I Will Miss You Tomorrow

by Heine Bakkeid

  ‘What is it?’ Johannes peers impatiently around, holding his nose. ‘Have you found something?’

  I point the flashlight at him before turning the beam back on the floor. ‘Footprints,’ I answer.

  In front of me I can see my own wavering prints in an arc from the booth to the dance floor before heading in a straight line, ending at the emergency exit. I can also see a thicker line that starts at the booth where I am sitting and partly passes over mine before these also stop at the emergency exit.

  ‘It looks as though someone has come here and taken her out the same way that I left,’ I say. I swing round and play the light over the floor from the booth, and in the opposite direction, further in, behind the DJ booth. ‘Not long after me.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Johannes’s breathing is growing more and more laboured and his face looks greyer the longer we stand down here. He shuffles his feet and rattles the matchbox impatiently on his trouser leg as he speaks: ‘You can hardly see anything at all in here. There’s just this foul stench—’

  ‘The dust,’ I answer, pointing at the floor ahead of me where two sets of footprints are visible in the soft layer of dust. ‘My own prints and the other set have exactly the same amount of dust on them.’

  ‘Did you see anyone while you were here?’

  ‘No, but I doubt whether I’d have noticed a drunken elephant jiving on the dance floor, the state I was in.’

  Johannes tries to laugh, but his smile falters, fades. Instead he presses the matchbox containing the cigarette stub against his face once more and follows me. I trace the footsteps with the mobile light held out in front of me, past the rows of empty, dust-covered seating covered in rotted upholstery fabric, the DJ booth, and on in towards two billiard tables in one of the corners.

  The footsteps end behind one of the billiard tables. The dust is trampled in a pretty large, irregular circle. The baize covers are only just visible and billiard balls lie spread out on the tables. They look like small cabins in a miniature landscape of the type found in a natural history museum dedicated to lost civilisations.

  I direct my gaze up and out across the room. On the opposite side of the disco, I make out the emergency exit with the green man and the booth where I had sat last time I was here. On the other side I can barely discern the light from the entrance area. In the middle, between the two, is the dark wall of the DJ booth.

  ‘An ideal lookout point, don’t you think?’ I suggest when Johannes crosses to stand immediately facing me.

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘A culprit,’ I mutter, shining the light on a door that is open a crack, between two billiard-cue stands at the far end of the room. ‘Who enjoys playing with me,’ I add, going over to the door and opening it wide. Inside, a dark, narrow staircase leads up to the ground floor.

  ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ he asks once we can finally close the basement door and leave the rancid darkness behind us. We have ended up in the restaurant kitchen on the ground floor. The room consists of a food store and three freezers on one wall, one of them humming faintly. The room has been recently scrubbed down and smells strongly of detergent and cleaning agents.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I answer, turning to Johannes with a smile.

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘I think the dead woman was Russian,’ I explain as we continue to walk through the restaurant, where furniture is stacked and covered in plastic and white tablecloths in one of the corners. ‘Maybe she was a sex worker on her way to the city to find work – that would at least explain why no one has reported her missing. I think Rasmus found her while he was out diving, and he was murdered because of that.’

  ‘Good grief,’ Johannes grunts, rubbing his hands when we are finally out in the foyer again. ‘Where will all this end?’

  ‘And last, but not least,’ I round off, mostly to myself, with a hint of a smile on my lips. ‘The rumours of my own unreliable state of mind have been greatly exaggerated …’

  CHAPTER 59

  ‘Well.’ Johannes has returned the matchbox to his pocket and now claps his wrinkled hands, as if to congratulate himself on being outside again. At last, having left the main building, we have stopped in the yard between the keeper’s residence and the boathouse. ‘Then surely it’s time to go back ashore again?’ His eyes are squinting at me. ‘Think of dinner.’

  ‘This trawler,’ I say, tucking my mobile into my jacket pocket. I perform a few short facial gymnastics to chase away the tingling under my skin. ‘Do you know where it sank?’

  ‘Of course – I plotted the coordinates in the GPS to see where they were when the SOS came in. I have a portable, you see.’

  ‘Is it far from here?’

  ‘No. Near the northern tip of the island.’

  ‘Deep?’

  ‘Not specially.’

  I shiver as we both let our eyes wander across the surface of the sea, smooth as glass, beyond the little island where the lighthouse is located. ‘I think I need your help,’ I tell him, after a few moments of silence.

  ‘I thought you might.’ Johannes screws up his eyes as the reflection of the sun on the sea strikes his face. ‘You’re going to need equipment,’ he eventually comments.

  ‘We’ve got everything we need here.’ I turn to face the boathouse. ‘In there.’

  ‘Can you dive?’ Johannes takes the half-smoked stub from the matchbox and lights it once we reach the boathouse.

  ‘Yes.’ I pull the door open and make for the emergency generator exhaust system and the pipe where the plastic sheeting – that I’d used to wrap the woman’s body after I hauled her out of the sea – is lying. I continue on towards the cases of diving equipment and take out an inner and outer suit, shoes, gloves, flippers, bottles, brackets, carbine snap hooks, a diver’s lamp with pistol grip, and another lamp that attaches to the actual mask, as well as a knife.

  Apart from the obligatory mine-clearance diving courses in the military, I had also – unwillingly – accompanied Gunnar Ore on a couple of team-building trips to his family home at Nesodden while I was still serving in Internal Affairs. We all had to take part in either wreck diving or underwater fishing for the duration of the trip: even our legal team were forced to plumb the depths.

  ‘What makes you so interested in this wreck?’ he asks once I am ready. He sucks down the last traces of smoke and fritters the embers between his fingers.

  ‘I think the woman I found in the sea out at the lighthouse was on board the trawler that sank on its way to Tromsø a month ago. I think that Rasmus may also have heard them on his walkie-talkie when they sank, and decided to dive down to the wreck the weekend he disappeared to take a look. So he found the woman. That is why no one can know about her, and why the GPS equipment was removed from Rasmus’s boat and from the ambulance vessel used by Bjørkang and Arnt. Because they’ve both been out there at the wreck. They didn’t all get out of that boat before it sank – she was left behind.’

  ‘Rasmus was killed because he found her on board the wreck?’

  I nod.

  Johannes shudders. ‘Does that mean that she was the one I heard on my walkie-talkie that night?’

  I press fingers into my cheek while the other hand instinctively grasps my jacket pocket where the insect eggs are usually kept. Now my pocket is empty.

  ‘B-but,’ Johannes stutters when I don’t answer. ‘That was a long time afterwards. The boat must have already been sunk and …’

  Our eyes meet, and he doesn’t complete the sentence. We stand there in silence for all of a minute until finally we pack up in the boathouse and carry the bags down to the boat.

  ‘I still don’t understand what you’re expecting to find in this wreck,’ Johannes says once we have set off back to the boat.

  ‘First of all we have to find the vessel,’ I tell him as a chill gust runs through my body and combines with the gnawing in my belly that had started as soon
as I discarded the empty blister pack of Paralgin Forte on my way into the church. I pull my jacket collar more snugly around my neck and swallow, in the hope that the cold air will pump my withdrawal symptoms further down into my gut. ‘But once that’s accomplished,’ I say in an undertone, ‘there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure we’ll find inside it.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Johannes asks as we clamber on board and take our places.

  I look at him. ‘A dead policeman.’

  CHAPTER 60

  We hug the shore of the main island, heading northward past bare hillsides, small islands and rocky skerries, steep mountains and cliffs, as well as the occasional sand- or pebble-fringed bay hidden in amongst them. The breeze ruffles my hair and tweaks at my face.

  ‘What is that?’ I point towards serried ranks of floats that have appeared outside a narrow cove just ahead of us. The floats are suspended side by side in six lines with approximately two metres’ distance between them. The entire area is around two to three hundred metres long and runs at an angle across the bay.

  Johannes drops his speed so that we are moving more slowly through the water. ‘The farm,’ he says. We see a barge and a substantial blue aluminium catamaran moored close to the shore. Farther in, there is a modern quay with a fairly large boathouse. The cove is tucked between two squat hills flanking a white-painted timber house and barn. The place is dark, as if the sun did not reach the farm because of the closeness of the hills. ‘Harvey’s mussel farm. You can see Merethe’s childhood home on the shore.’

  ‘I don’t see a factory,’ I remark as we pass over the crystal-clear shallows. ‘Where does he process the mussels?’

  ‘On the catamaran,’ Johannes answers. ‘He uses the boat for setting out the spawn, harvesting, cleaning and packing, before he transports them to the warehouse in Tromsø, and from there they’re dispatched on large pallets out into the big wide world. That’s actually all you need nowadays.’

  ‘It looks solid.’ I nod in the direction of the blue, purpose-built boat with a massive, heavy crane at the stern, as we pass the quay and proceed out of the cove on the other side.

  ‘Boats with side moorings, you know. That one there can harvest mussels in all kinds of weather.’

  In front of us a number of smaller islands and reefs come into view, where a group of birds with bluish plumage, giving an almost metallic sheen, and white markings on their heads, are perched, drying their wings in the good weather. Some have their heads bowed, while others crane their necks at the boat as we approach.

  ‘I don’t like those birds,’ Johannes says, shivering as we close in on the largest islet where a slanted iron post holds a beacon on a submerged reef, just offshore. The yellowy tufts of forests of seaweed stir on the surface of the sea all around the little islands and nearby reefs. A few of the birds flap their wings in the water before flying off when they appear from behind a mound of bladderwrack.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘The cormorant warns of death,’ Johannes mumbles, accelerating again as soon as we have passed the last of the reefs.

  ‘Oh, bloody brilliant,’ I grunt in response, sinking my head down between my shoulders as we pick up speed and the boat begins to thud against the waves again.

  ‘Hold tight,’ Johannes shouts. ‘It’s not far now.’

  I grab hold of my seat, using both hands. Farther ahead, I see how the entire island tapers and curves in on itself. In the distance there is nothing but sea.

  After a while we have passed the tip of the island, and Johannes reduces his speed in preparation for steering round in a figure of eight, keeping his eye on the GPS and echo sounder between his swerving manoeuvres. ‘Here,’ he announces at last, switching the engine off completely, so that the boat settles, rocking lazily in the slight swell.

  ‘Have we arrived?’ I get to my feet and peer over the gunwale. The sea is glittering in the dappled afternoon light. We are about a kilometre from shore. The sky has assumed a blood-red, almost purple, shimmer.

  ‘This is the location of the GPS coordinates they gave on the walkie-talkie. The echo sounder indicates that the seabed tilts down slightly and gets deeper farther out. We don’t have much time,’ he says, scanning the sky and looking back at me again. ‘It’ll soon be dark.’

  Nodding, I take out the diving suit and put it on as fast as I can before the autumn chill penetrates my bare skin.

  Johannes glances at the time before peering over the gunwale, down into the cold water. ‘I hope you’re wrong. That there isn’t even a boat down there.’

  ‘I hope I’m wrong too,’ I answer, while checking the pressure in the air tanks. ‘Believe you me.’

  I put on the diving vest, take hold of the mouthpiece and check the regulator, and then add the diving mask, switching on the light. The truth is that I hate diving. Hate it with a vengeance. But this is one of those things you simply can’t avoid, such as rectal examinations when you have a sore backside, and having your thoughts ransacked by a shrink when you’ve attempted to take your own life.

  Inserting the mouthpiece, I pick up the lamp with the pistol grip and check that it’s working before sitting on the edge of the boat with my back to the waves.

  ‘We can always turn back,’ I hear Johannes say as I lean backwards and tumble over the gunwale. My body breaks the surface of the water almost immediately.

  I think it’s too late is what runs through my mind the moment the cold surf hits the skin between the hood, mask and mouthpiece. Far too late for that now.

  CHAPTER 61

  The cold makes my face contract. Chilled and floundering, I kick out to get my circulation moving. I have never dived in late autumn before and struggle to adjust the respiration and force enough heat into my body.

  After some time spent just below the surface, kicking hard and thrashing about, I eventually muster rhythm and calm enough to get moving. Above me I can see Johannes leaning over the gunwale. I give him a thumbs-up before turning round and starting downwards. Next time I look up, he is merely a dark shadow far above.

  The water is clear, but rapidly grows so dark that I have to use the hand-held flashlight to see more clearly. I can already make out the slope of the seabed below me. The depth gauge shows seven metres. The effort of controlling my breathing and the unnatural movement of my thighs makes me think of Frei and me at the dancing class in the Arts Centre the day I followed her. It occurs to me that this is the first time I have thought of her since that evening out at the lighthouse.

  ‘You there. Come on!’ commands the instructor, strutting proudly in front of us as we sit in a semicircle around her. She is wearing high heels, a short black leather skirt, and her dark curls are tied in a ponytail. She reaches a hand to me, as if to summon a scruffy dog.

  Reluctantly, I stand up and approach her, leaving Frei seated on the floor.

  ‘OK, señor, what’s your name?’

  ‘Thorkild.’

  ‘Señor Thorkild. Have you danced before?’

  ‘A little.’

  Now she turns to face the group. ‘OK then, amigos. Pair up, and Señor Thorkild and I will walk through the basic steps with a simple shoulder rotation, and also demonstrate some arm movements and back-to-back.’

  ‘Imelda?’ Frei comes across to us in the centre of the circle, where I stand held in Imelda’s iron grip. ‘Couldn’t you take Robert instead? And then I can have this man here?’

  Imelda lets go of me and looks at Frei. ‘Robert? Si,’ she laughs. ‘Claro, hermana.’ Then her face stiffens again, and she gestures to Alvin, who makes his way across to the stereo system.

  ‘Which song, Señora Imelda?’

  ‘“Dos Gardenias”, Señor Alvin.’ Immediately afterwards, a silky soft male voice singing in Spanish rings out as Robert glides elegantly past me into Imelda’s arms.

  ‘What are you doing here, Thorkild?’ Frei whispers as she leads me in among the other couples.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answer. Frei puts her right han
d in mine, while her left grips my upper arm.

  ‘Has it anything to do with Uncle Arne or that other case of yours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see …’ She hesitates. ‘You came down here just to see me dance?’

  ‘I believe so,’ I murmur as I struggle to keep pace with the rotation before Imelda’s voice sounds again above the music.

  ‘Come on now, all of you. Hips, Thorkild. Hips. This is a bolero. Hot, torrid, sensual, calma, calma.’

  ‘There’s a word for that sort of thing,’ Frei goes on to say when Imelda has finished her instructions. ‘For people like you.’

  ‘I know. Pathetic,’ I sigh. ‘You …’ I’m about to pull away when Frei’s fingers slide farther into mine, and I can feel her breath on the hollow of my neck, and her eyes burning on my skin. Her face is only a few centimetres away from mine. All I had to do was to lean in and kiss her.

  ‘Or dedicated?’ Frei continues. ‘Inquisitive?’

  ‘Too old.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For this.’ I make a fresh attempt to free myself, but Frei will not let go.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she says, holding tight. ‘Not while we’re in the middle of the dance. You can leave when we’ve finished.’

  ‘OK,’ I answer, and then draw another breath when Imelda signals that a new rotation is coming. ‘We’ll dance.’

  This moment always stops just here. It has no sequel, even though I know that we parted shortly afterwards. She and Robert went one way and I headed back to the hotel room and my interview documents, reports and whole writing pads of notes about things that have no meaning at all. Everything stops here, even me, even though right now I am drifting under the surface, searching for a boat on the ocean bed.

  ‘You bloody fool!’ I gasp, and next second my mouth fills with salt water. I open my eyes and see that, in my bout of self-reproach, I have managed to spit out the mouthpiece connected to the diving bottle.