Lethal Investments

2

Once home, he changed into fresh work clothes. Time was on his side. So he rested on the bed. Just have a little doze, fifteen minutes. But went out like a light. Overslept his shift. Had forgotten to set the alarm clock. Slept until two in the afternoon. Thought of her as soon as his eyes opened. Thought of the night before, of her body. Of her wriggling beneath him. Of them lying side by side afterwards, of him holding her face in his hands, chatting, stray fingers on bare skin.

He had left her and skipped work afterwards, though unintentionally. Had lost six hours of a hundred per cent overtime and annoyed the fat-bellied firebrand of a foreman into the bargain. But he didn’t ring in. That would have been asking for an earful. So he sat up in bed, found her telephone number with a yawn and dialled.

Televerket automatically broke the connection. He put down the receiver and then picked it up again. Dialled the same number and let it ring, but without success. Until Televerket cut him off again.

The sound of a phone doesn’t carry. But if the flat is small and the door is open and banging, then it does. If the phone stops ringing, you know someone is at home. If it doesn’t, no one is at home. A problem emerges when all the indications tell you someone is at home, but the phone carries on ringing. The continuous ring is a signal, a warning that something is not right.

If you are washing the stairs, you don’t listen. But three-year-olds have not learned what you should or shouldn’t do.

Three-year-old Joachim had a little cloth in a bucket and of course the bucket tipped over at the bottom of the stairs between the second and third floor. Joachim smiled. ‘Wet’, he shouted and laughed, then started washing like mad. Until it was dry and Mummy had to go down with her bucket and give him a top-up. While she was there she noticed that Reidun Rosendal’s door was open. The door was banging. The lock kept knocking against the door-frame in the light draught there always was on this staircase. What was strange was the silence inside. Reidun had a small flat, so she ought to have been heard from inside the door. Mia Bjerke didn’t know Reidun that well, they just said hello, the way that neighbours do as they pass on the stairs.

But then, when she was halfway through the cleaning, the telephone rang inside the flat. For a long time, and when it finally stopped, it started up again. From the bottom of the steps, tiny Joachim said:

‘Ringing, Mummy!’ Twice he said that and twice she answered it was probably because Reidun, who lived there, wasn’t at home.

But then she opened the window on the landing between the floors to let air in and Joachim said that Reidun was at home. ‘You’re fibbing, Mummy!’ Joachim said.

For by opening the window Mia had created a kind of through-draught. Possibly because of a sudden gust of wind. At any rate, the draught was so strong that the door to Reidun’s bed-sit banged wide open.

‘Come here, Joachim!’ she called sharply. And Joachim listened to her. Perhaps because of the sound of his mother’s voice or perhaps because he was affected by the atmosphere that had developed on the staircase.

A naked foot on the floor of the bed-sit told Mia Bjerke that someone had been at home the whole time.