Death By Water

EPILOGUE

Tuesday 20 January

JENNIFER PLÅTERUD SWITCHED off the computer, hung her white coat in the cupboard, let herself out into the corridor and locked the door behind her. She had just decided she was going to treat herself to a new pair of boots. She’d seen them on the net at Hatty and Moo. They were made of antelope leather too, but with a bronze buckle that gave them a touch of roughness that suited the mood she was in these days.

The time was 4.15 The tenth class parent-teacher evening was due to begin at seven, and in Ivar’s opinion it was time she took a turn for once. She had also promised to have dinner ready before that, because both boys had sports practice to go to. Thinking about it, it was actually Ivar’s turn to go to the meeting, and she was annoyed with herself for letting herself be persuaded. She took another glance at her watch and decided to stick to what she had already decided to do. In spite of all her domestic obligations, she headed up towards the main wing of the Riks Hospital and into the large hallway that always reminded her of an aeroplane hangar.

As she headed up the steps towards the gallery, she thought of Roar Horvath. Earlier that day, she had called him and hinted that she might possibly find herself in the Manglerud area one day soon. But he had other things on his mind and for the third time that week she got a vague response. Why couldn’t he tell it like it was? Did he think she wouldn’t be able to take it? It annoyed her, not having had the chance to show him how little it bothered her. She’d made a mistake about him. The first time she met him, at the Christmas party, she had got the impression of a man of sanguine disposition. But then who isn’t sanguine at a Christmas party? Now he seemed to her more and more a combination of the phlegmatic and the melancholic, not all that different from Ivar and Norwegian men generally. It wasn’t the first time she had got something so badly wrong, but any re-evaluation of the Hippocratic system was completely out of the question.

As she walked along the third-floor gallery, faces streamed towards her. Some she recognised, nodded to in passing; most of them were strangers. She would miss him for a few days, she had decided, and then it would be over. That was the usual way of it when things were allowed to rest in peace. She had even got over Sean. At least, it had become possible not to think about him. And this fling with Roar Horvath hadn’t really amounted to anything more than a bit of therapy. For a while it had muted the fear of withering away completely, and now she didn’t need it any longer.

Following instructions from the reception desk, she knocked on the next-to-last door in the corridor. It was dark inside, and it took a couple of seconds for her to realise that someone was sitting in a chair by the window.

– Hi, Liss.

The young woman turned. One eye was hidden behind a large bandage.

– Hi, she answered tonelessly.

Jennifer closed the door behind her. – I heard you were still here. Just called in to see how you are.

Liss switched on a lamp, she looked even thinner than the last time Jennifer had seen her, at her sister’s funeral. She had a Melolin compress around her neck, fastened with tape.

– Got all I need. They’re looking after me.

She nodded towards the table, where there was a jug of orange juice and a packet of Marie biscuits. On a plate beside them lay a slice of bread and cheese, untouched.

– They’re discharging you tomorrow?

– Think so.

– How’s the eye?

Liss gave a slight shrug. – They’re going to take another look at it before they let me go. They don’t know yet.

Jennifer sat down on the edge of the bed. – Have you spoken to anyone… about what happened?

Liss made a face. – Some bloke doing a psychiatric survey was here. A complete nerd. I turned him down as politely as I could, and that seemed to make him happy.

Jennifer had to smile. – Anyone else? Your mother, or your stepfather?

– They do the best they can. My mother needs help more than I do.

In the pale light of the lamp Liss’s face was a faded grey oval beneath the bandage. Jennifer felt like stroking a hand across her hair.

– The detective chief inspector came by. The one named Viken. He wanted answers to a few questions.

– They’ll probably have to interview you, Jennifer nodded. – Even if your doctors say as much rest as possible.

– It took them almost ten hours to find him.

– I heard that.

Jennifer had carried out the autopsy on Viljam Vogt-Nielsen after he was brought up from under the ice, but she didn’t want to say anything about that.

– Do you think he suffered?

– No, Jennifer said firmly, adding: – He lost consciousness before he hit the water. He must have hit his head on a rock when he fell.

Liss sat a while staring out of the window.

– I pushed him. I heard his head crack against the outcrop. But I ran away. It sounded as if she was rebuking herself.

– That’s why you’re sitting here today, Jennifer protested.

Liss began twisting a lock of hair around her index finger. – And because the detective chief inspector decided they should come out to the cabin. He realised Viljam might be there.

It didn’t surprise Jennifer to hear that Viken had made it obvious who Liss could thank for having been found.

– I’ve killed someone.

Jennifer got up and stood beside the chair. – Dear Liss, she said as she touched her shoulder. – I’m not a psychologist, but it’s normal to feel that way after going through such an awful experience. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. I recommend that you talk to someone about this. Not all shrinks are nerds, after all.

After Jennifer Plåterud had gone, Liss lay thinking for a while about what she had said. Did she need to talk to a psychologist? When Chief Inspector Viken had been there, she had kept it together as much as she could so that she could tell him what had happened down by Morr Water. It had helped her. The chief inspector too claimed that the primary motive for his visit was to see how she was getting along. But he didn’t protest at all when she started telling him what she knew.

– He followed Mailin to the post office. He waited for her in the car outside and went with her to the cabin. How he managed to make it look as if he was in Oslo the whole time I have no idea.

– I can help you there, said Viken. – He came home in the evening to work, and then returned to the cabin afterwards. He must have held her captive there that night and then driven her to the factory early on the morning of the eleventh.

– Was that when he filmed her? The date on the video was the twelfth. She thought about it. – It isn’t difficult to change the date on a mobile.

Viken gave a wry smile. – Your deductions are good. I don’t think there’s much wrong with your head, even if it was frozen for a while.

She liked his tone, straightforward and no fake sympathy.

– He must have sent the message to Berger from her telephone, she said. – And probably several others. Keep Midsummer’s Day free next year. - Did he kill Jim Harris too?

– We have reason to believe he did, Viken confirmed. – Harris saw something he shouldn’t have seen.

– He was at Mailin’s office that afternoon… The car. He saw Viljam parking her car.

– Exactly. It was only later that he realised what it meant. I’m guessing he tried to make a little money from what he’d found out. Everyone has to live off something.

– But Viljam was at lectures the whole of Thursday, and then on the Justice Bus.

Viken pushed the upright chair back and stretched his fairly short legs. – We’ve been through the security camera pictures from the Ibsen car park and seen Mailin’s car on its way in in the morning. When Viljam had a break from the Justice Bus, he had time both to shop at Deli de Luca and move the car up to Welhavens Street. It’s not difficult, he wouldn’t have needed much time.

Liss realised she was sitting there twisting and twisting at a lock of hair. She let her hand fall to the armrest.

– I found something out, she said. – Viljam was sexually abused. He met Berger on a holiday in Greece when he was twelve years old.

Viken raised his eyebrows.

She told him about the CD Mailin had sent her, repeated what she could recall of the document’s contents. The inspector listened without interrupting her. Sitting there in the chair by the window of the hospital room, he seemed less insistent. Less threatening.

– Jacket was the nickname Viljam used for Berger.

– If you’re right about this, Viken exclaimed, – that fills in quite a lot of important blanks for us. If Viljam was twelve years old, it might have been 1996. He didn’t say the name of the place?

– I think in Mailin’s document it said Crete.

Viken seemed energised now; he took out a piece of paper and made a note. – Is it possible that there are other CDs? he wanted to know.

– Viljam destroyed the one Mailin sent me. He destroyed everything Mailin wrote. He and Jacket swore an oath together. They swore to die before they would tell the world about the two of them. Mailin couldn’t be allowed to live because she found out who Jacket was.

– And yet Berger’s plan was to name Viljam as the killer, live on television? That was what he implied in that story in VG.

Liss recalled what Viljam had said about that.

– He got Berger to believe that he was going to confess to the murder on Taboo.

Viken rubbed two fingers over his clean-shaven chin as she finished her story.

– Berger must have lost the few powers of judgement he still had left, he observed. – This business of some kind of pact is still not clear to me, but if what you say is true, it would explain why he admitted Viljam to his apartment. We can only guess exactly what happened. But we found traces of… well, the two of them engaged in sexual activity in that apartment just before Berger died of an overdose of heroin.

Liss didn’t feel the need to hear any more about that.

– That girl in Bergen, she said instead. – Ylva Richter. Why did Viljam seek her out more than seven years after the holiday in Crete? Had he been in touch with her in the meantime?

Viken spread his hands. – We’ll have to wait for the rest of the investigation to see if we find an answer to that. And anyway, certain things we just have to live with without understanding them.

There are a lot of things we have to live with, Liss thought once Viken stood up to leave. Waking up that day in hospital, it occurred to her that she had paid her debt. She had come face to face with death but been spared. In the days that followed, sitting and looking out of the window with her one good eye, that feeling had gradually diminished. Because what sort of calculation was that? Was it supposed to mean something for Zako, or his family, that she herself had very nearly been killed?

For a moment, as Viken stood with his hand on the doorknob, she was on the point of blurting out everything that had happened in Bloemstraat. She opened her mouth, but in that same second changed her mind. Don’t tell anyone. Carry it alone. Live alone.

One of the nurses came in. She knocked as she was closing the door behind her.

– Got everything you need, Liss?

She said her name as though they were old friends meeting again. Actually she was an auxiliary nurse. A bit chubby and sharp eyed, but friendly enough in her professional way.

Liss wasn’t hungry, and she didn’t need a stranger’s hand to hold. But there was something she did need.

A few moments later the nurse was back, and placed a pen and a little notebook on the bedside table.

She sits high above the ground, head almost in the clouds. She’s holding his long hair, like reins, but she’s not in charge of what happens, and suddenly she’s thrown down and comes sailing through the air towards the ground at a terrific pace. Just before she’s smashed to pieces, she is caught in an enormous pair of hands. They lift her up on to the shoulders again. She shrieks and pleads with him to stop, but again she is thrown down, flies through the air, is caught. It happens over and over again, until the point comes where all she wants is for it to go on for ever.

I should have written that in the book you gave me, Mailin. And not a word about what happened that night in Amsterdam. Because that isn’t where it began. All stories begin somewhere else. By Morr Water, maybe, or in a house in Lørenskog, long before I was born. This is the way to carry it with me: write about it without saying a word. What happened, and what could have happened, what brought something else in its wake, shadows within shadows, rings around rings. A finger dipped in the water moves round. Somewhere down in the cold darkness I am born.

The telephone on the wall rang. She recognised the nurse’s voice.

– I’ve got your boyfriend on the line, shall I put him through?

Liss screwed up her one good eye, then had to laugh. – I don’t have a boyfriend.

– Well that’s what he said when I asked.

The nurse didn’t seem to understand, but without pursuing the matter further she put the call through. Liss was not surprised to hear Jomar’s voice at the other end.

– Is this what you call the gift of cheek? she grunted. – When did you become my boyfriend?

She heard him grin. – It was the nurse’s idea. I just let her get on with it. Let people believe what they want. That usually works.

– And what makes you think I might want to talk to you?

– I have to know how you are.

She was sitting there in a worn tracksuit Tage had brought her from the house. The legs were too short and the colour was something she liked when she was about sixteen. She was unwashed, wearing no make-up, and wrapped in a bandage that covered half her face.

– Well at least don’t even think about coming here, she said, exasperated. – I’m sitting here like a one-eyed troll.

– Okay, I’ll leave it till tomorrow.

– I’m being discharged tomorrow.

– I can come and fetch you. Drive you home.

Where might that be? She realised she didn’t have anywhere to go.

– You do remember, don’t you, everything I said to you on the phone that night?

– Every single word, he assured her.

– That is how I am, Jomar Vindheim. I like you, but there can never, ever be anything more between you and me.

– You already said that eleven times. Can you hear me yawning? The noise he made into the receiver sounded more like snoring.

– I didn’t bring anything here with me, she interrupted. – So I don’t need to be picked up.

After hanging up, she wrote in her notebook:

But there is one person who could take hearing about what happened in Bloemstraat. Someone who can tell me what to do. Maybe he’s the one person in the world you trusted most, Mailin.

Wednesday 21 January

THE DOOR TO Dahlstrøm’s office was locked. Liss knocked, waited; nothing happened. She walked round the corner, past the garage, up to the stairs to the main entrance. The doorbell was in the form of a miniature relief depicting a landscape. The button itself was between a pair of peaks stretching up into a dark sky. She heard two deep notes sound inside the building. At the same moment the door opened. The girl standing there couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. Her hair hung down her back in two thick dark braids.

– Your name is Liss, she said.

Liss had to admit she was right about that.

– Did you lose your eye? the little girl wanted to know. She was wearing a pink padded jacket and a pair of boots and looked as if she was on her way out.

– Not completely, Liss replied as she walked in. – And I see you have lost a front tooth.

– Yeah, but what does that matter, a new one’ll come. The girl opened her mouth and pointed to a white outline that was just about visible through the gums. – I’ve lost eight teeth, she explained, guiding Liss around her mouth as she went through them.

– But you lost your sister, she asserted once she was finished.

Liss realised that Dahlstrøm had told his daughter about her.

– I don’t know what your name is.

– Elisabeth, the girl replied. It was strange to hear that frail little voice pronounce the name.

– That was my grandmother’s name too, said Liss. – That’s funny.

– Is it so funny? the little girl said, rolling her eyes. – I know this girl in 2b who’s called that. Plus a teacher. Plus Mum’s aunt.

Tormod Dahlstrøm appeared in the hallway.

– Liss, he said, not surprised, because he knew of course that she was coming, but it seemed to her that he was pleased to see her. She didn’t like it when people she hardly knew hugged her, but if he had done so she would have let him.

He turned to the little girl.

– Remember to look both ways before you cross the road, Betty. With a worried look he stroked her hair.

His daughter sighed. – Daddy, you’ve told me that a hundred times!

Liss couldn’t help smiling.

– Yes, I probably have, Dahlstrøm conceded, gathering the two braids in his hand. The bands that fastened them at the ends were decorated with ladybirds, one yellow and one red. – Don’t forget to wear a hat. There’s a terrible wind blowing.

Once the little girl had run off down the driveway, he took Liss’s leather jacket and hung it behind a curtain next to the mirror in the spacious hallway.

– I’ve got the house to myself for a couple of hours. Let’s go up into the living room.

Liss was glad they wouldn’t be sitting in his office; it made her feel more like a guest and less like a patient.

He let her go up the stairs ahead of him. There was an open fire at the far end of the room.

– Do you want anything to eat with it? he asked when he arrived with the coffee. – Not even a piece of Belgian chocolate?

He said it in a teasing way, she thought, and for a moment she wondered if he was testing her, noting the way she declined, coming to his own conclusions about her attitude towards food. She felt as if she was revealing herself the whole time. Astonishingly enough, it didn’t make her irritable.

– What did the doctor say about your eye? He peered at the bandage.

– They don’t know yet. They think I’ll keep my sight. But it’ll never be as good as it was before.

He nodded, didn’t try to comfort her. – What about all the other things that happened?

The other things? Did he mean the rope that was tightened around her neck? Viljam’s face as he was strangling her?

– I want to talk to you about something else, she said. – Viljam was destroyed on the inside. He came to Mailin for help. She seduced him.

Dahlstrøm sat there looking at her. The eyes widened slightly, but even now he still didn’t seem surprised.

– You knew that, she exclaimed.

He settled into the high-backed chair. The eyes were deep-set beneath the forehead. The gaze from within them made her feel calm. Was there nothing that made him uneasy? She knew there was. She had heard the slight fear in his voice as he said goodbye to his daughter. Her name was Elisabeth, and there was a road full of cars she had to cross.

– During several of our counselling meetings a couple of years back, Mailin talked about a patient she was particularly worried about, he said. – It was clear that he was very badly damaged.

– Viljam was abused by Berger from the age of twelve. Mailin sent me a CD with a record of the conversations she had with him that time he came to see her.

– A CD? This is something you should talk to the police about, Liss.

– I’ve already told them. But when I called Viljam, he got me to tell him where it was. He destroyed it. He seemed obsessed by the idea that no one should know about him and Jacket – that was the name he called Berger.

– But Mailin might have made other copies.

Liss picked up a chocolate from the little rose-patterned plate. – I’m certain Viljam destroyed them all. Or else the police would have found them.

Dahlstrøm crossed one leg over the other, rubbed the hollow in the bridge of his nose with a finger. – He can’t have seen Mailin more than three or four times before she suddenly decided to end the treatment. I asked if he’d threatened her. Her reply was evasive. And then I realised what was happening.

Suddenly Liss felt a terrible anger. – Exactly what she wrote about. That people get abused. Children who need tenderness and care, who open themselves and are met with desire and abused. He went to see Mailin because he felt so fucking bad. She was supposed to help and ended up sleeping with him instead. Fucking hell!

She tore the paper off the chocolate and bit it in half, squeezed the soft centre between her tongue and her palate.

– Mailin ended the treatment immediately, she said once she had calmed down. – It would have been considered a crime if she hadn’t gone on seeing him. And the moment she broke up with him, he could have reported her and had her convicted. Maybe she would have been barred from practising for life. You read about shits like that in the papers. How could she have done such a thing?

Dahlstrøm looked to be thinking long and hard about what she said, yet he never seemed to lose touch with her.

– You know, even the best of us are capable of mistakes, he said at last. – Serious ones sometimes. We’ll never know what went on in her office. I think the best thing is to just drop it.

– I don’t think I can.

Dahlstrøm stood up, looked out of the window. The day had begun to turn grey. He stroked the thin wisps of hair back over his head, went out into the kitchen, returned with the coffee jug and refilled their cups.

– Mailin was skilled. She helped a lot of people. She meant well. A thoroughly good person. But she’s something more than that to you, Liss. Something far more than a human being.

Liss looked down. Regretted what she had said.

– She’s an image of everything that’s good in life. You needed that image. It might be that you’ve reached a point now where you’re going to have to live without your guardian angel. And maybe that’ll be better for you.

What he said was quite right. Every single word. And yet she shook her head, suddenly frozen.

– I’ve killed someone.

Dahlstrøm leaned towards her. – You had no choice, Liss, if you were to survive yourself.

– I’m not talking about Viljam. I killed someone else.

She closed her eyes. For an instant she was sitting high above the ground; she let go the reins, was tossed up into the air and came hurtling downwards… She didn’t dare to look at him. Finally she noticed that he had leaned back in his chair.

– Is this something you want me to know, Liss?

She couldn’t answer, but realised that he was giving her a choice. It might remain unspoken, unsaid.

– His name was Zako. He lived in Amsterdam. We were a couple, in a way.

She spoke with lightning rapidity, as though it was a matter of urgency to close off that road ahead on which she could walk alone.

Tormod Dahlstrøm said nothing. He sipped some coffee, put the cup back into the saucer so softly that the chink of porcelain was almost inaudible.

How long she sat there telling her story she didn’t know. She felt as though she were anaesthetised. Her body was numb, time stopped, the only thing in the room was her voice. First she told him the most important facts. Then she started again, in more detail. Not once did she look up. If she met his eyes now, her story would recoil on her, it would turn inside and explode everything it encountered.

When she fell silent, he once again crossed his legs. She could see his foot dipping up and down once or twice, then still, then dipping again.

– It sounds as though I’m the first person you’ve told all this to.

She felt herself nodding. He was the only one who knew. If there was a single person she dared give so much power to, it had to be Dahlstrøm. Only now did she fully understand why she had come to him. His reaction would decide what she must do once she left that room.

– I don’t think you want advice from me, he said. – It’s enough that I know about it.

She tried to work out if that was right. His mobile started to vibrate. It was on the desk behind him.

He stood up and looked at it. – I have to take this.

She stood up too.

– You mustn’t go now, Liss.

– No, she said, I mustn’t.

He disappeared out into the kitchen, closed the door behind him. She could hear his voice through the wall, not the words, but a low note that made her feel calmer again. Suddenly overcome with gratitude that a man like him existed. Mailin must have felt the same sense of calm when she talked to him. Mailin too needed someone to help her carry her load.

She strolled over to the window, looked out. The grey was denser now, but it was moving, and the light behind it was sharp. The snow in the garden was wet and covered in twigs and autumn leaves. The property ran up towards the forest, where it was framed by trees that swayed mightily in the wind. One window was open slightly and through it she could hear the sound, the way they moaned.

The sideboard was covered in family photographs. She recognised the daughter she had met in the doorway, wearing a white frock with bows on it and a satchel on her back. Another was of Dahlstrøm, taken a few years earlier, the hair thicker, the face firmer. But with that same calm gaze. Constitution Day, 17 May. He was wearing a suit and tie, and a boy that looked like him was sitting on his shoulders waving a flag. The next picture was of a dark woman with wavy hair. There was something Greta Garbo-like about her face. It was a black-and-white picture, and Liss guessed this was Dahlstrøm’s mother. Another photo showed the same woman wearing a long, waisted frock. A man with dark, slicked-back hair had his arm around her. He too had deep-set eyes and a chin that jutted even more than Dahlstrøm’s. Liss picked up the photo and held it to the light. It struck her that she was surprised that Dahlstrøm had parents, as though she had been thinking of him as belonging to a completely different species.

At that moment he came back in. She was startled, didn’t have time to put the photo back. It didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.

– Are you interested in family histories?

She gave it a moment. – It’s interesting to see who we get what from.

– Who do you resemble most? he asked.

– My father, she answered without hesitation. – I get it almost all from him. And his mother, my grandmother. If I showed you pictures of her, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between us.

– Are you like her in other ways too?

She found a lock of hair and began twisting it. – My grandmother on that side was strange. No one understood her. I’m sure she felt she didn’t belong in this world. She died in the mental hospital, Gaustad. Liss avoided saying her name.

– You say that as though there was a sort of forewarning in it. There was a question somewhere inside his observation.

– Maybe… She wriggled away from it. – Isn’t your life also determined by who your parents and grandparents were?

– To a certain extent, he answered. – My father wanted me to be somebody, preferably a doctor. He had no views on psychiatry, there’s not much prestige in it. He ran a gents’ outfitters, as people used to call them in those days. He spent more than sixty years dealing with clothes, and in his eyes I had taken a big step forward. At the deepest level, that was what life was about for my father, to help the next generation take another step up the ladder.

Something struck her. She didn’t know where it came from. She was still standing there with the photograph of his parents in her hand. She lifted it up and stared at the well-dressed man with his arm round this woman who was looking not into the camera but beyond it, smiling, if that was what she was doing.

Mailin’s document on the CD, she thought. There was something about Jacket’s father there.

– I read everything I could find on the net about Elijah Berger… His father didn’t sell clothes. He was a pastor in the Pentecostal church.

Thoughts that had been lying jumbled up and separate from each other suddenly whirled together. She turned towards Dahlstrøm and heard herself whisper: – Jacket.

She glanced up at his face. It stiffened, the eyes narrowing in the depths beneath the forehead. And then she knew it. – They called you Jacket where you grew up.

– That is correct.

She felt she didn’t have enough air. Viljam never said that Berger was Jacket, she was the one who had come to that conclusion. Viljam said he would rather die than reveal Jacket’s true identity…

Dahlstrøm’s gaze didn’t waver. To avoid it, she closed her eyes. The shame surged through her. Apologise to him, she thought. Dahlstrøm is a good person. Apologise to him, Liss, for what you’re thinking. Was there any way she could get out of here without looking up, just turn and run for the door without having to meet his gaze again? What will be left of me, Mailin?

– You told me a story from Amsterdam, Liss. You made a mistake and the consequences were terrible. I listened to you until you had finished. Now I want you to listen to me.

– How long was he lying in the water before he died? she murmured.

She was still standing with the picture of his parents in her hands. Didn’t dare to put it down.

– Spring thirteen years ago, he began, and from the corner of her eye she could see that he had collapsed a little, placed one arm on the sideboard and rested his head in his hand. She didn’t want to hear, but couldn’t tear herself away.

– I stopped him when he was going to drown himself. I saved him. And he saved me…

Reciprocal help, she thought in disbelief. Is that what you call it?

– You had sex with him, she managed to say.

The shame continued to stream through her, hitting in bursts.

– Only the once. Or just a few times. Carefully. On his conditions. He was proud of it. I did everything I could to help him, Liss. Please understand that. He couldn’t keep on coming to me, but he wouldn’t let go.

She noticed a current deep down in his voice. She could let herself be carried along by it, wherever he wanted. She could throw herself at him and let him do what he wanted. Or hit him with a stone. Until he lay on the floor bleeding from the eyes, unable to rise any more.

– Ylva Richter, she said. – You knew that he had killed her.

He shook his head slowly. – You must believe me, Liss. I no longer had any contact with Viljam. Eight years went by without my seeing him. One day he showed up in my office. He stood in the doorway, wouldn’t sit down. He was standing on the brink of a precipice, staring down. I couldn’t begin treating him, but I knew someone who was unusually talented.

She was struggling to comprehend what he was saying. – It was you who referred him to Mailin.

Only now did she raise her eyes. His face looked grey, and the lines on his forehead sunken, squeezing it.

– Mailin found out. She realised that you were Jacket.

– My dear Liss. If you only knew…

His voice grew thicker. Still that need was there: lean into him, let him put his arms around her, carry her away. But it was vanishing. The other thing was overtaking now. If she let it loose, it could fill the whole room, crushing everything that stood in its way.

– Had you not destroyed Viljam, he would never have killed Mailin. She said it without raising her voice, and the fact that she did so made her anger manageable and she was able to control it. – You killed Mailin.

Then he said: – There is a limit to how much guilt you can ask one person to assume, Liss. Once that is reached, you have to stop pouring, or the person goes under. If I manage to stay afloat, I can help many people. If I don’t, they’ll find that they’re alone again.

She felt his hand on her shoulder.

– You told me of your fatal mistake, Liss. I’ve told you mine. It’s possible for us to say that we’re quits. That we have something that binds us together. That there are two of us to share the burden as we walk down the road.

She looked at him. Saw no sign of grief in his eyes, or regret. And there was no passion in what he was offering her either. It was a partnership. Start a firm, with themselves as joint owners, for the transporting of corpses.

She moved her gaze to the window. The wind swirled up a rain of dead leaves and then laid them down again, making a pattern.

Without saying anything more, she turned away from him, crossed the living room and found her own way out.

As I sit here in the living room looking out on the winter afternoon, I continue our conversation in my thoughts. How could you who knows everything about a child’s needs allow yourself to do something like that? you ask. And again I try to tell you about that spring thirteen years ago, before the trip to Makrigialos. I had patients, I had TV programmes, I had regular columns in newspapers and magazines. Everyone had a piece of me. And I had something for everyone. Then came that day in early April. When I let myself into the living room, Elsa, the woman I was married to, was sitting in that chair you have just vacated. She asked me to sit down on the sofa. Then she said: ‘I’m moving out, Tormod.’ I didn’t believe her. Ours was a good marriage. Our children were happy. We did things together, she and I, even still had a sex life after almost twenty years. ‘It’s not true,’ I said. But three days later, she was gone. I walked into a storm. It was everywhere, around me and inside me. I didn’t know if I could survive it. Then suddenly it was gone.

That was when things became difficult. Getting up in the morning. Washing, getting dressed. Not to speak of going to the shops. Or taking the kids to after-school activities. I had been tossed aside, washed up in another landscape. Complete stillness. Utterly dead. No trees, no colours, nothing but that huge black sun up there, sucking all the light into itself. All I heard was the sound of my own footsteps as I trod through the ashes. A friend and colleague, well intentioned, perceptive, came to talk to me, friendly and cautious at first but then tough and decisive. One day early that autumn, he tossed a few clothes into a suitcase and drove me out to Gardermoen in his car. He’d booked me on a holiday. He was actually supposed to come with me, but something happened at home, illness, and he had to cancel at the last moment.

You can’t make me believe the relationship between you and Viljam was reciprocal, you say, that you were equals.

We were, Liss. In the beginning. But Jo, as I still think of him, bonded with me. He clung to me as if it was a matter of life and death. He worshipped me. And wouldn’t let me be anything else for him but the god that he needed.

And Ylva, you ask, how could you fail to know who had killed her?

I saw no connection. I want you to believe me, Liss. A girl in Bergen named Ylva. A front-page picture in the newspapers. Maybe she resembled someone I’d seen at a holiday resort many years previously. Maybe not… Of course I would have seen the connection if I could have faced looking for it. Because we often talked about her. I had to build up a picture of her in his imagination. Teach him how to approach her. She was a symbol of womanhood. I guided his desire in that direction, towards her, towards a girl his own age. Not Ylva in a literal sense, but Ylva as an image.

Do you understand me, Liss? Tell me you understand me.

You aren’t here any more. All that remains in the room is the sound of your footsteps crossing the floor. The sound of the door closing. The sound of the last words you said to me: You killed Mailin.

Maybeyou know that whatever happens now is entirely up to you. Wander like a blind person. The unending drought. Or chance upon a few drops of water. A peace that passeth all understanding.

She reached Frognerseter Way and carried on down through the smell of cold exhaust. It started snowing again, but the wind had dropped by now. She passed the metro station, continued along the banks left by the snowplough. Her feet were still painful from the chilblains after being frozen at Morr Water. A steady stream of cars came towards her, splashing dirty snow over them.

She turned off when she reached the Riks Hospital and stamped her way along the road that twisted by Gaustad. The country’s first insane asylum, she knew that. Had stood there for more than a hundred and fifty years. Her father’s mother had been locked up in there for a few months before she died. Had she done it to herself? Had she twisted bed linen and clothes together into a rope and fastened it to the light fitting in the ceiling, looped it around her neck and kicked away the chair? No one talked about it; what happened had been deleted from history by silence. What was left of her? A few black-and-white photos of a beautiful woman, strange and distant.

On the path leading towards the lake at Sognsvann, the snow lay deep. Liss kept on walking. Heard the sound of her own footsteps. At one point she stopped and turned round, studied her tracks through the dense, driving snow. Soon they’ll be gone, she thought, and the thought latched on to another: He caught me just before I smashed to pieces. He threw me down, but never dropped me once.

By the time she reached the lake, she had made up her mind. She didn’t carry on up into the woods but took a right turn and headed across the car park. She stopped outside the entrance to the sports academy and sent a text message.

It took three minutes for Jomar Vindheim to come running down the steps.

– Sorry if I interrupted your lectures.

He stood there open mouthed, staring at her.

– Thought you ought to see the one-eyed troll after all, she said. – Because I’m sure you like going to freak shows and stuff like that.

He stepped closer. For the second time he laid a hand on her cheek. This time she didn’t take it away.

– There are two things I want to ask of you, Jomar.

– All right, he said.

– The first is that you take me home to your flat. Treat me the way you were going to that night we were supposed to be going out.

He stood there looking down into her good eye. Maybe he was searching for a code there, something that might explain what was happening.

– Liss… he said finally.

– I’ll tell you the other thing later, she interrupted. – My only condition is that you don’t talk about your grandfather. Not a single word.

He was thinly dressed, wearing only a T-shirt, but he put his arms around her as though she were the one who needed warming.

She stood naked by the living-room window on the ninth floor, trying to make things out through the driving snow. On a clear day I bet you can see a long way from here, she thought. The whole city and out over the fjord, down to Drøbak, maybe further…

Mailin hadn’t said anything to their mother about those nights at the house in Lørenskog. She’d wanted to protect her. Now there’s no one who knows what happened, thought Liss. No one but the person who went away and never came back. And me, who cannot bring it to the surface… That was where she must live from now on, in the place between what she could not remember, and what she would never be able to forget.

She heard Jomar getting out of the bed. He came into the room, crossing the floor. Hands around her from behind. They smelled of something that reminded her of sap, not too sweet, not too strong. It would be possible to learn to like these hands.

– The nurse at the hospital said you should be my girlfriend.

The way children talked to each other. She had to laugh at him.

– She probably meant for a while, she answered.

He pulled away and looked at her through the grey light.

– There are a lot of things I don’t understand about you, Liss. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ve got a long time to find out about them.

She looked down. – There were two things I was going to ask of you, she said. – Now I’ll tell you what the second one is.

It took almost three hours to drive into the city centre. Several times he pulled over to the side of the road, into a bus bay, or up on to the kerb, and turned off the engine. Sat looking out of the front window as she told her story. By the time he stopped at the barrier outside Oslo police station, it had become evening.

– I’ll come with you.

She shook her head.

– Then I’ll wait here, he insisted, pointing to an empty space on the other side of the little cul-de-sac.

– Jomar Vindheim, haven’t you understood a single thing?

– I’ll wait.

The girl behind the counter was about her own age. She was dark, with Asiatic features. There was a photo of her on the ID that was pinned to her uniform shirt.

– Yes, how can I help? she said in a voice pitched midway between friendly and dismissive.

– I want to talk to a detective chief inspector named Viken.

She’d thought about it. It had to be him.

– Viken from Violent Crimes? I can’t just…

– It’s about a murder.

The girl behind the counter blinked several time before she managed to say:

– Are you certain? Then we need to talk to the crime response unit.

Liss supported herself with both hands against the counter. – It happened a long time ago, more than a month. And it wasn’t here, it was in Amsterdam.

The girl picked up the phone. When she put it down again, she said:

– He’ll come and fetch you in about two minutes.

Liss waited by the column in the middle of the great hall. Through the windows at the top, up on the eighth floor, she saw that it had stopped snowing. She let her gaze drift down the galleries, towards the main exit. Two minutes, she thought. It’ll take him two minutes to finish what he’s doing, walk down that red corridor, take the lift and get down here. For the next two minutes it’s still possible to leave by that door with neither Viken nor anyone else here ever knowing why I came.