You don’t drown if you’re going to be hanged.
He didn’t know why the old saying had popped into his head.
Or why he was thinking about the blue dress.
Or Roar Bohr.
A noise was getting closer.
Roar Bohr. Blue dress. Younger sister. Norafossen. Twenty metres. Smashed on the rocks.
And when he emerged into the light, the water became a white wall of bubbles ahead of him, and the noise rose to a rumbling roar. Harry felt beneath him, grabbed hold of the back of the seat, took a deep breath, pulled himself under the water as the front of the car tipped forward. He stared through the water, through the windshield, straight down into something black, where cascades of white water splintered into white nothingness.
Part 3
40
Dagny Jensen looked out at the schoolyard, at the rectangle of sunlight that had started over by the caretaker’s house that morning, but that now — towards the end of the school day — had moved to right below the staffroom. A wagtail was hopping across the road. The large oak tree was in bud. What was it that had suddenly made her notice buds everywhere? She looked across the classroom, where the students were hunched over their English coursework and the only sound breaking the silence was the rhythmic scratch of pencils and pens. It was actually their homework, but Dagny’s stomach had been hurting so badly that she hadn’t felt up to doing what she had been looking forward to, a study of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. About Charlotte, who had worked as a teacher and had preferred an independent life to entering into a socially acceptable marriage with a man whose intellect she didn’t respect, an almost unheard-of idea in Victorian England. About the orphaned Jane Eyre, who falls in love with the master of the house where she works as a governess, the apparently brusque and misanthropic Mr. Rochester. About how they declared their love for each other but that she — when they were about to get married — discovered that he was still bound to his wife. Jane leaves and meets another man who falls in love with her, but to Jane he is no more than a mediocre surrogate for Mr. Rochester. And the tragic, happy ending where Mrs. Rochester is killed so that Jane and Mr. Rochester can finally be together again. The famous exchange where Mr. Rochester, defaced by the fire that destroyed the house, asks: “Am I hideous, Jane?” And she replies: “Very, sir; you always were, you know.”
And right at the end, the tear-jerking chapter in which Jane gives birth to their child.
Dagny felt sweat break out on her forehead when another jolt of pain cut through her stomach. The pains had been coming and going over the past couple of days, and the indigestion pills she had been taking hadn’t helped. She had made an appointment to see her doctor, but that wasn’t until next week, and the thought of having to spend a week in this much pain was anything but appealing.
“I’m just popping out for a couple of minutes,” she said, and stood up.
A few faces looked up and nodded, then concentrated on their schoolwork again. They were good, industrious students. A couple of them were genuinely talented. And sometimes Dagny couldn’t help herself dreaming about one day, after she had retired from teaching, when one of them — one of them would be enough — called to thank her. Thank her for showing them a world that was about more than vocabulary, grammar and the most basic nutrients of the linguistic world. Someone who had found and been inspired by something during her English lessons. Something that put them on the track to creating something themselves.
When Dagny came out into the corridor outside the classroom a policeman got up from his chair and followed her. His name was Ralf, and he had taken over guard duty from Kari Beal.
“Toilet,” Dagny said.
Katrine Bratt had assured Dagny that she would have a bodyguard with her for as long as they thought Svein Finne was a threat to her. Katrine and Dagny hadn’t spoken about the reality: that it wasn’t a question of how long Finne was free, or alive, but how long Bratt’s budget or Dagny’s patience could last.
The school corridors had a peculiar silence when lessons were taking place, as if they were resting between the bursts of frantic activity that occurred whenever there was a break. Like the periodical cicadas that swarm around Lake Michigan precisely every seventeen years. She had been invited to the next swarm by an uncle over there who said you just had to experience it, both the intense music of billions of insects, and the taste. The cicadas were apparently related to prawns and other shellfish, and he had told her during a meal of prawns on his visit to Norway that they could be eaten the same way: hold the hard shell tightly, remove the feet and head, and pull out the soft, protein-rich parts. It didn’t sound particularly appetising, though, and she never took invitations from Americans seriously, especially when they were — if she had calculated correctly — for 2024.
“I’ll wait here,” the policeman said, stopping outside the girls’ bathroom.
She walked in. Empty. She went into the last of the eight cubicles.
She pulled down her trousers and underwear, sat down on the toilet, leaned forward, then pushed the door to lock it. She discovered that it wouldn’t close properly. She looked up.
There was a hand sticking between the door and the frame, four large fingers, one of them with a ring in the shape of a snake. And in the palm of the hand she could see one edge of a hole that went right through.
Dagny just managed to take a deep breath before the door was thrown open and Finne’s hand shot forward, grabbing her by the throat. He held the snake-like knife up in front of her face, and his voice whispered right next to her ear:
“So, Dagny? Morning sickness? Stomach ache? Weak bladder? Tender breasts?”
Dagny closed her eyes.
“We can soon find out,” Finne said, then slipped down onto his knees in front of her and, putting the knife into a sheath inside his jacket without taking his hand from her throat, pulled something that looked like a pen from his pocket and stuck it between her thighs. Dagny waited for it to touch her, penetrate her, but it didn’t happen.
“Be a good girl and pee for Daddy, will you?”
Dagny swallowed.
“What’s wrong? That is what you came in here for, isn’t it?”
Dagny wanted to do as he said, but it was as if all her bodily functions had frozen, she didn’t even know if she’d be able to scream if he loosened his grip.
“If you don’t pee before I count to three, I’ll stick the knife in you, then into the idiot standing out in the corridor.” His whispered voice made every word, every syllable, sound like an obscenity. She tried. She really did try.
“One,” Finne whispered. “Two. Three... There, that’s right! Clever girl...”
She heard the trickle hit the porcelain, then the water.
Finne pulled the hand holding the pen towards him and put it on the floor. He wiped his hand on the toilet roll hanging from the wall.
“In two minutes we’ll know if we’re pregnant,” he said. “Isn’t that wonderful, darling? Pens like this, they didn’t exist, we couldn’t even dream of things like this the last time I was free. And just imagine all the wonderful things the future is going to bring. Is it any wonder that we want to bring a child into this world?”