Don't Look Back (27 page)

"What do you call Eddie?" he asked.

"I call him Papa," she said.

"And your real father?"

"I call him Father," she said simply. "That's what I've always called him. It's what he wanted; he was always so old-fashioned."

Was. As if he no longer existed.

"I hear a car!" she said, sounding relieved.

Holland's green Toyota pulled up in front of the house. Sejer saw Ada Holland set one foot on the gravel and cast a glance at the window.

"That bird, Sølvi, could I have it?" he said quickly.

"The broken bird? Sure, take it."

She handed it to him with an inquisitive look.

"Thanks. I won't disturb you any longer," he said, and left the room. Tucking the bird into an inside pocket, he went back to the living room, leaned against the wall, and waited.

The bird. Torn from Eskil's headstone. In Annie's room. Why?

Holland came in first. He nodded and held out his hand, with his face turned away. There was something resigned about him that hadn't been there before. Mrs. Holland went to the kitchen to make coffee.

"Sølvi's going to have Annie's room," Holland said. "So it won't stand there empty. And we'll have something to keep us busy. We're going to take out the dividing wall and put up new wallpaper. It'll be a lot of work."

Sejer nodded.

"I have to get something off my chest," Holland said. "I
read in the paper that an eighteen-year-old boy was taken into custody. Surely Halvor couldn't be the one who did this? We've known him for two years. It's true that he's not an easy person to get to know, but I have good instincts about people. Not to insinuate that you don't know what you're doing, but we just can't imagine Halvor as a murderer, we just can't, none of us can."

Sejer could. Murderers were like most people. Maybe he'd blown his father's head off, killed him in cold blood as he slept.

"Is Halvor the one in custody?"

"We've released him," Sejer said.

"Yes, but why was he taken into custody?"

"We had no choice. I can't tell you any more than that."

"So as not to prejudice the investigation?"

"That's right."

Mrs. Holland came in with four cups and some cookies in a bowl.

"But has something else come up?"

"Yes." Sejer stared out the window, searching for something that would divert their attention. "For the time being I can't say much."

Holland gave him a bitter smile. "Of course not. I imagine we'll be the last people to find out. The newspapers will know long before we do, when you finally catch the killer."

"That's not true at all." Sejer looked into his eyes, which were big and gray like Annie's. They were brimming with pain. "But the press is everywhere, and they have contacts. Just because you read something in the paper doesn't mean that we've given them the information. When we make an arrest, you will be told, I promise you that."

"No one told us about Halvor," Holland said in a low voice.

"That's because, quite simply, we don't think he was the right person."

"Now that I think about it, I'm not sure that I even want to know who did it."

"What are you saying?"

Ada Holland was staring at him in dismay.

"It doesn't matter any more. It's like the whole thing was an accident. Something unavoidable."

"Why do you say that?" she asked in despair.

"Because she was going to die anyway So it doesn't matter any more."

He stared down at his empty cup, picked it up and began swirling it, as if trying to cool off the hot coffee that wasn't there.

"It
does
matter," Sejer said, stifling his anger. "You have the right to know what happened. It may take time, but I'll find out who did it, even if it turns out to be a very long process."

"A very long process?" Holland smiled, another bitter smile. "Annie is slowly disintegrating," he said.

"Eddie!" Mrs. Holland said in anguish. "We still have Sølvi!"

"You have Sølvi."

He stood up and left the room, disappearing somewhere in the house. Neither of them went after him. Mrs. Holland shrugged her shoulders dejectedly.

"Annie was a daddy's girl," she said.

"I know."

"I'm afraid that he'll never be the same again."

"He won't. Right now he's getting used to being a different Eddie. He needs time. Perhaps it will be easier when we do discover the truth."

"I don't know whether I dare find out."

"Are you afraid of something?"

"I'm afraid of everything. I imagine all kinds of things up there at the lake."

"Can you tell me about it?"

She shook her head and reached for her cup. "No, I can't.
It's just things that I imagine. If I say them out loud they might come true."

"It looks as if Sølvi is managing all right," he said, to change the subject.

"Sølvi is strong," she said, suddenly sounding confident.

Strong, he thought. Yes, maybe that
is
the proper term. Perhaps Annie was the weak one. Things began whirling through his mind in a disquieting way. Mrs. Holland went out to get cream and sugar. Sølvi came in.

"Where's Papa?"

"He'll be right back!" Mrs. Holland called from the kitchen in a firm voice, perhaps in the hope that Eddie would hear her and reappear. It's bad enough that Annie is dead and gone, Sejer thought. But now her family is falling apart, the welded seams are failing, there are big holes in the hull, and the water is gushing in, and she's stuffing old phrases and commands into the cracks to keep the ship afloat.

She poured the coffee. Sejer's fingers were too big for the handle and he had to hold the cup in both hands.

"You keep talking about why," she said wearily, "as if he must have had a good reason for doing it."

"Not a good reason. But the killer had a reason, which at that moment seemed to him to be the only choice."

"So evidently you understand them—these people that you lock up for murder and other appalling crimes."

"I couldn't stay in the job otherwise." He drank some more coffee and thought about Halvor.

"But surely there must be some exceptions."

"They're rare."

She sighed and glanced at her daughter. "What do you think, Sølvi?" she said. Softly, using a different tone than he'd heard her use before, as if for once she wanted to penetrate that carefree blond head of her daughter's and find an answer, maybe even one that would make sense of it all. As if the only
daughter she had left might be a different person than she had initially thought, maybe more like Annie than she knew.

"Me?" Sølvi stared at her mother in surprise. "For my part I've never liked Fritzner across the street. I've heard that he sits in his dinghy in his living room and reads all night long, with the oarlocks full of beer."

Skarre had turned off most of the lights in his office. Only the desk lamp was on, sixty watts in a white spotlight on his papers. A gentle, steady hum came from the printer as it spewed out page after page, covered with perfect text, set in Palatino, the typeface he liked best. In the background, as if from far away, he heard the door open and someone come in. He was about to look up to see who it was but just at that moment the pages tumbled off the printer. He bent down to get them, straightened up, and discovered that something was sliding into his field of vision, across an empty page. A bronze bird sitting on a perch.

"Where?" he said at once.

Sejer sat down. "At Annie's house. Sølvi has inherited her sister's things, and this was among them, wrapped in newspaper. I went out to the cemetery. It fits like a glove." He looked at Skarre. "Someone could have given it to her."

"Who?"

"I don't know. But if she went there and took it herself, really went there, under cover of darkness, and used some kind of tool to break it off the headstone, then that's quite an unscrupulous thing to do."

"But Annie wasn't unscrupulous, was she?"

"I'm not entirely sure. I'm not sure about anything any more."

Skarre turned the lamp away from the desk so that it made a perfect half-moon on the wall. They sat and stared at it. On impulse, Skarre picked up the bird, gripping it by its perch, and held it up to the lamp with a swaying motion. The shadow it made in the white moon was like a giant drunken duck on its way home from a party.

"Jensvoll has resigned from his job as coach of the girls' team," Skarre said.

"What did you say?"

"The rumors are starting to circulate. The rape conviction has come out, and it's hovering over the waters. The girls stopped showing up."

"I thought that would happen. One thing leads to another."

"And Fritzner was right. Things are going to be tough for a lot of people now, until the murderer is caught. But that will happen soon, because by now you've worked it all out, haven't you?"

Sejer shook his head. "It has something to do with Annie and Johnas. Something happened between the two of them."

"Maybe she just wanted a keepsake to remind her of Eskil."

"If that was it, she could have knocked on the door and asked for a teddy bear or something."

"Do you think he did something to her?"

"Either to her or maybe to someone else she had a relationship with. Someone she loved."

"Now I don't follow you—do you mean Halvor?"

"I mean his son, Eskil. He died because Johnas was in the bathroom shaving."

"But she couldn't very well blame him because of that."

"Not unless there's something unresolved about the way Eskil died."

Skarre whistled. "No one else was there to see what happened. All we have to go on is what Johnas said."

Sejer picked up the bird again and gently poked at its sharp
beak. "So what do you think, Jacob? What really happened on that November morning."

Memories flooded over him as he opened the double glass doors and took a few steps inside. The hospital smell, a mixture of antiseptic and soap, combined with the sweet scent of chocolate from the gift shop and the spicy fragrance of carnations from the flower stand.

Instead of thinking about his wife's death, Sejer tried to think about his daughter Ingrid on the day she was born. This enormous building held memories of both the greatest sorrow and the greatest joy of his life. Back then he had stepped through these same doors and noticed the same smells. Involuntarily he had compared his own newborn daughter to the other infants. He thought they were redder and fatter and had more wrinkles, and that their hair was more rumpled. Or they were born prematurely and looked like undernourished miniature old men. Only Ingrid was utterly perfect. The recollection helped him to relax at last.

He was not arriving unannounced. It had taken him exactly eight minutes on the phone to locate the pathologist who had overseen the autopsy of Eskil Johnas. He made it clear in advance what he was interested in, so they could find the files and reports and get them out for him. One of the things he liked about the bureaucracy, that unwieldy, cumbersome, difficult system that governed all departments, was the principle that everything had to be recorded and archived. Dates, times, names, diagnoses, routines, irregularities, everything had to be in the file. Every facet of a case could be taken out and reexamined, by other people with different motives, with fresh eyes.

That's what he was thinking as he got out of the elevator. He noticed the hospital smell grow stronger as he walked along the corridor of the eighth floor. The pathologist, who had
sounded staid and middle-aged on the phone, turned out to be a young man. A stout fellow with thick glasses and soft, plump hands. On his desk stood a card file, a phone, a stack of papers, and a big red book with Chinese characters on it.

"I have to confess that I took a quick glance at the case file," the doctor said. His glasses made him look as if he were in a constant state of fear. "I was curious. You're a chief inspector. Isn't that what you said?"

Sejer nodded.

"So I'm assuming that there must be something unusual about this death?"

"I have no opinion about that."

"But isn't that why you're here?"

Sejer looked at him and blinked twice, and that was all the answer he gave. When he remained silent, the doctor started talking again—a phenomenon that never ceased to amaze Sejer, one that had produced numerous confessions over the years.

"A tragic case," the pathologist said, looking down at the papers. "A two-year-old boy. An accident at home. Left without supervision for a few minutes. Dead on arrival. We opened him up and found a total obstruction of his windpipe, in the form of food."

"What type of food?"

"Waffles. We were actually able to unfold them, they were practically whole. Two whole, heart-shaped dessert waffles, folded together into one lump. That's an awful lot of food for such a small mouth, even though he was a sturdy boy. It turned out that he was quite a greedy little fellow, and hyperactive too."

Sejer tried to picture the waffle iron that Elise used to have, with five heart shapes in a circle. Ingrid's iron was a more modern kind with only four hearts that weren't properly round.

"I remember the autopsy clearly. You always remember the very sad cases; they stay in your mind. Most of the people we see, after all, are between eighty and ninety years old. And I remember the waffle hearts lying in the bowl. Children and dessert waffles go together. It seemed especially tragic that they should have caused his death. He was sitting there having such a good time."

"You said 'we.' Were there others working with you?"

"Arnesen, the head pathologist, was with me. I had just been hired back then, and he liked to keep an eye on the new people. He's retired now. The new departmental head is a woman." The thought made him glance down at his hands.

"Two whole waffles shaped like hearts. Had he chewed them?"

"No, apparently not. They were both nearly whole."

"Do you have children?"

"I have four," he said happily.

"Did you think about them when you were doing the autopsy?"

The doctor gave Sejer a look of uncertainty, as if he didn't quite understand the question.