Killing Moon

48 Friday

The forest

In a block of flats in Hovseter, Thanh was standing by a window on the third floor staring down below. She was holding her phone in her hand. It was one minute to nine. She was looking down at the car parked right outside the front door. It had been there for almost five minutes. It was Jonathan’s car. She gave a start as the phone began to ring. The digits on the screen showed that the time was nine o’clock. Exactly.

She thought about all the excuses she had come up with over the last hour only to dismiss them. She pressed Accept.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m outside.’

‘OK, coming,’ she said and dropped the phone into her handbag.

‘I’m off!’ she called out from the hall.

‘Tam biêt,’ her mother answered from the living room.

Thanh closed the door behind her and took the lift down. Not because she couldn’t face the stairs, she usually took them, but because there was a theoretical possibility the lift might break down, get stuck, necessitating a call to the fire brigade and the cancellation of all other plans.

But the lift didn’t break down. She walked out into the street. The night was oddly warm for one so late in September, especially as the sky was cloudless.

Jonathan leaned across the passenger seat and pushed open the door for her. She got in. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi, Thanh.’

The car pulled out. It struck her that he had used her name, which he never did when they were in the shop.

When they came to the main road, he headed west.

‘What was it you wanted to show me?’ she asked.

‘Something beautiful. Something just for you.’

‘For me?’

He smiled. ‘And for me too.’

‘Can’t you tell me what it is?’

He shook his head. She sat looking at him out of the corner of her eye. He was so different. For one thing he used her name, but she had never heard him use a word like ‘beautiful’ or say something was for her. She had been fretting, yes, frightened almost, before getting into the car but something — perhaps the way he spoke — calmed her.

And now he smiled as though he was aware of her peeking over at him. Maybe this is how he is when he’s not at work, she thought. But then she remembered that she was an employee, and he was the boss, so this was work, in a way. Or maybe it wasn’t?

Hovseter was on the west side of the city, and after a few minutes they had passed Røa, the golf course at Bogstad, and were deep into Sørkedalen with extensive, dense spruce forest on both sides.

‘Did you know bears have been sighted around here?’ he asked.

‘Bears?’ she said in alarm.

He didn’t laugh at her, merely smiled. He had a nice smile, Jonathan, she hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe she had, just not let the thought fix in her mind. After all, it was so seldom he smiled in the shop you could easily forget how it looked in the intervening time. As though he were afraid of exposing something he didn’t want to show her if he smiled. But now he did want to show her something. Something ‘beautiful’.

Her phone rang, giving her a start once again.

She looked at the display, declined the call and put the phone back in her bag.

‘Feel free to answer it if you want,’ he said.

‘I don’t answer if I don’t know who’s calling,’ Thanh said. That was a lie, she had recognised the number of the policeman, Sung-min. But, of course, she couldn’t take it and risk Jonathan becoming angry again.

He indicated and slowed down. Thanh couldn’t see any turn-off but suddenly it was there. Her heart beat faster as the wheels crunched along a narrow gravelly road. The headlights were the only light on a wall of black forest.

‘Where...’ she began but stopped for fear he would hear the tremor in her voice.

‘Don’t be scared, Thanh. I just want to make you happy.’

She had been found out. Just make you happy? She wasn’t so sure she liked him saying strange things like that to her any more.

He stopped the car, switched off the engine and the lights, and suddenly they were sitting in total darkness.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’re getting out here.’

She drew a deep breath. It must be that calm in his voice, it was almost hypnotic, because now she wasn’t frightened any longer, just excited. Show her alone. Something beautiful. She didn’t know why, but it suddenly occurred to her that this really wasn’t so strange. That it was something she had been waiting for, yes, hoping for. That the intense anxiety she had felt all day must be like how a bride feels on her wedding day. She stepped out of her side of the car and inhaled the fresh evening air and the smell of spruce. Then the panic returned. Since he had been so emphatic about her not telling a soul, she had — being the idiot she was — not told anyone. Absolutely no one knew she was there. She swallowed. At what point would she say stop, that she wanted to go home? If she did it now, wouldn’t that just make him very angry and maybe... maybe what?

‘You can leave the bag,’ he said, opening the rear door on his side.

‘I’d like to bring my phone,’ she said.

‘Suit yourself, but you should put it in the pocket of this, it could be cold.’ He handed her a padded jacket. She put it on. It smelled. Of Jonathan, probably. And of campfire. At least of recently being near to an open fire.

Jonathan had put on a headlamp and turned away before switching it on so as not to blind her. ‘Follow me.’

He stepped over a shallow roadside ditch right into the woods, and Thanh had no choice but to jump over after him. They made their way into the forest. If there was a trail, she couldn’t see it. The terrain rose and he stopped here and there to hold branches aside so she could make her way through more easily.

They emerged onto open moorland bathed in moonlight and she took the opportunity to take her phone out and check it. Her heart sank. The coverage wasn’t just poor, there was no coverage.

When she looked up again, she realised the light from the phone had ruined her ability to see in the dark, and all she saw was a black wall. She stood blinking.

‘Over here.’

She moved in the direction of the voice. Made out Jonathan standing at the edge of the forest holding his hand out to her. She took it without thinking. It was warm and dry. He led her further in. Should she peel off and run? Where? She no longer had any idea in which direction the road or the city were, and here in the forest he would catch up with her anyway. If she were to resist, it would probably only accelerate the plans he had for her. She felt a welling in her throat, but defiance at the same time. She wasn’t some helpless, naive little girl, there had to be some part of her brain telling her this was OK, so why feed her fear with paranoid thoughts? Soon she would understand what it was he wanted, and it would be like those nightmares you wake from and realise that you’ve been lying safely in bed the entire time. He was going to show her something beautiful and that was that. And instead of letting go, she held a little tighter around his hand, which in spite of everything felt strangely safe.

She was startled when he stopped.

‘We’ve arrived,’ he whispered. ‘Lie down here.’

She looked at the place his headlamp illuminated, it was a sort of lair, a bed of pine-needle branches. As if sensing her hesitation and wanting to show it was safe, he lay down himself and motioned for her to lie down next to him. She drew a deep breath. Wondered how to formulate her refusal. Moistened her lips. Saw that he had placed his forefinger over his own lips and was looking at her with a happy, boyish expression. It put her in mind of her little brother when the two of them did something they weren’t allowed, that bond of conspiratorial delight. Whether it was that or something else she didn’t know, but she suddenly found she had lain down beside him. She could see the remains of a small fire next to them, as though someone had been here a few times before, even though it was in the middle of the forest and hardly a logical place to make camp. From where they were lying, she could see the sky and the moon between the treetops. What was there here for him to show her?

She felt his breath close to her ear. ‘You must be completely quiet, Thanh. Can you turn over onto your stomach?’ His voice, his smell, yes, it was as if the person she had always known had been inside Jonathan had finally stepped out into the light. Or rather, into the dark.

She did as he said. She wasn’t afraid. And when she saw his hand right in front of her face, her only thought was this is it, now it’s going to happen.

Sung-min raised his glass to Chris. After Harry had rung, Sung-min had drawn a line under the working week by calling Thanh’s number to book a dog walker and hear if she wanted to take the opportunity to tell him anything about her boss. She hadn’t answered. It didn’t matter much; he had checked out this Jonathan very thoroughly without finding a trace of anything criminal, either past or present. He had made up his mind there and then to put suspicion aside. After all, that was the method he had always sworn by: follow rigorous and proven principles of investigation. He should have learned by now that listening too much to that so-called gut feeling was only tempting due to it being so easy. He had also learned that if you wanted to survive as a homicide detective, you had to put the case aside in your free time. And in order to do that, you had to focus on something else. So now he was focusing on Chris. On them. On this meal and the evening they were going to spend together. Things had been slightly strained when he had arrived, the echo of their argument still lingering. But the atmosphere had already improved. It was going to be a nice dinner, and afterwards there was going to be good make-up sex.

So when he felt the phone vibrate, saw it was Harry again and Chris looked at him with one eyebrow raised as if to let him know that make-up sex was at stake, Sung-min decided not to take the call. Surely it was something that could wait. Couldn’t it? Sung-min had instructed his right forefinger to press Decline but it didn’t obey. He sighed heavily and made an apologetic face.

‘If I don’t answer they’re just going to keep on ringing all night. I promise, this will only take twenty seconds.’ Without waiting for a reply, he pushed his chair back and ran out to the kitchen to show Chris that he meant it literally when he said twenty seconds.

‘You need to make this quick, Harry.’

‘OK. Is there anyone working at Krimteknisk by the name of Arne?’

‘Arne. Not that I can think of. What’s his second name?’

‘I don’t know. Could you find out who at Krimteknisk analysed the seizure of green cocaine?’

‘Sure, I’ll get on it tomorrow.’

‘I was thinking now.’

‘Now tonight?’

‘Now within the next fifteen minutes.’

Sung-min paused to allow Harry time to realise how unreasonable such a request was on a Friday night, and to someone who was technically his superior to boot. When neither an emendation nor an apology was forthcoming, Sung-min cleared his throat.

‘Harry, I’d like to help, but right now I have some private matters I need to prioritise, and the truth isn’t going to disappear in the space of twelve hours. My lecturer at Police College maintained he was quoting you when he said that the investigation of a serial killer wasn’t a sprint but a marathon. That you need to pace yourself. But now my twenty seconds are up, Harry. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow.’

‘Mm.’

Sung-min wanted to take the phone from his ear, but again his hand refused to obey.

‘Katrine is together with this Arne guy at the moment,’ Harry said.

Chris had counted the seconds. It annoyed him that over thirty of them had passed when Sung-min sat down across from him again. And it annoyed him even more that his boyfriend did not look him in the eye. At least not until he had taken a mouthful of the red wine Chris had already forgotten the name of. He could sense Sung-min’s restlessness, which always made him feel like — at best — number two.

‘You’re going to work, aren’t you?’

‘No, no, relax. Tonight, you and I are going to enjoy ourselves, Chris. Why don’t you take that glass of wine to the sofa and I’ll put on that recording of Brahms’s third symphony I brought with me?’

Chris looked at Sung-min suspiciously, but they went into the living room. It was Sung-min who had persuaded him to buy a vinyl turntable and while Sung-min put the record on he sat back on the sofa.

‘Close your eyes!’ Sung-min ordered.

Chris did as he was told and a moment later the music streamed out into the room. He waited to feel the sofa yield to the weight of Sung-min where he had left space but it didn’t happen. He opened his eyes.

‘Hey! Sung! Where are you?’

The reply came from the kitchen. ‘Just making a few quick calls. Listen in particular to the cellos.’