The Writing on the Wall (13 page)

JIMMY’S OPENED
at twelve o’clock, and it was just after ten past as I approached the door.

When I looked in through the window I saw the silhouette of a man clearly outlined against the bright light in the room at the back. Behind the counter sat ‘Kalle’ in the same unwashed chef’s smock as before, but with a fresh newspaper and hopefully freshly brewed coffee in his cup. As I opened the door and went in, I heard the sound of another door being closed. When I looked up the man who had been standing in the doorway of the room at the back had gone.

Kalle shot a sullen sideways glance at me.

I took a quick look around. At the far end, hunched over a machine, was a lad with a lock of long fair hair falling over his eyes. He scowled in my direction, obviously bothered by his
conscience
, missing school as he was, and for all he knew I could be from Child Welfare.

Kalle slammed down his cup and stood up behind the counter. ‘What do you want?’

‘Actually, I was looking for my – nephew.’

‘Nephew. Kiss my arse!’

‘Ronny.’

‘Daren’t show his face here any more. I told him that was it. You’d best look for him somewhere else.’

I moved towards him. ‘Er … Kalle … I didn’t catch your surname.’

‘Persen,’ he said, a bit surprised. ‘What’s it got to do with you anyway?’

‘I was hoping to have a word with Bjelland actually.’

‘Bje –’ He glanced involuntarily towards the back door. ‘What for? It’s me who’s business manager here.’

‘Diploma from Bergen Business School, I suppose? Does
Bjelland
know about the scam you’re running from here, or is it
something
you started off your own bat?’

He looked even more sullen. ‘What scam?’

The lad in the corner glanced at us for a second, before
dropping
in a coin and starting a new game. The hollow tinny sound of the introductory music echoed through the room.

‘I think you know what I’m driving at. Young girls and – boys … I hung around for a while outside this place on Thursday, and it wasn’t all that hard to find out where at least one of them ended up. Same place as Torild Skagestøl last Friday, right?’

Kalle Persen leaned forward over the counter so abruptly that I stepped back. He waved a podgy index finger in my face and snarled: ‘Look, mate, if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with broken kneecaps, I suggest you watch your mouth – and no mistake. Got my drift?’

‘Can I have that in writing so I can take it down to the police station in Domkirkegaten and show them?’

‘You can have it for real some night when you’re least expecting it.’

‘Better be before Wednesday.’

‘Before Wednesday? How d’you mean?’

‘Forget it. In other words, you’re suggesting I should speak to Bjelland in person, are you? Where can I find him?’

‘He’s in the phone book.’

‘So, he’s not the one hiding in the back room, is he?’

A sort of smile broke out beneath the mouse fur on his upper lip. ‘You can go and take a look if you want …’

‘It’s not
that
important.’ I walked towards the door. ‘Have a nice day.’

‘Kiss my –’

‘I didn’t do it last time, and I’m not going to this time either.’

I left the door ajar when I went out, so he’d have the pleasure of coming out from behind the counter and walking across the floor to shut it again after me.

♦

It wasn’t time for a visit to Birger Bjelland yet and perhaps never would be.

Instead I went back to the office and, not without a trace of anxiety, went through the mail. But today’s contained no death notices.

I tried to get hold of Evy Berge. There was no answer at her home number. And when I called her department at Haukeland Hospital, she was in theatre. – Could they ask her to call me? – But I preferred not to leave my name. You could never tell. It might end up in their database, and next time I was taken to hospital, they might discover I’d donated all my internal organs to the
Institute
of Pathology.

I ought to talk to one of the girls.

Astrid was the hardest nut to crack, but Åsa was probably harder to get hold of, at least, if I wanted to avoid having her parents there.

I leafed back through my notes with the feeling that there was another lead I’d meant to chase up before …

The Guide leader …
Sigrun Søvik
. I’d made a note of it.

When I called the office of the Girl Guides Association at Vetrlidsalmenningen I was given her work phone number: a development company with offices in Søndre. And if I still wanted to go to Karin’s in Landås, it wasn’t much of a detour.

♦

The district of Mindemyren is the coldest place in Bergen. In winter, the frost smoke never quite loosens its grip there. If you leave your car parked for long, you can have trouble starting it.

The development company had offices on the first and second floors over a warehouse, behind large grey steel Venetian blinds. I found Sigrun Søvik in a red check flannel shirt and grey
pullover
, totally absorbed in a computer screen, where she was slowly rotating a construction, with technical data listed here and there, deftly touching certain keys. The walls around her were covered in technical drawings. On a couple of them I thought I recognised the same diagram as on the screen.

She looked up at me vaguely as I stood in the doorway of her tiny office. ‘Yes? What, er …?’

She was a stocky woman with medium fair hair, shorter at the back than in front, staring eyes and a strikingly broad bridge of the nose, as if it had once been broken. Her mouth – she was not wearing lipstick – seemed slightly too small for her large face, and when she pursed her lips rather primly, it looked out of place, like a transplant after some terrible accident.

 ‘The name’s Veum.’

‘Yes? Do we have an appointment?’

‘No, I’ve come to see you in connection with a death.’

She swung the chair right back round and stood up. ‘A death? What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know if you saw it in the papers … Torild Skagestøl.’

‘Oh, Torild …’ For some reason she looked almost relieved. ‘For a moment I was afraid that … But why have you come to see me?’

‘Because I thought that maybe you knew something about Torild, I mean that you knew another side of her than – her parents did.’

Her mouth became even smaller. ‘Another side? Who are you actually?’

‘I’m a private investigator who was looking for Torild the week she was – went missing.’

‘A private investigator? But I still don’t understand … Why have you come to see me?’

‘You were her Guides leader, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, I was leader of the troop she was in – but it’s … I mean she hasn’t attended since – spring last year.’

‘Is that when she stopped?’

‘Yes, er … just before summer, as far as I remember.’

‘And Åsa Furebø stopped at the same time, did she?’

She scratched her forehead as though to jog her memory. ‘Yes, that’s probably right … They were – best friends, you see.’

‘You say that as though it was somehow – suspect?’

She smiled, but not from the heart. ‘Suspect? I just meant … best friends tend to be in league with one another. Follow in each other’s footsteps, so to speak. When one of them stops, the other one often does too.’

‘So there was no special reason they stopped just then?’

‘Special? Have they said anything themselves?’

I purposely held back my answer and noticed how the pause made her uneasy, as if afraid of what I would say.

‘Er, no. They haven’t …’

This time she answered straight away. ‘No, because in our
experience
, that’s exactly the age – either they carry on or they stop, and then they carry on right until they become Head Guides. But as you can well imagine, many of them develop other interests at that age.’

‘Yes, I’m sure … I was in the Scouts myself once – and stopped at just about that age too.’

‘Yes, well, there you are, that’s what I …’

‘But actually, that’s not what I was trying to find out. How long were these girls Guides?’

‘Torild and Åsa?’ I nodded. ‘Oh, er … seven or eight years. Right from when they were at primary school.’

‘You must know them quite well, then?’

‘Yes, as far as … Over such a period of time they change quite a lot, you know.’

‘Yes, of course, but – what was your impression of them?’

‘Oh, er … they were perfectly ordinary nice young girls from good homes.’

‘Hm. Does that mean you also met the parents?’

‘Yes, I did. You see we sometimes had events that were attended by the parents. Usually at Christmas, or if we were planning a trip; and when they took the Guides’ Promise of course. The last few years we didn’t see all that much of them. When the girls had started to grow up, so to speak.’ She hesitated a little. ‘Apart from …’

‘Yes?’

‘The last time we were at camp, at Whitsuntide, north of Radøy, not all that far from Bøvågen, Torild’s father and Asa’s mother paid us a visit one morning.’

‘Torild’s
father
and Åsa’s
mother
? Wasn’t that a little – unusual?’

‘No, they would normally come down together, all four of them, but Åsa’s father was away on a trip, as we’d already been told in advance, and Torild’s mother didn’t feel well, so …’

‘And how did the girls react to that?’

‘Nothing special. There’s always a rather awkward atmosphere when the parents visit. Children need to be free from parental supervision sometimes as well, you know!’

‘As well?’

‘Yes!’ she said defiantly.

‘Yes, I suppose so …’ I nodded at her to carry on. ‘And then?’

‘Well, we gave them a cup of coffee made over a campfire, had a tour of the camp and went down to the cove where we used to swim, then they left. That was it.’

‘And in August of that year Torild’s parents separated.’

‘Oh? I didn’t know. But … the girls had already dropped out then, hadn’t they?’

‘So there’s nothing else you can tell me that might shed any light on what happened to Torild?’

‘No, I … I must admit, I got a bit of a shock when I saw it in the papers, but … And if it’s really true that she’d got involved in – Satanism … she’d moved a long way from the Guides in the space of just one year, I
must
say.’

‘If I told you she was taking drugs – and was also maybe involved in prostitution … would that surprise you?’

Her features alternated from shock to disbelief and – something else I couldn’t quite pin down. When she eventually replied her voice was shaking slightly: ‘Yes, that really would have shocked me, Veum.’

‘They never gave any hint of that while you –’

‘They were
children
, Veum!’ she cut in. ‘Children.’ She turned to face her computer screen as though it might offer a more complete answer to what I’d asked her than she herself could provide.

But she remained silent. She did not share the answers with me, if any there were.

Without troubling her with further questions, I nodded goodbye and left her, as silently as the passage of time, as silent and unremarkable as the sometimes sudden transition between childhood and adulthood in a young life: long before expected and completely unbidden.

THE VIEW OVER THE GARAGE
S
in Sporveien and the
workshops
in Mannsverk was the same as before: so much so that I couldn’t even tell if any of the buses had actually been moved.

I stood and waited after ringing the doorbell where Astrid Nikolaisen and her mother lived.

The curtains were drawn. And it was quite a time before there was a hint of movement in one of them, as if somebody was taking a careful peep.

Then there were muffled footsteps and the door was opened the tiniest crack.

Gerd Nikolaisen looked older than on my last visit. Now she seemed not far off forty. Her hair was untidier, as if she’d just got up, and she was also wearing nothing but a loose-fitting, dark-red dressing gown. The thick layer of make-up did not conceal a nasty swelling round one eye and on her lower lip on the other side, giving her whole face a tragic clown-like air.

She looked at me blankly. ‘What d’you want?’

‘Don’t you remember me? It’s Veum, I called on Thurs –’

‘Yes, I do. Astrid’s not home.’

She was about to close the door, and I leaned carefully forward. ‘Where is she then? At school?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Where then?’

She shrugged her shoulders with a jaded air. ‘Haven’t a clue.’

‘Have you read what happened to Torild?’

She nodded but didn’t say anything.

I glanced quickly both ways. ‘Listen … might I come in for a moment?’

She shrugged again before stepping aside. It made no difference to her. She apparently had nothing better to do.

I followed her through the dark hall and into the living room.

The room was spartan, dominated by chrome-plated tubular steel furniture with black, slightly grubby fabric cushions. In a corner stood a TV and on the floor below it a VCR, surrounded by a fair number of video cases. A rack contained a radio, a twin-deck cassette player and a gaping hole where the CD player should have been. The loose leads behind suggested it had once been there.

From the radio, a commercial station blasted its semi-
hysterical
ads out over the ether into Gerd Nikolaisen’s living room. She walked across and turned down the sound with a gesture of
irritation
. As she turned back to face me, she gathered her dressing gown more tightly about her waist, yet not so quickly that I didn’t glimpse her naked breasts.

I remained standing. ‘These girls … Have you any idea what sort of company they keep?’

She nodded towards one of the chairs to indicate that I should sit down and followed me, placing herself on the sofa on the other side of the low table. The tabletop was black Formica, with the same tubular steel frame as the rest of the furniture. ‘Have you any idea … what are you driving at exactly?’

‘I mean … do you
know
what sort of people they knock about with when they’re in town?’

She took a pack of cigarettes from the table, shook one out, stuck it in her mouth and looked around for something to light it with.

I picked up a barrel-shaped lighter, ignited it and held it towards her. Her thin fingers shook as she leaned forward with the
cigarette
between them, and I couldn’t help noticing how she’d gnawed the skin raw towards the bottom of the pink nail varnish.

‘Well, I … You can’t keep an eye on everything, especially as I’ve had to bring her up alone the whole time.’

She leaned back in the chair, crossed one leg over the other so that her dressing gown parted and inhaled the smoke so deeply that you’d have thought it might soon start seeping out between her legs. Then slowly it was exhaled the usual way. Through the bluish smoke I could just see her eyes. They were dark-brown, almost black, as though consisting of nothing but pupils.

‘But doesn’t it – scare you when stuff like this with Torild happens?’

There was a faint movement at the corner of her mouth. ‘Astrid can take care of herself. Better than I’ve ever taught her to.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’

I sighed. ‘Tell me, shouldn’t Astrid actually have gone to Ulrik School?’

‘Well … she crossed swords with the teacher they had down there, so she was transferred to Nattland, that’s when she was about ten, in Class 5, I think.’

‘So that was when she met Torild and Åsa?’

‘Åsa?’

‘Åsa Furebø.’

‘Oh? Yes, it probably was.’

‘Wasn’t she in the Guides?’

‘In the Guides, Astrid?’ Her upper lip curled up in a crooked grin that revealed her slightly irregular teeth. Then her brow
furrowed
. ‘No, actually, she did try it for a couple of weeks.’ She leaned forward and flicked the ash into the already overflowing ashtray.

‘But when it came to buying the kit, the shirt and stuff, it was too expensive. Anyway, she wasn’t interested.’

‘So what was she interested in?’

She looked at me, baffled. ‘Well, er … What are girls interested in at that age? For a while she used to go up to the riding centre, but we hadn’t really … Then all she did was walk alongside while the others rode, lent a hand with mucking out the stable a bit then she packed that in as well.’

I sat waiting for her to continue.

‘Apart from that … pop music and films and larking about in the evening.’ With a slightly bitter look she explained: ‘She started going out very early with boys who were …’

‘Who were …?’

‘Well, a good bit older than her! I suppose that’s how she got into – the habit …’

‘Habit?’

‘Yes.’

Every time I asked a new question she looked at me as though I was utterly dense. Now she uncrossed and crossed her legs again, with the result that a bit more of her thigh showed. Yet there was nothing seductive in this shifting of position; it was more like an expression of utter disinterestedness. ‘Me and Astrid … we’re not like mother and daughter to each other, really, more like mates. That’s why she calls me Gerd. Remember, I was so young when I had her.’

‘How young?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘But you were saying about
the habit
?’

She looked at me blankly.

‘Oh yes. Well … since we’re practically the same age …’ She paused for a moment, as if waiting for me to protest, but I didn’t say anything. ‘It sometimes happened her boyfriends were my type too … and vice versa.’

‘Hm?’

Quickly she added: ‘Yes. I don’t mean we … you mustn’t think we swapped. But sometimes – situations arose which led to –
jealousy
, right?’

I put my hand up to my eye and nodded towards hers. ‘These marks you’ve got here … and here …’ I moved my hand to my lower lip. ‘Are they the result of such a – situation?’

She pursed her lips, and her eyes flashed. The hand holding the cigarette was shaking even more now, and before she said
anything
, she inhaled deeply through her nostrils.

The words slithered out of her mouth like creepy crawlies from under a stone. ‘I came home … yesterday… I’d just been down to hire a video and buy some fags … so they thought they could get in a quick one …’

I waited.

‘I didn’t ring the bell, just let myself in … then, of course, I heard the creaking from her bed right out here on …’ She nodded towards the front door. ‘She was starkers, and he’d just – pulled down his pants. But they were at it like rabbits … Just like rabbits!’

The only sound that could be heard as she breathed was the muffled, but nevertheless relentless, blare of commercials from the radio.

There were tears in her eyes. ‘You’d think they’d have had enough shame not to do it … here in my own flat … when I could come in any moment. But that’s just what he’s like, doesn’t give a shit! And as for her …’

‘What happened then?’ I asked quietly.

‘There was a hell of a row, obviously. I don’t mess about when my back’s up!’

‘No, I’m sure you –’

‘She got dressed like greased lightning, and I haven’t clapped eyes on her since. But him …’ A hurt look came into her eyes. ‘He just let fly, as though I was the one in the wrong … Here … And here … And look at this …’

Abruptly, she opened her dressing gown and pulled it down over her shoulders baring her top half. She had big blue bruises both around and between her breasts.

She looked down at herself. Her small breasts looked rather pathetic. ‘How can I help it if mine aren’t … if I don’t have big boobs like her? If it was lamb he was after, couldn’t he have taken himself off somewhere else?’

‘Who are we talking about, anyway?’

‘Who? Kenneth of course!’

‘What else is he called besides Kenneth?’

‘Kenneth Persen! Do you know him?’

‘No, but … I bumped into him just as I was leaving, the last time I was here.’

‘That’s right …’ She threw up her hand before pulling the
dressing
gown back round herself.

‘Do you think Astrid could be at his place?’

She looked bitter. ‘Well, good luck to her if she is, that’s what I say …’

‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘What for? Are you going to go and see him?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s Astrid I’d really like to have had a word with right now.’

‘He lives in a dump of a flat in Nedre Nygård. In Jonas Reins Street.’

‘Listen … Astrid and Torild … would it surprise you if I said that they were maybe involved in – prostitution?’

The last spark of life went out in her eyes. ‘No. Nothing can surprise me now … nothing. I think …’

I stood up.

She accompanied me out into the hall. She only managed to raise her eyes as far up as my chest as she said: ‘It did me good to talk to somebody.’

I took out my wallet and handed her one of the visiting cards that only gave my name and office phone number. ‘If you think of anything else, or need to talk to somebody, call this number. If I’m out, you can leave a message.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, looking as though she had to turn the word over in her mouth, unable as she was to remember when she’d used it last.

‘It’s the least I can do,’ I said and left.