Death By Water (43 page)

– I did it to give a few poor buggers a chance, you know that.

Did she know that? To begin with he had been helping some immigrants who had no money. She’d turned a blind eye to it, bought his argument that these people were on the very bottom rung of society’s ladder and deserving of a few crumbs of the country’s vast excess of wealth; that they didn’t have the slightest hope of getting these crumbs in any other way. Helping them to a disability allowance that strictly speaking they weren’t entitled to was, he argued, a sort of political act, a form of civil disobedience. But gradually he’d started receiving kickbacks, and before long he had more money than he’d ever dreamed of, and the economic advantages began to overshadow the political aspect completely. Time and again she had warned him, but it was as though he was addicted to the game and couldn’t stop. It was only a question of time before the whole thing would be discovered. In the first instance by those closest, like Mailin.

– I can help you, Pål. You know I’m always there for you.

She got carried away by the compassion in her own voice and stroked his arm. Suddenly he lifted her hand and pressed it against his eyes, and his shoulders began to shake.

She stood up and walked round the table. – Now, Pål, she comforted him, – of course I’ll help you. But we have to make peace with each other, you do understand?

It looked as though he might be nodding.

– And one other thing. You
must
tell me where you were on the evening Mailin went missing.

T
HE DOORBELL HAD
rung three times. Liss sat on the sofa looking out on to the patch of garden with the stone-built barbecue and the tool shed sticking up out of the snow like a tombstone. She didn’t intend to see who it was. No one knew she was living there, almost no one. She didn’t feel the need to talk to any of Viljam’s friends. Nor anyone else. But when it rang for a fourth time, she got to her feet and padded up the stairs and out into the hallway.

It was for her.

– You might as well open up now. I’m not the type to give up.

She had realised this. All the same, inadvertently, she had let slip where she was living at the moment. She should have been firmer with Jomar Vindheim,
the footballer
, as she continued to call him in her thoughts. No chance, she should have told him, neither in heaven nor in hell, of there being anything between us. Even in her thoughts
between us
sounded like a chord played on an out-of-tune piano. All the same, she had to admit that she liked how he wasn’t easily put off.

She stood in the doorway and did nothing that might be taken as an invitation to him to step inside.

– Have you checked the net?

She hadn’t. She’d slept in as long as possible. And then moved about the house as slowly as she could. Put off eating, even put off smoking.

– Not seen the newspapers or listened to the radio?

Something in his voice set alarm bells ringing.

– Best if I come in, he urged, and she could hardly stop him from slipping by her.

– If you’ve come here to tell me something, then say what it is.

– Jimbo’s dead, he said. – Jim Harris.

They sat in the kitchen. She turned the cup round and round in her hands. It was empty; she’d forgotten to put the coffee on.

– Have you spoken to the police? Jomar asked. – Told them everything you told me?

– Last night. I was interviewed there. When did he die?

– Night before last. He was stabbed to death on Aker Brygge.

The policewoman who interviewed her had returned over and over again to this business with Jim Harris and his behaviour in the park. Several times she had asked Liss where she was the night before last, but never said a word about Harris being dead.

– Might it have been something else? she asked quietly. – Something that had nothing to do with Mailin?

Jomar rested his head in his hands. – Jim had drug debts. He owed money to people in the B-Gang. He told me so himself.

He rubbed himself so hard across the forehead that a broad red stripe appeared on the skin. – I tried to help him, but I should have done more. He came up to my place the other week and asked for a loan of thirty thousand. I could have managed it, but I’d already made it clear to him that I wasn’t going to lend him any more money. It would only drag him deeper down into the dirt.

– Need a smoke, she said and got up.

Water was dripping from a crack in the guttering. She huddled back below the porch. Jomar stayed on the stairway, one step down. She sneaked a glance at his face. The slightly slanting eyes were coloured by the grey light, but there was something reassuring about them. That impression was reinforced by the mouth, though the lips were quite narrow. Suddenly a memory of that night at Zako’s returned to her. Not of the lifeless body on the sofa, but something or other about the pictures on his mobile phone. She couldn’t quite get what it was … The letter from Zako’s father was still lying on the floor underneath her bed upstairs. If what he had written had been full of bitter recriminations, she might have been able to throw it away. But that gratitude of his was unendurable.

– Before Christmas something happened in Amsterdam, she suddenly blurted out. – Someone I knew died. I mean, more than just someone I knew.

He looked directly into her eyes. – Your boyfriend.

– In a way. I’ve been avoiding it. What happened to Mailin …

She filled her lungs with smoke, let it slowly ooze out again.

– Yesterday I got a letter from his father. And it brought it all back.

Jomar reached out for the Marlboro packet she’d balanced on the railings. – Can I take one?

– Not if it’s going to ruin your career as a footballer.

She heard how silly her response was, and her need to talk was suddenly gone.

He lit up. – What were you going to say about the guy who died in Amsterdam?

– I’d prefer to hear about your grandfather, she said quickly.

– My grandfather?

She glanced over at him. – When I was at your place you mentioned him.

– You mean when we were talking about that novel?

She nodded. – I need to think about something else. What was it about
Atonement
that reminded you of your grandfather?

He inhaled deeply a couple of times. – The stuff about the two who were meant for each other.

Liss half turned away. She had a response on the tip of her tongue but let it stay there.

– My grandfather was a fisherman, said Jomar. – He grew up in Florø. The day he turned twenty-two, he was delivering a catch to Bergen. He told me how he had a few hours free and spent the time wandering around Torgalmenningen. In one of the stalls a woman was selling clothes. This was during the war. He went over to her, and at that moment he knew she was going to be his wife.

– What about your grandmother? Liss said acidly. – Didn’t she have a say in the matter?

– She gradually came to understand.

Liss had to admit she liked the story. She liked the way he told it, that he dared to do so without resorting to irony.

– And your parents, was that as romantic?

– That’s another story altogether. Jomar fell silent.

– Are you never afraid of going insane? she asked out of nowhere.

He thought about it. – I don’t think so. Very few footballers go insane, for some reason or other.

He flipped his cigarette down into the street, climbed up the last step and underneath the porch where she was standing. Don’t do it, she thought as he lifted his hand and stroked her cold cheek.

Outside it had grown dark. Liss lay in bed listening to the magpie that never stopped hopping round on the roof and pecking at the tiles. She glided inward to a state between sleep and waking. The room changed, became a different room, one that she once lay in and slept in. She tries to wake up. Then Mailin is standing there, in her yellow pyjamas.

She forced herself to sit up, turned on the light, hit herself on the head with her palms.

– I’ll call him, she muttered, fumbling for her mobile in her bag.

– Hi, Liss, said Tormod Dahlstrøm.

– I’m sorry, she said.

– For what?

She didn’t know what to say.

– Waking you up in the middle of the night at the weekend.

He must have understood that she wasn’t calling to apologise yet again but said nothing, gave her time. She started by explaining how she had realised that the words Mailin was saying on the video were the name of this Hungarian psychiatrist.

– Sándor Ferenczi? Dahlstrøm exclaimed. – Strange that she should be saying that. I assume you’ve contacted the police.

Liss described both her interviews. That she had walked out during the first one.

– Something’s happening to me.

– Happening?

She took the plunge. – It used to happen a lot before. It’s a kind of attack. I don’t know whether I can describe it. The room around me suddenly becomes different, unreal. The light moves away, as though I’m not there, but at the same time everything is much more intense … Are you busy? Shall I call another time?

He reassured her that he had plenty of time.

– After I went to Amsterdam, it went away. No one there knew me. But then it began happening again. Just before Mailin went missing.

It was at the Café Alto, when Zako showed her the photograph.
Tell him about it, Liss. Everything that happened. He can tell you what you should do.

At the last moment she changed her mind.

– Berger knew our father, she said quickly. – I think that’s why Mailin kept going to meet him.

She told him what Berger had said about their father.

– Mailin once mentioned to me that she hadn’t seen him for many years, Dahlstrøm observed. – Do you remember him?

Liss took a deep breath. – I remember almost nothing from my childhood. Isn’t that abnormal?

– There are great variations between how much we all remember.

– But to me it’s as though it’s been deleted, edited out. And then without warning something pops up.

Suddenly she began talking about the bedroom in Lørenskog. Mailin standing there in the dark, locking the door and creeping into bed beside her. The hammering on the door.

– Did she mention any of this to you?

– No, said Dahlstrøm. – We didn’t discuss our own possible traumas. I gathered that Mailin, like most of us, carried some kind of burden, and I did recommend that she go into therapy herself. She hadn’t got round to it, not yet.

He paused a moment before he said: – Tell me this about the bedroom again, in as much detail as you can.

Liss closed her eyes. Brought it back again. Mailin in the blue pyjamas, that could also be yellow, maybe several different episodes fused into one. Mailin with her arms around her.
I’ll look after you, Liss. Nothing bad will ever, ever happen to you.

– She said something else … Something about Mother.

Liss switched off the light, listened into the darkness. Somewhere out there Mailin’s voice came back to her:
Don’t tell anyone about this, Liss. Not even Mum. She won’t be able to take it if she finds out.

O
DD
L
ØKKEMO TURNED
in to the petrol station at Kløfta. The gauge was only just down into the red, the reserve tank capacious, eight litres at least, and it was less than forty kilometres home. But the mere thought of running out along the E6 in the January dark was enough to make him shiver. Walking along an icy hard shoulder for several kilometres with an empty petrol can in his hand. The likelihood of it happening wasn’t great, he argued, but then the consequences of it doing so were all the greater. He’d been turning these thoughts over in his mind ever since Minnesund.

He checked his mobile before getting out. No messages. He’d sent two to Elijah announcing that he was on his way. At the very least he deserved a reply. Though never explicitly stated, there was a tacit agreement that he keep out of the way until he received a message that it was okay to come home. It was always like that on days when Elijah was due at the studio in the evening. He had to have the whole house to himself. Couldn’t stand the sight of anyone, especially not Odd. After the broadcast, things changed completely. Then he was like a complaining child who could never get enough attention and Odd was the most important thing in the world to him.

But it was probably not only on account of this evening’s
Taboo
that Elijah wanted him out of the house that afternoon. Odd was certain he was expecting a visitor. The same visitor who had been there so often over the past few weeks. Once they had shared secrets like this, but now Elijah had become more and more cranky about them and wanted to keep them all to himself.

Odd pushed the button to pay at the counter. Didn’t like using the credit card pumps. Often the receipt was missing, and that left him standing there not knowing how much had been withdrawn from his account. At last a vibration in his pocket. He almost hung the diesel pistol back in its cradle at once but overcame the impulse and continued to follow the rolling display, how many litres, how many kroner, the figures creeping slowly up towards a full tank, sixty litres, so slowly that the pump was clearly faulty; all the same, he forced himself to wait for the click inside the pistol, and even then he first washed the diesel smell off his hands in the shabby toilet, which had no paper towels, and toilet roll strewn across the floor all the way over to the washbasin, and picked up copies of
VG
and
Dagbladet
and a packet of salt pastilles, and paid the teenage girl, who didn’t look at him once – overlooked, invisible; when did that happen, Odd, when did people stop even looking at you? Only then did he pull out the phone and read the message from Elijah. Sat there staring at it.
Don’t come for another hour and a half.
He fought against a desire to call him. Rage at him that he had no right to stop him coming home whenever he wanted. It was just as much his home. It was his apartment … No, he would never sink to the depths of reminding Elijah who it was who owned the apartment. Last time he tried it, a few years back, Elijah moved out, and he had to beg him to come back again.