The Lion's Mouth (47 page)

Billy T. let his fingers run up and down the CD rack at the other end of the room. Eventually he found what he was looking for. When he placed it in the player, he was momentarily moved to tell Håkon what he thought of his inferior stereo system, but decided against it. Instead he stood up with a sigh of satisfaction as the
Tosca
overture poured out from the loudspeakers.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Tone-Marit.”

He closed his eyes as he began to conduct the invisible orchestra.

“Opera,” he yelled. “Opera is actually a load of garbage. But Puccini, you understand, he creates women the way women really should have been. Tosca, Liú, Madame Butterfly, the whole bunch – when they’re faced with the ultimate tragedy, they take their own lives. They make such great demands of life and of themselves that they no longer wish to live once something has gone really wrong.”

His arm movements became increasingly energetic, and the others sat mesmerized, watching his strange demeanor.

“They are uncompromising,” Billy T. thundered. “Completely uncompromising!”

Then, without warning, he stopped, in the middle of a vigorous swoop from floor to ceiling. As his arms dropped to his sides, he opened his eyes and crossed the room quietly to reduce the volume.

“Just like you, Hanne,” he said as he sat down beside her and gave her a smacker of a kiss on the cheek. “Totally uncompromising. But …”

He stared at her, and the others had obviously noticed it as well. Chief Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen appeared to be in a trance. Her mouth had fallen open, and she had apparently stopped breathing. Her eyes, big as saucers, were shining and seemed to be peering into something somewhere else entirely, perhaps in another time as well. On her neck, a pulse was beating quite clearly, with a steady rhythm.

“What’s up with you?” Billy T. asked. “Hanne, are you sick?”

“I’m thinking about the Volter murder,” she whispered. “We have eliminated all the possible murderers. So we are faced with …”

The CD began to stutter, the player spitting out three staccato notes, over and over again. But not even Billy T. made a move to do something about it.

“The truth is, it’s impossible for the murder of Prime Minister Birgitte Volter to have been committed,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said. “Nobody could have done it.”

Inexplicably and entirely automatically, the CD player pulled itself together. The music gushed once again from the loudspeakers, pure and flowing, filling the house where a newborn baby lay sleeping together with her mother upstairs. Tone-Marit Steen stole a glance at her bare arm and saw that she had goosebumps. It was as though an angel had just flown through the room.

SUNDAY, APRIL 27

16.00,
OLE BRUMMS VEI
212

T
he ray of light that fell like a skittle from the skylight onto the dirty timber floor put him in mind of a seal. The darkness was almost black around the sharp, white gash in all the grayness. The air was distended with dust and old memories, and he stumbled over Per’s first pair of blue-painted skis as he approached the opening ahead of him. He recalled a holiday long ago – before Per. He and Birgitte had gone to Bergen and they had watched the seals in the aquarium there, at Nordnes. As he had looked at them from the window in the pool, down in some kind of basement, the seals had twirled around in the water, round and round, until all of a sudden they shot up toward the light that fanned out from the sky; the seals had veered upward, up toward the light, toward the air.

Roy Hansen stood in the middle of the attic floor. He had not been up there for three years, and he was thinking about seals. It was about time the place had an airing.

For several days, he had thought about moving away. After the funeral, when everything had been at a slight distance but the road ahead seemed impossible to travel. He did not want to live there any longer, not with Birgitte’s belongings, her stamp everywhere: a plaster fridge magnet she had made once, before Christmas; the settee that he had not wanted but she had insisted upon – she thought it matched the walls so well, and he had capitulated. Per had cleared out her clothes in private one evening
when he had been visiting his mother; she had become so terribly old. When he returned home, Per had said nothing, only given a little smile, and Roy had tried to thank him, but it was impossible. The clothes were gone, and with them something of her scent. He had already thrown out the bed linen in which she had slept on the last night of her life.

But in recent days these things had gained new meaning. They were no longer a burning, cruel reminder of something he would never regain. Birgitte permeated the walls, the objects, the pictures she had chosen and the books she had read. It was okay. He wanted it to be like that. But he wanted to know what was there.

That was why he was standing in the attic. Birgitte had not come up here often either. But far more often than he had. When she came downstairs again, there was always something incandescent and dreamy about her, not for long, but it lasted for a day or so. A faraway look in her eyes, something he had never attempted to break through. He had loved her too long to do that. There must be something up here, and he had never been able to muster the strength to come and look, until now.

It was painful, skirting around things. An old loom with damaged shuttles made him laugh to himself. That had been a phase, too. Birgitte heavily pregnant with Per, wearing hand-woven jackets by Sigrun Berg, and consumed by an irrepressible desire to learn to weave – though she lacked the time to do anything more than take an introductory course at the Workers’ Education Association. He touched the yarn: it was so dusty that it was impossible to make out the color in this dim light. The pattern on the wall hanging, barely begun, was almost invisible, and he ran his finger over its grimy surface, outlining a heart with the letter B inside it. The loom could stay. He would never get rid of that.

A massive trunk sat at the edge of the beam of light. He groaned as he dragged it all the way across to take a better look. The key
was missing. He straightened his back and looked around. The hiding place was obvious; he spotted it at once and it crossed his mind that perhaps Birgitte had wanted him to. He ran his fingers over the joist that divided the attic into two sections. The key – large, heavy and black – was there, where it had to be.

The lid was heavy but did not creak when he opened it. The trunk was empty, apart from a smallish, round box; a hatbox, he thought – his mother had owned ones like it. The color was ashes of rose, and a large bow was tied around its circumference. Birgitte had knotted that, he thought, as he let the heavy silk slide through his fingers.

He hesitated before opening the box. A peculiar taste spread through his mouth: iron or blood. His posture was uncomfortable. With great care, he lifted the box, closed the lid of the trunk, and sat down.

On top lay a pair of baby socks that must at one time have been brilliant white. They were tiny, for a newborn infant, with delicate lace edging around the ankles. He placed the socks on his knees and stroked them gently with his thumb before taking up the photograph. The very first photo of Liv, lying naked with her knees drawn up to her chest and her fists clenched: she was crying. Underneath the picture was a pink book. Opening it, he leafed through it cautiously, afraid the pages would disintegrate in his hands. Birgitte had recorded so much. Birth-weight, length; the little linen bracelet from the maternity unit, inscribed with Birgitte’s name and Liv’s date of birth, glued onto the first sheet of paper. The glue was almost completely desiccated, and when he stroked the bracelet, it fell out; he re-inserted it right at the back, where it was held fast between the pages. The very last entry was dated June 22, 1965: “Liv was given her triple vaccine today. She cried bitterly, and it was painful for both mother and baby, but it was soon over and done with.” After that, there was nothing.

Roy could not breathe. Abruptly, he put down the box, and the baby socks dropped from his knees onto the dirty floor as he stood up. The skylight was stiff and difficult to budge, but he managed to open it in the end. He remained for a while in the draft of fresh air, with the light dazzling his face.

Birgitte would not even have pictures on display. Once, a year after Liv’s death, he had put a photo of her on their bedside table, in a silver frame he had just purchased. In a fury, Birgitte had told him to remove it. She would never talk about Liv. She would not keep anything of hers. After Per was born, Roy had tried to raise the issue on a couple of occasions. Per ought to have been told about her. There was an obvious risk that he would find out about his sister from someone else, and that would be so much worse. Again, Birgitte was furious. Eventually it had become impossible. Liv was a no-go subject, and Roy had found it even more difficult to tell Per about her when he became older. And so the baby had simply disappeared, gradually and slowly. He would think of her now and again, it could catch him fiercely, mostly around Midsummer, when the sun shone brightly in the sky and everything had that fresh odor of new, summer life. Liv. Birgitte would not hear of her, or speak of her, or be reminded of her. That was what he had always thought.

There was only one child in Birgitte’s life: Per. That was the impression she had given. That was what they had all thought. She had accepted Per with gravity and responsibility. That playful, youthful joy that had danced between them when Liv was born had vanished. A constant, anxious concern had replaced it, and had not relinquished its grip until Birgitte had finally come to accept that Per was a robust, healthy ten-year-old.

He sat down gingerly on the trunk once more, balancing the hatbox on his lap. There was the silver spoon they had bought when she had been christened. And her pacifier: he smiled when
he saw how old-fashioned it was, plain and baby pink, the rubber brittle with age. Underneath everything, right at the bottom of the box of memories, lay a letter. It felt substantial, inside the envelope. On the outside, his name was penned in Birgitte’s elegantly flowing handwriting.

As he opened it, his hands were shaking so violently that the envelope fell to the floor. Straightening up, he turned his face to the light again, and took a deep breath. Then he unfolded the letter and smoothed it out several times with the edge of his hand. It had been written thirty-two years earlier.