Punishment (10 page)

Johanne Vik had the same jacket herself. It was hanging in her parents' cottage and was used only in pouring rain. The F was half faded and the B had nearly disappeared.

The FBI men laughed. One stuffed a piece of chewing gum into his mouth, then straightened his cap and opened the car door for a woman in high heels who crossed the road quickly. Johanne turned away. She had to hurry if she was going to catch the bus. She still felt a bit ropy and sick and hoped that she would sleep on the bus. If not, she would have to find a place to stay overnight in Hyannis; she was hardly in any state to drive in the dark.

Johanne started to run. Her suitcase bumped along on its
tiny wheels. Breathless, she handed her luggage to the driver and climbed on board.

It struck her that she hadn't given Aksel Seier a single thought since she left Gardemoen. She might even meet him tomorrow. For some reason or another, she had built up a picture of him. He was quite good-looking, but not particularly tall. Maybe he had a beard. God knows if he would want to see her. To travel to the States, more or less on a whim, with no agreements, no actual information other than an address in Harwichport and an old story about a man who was convicted of something that he probably didn't do – it was all so impulsive and unlike her that she smiled at her reflection in the window. She was in the US. In a way, she was home again.

She fell asleep before they had left the Ted Williams Tunnel.

And her last thought was of Adam Stubo.

J
ohanne Vik could not remember what day it was when she woke up on Tuesday morning.

The evening before, she had collected the car from Barnstable Municipal Airport, which was no more than a couple of small airstrips alongside a low, long terminal building. The lady behind the Avis desk had given her the keys and a slightly embarrassed yawn. It was still two hours until midnight. Even though it would only take her about half an hour to drive to the room she had booked in Harwichport, she didn't want to chance it. So she checked in at a motel in Hyannisport, five minutes from the airport. She had a shower and then went for a walk in the dark.

Down by the quay, the anticipation of summer was tangible. Pubescent boys, who had been bored by an uneventful winter, now cheered and laughed in the night and waited for the town to explode. Children as young as ten fled from their mothers and bedtime and zigzagged between the bollards and old barrels on their scooters. Memorial Day was only a few days off. The population of Cape Cod would increase tenfold in the course of one weekend and then remain constant until September and Labor Day, and the start of another idle winter season.

Johanne fumbled for her watch. It had fallen on to the floor.

It was just gone six in the morning. She had slept only for five hours. But she felt good all the same. She stood up and pulled on a T-shirt that was too big, the one she normally slept in. The air conditioning gave a strained sigh and then
was quiet. It must be about twenty-five degrees in the room. The morning light poured in when she opened the curtains. She looked to the south-west. The express boat to Martha's Vineyard lay at the quay, newly painted and white; there was an offshore breeze and the mooring ropes were straining between the jetties and boats. Beyond the ferry, in the shelter of a copse, was the massive, grey Kennedy memorial. She had gone there last night and sat on a bench looking out to sea. The night air was already saturated with early summer, salty and sweet. She sat with her back to the memorial, a huge stone wall with an unimaginative copper relief in the middle. An expressionless, dead president in profile, like on a coin – a king on a gigantic coin.

‘The king of America,' Johanne said to herself as she connected her notebook to the Internet.

Only one email was worth the units: a drawing from Kristiane. Three green figures in a circle. Kristiane, Mummy and Daddy. The hands they were holding were enormous, with fingers that were interwoven like roots on a mangrove tree. In the middle of the circle stood a beast with lots of teeth that Johanne found hard to identify at first. Then she read the message from Isak.

‘He's given the child a dog,' she groaned, logging off abruptly.

When she got into the car just after nine, she felt resigned. She had been away from home for just over twenty-four hours and Isak had bought a dog. Kristiane would insist on keeping the animal with her in the weeks when she stayed with Johanne. And Johanne had absolutely no wish to have a dog.

Isak could at least have asked.

*

Her irritation had in no way subsided. She followed Route 28 along the coast. It wove its way from small town to small town,
with sudden vistas of Nantucket Sound beyond the marinas and river mist. The sun hurt her eyes. She stopped at a garish tourist shop to buy a pair of cheap sunglasses. She'd left her own prescription sunglasses at home in Norway, so she had to choose between seeing very badly without lenses or being blinded by the sharp light. The shop assistant tried to tempt her to buy a cowboy hat – as if there had ever been a cowboy within a mile of Yarmouth, Massachusetts. She eventually gave in. Thirty dollars straight in the bin, literally. She hoped that he wouldn't see her stuffing the headgear into a green bin. The man didn't have a right leg; he had presumably been nineteen and a private in 1972.

Mid-Cape Highway would have been a more sensible choice in every way, a four-lane motorway that divided the peninsula down the middle. She suspected that she'd chosen the coastal road to delay her arrival. Yesterday she had smiled at her impetuousness. Today it was no longer funny.

There seemed to be something wrong with the gearbox.

What should she say?

Isak could have made a mistake. He'd put his hand on his heart and opened his eyes wide when she asked him for guarantees. There must be more than one person called Aksel Seier. Perhaps not that many, but some at least. Isak might have got it wrong. Aksel Seier in Harwichport had perhaps never lived in Oslo. Maybe he had never been in prison either. Maybe he had been in prison, but didn't want to be reminded. He might have a family. A wife, children, grandchildren who knew nothing about pater familias's past behind lock and key. It wasn't fair just to rip open old wounds. It wasn't fair on Aksel Seier. Yesterday she had smiled at her impulsiveness. Today she realised that this trip to the USA – like her search for the truth – was a way of getting away from something. Nothing serious, she quickly reassured herself. It was not about escaping. America was where she felt most herself and that was
why she'd come. She was just a bit uncertain about what she needed a break from.

By the time she reached Dennisport, just over a mile from the address that was tucked in her wallet behind the photo of Kristiane, she had decided to turn around. She could call it a wild goose chase. Alvhild Sofienberg would understand. Johanne couldn't do any more. She would continue her research without Aksel Seier. His case was not vital to her. She had plenty of other cases to choose from, cases where the people in question lived only a trip on the metro away from the office, or a short flight to Tromsø.

The gearbox made a horrible scraping noise.

She carried on driving.

Maybe she could just have a look at his house. She didn't need to make contact. As she had come this far, it would be good just to get an impression of where Aksel Seier had got to in life. A house and a garden and maybe a car might tell a story that was worth knowing, having come this far.

Aksel Seier lived at 1 Ocean Avenue.

The house was easy to find. It was small. Like all the other houses around it, it was clad with cedar, grey with age, weatherworn and typical of the area. The window sills were blue. On the roof, a weathercock reluctantly faced the wind. A stocky man was struggling with a ladder by the east wall. It wasn't lunchtime yet, but Johanne felt hungry all the same.

*

Aksel Seier had to get a new ladder. He needed to get up on the roof. Some rungs were missing from the old ladder and it creaked alarmingly. But he had to get up there. The weathercock kept getting stuck. Aksel was sometimes woken up at night by the wind forcing the stubborn bird round; it screeched when the wind came from the south-east.

‘Hi, Aksel. Pretty thing you've got there!'

A younger man in a checked flannel shirt was leaning against the fence, laughing. Aksel nodded briefly at his neighbour and held the pig up in front of him. He tilted his head and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Kind of original, I guess. I like it.'

The pig was made of oxidised copper, a slim pig that stood guard over the four crossed arrows that marked out each point of the compass. Aksel Seier had got the weathervane in exchange for some colourful net markers. The glass floats had water in them and couldn't be used, but were still valuable as souvenirs.

‘Help me with this ladder, will you?'

Matt Delaware was seriously overweight. Aksel hoped that the younger man would not offer to switch the cock for the pig for him. They finally managed to get the ladder in place.

‘I would have helped you, you know. But . . .'

Matt looked at the ladder. He slapped one of the rungs lightly and pulled his baseball cap round. Aksel grunted. He carefully placed his foot on the first rung. It held. Slowly he climbed to the top. The weathercock was so rusty that it broke when Aksel tried to unscrew it. The fixture was still fine though. The pig was easily tamed by the wind and it took a matter of minutes to adjust the arrows to the points of the compass.

‘Awesome,' grinned Matt, staring up at the pig. ‘Just awesome, you know!'

Aksel mumbled his thanks. Matt put the ladder back in its place. Aksel heard him chuckling long after he was out of sight, round the corner on the way to the O'Connors, who hadn't opened their house for the summer yet.

Someone had parked in Ocean Avenue. Aksel glanced idly over at the Ford. There was a woman sitting alone inside the car. You weren't allowed to leave cars here. She would have to use the car park on Atlantic Avenue, like all the other visitors.
She didn't come from round here. That was obvious, without him really knowing why. The summer season was hell. City folk everywhere. Throwing their money around. They thought that everything was for sale.

‘If the price is right,' the estate agent had said in the spring. ‘Name your price, Aksel.'

He didn't want to sell the house. Some Boston bigwig or other would be happy to pay a million dollars for the small house by the beach. A million! Aksel snorted at the thought. The house was small and he barely had enough money to cover more than basic maintenance. He did most of it himself, but the materials cost money. As did plumbers and electricians. This winter he'd had to put in a new water pipe when the old one burst. The pressure had fallen to a dribbling nothing from the kitchen tap and the water authorities had threatened to take him to court if he didn't do something immediately. When it was all done and the bill had been paid, there were only fifty-six dollars left in Aksel Seier's savings account.

A million!

The buyer would just pull the whole lot down. It was the location that was attractive. Waterfront. Private beach. With the right to erect a large sign saying No trespassing and Police take notice. Aksel Seier had sent the estate agent packing and told him to spare himself any more visits. To be sure, he could do with a few hundred dollars every now and then, but only when he earned them himself. Aksel had no idea what he would do with a million.

He tidied away his tools. The lady in the Taurus was still sitting there, which irritated him. Normally at this time of year he was quite tolerant; he would hardly survive the summer if he weren't. But this lady was different. He felt she was staring at him. Her car wasn't parked for the ocean view. It was too far up the road. Too close to the big oak tree that towered over the Piccolas' house; they would have to do something about it this
summer, chop it down, at least saw off some branches. They hung heavy over the roof now and scraped off the shingle. Soon it would start leaking.

The lady in the car was not interested in the ocean. It was him she was interested in. An age-old fear ripped through his body. Aksel Seier caught his breath and turned around abruptly. Then he went in and locked the door, even though it was no later than eleven in the morning.

*

Aksel Seier was just as Johanne had imagined. Well built and stocky. From a distance it was difficult to tell whether he was clean-shaven, but there was certainly no beard to talk of. It was almost as if she had seen him before. From that first night when she read Alvhild Sofienberg's papers, she had tried to put together a picture of the old Aksel Seier, thirty-five years after his release. His jacket was threadbare and dark blue. He was wearing heavy boots, even though the outside temperature was more than twenty degrees centigrade. His hair was grey and a bit too long, as if he didn't care about his appearance. Even from a hundred metres, it was easy to see that he had big hands.

He had looked over in her direction a couple of times. She tried to shrink in the car seat. Even though she was not doing anything illegal, she felt herself blush when he straightened his back and squinted over at her for the second time. If he had really seen what she looked like, it would be embarrassing to approach him later.

She wouldn't talk to him. She could see that he was content. He had a good life. The house might be small and weather-worn, but the site would be valuable. There was a small pickup truck in the garden, not very old. A younger man had stopped and chatted with him. The man laughed and waved when he left. Aksel Seier belonged here.

Johanne was hungry. It was unbearably hot in the car, even though she had parked in the shade of a large oak tree. She wound down the window slowly.

‘You can't park here, sweetie!'

A large pink angora sweater made the old lady look like candyfloss. She was smiling broadly in all the pink and Johanne nodded in apology. Then she moved the car into drive mode and hoped that the gearbox would last another day. She noted that it was eleven o'clock exactly, on Tuesday 23 May.