The man doesn’t reply. Thorleif sighs and puts the car in ‘D’. He pulls out into the road again, calmly increases his speed to 60 kilometres per hour and follows the long curve to the left, towards the sign for the 301. He brakes in the bend before continuing straight ahead and accelerating up a small hill. The narrow road continues to wind its way through dense forest interspaced with onion and potato fields on both sides whenever the landscape opens up. No cars come in the opposite direction. Thorleif clutches the steering wheel. Tiny side roads turn off to the right, towards farms and cottages he can’t see.
‘Pull up over there.’
The man points to a faded brown fence enclosing a plot which doesn’t appear to be named, but where gravestones stick up from the well-tended grass. Thorleif parks in between two birches whose branches offer them shade.
‘What do we do now?’ Thorleif asks.
‘We wait. You can turn off the engine now.’
They sit in silence for several minutes. They hear the sound of a car approaching. A black cat runs along the edge of the road before it shoots off in between the rowan bushes. The car appears, zooms past them before it falls silent once more. Soon afterwards a tractor comes along. Then two cyclists. Thorleif notices that the man follows them with his eyes with considerable interest.
Suddenly he leans forwards and says, ‘Perfect.’
‘What is?’
‘Check your wing mirror.’
Behind them a man wearing a headset, dark-blue running trousers and a blue jacket comes jogging. His pace is leisurely.
‘Wait until he has passed us.’
Thorleif waits. He watches the jogger in his mirror, sees him overtake the car. The jogger pays no attention to them, he just disappears around the next bend. The minutes pass.
‘Okay, start the engine.’
‘What are we doing?’
‘Just do as you are told.’
The engine growls menacingly.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Drive. Faster.’
Thorleif pushes down the accelerator a little more. The car gains speed. The jogger appears around the next bend. He has reached the foot of a long sloping hill that twists like a snake.
‘Faster!’ The man leans forwards.
‘Why?’
‘Because I want you to hit him.’
‘I can’t drive into him. I’ll kill him!’
‘Faster!’
Thorleif obeys, gripping the steering wheel. His thoughts bounce up and down like a roller-coaster. What does he do now? Surely he can’t run over someone deliberately?
They pass a house and a sign advertising a sculpture exhibition.
‘There are people living here,’ Thorleif yells.
‘So what?’
‘What if they see us? What if there are other cars behind us or coming towards us?’
‘Think about your girlfriend. Think about what we’re going to do to her if you don’t run him over.’
‘I can’t do it!’ he screams.
‘Of course you can!’
The tears well up in his eyes and make it difficult for him to see clearly. Thorleif closes them and tries to blink away the wetness, but the tears keep flowing. He struggles to breathe. The engine emits another roar as they gain on the jogger. The fields open up on both sides of the road and there is a smell of onions, of bloody onions, while Thorleif’s heart feels as if it is about to jump out of his chest. His hears himself cry out as his hands twist the steering wheel in the direction of the jogger. I’m going to hit you, Thorleif thinks, I’m going to hit you now.
He closes his eyes and waits for the car to react to the collision with a human being and the loud crash that will follow as Thorleif takes the life of an innocent man. But the crash never comes. The wheels of the car never stray across the edge of the tarmac where the gravel starts, where thousands of onions are neatly lined up. Thorleif opens his eyes again. Only a few metres ahead of them the road goes into a double bend, and they are about to plough into a field where the red-tinted flowers of the potatoes still display the remains of summer. Thorleif tries frantically to regain control of the car, to get it back on the road. He hears a quartet of tyres scream as the car hurls itself to the left just as they come into the bend and Thorleif clings to the steering wheel while he pants and tries to straighten up, gasping and frantically turning the wheel. Behind them the jogger has stopped. He waves his clenched fists at them.
You failed, Thorleif mutters to himself. You failed the test.
He stares at the man who has already pressed a number on his mobile which he is pressing against his ear.
‘Hi, it’s me,’ he says and sends Thorleif an icy stare. ‘He screwed up. Kill his girlfriend.’
Chapter 37
A bunch of keys that editor-in-chief Ida Caroline Ovesen has lent to Henning is jingling in his hands. One of the keys fits the lock of a basement storeroom where all superfluous office equipment was dumped during the refurbishment until someone found a suitable home for it. ‘It’ll probably stay there for ever,’ Ida remarked.
She had no idea where his cassette tapes might be. The refurbishment had been chaotic, and many staff had helped clear out the offices. This impression of chaos is reinforced when Henning enters a room filled to the rafters with chairs, desks, old computers, boxes of wires and cables, mice and mouse mats, ring binders and bookcases, workstations and monitors.
Henning moves a chair, clambers to the first desk and opens its drawers one by one, but they are all empty. The desks are identical, and none of them has his or any of his colleagues’ names on them so he has no other choice but to go through all of them and keep his fingers crossed that he might have some luck for once. He clears a path, taking one drawer at a time and slamming it shut as soon as he has looked inside. Soon he has built up a rhythm, but it produces no result.
Perhaps the drawers were emptied first, he speculates. He closes his eyes and imagines being the person who cleared out and removed the tapes from his desk. Could they have been put in a separate box? Bundled together with sticky tape even? Henning opens his eyes and locates the packing crates but soon realises that the filing system used was the one known as chucking stuff in any old box. Ten minutes later he has rummaged through all of them without finding a single audio cassette.
He looks around again. At the rear, behind the storage crates, he can see an unvarnished pine shelving unit filled with old stationery, headed paper with 123news ’s old logo, envelopes, pens — even umbrellas and white T- shirts. Henning works his way across to it, stepping over a dusty computer monitor in the process, and starts scanning the shelf in front of him at eye level. Nothing of interest. He stands on tiptoe and takes down a box from the top shelf. As he does so its bottom falls out and the contents cascade around his feet. He bends down and feels twinges in his back and hip, pain that sometimes returns as a reminder — as if he could ever forget the slippery railing and the fatal flagstones two floors below, but he grits his teeth and searches through the rubbish which someone decided was worth keeping. Conference papers for the Norwegian Foundation for Investigative Journalism. Union agreements. A computer mouse. Three pens that are unlikely to work. He removes two half-empty boxes of drawing pins that have fallen out — and spots a pile of cassettes held together with yellow tape. The initials HJ have been written on the side followed by a question mark.
Henning smiles. So someone did pack them, he thinks, delighted, as he counts eight cassettes, each containing four hours of recording time. He realises immediately that he will be unable to concentrate on anything
