The Writing on the Wall

Fifteen

I HELD THE CAR DOOR OPEN for her. She got in and had dutifully put on her seatbelt before I’d walked round to the other side and sat behind the wheel.

As I turned on the ignition, she asked: ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘More or less.’

Then she said nothing further until we sat waiting for the light to turn green at Paradiskrysset. ‘You’d have thought a crisis like this ought to repair a broken relationship.’

I shot a sidelong glance at her. ‘Often it does.’

‘Hm,’ she said pensively to herself rather than anyone else.

I turned right at Hopskiftet and took the motorway to Rådalen. The white snowflakes gave the landscape a grey tint like in an old copper engraving.

She sat quiet as a mouse beside me: her breathing calm and regular. She seemed to have left the pent-up hysteria behind at the house in Furudalen. Now we were more like a couple approaching middle age, with nothing more to say to one another, on the way to some shopping centre or other.

In Rådalen, the stench from the landfill site suggested it wouldn’t be long before the refuse dump, now almost thirty years old, would be so full that the contents would start spilling out over the sides. Then we were out on the open farmland between Stend and Fanafjell, where the wind from the sea drove the snowflakes obliquely in across the landscape like dramatic flourishes in the copper plate. Fana Church, with its medieval-looking grey stonework, stood there like a reminder of life and death at the foot of Fanafjell, and I changed down so the car would smoothly take the first sharp bends on the way uphill.

As we neared the highest point on the road, she suddenly placed her hand on my arm and pointed left. ‘Can you drive into the parking place there, Veum?’

I did as she said.

She took hold of the door handle. ‘I think I could do with some fresh air before…’

I nodded and turned off the engine.

There were no other cars parked there. It was so utterly out of season that the café at Fanaseter was closed, and even if they still had any animals in the enclosures there, there were no kindergarten or other kids visiting them at this time of the year.

Sidsel Skagestøl walked ahead of me towards the old vantage point, where the base of a panoramic telescope still stood, the view long since obscured by the fast-growing conifers. She walked on over the rocky outcrops facing north until she finally felt she was high enough and paused, her gaze sweeping round in an arc, the wind tugging at her blonde hair, so that she had to gather her dark green coat tight round her to keep out the cold.

I climbed up and stood beside her, following her gaze. To the south-west Korsfjord cut its way through between Austevoll and Sotra, where the Lia Tower rose up to a height of 1120 feet above sea level. In the north-west, on the other side of Nordåsvannet, lay the collection of houses at Bønes like a scar in the landscape along the narrow elongated western side of Løvstakken, and beyond that Lyderhorn’s highest point at 1300 feet. Behind the mountains the horizon could just be made out: a barely perceptible line between grey and white somewhere far out in the maw of the open sea.

‘Life is something you lose,’ she said in an undertone. ‘Bit by bit.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Childhood – a distant memory. You’re young and frisky, full of expectations of life, and then – then suddenly that phase is over. You find love, or you don’t find it, in all its various guises. And before you know where you are, that’s gone too. The children you bring into the world…’ She swallowed and blinked back the tears as though the wind had become too biting for her. ‘Suddenly they’ve gone too.’

‘But life does go on, Sidsel.’

She seemed not to hear me. ‘There are those who would say life is something we build stone by stone until by the day we die we have a complete edifice.’

‘Mm.’

‘I’d put it differently. The edifice is what is given to you when you’re born: a beautiful edifice into which you are invited. But it’s not long before they start to tear your fine edifice down, bit by bit, until at last there you sit, quite alone, on the empty plot. And some houses,’ she added with sudden vehemence, ‘are not even torn right down! They stand there for ever, like incomplete… lives.’

She turned abruptly and looked east, where the broad channel on the far side of the Hardangerijord lay like a diminutive duvet between the mountains at Fusa. ‘And there – lies Folgefonna glacier, just as it has for thousands of years. It will never die.’

‘Hm, glaciers are like people. They come and go too. They just take a bit longer, that’s all.’

She started to walk back down. ‘Shall we – carry on, now?’

‘It’s up to you.’

We got back into the car again.

The valley on the eastern side of Fanafjell is covered in conifers right to the top of Lyshorn, and the road descends in a succession of narrow bends down towards Nordvik and Lysefjord. On a bend a mile or so from the top, two cars were drawn up at the side of the road: a patrol car and a private vehicle. A uniformed policeman stood midway between the cars almost as though he was parked there too.

He followed us with his eyes until I pulled in to the side and parked behind the other two cars. At which point he immediately set off in our direction. As we got out of the car, he said: ‘I’m sorry, but this is a restricted area for police only.’

‘This is the deceased’s mother,’ I said with a small gesture of the hand in the direction of Sidsel Skagestøl.

The young constable blushed. ‘Oh, I see… I’m really sorry, but I still can’t let you through… Of course, you can look…’ He cleared his throat. ‘I mean… Obviously you understand… we’re still carrying out technical investigations down there. To make sure we have all the evidence,’ he said, addressing Sidsel Skagestøl directly.

She nodded but looked at neither of us. Her gaze was directed towards the steep slope on the far side of the concrete kerb. With the look of someone afraid of heights she moved gingerly towards the edge of the road, leaning slightly back as though afraid of being sucked in by the downward air currents.

I followed at a discreet distance, conscious of the constable’s eyes on the back of my neck. He said nothing but would certainly let us know if we made any attempt to step over the red-and-white tape cordoning off the police’s preserve around the scene of the crime.

From the concrete kerb we looked down a steep slope towards an area of newly planted conifers. Under the road a concrete channel had been built to carry one of the streams running down from the mountain behind us. Around the mouth of the tunnel two plain-clothed individuals were carrying out a meticulous examination of what I reckoned must be the actual place where the body had been found, partly beneath the road itself.

I saw it straight away. There was something that didn’t add up.

I turned and looked across at the far side of the road. There, the mountainside sloped gradually up towards the top of Fanafjell, the trees like tall dark sentries reaching right down to the edge of the road.

Slowly I redirected my attention to Sidsel Skagestøl. Tall, erect and silent, she stood there, apathetic almost, staring down the slope not unlike someone contemplating suicide on a bridge, wondering whether to jump or not. Beneath the surface, her feelings were no doubt in turmoil, wave upon wave dashing against the rocks so hard that the spray was visible in her eyes. But she did not jump: just stood there, alone and dignified as though already at the cemetery saying her last farewell before the body was interred.

She glanced quickly sideways, as if to reassure herself that it was me standing there. ‘I just can’t imagine it.’

‘I’m sure it’s best like that,’ I said gently.

‘This isn’t where she died…’

‘Probably not.’

‘It’s just a – place where… her body was kept. She’s never actually been here herself. Not what was Torild.’

‘You’re quite right about that. Now you’ve seen it, I think you should sort of erase the image of this place – not from your memory, because I don’t think you could do that, not for a long time anyway, but from your consciousness, from the place where you are – and where, in a way, your daughter will also always be.’

She turned to face me. For the first time today she looked me straight in the eye, and the trace of a smile flickered over her mouth. ‘Was that the sociologist in you speaking?’

I smiled back. ‘Probably. But he’s the one who’s usually right. Inside me, I mean.’

During the drive back one thought kept coming back to me: Surely the police must also have seen it? The thing that didn’t add up?

I drove her right back to the door. ‘Shall I come in with you?’

‘I don’t think that’s really necessary.’ She glanced at the door, where Holger Skagestøl was already coming out to meet us.

‘How are you feeling, Sidsel?’ he asked. ‘Did you manage all right?’

An involuntary twitch ran across her face. She became a paper cut-out someone had suddenly crumpled up. ‘Why shouldn’t I have managed? It was just a place, wasn’t it? Why don’t you go up there yourself? You won’t find Torild – not there either!’

He made an awkward gesture of the hand and looked dejectedly at me before turning to her again. ‘The children are taking it – well. Alva is with them just now. I called her and asked her to -’

‘Oh! I have to put up with that too, do I?!’

‘The children can spend the night at their place, Sidsel. Then you can get a proper rest.’

‘Who is Alva?’ I asked.

‘My sister,’ said Skagestøl curtly.

‘It might be best for Sidsel to be with the children.’

‘And what business is that of yours, Veum?’

‘None, strictly speaking, but she’s been a hundred per cent calm now, during our drive.’

He grew red in the face. ‘A hundred per cent calm now! What are you implying?’ He rushed up to me as though about to hit me.

I immediately took a step or two back.

‘For goodness’ sake, Holger! Don’t be such an idiot! Listen, we can’t leave Alva in there on her own, can we? She’ll wear the children out.’

Holger Skagestøl controlled himself, cast a final look of irritation in my direction before turning his back on me and following his wife inside. ‘She’s reading to them, Sidsel!’

Neither of them took the time to say a formal goodbye to me. My duty as a chauffeur was done; and I hadn’t been much of a sleuth either. In fact, the only thing I could be credited with was that I’d more or less just happened to be there.

I got into the car, turned in the driveway, and then drove slowly down the steep slope to Sædalen, thinking: Surely the police must have seen it?