Death By Water (55 page)

Do you understand me, Liss? Tell me you understand me.

You aren’t here any more. All that remains in the room is the sound of your footsteps crossing the floor. The sound of the door closing. The sound of the last words you said to me:
You killed Mailin.

Maybe
you know that whatever happens now is entirely up to you. Wander like a blind person. The unending drought. Or chance upon a few drops of water. A peace that passeth all understanding.

She reached Frognerseter Way and carried on down through the smell of cold exhaust. It started snowing again, but the wind had dropped by now. She passed the metro station, continued along the banks left by the snowplough. Her feet were still painful from the chilblains after being frozen at Morr Water. A steady stream of cars came towards her, splashing dirty snow over them.

She turned off when she reached the Riks Hospital and stamped her way along the road that twisted by Gaustad. The country’s first insane asylum, she knew that. Had stood there for more than a hundred and fifty years. Her father’s mother had been locked up in there for a few months before she died. Had she done it to herself? Had she twisted bed linen and clothes together into a rope and fastened it to the light fitting in the ceiling, looped it around her neck and kicked away the chair? No one talked about it; what happened had been deleted from history by silence. What was left of her? A few black-and-white photos of a beautiful woman, strange and distant.

On the path leading towards the lake at Sognsvann, the snow lay deep. Liss kept on walking. Heard the sound of her own footsteps. At one point she stopped and turned round, studied her tracks through the dense, driving snow. Soon they’ll be gone, she thought, and the thought latched on to another: He caught me just before I smashed to pieces. He threw me down, but never dropped me once.

By the time she reached the lake, she had made up her mind. She didn’t carry on up into the woods but took a right turn and headed across the car park. She stopped outside the entrance to the sports academy and sent a text message.

It took three minutes for Jomar Vindheim to come running down the steps.

– Sorry if I interrupted your lectures.

He stood there open mouthed, staring at her.

– Thought you ought to see the one-eyed troll after all, she said. – Because I’m sure you like going to freak shows and stuff like that.

He stepped closer. For the second time he laid a hand on her cheek. This time she didn’t take it away.

– There are two things I want to ask of you, Jomar.

– All right, he said.

– The first is that you take me home to your flat. Treat me the way you were going to that night we were supposed to be going out.

He stood there looking down into her good eye. Maybe he was searching for a code there, something that might explain what was happening.

– Liss … he said finally.

– I’ll tell you the other thing later, she interrupted. – My only condition is that you don’t talk about your grandfather. Not a single word.

He was thinly dressed, wearing only a T-shirt, but he put his arms around her as though she were the one who needed warming.

She stood naked by the living-room window on the ninth floor, trying to make things out through the driving snow. On a clear day I bet you can see a long way from here, she thought. The whole city and out over the fjord, down to Drøbak, maybe further …

Mailin hadn’t said anything to their mother about those nights at the house in Lørenskog. She’d wanted to protect her. Now there’s no one who knows what happened, thought Liss. No one but the person who went away and never came back. And me, who cannot bring it to the surface … That was where she must live from now on, in the place between what she could not remember, and what she would never be able to forget.

She heard Jomar getting out of the bed. He came into the room, crossing the floor. Hands around her from behind. They smelled of something that reminded her of sap, not too sweet, not too strong. It would be possible to learn to like these hands.

– The nurse at the hospital said you should be my girlfriend.

The way children talked to each other. She had to laugh at him.

– She probably meant for a while, she answered.

He pulled away and looked at her through the grey light.

– There are a lot of things I don’t understand about you, Liss. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ve got a long time to find out about them.

She looked down. – There were two things I was going to ask of you, she said. – Now I’ll tell you what the second one is.

It took almost three hours to drive into the city centre. Several times he pulled over to the side of the road, into a bus bay, or up on to the kerb, and turned off the engine. Sat looking out of the front window as she told her story. By the time he stopped at the barrier outside Oslo police station, it had become evening.

– I’ll come with you.

She shook her head.

– Then I’ll wait here, he insisted, pointing to an empty space on the other side of the little cul-de-sac.

– Jomar Vindheim, haven’t you understood a single thing?

– I’ll wait.

The girl behind the counter was about her own age. She was dark, with Asiatic features. There was a photo of her on the ID that was pinned to her uniform shirt.

– Yes, how can I help? she said in a voice pitched midway between friendly and dismissive.

– I want to talk to a detective chief inspector named Viken.

She’d thought about it. It had to be him.

– Viken from Violent Crimes? I can’t just …

– It’s about a murder.

The girl behind the counter blinked several time before she managed to say:

– Are you certain? Then we need to talk to the crime response unit.

Liss supported herself with both hands against the counter. – It happened a long time ago, more than a month. And it wasn’t here, it was in Amsterdam.

The girl picked up the phone. When she put it down again, she said:

– He’ll come and fetch you in about two minutes.

Liss waited by the column in the middle of the great hall. Through the windows at the top, up on the eighth floor, she saw that it had stopped snowing. She let her gaze drift down the galleries, towards the main exit. Two minutes, she thought. It’ll take him two minutes to finish what he’s doing, walk down that red corridor, take the lift and get down here. For the next two minutes it’s still possible to leave by that door with neither Viken nor anyone else here ever knowing why I came.

INTRODUCING TORKIL DAMHAUG’S
OSLO CRIME FILES