Bad Intentions

CHAPTER 22

Yoo Van Chau was a small woman with round childlike cheeks. When she saw Sejer, she spun around and buried her face in her hands. Some coats hung on one wall and she disappeared between a jacket and an overcoat. Sejer noticed two things. She had black silky hair and wore tiny embroidered slippers on her feet.

Having hidden behind the clothes for a while, she reappeared with an apologetic smile. He followed her into the living room and spotted a photo of Kim Van Chau straight away. It stood on a tall chest of drawers. A candle burned next to it. Kim was a handsome boy and he could not stop himself from thinking of the body they had dragged out of the water. It was not handsome, but Yoo Van Chau did not know that.

She gestured towards a sofa. It was red with golden trim. She sunk into a chair. Sejer could not take his eyes off the embroidered slippers. He thought he could make out a motif of fire-breathing dragons.

‘I can make tea,’ Yoo Van Chau said.

‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ Sejer said.

Her hands settled in her lap and a stream of words poured out of her. She spoke good Norwegian with a charming accent, and her voice was that of a little girl.

‘They told me he was found close to the shore,’ she said. ‘That he’s been lying there a long time. It’s nine months now since he went missing. So I’m happy in a way. Because I had given up. I thought that all was lost and that my hands would be empty for ever.’

‘Do you have any other children?’ Sejer asked, hoping she would say yes. That any second now a teenage daughter would appear from one of the rooms and put her arms around her mother’s neck. Or a small child might crawl up into her lap. She seemed young.

‘Kim’s my only one,’ she explained. ‘We never had any more children, my husband died when he was only thirty-two. I couldn’t support us on my own. Kim was only eight years old when we moved to Norway. We come from Yen Bai. We decided on Norway because we have family here and they said it was a fine country.’

‘And what do you think?’ Sejer asked. ‘Is Norway a fine country?’

‘You want for nothing,’ she said simply.

Sejer did not reply.

‘Kim didn’t have many friends,’ she went on. ‘And whenever he found someone to spend time with, they wanted to go out drinking. That’s what he said to me: if I want to hang out with them, I have to go drinking.’

She stopped her flow of words.

Sejer had listened in silence. To come all this way, he thought, from beautiful Vietnam, to the dark Norwegian winter with ice and snow and lose everything you have. And yet sit there calmly talking with your hands in your lap. Tiny porcelain hands. And fire-breathing dragons on your feet.

‘Isn’t it odd that some people end up without friends?’ she said. ‘After all, he wanted for nothing. He did well at school and you can see from the photo that he was good-looking, so it’s hard for me to understand. It’s very hard indeed.’

‘Tell me about the night he went missing,’ Sejer asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I will tell you. It was 19 December last year, in the early evening. He wanted to go into town. He wasn’t meeting anyone in particular, he just wanted to watch the world go by, he said, and I told him to dress up warm because it was freezing cold that day. And a seventeen-year-old boy should have some independence, I do know that, so I was happy that he wanted to go out and meet people even though I didn’t know who they were. He called out to me from the hall. That was the last time I heard his voice, I can still hear his very last words. I went to bed at midnight, but I didn’t go to sleep. I lay waiting for his key in the lock because it makes quite a loud noise, you can’t mistake it. I listened out for his voice and his footsteps, and I waited for the pipes in the bathroom to gurgle. The night has never been so full of sounds. I kept hearing things, and every time I sat up with a start. Kim’s coming, that’s definitely Kim. Wasn’t that the sound of a car starting in the road? They must have given him a lift home, after all he’s gone out with nice people. Because he’s a nice boy. That’s what I thought as I lay in my bed. After several hours dawn broke and then I was sure that something must have happened. I stood in the doorway and looked at his empty bed. I could hardly believe it. Then there was the business of trying to find out what had happened. When he was reported missing in the newspaper, the police received some calls. It turned out he had met some young people and gone to a party with them, and they’d all been questioned, but none of them had any idea what might have happened to him. Kim had done what they had done. He had been drinking and he wasn’t used to that. They made no bones about it. Kim was drunk. And I don’t know what happened, but he shouldn’t have been drinking because he can’t handle it.’

‘What do you think might have happened?’ Sejer asked.

‘For a long time I thought he might have fallen asleep in a ditch on his way home and frozen to death, but then I heard that he had been given a lift as far as the letterboxes and that’s when I started to have doubts. But the days passed and no one found him, and I knew that this was something completely different, something incomprehensible. I don’t understand why they found him in the water, perhaps he fell through the ice. But it was so cold last winter. The ice must have been thick, and what would he have been doing up at Glitter Lake?’

She wiped tears from her cheek. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some tea?’ she asked again.

‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ Sejer said.

He regretted saying it immediately. Perhaps she would like to go to the kitchen and do something, boil water, fetch cups from the cupboard, do the things she normally did when she had visitors. And he had rejected her hospitality. For a while he wondered if he should ask for a cup anyway, but he was too slow.

‘Can you discover anything after such a long time?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to blame anyone, but if someone is responsible for what happened, then they must be punished for it. The police thought he might have killed himself because they soon found out that he was lonely, obviously. But Kim would never have done anything like that.’

‘The case will be reopened,’ Sejer said. ‘Now that we’ve found him, it will be easier to investigate. He didn’t drown, that much we do know, but the cause of his death is unknown. Was he in good health?’

She nodded. ‘He was. He wasn’t on medication, or anything. He didn’t take drugs, I’m certain of it, and he didn’t smoke, either.’

Again she started to weep softly. She straightened out an embroidered tablecloth and smiled apologetically for becoming emotional.

‘If you discover the truth, I’ll be happy,’ she said. ‘As it is now, I lie awake at night and imagine the very worst. What if they killed him? All the drunk young people at the party. What if they killed him?’

‘They didn’t,’ Sejer said. ‘The forensic examiner would have discovered that.’

‘Is it possible to drink so much that it kills you?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Sejer said, ‘it is. And the forensic examiner has taken samples which will reveal whether he died from alcohol poisoning, but we don’t think that’s what happened.’

‘Can you tell when people lie?’ she asked.

He contemplated this for couple of seconds. ‘Often, but not always.’

‘Will you be speaking to the people who were with him that night?’

‘I’ll be speaking to every single one of them.’

Yoo Van Chau looked at him with piercing eyes.

‘You must study everyone you talk to very closely,’ she said. ‘You must listen to their voices and look into their eyes to see if they speak the truth.’

‘I’ll listen very carefully to everything they’ve got to say,’ Sejer said.

‘And you must watch their hands,’ she said. ‘Observe what they do with their hands, if they flap.’

‘I’ll watch their hands,’ he promised.

‘Can you find out what happened?’ she said, and now her voice was urgent. ‘Will you know if anyone killed or tortured him? Can you find out why his heart stopped beating, his young, strong heart? There has to be a reason,’ she pressed on. ‘Nothing happens without a reason.’

‘You’re right about that,’ he said, ‘but you know, often several circumstances coincide.’

‘Then I want to know all about those circumstances,’ she said.

‘Can you find them out? Please,’ she added while she waited desperately for his reply. She looked small and lost in the big chair. Sejer did not want to promise her anything or give her any guarantees. He never did, he knew better than to do that. But suddenly he felt weak, and the forbidden words slipped out of him.

‘I’ll find out what happened,’ he said. ‘I promise.’