Death By Water (40 page)

He turned into Bogstadveien. The asphalt was slippier there, but he accelerated as he headed on down the road. He’d show them, all those who’d turned their backs on him. Those who’d trodden him down into the shit. Mailin Bjerke was the only one who had never given up on him. But she made him so mad. She was actually pretty ruthless. Found the weak spot and then twisted. All the same, he’d gone there that Thursday. For the first time, she wasn’t there when he arrived. Hadn’t left a message or anything. The office windows dark. He was furious, kicking and kicking at the main gate. Walked a couple of times around the block. Her car was fucking well there, the Hyundai with the dent in the front bumper. Not hard to recognise. But it was only when he was about to turn the corner, and glanced round, that he saw what happened …

And now she was dead. He’d read about it in the papers a few days later. And yet he went back again. As though she would still be sitting there in her office promising to do all she could to help him. The door had been open, and he’d looked in. Opened a few drawers. Old habit. People left all sorts of stuff lying about. Her appointments diary was on the table; he looked up the day when he should have had his. There were his initials:
17.00 JH
. No one else due to see her that day. Below was written BERGER – Channel Six, Nydalen, 8 o’clock. And a message he didn’t understand. Something about a jacket. He’d ripped out that page. Often wondered why he did things like that. Maybe to avoid getting dragged into anything.

So that girl who suddenly appeared was her sister. Not that you would have guessed. As unlike Mailin as you could get. A nervous, weird girl. Like something out a fairy tale. The Brothers Grimm, he recalled, that book he’d had lying under his bed all those years when he was a kid. This sister wanted something from him, kept showing up all the time. Obviously after him. That was why he stopped her in the park. She said something there that made him understand what he had seen in Welhavens Street that Thursday. At least understand enough to take a chance and lay out some bait. A stroke of luck. Because there was one person at least who had more reason to be nervous than him.

Jim had made up his mind not to ask for more than thirty thousand the first time. Then five or ten. Then raise it gradually. Could be a nice little earner on the side. He wasn’t scared of Karam any more. He ran. Going to run his way out of it. Round the roundabout behind the National, down Munkedams Way. Not slippy here. Good grip for the shoes. He was pleased with them. Grabbed them from a store in the Storo shopping mall. The alarm went off, but the security guard who could catch up with him hadn’t been born yet. The shoes were as lightweight as the best he’d had from Nike, but the soles were better.

He didn’t slow down until he reached the fjord. Could have kept on running the rest of the night. Getting close to his form from 2003, his best season, when he crushed the junior record for the four hundred flat, and the eight hundred. Eight hundred is the best. The others are done for by the time he starts his sprint, merciless, inhuman, impossible to respond to.

All the restaurants and shops on the fjord side had shut hours ago. Not a soul in sight along Aker Brygge. Should maybe have insisted on Egertorget. You got people there, even in the middle of the night. But the person he was going to meet insisted that no one should see them together. Jim knew that from now on he would be the one setting the conditions, so he’d gone along with the suggested meeting place on this occasion.

He stopped by the flaming torch that stood outermost on the quay. The Eternal Peace Flame. Peered down one of the alleyways. A couple of boats moored on the canal. Started walking along, keeping to the edge of the quay, towards the sculptures in the water. He checked his mobile phone: 1.35. The person he was supposed to meet should have been here by now.

Something rattled down on the boat deck on his left, metal on metal, a box or a weight or something falling. He turned and peered down into the half-darkness. In the same instant he realised that the sound had something to do with him, with the meeting he’d arranged, with what he’d seen that Thursday outside Mailin’s office, with the thirty thousand he was going to get, but he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him. Something hit him in the neck, boring its way inward from the side, and suddenly everything was clear around him and as bright as midday. He stood, frozen in this light, as his mouth was blasted open by what came gushing out of him.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY MORNING
, Liss was woken by a magpie screeching outside her window. She got up and closed it, but was too wide awake to sleep any more. She sat on the edge of her bed for a while, bare feet on the cold floor. Couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed, but still something lingered, as if someone had been pecking and plucking away at her thoughts, helping themselves to the best bits and leaving small holes behind.

She pulled on trousers and a top, padded out into the corridor. Heard Viljam busy down below, and once she was finished on the loo went downstairs to join him. He was sitting at the kitchen table reading
Aftenposten
with a cup of coffee. Again the thought that he grieved in the same way she did, something silent, something he wanted to be alone with. She felt an urge to stroke his hair. It won’t pass, Viljam. Just keep going anyway.

– Have you thought of how similar your name is to hers?

He looked up and gave her a quick smile. – Mailin noticed it, it hadn’t occurred to me. It’s almost hers backwards

Mailin must have noticed the other thing too, the similarity to their father. Not so much the individual features. Something in the eyes. A way of moving the hands. The timbre of the voice. The sorts of things Liss believed she remembered.

He folded up the newspaper and put it on the windowsill. – How long are you going to stay in Norway?

She didn’t know if she’d be going back to Amsterdam. Mailin had called her brave. Maybe it was the thought of Mailin being somewhere in the world that made her brave.

– I’ll see after the funeral. She poured herself a mug of coffee. The mug was white with a large red M on it. – My mother still hasn’t heard whether she can be cremated. That’s what Mailin would have wanted. The police haven’t decided yet whether they’ll allow us to.

Mailin’s dead body lying in the ground? Sudden thought: she mustn’t get cold. We must wrap her in something warm. Blankets, or a duvet.

– Have you been in touch with any of your friends here? Viljam asked, obviously wanting to talk about something else.

– I had one night out. Just before Christmas.

She told him about the evening out with Catrine. The party she went to. Mentioned the footballer, although not the fact that she’d seen him again.

– What did you say his name was?

She had avoided using his name. He didn’t belong in a conversation between them. She turned the coffee mug round and round. – Jomar something or other.

– Plays for Lyn? Jomar Vindheim?

– Something like that, she said, exaggerating her tone of indifference. – Have you met him?

– No, but anybody with the slightest interest in football knows his name. He’s played for the national team. Even Mailin knew who he was.

– Mailin? She never had a clue about football.

Viljam shrugged. – There was a picture of him on the front page of the sports section. ‘Isn’t that Jomar Vindheim?’ she said. Apparently she’d bumped into him somewhere or other.

To Liss it didn’t add up. Twice she’d met Jomar. He hadn’t said a word about knowing Mailin.

Viljam got up suddenly, went out into the corridor. She heard him open a drawer in the chest. When he came back, he had a letter in his hand.
Not for me
,
she prayed inwardly.

– Tage called in yesterday. Wanted to know how things were going. And deliver this.

He put it down in front of her. It had been sent to her mother’s address in Lørenskog. The envelope was creamy yellow, the paper thick, the handwriting in ink, elegant and neat. There were Dutch stamps on it, and it was postmarked Amsterdam. On the back, the sender’s name in printed capitals,
A. K. El Hachem
. She sat looking at it for some time, waiting for the reaction she knew would come. It took five seconds, maybe longer. In this brief interlude she had time to think,
Zako’s surname
, and
damn you, Rikke
before her body took over. She excused herself, managed to get up the stairs and into the bathroom. Stuck her finger down her throat, but her stomach was empty. She stood stooped over, spitting down into the curve of the porcelain as the water formed a whirlpool around the outlet.

In her room she stood by the window, the letter in her hand. The magpie on the roof outside was at it again.
Throw it away without opening it
, it chattered. That’d make things even worse, she thought. Lie awake every night wondering what was in it. Wait for someone in uniform to come and pull the duvet off her and drag her out to a waiting car. A man wearing a grey overcoat sitting in the back seat. Wouters, that’s his name, and she will never be able to forget it.

The writing paper was the same creamy yellow as the envelope, the heading a curling monogram formed with the initials AKH.
Dear Miss Liss Bjerke
. Zako had occasionally called her
Miss Lizzie
, she remembered, usually when he was about to say something sarcastic. A. K. El Hachem was not sarcastic. He was Zako’s father. He hoped that it wasn’t inconvenient of him to approach her in this way. He had heard that she had recently lost her sister, and expressed his deepest sympathies. He realised that this was the reason she had been unable to attend Zako’s funeral. She skimmed through these and several other extended formal courtesies, as convoluted as the monogram. She searched for a reason why she should now be standing here with this letter in her hand. Had to read more closely to find out. A few words about losing those closest to one, as had happened to them both. Zako was A. K. El Hachem’s only son – Liss had always thought he had a younger brother; they had always been close, even if in recent years Zako had started leading a life his father could not approve of. Until the unthinkable happened, he had, however, entertained hopes that this son of his would return to the course laid out for him, become a partner in his father’s firm, and later take over and carry on the hard work of four generations before him. For none among those who knew him could have any doubt that Zako was a young man of remarkable talents.

And now the father approached his reason for writing the letter. In conversations with his son over the past year, it had become apparent that something unusual had happened in his life. It concerned a woman. Zako had never had any trouble attracting women, it was a curse as well as a gift, but this young woman was, he had revealed to his father, not just one of many, but the only one. And the father had seen the change in his son. He had grown less hot headed, more thoughtful, more interested in planning for a secure future, more concerned for the well-being of his parents and sisters; in a word, the maturing of a self-centred young man that only a woman could effect, the thing his father had been waiting for with growing impatience as time went by, although never quite losing his faith that it would happen. There could be no doubt that this woman, that is, Miss Bjerke, had been sent to his son from a better world; the scales had fallen from Zako’s eyes, and his life was about to take a turn in the direction his father, in the depth of his heart, had always longed to see it take.

A. K. El Hachem was writing to her to express his deepest gratitude that his son had known this time together with her, this reminder that life was good when one was open to what was good. In the darkest hours following his son’s death, the knowledge that he had experienced something like this was an enormous comfort to him as a father, and to the whole of the family, and they had talked a lot about this Norwegian woman who had brought new light into their son’s life. In conclusion, A. K. El Hachem expressed his deepest hope that at some point he would have the opportunity to meet her, whether in Nimes, where the family lived for most of the year, in Amsterdam, or in her own country up there in the far north.

T
HIS TIME IT
was Berger himself who opened the door when Liss arrived. He took her jacket and hung it up for her.

– Did you give your butler the evening off? she said casually, and Berger confirmed that he had indeed done so.

– A couple of times a year he has a weekend off. He has his aged mother to visit, that kind of thing.

In the living room, music was coming from speakers she couldn’t see. Indian drumming, it sounded like, with a kind of accordion and a man with a light, hoarse voice forcing curious sounds from his throat at a ferocious pace, up and down strange musical scales.

– Sufi music, Berger informed her. It meant absolutely nothing to her.

The smell in the room also had an Oriental origin. He picked up a smoking pipe from an ashtray and offered it to her. She declined. Hash made her distant and slow; her thoughts went off in directions she didn’t like, became dense and nightmarish.

Berger slipped down on to the sofa, put his long legs on the table and puffed away.

– I hope you don’t mind my taking my afternoon medicine, he said. – You who live in Amsterdam are probably used to this kind of thing.

– You asked me to come, she interrupted. No more than an hour had passed since she received his text as she was wandering around in the park at Tøyen trying to collect her thoughts.

– I did ask you to come, Liss, he nodded inside his cloud of cannabis smoke.

She waited.

– I liked Mailin, he said. – She was a fine girl. Preoccupied with her principles, but nevertheless fine.

– She had an appointment with you. That evening she disappeared.

– We talked about that last time.

– But now she’s been found. If this has anything at all to do with you … She didn’t know what to say, tried to calm down. – You don’t seem in the slightest surprised. You seem cold and unaffected.