face with an open round mouth, like a fish in an aquarium, unable to escape through the glass, to get out and away.
I held up the plastic bag. ‘Here’s the food.’
He motioned with the rifle barrel. ‘Throw it here!’
‘There’s a bottle of Coke inside.’
‘Then bring it here!’ he commanded impatiently.
I went closer. Now I saw that the skin around his mouth was pimply and uneven. When I had advanced far enough, he said: ‘Stop!’
I did as instructed. Then I passed over the bag.
He removed the hand that had been resting on the trigger. As he held it out, our eyes met for the first time, and immediately I recognised him. Set far back in the oblong, pimply adolescent face, there was Johnny boy’s wronged, defiant expression that we had grown to recognise in the period after Vibecke Skarnes’s arrest, when the responsibility for him had been ours for six months. The round, not yet fully formed facial features of the small boy were gone, replaced by new, craggy contours, but the look and that particular set of the mouth were the same.
He grabbed the bag and took it. He cast a look inside. Then he threw it over to the girl who snatched at it greedily, opened the bottle of Coke and took a long draught before feverishly tearing the paper off the energy bars. Once the bars were out, she passed one to Jan who started eating without letting me out of his sight for a moment. Then he extended his hand for the bottle, raised it to his mouth and took a long, deep swig.
I could have rushed him then. I could have thrown myself on him, grabbed the rifle and tried to wrestle it from his hands. But I didn’t. The risk of something going wrong was too great.
It was as if I could sense the presence and intensity among the police officers down in the woods. I knew that those with night sights on their rifles were keeping an eye on us. But I didn’t want to give them the slightest reason for going into action.
I felt a strange calm seeping into me. The two young persons stuffing themselves with emergency rations in front of my eyes reminded me of starving whelps. This seemed to be what they had actually holed themselves up for: a last, desperate meal before they had to face reality head-on again.
While they were eating I saw that Jan Egil was paying less and less attention to the weapon. It was no longer pointing in my direction; it just hung loosely under one arm, hitched over a shoulder with a military-coloured strap, but out of action for no longer than the second it took to lift it.
‘Do you remember what a great time we had in Bergen… Jan?’
‘My name’s Jan Egil!’
‘Jan Egil,’ I corrected. ‘The fishing trips we went on, the walks in the mountains with Cecilie and…’
‘Barely,’ he sulked.
‘But you must have had a reason to ask me to come all this way here?’
With an involuntary toss of the head, he fixed his gaze on me and his eyes were shiny, filled with tears. He swallowed and nodded. After a while he said in a strangulated voice: ‘You were kind.’
I nodded. ‘We liked you, you know.’ As he didn’t react, I went on: ‘You had experienced terrible things, and we wanted you to have a good time. That was why Hans got you this home here, too. Everyone wanted the best for you.’
His lips trembled, and I saw him pursing them tight.
I chose my words with care now. ‘But… something happened here, too, I understand.’
He gave a brief nod. A single tear ran from one eye, down the side of his nose, resting under one nostril as a teardrop.
‘But whatever has happened… there’s no sense in hiding up here with… what’s your girlfriend’s name?’
I watched him fight to speak. I turned to face her. ‘You… can you answer me? What’s your name?’
‘Silje,’ came the reedy response.
‘You want to go home, don’t you?’
As she didn’t reply, I addressed Jan Egil again. ‘This is horrendous weather, and the night’s going to be long and cold. You can’t seriously mean that you’re going to stay out here all night?’
As he didn’t reply either, I went on: ‘I can promise you one thing, Jan Egil. You’ll be given a hundred per cent fair treatment.’
He snorted with contempt.
‘You will! I’ll guarantee it. Perhaps you don’t know, but since we got to know each other ten years ago, I have stopped working for social services. Now I’m a private investigator. A detective. I promise you that if there’s anything at all doubtful in this case that you’ve got involved in, then I… I won’t leave a stone unturned until I know everything. Together we’ll find out what actually happened here, and you’ll get all the help you need. It won’t cost you a bean!’
I thought I could hear my creditors cheering in unison in the background, but I could see the message had got through. The word detective had been the key to make him listen, and it was also the first word he said, in that same slightly dumbstruck intonation most people adopted after being told: ‘D-d-detective?’
‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘Varg Veum, private investigator, with an office in Strandkaien, just by the fish market. Next time you’re in town, you’ll have to pop in!’
‘But the police…’
‘The police have their job to do. But now that you’ve turned seventeen, social services don’t have much say any more. You’ll get some help from a solicitor as well, of course. You can be sure of that. No one down there is after you, Jan Egil! Everyone wants to help you.’
It had almost stopped raining now. I celebrated by pulling back my hood so that he could see all of my face. ‘What do you say?’ I carefully stretched out my hand. ‘Give me the rifle, Jan Egil. Then it’s all over. We can go down to the village, have a roof over our heads, put on dry clothes and get something nice and hot down us. Eh? Doesn’t that sound good?’
I could see how his emotions were pulling him in all directions. But I knew that I had got through to him, that the thought of spending the whole night up in the valley, soaked, cold, without any food, other than what they had already made short work of, as compared with what I had promised him — dry clothes, roof over your head, hot food — was too much to resist.
He looked down at Silje. She nodded back enthusiastically.
Then he held out his hand, holding the rifle.
I grasped the barrel firmly and took it. Then I hurriedly examined the side for the safety catch. With some surprise I noticed that it was on. I stepped away in case he should change his mind.
I half-turned, looked down towards the trees, formed my hands into a loud-hailer and called: ‘Veum here! Everything’s fine. We’re coming down.’
It took a bit of time for an answer to come. I heard the sergeant’s voice, metallic in the speaker they had brought with them. ‘That’s great! We’ll be waiting here!’
‘Will I have to wear… handcuffs?’ asked Jan Egil in a thin voice behind me.
I turned back to him. ‘No, no. That shouldn’t be necessary.’
‘No,’ said Silje. ‘Because it was me who did it.’
21
‘Wha…’ I started.
‘Shuddup, Silje!’ Jan Egil shouted.
‘But I…’
‘Shuddup, I said!’
I took a couple of steps away from them. ‘Now I think we should do what I said, OK? Go down to the village, put some dry clothes on, and then we can talk all this through properly in somewhat more comfortable surroundings than these, right?’
‘I just wanted to say that,’ she sobbed.