The Writing on the Wall

Fourteen

IT WAS WITH A HEAVY HEART that I parked my car in front of the steep wooded plot in Furudalen. Slowly I walked through the gate and up to the entrance. I hesitated slightly before ringing the bell.

Holger Skagestøl answered the door himself. His gaunt face was deeply lined now, and there was a grimness about the mouth that had perhaps never been there before. ‘Yes?’ he asked testily before he’d recognised me. ‘Oh, Veum.’

‘I hope I’m not intruding.’

He looked at me without expression.

‘I just wanted to say how – sorry I am. It’s so terribly sad when this happens, at such a young age.’

His mask did not flicker.

‘I… Could you tell your wife that I called…?’

All of sudden he seemed to come back to life. A slight shudder ran through him, he stepped aside, opened the door wide and said: ‘You can tell… just come on in, Veum.’

I stepped cautiously into the hall. ‘I really don’t want to -’

He closed the door behind us. ‘No, no, it’s quite all right. Just go on in.’ He nodded in the direction of the sitting room.

Sidsel Skagestøl was sitting on the same dark-green sofa as the last time I’d been here. She didn’t notice the ash falling from the cigarette in her mouth down onto her white sweater.

As I went into the room, she looked up at me with the glassy stare of someone who had taken a large dose of tranquillizers and still wanted more.

I approached her and put out my hand. ‘Mrs Skageststøl…’

She took the cigarette from her mouth with one hand and gave me the other as though not quite sure where to put it.

Her hand was cold and damp, and I put both my hands round it. ‘I can’t find words to say how terrible this news is.’

I heard Holger Skagestøl make a movement behind me, a little uneasy, as if unsure what she might come out with.

She opened her mouth. Her lips looked dry, and she ran the tip of her tongue over them before speaking. ‘Torild, she…’

‘Yes, it’s all right, Sidsel. Veum knows everything,’ said Skagestøl.

‘She’s dead.’ Sidsel Skagestøl went on as if he had not spoken.

‘I’d hoped I might find her before – anything like this,’ I said.

‘We were too late contacting you, Veum. The damage was already done,’ said Skagestøl.

I turned partway towards him. ‘Have they given you – the time of death?’

‘No, no!’ he said quickly. ‘But… it was a few days ago at any rate. The pathologist was absolutely categorical about that.’

‘Well, you went up there yourself and…?’

I looked down at Sidsel Skagestøl. She sat there dragging heavily on her cigarette, with a sunken expression on her face.

I moved a few paces away from her and lowered my voice. ‘You saw her…’

He nodded and moved almost over to the picture window. ‘She didn’t look – a pretty sight. That isn’t how one wants to see one’s…’ His voice broke, and he had to regain control of himself so he could finish the sentence, ‘… daughter.’

‘No.’

‘She…’ He put one hand over his face. ‘Her face was completely bloated and there was bruising on the skin.’

I looked at him. He was struggling to keep control of his facial muscles. ‘It was horrible! They showed me pictures of the place where she was found… Her clothes… they’d been pulled up… her skirt, her jacket and her pants had been pulled down, and she was na… had nothing on under… Was lying on her stomach facedown and… Here, Veum, just here…’ He placed his hand behind his hip, on the far right-hand side. The look he gave me was a mixture of fear and bitterness. ‘Here, someone had carved a mark into her flesh!’

A shudder ran through me. ‘A mark?’

‘Like a branding mark on a cow!’

‘But what… what did it look like?’

‘A bit like – an inverted cross.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you, Veum? Do you really?’ He almost hissed the words at me.

It sounded so sharp that his wife turned to look at us again and said in a pathetic little voice: ‘What are you two talking about?’

Skagestøl rushed up to her. ‘Nothing, dear, nothing.’

‘No – thing?’ she repeated as though it was a word she had never heard before.

I remained standing by the window and looked out. For a moment I wondered who was looking after the other children. Maybe they hadn’t been told yet. Perhaps they had not yet come home from school.

I got my answer quicker than expected.

‘I want to see it!’ Sidsel Skagestøl exclaimed behind me. ‘I want to, Holger! I want to!’

‘There, there, Sidsel,’ he said, trying to calm her. He looked up at me apologetically, as I turned towards them again.

‘I want to see the place where she was found!’

‘But we have to be here… Vibeke and Stian will be home soon, and we…’

‘I don’t want to be here! What shall I tell them?’

‘You don’t need to… I’ll -’

‘I…’ She stood up abruptly. ‘Get me a taxi!’

‘A taxi! But…’

She tossed back her head. Suddenly she had the look of a woman rather the worse for wear at a very boozy follow-on party suddenly deciding she’s going home. ‘You can’t deny me that, Holger!’

‘No, I can’t…’

‘We’re no longer even married!’

‘Just separated,’ he muttered.

It was as though it only now dawned on her that I was there too and, looking at me, she said: ‘You can drive me, Veum!’

‘Me! But I… Don’t think you should…?’ I looked at her husband. ‘She ought to lie down.’

He made as if to take her arm gently, but she pulled away from him dramatically. ‘I said no! No, no, no! I’ll scream.’

‘It might perhaps be best…’ Holger Skagestøl said softly. ‘It might do her good, and I’ll have a chance to talk to the children alone – first.’

She looked at me with the same agitated expression, as though she hadn’t heard what he had said at all. ‘Well? Yes or no?’

I threw up my arms. ‘All right, then. Of course I’ll drive you up there, if you think…’ I lowered my voice. ‘But I’m not at all sure the police are going to like it.’

‘The police? What have they got to do with it?’

‘Well, in any case it’s become a police matter now, hasn’t it?’

‘But she’s our… she’s my daughter, isn’t she?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, of course she is.’

‘Shall we go, then?’

Without waiting for an answer, she turned to the door and set off. I trotted after her as obediently as a little dog, with an apologetic backward glance at the hapless trainer who was staying behind to wait for the children. The other children.