‘It’ll die down now that Hagavik’s been arrested. A case that’s been cleared up doesn’t have the same news value as an unsolved one.’
‘But he hasn’t confessed, Veum! That’s the devil of it! So long as there’s no confession, they’re free to speculate about everything imaginable, Satanism or worse.’
‘Worse?’
‘Yes!’ He lowered his voice and, after a pause, said: ‘We understand now, after the event, that Torild was mixed up in – all sorts. Drugs…’ He found it hard to get the word out: ‘P-prostitution!’ With a jerk of the head, like a bird catching an insect in flight, he added ‘But it was last autumn she went off the rails! After I lost control of her!’
‘Are you blaming your wife?’
‘I’m not blaming anybody! I’m just stating the facts… As recently as last Whitsuntide, when she was, she was – when we were down visiting her at a guide camp on Radøy…’
‘Yes, I heard about that. But your wife didn’t go.’
He looked at me in surprise. ‘What is it you’re referring to now?’
‘Your wife wasn’t with you when you two went to visit the girls. It was just you and Randi Furebø, had you forgotten?’
‘Forgotten?’ Again he ran his hand over his brow in that characteristic gesture of his. ‘No, but… so what?’
‘A few months later you and your wife separated.’
At last he seemed to get what I was driving at. ‘You mean there was supposedly a connection between, that… No, frankly, I hadn’t thought of that.’
He almost turned around in his seat, trying to convince me how wrong I was. ‘Listen, Veum. Firstly, Randi and Trond, Sidsel and I have been best friends for years, we’ve been on holidays together, we’ve shared dinners and breakfasts, been on school trips and goodness knows what else. Trond and I are mates; we share everything. If his car conks out, he borrows mine. If mine’s in for repairs, I can borrow his. But not our wives; we’ve always kept them to ourselves. Randi and I could have driven to the southern tip of Italy together, we could have slept in the car or in camping chalets together, but it would never even have occurred to me to go to bed with her!’
‘Really? She’s not that unattractive.’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about either! But she’s Trond’s wife, don’t you see? We’re mates!’
‘And your wife and Trond, do they have such high ideals too?’
‘Sidsel and Trond? If it’s that Whitsuntide trip you’re talking about, Sidsel was in poor shape, and anyway, she’s never been all that keen on driving, and Trond had gone hiking somewhere. I don’t remember exactly. Secondly, Veum, Sidsel and I split up after many years of wear and tear. There was no single event that triggered it off. It was just a gradual realisation, mainly on my part, that she and I had reached the end of the road, no mistake about it. We were way beyond the last warning sign, if you see what I mean. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk. From then on we were up the creek without a paddle. And thirdly, nothing of this has anything whatever to do with what happened to Torild!’
‘Apart from what you said yourself,’ I added, ‘that, because of this, of the new family situation, you no longer had any control over her.’
He threw up his hands. ‘And I stand by it. If I’d been at home, this wouldn’t have happened.’
I made no further comment on that particular point. To protect their own egos, everyone needed to come up with their own explanations. This was Holger Skagestøl’s version. His wife would have hers. My own experience told me that the truth lay somewhere in between.
I tried another tack. ‘So… Not that it’s any of my business actually, but who left whom?’
‘Exactly. Not that its any business of yours!’
After a few moments, he felt unable to leave it at that, all the same. He half turned towards me and demonstratively beat the left side of his breast. ‘A heart of stone, you see. There are far too many idiotic deserted men out there with visiting rights to their children once a week.’
‘Tell me about it!’
‘You won’t catch me in that brigade, Veum. I never look back. Never!’
‘“Never” is a strong word to use, Skagestøl. Too strong for most of us.’
He snorted, turned aside and looked out of the window.
The plane was making its approach to Stavanger’s Sola Airport now. As instructed, we fastened our seat belts, and the plane dipped down through the clouds. The sea lay beneath us, grey and surly, with the look of dishwater. The bathing beaches were deserted and slightly reminiscent of the bones of gigantic corpses picked clean.
Holger Skagestøl leafed idly through one of the papers, apparently irritated with himself for what he had said. We landed not long afterwards.
It might perhaps have been natural for us to share a taxi into town, since, despite everything, we had got to know one another a little. But neither of us made the necessary preliminaries, and eventually, he took a taxi in solitary splendour, while I took the airport bus into town.
Thirty-eight
WHEN YOU TRAVEL by plane from Bergen to Stavanger you just have to accept that you’ll spend longer on the bus and in your car than in the air, even when the traffic flows as smoothly into the centre of Stavanger as it did on the day I was supposed to die.
The fields round the city were sallow and bare, and the tops of the trees waved in the wind. Yet even now you could already feel why spring came earlier here than anywhere else in the country. There wasn’t a snowflake to be seen, only a few scattered patches up on Ryfylke moors. The sun sliced through the clouds at a sharp angle, cut through the windows of the bus and lay there smouldering on your skin. But when I got out of the bus, the blast from the sea was like the scratch of a dirty claw on my cheeks, and it sent a shudder down my spine. Winter still had the upper hand.
I got off at the cathedral, nodded discreetly at the statue of Alexander Kielland and surveyed the scene. The last time I’d been in Stavanger it had been a modern Klondike, a frenzy of activity, its sudden wealth sending prices through the roof. Now everything seemed to have calmed down again. The place had finally got used to its new status, a place where Neil Young, head held high, could sing ‘After the Gold Rush’ without being booed off the stage.
Stavanger was one of those places God forgot. Perhaps that was why so many chapels had been built there, in a vain attempt to make contact again. When they had eventually given up, they sold their souls to Mammon instead, even though the old neon letters proclaiming that jesus was the light of the world still shone like a monument from another age over Breiavatnet Water.
Stavanger was a city I’d felt ambivalent about over the years. From 1966 to 1969 I’d attended The School of Social Affairs there. To start with, I lived in rather miserable lodgings way out beyond Banevigå. In the year above there was a girl the same age as me from Jørpeland, a place opposite Stavanger. Her name was Beate Larsen, and in a colourful get-together at a sort of collective somewhere out towards Egeland, we ended up in the kitchen like two self-obsessed stand-up comics, oblivious of what was going on around us. The following day we took the bus out to Sola and walked hand-in-hand along the beach even though it was September and summer had long since departed south; and when we got back to town, she invited me up to her room, where we deepened our new acquaintance further. With her white thighs on either side of my head and my face deeply anchored in her fjord, I heard her Rogaland accent like a distant eenie, meenie, miney mo in the air above me: Oh yes, yes, oh yes, Varg!