Death In Oslo

XII

The woman was nearly at the lake. She wasn’t really dressed for this weather. The sky hung leaden above the water and the waves were being whipped into white horses only a hundred metres from the shore. It had looked so promising in the morning that she had even risked taking her thermal underwear off. Which had been fine on the way out to Ullevålseter, but she now regretted having taken a detour to Øyungen on the way back.

She had parked her small Fiat at Skar; she was still driving, despite her son’s desperate attempts to stop her. She had just celebrated her eightieth birthday, and after the party, she had discovered that her car keys were missing from the hook above the hall shelf. She knew that her son meant well, but it still annoyed her that he had done it and that he believed he was a better judge of her health than she was. Fortunately she had an extra set of keys in her jewellery box.

She felt fit as a fiddle, and it was her walks in the forests and hills that kept her that way. She had had a couple of aneurysms, which made her a bit forgetful, but there was nothing wrong with her legs.

She was very cold and desperately needed to pee.

She wasn’t shy about going to the loo in the woods, but the thought of pulling down her trousers in the bitter wind made her pick up pace so she wouldn’t need to.

But it didn’t help. She had to find a suitable spot.

She headed north by the dam and broke a path through the undergrowth and the birch trees that were exploding with catkins and sticky light green leaves. A natural embankment made it difficult to go any further. The old woman gingerly tested a tussock with her boots and then lowered herself down into the ditch behind the embankment, which was about a metre and a half deep. She was just about to undo her trousers when she saw him.

He was lying peacefully asleep. One of his arms was over his face, as if to protect it. The moss he was lying on was thick and soft and the low birch trees almost acted like a duvet.

‘Hello,’ the woman called, keeping her trousers on. ‘Hello there!’

The man didn’t respond.

She struggled past a boulder and stepped in some mud. A branch whipped her face. She swallowed a scream, out of consideration for the man under the trees. Finally she managed to fight her way over to him and stood there, gasping.

Her pulse increased. She felt dizzy, and carefully lifted his arm. The eyes that stared at her were brown. They were wide open and there was a fly crawling around in one of them.

She had no idea what she was going to do. She still didn’t have a mobile phone, despite her son’s constant nagging. It ruined the whole purpose of being outdoors, and could also cause brain tumours.

The man was wearing a dark suit and some good shoes, which were very muddy. The old lady was on the verge of tears. He was so young, no more than forty, she reckoned. His face was so peaceful, with beautiful eyebrows that resembled a bird in flight over his big open eyes. His lips were blue, and for a moment she thought that the right thing to do would be to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. As she pulled back his jacket to get to his heart, something fell out of his inner pocket. It was a kind of wallet, she thought, and picked it up. Then she straightened her back, as if she finally understood that the cold corpse was more than several hours beyond being saved by heart compressions. She still hadn’t noticed the bullet hole in the man’s temple.

She was suddenly overcome by nausea. Slowly she lifted her right hand. It seemed to be so far away from her, completely out of her control. Fear made her want to run away, back on to the path, to the road through the forest where there were always other people. She put the small black leather wallet in her pocket, automatically, and clambered back over the embankment. Her right leg gave way underneath her; it felt numb, but the old lady managed to struggle through the undergrowth and get back on to the gravel track, thanks to the iron willpower that had kept her so strong and healthy for eighty years and five days.

Then she collapsed and lost consciousness.