Death In Oslo

VI

‘Well, isn’t this a Kodak moment?’

President Helen Bentley was sitting with Ragnhild on her knee. The little girl was asleep. Her blonde head had flopped back, her mouth was wide open and you could see her eyes moving from side to side behind her paper-thin eyelids. At regular intervals she produced little grunts. ‘There was certainly no need for you to…’ Johanne stretched out her arms to pick up the child.

‘Just let her be.’ Helen Bentley smiled. ‘I need a break.’

She had been sitting in front of the computer screen for three hours. The situation was serious, to put it mildly. Far worse than she had imagined. The fear of what might happen when the New York Stock Exchange opened in a few hours’ time was enormous, and it seemed that the media had been more concerned about the economy than politics over the past twenty-four hours. As if it was possible to make such a differentiation, Helen Bentley thought to herself. All the TV stations and Internet papers were still reporting regularly from Oslo to keep the public updated on the President’s disappearance. But it still seemed that Helen Bentley and her fate had actually been pushed out on to the periphery of people’s consciousness. The focus was now on essential things, like oil and petrol and work. The tumult in more than a few places was close to rioting and the first two suicides on Wall Street were now a fact. The Saudi Arabian and Iranian governments were united in their fury. Her own Secretary of State had had to reassure the world several times that rumours of a link between the two countries and the kidnapping of the President were unfounded.

The words from his speech the night before were still hanging in the air and the conflict was escalating.

She had for a brief moment surfed public pages on the Internet. But she knew that sooner or later she would have to access websites that would make alarm bells ring in the White House, so she would wait to do that until it was absolutely necessary. The temptation to set up a Hotmail address and send a reassuring message to Christopher’s private inbox was almost overwhelming at times. But thankfully she had had the willpower to withstand it.

There was still far too much that she didn’t understand.

The fact that Warren had double-crossed her was in itself unbelievable. But her life experience had taught her that people took the most incredible gambles sometimes. And if God’s ways were mysterious, they could in no way compete with those of mortal beings.

It was the bit about the child that she couldn’t work out.

The letter that Jeffrey Hunter had shown her early that morning, which now felt like a lifetime ago, had said that they knew. That the Trojans knew about the child. Or something to that effect. She couldn’t for the life of her remember the exact wording. As she read the letter, an image of her daughter’s biological mother had flashed in front of her: the red-coated figure in the rain with eyes wide open, the plea for help that was never answered.

Little Ragnhild tried to turn.

She was a beautiful child. Fair, wispy hair and white teeth behind wet red lips. Her eyelashes were long and beautifully curved.

She looked like Billie.

Helen Bentley smiled and made the child more comfortable. This really was a strange place. It was so quiet here. In the distance, she could hear the roar of the world from which she had hidden. There were five people in here, and they chose not to speak.

The odd housekeeper was sitting by the window, crocheting. Every now and then she smacked her lips noisily and looked out at the enormous oak tree. Then she seemed to talk herself round again in a silent mumble, and focused on her bright pink handiwork.

The child’s mother was a fascinating woman. When she told the story about Warren, it felt like she had never told it to anyone else before, which gave Helen a feeling of shared destiny. Paradoxically, she thought, since her secret was about her own betrayal, whereas Johanne had very definitely been betrayed.

Us women and our damned secrets, she thought to herself. Why is it like that? Why do we feel ashamed whether we have reason to or not? Where does it come from, that crushing feeling of always carrying the blame?

She couldn’t work out the woman in the wheelchair at all.

Right now, she was sitting on the other side of the kitchen table, with a paper on her knees and a cup of coffee in her hand. But she didn’t seem to be reading the paper. It was still open at the same place that it had been about quarter of an hour ago.

Helen couldn’t work out who belonged to whom in this home. For some reason, it didn’t matter. Her strong need to control would normally have made the situation unbearable. But instead she now felt calm, as if the unclear constellations made her own absurd situation more natural somehow.

They hadn’t asked her a single question since she woke up at daybreak. Not one.

It was unbelievable.

The child on her lap sat up, drunk with sleep. For a moment she caught the smell of sweet milky breath before the child looked at her suspiciously and said: ‘Mummy. Want Mummy.’

The housekeeper was up faster than she dreamed was possible for such a scrawny, lame person.

‘You come to your Auntie Mary, darlin’. Let’s go look for Ida’s toys. Let the ladies sit here in peace.’

Ragnhild laughed and held up her arms.

They must come here quite a lot, Helen Bentley thought. The little girl looked like she adored the old scarecrow. They disappeared into the sitting room. The sound of the child chatting and the woman scolding faded into the background and there was silence. They must have gone into another room.

She turned back to the computer. Somehow she had to find the answers she was looking for. She had to keep searching. She must be able to find what she was looking for somewhere in the chaos of information that swirled around in cyberspace, before she let anyone know where she was and got the world back on its feet.

But she wouldn’t find the answer on an ordinary computer. She knew that. There was nothing in the outside world that could help before she logged on to her own website.

She caught herself staring at her hands. The skin was dry and she had broken a nail. Her wedding ring seemed to be too big. It was loose and felt like it would slip off when she caught it between two fingers and turned it. Slowly she raised her head.

The woman in the wheelchair was looking straight at her. She had the most incredible eyes that Helen Bentley had ever seen. They were icy blue, almost bleached of colour, and yet at the same time they gave the impression of being deep and dark. It was impossible to read her face: no questions no demands. Nothing. The woman just sat there looking at her. It made her feel small and she tried to look away, but it wasn’t possible.

‘They tricked me,’ Helen Bentley said in a quiet voice. ‘They knew what they had to do to make me panic. To make me go with them, willingly.’

‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ the woman asked and started to fold the newspaper carefully.

‘I think I have to,’ Helen Bentley said, and took as deep a breath as she could. ‘I don’t have any other choice.’