Bad Intentions

CHAPTER 28

Ingerid Moreno was an attractive woman, but grief had ravaged her. Her cheeks were sunken and her fingers were feeble when she buttoned her coat. It was late October. She tied a floral shawl around her neck. She had decided to take action. Passively grieving or waiting for something that might never happen was making her ill. But it was hard for her to move. Her body was weighed down by lethargy, and the things she had done automatically, such as getting dressed, locking the front door and going to her car, took much longer than usual. She was used to her days being familiar, predictable entities, like a staircase she would walk up every morning and find her bed at the top. The staircase had collapsed now. It had been reduced to rubble and she did not know how to climb it.

The wind caught her shawl as she reached the flagstone path. It was a colourful shawl decorated with red poppies that she had bought in Naples. It was there she had met Tony Moreno. She got in her car and drove to Nattmål. She stopped at the foot of the hill and thought for a while. Then she got out to check the letterboxes to make sure she was in the right place. Do I dare, she wondered, have I really got the nerve? I have no right. Nevertheless she drove up the long hill until she reached the terraced houses. She stayed in her car listening to a piece of music on the radio. When it has finished, I’ll go in, she decided. A few minutes later she headed for Yoo Van Chau’s front door. Suddenly she was on the verge of tears. She had no idea what might happen to her. A furious woman might appear at the door, screaming, don’t come near me with your grief, I’ve got enough with my own. She heard a faint click from the lock. A tiny dark-haired woman gave her a quizzical look and Ingerid felt enormous and clumsy.

‘You don’t know me,’ she stuttered, ‘but I know who you are. I read about your son in the papers. About Kim.’

She wanted to hurry up and explain herself. She did not know how long the other woman would be prepared to listen.

‘I’ve lost my son too,’ she said. ‘He drowned himself. Or at least we think he did, but it’s not certain. There’s something very strange going on which we don’t understand. It happened just a few weeks ago. He was on a trip with some friends, and when they woke up in the morning he was gone. That’s what they said. The police came to my house yesterday,’ she said. ‘They told me something new and I got really scared.’

She grew more animated because Yoo Van Chau did not look as if she was about to stop her.

‘He went to the same party, in December. Out at Skjæret, near Åkerøy. He was there with Kim.’

Total silence followed. Yoo made a move towards Ingerid and placed a hand on her arm. Her eyes were huge and shining.

‘Now they’re both dead,’ Ingerid said. ‘Do you understand what happened at that party?’

‘Please come in,’ Yoo said. She stepped aside; the hallway was narrow. The moment they entered the living room Ingerid spotted the photograph on the chest of drawers. For a while she studied the young Vietnamese man.

‘You’ve lost a handsome boy,’ she said.

Yoo placed a hand on her heart. She would keep all the beautiful words spoken about Kim in there and carry them with her.

‘Jon was very fair,’ Ingerid said. ‘But he was also slender, and he was the smallest. Of the three of them,’ she explained. ‘You know, Axel and Reilly. Have you met Axel and Reilly? His friends?’

‘No,’ Yoo said. ‘I haven’t met them. But they were the ones who gave Kim a lift home. They drove him as far as the letterboxes. That’s what they told the police. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know anything any more.’ Suddenly a thought occurred to her. ‘Was your son in that car?’

‘Yes,’ Ingerid said. ‘He was in the car.’ She felt utterly desolate. Now that they had arrived at the unpleasant part, the incident she was still unclear about, her strength deserted her. ‘Please may I sit down?’

Yoo gestured towards the sofa. She slipped into an armchair with an elegance which reminded Ingerid of a swan gliding on water.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ Ingerid said. ‘I don’t know what Jon was mixed up in, and I can barely look you in the eye, but I have to. It pains me to think that Jon might have done something illegal. He was a decent lad. He knew the difference between right and wrong, I’m absolutely convinced of that, but there were several of them in the car that night, and they had been drinking. Jon died in the middle of September,’ she said. ‘He was found at the bottom of the lake they call Dead Water.’

‘Dead Water?’ Yoo said.

‘Your son was found in a lake too,’ Ingerid said. ‘It all means something. I believe that now.’

She was starting to become distressed and had to compose herself.

‘Jon left behind a diary,’ she said. ‘He writes page after page about how guilty he feels. That he doesn’t deserve to live. I think it has to do with Kim. That’s why I wanted to meet you. We have to find out what happened that night.’

Yoo listened quietly. She had a serenity which made Ingerid relax her shoulders.

‘Jon was in hospital,’ she explained. ‘He had had a nervous breakdown. But he never mentioned that he was planning to kill himself, and I still find it hard to believe. When someone commits suicide, strong forces are involved. But did they really come from inside him? Or was it something external that killed him? This is what troubles me.’

‘Kim got into a car,’ Yoo said, ‘because he wanted to go to a party. There were two girls in it. I wonder who they were and what they were thinking when they saw him standing by the side of the road. I was sitting in this chair as they drove off. I should have taken better care of him.’

‘You can’t babysit a seventeen-year-old,’ Ingerid said. ‘They’re off on their own. They get mixed up in things. Surely that’s not our fault?’

‘That’s not our fault,’ Yoo agreed.

They looked each other in the eye.

‘But I’m still convinced that someone out there is guilty of something, and I want that guilt apportioned,’ Ingerid said.

‘What are we going to do?’ Yoo whispered.

Ingerid gave her a triumphant look. ‘Jon’s friends, Axel and Reilly. They’re hiding something. In Jon’s diary it’s clear that something happened, something got out of control. Do you follow? Something is going on behind our backs.’

Yoo leaned forward in her armchair, listening.

‘What scares me the most,’ Ingerid said, ‘is that the police won’t be able to arrest them. Because it gets harder after such a long period of time and because they haven’t found any evidence, you know, as Kim was in the water for so long. But I can’t bear doing nothing, I have to do something. We can’t beat them up, but we can scare the living daylights out of them.’

Yoo Van Chau was thrilled to have found someone who felt the same way.

‘I’m thinking of inventing a lie,’ Ingerid said. ‘Give them a taste of their own medicine. I want to give them a wake-up call.’

‘A wake-up call?’

‘An anonymous letter,’ Ingerid said, ‘which will make them think that someone is on to them. That’s what they’re scared of, isn’t it, that someone suspects them? You do and I do, and I want them to know that.’

Yoo clenched her fists in her lap; her cheeks were flushed. ‘We’ll write a letter,’ she said, ‘but you need to write it. I make so many mistakes. Speaking Norwegian is no problem but writing it is difficult. I’ll get some paper.’

Yoo leapt up from her chair and went over to the chest of drawers where Kim’s photograph stood. Suddenly she waved her fist in the air. ‘We’ll get them,’ she said.

She opened one of the drawers and rummaged around. Then she returned with pen and paper. Ingerid took them.

‘It must be short,’ she said, ‘and to the point. It must be menacing.’

Yoo felt vengeance fill her heart, and it was true what they said: revenge was sweet. Ingerid started scribbling. She crossed her scrawl out and wrote something else. Yoo looked like a child expecting an exciting present. She perched on the edge of her armchair and craned her neck. Ingerid crossed her words out again, frowned and tore off the sheet. Eventually she frowned with determination and wrote without hesitation. Then she pushed the pad across the coffee table.

WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

WE ARE WATCHING YOU.

‘Where do we send it?’ Yoo asked.

‘To Reilly,’ Ingerid said. ‘Reilly is weaker.’

Afterwards Yoo retrieved an atlas from the bookcase.

She pointed as she explained to Ingerid, ‘Look, that’s China, Laos and Cambodia. Here’s the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. And this’, she said, ‘is Vietnam.’

The small country was reproduced in purple. North-west of Hanoi lay the town of Yen Bai. She drew a long line with the tip of her finger up to Norway.

‘We had to leave it all behind,’ she said, ‘when my husband got sick and died, and we were all alone.’

Then Ingerid pointed to Italy, which was reproduced in pink. She placed her finger on Naples.

‘Jon’s father lives here,’ she explained. ‘He left when Jon was a little boy. One day he just packed his bags and vanished. Then there was only Jon and me.’

Yoo put the atlas away.

‘Our sons are dead,’ Ingerid said, ‘but we’re not. I want to go outside in the wind. Do you have some stale bread so we can feed the ducks? Put on a warm coat.’

Yoo quickly went to the kitchen to fetch some bread. When they got outside they were hit by an icy blast.

‘As if grief weren’t bad enough,’ Ingerid said, ‘the gods have sent us a storm.’

They clung to each other as they walked. No one else had ventured out in the cold weather. It took them half an hour to walk to the pond. They found a bench by the water’s edge and Yoo took the bag of bread from her handbag. The ducks heard the rustling and zoomed in on them like small ships in a dense feather-clad fan formation. Their orange feet paddled energetically in the water.

‘It doesn’t matter if we get a bit chilly,’ Ingerid said. ‘We can warm up afterwards. How are you doing? Are your hands freezing?’

Yoo started tossing pieces of bread at the ducks. She found it amusing the way they all made a beeline for her. It seemed like devotion.

‘I’m going to come here every day,’ she vowed. ‘With stale bread.’

‘I would like to come with you,’ Ingerid said. ‘If you don’t mind.’ She gave the small woman a kind look.

‘Do you know what I often think?’ Ingerid said. ‘When something terrible happens, we talk about people getting over it. Is she over it? we say, as if the tragedy is an obstacle in someone’s path and we have to scale it. It’s not that straightforward. Grieving is something we have to live with,’ she said, ‘it’s a constant battle. And the enemy is the rest of our lives. All those nights. All those hours.’

She was reminded of something she had read in Jon’s diary. ‘He was so horribly ashamed,’ she explained. ‘He was so burdened by guilt and shame. He wrote as though he didn’t deserve to live.’

Ingerid looked down at the bread that Yoo was holding in her hand.

‘That crust of bread reminds me of something,’ she said. ‘A man was in a German prison camp during the war. He was subjected to so many awful things – abuse, torture, starvation and exposure. There were thirty men crammed into a freezing barrack, and the snow blew in under the door. Nevertheless he survived, and when the war ended he returned home. Though he now had plenty of food and warmth, he died shortly afterwards. He was haunted by a terrible memory. One night he had stolen a crust of bread from a sleeping man. It was this incident that killed him. He could not bear to eat.’

‘That’s very sad,’ Yoo said. She could visualise it all, an emaciated man in prison clothes stealing in the night. Crouching alone in the dark, furtively gnawing at the dry crust.

‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ Ingerid said. ‘But I also think that it says something positive about people. We need a sense of decency. Without it we cannot live a good life. And Jon had lost that sense of decency.’

Yoo looked down at what was left of the crust.

Ingerid took one of her hands and gave it a friendly squeeze.

‘Put your gloves back on,’ she ordered her. ‘You’re freezing. Look. They want more.’ She pointed to the ducks, which kept coming.

‘I think we’ve made friends for life,’ Yoo smiled.

Afterwards they headed towards Nattmål to warm up with a pot of tea.

‘Kim is never coming home again,’ Yoo said. ‘That means that no one will find me when I die. Not for a long time. Not many people come to my house,’ she explained.

‘That could happen to me too,’ Ingerid said. ‘I have an idea. Why don’t we call each other every evening?’

At that Yoo looped her arm though Ingerid’s, and they walked the last stretch close together.

‘What about us?’ she remembered when they were back inside. ‘Is sending that letter to Reilly an act of decency?’

Ingerid had her answer ready.

‘We forgive the poor wretch who stole the bread,’ she said. ‘He stole because he was in need. And so are we. Different rules apply.’