The black car followed me right down to the ring road. I lost sight of it in the traffic build-up behind me. It was impossible to see if it was still there. When I saw Ulleval Stadium rise before me, I took a right and pulled over. I sat waiting, totally composed. After thirty seconds a big, black car drove past heading east towards Tasen without turning off the ring road.
I waited for a few more minutes, but it didn’t reappear. Reassured, I drove off again. After passing the stadium, I turned off towards a petrol station on the right and pulled into a large, at this moment, unused car park. I pulled up outside the Mercedes showroom, switched off the engine, opened the door and got out. A bit nervous, I strolled around the car without stopping in case someone had me in their sights. I was uneasy.
From the ring road I heard the sound of traffic, a regular pulsating rhythm. The lights from the town contaminated the evening sky with jaundice, and from high above me I heard the throb of a plane on its way to Fornebu.
I heard the sound of his footsteps on the tarmac. He came round the corner from the back of the showroom as if on a quick evening run out with the dog. But he didn’t have a dog, and he came straight towards me.
He was wearing a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, and his body had grown since I last saw him. In Forde — and the last time in the courthouse in Bergen — he had still cut a gangling, immature figure, not unlike the man I now knew was his father. During his prison stay he had obviously killed lots of hours in the gym. He was bigger and bulkier and definitely looked more dangerous than he had before. Coming to a halt in front of me, he radiated an edgy, pent-up strength that, if released, could have trashed me in the space of a few short seconds.
Under the peak of his cap, he was staring at me through wide-open dark eyes. Without changing expression, he nodded towards the car. ‘Get in.’
I did as he said, leaned over and opened the door on the opposite side. He dropped in so heavily that for a moment it felt as if the whole car would tip over. ‘Drive,’ he said.
‘Where to? Shouldn’t we — ?’
‘Just drive!’ he ordered roughly, and I didn’t feel it was the right time to object.
53
On the ring road, I tried again. ‘I have to know which direction we’re taking.’
‘We’re just going somewhere we can have some peace and quiet. I’ll tell you.’
I cast a sideways glance. ‘What is it exactly you want with me?’
‘You know what.’
‘No, I don’t! Wasn’t it enough with Hammersten?’
We passed a turn-off, but he just pointed ahead. ‘It wasn’t me who killed him!’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘He was dead when I found him.’
‘When you… but what did you want from him?’
‘I was shoppin’ in the street when I met him. I knew of course that he… he’d been married to my mother. My real mother.’
‘Yes, you met her again, I gather. She visited you at Ullersmo Prison?’
‘I recognised her soon as I saw her.’
‘You recognised her? But you were just three when you… were taken from her.’
‘Not that time, you idiot!’
I was suddenly ill at ease. ‘So when was it?’
‘It was when we were comin’ home from school in Angedalen. Silje and I. We walked past a woman walkin’ along the road, and I can still remember her gawping at us. At me most of all. Afterwards we had to laugh at her, and Silje said: Did you see the old biddie! She must be completely crazy, and then we laughed even more. And when she turned up at Ullersmo I recognised her at once. Not as my mother of course, but as the crazy woman from Angedalen. So, we had been laughing at my mother, my own real mother. I wonder if you can imagine how that felt! I could’ve cried, a grown man… and it was the likes of Hammersten who had turned her into what she was. I understood that from what she told me later.’
‘But what — ?’
‘And then I knew what I’d been missin’ for all those years.’ His voice was trembling, as if it was hard for him to speak, harder than any bench presses. ‘The other so-called mothers’ve never loved me, not like her, who had to live without me for all that time. And who came after me, through the prison gates. But we had a few good hours anyway, at the end of her life.’
For a while we sat in total silence. The impression I was left with from what he had just said was so strong that I found it difficult to continue the conversation. It was Jan who resumed. ‘He said I should drop by to see ’im.’
‘Hammersten?’
‘Yeah. He had something to tell me, he said.’
‘Something to tell you?’
‘Something very important for me… and many others. He’d become a Christian, and now he wanted to clear things up. But when I went to see him that evening, he… was just lyin’ there. Unable to speak to anyone. Killed, and with such brutality that there was blood everywhere.’
‘But how did you get in?’
‘Door wasn’t locked.’
‘But if it wasn’t you who knocked the living daylights out of Hammersten…’
‘It wasn’t me, I told you!’
‘OK, Jan Egil. I believe you. But who was it then?’
‘He was just paid back for all the torment he had caused me.’
‘Hammersten?’
‘He killed my first foster father, in Bergen, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he hadn’t taken out Kari and Klaus in Angedalen as well!’
‘Do you know that?’
‘Does anyone know anything at all? I’ve had to do time for it!’
‘Do you know that he killed your foster father in Bergen, I mean?’
He didn’t answer, just stared into the distance.
I went on: ‘But… at any rate it wasn’t your foster mother, and she has also paid a debt to society for a murder she didn’t commit.’
He took his eyes off the road and stared straight at me. ‘How do you know?’
‘I spoke to her earlier today. Do you know where she lives?’
‘No.’
‘But you know she lives in Oslo?’
‘I couldn’t care less where she lives! She was out of my life a long time ago.’
‘But you must be interested to hear what she had to say?’
‘Course! So what did she say?’
‘She said she arrived home that day in 1974 and it had already happened. You were standing in the hall, paralysed. Nothing else. She didn’t know anything else. She did think…’
‘What? Who did she take the blame for?’
‘For you, I guess.’
He blinked. ‘For my sake! I refuse to believe that.’
‘It wasn’t for Terje Hammersten’s sake anyway.’
‘How long was her stretch?’
‘You don’t know? Has no one told you…?’
‘No!’
‘She was out again by the time of the Angedalen murders.’
