The Redbreast

69

Irisveien. 8 May 2000.

'Who's that?' came a shout from inside the door. The voice was small and frightened. Harry could see her outline through the frosted glass.

'Harry Hole. We spoke on the phone.'

The door was opened a fraction.

'Sorry, I…'

'That's alright.'

Signe Juul opened the door wide and Harry walked into the hallway. 'Even's out,' she said with an apologetic smile. 'Yes, you said on the phone,' Harry said. 'It was actually you I wanted to talk to.’

‘Me?'

'If that's OK, fru Juul?'

The elderly lady led the way in. Her hair, thick and steely grey, was twisted into a knot and held in place with an old-fashioned hairslide. And her round, swaying body was the kind that made you think of a soft embrace and good food.

Burre raised his head when they came into the sitting room.

'So, your husband has gone for a walk on his own?' Harry asked.

'Yes, he can't take Burre into the cafe,' she said. 'Please, do sit down.'

'The cafe?'

'Something he's started doing recently,' she smiled. 'To read the papers. He says he thinks better when he's not sitting at home.’

‘There's probably something in that.’

‘Absolutely. And you can daydream too, I suppose.’

‘What kind of daydreams, do you think?'

'Well, I've no idea. You can perhaps imagine you're young again, drinking coffee at a pavement cafe in Paris or Vienna.' Again that same quick, apologetic smile. 'Enough of that. Coffee?'

'Yes, please.'

Harry studied the walls while Signe Juul went into the kitchen. Above the fireplace was a portrait of a young man wearing a black cloak. Harry hadn't noticed the picture when he had been here previously. The cloak-clad man was standing in a dramatic pose, apparently scanning distant horizons beyond the painter's view. Harry walked over to the picture. A little framed copper plaque read: Overlege Kornelius Juul, 1885-1969. Medical consultant.

'That's Even's grandfather,' Signe Juul said, arriving with a tray of coffee things.

'Right. You have a lot of portraits here.'

'Yes,' she said, putting down the tray. 'The picture beside it is Even's maternal grandfather, Dr Werner Schumann. He was one of the founders of Ulleval Hospital in 1885.'

'And this?'

'Jonas Schumann. Consultant at the Rikshospital.’

‘And your relatives?'

She looked at him in bewilderment. 'What do you mean?'

'Where are your relatives?'

'They… are elsewhere. Cream in your coffee?'

'No, thank you.'

Harry sat down. 'I wanted to talk to you about the war,' he said. 'Oh no,' she burst out.

'I understand, but this is important. Is it alright to ask?’

‘We'll see,' she said, pouring herself coffee.

'You were a nurse during the war…'

'At the Eastern Front, yes. A traitor.'

Harry looked up. Her eyes watched him calmly.

'There were around four hundred of us. We were all sentenced to imprisonment afterwards. Despite the fact that the international Red Cross sent in an appeal to the Norwegian authorities to stop all criminal proceedings. The Norwegian Red Cross didn't apologise until 1990. Even's father, in the picture over there, had connections and managed to get my sentence commuted… partly because I had helped two injured Resistance men in the spring of 1945. And because I was never a member of the Nasjonal Samling. Is there anything else you would like to know?'

Harry stared into his coffee cup. It struck him how quiet it could be in some of Oslo's better residential areas.

'It's not your past I'm after, fru Juul. Do you remember a Norwegian soldier at the front called Gudbrand Johansen?'

Signe Juul flinched, and Harry knew he had stumbled on to something.

'What is it you actually want to know?' she asked, her face taut. 'Hasn't your husband told you?’

‘Even never tells me anything.'

'Right. I'm trying to identify the Norwegian soldiers who went through Sennheim on the way to the front.'

'Sennheim,' she repeated softly. 'Daniel was there.'

'Yes, I know you were engaged to Daniel Gudeson. Sindre Fauke told me that.'

'Who's he?'

A veteran of the front and the Resistance whom your husband knows. It was Fauke who suggested I talk to you about Gudbrand Johansen. Fauke deserted, so he doesn't know what happened to Gudbrand afterwards. But another soldier from the front, Edvard Mosken, told me about a hand-grenade exploding in the trenches. Mosken wasn't able to account for all the events following the explosion, but if Johansen survived it would be natural to assume that he ended up in the field hospital.'

Signe Juul made a smacking noise with her lips. Burre ambled over and she buried her fingers in the dog's thick, wiry coat.

'Yes, I can remember Gudbrand Johansen,' she said. 'Daniel occasionally wrote about him, in the letters from Sennheim and in the notes I got from him at the field hospital. They were very different. I think Gudbrand Johansen became like a younger brother to him.' She smiled. 'Most men in Daniel's presence tended to behave like younger brothers.'

'Do you know what happened to Gudbrand?'

'He ended up in the hospital with us, as you said. This was at the time when our section of the front was falling into Russian hands and there was a full-scale retreat. We couldn't get any medicine to the front because all the roads were blocked by traffic coming from the other direction. Johansen was badly injured with, among other things, a shell splinter in his thigh, just above the knee. Gangrene was spreading in his foot and there was a risk we might have to amputate. So, instead of waiting for medicine which wasn't coming, he was sent with the stream of traffic to the west. The last I saw of him was a bearded face sticking up from under a blanket at the back of a lorry. The spring mud was up to the middle of the wheels and it took them an hour to move round the first bend and out of sight.'

The dog had rested its head in her lap and looked up at her with sad eyes.

'And that was the last you saw or heard of him?'

She slowly raised the delicate porcelain cup to her lips, took a tiny sip and put it down. Her hand didn't shake much, but it was trembling.

I received a card from him a few months later,' she said. 'He wrote that he had some of Daniel's personal effects, a Russian cap that I understood to be some kind of trophy of war. The writing was rather confused, but that is not at all unusual among recent war casualties.'

'The card, do you…?'

She shook her head.

'Do you remember where it was sent from?’

‘No. I can only remember that the name made me think it was somewhere green and rural and that he was well.'

Harry stood up.

'How did this Fauke know about me?' she asked.

'Well -' Harry didn't quite know how to put it, but she broke in.

'All the soldiers at the front have heard of me,' she said and her mouth smiled. 'The woman who sold her soul to the Devil for a shorter sentence. Is that what they think?'

'I don't know,' Harry said. He knew he had to get out. They were only two blocks away from the circular road round Oslo, but it was so quiet they could have been by a lake in the mountains.

'You know I never saw him again,' she said. 'Daniel. After they told me he was dead.'

She had focused on an imaginary point in front of her.

'I received a New Year's greeting from him via an orderly and three days later I saw Daniel's name on a list of the fallen. I didn't believe it was true. I told them I would refuse to believe it until they showed me his body. So they took me to the mass grave in the Northern Sector where they were burning the dead. I went down into the grave, trod over dead bodies as I searched, going from one burned corpse to the next, staring into the blackened, empty eye sockets. But none of them was Daniel. They said it would be impossible for me to recognise him, but I told them they were wrong. Then they said that he might have been put in one of the graves that had been covered over. I don't know, but I never saw him again.'

She started when Harry cleared his throat.

'Thank you for the coffee, fru Juul.'

She followed him out to the hall. As he stood by the wardrobe, buttoning up his coat, he couldn't help looking for her features in the faces peering out of the framed photographs hanging on the wall, but in vain.

'Do we have to tell Even any of this?' she asked, opening the door for him.

Harry looked at her in surprise.

'I mean, does he have to know that we talked about this?' she added hurriedly. About the war and… Daniel?'

'Well, not if you don't want him to, of course.'

'He'll see that you've been here. But can't we just say that you waited for him and you had to go to another appointment?'

Her eyes were imploring, but there was something else there too.

Harry couldn't put his finger on what it was until he was in Ringveien and had opened the window to let in the liberating, deafening roar of cars, which blew the silence out of his head. It was horror. Signe Juul was terrified of something.