by Anne Holt
With no tears, which for her was the most important thing.
She graced the front page of every other passenger’s newspaper, and was named in one conversation after another. Nevertheless, she had been left completely in peace. When anyone gave her a second glance over the top of a newspaper, she hid her chin in her scarf, tugged her hat even further down her forehead and looked out of the window.
The journey had finally neared its end. She hadn’t eaten since her extravagant breakfast, and felt tired. Her mobile had vibrated only once. It was Maggi, but Hege could not bring herself to talk, so she had sent a reassuring text instead.
She wanted to quit, she thought, as the subway train ascended the hill.
Everything would ease off if she just stopped skiing. The story would be forgotten in a couple of months, maybe before that, at least until the Winter Olympics started, and Hege had really always wanted to study. Maybe medicine. Or pharmacy, since chemistry had been her favourite subject at high school.
Mum would have listened and let her give up.
Dad would never go along with it.
Her phone had vibrated again.
Hege did not recognize the number. A journalist, probably, even though approaches from them had diminished drastically in the course of the past few days. They had begun to learn that she wouldn’t answer.
Not now either.
It took only a few seconds from the call ending before a text message illuminated the screen.
This is Sølve Bang calling. I realize that these days you need to know who it is. I have something urgent I need to speak to you about. Can you phone me back?
Hege had never been particularly keen on Sølve Bang. She didn’t really know why. She had read all his books and liked them. Particularly Forgotten Tracks, his first novel. All the same, there was something sleazy about him, especially the way he spoke to Maggi. He was so exclusively friendly to the almost invisible home help, but Hege was convinced this was mainly an opportunity to impress the other guests by speaking Polish. There was something servile and at the same time exaggeratedly self-assured about the man, and she had always felt slightly ill at ease in his company.
Dad liked Sølve Bang. Called him a colourful character. A renaissance man. Well versed in languages, knowledgeable and an important writer. As if Dad had any idea about that, as he never read anything other than business documents and newspapers.
Hege could not fathom what he wanted with her.
However, she called him back. He was a friend of her father’s and had delivered a beautiful speech at her mother’s funeral. Hege did not remember much about that day, but she had never forgotten that. Sølve had called her mother ‘a fairy straight from the pages of Tolkien, a gracious bearer of light and goodness’.
Hege had read the whole of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the following six months, even though she was only eleven years old and her mother had thought she ought to wait.
She phoned Sølve Bang and heard what he had to say. Gave him a blunt response, broke off the conversation and then took off at top speed. She had never run so far and so fast, and when she reached her destination, her head was in a spin.
THE CAR
Standing in Ormsundveien, Selma Falck stared up at a house that was no longer hers. It was close to eleven o’clock at night.
As usual it had grown colder again in the afternoon and at eight p.m. it had started to snow once more. Wet, massive blobs of snow that eventually lay everywhere as slush before finally freezing to ice. She had run from Grünerløkka and was drenched. She quickly tore off her orange reflective waistcoat, rolled it up to next to nothing and stuffed it into her Camelbak rucksack after rummaging to find her car keys.
The house, which in Selma’s opinion was the most hideous in all of Norway, was shrouded in darkness. Only the lamps around the swimming pool, covered over for winter, were lit; the bulbs in the wrought-iron lamps flanking the steep driveway up to the main garage had not been replaced when they had all gone at the one time due to a short circuit earlier that autumn.
Selma stood gazing at the house.
She wished him all the best in owning it. He loved every bay window and pillar of it. He was the one who had insisted on glazed roof tiles when they had to renew them in 2010, at least twenty years after the shiny roofs had gone out of fashion. Jesso had laid out most of the garden. He had taken a stand about the swimming pool as well, even though environmental concerns meant it was unheated and so served the same purpose as the fjord directly across the road.
And which was free of charge into the bargain.
Selma had put her foot down when it came to the interior, but the house in Ormsundveien had always been mostly his, in actual fact.
And now his mother was living there too.
As an MP, Jesso earned around a million kroner a year. He had not been able to buy out Selma’s half-share in the house. The valuation was set at 26 million, the mortgage had been paid off two years ago, and Selma had asked for her rightful 13 million virtually overnight.
But he was the only son of a mother aged eighty-four, a widow living in a huge villa in Nordberg. Her house had barely seen a tradesman’s work since the sixties, and some of the land had been parcelled out and sold by Jesso’s father after a bankruptcy. Nordberg was still Nordberg, however, and on a promise of being allowed to live in a basement apartment in Ormundsundveien for the rest of her natural life, his mother had allowed Jesso to sell his childhood home and use the money to become sole owner of what had once also been Selma’s residence.
Her mother-in-law was allergic to cats, so Darius had been included in the arrangement. Selma had to take the cat with her and renounce all claim on the house and its contents, in exchange for 10 million kroner and a mortgage credit bond on Ormsundveien as security for the remainder of the sum owing.
That could not be called in for at least ten years.
It crossed her mind that it did not matter as she stood there looking up at the building. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she had left. The only sound to be heard was the constant hum of traffic from Mosseveien on the other side of the water and the lazy lapping of the waves on the foundations of the boathouse behind her. The air was filled with the tang of the sea, wood smoke and a faint hint of engine oil.
For eighteen years she had called this place home. She knew the sounds and the smells, the plants and trees and every stone on the solid perimeter wall on the western side that she and Jesso had built the summer Johannes turned four.
It was good to be rid of it all.
Liberating, Selma realized: this was not her life. She did not know where her life truly lay. Not yet, but the sight of the ridiculously expensive villa by the fjord, with its projections, mullioned and dormer windows, and eaves that were far too deep, made her suddenly appreciate it was not just her marriage that, deep down, she was glad to be finished with.
They were all asleep.
Selma did not need to go up to the house. At the bottom of the property, right beside the road, there was an ancient garage that should have been demolished a decade ago. They had let it remain because they probably didn’t want to build a replacement so close to the fjord. Only the most necessary maintenance was carried out on the sagging, red-painted building, and the door springs were so stiff that Selma was afraid it would be difficult to open.
Up in the double main garage, flush with the house, was a Volvo XC90 T8, 2017 model. Jesso had been allowed to keep that, in accordance with an agreement with a list no lawyer in the world would have advised Selma to sign. As far as she was concerned, the car she had bought in January for almost 1.3 million kroner was of absolutely no interest, as long as she was allowed to keep the vehicle that came into sight as soon as she, with surprising ease, opened the manual garage door.
A Volvo Amazon 123 GT from 1966.
The year of her birth.
Even in the sparse light from the street lamp, the red paint-work shone with an intensity that made her shudder
. The roof was covered in a thin layer of dust, she noticed as she ran her fingers over the dull, black material that looked like leather and was actually synthetic fabric.
‘Are you taking out your swanky car in this weather?’
Selma bumped her head on an old bicycle hanging on the wall.
An ugly dog wagged its tail and pulled on the lead, anxious to make friends.
‘Do you have winter tyres on it, then?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Selma said, smiling: she hoped the darkness would prevent her neighbour from seeing that she was bluffing. ‘It’s to go for a service. Needs a complete overhaul every year, you know.’
‘So late? It’s nearly midnight. And wouldn’t it be wiser to wait until spring?’
The man smiled as he came closer. He lived in the house to the north-east. Notoriously argumentative, but of the kind who prefaced every criticism with a broad smile. Nasty comments presented as jokes. Protests as apparently pleasant, incontestable suggestions.
Selma grew increasingly relieved not to live here any longer.
‘Of course not now,’ Selma said, as she exited the garage. ‘Early tomorrow morning. Just wanted to check that everything was OK.’
She closed the door without too much exertion.
‘Good night, then,’ she said pleasantly and set off towards the driveway.
‘Have you been away somewhere?’ he virtually shouted after her. ‘I’ve not seen you for a while! By the way, I read in the newspaper that you had sold …’
Selma did not reply, but simply picked up speed.
Without really doing so.
She was walking with tiny steps, but extremely fast, to create the illusion that she was in a hurry. It worked. She had barely gone more than six or seven metres up the driveway before the man and his dog disappeared.
She stopped. Waited for a minute or two. She was about to go back down again when she noticed another set of footprints in the frozen slush on the new asphalt they had laid last year.
There was nothing strange at all about footsteps leading up to the house. They could belong to Jesso. Or Johannes. Since the footsteps did not go back down again, they must necessarily belong to someone who was still in the house, she concluded, and almost calmed down at that thought.
But not entirely.
There was something familiar about the footprints.
The pattern was distinctive, and the frozen slush sufficiently deep to see very clearly the impression of the steel rod across the sole.
Ski fastenings.
Someone had walked here in ski boots.
Recognizing the model, Selma was able to confirm it as soon as she had compared it with the photos she had taken in Jan Morell’s garden. They seemed identical. She carefully dangled her keys beside the clearest footprint.
Snap, said her iPhone, and Selma could understand precious little.
She tucked her mobile into her bag and continued on up. Fairly slowly and close to the cedar hedge, towards the swimming pool area. It was so high and dense that the house did not become visible until the driveway ended in a large, paved courtyard. The garage was right in front of her, the entrance to the house on the left-hand side. Even at a distance of so many metres, she could see that Jesso had changed the nameplate. The plastic-laminated, faded drawing of the whole family that Anine had produced as an eight-year-old had been replaced by an enormous brass plate.
‘Mork’ was all it said, as if Jesso and his mother already lived there on their own.
Things were really done and dusted here.
Selma realized she was breathing with her mouth open, slightly too fast, because she was so disconcerted by observing that the foot-steps undoubtedly crossed the courtyard, but did not reach as far as the door. Instead they continued towards the north-west and past the corner of the house. Selma let her eyes scan the building again. Everything was in darkness. Silent. She followed the footsteps.
At the rear of the house it was difficult to see anything at all. For a moment she considered using the flashlight function on her mobile, but dropped the idea. Now she was standing only a metre away from Johannes’s bedroom window. It was slightly open, despite the weather, and Selma held her breath in the forlorn hope of hearing his.
Don’t think of the children. Don’t.
Her eyes began to adjust to the darkness. The prints moved out on to the lawn, she could now see, all the way to the spot where Jesso had built a carp pond a few years ago. Four fish had to suffer an apparently painful death before Jesso accepted that he did not have a clue about aquaculture. The pit had become a birdbath instead, and was usually covered in green slime for the summer half of the year.
At the edge, constructed from small pebbles the children had been well paid to collect, the man in ski boots had come to a halt.
It looked as if he had stood there for a while, then trudged around a little, but always with his face turned to the house. Selma tried to get closer to the clump of footprints, but the frozen ground crunched so loudly beneath her shoes that she stopped. If Johannes turned on his light and looked out at that moment, she would be the first thing he saw. Her pulse accelerated at the very thought, and she suddenly grew angry.
Selma Falck was very rarely angry.
She showed it even more rarely.
This was her house. At least until a short time ago. It was her own almost-grown son who was behind those drawn curtains on the first floor, and naturally it did not matter if he discovered her. The truth was on her side. She merely wanted to collect her car, and had taken a walk up to the house to investigate some suspicious footprints.
‘Fuck,’ she said under her breath, switching on her mobile and walking diagonally across the grass, parallel with the footprints.
Quite right, beside the birdbath that was now empty of anything other than decaying leaves and dirty ice crystals, the man had lingered for a spell. Then he had taken a short cut towards the most northerly corner of the house. Selma followed and discovered that he had not moved on to the front of the house. That would have been risky. The living room window was massive, and the lights from the swimming pool area would make him easy to spot.
He had also lingered at this corner of the house. Not for quite such a long time, apparently. Then the footprints showed that he had walked towards the stone wall, climbed over and disappeared through the neighbour’s garden.
Selma was tempted to follow, but ditched the idea. She could always get away with prowling around in her own former property. A nocturnal visit to her neighbour would be more difficult to explain, and after a moment’s hesitation she therefore returned the same way she had come.
No one woke. No light was switched on. As quietly as Selma could manage, she again opened the garage door down by the road, clambered into the Amazon and turned on the ignition while murmuring a prayer. Two further attempts, two more prayers, and the engine started.
She slipped out on to the narrow road and drove towards the city. To Ensjø, where the Poker Turk had offered her garage space in exchange for help with his tax return in a few months’ time. She did not dare to leave the Amazon parked in the street in Grünerløkka, so she had accepted with alacrity. It would at least be more accessible to her in Ensjø than out on Ormøya.
The footprints in the garden had made her feel uneasy.
She drove slowly. If she were stopped with summer tyres on these slippery roads, her driving licence would be at stake. It would be easier as soon as she emerged on to Mosseveien, where the traffic kept the asphalt perpetually clear. From there it would only take minutes to reach Ensjø.
It could all be coincidence. Most things happened by chance, as Selma was well aware. She seldom searched for connections when there was no necessity to do so, and no harm had been done either in Vettakollen or on Ormøya. Besides, there might well be credible explanations for someone having wandered through the garden in the same type of ski boots in the north and south of Oslo.
Within the space of a few days.
And the expensive boots were scarcely something anyone would roam around in without skis on their feet. It was entirely possible to use winter shoes on roller skis, Selma knew, but most people who trained so rigorously that they would be out on days like this would be wearing special boots.
At least she thought so.
As she drove along Ormsundveien, she tried to tear herself away from thoughts of the boots and instead imagine what the person in question had been after.
Supposing it had been the same person.
Supposing it had been a man, something the shoe size at least indicated.
A housebreaker might well do a recce before breaking in, but would also have checked doors and windows. Alarm installations. The residents’ sleeping patterns could be partially discerned through surveillance, but not on only one visit.
It was all quite simply incomprehensible.
Unless skiers had taken to trudging through all of Oslo’s gardens for the time being, it was also impossible to understand the link between the footprints in Vettakollen and the ones in Ormsundveien. As far as Selma knew, no one apart from Jan Morell, Hege, the home help up there and herself had any notion of the assignment she had been given. Other than Einar Falsen, of course, but he never spoke to anyone except her. Quite literally.
Selma was the only link between the two properties. One was owned by her client, and the other had belonged to her until very recently.
Practically no one knew she had moved out less than a week ago.
Next to no one.
The car rolled quietly over the bridge to the mainland. The traffic was sparse, and when she reached Mosseveien a couple of minutes later, the lights flashed yellow and let her swing towards the city centre without stopping.