The Last Fix (37 page)

    The
woman who answered the door was plump around the waist and had unusually big
bags under her eyes and reddish, curly hair. Frølich remembered her from
the funeral. She was the woman with a handbag permanently hanging from her arm,
who had shaken Annabeths's hand after the service.

    Frølich
introduced himself. There was a burning in the woman's eyes, a muted yellow
glow, a spirit flame nourished by the bags under both eyes.

    'Long
way from home here,' she said. 'This is Buskerud.'

    Frølich
responded with a smile worthy of a TV preacher. 'My main reason for coming is
to talk about Katrine on… an informal basis,' he said, patiently placing his
hands on his hips.

    'Why's
that?'

    'To
get to know her background… upbringing… just to know a little more.'

    A big
lock of curly, red hair fell across her brow. The woman stroked the hair away
with a club of a hand. Her fingers were short and stubby, and inflamed with eczema.

    'I
would have liked to ask you in, but it's a mess here.'

    'We
can go for a walk,' Frølich said blithely.

    'Stroll
round the estate with the police? You've got to be joking!'

    She
turned her head and looked daggers at his profile. Hers were the eyes of a
deranged bird the second before it flies at someone. Frølich looked away
and noticed that the grey, damp-damaged wood was coming through the paintwork on
the front door. A leak, he thought, and noticed why the steps were crooked. The
base was beginning to rot.

    The
silence lasted for what seemed an eternity. An insect - a bug of some
description - with six legs and a three-sided shell lumbered cautiously along
the hand rail of the steps. Its two feelers looked like aerials and the creature
flourished its antennae in the same way that the blind tap with a stick to
detect dangers ahead. Wonder if it knows where it's going, thought Frølich.
He looked up again to meet the woman's fierce gaze.

    'Well,
you'd better come in then,' said the woman at last, turning with difficulty.

    'Sit
wherever you like, but not in the cat's chair,' she panted, brushing the lock
of hair off her brow again. It fell back at once. She pushed forward her lower
lip and blew it away. 'That's the cat's chair. If you sit there you'll have to
go home and wash your trousers right away!'

    Frølich
looked around and found the kitchen, where the sun was coming in through the
window and making the stains on the floor shine with a dry, matt lustre. He
took a wooden chair from the little table under the window and carried it into
the sitting room.

    'She
hadn't been home for a long time… to visit you… before she died, I mean… had
she?' he asked, sitting down.

    'She
never came home.'

    Frølich
said nothing in the silence that followed this outburst.

    'Well,
now she's dead, and it's sad, but things were bound to go wrong for her. She
was a pathological liar who knocked about with boys and men from the time she
was so big.' One club-shaped hand indicated a height of a metre off the floor.

    'What
do you mean by a pathological liar?'

    'That's
what she was. She lied about everything and everyone, and nothing was good
enough. I wasn't good enough. When she dropped by a couple of years back I
cooked for her. I remembered the food she had always loved as a child. But it
wasn't good enough. No, you should have seen the woman with her, the fine lady
who wouldn't accept any of my things, walking round the sitting room with her
arms crossed as though frightened she would be infected by some disease. These
people drove expensive cars and ate more elegant food. I wasn't good enough.
No, Katrine had a high opinion of herself. She thought she came from better
stock, her, the daughter of someone who couldn't take care of her own
children.'

    'You
adopted her, didn't you?'

    'Yes,
we did.'

    Frølich
waited for more. It didn't seem to be forthcoming. In the ensuing silence Frølich
considered how to formulate his next question. But to his surprise she spoke up
first: 'Katrine was fond of her father. My husband. They were inseparable. And
for as long as he was alive she was all right. But then he died, of cancer.
When she was eleven, I think. And she was a difficult teenager. We never really
got along.'

    Frølich
cleared his throat.

    She
interrupted, 'Now they'll be together, at last. I'll put her urn on his grave.'

    Frølich
tried to read what lay hidden behind the cheerless eyes, but gave up. When the
silence had lasted long enough he asked in a light tone: 'Why adoption?'

    'I
couldn't have any children.'

    'I
mean… why Katrine?'

    'Her
real mother was dead. That was all we knew. And then Fredrik died a few years
later. Yes, and then it wasn't many more years before I had the task of chasing
the men away. That was Katrine's problem. She never got over losing her
father.'

    'What
did she die of, Katrine's biological mother?'

    'No
one knows. But that fed the girl's imagination of course. She fantasized about
everything from here to Monaco.'

    Frølich
nodded and lowered his eyes. He didn't like to think about children with
unattainable dreams.

    'You
know, she thought about plane crashes and car accidents, reckoned her real
origins were the Soria Maria palace.'

    Frølich
recalled a job he had been on years ago, with two others as muscle for the
child welfare authorities - a case of gross neglect as a result of which the
child had been placed with the social services. The girl had been around seven.
How old was she now? Eighteen? Nineteen?

    'But
the woman could have been a drug addict or could have died of cancer like my
husband for all I knew. We were told nothing and didn't want to ask. We didn't
want to know.'

    'Does
the name Raymond Skau mean anything to you?' Frølich asked.

    She
pulled a bitter grimace.

    'So
you do know the name?'

    She
nodded. 'He was the one who got her into the mess. Much older than her. He was
one of the worst good-for-nothings round here. Moved to Oslo as well. He's off
the scene now, but they were a couple. She moved in with him as soon as she was
old enough.'

    'How
old was she then?'

    'Fifteen
maybe… or sixteen? I went there, I did, and dragged her back. He even tried to
go for me.
Be careful,
he shouted.
I'm warning you. I've got a black
belt in karate!
Well, I mean to say. But I gave him a mouthful.
Go home
and get it then and I'll whip your back with it!
I said.'

    Frølich
proffered a courteous smile.

    Beate
Bratterud smiled, too. 'Yes, it's easy to laugh now, after the event. But it
went wrong of course. For Katrine, I mean. It's a terrible thought. Even though
it was good that she managed to get out of the mess. But it was a pity she
couldn't do it without bitterness. She needn't have been ashamed of me, or her
home. We gave her what she needed and we fought for her. We did. But you have
to say that she didn't have it easy.'

    Frølich
stood up. 'Excuse me for a couple of minutes,' he said, taking his mobile phone
from his jacket pocket. He tapped in Gunnarstranda's number and sent a cheery
smile to the cheerless face on the other side of the table.

    It
rang three times.

    'Please
be brief.'

    'It's
me,' Frank said.

    'Spit
it out.'

    'Thanks
for everything last night,' Frølich said in a crabbed tone. Then he went
on: 'I'm at Katrine Bratterud's house, as we arranged. She says Raymond Skau
comes from here. She knows Skau, who it seems was Katrine's boyfriend during
her teens. I suppose he got her on to the streets.'

    'Well,
well,' Gunnarstranda said eagerly. 'Go on.'

    'That
was all for the moment.'

    'We'll
have to see what significance that has,' the voice on the telephone said. 'Some
activity in Skau's flat has been reported. If you jump into your car now you
may be able to catch them interviewing him.'

    Frølich
rang off and sat staring at the mobile in his hand. After a while he put it in
his pocket. 'You say Katrine fantasized about her origins,' he said, looking up
at Beate Bratterud. 'What do you mean by that?'

    'What
I said.'

    Frølich
waited.

    'Sometimes
her origins were all she had in her head. But she never did find out anything.'

    'In
practical terms, what did she do?'

    'Well,
now you're asking. Salvation Army maybe.

    Social
services couldn't help. I could have told her that. These women at social
services can endure the job for about two years and then they're burnt out.
Those that aren't just stand there going on about client confidentiality. The
only people who could tell her anything about welfare cases twenty years ago
are the welfare cases themselves. I told her, but I don't think she was
listening. I don't think she had much luck tracing her parents.' Beate
Bratterud sat up straight in her chair. 'In the years after my husband died all
this stuff took over full-time. They were very close. Katrine and Fredrik But
she never liked me. I was never good enough.' The woman with the curly hair
rose to her feet with difficulty, lumbered over to a worktable in the corner
and pulled out a drawer. She returned with a small box. In the box there were
photographs. 'Here,' she said taking out the photos, looking at some,
discarding them or passing them to the policeman, who studied them with polite
interest. They were younger versions of Beate with long, curly hair. She was
slimmer and her face was less lined. In one photo she was smiling; her teeth
were straight and pointed inwards, like fish teeth. Frølich examined the
smile and wondered whether it would be true to say that she had been
good-looking.

    Beate
passed him the whole box and clumped off to another chest of drawers. He
flipped through the photos and found a folded, yellowing newspaper cutting. He gently
unfolded it in his lap. It was a page from
Verdens Gang.
He read the
date in the top corner: 11 July 1965. The page was dominated by a girl in a
bikini posing on a diving block in a swimming pool. She had curls flowing down
to her shoulders and was a bit podgy around the thighs and stomach.
Today's
VG girl is Beate,
the caption ran. Frank subjected the newspaper cutting to
closer scrutiny. Yes, that was a younger version of Beate Bratterud. He looked
up and met her doleful eyes.

    'The
years pass,' she said in a sullen tone, turned and began to rummage through
another drawer. Frølich had no idea what to say, but felt it would be
wrong not to compliment her. He cleared his throat. 'Wow.'

    She
turned.

    He
lifted up the cutting.

    'Yes,
I heard you,' she said.

    He
could feel the blush warming his cheeks and concentrated on the photos again.
They were pictures of strangers in the Constitution Day procession on 17 May -
young people wearing flared pants, a young woman with a pram and a group
photograph in the park. In a few pictures there was a dark, thin man with
brushed back hair and elegant features. And there were a few of Katrine -
blonde and very good-looking with a sensual, slightly puffed-up lip. She didn't
look much like her foster parents.

    'There
was a photo I thought I would show you,' Beate mumbled and finally found what
she was looking for. 'Look here…'

    The
picture was of the thin man arm in arm with Katrine - in front of a wooden gate
- a woodland track lined with spruce trees in the background. The father's arm
was round the daughter's shoulder while she squeezed his waist. Two people who
loved each other.

    'We
met in the way that people did in the old days,' she said dreamily from the
other chair.

    Frølich
raised his eyebrows. 'You and your husband?'

    'Yes,
nowadays people advertise in the paper to get to know each other, or through
the internet or goodness knows what else. I wouldn't be surprised if you can
ring up for a partner, but in the old days… in the old days you went to dances…'