by Anne Holt
He came to a sudden halt. Just ahead on the ski trail, maybe fifty metres or so, three boys came whizzing out of the forest. They were laughing and yelling and didn’t look back. None of them caught sight of Vetle, but Vetle recognized the first of them, the biggest one: a fifteen-year-old with a knitted helmet in red, white and blue. He wore that hat all winter, the boy from Brannvaktveien, even though those helmets were really only for speed skaters. He was in the tenth grade, the class that actually didn’t exist, and everyone knew what sort of people were in there. The guy had Kandahar bindings attached to a pair of clunky, tar-coated wooden planks.
He was bloody good at skiing all the same. He came flying out of the deep snow and swerved perfectly on to the main trail.
Vetle stood like a statue and watched the three boys disappear from sight.
He could hear a wailing noise from the forest. Quite faint, but distinct nonetheless. It was someone crying, Vetle thought, a boy crying as Vetle had never heard anyone cry before. Arne never cried, he was far too big for that, but this was Arne, it was Vetle’s big brother who was blubbering so loudly, the seven-year-old was absolutely positive of that without really understanding why, and he turned abruptly with the lightest skis in the world and went back to the freshly made track towards the undulating slope on the east side of the ski run. Annoyed, he trudged quickly upwards, without sliding his skis, using the fishbone technique when the hill grew steeper. The trail didn’t go far. Just up to the steepest part, where it flattened out in a little clearing, a fissure on the mountainside beneath spruce trees heavily laden with snow and a naked, spindly beech.
Arne was sitting there.
Vetle’s big brother sat on the snow, on his backside, with his back leaning against a bare mountain ridge. He had lost his cap. His mittens were gone. He was curled up, with his head on his knees, and Vetle could see that the laces on one of his ski boots were untied.
The sobbing suddenly stopped, but Arne did not look up.
‘Go away,’ he said quietly. ‘Go home.’
‘But … your skis …’
One of the Madshus skis was lying diagonally in front of Arne, an arrow pointing straight at Vetle. The other one was planted in the snow. It was broken. The break cut the logo in two, and it said ‘Mads’ on the larger piece and ‘hus’ on the pitiful half-metre left hanging down towards the ground, still only just attached to the rest of it.
‘Dad will be mad at you,’ Vetle said softly. ‘He’ll kill you.’
‘Go. Go home.’
‘They were really dear, Arne. And you have to come with me. Mum said that you weren’t …’
‘You have to go home,’ Arne bawled, looking at him at last. ‘Go home! And don’t say a bloody word about this to anybody! Don’t you dare, Vetle! Not to Dad, not to Mum, not to …’
He drew breath in a gasp and shot his arm out into the darkness, towards the new trail that led down to the ski run, towards the residential area, all the houses on the plateau south of the lake at Maridalsvannet, where the ice-covered water could only just be made out through the spruce trunks that had been studded with snow diamonds since long before Christmas.
Arne pointed towards Oslo and screamed: ‘Get yourself home! Swear you won’t say anything!’
There was something strange about Arne’s eyes. They were shining and slightly faded at the same time. It was difficult to see clearly in the semi-darkness, but a strange expression had come over his brother’s face.
‘I swear,’ Vetle mumbled.
‘Go!’ Arne bellowed again.
Vetle went. He gave his brother a final glance as he pressed on his poles and set off across the short expanse of snow. He said nothing. Asked no questions. He skied the kilometre or so to the car park, colder than he had ever been in his little life. He removed his skis and rubbed them clear of snow before tying them together with his poles and hoisting them over his right shoulder. Vetle went home to his mum, and there was no chance of cheese toasties or Tante Pose, but on the contrary a tongue-lashing because he had come back three hours late. Without Arne. Who looked as if he would never come back.
And then night fell.
Vetle hadn’t said anything. He got undressed, brushed his teeth and shrugged at all their questions. Mum cried and moaned, Dad coaxed and threatened, but Vetle had made a promise. Even the policeman who came, in a stiff uniform and a captain’s cap he folded and pushed under his epaulettes when Mum opened the door, couldn’t persuade him to change his mind. The grown-ups would find the tracks, Vetle thought sleepily, and he wouldn’t give away anything that would make Arne angry.
‘He left me behind,’ was all he could say.
Arne was a good big brother, even if he had left him behind, and Vetle had sworn not to say anything.
Vetle took his teddy bear and went to bed. No one came to say goodnight. Dad had gone out with three other men, all neighbours. Mum had other mums visiting her. The last thing Vetle heard before he fell asleep with Teddy in the crook of his arm was women’s voices from the living room. If he hadn’t been sleeping so incredibly heavily after his long ski trip, he would probably have heard more and more people coming into the little apartment where a star hung in the window and the Christmas tree lights were not turned off even though it was night-time. If Vetle hadn’t fallen asleep so quickly, he might well have padded across to the window, as he sometimes did when Arne hadn’t yet come to bed and he couldn’t sleep. Then he would have seen that it had started to snow. He would have noticed the wind that picked up and packed the snow into soft frames around the windowpanes. Vetle would have struggled to see the streetlamps, only fifteen metres away, for all the whirling, dancing snowflakes that in the end turned to driving snow in a blizzard no one had forecast.
But Vetle was fast asleep.
When he woke the next day, it was a completely different mum who ran her hand through his hair, over and over again. It was a mum who had lost her voice, and with eyes that resembled Grandma’s. And in those eyes, in the pale-blue gaze that Vetle would never forget, there was something that even then caused his life to collapse in ruins, but that he only learned to put into words many years later.
Reproach.
It was the day before New Year’s Eve and the beginning of a new and dreadful time.
ANNE HOLT is Norway’s bestselling female crime writer. She spent two years working for the Oslo Police Department before founding her own law firm and serving as Norway’s Minister for Justice between 1996 and 1997. She is published in 30 languages with over 7 million copies of her books sold.
Contents
Title
Copyright
Thursday 7 December 2017 Selma Falck
The Cell
The Skier
The Father
The Tube
The Glass Palace
The Bet
The Hiding Place
The Down-and-Out
Vettakollen
The Manuscript
Friday 8 December 2017 The Lynx
The Message
The Tip-Off
Saturday 9 December 2017 The Press Conference
The Mobile Phone
The Wall
The List
The Manuscript
Sunday 10 December 2017 A Stroke of Luck
The Deluxe Edition
The Manuscript
Monday 11 December 2017 Qui Bono
The Wall
Maggi
The Viewing
The Conversation
The Dilemma
The Certificate
The Manuscript
Tuesday 12 December 2017 The Ceremony
The Realization
The Wildlife Camera
The Accounts
Elise
The Confidence
The Money
The Certificate
The Train Journey
The Car
The Bonfire
The Manuscript
Wednesday 13 Decemb
er 2017 The Dough
The Macbook
Reported Missing
The Prisoner
The Nickname
The Beginning
The Corpse
The Confidence
The Manuscript
Thursday 14 December 2017 The About-Turn
Discovering the Corpse
Train of Thought
Imbalance
The Break-In
The Bus Trip
New Plan
The Moelven House
The Showdown
Einar Falsen
The Manuscript
Friday 15 December 2017 The Poker Turk
Karma
The Funeral
The Fixer
The All-Points Bulletin
The Tip-Off
The Story
The Email
The Shot
The Christmas Present
Sunday 17 December 2017
Sunday 25 February 2018
Epilogue
About the Author