Don't Look Back

'He won't. Right now he's getting used to being a different Eddie. He needs time. Perhaps it will be easier when we do discover the truth.'

'I don't know whether I dare find out.'

'Are you afraid of something?'

'I'm afraid of everything. I imagine all kinds of things up there at the lake.'

'Can you tell me about it?'

She shook her head and reached for her cup. 'No, I can't. It's just things that I imagine. If I say them out loud they might come true.'

'It looks as if Solvi is managing all right,' he said, to change the subject.

'Solvi is strong,' she said, suddenly sounding confident.

Strong, he thought. Yes, maybe that is the proper term. Perhaps Annie was the weak one. Things began whirling through his mind in a disquieting way. Mrs Holland went out to get cream and sugar. Solvi came in.

'Where's Papa?'

'He'll be right back!' Mrs Holland called from the kitchen in a firm voice, perhaps in the hope that Eddie would hear her and reappear. It's bad enough that Annie is dead and gone, Sejer thought. But now her family is falling apart, the welded seams are failing, there are big holes in the hull, and the water is gushing in, and she's stuffing old phrases and commands into the cracks to keep the ship afloat.

She poured the coffee. Sejer's fingers were too big for the handle and he had to hold the cup in both hands.

'You keep talking about why,' she said wearily, 'as if he must have had a good reason for doing it.'

'Not a good reason. But the killer had a reason, which at that moment seemed to him to be the only choice.'

'So evidently you understand them – these people that you lock up for murder and other appalling crimes.'

'I couldn't stay in the job otherwise.' He drank some more coffee and thought about Halvor.

'But surely there must be some exceptions.'

'They're rare.'

She sighed and glanced at her daughter. 'What do you think, Solvi?' she said. Softly, using a different tone than he'd heard her use before, as if for once she wanted to penetrate that carefree blonde head of her daughter's and find an answer, maybe even one that would make sense of it all. As if the only daughter she had left might be a different person than she had initially thought, maybe more like Annie than she knew.

'Me?' Solvi stared at her mother in surprise. 'For my part I've never liked Fritzner across the street. I've heard that he sits in his dinghy in his living room and reads all night long, with the rowlocks full of beer.'

CHAPTER 13

Skarre had turned off most of the lights in his office. Only the desk lamp was on, 60 watts in a white spotlight on his papers. A gentle, steady hum came from the printer as it spewed out page after page, covered with perfect text, set in Palatino, the typeface he liked best. In the background, as if from far away, he heard a door open and someone come in. He was about to look up to see who it was but just at that moment the pages tumbled off the printer. He bent down to get them, straightened up, and discovered that something was sliding into his field of vision, across an empty page. A bronze bird sitting on a perch.

'Where?!' he said at once.

Sejer sat down. 'At Annie's house. Solvi has inherited her sister's things, and this was among them, wrapped in newspaper. I went out to the cemetery. It fits like a glove.' He looked at Skarre. 'Someone could have given it to her.'

'Who?'

'I don't know. But if she went there and took it herself, really went there, under cover of darkness, and used some kind of tool to break it off the headstone, then that's quite an unscrupulous thing to do.'

'But Annie wasn't unscrupulous, was she?'

'I'm not entirely sure. I'm not sure about anything any more.'

Skarre turned the lamp away from the desk so that it made a perfect half-moon on the wall. They sat and stared at it. On impulse, Skarre picked up the bird, gripping it by its perch, and held it up to the lamp with a swaying motion. The shadow it made in the white moon was like a giant drunken duck on its way home from a party.

'Jensvoll has resigned from his job as coach of the girls' team,' Skarre said.

'What did you say?'

'The rumours are starting to circulate. The rape conviction has come out, and it's hovering over the waters. The girls stopped showing up.'

'I thought that would happen. One thing leads to another.'

'And Fritzner was right. Things are going to be tough for a lot of people now, until the murderer is caught. But that will happen soon, because by now you've worked it all out, haven't you?'

Sejer shook his head. 'It has something to do with Annie and Johnas. Something happened between the two of them.'

'Maybe she just wanted a keepsake to remind her of Eskil.'

'If that was it, she could have knocked on the door and asked for a teddy-bear or something.'

'Do you think he did something to her?'

'Either to her or maybe to someone else she had a relationship with. Someone she loved.'

'Now I don't follow you – do you mean Halvor?'

'I mean his son, Eskil. He died because Johnas was in the bathroom shaving.'

'But she couldn't very well blame him because of that.'

'Not unless there's something unresolved about the way Eskil died.'

Skarre whistled. 'No one else was there to see what happened. All we have to go on is what Johnas said.'

Sejer picked up the bird again and gently poked at its sharp beak. 'So what do you think, Jacob? What really happened on that November morning.'

Memories flooded over him as he opened the double glass doors and took a few steps inside. The hospital smell, a mixture of antiseptic and soap, combined with the sweet scent of chocolate from the gift shop and the spicy fragrance of carnations from the flower stand.

Instead of thinking about his wife's death, Sejer tried to think about his daughter Ingrid on the day she was born. This enormous building held memories of both the greatest sorrow and the greatest joy of his life. Back then he had stepped through these same doors and noticed the same smells. Involuntarily he had compared his own new-born daughter to the other infants. He thought they were redder and fatter and had more wrinkles, and that their hair was more rumpled. Or they were born prematurely and looked like undernourished miniature old men. Only Ingrid was utterly perfect. The recollection helped him to relax at last.

He was not arriving unannounced. It had taken him exactly eight minutes on the phone to locate the pathologist who had overseen the autopsy of Eskil Johnas. He made it clear in advance what he was interested in, so they could find the files and reports and get them out for him. One of the things he liked about the bureaucracy, that unwieldy, cumbersome, difficult system that governed all departments, was the principle that everything had to be recorded and archived. Dates, times, names, diagnoses, routines, irregularities, everything had to be on the file. Every facet of a case could be taken out and re-examined, by other people with different motives, with fresh eyes.

That's what he was thinking as he got out of the lift. He noticed the hospital smell grow stronger as he walked along the corridor of the eighth floor. The pathologist, who had sounded staid and middle-aged on the phone, turned out to be a young man. A stout fellow with thick glasses and soft, plump hands. On his desk stood a card file, a phone, a stack of papers, and a big red book with Chinese characters on it.

'I have to confess that I took a quick glance at the case file,' the doctor said. His glasses made him look as if