The Consorts of Death

17

Twenty-one years later she asked me with a slight blush, on the bench in Fjellveien: ‘Do you remember that we had a — fling at that time, Varg?’

I gave a wry grin. ‘Is that so?’

Yes, I remembered we had had what she called a fling. I remembered the iron tang of the red wine she brought with her that Thursday night in 1974, with the case apparently solved and Jan in specialist care; I remembered her lips tasting of the same, and the compact little body that she could never quite keep still, but wriggling and squirming whether on top or underneath, so lively that I slipped in and out of her like an inexperienced plumber on his very first solo call-out. She had kissed me, hard and firm, and there had never been any doubt about what she wanted. Afterwards we were agreed that it had been our way of celebrating the end of the case. Later we repeated the celebrations on two or three occasions before the whole thing, for reasons I had never quite been able to articulate, just petered out, becoming fleeting memories, a quick raid on my recall faculties when later in my life I was served a red wine with a similar flavour.

Yes, I did remember. I had not forgotten. But there were so many other things that happened that year, far too many other agonising incidents.

The investigation ended with Vibecke Skarnes being charged with involuntary manslaughter. The case went straight to court where she was defended with great passion by Jens Langeland.

I was myself sitting on one of the court benches for several of the days and I was impressed by Langeland’s performance. He used Vibecke Skarnes’s confession to maximum effect, and in court a far more negative impression was given of Svein Skarnes than I had received from Randi Borge. Langeland presented the awkward home situation, with a very unstable adopted child requiring a lot of attention. Vibecke Skarnes claimed that her husband had made unjustified accusations of infidelity against her, accompanied with violence, and just such a row had ended with the fatal fall down the cellar stairs, a fall caused by her pushing her husband away so that she would not be beaten up in, what Langeland called in his final summing up, nothing less than self-defence. She also claimed that Skarnes, on several occasions, had shown unnecessary brutality towards their tiny adopted son.

These claims were rejected by the opposing side in no uncertain terms. I remembered one day in particular when one character witness after the other testified what a decent fellow Svein Skarnes had been, and that they had never seen a hint of maltreatment towards his wife or had any reason to suspect that anything of the kind had taken place. Randi Borge took her stand, even more attractively dressed than when I visited her in the office, and gave Skarnes the best possible character reference; it was so convincing that Jens Langeland had squeezed in a couple of well camouflaged but nonetheless quite defamatory insinuations about the kind of relationship there might have been between this magnificent boss and his secretary. He was soon called to order, but I could see that the jury had taken the point.

However, the court was never entirely convinced that the tumble down the stairs was a pure accident in an impassioned situation. Despite what was referred to as mitigating circumstances, Vibecke Skarnes was convicted. She was sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment for involuntary manslaughter, and the subsequent High Court appeal from both sides did nothing to change the judgement. I was present at the court’s final pronouncement, and it was with a feeling of sadness that I left the courtroom that day with a cursory nod to Vibecke Skarnes.

After emergency hospitalisation in Haukeland, Jan was given treatment for what Marianne Storetvedt termed reactive attachment disorders and placed in Haukedalen. In the autumn of 1974, on the initiative of Hans Haavik, he was transferred to a foster home in Sunnfjord, where the combination of a smaller community and life on a farm working at full capacity was assumed to be a good way to lead him back onto the right path, to make him a benefit to society.

Both Cecilie and I had kept tabs on him as well as we could during the six months he was in therapy. We went for walks with him on Geitanuken or other mountains in Asane and around Bergen. We went out on the fjord with boat-savvy social workers and taught him how to fish. One June day in 1974 we went to Vollane to swim, and I can remember — yes, I remembered Cecilie in a very small bikini, white with green dots, and nipples that went erect after a cold dive. That was another of the times when we rounded off the day with a very private party in Telthussmauet. But it was a grey, rainy summer, and there were not many swimming trips.

We were like a little family, a bit maladjusted and dysfunctional, as families with such children often are. I also remembered the afternoon in September that year when Hans called us into his office after we had taken Jan on a trip to Akvariet, the sea centre in Bergen. He told us he had found a foster home for him in Sunnfjord and that he himself would travel up with him the day after. I could hardly look at Cecilie. In a way it was as if our own little child was being taken away from us, our own difficult little sprog. And perhaps that was the real reason it never came to more than the two or three celebrations between us: the separation we both felt when Jan was sent to Sunnfjord that September.

I remembered him the way he had been in those six months. From the apathetic tiny boy we had seen in the first days he had developed into an active and vigorous boy, a bit too vigorous at times. He didn’t know where to draw the line and sometimes he seemed to be deliberately provoking us, to make trouble, to create an unpleasant atmosphere and evoke rejection. ‘Extremely characteristic of children with early emotional damage,’ Marianne informed us in a conversation we had with her. ‘So what can we do?’ I had asked, and she had looked at us with a tiny resigned smile: ‘Hope the therapy helps, hope that he gets clear signals from the adult world and that someone sets new boundaries for the life he has to teach himself to live.’ We had nodded in agreement, but after leaving her we felt as despondent as we had when we arrived.

‘What are the people he’s living with like?’ I had asked Hans that September day. ‘Decent folk. I know them personally. Klaus and Kari Libakk. Klaus is a cousin of mine. They run a farm in Angedalen, north-east of Forde,’ ‘Does he have local support?’ ‘Of course. Social services in Sunnfjord has put one of their own on the case…’ He flicked through a few papers. ‘Grethe Millingen. That name mean anything to you?’ ‘No,’ I said and Cecilie just shook her head sadly.

In the car back to town we had little to say to each other. We both sat enclosed in our own worlds, and when we parted neither of us saw any reason to celebrate anything.

It was a miserable year in general. The period of separation came to an end and the divorce from Beate was executed without mercy. We negotiated a visiting agreement for Thomas and it wasn’t long before it came to my ears that she had got herself a new friend, some teacher, Wiik, whom Thomas called Lasse. In my welfare work I regularly became frustrated and there were a number of episodes that indicated that perhaps I was not the right man to tackle all the challenges I confronted. The whole thing came to an end the year after when, under strong pressure from above, I was requested to look around for something else to do.

I had a distressing feeling that life was passing me by before my very eyes, outside my windows, and that feeling was not exactly diminished when in August of that year I turned Muus’s nightmare into reality and started my own little firm as a private investigator in Strandkaien, a street fronting the harbour and a block away from Marianne Storetvedt.

Nine years later, I received a phone call from Forde.