In the Darkness Page 9

  ‘“Necessity is the mother of invention”,’ he said sharply. ‘You’re unusually punctual paying your bills at the moment. Compared to the time before Ms Durban died. You were late with everything then. It’s really quite admirable.’

  ‘What on earth do you know about that?’

  ‘I only had to make a phone call. To the council, to the power and phone companies. It’s funny, you know, when you ring from the police, information simply pours out.’

  She wavered for a second, made a great effort to pull herself together and met his gaze. Her eyes flickered like torches in a strong wind.

  ‘Was your daughter in the phone box with you?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘No she waited outside. It was so cramped in there. She takes up quite a lot of room.’

  He nodded to himself. She’d turned again, away from him. ‘But you knew that Durban and Einarsson were acquainted, didn’t you?’

  The question was a shot in the dark, and hung there in the room. She opened her mouth to reply, closed it again and opened it once more, while he waited patiently with his gaze fixed on her golden eyes. He felt like a bully. But she knew something, he had to get it out of her.

  She continued to struggle a little with her thoughts, then she mumbled: ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Lies,’ he said slowly, ‘are like sand. Have you ever considered that? The first is just a minute grain, but sooner or later you’ve got to go a bit further and add another to the first, so that they’re growing all the time and getting bigger and bigger. In the end they’re so heavy you can’t bear the weight.’

  She was silent. Her eyes filled, and she blinked rapidly a couple of times. And then he smiled. She stared at him a little confused, he was so different when he smiled.

  ‘Aren’t you ever going to paint with colours?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because reality isn’t black and white.’

  ‘Well, then it probably isn’t reality I’m painting,’ she said sullenly.

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know really. Emotions, perhaps.’

  ‘Aren’t emotions real?’

  There was no answer. She stood at the door a long time watching him as he went to the car, as if she wanted to hold him back with her eyes. And really wanted him to turn and come back.

  Afterwards he drove to his daughter’s house. He reached it just as Matteus had finished his bath. Warm and wet and with a thousand small glittering drops of water in his curly hair. He got into a pair of yellow pyjamas and looked just like a chocolate wrapped in gold paper.

  He smelt of soap and toothpaste, and the bath water still contained a shark, a crocodile, a whale and a watermelon-shaped sponge.

  ‘It’s high time,’ his daughter said with a smile, and embraced him, slightly embarrassed, because it was so long between visits.

  ‘It’s busy at work. But I’m here now. Don’t make anything extra, I’ll just have a sandwich if you’ve got one, Ingrid. And a coffee. Isn’t Erik at home?’

  ‘He’s playing bridge. I’ve got a pizza in the freezer, and cold beer.’

  ‘And I’ve got the car,’ he smiled.

  ‘And I’ve got the number of the taxi,’ she parried.

  ‘The way you twist things about!’

  ‘No,’ she laughed, ‘but I’ll twist this!’ She pinched his nose.

  He seated himself in the living room with Matteus and a gaudy children’s book of dinosaurs. The small, freshly bathed body was so warm in his lap that sweat began to prickle on his scalp. He read a few lines and ran his hand through the coal-black hair; he never ceased to be amazed at how crinkly it was, at how unimaginably small each individual curl was, and the feel of it against his hand. Not soft and silky like Norwegian children’s hair, but coarse, almost like steel wool.

  ‘Grandad going to sleep here?’ the boy said hopefully.

  ‘I’ll sleep here if Mum lets me,’ he promised, ‘and I’m going to buy you a Fina suit which you can wear when you’re mending your trike.’

  Later he sat on the edge of Matteus’s bed for a while, and his daughter could hear indecipherable mumblings from within. There were growlings and rumblings, probably supposed to be a rendering of some nursery rhyme or other. His musical abilities weren’t much to boast about, but it achieved the desired effect for all that. Soon Matteus had fallen asleep with his mouth half open, his small teeth shining like chalky-white pearls in his mouth. Sejer sighed, rose and sat down to eat with his daughter, who’d begun to be seriously grown up, and who was almost as beautiful as her mother had been, but only almost. He ate slowly and drank beer with the meal, registering all the while that his daughter’s house smelt exactly like his own had done while Elise was alive. She used the same detergents and the same toiletries, he’d recognised them on the bathroom shelf. She seasoned food in the same way her mother had done. And each time she rose to fetch more beer, he followed her movements clandestinely, and saw that she had the same walk, the same small feet and the same mannerisms when she spoke and laughed. Long after he’d gone to bed in what they called the guest room, which in reality was a tiny child’s bedroom that they hadn’t yet managed to fill, he lay thinking about it. He felt at home. As if time had stood still. And when he closed his eyes and shut out the strange curtains, everything was almost as it had been long ago. And perhaps, in the morning, it would be Elise who would come to wake him.

  Eva Magnus sat shivering in a thin nightie. She wanted to go to bed, but couldn’t seem to leave her chair. It was getting harder and harder to do the things she needed to, as if she felt the whole time that it was a wasted effort. She jumped when the phone rang, the clock told her it must be her father, nobody else phoned this late.

  ‘Yes?’ She got into a more comfortable position. She had to treasure the talks with her father, and they could be lengthy.

  ‘Eva Marie Magnus?’

  ‘Yes?’

  An unknown voice. She’d never heard it before, at least she didn’t think so. Who would ring so late in the evening, if they didn’t even know her?

  There was a small click. He’d hung up. Suddenly she began to tremble violently, she looked fearfully out of the windows and listened. All was quiet.

  Chapter 13

  INGRID HAD GIVEN him a tube of tar ointment. He sniffed it tentatively, wrinkled his nose and put it in the drawer. Then he stared at the pictures on the desk in front of him, of the beautiful Maja Durban and the somewhat more prosaic Einarsson, who was as bereft of force and manliness as she was bereft of innocence. He couldn’t imagine them knowing each other, moving in the same circles. Or even that they’d had acquaintances in common. But Eva Magnus was a link. She’d found Einarsson in the river, and for some reason she’d said nothing about it. She’d been friends with Durban and was one of the last people to see her alive. Only days separated their killings, and both frequented the south side, although that meant nothing, it was a small town.

  Two unsolved murders didn’t disturb his equilibrium, and he wasn’t capable of becoming stressed. Rather, he became dogged, even more attentive, as he organised and reorganised his thoughts in logical sequences, tried various juxtapositions and played the resulting possibilities to himself like short film clips. He made deeper inroads into what was really his leisure time, although he had enough of that for his own needs anyway. His whole intuition told him there was a connection between the two victims, although he lacked most of the hard facts. Could Einarsson have had an affair, even though the idea made his wife smile? Certainly, wives didn’t know everything. Apart from Elise, he thought, and realised all at once that he was blushing at the thought. He should have hauled Eva Magnus in and really piled on the pressure, but he couldn’t do that without reasonable grounds. She should have been in here on the other side of his desk, off balance and insecure, not as she was in her own home, but alone and anxious within this great edifice, this grey giant of a building which could break anybody. Easy enough to stick to a story
at home. My home is my castle. He should have had one of those old-fashioned mangles, and put her through it to see what got squeezed out. Probably black and white paint, he thought. Yet he had no grounds for bringing her in, that was the problem. She had done absolutely nothing illegal, she’d made a statement after Durban’s murder, and he’d believed her. She lived as most people did, took her daughter to playschool, painted, shopped for food, didn’t keep company of any sort, not even that of other artists. And it wasn’t a crime to pay your bills before they fell due. He cursed the fact that she’d been given such an easy ride from the start. He had believed her, that she knew absolutely nothing at all. And perhaps it was true that she’d met Durban quite accidentally. The fact that someone killed her the following evening must have been a shock. It might explain her strained manner when he’d visited her the first time. An almost quivering nervousness. But who, he thought again, finds a body in the river, shrugs their shoulders and goes for a meal at McDonald’s? And also, she had more money than she had before. Where had she got it from?

  He sat there sifting for a while, continually gazing out of the window, but seeing nothing except roofs and the tops of the tallest trees. It was a paltry view, but at least there was a bit of sky, and that was the most important thing. That was what the prisoners looked at, he thought, sitting in their cells. That was what they missed. The various colours, the changing light. The constant motion of the clouds. Sejer grunted, opened his desk drawer and took out a bag of Fisherman’s Friends. The phone rang just as he’d stuck two fingers in the bag. It was Mrs Brenningen down below in reception, she said she had a small boy with her who absolutely had to speak to him.

  ‘You’ll have to be quick,’ she said, ‘he wants a pee!’

  ‘A small boy?’

  ‘A skinny little lad. Jan Henry.’

  Sejer leapt to his feet and sprinted to the lift. It descended through the building almost noiselessly. He didn’t like the way it made so little sound, it would have made a solider impression if it had been more raucous. It wasn’t that lifts made him nervous or anything, it was just a thought.

  Jan Henry stood quietly in the wide space watching out for him. Sejer was moved when he saw the thin little figure; here in this large lobby he seemed even more lost. He took him by the hand and led him over to the toilets. He waited outside until he’d finished. Afterwards he looked very relieved.

  ‘Mum’s at the hairdresser,’ he explained.

  ‘Is she? So she knows you’re here?’

  ‘No, not that I’m here exactly, but she said I could go for a walk. It takes such a long time. She’s going to have curls.’

  ‘A perm? Yes, that’s no joke, takes about two hours,’ Sejer said knowledgeably. ‘Come up to the office with me and I’ll show you where I work.’

  He took the boy’s hand again and shepherded him into the lift, while Mrs Brenningen sent him a long, appreciative look. She’d witnessed the power play and got through most of her book’s intrigues. Now only the lust remained.

  ‘You probably don’t like Farris mineral water, Jan Henry,’ he said, looking round the office for something to offer him. Farris and Fisherman’s Friends were hardly the things to offer a small boy with all his taste buds unsullied and intact.

  ‘Yes, I like Farris. Dad used to give me some,’ he said contentedly.

  ‘That’s lucky then.’ He tugged a plastic cup loose from the stack above the sink, filled it and placed it on the desk in front of him. The boy took a long drink and burped gently. ‘How have you been keeping?’ he asked amicably and noticed that his freckles had multiplied.

  ‘Not too bad,’ he mumbled. And then added, as if in explanation for why he’d come: ‘Mum’s got a boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ he exclaimed, ‘so that’s the reason for the curls.’

  ‘I don’t know. But he’s got a motorbike.’

  ‘Has he? A Japanese one?’

  ‘BMW.’

  ‘No! Been on it?’

  ‘Only backwards and forwards between the clothes lines.’

  ‘That’s not too bad, perhaps the trips will gradually get longer. You wear a helmet, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And your mum, does she go on it?’

  ‘No, she’d rather die. But he’s trying to change her mind.’

  Sejer drank from the bottle and smiled. ‘It was nice of you to come, I don’t often get visits at work.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No, I mean, not visits like this one. Which are just nice. Which haven’t got anything to do with work, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Oh yes. But actually I’ve come with that note,’ he said quickly. ‘You said I should say if I remembered anything. About the note, that Dad had.’

  Sejer snapped his mouth shut and clamped himself to the edge of the desk. ‘The note?’ he stammered.

  ‘I found it in the garage. I sat on the bench for a few days and thought, just like you said. And when I closed my eyes I imagined Dad just as he was on that day – the day when he didn’t come back. And he’d got the note out of his pocket. And suddenly I remembered that he was lying under the car and pulled the note out of his pocket. He read it, and wriggled out a bit, and then he just stretched back, like this’ – he stretched one arm above his head and seemed to relinquish something in the air – ‘and put it down on a little shelf under the bench, right near the ground. I jumped down and looked, and there it was.’

  Sejer felt his blood pressure rising, but as it was low to begin with, his well-trained body experienced no strong physical effect. The boy had put his hand in his pocket. Now he held it out and in his fingers was a crumpled piece of paper.

  Sejer’s hands trembled, he flattened it out and read.

  There was the name Liland, and a phone number. The sheet of paper had been torn in two, as if there had perhaps been more writing. Liland?

  ‘Well done, young man!’ he said firmly, and poured more Farris. It was a local number and didn’t necessarily prove anything. He knew that much, after almost thirty years in the force. Despite everything, most people were honest, and there was nothing illegal about showing interest in a car. Especially not in an Opel Manta, which was an attractive proposition for anyone who liked German cars, he thought. If Einarsson really had expressed an interest in selling it. But he nodded contentedly and itched to snatch up the phone, he almost felt like having a roll-up, but he never brought the pouch with him to work, he only had a few nasty, dry cigarettes that he offered to others. Jan Henry deserved a little tour of the station, perhaps a quick look at one of the remand cells and an interview room. Einarsson’s killer had been on the loose for more than six months, an hour here or there made little difference. He took the boy’s hand and led him along the corridors. His hand was thinner than the strong, podgy fists that Matteus owned. I mustn’t forget that mechanic’s suit, he said to himself again, as he struggled to take small steps. He halted at the furthest cell and unlocked the door. Jan Henry peeked in.

  ‘Is that the toilet?’ he asked, pointing to a hole in the floor.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to sleep here.’

  ‘You won’t have to. Just do what your mum tells you.’

  ‘But the floor’s hot.’ He wiggled his toes inside his trainers.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. We don’t want them freezing to death.’

  ‘D’you look at them through the window?’

  ‘Yes we do. Come on, we’ll go out again. I’ll lift you up and you can take a look yourself.’

  The small body jumped up between his arms.

  ‘It looks just like what I thought it would look like,’ he said simply.

  ‘Yes. It looks like a prison, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Are there lots of prisoners here?’

  ‘We haven’t got many at the moment. There’s room for thirty-nine, but just now we’ve got twenty-eight. Mostly men, and a few women.’

  ‘Women as well?’


  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I didn’t know women went to prison.’

  ‘Didn’t you? Did you think they were nicer than us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ he whispered. ‘They are.’

  ‘But they must be allowed radios. Someone’s got music on.’

  ‘That’s coming from in there.’ Sejer pointed to a grey door. ‘There’s a cinema in there. And at the moment they’re watching a film called Schindler’s List.’

  ‘Cinema?’

  ‘They’ve got all they need here. Library, school, doctor, workshop. Most of them work while they’re inside, just at the moment they’re having a break. And they’ve all got to wash their own clothes, and they cook their own meals, in the kitchen upstairs. And then there’s an exercise room and an activities room. And when they need fresh air, we take them up on to the roof where there’s a roof garden.’

  ‘They’ve got everything, then!’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. They can’t take a stroll into town on a fine day and buy an ice cream. We can.’

  ‘Do they escape sometimes?’

  ‘Yes, but not very often.’

  ‘Do they shoot the guards and take their keys?’

  ‘No, it’s not as exciting as that. They break a window and climb down the side of the building, where they’ve usually got an accomplice waiting in a car. And we’ve had broken bones and concussion here, too. It’s a long way down.’

  ‘Do they tear the bedclothes into strips like in the films?’

  ‘No, no. They steal nylon rope from the workshop. They’re not in their cells most of the time, you see, they’re mainly moving around the building.’

  He took his hand once more, passed the security centre and pointed so that the boy could see himself on the monitor. He stopped and waved into the camera. Then they made their way to the lift. Afterwards he accompanied Jan Henry the two blocks to the hairdresser’s and saw him safely inside and ensconced on a flower-patterned Manila sofa. He strode back as fast as he could.