Death In Oslo

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‘Mum! It’s true! Just ask Caroline!’

She crumpled over the table and hit the surface with her left hand. Her eyes were red and her make-up had run in grey streaks down her cheeks. Her hair, which the evening before had been tied up with colourful ribbons and shoelaces in an eighties-style fashion, was now hanging down her back in bedraggled knots after what had been a slightly too successful party. She had her overalls half down. The arms were tied loosely around her waist and she had stuffed a half-litre bottle of Coke in the waistband. ‘Why won’t you believe me? You never believe what I say!’

‘Of course I do,’ her mother said calmly and put a dish in the oven.

‘No you don’t. You just think that I drink and fu-’

‘Careful, young lady!’ The mother’s voice was sharper and she slammed the oven door shut with a bang. ‘You may be moving away from home this autumn, and then you can do what you like. But until then…’

The woman turned to her daughter. She put her hands on her hips and opened her mouth to say something else. Then she closed it again and smoothed down her hair in exasperation.

‘Just ask Caroline,’ sobbed the daughter and grabbed hold of a half-full glass of milk. ‘We were both there. I don’t know where they came from, but they got into a car. A blue car. It’s true. It’s the truth, Mum!’

‘I don’t doubt that you’re telling the truth,’ her mother replied in a strained voice. ‘I’m just trying to point out that it couldn’t have been the American president that you saw. It must have been someone else. Don’t you understand? Don’t you realise…’

With a groan, she sat down at the table and tried to hold her daughter’s hand. ‘If someone had just kidnapped the American president, they wouldn’t calmly walk over to a car parked by the Central Station on the morning of the seventeenth of May, where everyone could see them. You’ll have to stop-’

The girl pulled her hand away.

‘Where everyone could see them? Where everyone could see them? There was no one bloody else there. It was only me and Caroline and-’

‘You must try to stop being so dramatic all the time! Surely you understand that-’

‘I’m going to call the pigs. The woman was wearing the same clothes as on TV. Exactly the same. I’m going to phone, Mum.’

‘Well, if that’s what you want to do. But you’ll just make a fool of yourself. And remember that they call themselves the police. Not pigs. Phone away.’

The mother got up. There was a strong smell of cooking. She opened the window a bit.

‘Who the hell has a dinner party on the seventeenth of May, anyway?’ the girl muttered and finished the glass of milk.

‘Now you watch yourself, my girl. And stop all that unnecessary swearing!’

‘People have breakfast on the seventeenth of May, Mum. Breakfast, or at a push a nice lunch. I have never heard of anyone having a bloody-’

A casserole was thumped down on the worktop. The woman pulled off her apron and took two neat steps towards her daughter. Then she slapped the table.

‘We have a dinner party on the seventeenth of May, Pernille. We, the Schou family. And we have done so for generations, and you…’ She lifted a finger. It was trembling. ‘You had better be in the dining room at six o’clock sharp, and in a better state than you are now. Understood?’

The mother interpreted her daughter’s muttering as agreement.

‘But I did see the President,’ the girl insisted, almost inaudibly. ‘And she didn’t bloody well look like she’d been kidnapped.’