The Writing on the Wall

Thirty

I PARKED DIRECTLY OUTSIDE Nattland School. There were still ten minutes to go before the bell went for the end of the last lesson.

Yes, it had been something to do with a girl. But not the way Dankert Muus had always liked to think.

During the years I worked in Child Welfare there’d been two cases I’d been particularly taken up with. One of them was Siren, Karin Bjørge’s sister. The other was Eva-Beate.

Siren had not worried me all that much. She came from a family who took an interest in her and had a sister who sacrificed some of the best years of her youth to look after her. That everything eventually turned out as it did could not be laid at the door of the family or her sister.

But Eva-Beate had been a different matter. She was from a children’s home. Her mother, who was a drug addict, committed suicide when her daughter was no more than three years old, and I never really figured out whether she remembered anything at all about that first chaotic period in her life. Her father belonged to the army of the unknown. He was not even a name in the population register. The attempts made to place her in foster homes failed. She ran away every time. The only place she felt at all at home was in the children’s home. Everything was fine while the old housemother was still there. But when she retired new people took over. They tried their best to give Eva-Beate opportunities she hadn’t had before, tried to nudge her into school and vocational courses. But by then running away had almost become a way of life for her. She was one of those desperate kids whom nothing could hold, who shied away from the light as often as she could and sought the darkness wherever it was to be found.

To begin with, she was one of those ghostly faces that always turned up when we would check out a building due for demolition as we tried to track down other kids, the ones who were hauled in time after time when the police made a drugs raid. Then I suddenly started to get through to her, as if I reminded her of somebody or other. I invited her home to dinner. Together with a colleague, I went hiking with her in the mountains. Slowly but surely I drew her away from the drugs world and found out who her pimp was. But she didn’t want us to shop him. She couldn’t even entertain the thought of having to give evidence against him. He does you with his knife, she said. One of the girls who grassed him up was slashed to bits, here… and here… and here! She pointed first to one cheek, then the other, then to her breasts.

Then eventually I paid him a visit in person, at his usual table at the back of The Owl one day in October 1973. He asked me to come outside with him, and we walked up Olav Kyrres Street towards Nygårdshøyden. We went into the inner courtyard in front of the old mansion where the Conservatoire used to be, and suddenly he pulled his knife on me. But I was ready for him and kicked him in the thigh, twisted his arm right round his back so he had to let go of the knife. As I kicked the knife away, I gave him one of my lectures. – I can either break your arm, Knife, or I won’t. But I know all there is to know about you, and if you don’t bloody steer clear of Eva-Beate, I’ll tell the police all I know, with a copy to the Devil himself. He gasped: Why the hell don’t you do it, then? I twisted his arm a bit further without answering. – Get the fuck off me, he groaned. I’ll steer clear of the little slag!

I released my grip on him, and he fell over. I bent down and picked up his knife and put it in my pocket. Eyes flashing like a cornered rat, he said: I’d lock my bloody door at night, if I were you, Veum! I’ll come for you one of these days, and I don’t give a flying fuck if the whole Child Welfare Department’s standing guard over you and holding your hand! – Be my guest, I said, young and cocky as I was in those days.

Meanwhile, things went better than anyone could have expected with Eva-Beate. She really got back into attending school, found a foster family where she felt accepted at last, fell in love and suffered all the usual heartaches: just as life should be for a fifteen-year-old, even if she still had too many memories to have the courage to be fully at ease with her friends. I followed all these developments with great satisfaction, like a proud uncle on the fringes of her life, and several times when I was dealing with cases which seemed at least as hopeless as hers once had, I used her as an example of the fact that there were success stories.

Then all of a sudden, during the weekend of the national Mayday holiday in 1975, she disappeared. Her foster family were beside themselves with worry. I dropped everything I was doing, put on an oxygen mask and plunged deep down into the subterranean world she had frequented before. One day I passed The Knife in the street. He gave me two fingers with an unconcealed look of triumph in his eyes, but when I tried to grab him, he gave me the slip.

A week after she’d gone missing, we heard the first rumours that she was back on the leash again and was on the game. A fortnight after she’d run away from the foster home, she was found.

The trail led to a cheap hotel in the centre of town. Without realising it, I walked past one of the drug police’s cameras, went up the stairs to the second floor and barged right into the room they were in without even knocking.

Eva-Beate lay on her back in bed, thighs splayed, and her sex gaping like a bloodhound’s muzzle. Her vacant look showed she was completely out of her head, and there wasn’t much life in The Knife either as he lay there on his belly, wearing no more than a pair of tiny briefs and with one of his arms draped across her small breasts like a flabby, bloated maggot.

When I walked in he turned round with a sleepy expression on his face. As he swung his legs down onto the floor and reached for the knife that lay on the bedside table, Eva-Beate sat up confused in bed and reached out for him as though she was having a nightmare and wasn’t sure whether she was asleep or awake yet.

First I kneed him in the face then broke his arm this time. I dragged him out of the bed and onto the floor and kicked him over and over again until I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and the two officers from the drugs section came storming in and had to get me in a half-nelson to calm me down. The Knife lay apparently lifeless on the floor in front of me, while Eva-Beate had sunk back into the same position as when I had come in, her sex like a trussed chicken between her legs.

Then we had to start again, right from the bottom. But this time with other people to help her. I never did actually get the boot from the Child Welfare Department. Yet some highly placed individuals suggested I should take some leave for as long as I liked, and I took the hint and never went back

That same autumn I opened my office on Strandkaien. Eva-Beate was not faring so well. She died of an overdose in Møhlenpris a few years later, never having really shaken the habit.

And here I sat again, almost two decades later, waiting for another girl whose circumstances were not quite so dramatic. But I was afraid that Åsa too was teetering on the edge.

The school bell rang, and it was not many seconds before the pupils began to pour out of the low building. I went to stand beside my car so she would see me.

She came out in a little group, yet there was something lonely and dejected about her. When she caught sight of me it was almost as though she was relieved to have an excuse for parting company with them. Nor did any of them show any visible reaction when she said she was off.

‘Hello, Åsa,’ I said.

She frowned. ‘Was it Dad who sent you?’

‘No. Should he have?’

‘He’s fetched me from school every day since – Torild went missing.’ She looked at the clock. ‘Suppose he must have been held up a bit then.’

‘I just wanted to ask you a question. Shall we sit in the car?’

She glanced up Merkurveien. ‘We can just stand here if you like.’

‘Last time we spoke…’

‘Yes?’

‘You weren’t entirely honest, were you?’

‘Yes, I was!’

‘A lot’s happened since then, Åsa. You mustn’t keep anything back now.’

‘Like what, for example?’

I nodded at her new brown leather jacket. ‘Your Dad knew you couldn’t afford to buy a jacket like the one you two took back. And in the shop, it turned out the jacket wasn’t stolen. I’m not surprised he comes to fetch you.’

She looked away.

‘Where did you get the money from, Åsa?’

She didn’t reply.

I moved a step closer. ‘Do you realise what you’re doing with yourself, Åsa? With your own youth?’

She turned to face me again, an insolent look on her face. ‘It’s guys like you who want a piece of it!’

‘Guys like…’

‘Yes, don’t think I haven’t seen the way you look at me!’

‘I was looking at your jacket, Åsa!’

‘Oh yeah, it’s the blinking jacket you were interested in, is it?’

‘You’d do better to listen to what I’m saying to you, Åsa! You and Torild were with Helge Hagavik at Jimmy’s the Thursday she – didn’t come home, right?’

‘And what if we were? I told you, I went home earlier!’

‘So it was Helge Hagavik, then?’

‘Yes, I…’ Almost immediately her face closed up again. ‘Oh shit!’ she said almost inaudibly.

Higher up Merkurveien the whine of a car engine driven at speed could be heard; it was somebody in too much of a hurry for all the sharp bends. Then it came into view. The white Mercedes swept down towards the school and came to a halt just behind my little Toyota. Trond Furebø pulled on the handbrake, opened the door and was standing beside us all in one movement.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Veum?’ Without waiting for a reply, he turned to Åsa. ‘I was held up five minutes. I’m sorry. I broke our agreement.’

She gave him a look so much as to say this was one thing parents were experts at: breaking agreements.

He turned back to me. ‘I asked you a question!’

‘You didn’t give me a chance to answer.’

‘He was making advances to me, Dad,’ said Åsa pertly.

I stared at her.

‘Advances?! You mean -’

Just long enough for him to land the first impulsive punch – bang – on my chin.

I fell backwards, saw stars, and as I tried to focus, momentarily saw both of them double.

I nevertheless managed to parry the next blow, well enough to adopt a defensive position, and he was no trained fighter. His temper made his voice rise several octaves. ‘Goddamn it, Veum, we parents do all we can to protect our children, leave work early, just to get up here to fetch her every day, with all the impact that has on those crucial early evening hours at work, then you come and -’

‘Surely you don’t believe her, Furebø? Think I’m an idiot or something? I haven’t made any bloody advances to her at all! I asked her a couple of questions, and if you don’t believe me, then we can all three of us go down to the police station and repeat them there!’

He was calming down now. He kept glancing at his daughter. ‘Åsa?’

She looked at him defiantly.

‘I asked whether it wasn’t true that she and Helge Hagavik were among the last people to set eyes on Torild before she disappeared. She confirmed it. Helge Hagavik’s been taken into custody as a so-called “witness” in the case. He for one knows a lot more than he’s prepared to say. Which makes me suspect that Åsa knows more too…’

He had lowered his fists now. His arms hung straight down at his sides as though they didn’t belong to him at all. ‘Åsa…’

‘I’ve said all there is to say. Me and Torild were at Jimmy’s, and we sat there talking to this guy, I don’t know who he was or what he was called, and then Torild got… then there came… But I went home.’

‘Then Torild got what?’ I asked.

‘A telephone call!’

‘From who?’

‘How should I know? She had to go, she said, to He – to that guy and then – we left.’

As calmly as I could, I said: ‘The hardest thing about lying, Åsa, is that it’s so impossible to remember what you have said and what you haven’t. You’re starting to get your wires crossed.’

‘Like hell I am! I’m telling you exactly what happened! Torild left, and I left to catch the bus home. Just ask Mum what time I got back!’

‘That’s right, Veum,’ Trond Furebø said quietly. ‘My wife confirms that she came home surprisingly early that evening.’

‘But it still doesn’t explain… I mean, I think you know perfectly well where Torild was going that evening!’

‘No, I don’t know! I don’t!’ She turned to her father. ‘Can we go home now?’

‘Yes, we…’ Trond Furebø pulled himself together. ‘Strictly speaking, this is nothing to do with you either, Veum. Get into the car, Åsa. We’re going.’

I gave a heavy sigh.

If she was telling the truth, there were only two people who could confirm it. One of them was dead. The other was Helge Hagavik, and he was in custody.