The Beloved Son
As she stood there with her hand resting on the door handle, Trude Hansen no longer remembered where she was going. She swayed and realized she had already got hold of enough to see her through until tomorrow. The relief was so great that her knees gave way, and she had to lean on the wall when she let go of the door handle.
It still smelled vile in here.
She must do something about it.
Soon, she thought, staggering into the small room. In the alcove a sleeping bag lay on top of an unmade bed. At the bottom of the sleeping bag lay a red toilet bag with a picture of Hello Kitty on it. Someone had given the cat fangs and a patch over one eye. With hands that somehow didn’t want to obey her she eventually managed to pull out the bag and unzip it.
Everything was there.
Untouched. Three fixes.
Just like countless times before, she was intending to take the whole lot at once. Routinely, dully, she considered the chances that it would all be over if she took an overdose on purpose. She always started thinking along these lines on those rare occasions when she had enough heroin even to contemplate suicide, and it was equally inevitable that she would always reject the idea. She probably wouldn’t die. And when she came round, she would have nothing left.
The thought of running out of drugs was worse than the thought of going on living.
She took the toilet bag and staggered the few steps over to a green sofa against the other wall. It was covered with empty beer bottles from yesterday. Someone had dropped a cigarette on one of the cushions during the night, and she stood for a while looking at the big brown circle with a black hole in the middle.
Above the sofa hung a confirmation photo of Runar.
She grabbed it and threw it among the beer bottles.
Runar stared at her from the large picture in its gold frame. His hair was cut in a mullet, and he’d had a perm. His suit was powder blue. The narrow tie was pink. He had looked so smart, she remembered. He was her big brother, and the most stylish person in the entire church that day. Later, when the ceremony was finally over and her mother really wanted to get away before any of the other parents started asking about the party, he had picked up his sister and carried her in one arm all the way to the bus stop. Even though she was nine years old and much too fat.
They had eaten chicken wings.
Mum, Runar and Trude.
Runar hadn’t received a single present, because all the money had gone on his new suit, his hairstyle and the photographer. But they had eaten chicken wings and chips and Runar had been allowed a beer to go with it. He had smiled. She had laughed. Mum had smelled clean and wonderful.
Slowly she took out the spoon and the Bunsen burner Runar had given her. Soon she would feel better. Very soon. If only her hands would obey her a little better.
Her dull brain tried to work out how long it was since Runar died. Nineteen plus nineteen? No. Wrong. From the nineteenth to the nineteenth was thirty-one days. Or thirty. She couldn’t remember how many days there were in November. Nor how many days had passed since then. She couldn’t even remember what day it was today.
The only thing she knew for sure was that Runar died on 19 November.
She had been at home. He was supposed to come. Runar had promised to come. He was just going to get some money. Score some heroin. Get everything she needed. Runar was going to help his little sister, just like he always did.
He was late. He was so fucking late. Then the cops came.
They came here. Rang the bell, at some ridiculous hour of the morning. When she opened the door they told her Runar had been robbed in Sofienberg Park that night. He had severe head injuries when he was found, and was probably already dead. Someone had called an ambulance, and he was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital.
The policewoman was serious, and might possibly have tried to console her.
She didn’t remember anything apart from a piece of paper in her hand. The address and phone number of a funeral director. Five days later she had woken up so late in the day she realized she wasn’t going to make it to the funeral.
Since then the cops had done fuck all.
Nobody had been caught.
She hadn’t heard anything.
As the syringe emptied into a vein at the back of her knee, the blissful warmth spread so quickly that she gasped out loud. Slowly she sank back on the green sofa. She wrapped her stick-thin arms around the photo of Runar. Her last conscious thought before everything became warm clouds of nothingness was that her big brother had given her the last three chicken wings on the day he was confirmed and Mum gave him a beer for the first time.
The cops didn’t care about people like Runar.
People like her and Runar.
*
‘Do you care about this at all?’
For the first time in more than three quarters of an hour, Synnøve Hessel was on the point of losing control. She leaned towards the police officer, both hands gripping the edge of the table as if she were afraid she might hit him otherwise.
‘Of course,’ he said without looking at her. ‘But as I’m sure you understand, we have to ask questions. If you had any idea how many people just leave their normal everyday lives without—’
‘Marianne hasn’t left! When will you understand that she had absolutely no reason to leave?’
The police officer sighed. He leafed through the papers in front of him, then glanced at his watch. The small interview room was becoming unbearably warm. An air-conditioning unit hummed in the ceiling, but there must be something wrong with the thermostat. Synnøve Hessel took off her knitted sweater and flapped her shirt in an attempt to cool down. A damp oval stain was visible between her breasts, and she could feel the sweat trickling down from under her arms. She decided to ignore it. The police officer smelled worse than she did.
At Gardermoen police station they had at least been friendly. Almost kind, in spite of the fact that all they could do was direct her to a normal police station. They had sympathized, of course, and made her a cup of coffee. An older uniformed female officer had tried to console her with the one thing everyone else seemed to know: people go missing all the time. But, sooner or later, they turn up again.
Later was too late for Synnøve Hessel.
The journey home to Sandefjord that same night had been an ordeal.
‘Let’s sum up what we have,’ suggested the police officer, finishing off a bottle of cola.
Synnøve Hessel didn’t reply. They had already summed things up twice, and it hadn’t brought the man any closer to a realistic understanding of the situation.
‘After all, you are …’
He adjusted his glasses and read:
‘… a documentary film-maker.’
‘Producer,’ she corrected him.
‘Exactly. So you know better than most people what reality looks like.’
‘We were supposed to be summing things up.’
‘Yes. So. Marianne Kleive was supposed to be going to Wollogo … Wollongo—’
‘Wollongong. A town not far from Sydney. She was going to visit a relative. Celebrate Christmas there.’
‘Hell of a short stay for such a long journey.’
‘What?’
‘I just mean,’ the man said deliberately, ‘that if I was going all the way to Australia, I’d stay longer than barely a week.’
‘I don’t really see what that’s got to do with anything.’
‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that. Anyway, she left Sandefjord on Saturday 19 December on the train that leaves at—’
‘Mm. And she was going to meet a friend in Oslo …’
‘Which she did. I checked.’
‘Then she spent the night in a hotel before catching the flight to Copenhagen at nine thirty.’
‘And she never arrived there.’
‘She didn’t arrive in Copenhagen?’
‘She didn’t arrive at Gardermoen. At least, it’s possible that she did arrive there, of course, but she wasn’t on the flight to Copenhagen. Which naturally means that she didn’t fly on to Tokyo or Sydney either.’
The police officer didn’t pick up on her sarcasm. He scratched his crotch without embarrassment. Picked up the cola bottle and put it down when he realized it was empty.
‘Why didn’t you find out about this until last night? Hasn’t she got a mobile, this … your girlfriend?’
‘She is not my girlfriend. She is the person I love. The fact is that she’s my wife. My spouse, if you like.’
The man’s sour expression showed very clearly that he didn’t like it at all.
‘And as I have already explained several times,’ said Synnøve, leaning towards him with her mobile in her hand, ‘I received three messages over the course of the week. Everything indicated that Marianne was actually in Australia.’
‘But you haven’t spoken to one another?’
‘No. As I said, I tried to ring a couple of times late on Sunday, but I couldn’t get through. Last night I tried at least ten times. It goes straight to voicemail, so I assume the battery is dead.’
‘Could I have a look at the messages?’
Synnøve brought them up and passed him the phone.
‘Everything OK. Excitting country. Marianne.’
The man couldn’t even read fluently, but made a big thing of the fact that ‘exciting’ was spelt incorrectly.
‘Not particularly …’ he went on, trying to find the right word before he read the next message. ‘Not particularly romantic. Having a good time. Marianne.’
He looked at her over the top of his glasses. The chewing tobacco had formed black crusts at the corners of his mouth, and he constantly sprayed tiny grains into the air.
‘Are you two usually so … concise?’
For the first time, Synnøve was lost for words. She didn’t know what to say. She knew the question was justified, because it was precisely the unusual brevity, the impersonality in the messages that had made her uneasy. She hadn’t given much thought to the first one, which had arrived on the Monday. Marianne might have been in a hurry. Perhaps her great aunt was very demanding. As far as she knew, there could be thousands of reasons why a message didn’t arrive or was very brief. On Christmas Eve the message she received said only Merry Christmas, which hurt Synnøve deeply. The last message, saying that Marianne was having a good time, neither more nor less, had kept her awake for two nights.
‘No,’ she said, when the pause began to get embarrassing. ‘That’s why I don’t think she wrote them. She would never have misspelt “exciting”.’
The police officer’s eyes widened so dramatically that he looked like a clown at some ghastly children’s party. Tufts of hair stuck out behind his ears, his mouth was red and moist and his nose resembled an almost round potato.
‘So now we have a theeeeeory,’ he said, stretching the e for as long as he could. ‘Someone has stolen Marianne’s mobile and sent the messages in her place!’
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ she protested, although that was exactly what she was saying. ‘Don’t you understand that … that if Marianne has been the victim of a crime and someone …’
Crime.
‘… and someone wanted to make it more difficult to discover—’
‘Discover?’
‘Yes. That she’d disappeared, I mean. Or that she’s …’
For the second time in twenty-four hours she was close to bursting into tears with someone else looking on.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Kvam! They’re looking for you on the desk.’
A uniformed man smiled and came into the room. He placed a hand on his somewhat smelly colleague’s shoulder and waved towards the door.
‘I’m in the middle of—’
‘I can take over.’
Detective Inspector Kvam got to his feet with a sour expression. He started gathering up the papers in front of him.
‘You can leave all that. I’ll finish off here. A missing person, isn’t it?’
Kvam shrugged his shoulders, gave a farewell nod and headed for the door. It slammed shut behind him.
‘Synnøve Hessel,’ said the new officer. ‘It’s been a while.’
She half stood up and took the outstretched hand.
‘Kjetil? Kjetil … Berggren?’
‘The one and only! I saw you in here and I was a bit …’
He held out his hand and wiggled it back and forth.
‘… concerned when I saw that Ola Kvam was dealing with the report. He isn’t … he’s actually retired, but over Christmas we bring in a few people to cover … Anyway. You know. We all have our own way of doing things. I came as soon as I’d finished what I had to do.’
Kjetil Berggren had been a year below her in school. She wouldn’t really have remembered him at all if he hadn’t been the school athletics champion. He set a record for the 3,000 metres in Bugårds Park in the very first heat, and was a member of the national junior team before he gained a place at the Police Training Academy straight from high school.
He still looked as if he could run away from just about anybody.
‘I have actually followed your career!’ He grinned, putting his hands behind his neck and leaning back, tipping his chair. ‘Great programmes. Especially that one you did in—’
‘You have to help me, Kjetil!’
She thought his pupils grew smaller. Perhaps it was because the sun was suddenly in his eyes as he allowed the chair to drop back, and leaned towards her.
‘That’s why I’m here. We. The police. To protect and serve, as they say.’
He tried another smile, but she didn’t respond to that one either.
‘I’m absolutely, totally convinced that something terrible has happened to my partner.’
Kjetil Berggren slowly gathered up the papers in front of him and placed them in a folder, which he pushed to the left on the large desk between them.
‘You’d better tell me everything,’ he said. ‘From the beginning.’
*
He had understood his father in the beginning.
When the police rang the doorbell of the house in Os on Christmas Eve just as everyone was about to go to bed, Lukas Lysgaard’s first thought was for his father. His mother was dead, said the police officer, who seemed genuinely upset at having to deliver the tragic news. They had brought the priest – his mother’s closest colleague – from Fana, but the poor man was in such a state that he just sat in the car while the police took on the heavy burden of telling Lukas Lysgaard that his mother had been murdered three hours earlier.
Lukas had immediately thought about his father.
About his mother, too, of course. He loved his mother. A paralysing grief began to drain away his strength as soon as he grasped what they were telling him. But it was his father that worried him.
Erik Lysgaard was a mild man. Some people found him awkward, while others appreciated his gentle, reserved nature. He didn’t make much of an impact outside the family. Or inside it, come to that. He spoke little, but listened all the more. That was why Erik Lysgaard was a man who improved on closer acquaintance. He had his own friends, of course, some childhood friends and a couple of colleagues from the school where he had worked until his back became so twisted that he was granted early retirement on the grounds of ill health.
But above all he was his wife’s spouse.
He’s nothing alone, was the thought that struck Lukas when he was told that his mother was dead. My father is nothing without my mother.
And in the beginning he had understood him.
That night, that holy, terrible night that Lukas would never forget as long as he lived, the police had driven him to Nubbebakken. The older of the two officers had asked if they wanted company until daylight.
Neither Lukas nor his father wanted anyone there.
His father had shrivelled up into something that was hard to recognize. He was so thin and bent that he hardly even cast a shadow when he opened the door to his son, and without a word turned his back on him and went back into the living room.
The way he cried was terrifying. He cried for a long time, almost silently, then he would emit a low, long-drawn-out howl, without any tears, an animalistic pain that frightened Lukas. He felt more helpless than he had expected, particularly when his father refused all physical contact. Nor did he want to talk. As the day gradually came, a dark Christmas morning heavy with rain, Erik had finally agreed to try and get some sleep. Even then he refused to let his son help him, despite the fact that every single night for more than ten years Eva Karin had taken off her husband’s socks and helped him into bed, then rubbed his bad back with a home-made ointment sent by a faithful parishioner from their years in Stavanger.
But Lukas had understood him.
Now it was starting to get rather wearing.
It was five days since the murder, and nothing had changed. His father had literally eaten nothing during those five days. He was quite prepared to drink water – lots of water – and a couple of cups of coffee with sugar and milk in the afternoon. Lukas brought him to his own house in the hope that the grandchildren would at least arouse some spark of life in the old man, but Erik still refused to eat. The visit had been a complete disaster. The children were scared stiff at the sight of their grandfather crying in such a peculiar way, and the eldest, at eight years old, already had his hands full trying to deal with the knowledge that Grandma was never, ever coming back.
‘This won’t do, Dad.’
Lukas pulled a footstool over to his father’s armchair and sat down on it.
‘We need to think about the funeral. You have to eat. You’re a shadow of yourself, Dad, and we can’t go on like this.’
‘We can’t have the funeral until the police give their permission,’ said his father.
Even his voice was thinner.
‘No, but we need to do some planning.’
‘You can do that.’
‘That wouldn’t be right, Dad. We have to do it together.’
Silence.
The old grandfather clock had stopped. Erik Lysgaard had given up winding the heavy brass weights below the clock face each night before he went to bed. He no longer needed to hear the passing of time.
Dust motes drifted in the light from the window.
‘You have to eat, Dad.’
Erik raised his head, and for the first time since Eva Karin’s death he gently took his son’s hands between his own.
‘No. You have to eat. You have to go on living.’
‘Dad, you—’
‘You were our beloved son, Lukas. Never has a child been more welcome than you.’
Lukas swallowed and smiled.
‘That’s what all parents say. I say the same thing to my own children.’
‘But there’s so much you don’t know.’
Even though the noise of the city was out there, it seemed unable to penetrate the dead house on Nubbebakken. Lukas couldn’t even hear his own heart beating.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s so much that disappears with a person. Everything disappeared with Eva Karin. That’s the way it has to be.’
‘I have a right to know, Dad. If there’s something about Mum’s life, about both your lives, that—’
His father’s dry laugh frightened him. ‘All you need to know is that you were a much-loved child. You have always been the great love of your mother’s life, and mine.’
‘Have been?’
‘Your mother is dead,’ his father said harshly. ‘I’m unlikely to live much longer.’
Lukas quickly took his hands away and straightened his back.
‘Pull yourself together,’ he said. ‘It’s high time you pulled yourself together.’
He stood up and started pacing the floor.
‘This has to stop. Now. Right now! Do you hear me, Dad?’
His father barely reacted to this violent outburst. He simply sat there, as he had sat in the same chair with the same blank expression for five days, more or less.
‘I won’t put up with it!’ Lukas yelled. ‘Mum won’t put up with it!’
He grabbed a porcelain ornament from the little table next to the television. Two swans in a delicate heart: a wedding present from Eva Karin’s parents. It had survived eight house moves, and had been one of his mother’s most cherished possessions. Lukas seized the swans by the throat with both hands and smashed them against his thigh, causing himself considerable pain. The ornament shattered. The sharp surfaces cut into his palms. When he hurled the pieces on the floor, blood spattered the carpet.
‘You are not allowed to die! You are not allowed to fucking die!’
That was all it needed.
Lukas Lysgaard had never – not even during his rebellious youth – dared to swear in front of his parents. Now his father got to his feet more quickly than anyone would have thought possible. He reached his son in three strides. He raised his arm. His fist stopped no more than a centimetre from his son’s jaw. Then he stood there, frozen, as if in some absurd tableau, taller now and broader. It was from him that Lukas had inherited his broad shoulders, and it was as if they had suddenly fallen into place. His whole body grew bigger. Lukas held his breath, cowering from his father’s gaze, as if he were a child again. Obstinate and young and Daddy’s little boy.
‘Why did Mum go out?’ he whispered.
Erik let his hand drop.
‘That’s a matter between Eva Karin and me.’
‘I think I know.’
‘Look at me.’
Lukas was examining his own palms. There was a deep gash at the base of both thumbs. Blood was still dripping on to the carpet.
‘Look at me,’ Erik repeated.
When Lukas still couldn’t manage to look up, he felt his father’s hand on his unshaven cheek. Eventually he raised his head.
‘You know nothing,’ Erik said.
Yes I do, thought Lukas. Perhaps I’ve always known. For a long time, anyway.
‘You know absolutely nothing,’ Erik said again.
They were standing so close that their breath caressed each other’s faces in small puffs. And just as bad thoughts turn to solid secrets when they are never shared with anyone, so both of them were absolutely certain about something they thought the other didn’t know. They just stood there, each embarrassed in their own way, with nothing to say to one another.
*
‘I’m embarrassed to admit it, Synnøve, but we usually take a back seat when it comes to this kind of case.’
Kjetil Berggren had at least managed to lower the temperature in the small interview room. He was sitting with his shirt sleeves rolled up, flouting the regulations, absent-mindedly drumming a pencil against his thigh.
She had told him everything, hiding nothing. The fact that she had made Marianne’s disappearance less and less suspicious with every word was something she hadn’t fully grasped until now.
‘I see,’ she said feebly.
‘For example, you haven’t even spoken to her parents yet.’
‘Marianne hasn’t been in contact with them since we moved in together!’
‘I understand,’ he said, running his hand over his short hair. ‘I agree with you in principle that there is reason for concern. It’s just that …’
He was noticeably less favourably disposed than he had been when he rescued her from Ola Kvam ninety minutes earlier. He was more restless, and hadn’t written a single thing down in more than half an hour.
‘Yes, but I think you have to check with close family first. As far as I understand it, you’ve hardly been in touch with anyone.’
The enervating drumming against the thigh increased.
‘Not even her parents,’ he repeated.
As if the parents of a forty-year-old woman would have the answer to everything.
‘They didn’t come to our wedding,’ Synnøve said wearily. ‘How in the world could they possibly know anything about Marianne now?’
‘But she was supposed to be visiting her mother’s aunt, wasn’t she? Perhaps her mother—’
‘That great-aunt popped up out of nowhere. Listen to me, Kjetil. Marianne hasn’t spoken to her parents since a terrible confrontation more than thirteen years ago. It was to do with me, of course. She’s kept in touch with her brother, but only very sporadically. Both sets of grandparents are dead, and her father is an only child. Her mother keeps her own siblings in an iron grip. In other words, Marianne has virtually no family. And then, last autumn, a letter arrived from this relative. She emigrated before Marianne was born, and has been … persona non grata as far as the family is concerned. Bohemian. Married an African-American in the early sixties when that kind of thing wasn’t exactly popular with the posh families of Sandefjord. Then she got divorced and moved to Australia. She …’
Synnøve broke off.
‘Why am I sitting here giving you a load of totally irrelevant information about an eccentric and remarkable old lady who suddenly discovers that her niece has a daughter who is as excluded from the family as she is? I mean, the whole point is that Marianne never got to her!’
As she waved her arms she knocked over a full cup of coffee. She swore as the hot liquid ran down on to her thigh; she leapt up from her chair, and before she knew it, Kjetil Berggren was standing next to her with an empty water bottle.
‘Did that help? Shall I pour on more cold?’
‘No thanks,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s fine. Thanks.’
He went to fetch some paper towels from a dispenser next to a small sink in the corner.
‘And then there’s the fact that she’d gone off before,’ he said with his back to her.
Synnøve leaned back on the uncomfortable chair.
‘She didn’t go off. She finished with me. That’s something completely different.’
‘Here.’ He gave her a thick bundle of paper towels.
‘You said she was away for two weeks,’ he said. ‘Without getting in touch. The last time, I mean. I think you can see that this has a certain significance, Synnøve. The fact that this girl … that Marianne disappeared only three years ago after a huge row and went to France without even telling you she was going abroad. We have to take that kind of thing into account when we’re deciding whether to put resources into—’
‘But we hadn’t had a row this time. We hadn’t argued at all.’
Instead of returning to his seat opposite her, he hitched his bottom on to the desk, resting one foot on the chair beside her. Presumably this was intended as a friendly gesture.
‘I look like a wreck,’ she said, moving away. ‘And I stink like a horse. Sorry.’
‘Synnøve,’ he said calmly, seemingly unaware that she was absolutely right. His hand was warm as he placed it on her shoulder.
‘I’ll see what I can do, of course. You’ve reported Marianne’s disappearance, and I’ve accepted it. That’s a start, at least. But unfortunately I can’t guarantee that we’ll put much into this in the way of resources. Not for a while, anyway. In the meantime there are some things that you can do yourself.’
She stood up, mainly to break the physical contact, which felt unexpectedly unpleasant. When she reached for her sweater, Kjetil jumped down from the desk.
‘Make some calls,’ he said. ‘You’ve got lots of friends. If there’s any suggestion of … infidelity …’
Fortunately her sweater was over her head at the time. The blush spread quickly. She fumbled with the sweater until she regained control.
‘… then there’s usually someone within a circle of friends who knows about it.’
‘I understand,’ she said curtly.
‘And if you have a joint bank account, you could check if she’s withdrawn any money, and if so, where? I’ll ring you in a couple of days to see how it’s going. Or I’ll call round. Do you still live in the old place on Hystadsveien?’
‘We live on Hystadsveien. Marianne and I.’
The moment she said it, she was sure it was a lie.
‘Apart from the fact that Marianne is dead,’ she said harshly, grabbing her anorak and heading for the door. ‘Thank you, Kjetil. Thanks for fucking nothing!’
She slammed the door behind her so hard that it almost came off its hinges.