Scarred (14 page)

The sound of footsteps wakes up Trine Juul-Osmundsen. At first she is startled and wonders where she is before she remembers it could be one of her bodyguards who might have gone outside for some fresh air. But she doesn’t recognise the noise. It’s a small, hard stomping not made by shoes.

She sits up on the sofa bed in the living room and instantly feels the pounding in her head. Even getting to a sitting position is enough to make her nauseous. She groans and touches her temples. She screws up her eyes and sees the empty bottle of St Hallvard’s in front of her. Her stomach churns at the sight. Nevertheless she gets up and opens the curtains. A grey hare hops away. It was sitting on the hilltop, Tissetoppen, as they used to call the little mound on the side of the cabin that overlooks the sea where Henning used to go for a pee in the evening before they climbed into the bunk beds in the narrow bedroom.

The light outside is sharp and hurts her head. Her mouth is filled with dry cotton wool and the taste of cigarettes lingers on her tongue. Her laptop is open on the dining table. Last night, in between shots of liqueur, she tried to reconstruct her movements on 9 October. She remembered how she sneaked out of Hotel Caledonien and got into a car that was waiting at the goods entrance, a car that took her straight to Kjevik Airport. How she arrived at a different hotel an hour and a half later. The run she went for that same evening to rid herself of some of the anxiety that was coursing around her body at the thought of what she was going to do the next day. Trine even looked up her running profile on a street map, just to assure herself that her memory was correct.

She also tried to find a name and face among all her enemies, but she couldn’t think of a single one. Or, that is to say, the more she drank, the more potential candidates sprang to mind, but not one of them struck her as more plausible than the others. None of them is capable of gambling with such high stakes. It made her wonder if perhaps several colleagues have ganged up on her.

Trine groans and opens the door to let in the sea air. She walks outside in the clothes she fell asleep in. She is tempted to stick two fingers down her throat, so she won’t have to spend the rest of the day recovering from her hangover. On Tissetoppen she has to take a step to the side when a gust of wind almost knocks her over while she looks for the hare. It would appear to be hiding.

Sometimes, when they opened the cabin early in the spring, the hares would come unusually close to them. They hadn’t yet remembered to be wary of people after a long, lonely winter. Once she was sunning herself, wrapped up warm in a rug, when a hare hopped straight past her. It stopped only a few metres away. And it stood there, for a long time, just staring at her. While Trine stared back.

Now all she can see is the sea. An endless horizon, heaven and water united far, far in the distance without a clear dividing line, where one merges into the other. The spray rises behind the rocks of Svartskjær and Måkeskjær. Eider ducks dive under the surface of the water.

Trine goes back inside the cabin to get her mobile phone and brings it out with her to Tissetoppen where mobile coverage is usually better. There are no new text messages from Katarina Hatlem. Her core staff probably haven’t held their morning meeting yet, Trine thinks, while she wonders how long her friend with the curly red hair will manage to hold out. Trine is well aware that the press office is snapping at Katarina’s heels, even though Katarina wouldn’t admit to it when they spoke last night. And they are not the only ones. Trine dare not even think about what people must be saying about her in her department, across the whole Labour Party and in the Prime Minister’s office.

A large ship appears behind the rocks and slides past Rakke towards the foamy crests that are waiting for it. Trine turns towards the wind. The fast, blue colossus slices neatly through the white horses without rocking while her own little boat is listing and taking in water.

Further down the uneven hillside the hare peeks out from behind a bush. It stands still for a few seconds and sniffs before it runs off to hide from its enemies. And she thinks how easy it would be just to disappear out here among the rocks, the crags and the knolls, something she has been fantasising about in the last twenty-four hours. She could go for a walk along the coastal path and then just …

Trine closes her eyes and imagines it. And realises that she isn’t scared of the pain or of the darkness. The door is open. All she has to do is go in.

The investigation team return to their activities straight after the morning briefing. The information about the missing school photo is a welcome development in the case and much of their work now revolves around it. They contact the three schools where Erna Pedersen taught. Ultimately that could mean hundreds of photographs, thousands of pupils, but at least it’s a place to start. They have also requested pupil registers starting from 1972 and up to 1993 when she retired.

Other officers are busy searching the care home for a stone troll with a dent. There is a remote possibility that the troll might still have fingerprints or contain other forensic evidence that justifies expending resources on it. Meanwhile, they continue interviewing everyone who was at the care home at the time when Erna Pedersen was killed. Bjarne is responsible for interviewing the five people from the Volunteer Service.

Bjarne can’t imagine that he could ever do what they do and visit people who are lonely but complete strangers. Accompany them to the doctor or the hairdresser. He wouldn’t know what to say to them. What little time he has outside of work is spent on family and exercise. Quite simply, there isn’t room for anything else.

He reads the first name on the list, Markus Gjerløw, and runs it through the criminal records register. No hits. So he rings Gjerløw’s number and waits for a reply. The ring tone is interrupted by a bright voice saying ‘hello’.

Bjarne introduces himself and explains the reason for his call.

‘Yes, I wondered when you would get to me,’ Gjerløw responds with a voice laden with haughty contempt. Bjarne suppresses a sudden rage and coughs into the palm of his hand instead.

‘I’m trying to find out what happened at the care home on Sunday afternoon. Do you remember when the volunteers arrived and when they left?’

‘I don’t know when the others arrived, but I got there between three and three thirty, I think. And I guess I was there until around five o’clock. I didn’t check what time it was when we left.’

Bjarne makes a note of the times.

‘You said when
we
left. Did you all leave the care home at the same time?’

‘Yes, I think so. I wouldn’t know if anyone stayed behind as we didn’t share the lift down. It isn’t big enough for all five of us.’

Bjarne nods and gets a flashback to Sandland and him in the narrow space, a little too close for her comfort zone, too far apart for his. The silence that follows gives way to an impatience that prompts him to ask: ‘Have you been to these singalongs before?’

‘Yes, certainly.’

‘Did anything last Sunday strike you as a little unusual?’

Gjerløw falls silent.

‘Well, I’m not really—’

‘Did anyone behave differently, a patient, a staff member or . . . or anyone else?’

‘Not that I recall.’

Bjarne lifts his pen from the paper while he thinks.

‘How well do you know the other volunteers?’

Gjerløw sighs again.

‘I only know Remi. I don’t know what it’s like with the rest, if they know each other.’

Bjarne nods to himself and looks down at his notepad. Depressingly few notes.

‘What made you volunteer in the first place?’ he asks.

Gjerløw doesn’t reply immediately.

‘Helping others is a good thing to do,’ he says eventually. ‘Making a positive difference to someone’s day. You ought to try it sometime.’

The words smart like an unexpected slap to the face. Bjarne is lost for an answer.

‘Was there anything else?’ Gjerløw asks. ‘I’m about to go out.’

‘No,’ Bjarne says. ‘Thanks for your help.’

Bjarne spends the next hour calling the other four names on the list from the Volunteer Service, but none of them can add a single new detail. All of them confirm that they left the care home around the same time as they normally do.

Bjarne shakes his head while he tries to sum up the case for himself. First Erna Pedersen is strangled in her own room, then her eyes are pierced with her own knitting needles; the killer proceeds to smash a picture of her son’s family, which was on the wall, and takes with him a school photo from the crime scene without anyone seeing or hearing anything.

The only thing he can think of that could have distracted an entire floor in a care home is the Volunteer Service’s singalong that afternoon. Someone could have stolen away from the entertainment, gone to Erna Pedersen’s room, killed her and then returned to the singalong. It need not have taken more than a couple of minutes and no one would have noticed. Pedersen wouldn’t have been capable of making very much noise and her room was quite a distance from the TV lounge where the singalong was taking place. And it’s fairly easy to hide a framed school photo. All you need is a bag or jacket with big pockets.

But what was the point of mutilating her eyes? And what about the missing picture? Was Pedersen meant to look at it before she was killed?

His train of thought is interrupted by Ella Sandland knocking on his door and popping her head round.

‘I’ve just had a call from Forensics,’ she says, sounding agitated. ‘They’ve found a fingerprint on the knitting needles that doesn’t belong to Erna Pedersen.’

Bjarne looks up at her.

‘Okay? So who does it belong to?’

A layer of grey clouds hangs across Jessheim and refuses to let in the sun, but Emilie Blomvik doesn’t even notice it when she drops off Sebastian at nursery, just in time for him to join in the trip to the Raknehaugen burial mound. Inside his Lightning McQueen bag are two packed lunches, a clear blue plastic bottle of tap water and a green apple. She sends him inside with whispered instructions to have lots of fun today because that’s exactly what she intends.

As expected the morning started slowly after she came home late from work last night and found Mattis asleep on the sofa under a blanket. On the table stood a bottle of red wine that he had clearly consumed single-handedly because his dry cracked lips were stained blue. Next to the bottle was a note saying ‘Wake me when you get home …’ followed by three x’s – as if the first hint could be misunderstood.

But she didn’t have the energy. A long night shift at the airport had worn her out. The luggage belt had broken down – again – which meant it took longer to check in passengers, whose bad mood increased in line with Emilie’s. When she finally got home, well past midnight, she had only one thought in her head and that was to go to bed. So that was what she did. She fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.

Mattis was woken up by his mobile, which on weekdays makes an infernal noise at quarter to six in the morning. She heard him get in the shower, but when he returned to the bedroom to get dressed, she pretended to be asleep. She didn’t really know why she did that. He came over to her just before he left, but by then she had buried her head under the duvet and curled up in a ball.

As usual Sebastian woke up around seven o’clock and Emilie plonked him in front of the television for an hour, expertly ignoring all the voices in her head that called out:
you’re a bad mother, you’re a bad mother
, and went back to bed. She set the alarm for eight o’clock and woke up with a panicky feeling of being late for something. Fortunately she found Sebastian right where she had left him with his Lightning McQueen car in his hands and the remote control right beside him.

Television.

The world’s best invention, surpassed only by a baby’s dummy and the dishwasher.

But the mood of the day changed completely when she remembered that she was going to Oslo to have lunch with Johanne.

Emilie thinks about her friend’s gentle face as she leaves the nursery and walks out into a day that is waiting just for her. She is so looking forward to seeing Johanne again, hearing the latest news in her life since they last saw each other, what she did last summer, if she has met a new man, what’s going on with her.

Emilie drives towards the motorway while she wonders about Mattis. If anyone can make sense of the thoughts and feelings that have started to appear about the man she thought she loved, then it has to be Johanne. She has always given her such good advice.

He blinks and carefully opens his eyes.

It is a new day. It means he only has two days left.

The realisation makes him feel dizzy. The pills he took last night always have that effect on him. They slow him down. But the thought of what he is going to do today makes him leap out of bed and go over to the computer. Has she told the whole world where she is? And what she is doing?

Of course she has.

He goes to the bathroom and washes his face. Puts on his clothes and gets ready. Takes some pills with him, different ones that make him stronger. Then he goes outside. Out into a day, the number of which is decreasing.

But it makes no difference. All he can think about is how it will feel. If he’ll be there this time, all of him. When the light goes out.

Henning made a point of asking if the rental firm had a yellow car, but had to settle for a small white vehicle that hasn’t even clocked up 3,000 kilometres. Now it has clocked up another forty and his first stop is Jessheim School – one of Erna Pedersen’s former employers.

It’s more than sixteen years since she stopped working there and Henning realises there is a limit to what he can hope to achieve in just one morning. Even so he parks the car and enters the school’s playground, an area that has changed considerably since Henning was last in Jessheim. He played a football match here when he was in Year Five. It was a big deal at the time for a class from Kløfta to come all the way to Jessheim to play. It was rivalry at its best – and at its worst. On the lumpy pitch behind the school they played two halves of twenty minutes each and won 5–2. Henning scored three of the goals. He can still remember being lifted up on the teacher’s shoulders after the match.

If Tom Sverre Pedersen was right and the school walls used to be covered in graffiti about his mother, there is no trace of it now. The paint on the walls look fresh and the school has been extended since Henning took part in the legendary football match back in the eighties.

He walks around to the rear of the school. Everything looks much better than he remembers it. Back in his day the place was unloved and filthy. Today there are green areas. A new volleyball sand court. The football pitch that Henning used play on now looks like something a reasonably well-off football club would use for training purposes. It feels a little odd to be retracing his footsteps now that the past has been erased and replaced with something better. But he tries to visualise them, the pupils who detested Erna Pedersen, what they did, what they thought. The graffiti on the walls would probably have been removed as soon as it was discovered and the culprits probably wouldn’t have been hard to find. But would the kid who hated her most have done something quite so obvious?

Maybe. Maybe not. People differ. But if Henning had wanted to hate, he would have picked a spot where he could nurse his hatred. A specific place that no one could destroy, erase or restore.

Henning looks around. None of the pupils is outside. The sun shines on the school’s windows, but he can see activity behind them. There are some trees at the end of the playground close to the fence separating it from the grey high-rise buildings on the other side. Trees of various heights. Trees you can climb.

Henning studies them as he walks over to them. The branches stretch up high and spread to the sides, some of them have become tangled up in each other. He reckons there are ten or twelve trees clustered together.

He looks around for the thickest branch, tests it and starts to climb. He can find no carvings in the tree trunk after the first or the second metre, so he climbs back down again and tries the next tree. Same result. An elderly woman with a Zimmer frame walks past on the pavement outside the fence. Henning smiles to her before he scales yet another tree; he manages to climb quite high; he swings one leg over the biggest, fattest branch, leans into the tree trunk and looks around.

No.

Nothing.

And yet somehow he feels closer to the killer, or at least he can imagine having a place like this, a place where you can sit and think and feel and hate. The school photo that was removed from Erna Pedersen’s wall and the word ‘fractions’ that she uttered in horror the day before she was killed both suggest that someone truly loathed her. And that her death is linked to her job as a teacher.

Henning climbs back down again and goes inside the school just as the bell goes for break; a small boy helps him find the head teacher’s office. The head teacher isn’t there today, a helpful secretary tells Henning, but perhaps she can help?

‘Yes, perhaps,’ Henning says and smiles to the friendly woman with the long, black hair. ‘Tell me, how does it work – do you keep old yearbooks here?’

‘Yes, indeed we do,’ she smiles. ‘But we don’t have very many of them. We didn’t start producing yearbooks until the mid-noughties, I think.’

‘So if I were to ask you to find me a school photo that includes Erna Pedersen then you wouldn’t have it?’

The secretary’s smile freezes.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘So that’s why you’re asking.’

Henning realises that news of the murder of Erna Pedersen has obviously reached her former employer. He introduces himself and explains the reason for his visit.

‘I’m trying to find someone who knew her when she worked here. Do you have any teachers who were hired before Pedersen retired in 1993?’

The secretary thinks about it.

‘We have quite a young team here, so I don’t think so. But if you’re looking for a photo of her, you’re better off trying one of her former pupils. If you can find one, that is.’

Another smile.

‘Yes, that’s just it,’ Henning says. ‘Anyway, thanks for your help.’