Police

14

Laura Mittet looked at them. She had come down to the front of the block in Elveparken when they rang, and now she was standing with her arms crossed, freezing in her dressing gown. The first rays of sun glittering on the River Drammen. Something had flickered in her mind; for a couple of seconds she wasn’t there, she didn’t hear them, didn’t see anything, except for the river behind them. For a few seconds she was alone thinking that Anton had never been the right one. She had never met Mr Right, or at least had never got him. And the one she had got, Anton, had cheated on her the same year they got married. He had never found out that she knew. She’d had too much to lose for that. And he’d probably been having another affair now. He’d had the same expression on his face of exaggerated normality when he delivered the same rotten excuses. Overtime shifts imposed from above. Traffic jam on the way home. Mobile off because the battery was dead.

There were two of them. A man and a woman, both in uniforms without a wrinkle or a stain. As though they had just taken them out of the wardrobe and put them on. Serious, almost frightened eyes. Called her ‘fru Mittet’. No one else did. And she wouldn’t have appreciated it, either. It was his name and she had regretted taking it many times.

They coughed. They had something to tell her. So what were they waiting for? She already knew. They had already told her with those idiotic, hammed-up tragic faces of theirs. She was furious. So furious that she could feel her face writhing, distorting into someone she didn’t want to be, who had also been forced into a role in this comic tragedy. They had said something. What was it? Was it Norwegian? The words made no sense.

She had never wanted to have Mr Right. And she had never wanted his name.

Until now.