I Will Miss You Tomorrow

by Heine Bakkeid

  I pick up speed, not towards the waiting bull in front of me, but veering instead to the right, through the groups of people seated at tables, back to the corridor we had come from. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that the older Jørn or Jørgen is sprinting through the crowd to cut me off.

  I force my way past the room divider and race towards the lifts in the forlorn hope that one of them is open and available to get me out of here. Pivoting round for a second shows me that both Jørn and Jørgen are only a few metres behind. I’m never going to manage to close the doors behind me before they catch up. I fling open a glass door at one side of the lift, then slam it shut again and keep hold of it for a moment as my lungs whistle and the sweat runs down my face.

  On the other side of the glass, Jørn and Jørgen push against the door, both of them panting and puffing. Behind me, the buzz from a group of people gathered round a counter falls silent.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asks a young woman in white who leans over the counter.

  I have neither breath nor time to answer. Instead, I let go of the door and set off along the gable wall just as the glass door behind me springs open.

  Desperately, I unlatch an identical door at the other end of the wall and am back in the corridor, only this time on the other side of the lifts. I pass the first glass door again as the younger Jørn or Jørgen opens it. I swerve out and away from him as he launches himself at me, and I feel his fingertips snatch at my jogging trousers and fail to gain a grip.

  ‘Stop, for Christ’s sake,’ gasps the older Jørn or Jørgen at my back, while I tighten my hold on the yellow carrier bag and race onwards in the direction of the exit yet again.

  The cold air smacks me in the face, slicing straight through the woollen sweater, but I don’t slacken my pace. The taxis are parked on my right, three in a row along the kerb. In the distance I hear the rumble of heavy machinery from a closed-off area beyond the entrance, where some sort of extension is being built.

  Then I catch sight of the car.

  I spit the taste of blood out of my mouth. My diaphragm’s on fire, so are my cheeks, but I daren’t take a second’s respite, because the very next minute the door bangs open behind me and I don’t need to turn round to know that it’s the two care assistants hard on my heels, determined to show off their skills in welfare treatment such as tripping, headlocks and strangleholds.

  ‘Wait, for fuck’s sake!’ they yell in chorus as I move past the taxis towards the elderly Ford Mondeo parked in front of them with its engine running.

  ‘Drive, Liz!’ I scream, while I wrench the door open on the passenger side and leap inside.

  ‘Wh … what?’ my sister wheezes, staring at me in alarm. There’s a thick band of beaded perspiration emblazoned on her forehead and the hairs above her top lip, as if she is the one who has been running for her life.

  ‘Drive, for fuck’s sake!’ I repeat, and slam the car door shut at the very same moment that Liz floors the accelerator.

  CHAPTER 52

  The car hurtles down through the Tromsøysund tunnel that takes us from Breivika on Tromsøya Island across to Tomasjorda on the mainland. ‘I’ve been so worried for you,’ Liz laments, perched so far forward in the driving seat that her breath mists the windscreen, and clutching the steering wheel for grim death. ‘I’ve hardly slept since we last talked. I thought you had—’

  ‘Don’t give it a thought, Sis.’

  She turns towards me. ‘What happened?’ Her eyes scan my get-up. ‘Why are you dressed so weirdly?’

  ‘I fell into the sea,’ I answer, and fish my mobile phone from the plastic bag stuffed full of my clothes to plug it into the charger cable hanging from the dashboard cigarette lighter. ‘They chopped my clothes up to bits in Accident and Emergency.’

  ‘B … but …’

  ‘Just drive.’

  Liz reveals a row of crooked yellowed teeth and unhealthy gums. ‘I don’t get it—’

  ‘There’s not so much to get, Liz. Things happen, don’t they? Things we don’t always want to talk about.’

  Liz pouts crossly and asks no more questions. She has learned to recognise when it works best to keep quiet. Her servile, battered survival instinct functions on autopilot in such situations, thanks to the many lessons in violence taught by her creep of a husband through the years.

  ‘Why do we have to hurry?’ she asks submissively when she finally dares to open her mouth again. ‘Are you in more trouble?’

  ‘No,’ I answer, drawing breath. ‘I just didn’t have time to go where they wanted me to.’

  ‘I remember Dad.’ Liz flashes a smile once we have emerged on the other side of the undersea tunnel. ‘When they brought him home – we were only little at the time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘After he’d been in Kleppspitalin, the psychiatric hospital. It was a few years before he and Mum separated. You were so small then – you probably don’t remember it.’

  ‘No,’ I answer grouchily. I’m still feeling giddy and on edge after all the running. My body is shaky and longing for rest, nourishment and anti-anxiety medication.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she chuckles. ‘Don’t you recollect how—’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ I pounce on her in a burst of fury that makes the aches in my face explode. ‘I said I didn’t remember!’

  ‘No, no, no!’ Liz whines. ‘You don’t remember, then, you don’t remember!’ The flare-up makes her jerk the steering wheel, and the car swerves from side to side before she eventually regains control of it and herself.

  ‘Sorry, Thorkild. Sorry.’ She tightens her grip and leans closer to the windscreen, as if to demonstrate that now she will really exert herself and prove to me and the rest of the world that Elizabeth too can drive cars and not merely bake cakes and feel sorry for herself.

  I well remember when they came home with my father after he had left to regain his self-control following bad times at home with us. They used to put him in a chair at the kitchen table, where he sat for hours just staring vacantly out at the rain and sea. It was as though he had just returned from an alien planet and needed time to acclimatise again. Eventually I came to terms with the fact that he had some kind of illness inside that made him rot outwards, corroding everything that he might have been and replacing it with this pathetic creature who roamed around weeping for Iceland, for a few strips of moss or a bug in a river in a gravel wasteland under a volcano.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Liz asks, once she has calmed down.

  ‘I just need to go back to Skjellvik again to sort some things and pick up the hire car before leaving for an interview tomorrow.’

  ‘Interview? Another one?’

  ‘Gunnar Ore is in town.’

  ‘Gunnar? What’s he doing here?’

  ‘I’m still not entirely certain,’ I reply solemnly as Liz runs the tip of her tongue over her dry lips. The sky is almost completely cloudless, the air is colder, and there are brittle sheets of ice on the small puddles that dot the pavements. I check my mobile and find enough juice to make it useable, so I switch it on and call Anniken Moritzen.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asks.

  ‘Still in the north.’

  ‘They want us to come up there to look at him. I’m travelling up tomorrow.’ She hesitates slightly before continuing: ‘Could you meet me, when I have to go in and … see him?’

  I stare at the outline of my own face in the side window. My hand instinctively reaches out to the indentations in my complexion, and my fingertips trace the lines and scars until they find the pressure points. I dig into the damaged tissue on my cheek.

  ‘What is it, Thorkild?’ Anniken probes when I fail to answer.

  ‘Rasmus was murdered,’ I whisper.

  ‘Wh … what?’

  ‘He didn’t die in an accident, Anniken. Someone killed him.’

  ‘I …’ She starts to speak, but stops, bites back the words, and falls completely silent. Liz steals a concerned gla
nce at me from the driving seat without saying anything either.

  I relax the fingertip pressure on my cheek as my gaze travels over the landscape and sea farther down where a plastic boat is berthed, tugging listlessly at its moorings on the shore. ‘Could he have met someone up here – a woman?’

  ‘I’ve already answered that.’

  ‘I know,’ I continue. ‘But would he have told you if he had met someone?’

  ‘Rasmus didn’t have a girlfriend,’ Anniken Moritzen replies. ‘If he had, it wouldn’t have been a she. He was gay,’ she adds, ‘like his father.’

  ‘So he didn’t know her,’ I comment.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m trying to tie up these loose threads. To see how it all hangs together.’ I use my free hand to rub the damaged tissue on my cheek. The gnawing in my belly is worsening. ‘Did Rasmus use drugs?’ I ask, gritting my teeth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He couldn’t have been involved in anything illegal?’

  ‘Stop.’ I can hear her struggling to retain self-control. ‘I want you to stop talking,’ she says before her voice fades away entirely. All I can hear is a continual stream of muffled panting. ‘Can’t you just be there,’ she implores. ‘Be there when I arrive?’

  ‘OK,’ I answer, breathing out noisily. ‘Phone me when you land. By the way, is Arne coming with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘Yes, he knows.’

  ‘Has he said anything about—’

  ‘No. He doesn’t want to talk to you. Not yet.’

  ‘OK, Anniken, I’ll wait up here until you come.’

  ‘Goodbye, Thorkild.’

  

  ‘My God,’ Liz says under her breath after I have hung up. She has been totally silent during the phone conversation. ‘What on earth have you got yourself mixed up in?’

  I recline my seat to the maximum and turn my face to the sea. ‘At the interview tomorrow afternoon, Ore, the boys at Police Headquarters and the Chief Interviewer from Kripos, are all going to tell me they have found proof that Bjørkang and his sergeant came to the lighthouse that evening when I was there.’

  I hold my breath, watching the treetops outside, until finally I exhale again and continue: ‘They’re going to present me with a scenario in which a pill-abusing ex-policeman commits a murder before ultimately, filled with remorse and self-loathing, choosing to jump in the sea when the pressure mounts. Then they will ask me to give my version. They are going to sit there, quiet as mice, as I tell them about the woman I found in the sea, about the man who came up and snatched her away, about the party in the disco, about all of it. In the end they will tell me that they don’t believe me, and earnestly urge me to give them the right story. The truth.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because, Liz,’ I turn to face her, ‘it’s what I would have done. With the crime-scene finds and my own explanation, which even I find hard to believe, they consider this to be a solid case. They may even feel sure enough to make an arrest regardless of how the interview goes, if they have enough confidence that I will eventually break, even without a body.’

  ‘What about Rasmus and the woman you found? You weren’t even here when they were murdered.’

  ‘They will end up being treated as separate cases, and they will remain unsolved as long as she doesn’t turn up again – something she is never going to do,’ I add. I turn back to the side window where tiny snowflakes have started to dance between the trees. ‘And then you have the two policemen.’

  ‘What about them?’

  I let the question hang in the air between us while I try to conjure the faces of Bjørkang and Arnt the way I remember them from our meeting in the local police station. I am unable to summon them; they remain two grey, shapeless shadows. ‘I have to find them before this interview. It’s the only way out …’

  CHAPTER 53

  Liz parks in the car park outside the Skjellviktun Residential Centre. It will soon be half-past eight in the evening, and it’s dark outside. The air is cold and raw when we leave the car and walk to the apartments.

  ‘No one can find out we are here,’ I whisper to Liz as we cut across the gravel to the apartment block entrance where Harvey has given me a place. My eyes dart in the direction of the residential centre entrance when we pass the door, for fear that Siv, the nurse, will emerge with a police escort to take me to the ward that waits for me at Åsgård psychiatric unit. The corridor inside is deserted, and everywhere around us is silent – the whole place seems to have gone into hibernation.

  I produce the front-door key from the bag of ruined clothes and open the door without a sound, pushing Liz inside before closing and locking it behind us.

  ‘No light,’ I whisper, as soon as we are inside.

  The truffle cake is still in the cake container on the kitchen worktop, and Merethe’s crystals are scattered all over the coffee table and floor. Liz settles on the sofa while I find some clean clothes from my travel bag and take them with me into the bathroom.

  Pausing in front of the mirror in the gloom, I study my face in the glass. So worn out, so grey, almost merging into the darkness. ‘There’s no one else in there, is there?’ I whisper huskily to the shadow in the mirror. No more Thorkilds to be summoned when things get too difficult or when the opportunity presents itself. This mottled, dismal bag of bones is all that is left. Good God.

  At last I find a flannel and wash my face and armpits before stripping off the outfit from the lost property department at Tromsø University Hospital and replacing it with my own clothes.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Liz asks when I creep back into the living room. The coffee machine on the kitchen counter is rumbling and the lid of the cake container is lying open beside it. Liz sits there in the dark with a large slice of truffle cake in her hands. The streetlamp outside in the car park and the light from the main entrance send yellow glimmers in through the windows and curtains so that we can see slightly. ‘I put out a piece for you as well.’ Liz pushes a paper plate in my direction.

  ‘No thanks – just you eat. I have to make a phone call.’

  I am about to sit down when a light appears outside. Through the gap in the half-open curtains, we see a police car glide over the brow of the hill and drive slowly past, heading towards Skjellvik town centre.

  ‘Is it you they’re looking for?’ Liz asks with her mouth full of cake.

  Nodding, I close the curtains. ‘They’ve probably sent a car from Skjervøy.’

  Liz stops eating and looks at me.

  ‘Relax,’ I whisper, taking out my mobile. ‘They won’t find us here.’

  I sit down in the chair and call Gunnar Ore, who answers before the first ringtone has ceased.

  ‘On the run?’ he asks acidly. ‘Good move, Aske. Really smart.’

  ‘Yes, I’m on my way over the mountains to the Swedish border,’ I reply. ‘And then perpetual asylum on the Andalusian steppes dressed as a shepherd or a matador, depending on how things turn out. It’s possible, Gunnar. It’s possible.’

  ‘You idiot,’ he responds hoarsely. ‘The police are searching for you. You’re aware that the hospital sends an alert to the police as soon as a psychiatric patient escapes?’

  ‘Let them search.’

  ‘Then you must also know that the police have been armed since the time you left?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The boys drive around with rounds of live ammunition these days, Aske. And in your case they’re also searching for a suspected police killer on the run. Do you need any more details to understand how this is all going to end?’

  ‘I just wanted to say that I’ll come in tomorrow, to that interview,’ I say.

  ‘Too late,’ my former boss counters. I am well aware that the police in Tromsø must have called on Gunnar Ore for assistance as soon as they knew who had fled from the hospital. Nevertheless, I was obliged to talk to him, even though the thought of ending up as
a trophy for some recently qualified, trigger-happy police officer scared the wits out of me. I have nobody else to turn to.

  ‘Where are you?’ Gunnar continues when I do not say anything.

  ‘With Liz,’ I answer.

  ‘Your sister? So she was the one who picked you up outside the hospital. OK, now I get it. Why? Can I ask you that? Why did you run off?’

  ‘The interview,’ I reply as Liz returns from the kitchen counter with a steaming mug of coffee for me, and a fresh slice of cake for herself. ‘I can’t turn up for that interview until I know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Where I stand. What this is actually all about.’

  ‘Meaning you’re back in Skjellvik?’ Gunnar Ore concludes.

  ‘I’m coming in for interview,’ I say under my breath. ‘I promise. Give me until tomorrow, for old times’ sake. Can you do that?’

  ‘You played that card four years ago, Thorkild,’ he answers. ‘But I’ll forget this conversation until three o’clock tomorrow. For old times’ sake, as you call it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off. In the meantime you’d better hope that those policemen turn up by three o’clock tomorrow. If not—’

  ‘This is going to end fucking badly?’

  ‘It already has done,’ he answers, then hangs up.

  I put the phone on the table and raise the coffee to my mouth, but have to give up halfway and use both hands to hold on to it to avoid dropping the mug.

  ‘What is it?’ Liz asks, sounding worried. Her facial expression is hidden even though she is sitting just beside me. The aroma of rich truffle cream and coffee wafts towards me as she speaks. ‘Are you unwell?’