Punishment aka What Is Mine

THIRTY-SIX

On the one hand, Johanne Vik was quite pleased that everyone assumed she had ordered a cake. She was the cake buyer, in both her own and others’ eyes. She was the one who made sure there was always coffee in the staff room. If Johanne had been away from the office for more than three days, the fridge was empty of soda and water and there were only a couple of dry apples and a brown banana left in the fruit bowl. It was unthinkable that any of the office staff might take care of that sort of thing. Remnants of a seventies work ethic still lingered in the university, and in fact it suited her quite well. Normally.

But now she was extremely irritated.

They had all known about Fredrik’s fiftieth birthday for ages. He had certainly reminded them of the big day often enough. It was over three weeks since Johanne had collected the money, two hundred kroner each, and gone to Ferner Jacobsen on her own to buy an expensive cashmere sweater for the institute’s most snobby professor. But she’d forgotten the cake. No one had reminded her to remember, yet everyone still stared at her in astonishment when she came back from the university library. At lunch there’d been no marzipan-covered walnut cream cake on the table. No songs, no speeches. Fredrik was really pissed off. And the others seemed to think they’d been wronged, that she had betrayed her colleagues at a crucial moment.

“Someone else could make the effort sometimes,” she said, and closed the door to her office.

It was unlike her to forget something like that. The others did have reason to rely on her. They always had and she had never said anything. If she’d remembered the blasted birthday, she could have just asked Tine or Trond to buy a cake. After all, it was his fiftieth. And she couldn’t blame Adam either. Even though he had robbed her of a whole night’s sleep, she was used to that sort of thing. Something she’d learned in the first years with Kristiane.

She pulled a photocopied page from her bag. The university library had every edition of all the local papers on mircofilm. It had taken her less than an hour to find the announcement. It had to be the right one. As if by fateful irony, or perhaps as a result of a local print setter’s sensitivity, the death announcement was tucked away in the corner, right at the bottom of the page, unobtrusive and alone.

My dear son

ANDERS MOHAUG

born March 27, 1938,

passed away on June 12, 1965.

The funeral service took place in private.

Agnes Dorothea Mohaug

So the man was twenty-seven when he died. In 1956, when little Hedvig was abducted, raped, and killed, he was eighteen.

“Eighteen…”

There was no obituary. Johanne had looked for something, but gave up after she’d trawled through every paper in the four weeks after the funeral. No one had anything to say about Anders Mohaug. His mother didn’t even need to say “no flowers.”

How old would she be now? Johanne worked it out on her fingers. If she was twenty-five when her son was born, she would be nearly ninety today. Eighty-eight, if she was alive. She might be older. She could have had her son later.

“She’s dead,” Johanne said to herself, and put the photocopy in a plastic sleeve.

But she decided to try all the same. It was easy enough to find the address in a telephone directory from 1965. Directory Assistance informed her that a completely different woman now lived at Agnes Mohaug’s old address. Agnes Mohaug was no longer registered as having a phone, said the metallic voice.

Someone might remember her. Or her son. It would be best if someone could remember Anders.

It was worth a try, and the old address in Lillestrøm was as good a starting point as any. Alvhild would be happy. And for some reason that was now important to Johanne. To make Alvhild happy.