in.
‘Got everything?’
I fingered the back pockets of Endride’s uniform trousers. Could feel it was still there, the plastic bag with my shorn hair. I nodded.
I had to stop myself from running as I left. I was resurrected, I existed once more, and inside me this created a strange exultation. The wheels were spinning again, my heart was beating, my blood was circulating and my fortunes turning. I hurried up the stairs two at a time, passed the woman behind the glass partition at a more sedate pace and was almost at the door when I heard a familiar voice behind me.
‘Hello there, mister! Hold on a minute.’
Of course. It had been too easy.
I turned slowly. A man, familiar too, came towards me. He was holding up an ID card. Diana’s secret love. And the heretical thought flashed through my mind: I’ve had it.
‘Kripos,’ said the man in a deep pilot’s voice. Atmospheric noise, specks of outage. ‘May I have a few words with you, mis-er?’ Like a typewriter with a worn letter.
It is said that unconsciously we create an image of people we see in films or on TV that is bigger than they are in reality. This was not the case with Brede Sperre. He was even bigger than I had imagined. I forced myself to stand still as he walked towards me. Then he towered over me. From on high, under blond, boyish locks, cut so that his hair would seem wild in a trustworthy way, a pair of steel-grey eyes looked down at me. One of the things I had picked up about Sperre was that he was supposed to be having a relationship with a very well-known and very masculine Norwegian politician. Now rumours of homosexuality are, of course, the final proof that you have become a celebrity, the very hallmark so to speak. It was just that the person who’d told me this – one of the male models used by the designer Baron von Bulldog who had begged his way into Diana’s private view – claimed that he had allowed himself to be sodomised by the ‘police god’, as he reverentially called him.
‘Oh, that’s just talk, that is,’ I had said with a rigid smile, hoping the penetration angst did not show in my eyes.
‘Right, mister. I’ve jus-heard that you’re the third cousin of the Monsen boys and know them well. Perhaps you might be so kind as to help us iden-ify the bodies?’
I swallowed. The polite form of address and the semi-jocular ‘mister’ in the same utterance. But Sperre’s eyes were neutral. Was he playing the status game or did he just do that automatically, almost like a professional reflex action? I heard myself repeating ‘identify’ with a stammer as though the concept were totally unfamiliar to me.
‘Their mother will be here in a few hours,’ Sperre said. ‘But any time we could save… We would app-eciate that. It’ll on-y take a couple of se-onds.’
I didn’t want to. My body bristled and my brain insisted I refuse and get the hell out of there. For I had been reawakened. I – that is the plastic bag of hair I was carrying – was now a person who was active again on Greve’s GPS receiver. It was only a question of time before he would resume the hunt; I could already scent the dog in the air, sense the panic mounting. But another part of my brain, the one with the new voice, said that I should not refuse. That it would arouse suspicion. That it would only take a few seconds.
‘Of course,’ I said and was about to smile, until I realised that would be perceived as an inappropriate reaction to having to identify the corpses of your own relatives.
We went back the same way as I had come.
The porter nodded to me with a grin as we went through the locker room.
‘You should prepare yourself. The deceased are in pretty bad shape,’ Sperre said, opening a heavy metal door. We stepped into the mortuary. I shivered. Everything in the room suggested the inside of a fridge: white walls, roof and floor, a few degrees above zero and meat that was past its sell-by date.
The four bodies lay in a line, each on its own metal table. Feet stuck out from under white sheets, and I could see that film conventions were rooted in reality; they did in fact each have a metal tag attached to a big toe.
‘Ready?’ said Sperre.
I nodded.
He whipped back two sheets with a flourish, like a magician. ‘Traffic accidents,’ the policeman said, rocking on his heels. ‘The worst. Hard to identify, as you can see.’ I had the sudden impression Sperre was speaking abnormally slowly. ‘There should have been five people in the car, but we found only these four bodies. The fifth must have landed in the river and floated away.’
I stared, swallowed and breathed heavily through my nose. I was play-acting, of course. For even naked, the Monsen twins looked better now than they had in the wrecked car. Moreover, it didn’t reek in here. No gaseous faeces, no smells of blood and petrol or the stench of human intestines. It occurred to me that visual impressions are overrated, that sound and smell terrorise the sense mechanisms in a much more effective way. Like the crunching sound a woman’s head makes as it hits the parquet floor, after being shot through the eye.
‘It’s the Monsen twins,’ I whispered.
‘Yes, we’ve managed to work that out, too. The question is…’
Sperre paused for a long – a really long – dramatic pause. My God.
‘Which is Endride and which is Eskild?’
Despite the wintry temperature in the room I was soaked with sweat under my clothes. Was he speaking so slowly on purpose? Was it a new interrogation method, of which I knew nothing?
My gaze hovered over the naked bodies and found the mark I had made. The wound running from the ribs down the stomach was still open and had black scabs along the edges.
‘That’s Endride,’ I stated, pointing. ‘The other’s Eskild.’
‘Hm,’ Sperre purred with satisfaction, making a note. ‘You must’ve known the twins very well. Not even their colleagues, who have been here, could tell them apart.’
I answered with a sorrowful nod. ‘The twins and I were very close. Especially of late. Can I go now?’
‘Sure,’ Sperre said, but continued to make notes in a way that did not invite a dismissal.
I looked at the clock behind his head.
‘Identical twins,’ Sperre said, continuing to write. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ What the hell was he writing? One was Endride, the other Eskild, how many words did you really need to say that?
I knew I ought not to ask, but I couldn’t resist. ‘What’s ironic?’
Sperre stopped writing and looked up. ‘Born in the same second from the same egg. Dead in the same second in the same car.’
‘No irony in that, is there?’
‘None?’
‘None that I can see.’
‘Mm. You’re right. “Paradox” is probably the word I was looking for.’ Sperre smiled.
I felt my blood beginning to bubble. ‘It’s not a paradox, either.’
‘Well, it is strange anyway. There is a sort of cosmic logic to it, don’t you think?’
I lost control, saw my knuckles go white as I squeezed the bag and heard my quivering voice say: ‘No irony, no parody, no cosmic logic.’ The volume increased. ‘Just an arbitrary symmetry of life and death, which is not even that arbitrary since they, like many other identical twins, chose to spend a lot of their time in the immediate vicinity of each other. Lightning struck and they were together. End of story.’
I had almost shouted the last part.
Sperre looked at me with a thoughtful gaze. He had a finger and thumb placed at opposite corners of his mouth and now he ran them down to his chin. I knew that look. He was one of the few. He had the interrogator look, the eyes that could expose lies.
‘Well, Bratli,’ he said, ‘something bothering you, is there?’
‘Sorry,’ I said with a wan smile and knew I had to say something truthful now, something that did not register on the lie detector staring at me. ‘I had a bit of a dis agreement with my wife last night, and now this accident. I’m a bit off-kilter. My deepest apologies. I’ll remove myself this minute.’
I turned on my heel and left.
Sperre said something, perhaps goodbye, but it was drowned by the metal door slamming behind me and a bass tone booming through the mortuary.
