The Writing on the Wall

Forty

I CALLED VIDAR WAAGENES from Sola Airport in Stavanger. He was in a meeting, but his secretary had a message for me: Thursday, twelve o’clock at police headquarters.

While waiting for the first evening plane, I ate a lukewarm stew in the cafeteria, drank a cup of coffee and leafed through a crumpled copy of one of the morning papers, where yesterday’s news was equally lukewarm.

The day’s events had blotted out all thought of what date it was. But now, as I was about to head off homewards, it came back to me like a boomerang, so forcefully that even in the departure hall I started to look round for people I knew. But I saw no one.

The plane to Bergen was full. In the seat beside me sat a man in his thirties with rimless reading glasses and a briefcase. He looked as though he was planning to go through the whole year’s accounts in the bare half hour we were in the air and didn’t glance in my direction so much as once.

Nobody else set any alarm bells ringing either, and the only turbulence we experienced before Bergen’s Flesland Airport was the strong gust of wind on the port side just before we landed.

I was about halfway down the queue to leave the plane. Descending the stairs to the arrivals hall, I scoured the whole area while I still had a bird’s eye view of it. There was nobody to meet me, and nobody I thought I recognised either.

As I had nothing but hand luggage, I made quickly for the exit. And I was not the only one. Most of us were carrying little more than a briefcase.

Outside it was dark, with a biting wind, a good bit colder than in Stavanger. Quite a few people besides me had left their cars in the long-stay car park. In a way, it was reassuring to have company. But on the other hand… who were they all?

I found the car and gave it a quick once-over to check the locks and the windows. Then I opened the driver’s side door, took out the ice-scraper, scraped a thin layer of ice from the windscreen and got in, put the key in the ignition key and turned it.

The Corolla started like clockwork, just as it had done all the years I’d owned it.

I looked both ways before moving gently off.

Going down the airport road I kept a constant lookout behind. If there were any motorbikes on the road that evening, they were certainly nowhere near here, and if he’d transferred to a car, I had no idea which one it was.

The radio wasn’t properly tuned in, and I hit the search button. A local radio station issued a warning about icy roads in Bergen and the surrounding area and urged people to drive with caution and adapt their speed to the conditions. I did so immediately, to the great annoyance of the drivers behind. But then it was unlikely that any of them had received their own death notice in the post either.

Rather than opting for the motorway, I took the Nesttun exit and drove into town along Fanaveien. Between Nesttun and Paradis, I was stuck right behind a large, dark-blue van. Along the paths around Tveitevannet Lake people were already taking their evening constitutional, and I turned off up Hagerupsvei towards Landås.

It was a quarter to eight when I turned down Fløenbakken. I counted the traffic humps going downhill, looking both ways all the while. In the car park in front of Karin’s block there was just room for one more car, but it was a tight squeeze.

I had no idea where the juggernaut came from. I was just in the process of wriggling out of the car when it lumbered over the nearest traffic hump with a roar of its engine loud enough to put the wind up a bull elk. It swerved violently to the left before the brakes were slammed on with a screech that reverberated right through my bones. I glanced up at the driver’s seat. High up there behind the wheel, like a raised up deus ex machina, I glimpsed a shiny black motorbike helmet.

I closed the door in a desperate attempt to get out round the car. When he hit his target, my hand was still on the door handle.

There was a deafening bang, and a sort of shudder ran through me. As the car was catapulted forwards through the fence and up into the air, I still couldn’t grasp exactly what had happened. The car door was snatched away while my fingers were still clutching the handle, and I sailed in a large arc towards the prickly Berberis bushes that encircled the whole parking area. Instinctively, I tried to shield myself with the door, as though crash-landing a flying carpet. Bits of car rained down all around me.