Death By Water (11 page)

She pulled her clothes on as fast as she could. Zako was lying with his head against the arm of the sofa. She grabbed him under the arms and pulled him into a position that looked a bit safer. She took the almost empty bottle out to the kitchen, poured away the remains and rinsed it thoroughly. No need for him to wake up and find out what had happened. She rinsed her own out too and then dried it. Why? she asked herself without bothering to look for an answer.

Zako was still slumped like a sack on the sofa, snoring. Before leaving, she lifted his head backwards, put his tackle back inside his trousers and zipped up his flies.

Back in the flat in Haarlemmerdijk. Still high. It would soon pass. She had some coke in an envelope in her bedside table. Take it now, hang on to this feeling of being invulnerable, make it last. She was alone. It was night. Silent in the street below. Mailin was missing. You must come down, Liss.

She sat down at her computer. Googled the Norwegian telephone directory and ran a search for the number she’d noted down on the strip of newspaper.
Judith van Ravens
was the name that came up. An address in Ekeberg Way in Oslo. It was now 2.30. She decided not to call until morning. Pulled her clothes off in two movements, dropped them to the floor and curled up in the bed.

She’s at the cabin. Mailin is there too. They walk down to the water. It’s summer; they’ve both got bathing towels with them. Liss runs up on to the rock she usually dives off. The water’s very deep there. As she’s about to dive in, she notices the water is covered in ice.

She woke up cold. A grey, muted light crept in through the window facing the back yard. She picked up her phone. Had slept for twelve hours. Sat upright with a jerk. Thirsty. Staggered out to the bathroom, put her mouth under the tap, took a long drink. Sank down on to the toilet, let it all run out again. Sat there looking at her face in the mirror. – Mailin, she murmured.
I’ll look after you, Liss.

Afterwards, she rang Viljam. Certain for a moment that everything was as it should be, that her sister had come back.

She had not come back.

– She’s been missing for almost forty-eight hours.

– What is everyone doing? Liss wailed. – The police?

– They’ve put out a missing persons report. They’ve been here a couple of times. And I’ve been down to talk to the crime response unit. They keep on and on asking if we had a quarrel and all that kind of stuff. If she was depressed and had talked about killing herself.

– Mailin kill herself?

– None of us believe anything like that.

– But somebody has to do something!

– It doesn’t look as if they have any leads to go on. Tage and I went to the cabin at Morr Water. The police have been out there too. That’s all I know.

Liss stood looking down on Haarlemmerdijk. The café owner on the other side was hanging a Christmas decoration above the entrance. – Someone has to do something, she repeated. Said it aloud. Stood there without moving. Remembered just then about the telephone number.

She reached an answering service, a woman’s voice speaking in Dutch and then English:
This is Judith van Raven’s telephone, please leave a message …

She showered. Dressed. Put on her make-up. Everything she normally did. Ran down the stairs and let herself out, cut across the street and into the café. From the top of a rickety stepladder the owner beamed at her. He looked to be somewhere in his fifties, with a pink dome framed by a pretzel-shaped rim of grey curls. The steps were up on a table, and a ghostly blonde wearing black was holding them while he hung gold and silver balls from the ceiling. There was music coming from behind the bar.
It’s gonna be a cold, cold Christmas.

She ordered a double espresso and sat by the window. By the time it was finished, she had made up her mind. Ring Zako. Meet him one last time. Ask him straight out if he knew that Mailin was missing. She’d be able to tell if he was lying to her.

She called his number. It rang four times, five times. A deep male voice answered.

– Is Zako there?

– Who’s calling? the voice asked.

She hesitated before saying: – A friend.

– A friend? What is your business with him?

– I asked to speak to Zako, she exclaimed. – Is he there?

– Zako is dead.

She almost dropped her phone. – Don’t mess me about. Who the hell are you?

– Detective Inspector Wouters. Will you please answer the question I asked you?

She couldn’t remember what he had asked her. Out in Haarlemmerdijk the lights were being turned on. The six-pointed star with the red heart inside. A cyclist went by. A man with a child on a seat in front of him.

The voice on the phone: – When was the last time you saw Zako?

From very far away she heard her own answer: – A few days ago. Maybe a week.

There were more questions. About her relationship to him. About the drugs he used. If they had taken drugs together. She had to provide her full name and address. Tell him what she did in Amsterdam.

– We may need you to come in for a further talk with us.

– Of course, she muttered. – I’ll come in.

Afterwards she sat and stared at her phone. The skin around her mouth prickled. The sensation spread up into her cheeks.

The proprietor of the café had hung up all his balls and surrounded them with green garlands. He tottered down the rickety stepladder, gave her a smile. – There now. Now Christmas can come.

From the bar came the sound of John Lennon’s voice:
War is over, if you want it.
She felt her nose running. Fumbled out a handkerchief. When she took it away, it was full of blood. She pressed it to her nose again, hurried to the toilet.

– Everything all right? the proprietor asked as she passed him.

She locked the door. Held the handkerchief under the ice-cold water, used it to press her nostrils together. The diluted blood ran down over her chin and dripped on to the white porcelain.

Back at her table, she called Rikke. Rikke answered, but couldn’t get a word out.

– It’s not true, is it? Liss wailed. – Please tell me it isn’t true.

Rikke ended the call.

A few minutes later she called back.

– They found him this morning … two of his cousins … On the sofa … choked on his own vomit.

Then she was gone again. Liss pushed a note under her coffee cup and struggled out into the street.

The picture appeared again as she hurried along through the streets of Jordaan: disappear into the forest, down to the spot by the marsh, between the pines, a place only she, not even Mailin, knew about. For as long as she could remember she had thought of it as
the last place
, and it always used to calm her down to think of it. Nothing could calm her down now.

At Haarlemmerplein she hailed a taxi. Huddled up in the back seat. The driver was shaven headed and wearing a grey suit, reeked of a type of aftershave Zako sometimes used. She grabbed the door handle to get out again.

– Where does the young lady want taking to?

She slumped back. Thought she’d told him where she was going.

– Schiphol, she murmured, and pulled the thin leather jacket around herself.

The taxi driver turned again, winked at her in the mirror. – Travelling light, he observed as he offered her a cigarette.

A
S
I
WRITE
this, I think of all the things I would have said to you, dear Liss, if only you had let me tell you. Everything that happened that spring.
And how I got through that summer, how I found myself on Crete in the autumn, under a different sun, but with the same black light shining inside me. Among people gorging themselves, drinking, coupling. They argued and vomited and left the kids to look after themselves. That’s where I got to know Jo. In the evening I sat and read on the terrace outside the restaurant, the same poem over and over again, by the light of a candle. It’s about the end time, I think, or at least it felt to me as though it was about my end time; roaming through a waste land, no water, no meaning, blindness, emptiness, death.
What are you reading?
Jo asked when he came up to me. He was suspicious, as he no doubt was of everyone he met; what he needed more than anyone else was someone he could trust. I told him about the poem, recited the section called ‘Death by Water’, told him about the image of the dead Phoenician at the bottom of the sea.

Jo was twelve years old and left completely on his own. He knew what I felt like.

A
S THE PLANE
began its descent and the captain announced that they were approaching Oslo airport, Liss woke in the midst of an avalanche of thoughts. Two of them remained with her.
Mailin is missing. I must find Mailin.

Sunday afternoon. Just after four. She’d spent the night on a bench at Schiphol, hadn’t managed to find a seat on a plane until morning. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since she’d sat in the café in Haarlemmerdijk. Wouters was the name of the policeman who’d answered when she called Zako’s number. Could one ever forget such a name?
It isn’t true that I last saw Zako a week ago. I was there that night. Just before he died …
Enclose those thoughts in a room. Lock it. The name
Wouters
on a sign on the door. Not to be opened. Will it ever be possible to forget that there is something inside that room? Start with the name, Wouters, forget the policeman’s name. Forget his voice, and what he told her. Then it might also be possible to forget where she was on Saturday night.
I must find Mailin. I don’t care a damn about anything else.

The woman sitting next to her had finished reading
VG
. She handed it to Liss, even though Liss hadn’t asked for it.

She flipped through without reading. A few pages in, she stopped and just stared at the headline above a big story:
Missing woman (29) due to appear on
Taboo. It was about Mailin. Her partner had mentioned this TV programme.
VG
called it ‘a scandal show’. A talk show hosted by Berger, she read, a name she associated with obsolete rock music. Now he was attracting huge audiences with this series on the subject of taboos. Yesterday’s show was apparently about sexuality. It had caught fire when Berger defended the idea that child sex might be okay. Liss struggled to put this into context. What could Mailin, always so careful about the views she sponsored, be doing on a TV show with someone like that?
The 29-year-old psychologist never turned up at Channel Six’s studio in Nydalen. She had not been heard from since earlier that evening. Several times in the course of the show Berger claimed that she must have got cold feet. He now refuses to make any further comment.

The woman beside her sat with eyes closed and held on tightly to the armrests. Liss wedged the paper down into her seat pocket, pressed her head against the window. The layer of cloud beneath them was thinning out. She could just see the fjord below and the fortress at the top of it. Leaving four years earlier, she had thought she would never be back.

What’s to become of you, Liss?

She had told the taxi driver Ekeberg Way, but not the number. As they got close, she asked him to stop. Paid with her credit card and got out.

Up here on the hilltop above Oslo, it was biting cold. Liss was dressed for a mild day in Amsterdam; she’d fled to the airport without even thinking about going home and packing some clothes. The temperature on the dashboard read minus twelve. She buttoned the thin leather jacket all the way up to the neck, not that it helped, tried to stuff her hands down into the tiny pockets.

She found the number, a large, bright yellow functionalist villa. The name on the letter box was right. The driveway was paved in red flagstones, so slippery that she had to tiptoe up with tiny steps, like an old woman. She rang the doorbell. Rang again, a bit too quickly because already she could hear sounds inside. A woman put her head out. Dark hair, bunched at the neck, nicely made up. She might be in her mid-thirties, some ten years older than Liss.

– Judith van Ravens?

The woman gave a little smile in response, as if she’d been sitting in the house waiting for a floral delivery. Liss noticed that she had a bundle in her arm, something wrapped in a crocheted blanket.

– I must talk to you, she continued in Dutch, pointing to the hallway.

A hostile look showed in the woman’s eyes. – What’s this about?

Liss struggled to control herself. She was freezing from her toes and up through her back to the roots of her hair. She hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. She had killed someone. All she could hold on to were the two thoughts:
Mailin is missing. I must find Mailin.

– Let me come inside for a moment and I’ll explain.

The woman shook her head firmly and tucked at the bundle she was holding next to her body. She was on the point of closing the door. Liss put her foot across the threshold. She pulled the photo of her sister from her bag and held it up in front of the woman’s face. The woman blinked in confusion and released her hold on the door. Liss shoved it open and pushed her way past her and inside.

The large room seemed almost empty. A suite of chairs that might have come from IKEA, a dining table in one corner, a large, pallid painting on the biggest wall.

– We’re only living here temporarily, the woman excused herself. – My husband is working for Statoil. He spends most of the time in Stavanger, but I couldn’t live there.

Her uncertainty evidently made her talkative. Unless this information about Statoil was offered up as a way of showing the intruder the powers that stood behind her. She held the bundle up to her shoulder. There was a pushchair bag on the sofa; perhaps she didn’t dare lay the sleeping child down.