The Writing on the Wall

Twenty-two

JIMMY’S OPENED at twelve o’clock, and it was just after ten past as I approached the door.

When I looked in through the window I saw the silhouette of a man clearly outlined against the bright light in the room at the back. Behind the counter sat ‘Kalle’ in the same unwashed chef’s smock as before, but with a fresh newspaper and hopefully freshly brewed coffee in his cup. As I opened the door and went in, I heard the sound of another door being closed. When I looked up the man who had been standing in the doorway of the room at the back had gone.

Kalle shot a sullen sideways glance at me.

I took a quick look around. At the far end, hunched over a machine, was a lad with a lock of long fair hair falling over his eyes. He scowled in my direction, obviously bothered by his conscience, missing school as he was, and for all he knew I could be from Child Welfare.

Kalle slammed down his cup and stood up behind the counter. ‘What do you want?’

‘Actually, I was looking for my – nephew.’

‘Nephew. Kiss my arse!’

‘Ronny.’

‘Daren’t show his face here any more. I told him that was it. You’d best look for him somewhere else.’

I moved towards him. ‘Er… Kalle… I didn’t catch your surname.’

‘Persen,’ he said, a bit surprised. ‘What’s it got to do with you anyway?’

‘I was hoping to have a word with Bjelland actually.’

‘Bje -’ He glanced involuntarily towards the back door. ‘What for? It’s me who’s business manager here.’

‘Diploma from Bergen Business School, I suppose? Does Bjelland know about the scam you’re running from here, or is it something you started off your own bat?’

He looked even more sullen. ‘What scam?’

The lad in the corner glanced at us for a second, before dropping in a coin and starting a new game. The hollow tinny sound of the introductory music echoed through the room.

‘I think you know what I’m driving at. Young girls and – boys… I hung around for a while outside this place on Thursday, and it wasn’t all that hard to find out where at least one of them ended up. Same place as Torild Skagestøl last Friday, right?’

Kalle Persen leaned forward over the counter so abruptly that I stepped back. He waved a podgy index finger in my face and snarled: ‘Look, mate, if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with broken kneecaps, I suggest you watch your mouth – and no mistake. Got my drift?’

‘Can I have that in writing so I can take it down to the police station in Domkirkegaten and show them?’

‘You can have it for real some night when you’re least expecting it.’

‘Better be before Wednesday.’

‘Before Wednesday? How d’you mean?’

‘Forget it. In other words, you’re suggesting I should speak to Bjelland in person, are you? Where can I find him?’

‘He’s in the phone book.’

‘So, he’s not the one hiding in the back room, is he?’

A sort of smile broke out beneath the mouse fur on his upper lip. ‘You can go and take a look if you want…’

‘It’s not that important.’ I walked towards the door. ‘Have a nice day.’

‘Kiss my -’

‘I didn’t do it last time, and I’m not going to this time either.’

I left the door ajar when I went out, so he’d have the pleasure of coming out from behind the counter and walking across the floor to shut it again after me.

It wasn’t time for a visit to Birger Bjelland yet and perhaps never would be.

Instead I went back to the office and, not without a trace of anxiety, went through the mail. But today’s contained no death notices.

I tried to get hold of Evy Berge. There was no answer at her home number. And when I called her department at Haukeland Hospital, she was in theatre. – Could they ask her to call me? – But I preferred not to leave my name. You could never tell. It might end up in their database, and next time I was taken to hospital, they might discover I’d donated all my internal organs to the Institute of Pathology.

I ought to talk to one of the girls.

Astrid was the hardest nut to crack, but Åsa was probably harder to get hold of, at least, if I wanted to avoid having her parents there.

I leafed back through my notes with the feeling that there was another lead I’d meant to chase up before…

The Guide leader… Sigrun Søvik. I’d made a note of it.

When I called the office of the Girl Guides Association at Vetrlidsalmenningen I was given her work phone number: a development company with offices in Søndre. And if I still wanted to go to Karin’s in Landås, it wasn’t much of a detour.

The district of Mindemyren is the coldest place in Bergen. In winter, the frost smoke never quite loosens its grip there. If you leave your car parked for long, you can have trouble starting it.

The development company had offices on the first and second floors over a warehouse, behind large grey steel Venetian blinds. I found Sigrun Søvik in a red check flannel shirt and grey pullover, totally absorbed in a computer screen, where she was slowly rotating a construction, with technical data listed here and there, deftly touching certain keys. The walls around her were covered in technical drawings. On a couple of them I thought I recognised the same diagram as on the screen.

She looked up at me vaguely as I stood in the doorway of her tiny office. ‘Yes? What, er…?’

She was a stocky woman with medium fair hair, shorter at the back than in front, staring eyes and a strikingly broad bridge of the nose, as if it had once been broken. Her mouth – she was not wearing lipstick – seemed slightly too small for her large face, and when she pursed her lips rather primly, it looked out of place, like a transplant after some terrible accident.

‘The name’s Veum.’

‘Yes? Do we have an appointment?’

‘No, I’ve come to see you in connection with a death.’

She swung the chair right back round and stood up. ‘A death? What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know if you saw it in the papers… Torild Skagestøl.’

‘Oh, Torild…’ For some reason she looked almost relieved. ‘For a moment I was afraid that… But why have you come to see me?’

‘Because I thought that maybe you knew something about Torild, I mean that you knew another side of her than – her parents did.’

Her mouth became even smaller. ‘Another side? Who are you actually?’

‘I’m a private investigator who was looking for Torild the week she was – went missing.’

‘A private investigator? But I still don’t understand… Why have you come to see me?’

‘You were her Guides leader, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, I was leader of the troop she was in – but it’s… I mean she hasn’t attended since – spring last year.’

‘Is that when she stopped?’

‘Yes, er… just before summer, as far as I remember.’

‘And Åsa Furebø stopped at the same time, did she?’

She scratched her forehead as though to jog her memory. ‘Yes, that’s probably right… They were – best friends, you see.’

‘You say that as though it was somehow – suspect?’

She smiled, but not from the heart. ‘Suspect? I just meant… best friends tend to be in league with one another. Follow in each other’s footsteps, so to speak. When one of them stops, the other one often does too.’

‘So there was no special reason they stopped just then?’

‘Special? Have they said anything themselves?’

I purposely held back my answer and noticed how the pause made her uneasy, as if afraid of what I would say.

‘Er, no. They haven’t…’

This time she answered straight away. ‘No, because in our experience, that’s exactly the age – either they carry on or they stop, and then they carry on right until they become Head Guides. But as you can well imagine, many of them develop other interests at that age.’

‘Yes, I’m sure… I was in the Scouts myself once – and stopped at just about that age too.’

‘Yes, well, there you are, that’s what I…’

‘But actually, that’s not what I was trying to find out. How long were these girls Guides?’

‘Torild and Åsa?’ I nodded. ‘Oh, er… seven or eight years. Right from when they were at primary school.’

‘You must know them quite well, then?’

‘Yes, as far as… Over such a period of time they change quite a lot, you know.’

‘Yes, of course, but – what was your impression of them?’

‘Oh, er… they were perfectly ordinary nice young girls from good homes.’

‘Hm. Does that mean you also met the parents?’

‘Yes, I did. You see we sometimes had events that were attended by the parents. Usually at Christmas, or if we were planning a trip; and when they took the Guides’ Promise of course. The last few years we didn’t see all that much of them. When the girls had started to grow up, so to speak.’ She hesitated a little. ‘Apart from…’

‘Yes?’

‘The last time we were at camp, at Whitsuntide, north of Radøy, not all that far from Bøvågen, Torild’s father and Asa’s mother paid us a visit one morning.’

‘Torild’s father and Åsa’s mother? Wasn’t that a little – unusual?’

‘No, they would normally come down together, all four of them, but Åsa’s father was away on a trip, as we’d already been told in advance, and Torild’s mother didn’t feel well, so…’

‘And how did the girls react to that?’

‘Nothing special. There’s always a rather awkward atmosphere when the parents visit. Children need to be free from parental supervision sometimes as well, you know!’

‘As well?’

‘Yes!’ she said defiantly.

‘Yes, I suppose so…’ I nodded at her to carry on. ‘And then?’

‘Well, we gave them a cup of coffee made over a campfire, had a tour of the camp and went down to the cove where we used to swim, then they left. That was it.’

‘And in August of that year Torild’s parents separated.’

‘Oh? I didn’t know. But… the girls had already dropped out then, hadn’t they?’

‘So there’s nothing else you can tell me that might shed any light on what happened to Torild?’

‘No, I… I must admit, I got a bit of a shock when I saw it in the papers, but… And if it’s really true that she’d got involved in – Satanism… she’d moved a long way from the Guides in the space of just one year, I must say.’

‘If I told you she was taking drugs – and was also maybe involved in prostitution… would that surprise you?’

Her features alternated from shock to disbelief and – something else I couldn’t quite pin down. When she eventually replied her voice was shaking slightly: ‘Yes, that really would have shocked me, Veum.’

‘They never gave any hint of that while you -’

‘They were children, Veum!’ she cut in. ‘Children.’ She turned to face her computer screen as though it might offer a more complete answer to what I’d asked her than she herself could provide.

But she remained silent. She did not share the answers with me, if any there were.

Without troubling her with further questions, I nodded goodbye and left her, as silently as the passage of time, as silent and unremarkable as the sometimes sudden transition between childhood and adulthood in a young life: long before expected and completely unbidden.