The Writing on the Wall

Twenty

ON SATURDAY MORNING I went down to the main door early to collect the paper.

There was no missing the article. The editor had apparently come down on Bjørn Brevik’s side.

The headline read:

PARENTS IN SHOCK -

Friend of victim helping police with enquiries.

There was a large photo showing Holger and Sidsel Skagestøl being led out of the police station by a uniformed policeman. Holger Skagestøl was in the foreground, slightly too close to the flashbulb, and his overexposed face expressed in the clearest possible terms that he did not like being photographed. Sidsel Skagestøl was partly hidden behind him but was looking straight at the photographer, caught off her guard and anxious, like someone suddenly jumped on in a dark back street.

‘We didn’t even know she had a boyfriend,’ said Sidsel and Holger Skagestøl when, at midday yesterday, they were informed that the police had called in a friend of the victim, Torild Skagestøl (16), for further questioning at police headquarters. Detective Inspector Dankert Muus, who is heading the investigation, will not comment other than to say that the young man has been summoned as a witness. From another source, this newspaper has received confirmation that the witness is none other than the young jogger who reported having found the body late Thursday evening. The police are still refusing to comment on whether the victim had been the object of a sexual assault either before or after she was killed. Torild Skagestøl’s friends and family are deeply shocked at the murder. Friends and teachers describe her as a good friend and a positive student. No one has been able to suggest a motive for the murder yet.

That was all there was to the article, which, because of the early hour it had gone to press on Friday evening, was considerably briefer than would normally have been the case on a weekday.

After a similarly brief breakfast I rang Karin and asked whether she was ready.

The weekend was not spent in a suite at the Solstrand Fjord Hotel but in long steady sex on the island of Sotra in a cottage I sometimes borrowed from a second cousin who didn’t have much use for it in February anyway.

As soon as we crossed the Sotra Bridge we noticed that the wind had swung to the north-west, that the thermometer was rising and that the weekend would be best suited to indoor activities.

The cottage faced straight into the maw of the sea, and when the wind strength had increased significantly it felt like being in the middle of a gigantic conch, with the constant sound of the sea in your ears. The chasing clouds took on a leaden hue, and we had hardly lit the fire when the first flash of lightning dashed white stitches across the horizon, where the sky was about to rip apart.

The ensuing clap of thunder sent Karin straight into my arms, and even when the thunderstorm had moved off it was no easy matter to get her to shift. With a pot of tea simmering on the hotplate, we unrolled our sleeping bags, making one into a sheet and the other an eiderdown and, like two bears still drowsy from their long winter slumber and shunning the first cold dip of the year, went back into hibernation.

We made love like a couple of seventeen-year-olds on their first camping trip.

Afterwards we drank some tea, ate rough hunks of bread with thick slices of cheese and chatted. The advantage of being lovers at our time of life was there were so many stones to overturn, so many branches to pull aside, so much distance covered to talk about.

Late that night, with the gentle sound of her regular breathing beside me, I lay on my back, thinking. Was this happiness? Was this how life was supposed to have been the whole time? And, if so, how long would it last? Who the hell had sent me the death notice in the post?