– Liss, let the police do this.
She ignored him, navigated to the call list. Last call was outgoing: 11 December, at 19.03. She grabbed the pen that was hanging on the noticeboard and a piece of paper.
– What are you doing? He sounded as nervous as she was.
– I need this call list.
She opened the messages. Kept on taking notes. Found the one Mailin had sent to her: Keep Midsummer’s Day free next year. Call you tomorrow. By the time she was finished, she had covered two whole pages.
– Don’t you trust the police?
– Are you impressed by what they’ve done so far? she said as she navigated to the images file.
– She didn’t use the phone much for pictures, Viljam volunteered. – She bought herself a good-quality digital camera in the summer. Carried it with her almost everywhere.
It looked as though he was right. The last photo had been taken fourteen days earlier, obviously at a restaurant. Viljam’s face in golden-brown light.
He gave a quick smile. – Annen Etage. The evening we got engaged. I surprised her.
Liss opened the folder with video clips, sat there with her mouth open.
– What is it? Viljam stood up and walked round the table.
She pointed to the display. The last recording had been made on 12 December at 05.35.
– The day after she disappeared…
– Listen, Liss, I said we should let them have this straight away.
She didn’t answer. Pressed play.
Indoors, in darkness, difficult to make out detail. A torch is switched on, must be the person doing the filming who is holding it. A floor is illuminated. A few newspapers strewn about, some bottles. A figure lying there, tied to something.
– Mailin, Liss screamed, bit her lip without even noticing it.
The camera zoomed in, the torch was shone into the face. Suddenly Mailin’s voice: Are you there, is that light there?
– What’s the matter with her eyes? Liss whispered.
There was blood around her sister’s eyes, and they stared blindly into the light without blinking. What are you doing? Are you filming me?
Panning round the room, some crates stacked against a wall, a wheel next to two barrels. The camera turned back to Mailin’s face.
Sand…
She said something else, indistinctly. Then she shouted: Liss!
There was a cut. Then a glimpse of a building.
THAT EVENING AS I sat in darkness down by the beach listening to the sound of the breakers, I had almost made up my mind. Go down there and disappear into the darkness, let myself be swallowed up and consumed by the water, along with the Phoenician and all the other drowned bodies.
Then a figure appeared over by the stone steps. I had a feeling it was Jo. He passed by in the darkness without spotting me, wandered on through the sand. I could see he was taking his clothes off. That scrawny white boy’s body in the cold moonlight. I waited until he was undressed before getting up and sort of casually strolling up behind him. He was standing staring out to sea, still hadn’t noticed me. I saw there was a note in one of his shoes. There was something written on it, like Forget me, in big, scrawled handwriting. He was going to drown himself. I saved him, Liss. He saved me. On the beach that night, with the breakers washing in over our feet, we made a promise to each other, without a word being said.
PART III
1
Wednesday 24 December
JENNIFER PLÅTERUD STRUGGLED across the grass. The hill was coated with a layer of fresh snow some fifteen or twenty centimetres thick. It was Christmas Eve, approaching two o’clock, and still it hadn’t been cleared away. Trym, the elder of the boys, was on shovelling duty that day. The last thing she did before going out to shop was call up to his room and remind him of the fact. Now she was furious as she went over in her mind how she would confront him, firmly, but short and effective, so as not to ruin the Christmas mood. Trym was the phlegmatic type. It wasn’t something he got from her; on the contrary, he was exactly like his father. Only a touch worse. A characteristic like that was probably more strongly reinforced through the succeeding generations, she shuddered. The phlegm had accumulated in her husband’s family over the centuries, she had long ago realised. Now and then with an undercurrent of melancholy. As a pathologist Jennifer demanded the highest standards of scientific accuracy, and she was always dismissive of facile conclusions in the field of genetics, neurobiology and anything else that had to do with it. But when it came to psychology, to which she had a contemptuous attitude, she was oddly enough a sworn upholder of the ancient teaching about the four bodily fluids: depending which of these we have in the greatest abundance, one of four characteristics will be predominant. She herself was decidedly sanguine, but with a touch of the choleric, she had to admit. The fact that she had fallen for a man with quite the opposite characteristics – a brooding and silent bear from the other side of the world – and allowed herself to be transported to his much too cold and much too dark homeland only showed that opposites attract, another idea she sometimes advanced, with as little scientific basis as when applying it to the psychology of human beings.
In the hallway she put down her bags of shopping and pulled off her boots, which were made of antelope hide and had stiletto heels, and then called out to her oldest boy. She got no answer, not surprisingly, since the bass notes from his amplifier were making the ceiling above her shake. She was about to run upstairs to deliver the necessary rebuke when her mobile rang. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket.
– Flatland here.
The moment she heard that grey voice, she knew she had to be off. At the institute they had discussed who should be on duty over the Christmas weekend, and she had volunteered. As a rule, things were quiet on days like this; the odd call maybe, questions that could be dealt with over the phone. But Flatland was an experienced technician who never called about trivial matters.
Passing the crossing at Skedsmo on the slushy motorway, she took a quick look at her watch and assessed her chances of getting back in time for Christmas dinner at six o’clock. Missing the tidying up and the decorating was nothing to get upset about. And Ivar was cooking the rib of pork, the sausages and the sauerkraut. He was a keen and competent cook, and she would never get the hang of that Norwegian Christmas food anyway. She had introduced a few Australian traditions to the family. Stockings filled with small presents hung on the boys’ beds on Christmas morning. And in the afternoon, they would eat turkey and Yorkshire pudding, followed by mince pies with brandy butter.
She would even miss the traditional lighting of candles on her father-in-law’s grave, and the rice pudding at her mother-in-law’s that the boys, a few hours before their own Christmas meal, had to gorge themselves on in order to find the hidden almond. And then there was all the mulled wine, and as many ginger biscuits as they could get down while subjected to Grandma’s alternating cries of encouragement and admonishment. Ivar’s brothers and sisters and their children would also be there, and sitting there in the car Jennifer felt a relief that she would be getting out of it all.
Karihaugen appeared through the haze. She turned on the radio. Located a station she didn’t have to listen to. Eight days earlier, she had been unfaithful. It had happened so unexpectedly that she had to shut her eyes tightly every time she thought of it. Not from shame, but surprise. A man whom she had not remotely suspected she was attracted to. And maybe she wasn’t either, neither before nor after it happened. But he had turned her on in a way no one else had in years. Not since Sean. But that was different. She had been in love with Sean. More than that: unhappily and incurably obsessed from the moment he placed a hand on her shoulder in the lab. When he went back to Dublin, she would have gone with him unhesitatingly if he had suggested it. Of course she would have hesitated. But it might have ended with her leaving the boys and the farm and this wintry land… Sean was a scar that evoked a delicious pain when touched, and what had happened eight days earlier was fortunately nothing like that. Just frantically and crudely exciting. It began and ended there. Possible it might happen again, though not necessarily with him, but it might well force itself to the surface once again. That reminder of the part of herself that kept everything else going.