was the same photograph I had seen in his niece’s house four days earlier: the father and mother in front of a dark Fiat, both well advanced in years, but proud of their new acquisition, which they would keep for the rest of their of their lives and then leave to their heirs.

  I walked over, picked up the photo and held it in the air. ‘Your father was proud of this car, Liv Grethe told me when I visited her and your sister, last Thursday.’

  He glanced at the picture, then back at me. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must have driven it yourself now and then?’

  ‘No, never. It was Dad’s.’

  ‘Yes, but Liv Grethe said … After your father died it just stood in the garage. Your mother didn’t drive. I suppose y
ou do, though?’

  He shrugged and nodded. ‘Yes…’

  ‘Don’t say you never borrowed it.’

  He squirmed. ‘Once in a blue moon maybe.’

  ‘Like that Saturday in September 1977, for example?’

  ‘That Sat—’ He kept blinking as if I was blowing at him, hard. ‘No, no! What are you after …? Are you accusing me of …? Do you think I…?’ Tears were in his eyes, so big and shiny they were like oil.

  I persisted: ‘That Saturday in September 1977, when you drove up to Solstølen and took little Mette, whom you knew after you saved her from an incident in the woods earlier that summer.’

  He stared at me in silence.

  ‘You parked in the street. You saw her alone in the sandpit playing. Probably you called her from the gate, showed her a bar of chocolate and asked if she wanted some … When she went over you gave it to her, lifted her up, carried her to the car and asked if she felt like a trip, that would be more fun than sitting along and digging sand, wouldn’t it? And of course she thought so too?’

  His face contorted, twitched, more violently and uncontrolled than before, as though he were on the verge of some kind of stroke. He was breathing hard, but chewed his lip so as not to let out the smallest sound.

  ‘Isn’t that true? Give or take a detail? Wasn’t that how it happened?’

  ‘No! Not like that…’

  ‘How then?’

  Again he stood staring at me. I could read in his eyes that it was only now he realised what he had said. ‘I didn’t mean…’

  ‘You didn’t mean to do it?’

  ‘To say … what I said.’

  ‘But now you have.’

  At once he burst into tears. He slumped down on the nearest chair, covered his face with his hands and sobbed loudly and painfully as his whole body quivered and shook. It was like watching a little child that has fallen and hurt themselves. But I had to remind myself – what had happened to the little child we were discussing was far worse.

  With mixed feelings – sympathy and cold distance – I watched him, I didn’t say a word, I didn‘t move. I just waited, as so often before, when I knew a breakthrough was imminent.

  In the end his crying subsided. He was sitting hunched up in the chair, but lowered his arms and looked at me with the eyes of a wounded animal. ‘I knew it! Knew I would be blamed yet again for something I haven’t done.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘First the damned girls. Then the police. Then that dreadful policeman in 1977 – Dankert Muus. I still wake up in the night and see him before me. He was evil … evil!’

  ‘That may be a little exagg—’

  ‘And then you come along, twenty-five years later, with the same accusations.’ He hiccoughed and drew a deep breath. ‘That isn’t how it was. I’ve never been … like that. It wasn’t my fault she drowned.’

  This went through me like a sliver of ice. ‘Did she drown? Mette?’

  He looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘Mette? I’m not talking about Mette!’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Liv Grethe, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Liv Grethe?’

  ‘I told her when I went to make coffee that she had to keep an eye on her all the time. But she just lay there, half-naked in the sun. She was desperate for a tan. And then she fell asleep – or dozed off – or whatever it was that happened.’

  ‘And now you’re talking about … your sister?’

  ‘Maria, yes. And when I returned with a jug of coffee, Liv Grethe wasn’t anywhere to be seen.’

  Before he had gone off she had been sitting and playing at the edge of the water. Her little blue bucket and red spade were still there, but she…

  ‘Maria! What are you thinking of? Where’s Liv Grethe?’

  She had given a start, pushed her sunglasses up on to her head and looked around, befuddled. ‘What? But she was here!’

  ‘Well, she isn’t now. She’s gone.’

  They had desperately searched everywhere. He had run over to the water, but the waves were washing in and out and the sea quickly became deep. He threw himself in, swam out, dived down, opened his eyes, looked around, paddled back up to the surface, took a deep breath and dived back down. It was only after – how long? he was never quite sure – fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes that he found her, at the bottom in her tiny swimming trunks, her hair floating up with the water, her mouth and eyes open, the pupils had long disappeared behind her eyelids. A little mermaid.

  He swam down to her, so deep that his blood pounded like timpani in his head and his eardrums hurt, but he managed to get hold of her, grab her arm and pull her up, drag her shore-wards until he felt firm ground under his feet, stood up and waded back with the lifeless bundle in his arms, staring at his mother, his sister standing there, her stupid, pained face, stiffened into a grimace that would soon crack, soon dissolve into a thousand pieces, never to be the same face again, with a slow-working poison in her soul and brain that would leave its marks for the rest of her life.

  ‘She was dead, you see? We did all we could, but there was no life left in her. And that was when Maria realised, when she broke down. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so desperate. Desperate? Hysterical! She howled and screamed, pummelled my chest and said it was my fault, everything was my fault! Now she had lost everything, first of all her husband, then her daughter, now she had nothing left to live for, she might as well jump into the sea herself. I had to restrain her, I had to hold her so tightly my nails were gouging her skin, but she kept hitting me – your fault, Jesper, your fault, Jesper! And then I said … Well, then, I told her.’

  He paused. He stared at me blindly. He had been so deep into his narrative that he was finding it difficult to return to the present. His head sank further and he sat studying his hands, which opened and closed, opened and closed.

  ‘So then you told her…’ I repeated.

  He nodded mutely.

  ‘What did you tell her, Jesper?’

  He shook his head and refused to say.

  So I said it for him. ‘You said you’d find another little girl for her, didn’t you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  44

  I didn’t dare leave him while we waited for the police. Now everything was out in the open a new composure came over him, as though this was what he had been yearning for all these years: finally to be able to tell the truth about what really happened on that September day in 1977.

  As soon as he had promised her, he knew at once what he would do. First he had taken Maria into the house, given her several Valium tablets from a bottle she’d been prescribed and laid her down on the sofa in the sitting room with a woollen blanket wrapped round her. She fell asleep almost at once.

  ‘And the body, what did you do with that?’

  The next thing to do was to go back down to the beach, take the drowned child to her house, and, after a quick think, bury her. The rose bed facing the north-east was the nicest spot. With a spade he buried her deep, moved the rose bushes to the side, wrapped Liv Grethe in a blanket and placed her in the deep grave. For a moment he stood with bowed head looking down at the round bundle. Then he picked a pale-red rose from the nearest bush, held it to his nose and smelled the bewitching perfume, and dropped it onto the tartan plaid. Then he shovelled the soil back in, placed the rose bushes over her and it wasn’t long before everything was as it had been. No one could see a difference.

  ‘And she’s still there?’

  He nodded slowly. ‘It’s the most beautiful rose bed of them all.’

  We sat in silence, both of us, as the unreality of the situation gradually sank in.

  I was the first to speak. ‘And then…?’

  ‘This was a Friday…’

  He had checked his watch. It was too late now, but the day after … He spent the evening with Maria, sitting in the armchair next to the sofa, where she lay as if in a coma, with the television on, but not the volume, so as not to wake her up.


  She opened her eyes a couple of times, looked around, met his gaze and asked in a daze: ‘Liv Grethe?’

  ‘She’s asleep.’

  She was satisfied with that answer and soon went back to sleep.

  The following day he drove the car out of the garage for the first time in many months, got behind the wheel, filled up with petrol in Florvåg before driving down to the terminal in Kleppestø and waiting for the ferry to dock. During the crossing he stood on deck. It was a beautiful day with a few scattered showers, sunny intervals and late-summer temperatures, although it was mid-September. Inside, he felt a strange calm; everything was predestined, somewhere it was written in the stars that this is what he would do.

  In Solstølvegen he parked the car outside the fence, sat for a moment and deliberated, then he got out of the car. When he reached the gate it struck him once again. This was no mere chance. This was how it was meant to be. She was in the sandpit – alone. And there wasn’t anyone to be seen in the yard between the five houses. No one else but her.

  He took a bar of chocolate from his inside pocket, held it in the air and said: ‘Mette! Look what I’ve got for you…’

  The little girl looked up, recognised him at once, got up so quickly she knocked over the blue bucket she was filling and ran towards him smiling. ‘Hi!’

  He broke off a bit of chocolate for her. She took it and put it in her mouth in one movement while beaming up at him.

  ‘Look what I’ve got for you today, Mette … My new car.’

  She stretched her neck to look over the gate, nodding happily. He scanned the houses, from one to the next, window to window. Not a sign of life, not even in the house where she belonged. Then he quickly leaned over, lifted her up, held her away from his body and said: ‘Do you feel like a little trip with Uncle Jesper?’

  ‘Uncle Jesper,’ she answered, and nodded. ‘Are you my uncle too?’

  ‘I certainly am. Come on!’

  He whisked her off to his car, opened the door on the left, placed her on the front seat without fastening her seat belt, ran round the car, got in behind the wheel, twisted the ignition key and started up.