The Writing on the Wall

Five

SIDSEL SKAGESTØL opened the door quickly as though thinking it was Torild who had rung the bell.

When she saw who it was, she stepped aside. ‘Come in.’ She looked at me questioningly. ‘You haven’t…?’

‘No, alas. Still nothing concrete. I -’

‘Oh my God, I’m so scared, Veum! Where can she be?’

‘That’s what we must try and find out.’

‘Yes… Of course. Forgive me.’

‘I understand you completely. Don’t get me wrong.’

She was wearing jeans and a white blouse, only the collar and cuffs visible under the ribbed blue woollen sweater. Her hair was light and fluffy as though she’d just washed and blow-dried it, and she moved across the floor with a sort of girlish elegance, a mixture of shyness and sensuality.

She pointed to a coat rack. ‘You can hang your coat up there.’

I did as she said, followed her through the L- shaped hall, past the door into the kitchen, which looked out onto the back of the house, and came into a large, open-plan living room as luxuriously furnished as a showroom in a furniture store. A plum-coloured leather suite occupied the space in front of the picture windows facing south and east, while a dining table and chairs in dark-brown oak was the focal point at the other end of the room, just in front of the door to the kitchen. In the centre of the room there was also an L- shaped sofa and three chairs, all in dark-green material, set around a low black coffee table. The fact that the room didn’t seem too full gives some indication of its size, and there was still plenty of floor space for the children to play. Just now the place was as spick-and-span as an operating theatre.

Cheerful morning sounds poured forth from a radio in the centre of a large dark wall unit. She had set the coffee table for two. ‘I’ve made a couple of sandwiches, and the kettle is on. I’m just going to make the coffee, so… if you’d like some?’

‘Yes please.’

‘There are – some papers…’ She pointed to the two Bergen newspapers that lay folded up beside the white coffee service as though she was my secretary and had prepared lunch for the boss.

I leafed through one of the papers, while she was in the kitchen making the coffee. There had been a drugs raid in Møhlenpris, and two fifteen-year-olds had robbed a post office in Åsane at three-thirty the previous day. The raid had resulted in ten people being charged with possession of various amounts of drugs, mainly hash and tablets. The two fifteen-year-olds had been arrested an hour and a half later, having spent only eighty kroner on hamburgers and Cokes at a roadside café. Two new cases of AIDS had been registered in Bergen over the previous year, both in drug circles, and the health authorities stressed that heterosexuals had no cause to feel safer than homosexuals on that score.

So the cartoons were a lot more fun.

Sidsel Skagestøl came back in carrying a white coffee pot in one hand and a small dish with open sandwiches in the other. She put the dish down and poured out coffee for us both after I’d declined the offer of brandy in mine.

For a moment we sat in silence. Then she nodded in the direction of the dish. ‘Help yourself.’

‘Thanks.’ I took one with a brown goat’s cheese and beetroot topping. ‘You haven’t heard anything from her, I take it?’

‘No, I haven’t… And you? Have you – managed to have a word with anyone?’

I nodded. ‘Åsa and her parents and Helene Sandal.’

‘And… has anyone said anything?’

‘So far I’ve more questions than answers.’

‘Such as…’

‘That list we talked about last time, of her friends. Have you made one?’

She looked past me, towards one of the shelves in the wall unit, where there was a collection of family photos. ‘No, I… When I started going through the list of her class, it dawned on me that – I didn’t know. If it had been a few years ago, at primary school, I could have given you five or six names straight away. When she was in the Guides. And a few more besides. But now… It suddenly occurred to me how little I knew her, in that way. I mean – who she spent her time with. Actually, I don’t know of anyone apart from Åsa.’

‘What about a girl called Astrid Nikolaisen?’ I asked, taking a bite of the open sandwich.

‘… Astrid Nikolaisen… Er… For me she’s nothing but a name. She’s never been here. I know she’s one of Torild’s friends from her class, I mean, since she started in Class 7 when she was twelve, but… I don’t think there’s any more I can tell you.’

I swallowed my food. ‘Do you have her address, by any chance?’

She glanced at the wall unit. ‘Yes, I think it’s in the class list… But why…?’

‘Listen, Sidsel… Is it all right if I call you by your first name?’

She nodded.

‘Helene Sandal suggested that Torild may sometimes have looked as if she was on drugs…’

She reached out for her coffee cup then changed her mind. ‘Oh, that… It was never… We never got to the bottom of that.’

‘But she called the two of you in to a meeting.’

‘Yes. But only I went.’

‘Your husband…’

She pursed her lips slightly. ‘Holger was busy. It was in the evening anyway, and he was usually working late.’

‘But it didn’t lead to anything?’

‘No.’

‘Did you speak to Torild about it afterwards?’

‘Of course! But she consistently denied it. She said it was just something Miss Sandal had dreamed up because she didn’t like her. Or because she wasn’t satisfied with her schoolwork. I couldn’t…’ She looked at me with her large blue eyes. ‘I couldn’t force an answer out of her, could I?’

‘Did she call you again later?’

‘Yes, she did, and we got the same lecture as before, with the same results.’

‘Didn’t all this make you suspicious?’

‘Suspicious? I was anxious, obviously! After all, you had… You obviously know what it’s like yourself. Waiting up at night wondering whether she’ll come home or not, where she is, who she’s with. Thinking the worst, as we always do in such circumstances… I can’t count the times I’ve seen her in my mind’s eye, bleeding, beaten up, victim of a rape or a car crash.’

‘And when she does finally get back, you’re so pleased nothing’s happened that you forgive her for being late, that she smells of beer and cigarettes, and that you’ve no idea where she’s been. Because when you ask, she just replies… “Here and there’.”

‘Different places, you mean?’

‘Yes. A party. Disco. Hamburger joint.’

‘No pattern?’

‘No. And you think of her when she was little, how happy you were when she was born – she was the first, after all! – the clothes you got for her, the first shoes, the gold lacquer ones over there on the shelf…’

I glanced over at them. They were no larger than a doll’s.

‘All these photos – I must have at least twenty albums altogether, Veum! The first day at nursery school, then at primary school, always happy and smiling, but then… Her confirmation last year, when she insisted on a civil ceremony, and Holger was so cross he hardly spoke to her for six months. You can almost see it in the picture we took. The flash of defiance in her face. Triumphant defiance.’

She stood up, walked over to the bookshelves, picked up the photograph and stood there for a moment looking at it, before she brought it over to me. As I examined it, she fetched two more and sat down beside me.

‘Look at this’, she said, holding one of them up. It showed a girl three or four years old, with blonde, slightly curly hair and a little summer dress with flowers on it, taken on a bench in a park somewhere with her small legs sticking straight out in the air and such a happy smile that you could almost hear her gurgling with laughter. ‘That’s how she was then. And here…’

In the next picture she was older, about ten or eleven, wearing a Guides uniform, looking slightly more self-conscious perhaps, her hair a touch darker, but with just as big a smile.

‘But then…’ She pointed at the photograph I had in my hands. It showed a serious-looking young woman, with short scruffy hair, with no hint of a smile around her sullen lips and a darkness in her eyes that had not been present in the other photographs.

The three stages of childhood, like in a painting by Edvard Munch. And in the last one, she was already almost an adult.

I helped myself to another sandwich. ‘I think I asked you this yesterday, but… She hasn’t had any boyfriends yet, has she?’

She blushed slightly as though the word awakened unpleasant memories. ‘She’s never had… I don’t know, do they still call it a steady date?’

‘Goodness knows. But at least you and I speak the same language.’

‘I suppose she must have had her crushes like everyone else – but she’s never mentioned them here at home.’

‘Didn’t she confide in her mother?’

A hint of coldness flashed in her eyes. ‘No, fancy that – she didn’t.’

‘So we can’t come up with any names, can we?’

She shook her head.

‘Did I understand correctly, on my visit to Åsa’s house, that they’d been in the Guides together?’

‘Yes they were, right from Brownies up to Class 7 or 8. Then they both suddenly packed it in.’

‘Any idea why?’

‘No. They just said they were fed up of it. That they’d grown out of it.’

‘Maybe I could talk to one of the Guides leaders from that time?’

‘I can’t imagine it has anything to do with – with all that!’

‘No… probably not. But is there a name you could give me?’

‘Of one of the Guide leaders? Er… The one we had most to do with in the last years was called… what was it now? Yes, I’ve got it! Sigrun Søvik.’

I noted down the name. ‘And Astrid Nikolaisen’s address – do you have that?’

She nodded, stood up, went across to the wall unit again and pulled out a drawer. She leafed through a pile of papers before taking out a photocopy and bringing it over to me. ‘This should be this year’s.’

I looked at the class list, running my eyes quickly down the names until I got to Astrid Nikolaisen. I glanced up. ‘I couldn’t keep it for a bit, could I? In case any other names turn up?’

‘Do you expect them to?’ she asked anxiously, as if she’d suddenly started to wonder whether I was keeping anything back from her.

‘It’s just so I don’t have to bother you each time I -’

‘You’re not bothering me! I’m paying for it, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, if it comes to that… But…’ I held the list up, repeating the question with my eyes.

‘Of course you can keep it! – I’ve got last year’s anyway. There aren’t many changes.’

I drained my cup of coffee. ‘Anything else I should know?’

She shot a glance at me. ‘Like what, for example?’

‘Oh, I… How long have you and your husband been separated?’

‘Since August. It was during the summer holidays that things finally fell apart.’

‘Classic.’

‘Not how you think. We made the mistake of never going on holiday together. There was a lot of trouble down at the paper, as you’ll no doubt remember, blank pages and things, so he couldn’t go anywhere before school started again. And by that time we were already… Then eventually he took a week in London, or wherever it was, on his own, and when he got back home…’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Things like this don’t happen overnight anyway. They build up like a thunderstorm.’

‘And Torild was out at sea, in an open boat?’

She looked at me perplexed. ‘What?’

‘What I mean is… how did she take it? Did she react in any particular way?’

She gazed wistfully ahead. ‘No, I… Well, as I said yesterday, I suppose she did become a bit more distant. It was as though she’d opted out from what was left of family life. She went out more in the evenings, never brought anyone home and… would come home late herself.’

‘The other children… did they react in the same way?’

‘No, that was it.’ She shifted her gaze to the window and looked out.

When she looked at me again, you could see the fear in her eyes. She held her clenched fist against her breast. ‘Of course, you do ask yourself, when things like this happen: is it my, or our, fault? Where did we go wrong? But the others have had just the same upbringing! Stian, well he’s only ten, so I mean… He’s completely dependent on his mummy and daddy. As for Vibeke, she’s managing fine – she’s registered the situation and is doing just as well at school as ever. So what can the reason be?’

I threw up my hands. ‘Genes. Environment, and here I’m not necessarily thinking of the home environment. People who became her friends. The teachers. There’s an incredible number of possible influences. So the guilt can very seldom be laid at any one door. There are always several different factors at work.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose there are.’

‘And what about your husband, have you spoken to him today?’

‘Yes, I speak to him every day now about all this.’

‘Have you told him about me?’

‘No, yes… He’s started to say that we… That the police should be involved.’

‘I can quite understand that.’

‘But you said yourself -’

‘Let me put it like this. The police have something I don’t have – a whole apparatus. In other words, they can put out a general call over their entire network, to the other Scandinavian countries as well, with a cover I could never even begin to approach. On the other hand… Before it’s been established that something serious has happened, the police will seldom have time to conduct the sort of detailed investigation I’m engaged in now.’

‘So…’

‘I would absolutely advise you to get the police to investigate her disappearance but let me carry on with what I’m already doing. That is, unless you two want to save yourselves the expense.’

‘The money’s no problem,’ she said quickly. ‘What’s important is to find her and that… she’s all right.’

‘I ought to speak to your husband himself at some point.’

‘If he has time,’ she said somewhat tartly. ‘Anyway, I think I can almost guarantee you’re wasting your time. There’s nothing he can tell you about Torild that I can’t tell you.’

‘Isn’t there? But there could be something you’ve – overlooked – that he might think of…’

‘Hm,’ she said in a tone that indicated she didn’t have much faith in that.

I stood up with a final look at The Three Stages of Torild still on the table in front of us. ‘Well… in that case, I’d better…’

How mysterious people were. Could we ever get to know another person – properly? Or would they always keep something or other hidden from us, something we ourselves had perhaps known once but had gradually forgotten over the years?

She came with me to the door. ‘You’ll ring as soon as you – have any news, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

Down at the lights that control the traffic in the narrowest part of Sædalsveien, I waited at red. It struck me that certain situations in life are just like this too. You sit waiting at red, and when the light eventually changes to green, an articulated truck squeezing through on amber slams straight into you without giving you the faintest chance of avoiding it.

When the light changed to green it was with the greatest caution that I drove around the first blind bend.