He had left her and skipped work afterwards, though unintentionally. Had lost six hours of a hundred per cent overtime and annoyed the fat-bellied firebrand of a foreman into the bargain. But he didn’t ring in. That would have been asking for an earful. So he sat up in bed, found her telephone number with a yawn and dialled.
Televerket automatically broke the connection. He put down the receiver and then picked it up again. Dialled the same number and let it ring, but without success. Until Televerket cut him off again.
The sound of a phone doesn’t carry. But if the flat is small and the door is open and banging, then it does. If the phone stops ringing, you know someone is at home. If it doesn’t, no one is at home. A problem emerges when all the indications tell you someone is at home, but the phone carries on ringing. The continuous ring is a signal, a warning that something is not right.
If you are washing the stairs, you don’t listen. But three-year-olds have not learned what you should or shouldn’t do.
Three-year-old Joachim had a little cloth in a bucket and of course the bucket tipped over at the bottom of the stairs between the second and third floor. Joachim smiled. ‘Wet’, he shouted and laughed, then started washing like mad. Until it was dry and Mummy had to go down with her bucket and give him a top-up. While she was there she noticed that Reidun Rosendal’s door was open. The door was banging. The lock kept knocking against the door-frame in the light draught there always was on this staircase. What was strange was the silence inside. Reidun had a small flat, so she ought to have been heard from inside the door. Mia Bjerke didn’t know Reidun that well, they just said hello, the way that neighbours do as they pass on the stairs.
But then, when she was halfway through the cleaning, the telephone rang inside the flat. For a long time, and when it finally stopped, it started up again. From the bottom of the steps, tiny Joachim said:
‘Ringing, Mummy!’ Twice he said that and twice she answered it was probably because Reidun, who lived there, wasn’t at home.
But then she opened the window on the landing between the floors to let air in and Joachim said that Reidun was at home. ‘You’re fibbing, Mummy!’ Joachim said.
For by opening the window Mia had created a kind of through-draught. Possibly because of a sudden gust of wind. At any rate, the draught was so strong that the door to Reidun’s bed-sit banged wide open.
‘Come here, Joachim!’ she called sharply. And Joachim listened to her. Perhaps because of the sound of his mother’s voice or perhaps because he was affected by the atmosphere that had developed on the staircase.
A naked foot on the floor of the bed-sit told Mia Bjerke that someone had been at home the whole time.
3
Inspector Gunnarstranda was taken aback by the sight of the figure opening the door. But not by her reaction, neither the look she gave him nor the one she cast afterwards at his ID. He knew this look, and was inured to it. For no natural authority emanated from his short, thin body. He was one metre sixty in his stockinged feet. All of his fifty-seven years had left their marks. His face was wrinkled and his pate shiny, almost bald. There was just a dishevelled clump of hair clinging on. He combed a few frugal wisps into position every morning, over from one ear to the other.
Gunnarstranda was conscious of his sad outward appearance. For this reason he was tolerant of her askance look, from top to bottom, as if he were an insect she had espied under the mat.
He unleashed his whitest smile by way of a response. Watched her confusion grow. Few people expected such a toothpaste-white row of teeth from such a short-arse in a threadbare coat, with nicotine-stained fingers and scorch marks on his shirt. Then there was all the dental work. A kind of porcelain. The finery that Edel had once paid for with her lottery winnings. ‘Finally we’re going to get your ugly mouth sorted out,’ she had said with her glasses well trained on the list of prizes. She must have been heartily sick of the cactus landscape in his cake-hole. He didn’t know. If that was why, she would never have said. So he had never asked. Edel always got her own way whatever happened. And now it was too late to ask. Four years too late.
The smile helped him on this occasion, as indeed it always did. The smile that obliterated the impression of scruffiness. The smile that caused people to fumble rather than punch him in the face. The rascally smile.
The woman returned his smile, and they were friends. She blinked, and consciousness returned. Moved to the side and held the door open, told him to make himself comfortable while she saw to her child in the kitchen.
He stood at his ease looking around the large, airy living room. A newly decorated flat. White jute wallpaper. Varnished parquet flooring without cracks or flaws. Curtains in light pastels hanging lightly over large windows. Simple expensive furniture, linen and dyed leather. On the floor some children’s games, even though a coffee table in thick, tinted glass and a glass display case suggested disciplined behaviour indoors.
On the walls were three originals by a modernist painter Gunnarstranda neither knew nor could name. But his seasoned eye soon detected the touch of class in a genuine signed oil canvas.
He found himself in a flat that distinguished itself by its youthful affluence.
Surprising.
In itself it was no strange thing to be in a pleasantly furnished flat in an apartment building in upper Grünerløkka. It was the elegance that caught his eye. Oil paintings and the style of the dignified woman he had made up his mind to like. She seemed dependable, despite her Oslo West-accented Norwegian. ‘Would you mind waiting in the living room,’ she had said. In the living room! Her pronunciation of the words made him pay attention to her choice of clothes. The jewellery around her neck. The manner with which she tackled the conflict between the child in the kitchen and his unspoken demands from the door.
On the sly, Gunnarstranda had studied her languorous gait from the hallway to the kitchen. The natural rotation of her hips. A lithe and well-proportioned woman of around thirty. Finished with her studies, he imagined. So, the sensible type. Job first, then children.
He stood by the window, looking down on to the street. Thought about the old days, skating in Dælenenga, the brewery horses, the sub-zero outside privies and the utility sink in the kitchen where you pissed at night.
And nowadays high society put down genuine parquet flooring over the old boards. Bizarre, he thought, posh folk tripping around in slippers so as not to scratch the floor. Here, in this old block.
A few years ago, it had been acceptable for snobs to live in lower Grünerløkka too, in Markveien and Thorvald Meyers gate. But most had shipped out now. Shipped up. Now he could confirm that the upper reaches of Grünerløkka were holding their own. And this was rather surprising. Because the woman in the flat shoes in the kitchen was, socially speaking, different compared with the Pakistani next door, who walked around in seventies clothing. His flat was furnished with flimsy, wobbly furniture from the Salvation Army shop. An unusually polite, plump man with fleshy cheeks and a toothbrush moustache. The type that shooed his wife straight into the kitchen the moment she shuffled in through the door. The man had been like a wind-up doll. Hands against his back and a rictus smile on his face. Hadn’t heard or seen a thing. Never did, and definitely not last weekend. Nevertheless the man did fit in here. Him and the two dilettantes on the floor above. Two tall, skinny hippies dressed in garish clothes, who were trying to grow marijuana on the window sill. The man fortyish and unemployed. The woman, barefoot in flares embroidered with flowers. Two living fossils from the sixties wading through piles of newspapers and half-empty wine bottles. Both were far too concerned to point out how little they knew of the world outside, above all on a Sunday morning when they were on their way back from a party.