The Consorts of Death (26 page)

‘What is it? A family bible?’

She nodded with enthusiasm. ‘A very special one. I got it from my mother when I moved back here. She had been given it by her mother. But what makes it so special is that this bible has followed the women in our family through very different circumstances. My mother and her mother were married, but before them there was an unfortunate succession of one daughter after the other born out of wedlock and given the book.’

‘From illegitimate daughter to illegitimate daughter?’

‘For several generations, like a kind of original sin. But perhaps that’s not so strange when it comes down to it. A woman born out of wedlock was held in low public esteem. Anyone could lay their hands on her and thereby bring more illegitimate children into the world. The unfortunate thing for our family was that the first-born were always girls and thus inherited the rewards of sin.’

I stroked her hair. ‘But you’ve broken the line now …’

She turned her head, looked at me from the corner of her eyes. ‘Oh, we still have a sense of sin …’

Lying on her stomach, she pointed. ‘Look, here you have the whole of the line written down. The first, Martha, writes that she was born in 1799, and that she received the book when she was confirmed in 1816. She married a Hans Olavsson in 1819 and had a daughter, Maria, in 1823.’

‘No sons?’

‘Yes, but Maria hasn’t entered their names. You can see here … the writing changes. That’s Maria entering her name and her daughter’s, Kristine. Born in February 1840, out of wedlock. But she enters the father … look here, as M. A.’

‘Uhuh?’

‘That doesn’t mean anything to you?’

‘Not straight off, no.’

‘It might be Mads Andersen.’

‘Mads Andersen. You don’t mean …?’

‘Yes! Trodalen Mads. And look at the birth date. Count back nine months and you come to May 1839. The Trodalen murder, according to lore, took place on June 19th of that year.’

‘But … if your ancestral mother had a child with Trodalen Mads …’

‘She’s in fact my great-great-great grandmother.’

‘If she had a child with him …’

‘… then I’m a direct descendant of his, yes. Although we’ve never thought of announcing that in
Firda Tidend
, if I can put it like that.’

‘But M. A. could stand for something quite different too?’

‘Yes, yes, of course. But this is where oral tradition comes in. The secret inheritance, to use a more formal expression. You see my mother told me, when she gave me the bible, that her mother had told her that her mother in turn had passed down this
inherited
account of our spooky past, and that she swore with her hand on the family bible that this was how it was, may God himself strike me to the ground if I’m lying … she said.’

‘And that account says …?’

She rolled onto her side, put her free arm around my neck, held me tight and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Promise me first, Varg, that what I’m telling you now you will never tell another soul!’

I returned her gaze. ‘I certainly can’t swear on the book and beg God to strike me to the ground if I should lie, but …’ I put my hand on my heart. ‘I promise by all that I hold sacred, I won’t do that. What you tell me here and now will never go beyond these four walls.’

She scrutinised me long and hard, as if searching for lies and ignoble ideals in my eyes.

‘But you must’ve told … Tora?’

‘Not yet. Won’t be for a long time yet. If I tell you now, tonight, there are only three living people who know about it. My mother, me and you.’

‘And to what do I owe the honour? I wasn’t that good, was I?’

‘No, not
that
good …’ she teased with a smile, only to turn serious again straightaway. ‘I’m telling you this because in some way or other it may help us to understand what happened here this week.’

‘I see! Now I’m even more curious.’

‘That was the idea.’

‘Tell me then!’

‘I’m going to …’

She took me with her to Trodalen during the fateful summer of 1839. ‘The story about Trodalen Mads, the alternative version,’ as she called it, with a tiny smile. She told it in such a vivid way that I could see it unrolling before me, like a film: a flashback of almost one hundred and fifty years.

Mads Andersen was twenty-one years old that year. He was medium-height with a strong build, dark hair and melancholic
predisposition
, not unnatural for a young man who had grown up on an isolated farm in Trodalen with no one else except his parents, his sister and an adult serving maid. When he went to the priest, he got to know the eldest son of a family from Angedalen whose name was Jens Hansen, and Jens had a sister, Maria, who was four years younger. She was a quiet girl, a willing worker, industrious, who from early childhood had worked with her mother in the fields in the summer. She was at home in the mountains and could, even on Sundays, walk there on her own without any fear of what she might meet. After getting to know Mads, she used to walk all the way to Trodalen; not often, perhaps every other month, and they didn’t always bump into each other. How could they? There was no one to whom they could entrust messages, and she didn’t dare send a letter the few times the post went all the way up to Trodalsstrand.

According to what was passed down from Grethe’s ancestors, a romance sprang up between Maria and Mads that winter and the spring of 1839; and the winter up in Trodalen was long, the snow didn’t begin to clear until the end of April, even in June there were still great drifts left along the sunless mountainsides by the black mirror of Lake Trodalsvatn. There was something ominous and compelling about the lake, as though it, even at that time, concealed secrets it would not give up, memories of the past that were forever sunk beneath the depths. Mads often roamed in the mountains, hunting birds, deer or other game. He had set snares which he checked at regular intervals, and on not so few occasions during these wanderings he came to the mountain ridge at the end of the lake whence he could look down on Angedalen, at the farm where Jens and Maria had grown up. Sometimes they met there, he and Maria, and when May arrived and the sun began to warm, they embraced each other tenderly and vowed eternal fidelity …

‘…. My mother told me,’ Grethe said, still with her hand on the bible, as if the images were growing directly from the thin page where the family line had been drawn up.

‘Did she also tell you what happened on that June day when Ole Olsen Otternæs was killed up there?’

‘That’s precisely the point of all this, Varg, my love. Now listen to the valley drama …

‘When there is a confession it very soon becomes the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about past events. But in this case there was another version, hidden and clutched to the bosom of six generations of women, like a secret shame, kept alive by the family’s bad conscience about what really took place.

‘The second version of the Trodalen murder went as follows. On this particular Wednesday Maria Hansdottir had fled her life on the farm. Perhaps she was hoping to meet Mads again on this beautiful sunny summer’s day. The heat was making her blood pump extra hard through her veins, so much so that she could hardly bear being down on the farm, she just had to be up in the mountains where the person who was in her thoughts day and night was to be found. But ill luck was to have it that when she had climbed up to Trodalen and was on her way down to the lake, she bumped into Ole Otternæs, the dealer who only a short time before had taken his leave of Mads Andersen in Trodalsstrand. They stood and exchanged a few words, then she tried to move on. The dealer would not budge. Perhaps it was the summer heat that had gone to his head, too; perhaps it was the long period of abstinence that caused him to make a grab with lustful hands for the young girl. He was strong, strengthened from walking in the mountains. She struggled, screamed for help, the way the Arctic loon screeches at the steep faces of the mountains. But he would not let go. He burrowed up under her clothes with his strong hands until she screamed with fear and pain. Then she seized a rock lying on the ground and brought it down hard on the dealer’s head – once, twice, three times! His rough hands let go of her body and he began to slip to the ground. Once again she struck, in fear and fury, until Ole Olsen Otternæs lay lifeless before her.

‘Then she was gripped by a fear greater than anything she had ever felt before. She knew now that she had committed a deadly sin, and that the gates of hell would open and swallow her up as soon as her time had come. She was sentenced to eternal unrest, eternal fire, and the fear she felt now was so strong that she thought she would drop down dead on the path she was treading with such quaking feet. There was only one way to go she knew of: down to the water, down to a certain death.

‘However, Mads Andersen was coming to meet her. He had heard the cry of the Arctic loon, and he recognised the sound. Now he took her in his arms, held her tight, let her tears flow and ebb, and eventually followed her to where Ole Olsen lay, to see what wretched state he was in.

‘She stood at a distance watching Mads examine the lifeless body, and when he came back down to her, she realised from his posture that all hope was gone.

‘But then he gave her fresh hope, indeed he redeemed her, took her sin upon himself and said: Let me take care of this, Maria. Just go home. I’ll drop Ole Olsen Otternæs into the depths of the lake, and may he never return! Maria left him there and then, and that was the last time they spoke together. Later she was to see him only once, when after five days he was taken to the village by men from the neighbouring farm and from there to Førde with the bailiff and his assistants the following day.’

‘He confessed to the murder,’ I said. ‘For her sake.’

Her eyes met mine. ‘Does that sound familiar?’

‘What happened then?’

‘The rest of the story is well-known. He had taken a few
banknotes
and valuables from Ole Olsen and they were found on him. He confessed and was given his punishment. Not until many years afterwards, in 1881, was he released from Akershus prison. By then Maria had been dead for twenty-two years. She died in 1859, unmarried and without any heirs, apart from her apparently fatherless daughter, Kristine, who herself had a daughter after what we today would call a gang-bang, in 1863. My great
grandmother
, who was given the name Margrethe.’

‘And Maria never came forward with what she knew about the Trodalen murder?’

‘Not to anyone’s knowledge. She confided it to this.’ She gently patted the opened book with her hand. ‘The truth follows our family down from woman to woman.’

‘And now to me …’

‘But you swore an oath!’

‘Yes … and I stand by it. So many years afterwards, Mads Andersen’s reputation doesn’t count for so much, so long as his only descendant …’ With a flourish of my hand I indicated her. ‘… is happy to leave it like that.’

‘But the upshot of this, Varg, did you catch it?’

I nodded. ‘Never rely on what is said. A case is rarely what it seems at first glance.’

‘Then I’ve achieved what I set out to do,’ she said, closing the book with care and putting it on the bedside table. A fragrance arose from her body like mountain and sun, a scent of mothers past.

‘Is that everything?’

She rolled onto her side and slid open her thighs. ‘But I could easily handle a repeat performance,’ she said with a pert smile, pulling me close.

The day after was a depressing contrast, one long unbroken decline from the hectic breakfast at Hornnes, after which Grethe had to drive me in all haste to the hotel because she herself was in danger of arriving late for the morning meeting at work.

At the hotel the mood was one of leave-taking. A press
conference
had been set for twelve o’clock and the reporters who were still in Førde took the agenda as read. The next item would be the court case and the fixing of a date.

‘That’s bad,’ I concluded as soon as I had had my impression confirmed via a telephone conversation with Helge Haugen from
Firda Tidend
. The pathologist’s and the forensics report pointed very clearly in one direction, and Haugen said that a source of his at the police offices had ascertained that in the course of the day Jan Egil Skarnes would be charged with the double murder and held on remand until the case came to trial, incommunicado for the first four weeks.

I thanked him for the information and looked at my watch. There was still an hour and a half until the press conference.

In much the same way that Maria Hansdottir had her Trodalen Mads, Jan Egil had his Silje. It was the last loose thread. I decided to do a bit of unravelling and with the aid of the telephone
directory
found where Øygunn Bråtet had her office. She had her base in shared office space on the second floor of one of the
commercial
buildings to the south of the river, east of Lange Bridge.

A reticent secretary told me that Bråtet was extremely busy this morning. I turned on the last remnants of charm I had and against all the odds got to speak to her in the front office.

‘How can I help you?’ she said in a measured tone.

‘I was thinking about Silje. She’s something of a key character in this case.’

‘Not any more she isn’t.’

‘No?’

‘She’s withdrawn her confession.’

‘Really?’

‘She admitted she’d done it to help Jan Egil.’

‘And what caused her to change her mind?’

She looked at her watch. ‘A press conference has been called for twelve, Veum. All will be revealed then. You’ll have to turn up.’

‘Where’s Silje now?’

‘At home on the farm. But …’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t try and visit her. She’s not talking to anyone.’

‘It was more her foster parents I fancied a couple of words with.’

‘For what reason, if I might ask?’

‘Well … there’s the question of inheritance hanging in the air.
Fru
Almelid is, to my knowledge, the only heir to Libakk.’