toddler. He is not strong enough to use a free arm to grab Vera’s sleeve and pull her. He needs all his strength for the boy. He has nothing to move her but his power to convince. And he knows his power is limited.
‘
It is the only real Russian he knows.
He moves with the boy to the three stairs that descend into his own apartment.
There is a bang at the door.
‘
She talks more. She is explaining something crucial. He cannot make any sense of it, and then makes the kind of decision a soldier makes with simple, irreproachable logic.
‘I cannot understand you and I am not going to. A violent man is at the front door. I am therefore leaving through the back door. I am taking the boy. If you come with us, you will be better off. If not, I am removing you from the equation. So here we go.’
Sheldon steps down into his bedroom, past the bathroom, and past the closet on his right. Beyond the bookshelf there is a hanging Persian rug that covers the bicycle entrance, which Sheldon has known about for three weeks — not just this morning — but didn’t want to admit finding on the day he moved into their apartment.
With his elbow, he pushes the rug aside and sees the door behind.
‘Right, that’s it. We’re going. Now.’
The banging has changed from a firm knock to a frontal assault on the door. The monster is attempting to get in. He is kicking it with his boot. Hammering at the spot where the thin deadbolt holds the fifty-year-old dry- wood door to the opposing wall.
It is only a matter of time.
The problem is that the door in front of Sheldon is also locked, and he can’t manage to get it undone while holding the boy.
‘Come here, you fruitcake. Open this. Open it! Goddamn it!’
But she does not open it. She has crouched down under his bed.
Is she hiding there? That would be madness. Why hide when escape is possible?
There is no option. Sheldon has to put down the boy to struggle with the lock. And when he does, the boy rushes to his mother.
Just then the front door is kicked in.
It slams into the wall. Though he can’t see the front door from his angle, he hears the wood splinter and something metallic clank on the ground.
What Sheldon does next is focus.
‘Panic is the enemy,’ said staff sergeant O’Callihan in 1950. ‘Panic is not the same as being scared. Everyone gets scared. It is a survival mechanism. It tells you that something is wrong and requires your attention. Panic is when scared takes over your brain, rendering you utterly fucking useless. If you panic in the water, you will drown. If you panic on the battlefield, you will get shot. If you panic as a sniper, you will reveal your location, miss your mark, and fail your mission. Your father will hate you, your mother will ignore you, and women across this planet will be able to smell the stench of failure oozing from your very pores. So, Private Horowitz! What is the lesson here?’
‘Hold on a second. It’s on the tip of my tongue.’
Sheldon focuses on the lock. There is a chain lock that he slides off. There is a deadbolt that he twists. There is a door latch that he presses downward as he also lowers his weight onto it in the hopes the hinges will not squeak.
The steps down into Sheldon’s flat are not immediately visible from the kitchen. There are two other bedrooms off the living room for the monster to search first before reaching the stairs.
It is just a matter of seconds now.
Sheldon grabs the boy by the shoulders just as the mother emerges from under the bed. There is a moment when all three are standing silently. Looking at each other. Pausing before the final assault.
A stillness happens.
Vera is framed by the doorway leading upstairs. The Norwegian summer light floods around her, and in that blessed moment she looks like a saint from a Renaissance painting. Eternal and beloved.
And then there are heavy footfalls.
Vera hears them. She opens her eyes wide, then — slowly, quietly — pushes her boy towards Sheldon, mouths something to him Sheldon doesn’t understand, and then turns. Before the legs of the monster can descend the three steps, Vera, determined, rushes up the stairs and launches her whole body at him.
The boy takes a tentative step forward, but Sheldon grabs him. With his free hand, he tries the back door one more time. It still won’t open. They are trapped.
Releasing the rug and letting it fall back into position, Sheldon opens the closet door and leads the boy in. He raises his finger to his lips to signal silence. His eyes are so stern, and the boy so terrified, that not a sound passes between them.
There is screaming, heavy-body heaving and crashing, and cruelty upstairs.
He should go. He should grab the poker from by the fireplace and swing with all the force of mighty justice, and lodge the spike into the monster’s brainstem, standing tall as his lifeless body collapses full force to the floor.
But he doesn’t.
With his fingers under the door’s edge, he pulls it closed as far as it will go.
As he hears the sound of choking, the smell of urine fills the closet. He pulls the boy to his chest, presses his lips against his head, and places his hands around the boy’s ears.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. This is the best I can do. I’m so sorry.’
Chapter 3
Sigrid Odegard has been a police officer with the Oslo Politidistrikt for just over eighteen years. She joined after completing her advanced studies in criminology at the University of Oslo. Her father convinced her to go there, rather than study farther north, because — in his view — ‘there will be more eligible men in the big city.’
As so often happens in both police work and life, her father’s theory proved both true and irrelevant.
‘The question, Papa, is the ratio of available men to those who are interested in me. Not just the number of available men.’ Sigrid made this point to her widowed father in 1989, before going to Oslo.
Her father was a farmer from the countryside. Though not a formally educated man, he did understand numbers, as they came in handy for organising life on the farm. He was also a reader of history. He did not call himself a student, as he had no tutor, but he found reading pleasurable, took an interest in the worlds that have passed before this one, and he had a good memory. All this served him, Sigrid, and the animals rather well. He also had a fine mind for reason, and he and Sigrid found comfort there when emotions were too tender.
‘If your argument holds,’ he had responded over a quiet dinner of salmon, boiled potatoes, and a bottle of beer, ‘then it is not a matter of ratios at all, but a statistic of likelihoods. What is the likelihood of there being a man sufficiently observant as to note your desirability and availability? And again, I stand by the claim that such a young man is more likely to be found in the big city.’
‘It’s not such a big city,’ Sigrid said.
Her father slid each section of pink meat off the subsequent section of pink meat to see how well prepared it was. They slid easily, and he said nothing.
‘It is the biggest one available,’ he offered.
‘Yes, well…’ she muttered, reaching for the butter.
Sigrid’s older brother had moved to America on being offered a position selling agricultural machinery. It was
