Burned

Chapter 72

The day of Henriette Hagerup’s funeral starts off cloudless, clear and beautiful. It is Monday. Henning Juul has dusted down an old suit. He watches himself in the mirror. He adjusts the black tie he hates wearing, and runs his fingers over his scars.

It is a long time since he last looked at them. Really looked at them. But as he does, he thinks they have grown less noticeable. It’s like they have sunk into him, somehow.

He takes a deep breath in the bathroom, where the air is still warm and moist after the shower he took half an hour ago. Shaving cream and a razor lie next to the sink which now has a rim of stubble and foam.

Before he leaves, he checks that everything he needs is in place in his pockets. The most important thing you need to bring is your head, Jarle Hogseth used to say. That may be true, Henning thinks, but it’s not a bad idea to pack some tools as well. He needs to keep his wits about him now, even though he has made good use of them recently. He has reviewed every conversation and every encounter. Dr Helge and 6tiermes7 have both provided invaluable help and pieces for the jigsaw, but he doesn’t know if it’s enough.

He hopes to know the answer in a couple of hours.

*

Ris Church was consecrated in 1932. It is a beautiful stone church in Roman style. The church bells, all three of them, are already tolling when Henning arrives by taxi. He gets out and mixes with the mourners.

He enters the church and is given an order of service leaflet with Henriette Hagerup’s name and smiling face on the cover. He recognises the photograph. It was displayed on Henriette’s shrine outside the college last week. He remembers thinking that she looked intelligent. He takes a seat on a pew right at the back and refrains from staring at the mourners. He doesn’t want to look at anyone or talk to anyone. Not yet.

The ceremony is beautiful, dignified, subdued and sad. The vicar’s monotonous voice fills the church, accompanied by suppressed sniffling and silent weeping. Henning tries not to think about the last time he was in church, the last time he heard people mourn the loss of a child, but the thoughts are impossible to block out. Even when the vicar is speaking, he can hear the tune of ‘Little Friend’.

Fifteen minutes into the ceremony, he gets up and leaves. The atmosphere, the smell, the sounds, the black clothes, the faces, everything takes him two years back in time, to when he sat in another church, at the front, wondering if he could be put back together, if he would ever be human again.

He hasn’t moved on, he realises, as he comes out into the porch. He dreads to think about what lies ahead, his future, the unfinished business he has been too traumatised to face. But now that he knows his brain is working again, he can ignore it no longer. I can’t let it go, he thinks, I need to do something about the gnawing in my chest, this nagging clockwork which ticks away inside me; it will never release me and let me be swallowed up in the peaceful ground and close my eyes with a feeling of completion.

Because I know I’m right.

He loosens his tie a little as he comes outside and feels the fresh wind on his face. He steps away from the entrance. The vicar’s voice carries right through the open doors. A gardener is tidying up a nearby grave and making it look nice. Henning wanders around the graves. The grass is newly mown, its colours lush and green, and all shrubs are trimmed meticulously.

He strolls to the back of the church, where the gravestones are lined up like teeth. He thinks it has been a long time since he last visited Jonas, but pushes the thought aside when he sees her.

Anette is standing in front of the rectangular hole in the ground, where Henriette Hagerup will be laid to rest. Even now, Anette is carrying her backpack. A sudden onset of nerves sweeps through his body as he decides to join her. There is no one around. She is wearing a black skirt and black blazer over her blouse, which is also black.

Anette turns as he approaches from behind.

‘So you couldn’t stand it inside, either?’ she says and flashes him a smile.

‘Hi, Anette,’ he says, stops next to her and looks down into the hole.

‘I hate funerals,’ she begins. ‘I think it’s better to say goodbye like this, out here, before the hysteria begins.’

He nods. Neither of them speaks for a while.

‘I hadn’t expected to see you here,’ she says, finally looking at him. ‘Dull day was it?’

‘No,’ he replies. ‘I’m right where I need to be.’

‘What do you mean?’

He takes a step closer to the edge of the hole and looks at it again. He is reminded of Kolbein Falkeid’s poem, which Vamp set to music: When evening falls, I quietly embark and my lifeboat is lowered six foot down.

Twenty-three years, he thinks. Henriette Hagerup only lived for twenty-three years. He wonders if she had time to feel that she had had a life.

He sticks his hand into his jacket pocket.

‘You thought you had remembered everything,’ he says, meeting Anette’s eyes. Her cautious smile melts into an uneasy twitch in the corner of her mouth. He can see his words have taken her by surprise. Good, he intended them to. He waits until the dramatic effect is complete.

‘What?’

‘I couldn’t understand why you suddenly became so helpful and obliging. You drove me up to Ekeberg Common, right in the middle of a rainstorm. At that point, Stefan’s death wasn’t public knowledge. But you knew about it. You knew because you were the last person to see him alive. You knew because you talked him into taking his own life.’

She raises her eyebrows.

‘What the hell are you — ’

‘You suffer from epilepsy, don’t you?’

Anette shifts her weight from one leg to the other.

‘Can I have a look in your backpack?’

‘What — no.’

‘Epileptics are often prescribed Orfiril. I bet you have Orfiril in there,’ he says, pointing to her backpack. ‘Or perhaps you’ve run out?’

She doesn’t reply, but sends him a look that suggests he has wounded her deeply.

‘Orfiril tablets look just like this,’ he says and pulls out a bag of Knott from his suit pocket. He takes out a small, white pastille and holds it up.

‘Stefan had already let the cat out of the bag to his parents. You were going to prison for a long time, both of you. You saw a chance for Stefan to take all the credit. Or was that your plan all along?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘I stepped on one of these, when I found Stefan dead in his bed,’ he says, and shows her the sweets. ‘Orfiril mixed with alcohol is a lethal cocktail. But the only one who took Orfiril was Stefan. You swallowed a fistful of sweets. Yum. After all, you enjoy eating them all at once. The only problem with Knott is that sometimes they fall out of the bag or you spill some when you’re trying to swallow a handful.’

Anette shakes her head and holds up her hands.

‘This is beyond me. I’m leaving.’

‘I know why you gave me a lift to Ekeberg Common,’ he says, following her. She turns and stares at him again. ‘You were nervous. You knew that Stefan had blabbed, you were scared he might have told his parents what really happened, revealed the name of his partner in crime. You couldn’t ask Stefan about it that afternoon — he would have twigged that you were up to something — that the suicide pact wasn’t genuine, at least not as far as you were concerned. That’s why you offered to drive me: it gave you a reason to be there and find out how much his parents knew. That’s why you appeared in the tent.’

Anette puts her hands on her hips. She is about to say something, but she stops.

‘And what a performance,’ he continues. ‘You realised that Ingvild didn’t know who you were. You were safe. And you knew that Ingvild had been raped, because Stefan had told you. You also knew that she had taken self-defence classes, that she had a stun gun and that she had been trained to react defensively if someone approached her from behind. Like you did in the tent. Such a compassionate gesture, placing your hand on her back, near her throat, to show kindness, but you did it because you knew what Ingvild would do, she would stun you and surely there can be no better way to remove suspicion from yourself than by becoming the next victim, even if you survive.’

Anette averts her eyes. He can tell from looking at her that it is true, though she hides it well. He is convinced she has been to the Foldviks’ flat more than once. That’s why she closed the curtains. She knew how it was overlooked from the street, from the flats opposite, and she also knew that the Foldviks had nosy neighbours. Every time a front door was opened, Mrs Steen’s curtains would twitch. That was why the front door was almost closed, but not shut. So no one would see or hear her.

Anette scratches her cheek and flicks aside strands of hair that have flopped into her eyes. Henning continues:

‘After killing Henriette, you tried to implicate her boyfriend, a man who had won Henriette’s heart. You tried to set him up, just like in the script, so you could go free. It didn’t quite go according to plan, but with Stefan out of the picture, after his confession, all the loose ends were tidied up, as far as you were concerned. You thought you had remembered everything, Anette, but you missed a couple of things,’ he says and pauses for dramatic effect again. It appears to be lost on her. She looks at him with expressionless eyes.

‘Stefan,’ he says and waits a little longer. ‘How did Stefan know that Henriette would be in the tent that night?’

He lets the question linger for a long time. Anette doesn’t reply.

‘No texts were sent from Stefan’s mobile to Henriette that day or night. Or from her mobile to his. I know, because I checked.’

She doesn’t stir, she simply looks at him. Her face is blank and her breathing indifferent. He straightens up.

‘However, a call was made from his telephone to yours on the afternoon he died. It lasted thirty-seven seconds. Was that when he told you he had confessed to his parents? Is that why you drove over? To carry out a little damage limitation?’

Still no reply. He remembers what Anette said to him, outside the college, that Henriette had said she was going to email ‘A Sharia Caste’ to Foldvik. 6tiermes7, or someone else from the police, went through Henriette’s e-mails and established that she never did. Yngve wasn’t lying. Stefan couldn’t have found the script at home. There was only one way it could have happened: Anette must have shown, or given, it to him.

Henning watches her. There are no chinks in her armour.

‘I’m asking you again: how did Stefan know that Henriette would be in the tent that evening?’

This time, he doesn’t wait for a reply.

‘Because you told him. Henriette and you had already agreed to meet there. Otherwise, why would she leave her boyfriend’s flat? It had to be because of something important, something previously arranged. And you were going to start filming the following day.’

Anette doesn’t react.

‘What did you say to Stefan that evening?’ he continues, unaffected by her stonewalling. ‘That you were just going to scare her little? Was that how you made him bring his mother’s stun gun?’

Even though Anette doesn’t say anything, Henning is convinced that Henriette must have been surprised when Stefan appeared in the tent with Anette. That hadn’t been part of her agreement with Anette. But Stefan still thought that Henriette was the woman his father had had an affair with. Perfect for Anette. And the hole had already been dug, because it was needed for the filming the morning after.

‘Did you throw the first stone, or did you provoke him into killing her?’

He looks for sounds of acquiescence or admission, but finds neither. Even so he can’t stop now.

‘You planned the killing well. And to implicate Marhoni even more deeply, you e-mail Henriette the very day you intend to kill her. You e-mail a photo. Henriette with her arms around an older man. I’m willing to bet that the man in the photo was Yngve.’

‘I never sent Henriette a picture of Yngve,’ Anette snorts.

‘No. You didn’t press the ‘ send ’ button. You got someone else to do that.’

He points to her backpack.

‘Inhambane.’

She turns her head, but realises she can’t see which sticker Henning is pointing to. It says Inhambane in black print against a white background surrounded by a red heart.

‘Inhambane is a town in southern Mozambique, on the Inhambane Bay. Great beaches. The day Henriette was killed, she received an e-mail from an Internet cafe in Inhambane. A text message was also sent to her from a free e-mail account from the same cafe shortly afterwards, telling her to check her e-mail. This happened while she was with Mahmoud Marhoni.’

‘And then?’

‘And then? You’re telling me it’s pure coincidence that you happen to have a Inhambane sticker on your backpack? You’ve been there, Anette. You’ve probably got friends there. Inhambane isn’t exactly one of Star Tours’ top-ten travel destinations.’

Anette doesn’t reply.

‘The trouble with being partners in crime’, he carries on, ‘is that you can never be sure that the other one will keep his mouth shut. That’s why you were scared, the first time I met you. You were afraid that Stefan would give himself away, give you away, that he wouldn’t be able to live with what the two of you had done. And you were right. So you tricked him into taking his own life.’

Anette’s face dissolves into an enigmatic smile, but she quickly recovers.

‘Let me tell you something about Henriette,’ she says. ‘Henriette wasn’t that clever. Since her death, everyone has been at pains to say how talented she was, how brilliant.’

Her voice darkens.

‘The truth was that she was mediocre. I read the script she sold. It wasn’t that good. Control+Alt+Delete? — what kind of a title is that? The clever twists in that script were my ideas. But do you think she was going to give me any credit for that?’

She snorts.

‘That’s why you promised to carry on her work, as you wrote on the card. You felt you had certain rights to the script, to the clever twists. Have you been in contact with Truls Leirvag yet?’

Anette laughs briefly and then she nods.

‘We should make a film together, you and I. You’ve got a great imagination. But you, too, have forgotten something,’ she says. She walks right up to him and whispers:

‘The two people who can prove everything you’ve just described — ’ she begins and holds a dramatic pause. The coldness in her eyes hits him like an icy slap across his cheeks.

‘They’re both dead.’

She takes a step back. Then she smiles again. A small, cunning smile.

‘So what if they find sweets in Stefan’s room?’ she continues. ‘What does that prove? That he had a visitor who liked sweets? And what if he rang me that afternoon? I was going to direct his film. We were still in contact. None of that proves that I killed Henriette or Stefan. None of it.’

‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘The police can only prove that you tried to point the finger at Mahmoud Marhoni, but — ’

‘What kind of proof do you have?’ she interrupts him. ‘A sticker on my backpack?’

‘It doesn’t prove a whole lot, but if you line up enough matches and strike them all, you get a fairly decent flame. When I hand over everything I’ve discovered to Detective Inspector Brogeland, he and his colleagues will go over everything you have said and done in the last few years. They will turn your life upside down and inside out, every e-mail, text message, receipt and bill will be scrutinised in an effort to link you to a murder and a suspicious death. And when the toxicology report is ready and the police learn that Stefan’s body contained Orfiril, the circumstantial evidence will be so overwhelming that it will take a great deal to prevent you from going to prison. One sweet, as you rightly point out, doesn’t constitute proof, but remember the Orderud trial. Four people went to prison because of a sock.’

Anette doesn’t reply. He looks at her and tries to mirror her frosty smile.

‘What’s the point of being a genius if nobody knows?’ he says, mimicking her voice. She looks up at him. ‘Everyone, at some level, wants recognition for what they’ve done. We want applause. Human beings are like that. That’s why you gave me the script. You wanted me to understand. And I do. I understand that you planned it all, and I’m terribly impressed. But you’re not going to get a round of applause. Not from me, not from anyone.’

Anette stares at him. He turns around and sees the funeral procession leave the church.

‘Like you said, Anette, the hysteria is about to begin.’

She laughs at his remark.

‘Wow,’ she says, alternately shaking and nodding her head. She comes up to him again. She takes the sweet from his hand and pops it into her mouth.

‘Do you know who taught me that they taste best when you eat them all at once?’

She sucks the pastille demonstratively.

‘Given how clever you are, I’m sure you can find out,’ she says, without waiting for him to reply. She looks at him for a long time. Then she smiles again and walks past him in the direction of the funeral procession. He follows her with his eyes, as she strolls across the grass, past the mourners; she glances at them, nods to some acquaintances, but she doesn’t join them. Instead she strolls on, taking her time. As if she doesn’t have a care in the world.

And she might well be right, Henning thinks, when Anette disappears from view and the cemetery fills with mourners in black clothes. It may be impossible to prove that she plotted and executed plans that resulted in the deaths of two people. Because she has never admitted to anything, not today or in the tent at Ekeberg Common, and the evidence is, at best, circumstantial.

Jarle Hogseth used to say: Crimes are rarely delivered gift-wrapped to the police. Sometimes it is straightforward: the evidence speaks an unequivocal language, the perpetrator confesses, either spontaneously or due to evidence presented during interrogations; or in the subsequent trial, the prosecution’s version stands in sharp contrast to the explanations given by the defendant. That’s the way it is and always will be.

But the truth will never be lost to him. He saw it in Anette’s frozen eyes. And plenty can happen during an investigation. New evidence might appear. Witnesses could come forward with testimony that sheds fresh light on Anette’s actions. She will have a lot of questions to answer and it is difficult to give consistent replies, time after time after time, to complex questions, no matter how clever you are.

*

He remains in the churchyard during the interment. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t listen to what is being said; he only listens when they sing: Help me, God, to hum this song so my heart will carry on just one day, one moment at a time until I reach your good country.

He grits his teeth and swallows the memories and the pain, even though he sees Jonas all the time. He feels that he can finally say goodbye. He hasn’t been ready until now. He couldn’t manage it back then, because he couldn’t, didn’t want to accept that Jonas would never again wake him in the morning, at the crack of dawn, would never again snuggle up to him and cuddle, cuddle, cuddle until children’s TV began.

It’s hard to be grateful for what I had, he thinks, it’s hard to remember every day, every moment instead of mourning what will never be. But if I can convince myself that the six years Jonas lived were the finest of my life, then that’s a start.

It doesn’t feel like much, but it’s a start.

He refrains from offering his condolences after Henriette’s lifeboat has been lowered six feet into the ground. He knows he won’t be able to handle it, won’t have the strength to meet her parents and her family without identifying with them. He won’t suppress his grief, because he needs to feel it. But not here. Not now.

The time will come.

Just one day, one moment at a time. Until I, Jonas, reach your good country.