Axel gave her a baffled look. Reilly felt a blow to his stomach. A diary. Bloody hell.
‘Hanna wanted to give it to me personally,’ Ingerid said.
Axel nodded. He was gripping the edge of the table. Ingerid put the book back in her bag and clicked it shut.
‘I will copy Jon,’ she said. ‘I’ll put it in my desk drawer. One day, when I’m feeling very brave, I’ll read it. Jon may not have wanted me to – after all, a diary is a private thing – but I might find some answers.’
Axel finally leapt into action. You could see him preparing for an attack. He drew his chair closer, leaned forward over the table and placed a hand on her arm. It was golden against her white skin, a strong, tanned hand with clearly visible veins.
‘Think twice before you read it,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there were things he wanted to spare you.’
She looked surprised. Her eyebrows shot up.
‘What would they be?’
‘Well,’ Axel hesitated. ‘Those confessions may not be intended for our eyes. For yours, I mean.’
‘But he’s my son,’ she said, ‘and now I’ve got nothing left. Only his thoughts in that diary and I so want them.’
Axel tightened his grip on her arm.
‘But the things you write in a diary are the very things you want to keep secret,’ he said.
Ingerid Moreno started to waver.
‘I know that. But Jon took his own life. He left me all alone again. Who is going to bury me now, can you tell me that? Do you know what this means? I’ll have to die among strangers. I’ll forgive Jon, but only if he had good reason.’
‘Well,’ Axel nodded. ‘As long as you’re not disappointed. As long as it doesn’t make matters worse.’
Ingerid Moreno freed her arm from Axel’s grip.
‘Jon would never disappoint me,’ she said. ‘I’m sure of that.’
Axel was always the driving force in our little engine, Philip Reilly mused. He was in charge of operations and maintenance. He got us out of every scrape. Whenever it started rattling in one place, he would be there in a split second and tighten a bolt.
Whenever they needed forgiveness for some boyish prank, he would charm people into submission, men and women alike. They had been able to get away with anything. Axel Frimann had his own light, an overwhelming aura of warmth, and when he looked at people, their sense of self-worth would instantly soar. Now he had lost his usual composure. Axel was normally a man of action. He could turn every situation to his own advantage. He had no time for people who surrendered to their fate. But now it appeared that Jon’s innermost thoughts were to be found inside that diary, and he was no longer in control.
‘You know what this means, don’t you?’
‘You leave Ingerid alone,’ Reilly said.
Axel stopped pacing. What had Ingerid said? That she would do as Jon had done and put the diary in a drawer. And then, when she summoned up the courage one day, she would read it.
‘There’s a desk just inside the front door,’ he said. ‘I bet the diary is in one of the drawers.’
Reilly gave him a horrified look. The ideas taking shape in Axel’s head were more than he could tolerate.
‘We need that diary,’ Axel said.
‘And here I was thinking I was the crazy one,’ Reilly said. ‘It is completely out of the question and I sincerely hope that you understand that.’
‘The diary is evidence.’
‘That depends on what Jon wrote in it,’ Reilly said. ‘Don’t underestimate him.’
Axel crossed to the open window. He stared out of it, both hands planted firmly on the windowsill. His muscles bulged under his shirt and Reilly was reminded of an ox in front of a closed gate.
‘Deep down you’re really very naive,’ he said. ‘You think we’ve got a chance to get away with it all, but we don’t. And that might be just as well. I’ve always known that this day would come. But then again, I’m not the one worrying about a top job with Repeat.’
‘No, you live in a hovel,’ Axel said. ‘And you’ve got a crap job.’
‘I like my hovel. I like moving beds around.’
Over at the window Axel groaned loudly. His broad back was outlined by the light from outside.
‘Do you know what occurred to me in the church today?’ he asked. ‘Jon wouldn’t have made it anyway. Jon was constantly on edge, breathless, practically. You would have thought he had a heart defect.’
Reilly was pondering something else.
‘What do you think it looks like inside his coffin?’ he asked.
‘What are you on about now?’
‘It hit the ground. Jon must have skidded forwards. Perhaps he’s squashed up in a corner.’
‘There’s no room for movement inside a coffin,’ Axel said. ‘They’re made to measure. And even if he did bump his head against a corner, there’s no one to see it anyway.’
Reilly did not reply. But the thought that Jon was not lying as he should haunted him for a long time.
CHAPTER 11
The remains of the summer’s floral splendour glowed against the red walls of Mrs Moreno’s house. Above the doorbell was a porcelain sign in the shape of a salmon. INGERID AND JON LIVE HERE. Sejer and Skarre waited. It took some time before Ingerid opened the door and when she finally emerged, she did not speak a word. She disappeared inside.
‘How are you?’ Sejer asked.
She collapsed into an armchair, picked up a cushion and held it in front of her like a shield.
‘How am I? I’ve lost Jon, and I’ve lost the rest of my life.’
Sejer protested. ‘Don’t think about the rest of your life,’ he said. ‘No one can look ahead when they’re down.’ He placed his hand on her arm.
‘Jon kept a diary,’ she said. ‘Hanna Wigert brought it to the funeral yesterday. She found it in his room, in a drawer. It’s on my bedside table.’ Abruptly she got up from the armchair and went to her bedroom to fetch it.
Sejer touched the cover. The red fabric was coarse and quite plain.
‘May I read it, please?’ he asked.
‘What good would that do?’
‘We need it.’
She looked baffled.
‘We’ll talk more about it later,’ he said. ‘But first tell us about the funeral, please. Did you give Jon a lovely service?’
She pondered this for a while.
‘I met Molly,’ she said. ‘She and Jon were very good friends. She brought along a terrier which caused something of a commotion. Have you heard about it?’
‘Yes,’ Sejer said. ‘We’ve heard. How do you feel about what happened?’
‘I thought it might be a sign. That all of us who knew Jon, we couldn’t manage to hold on to him while he was alive. He got ill and he slipped through our fingers. And we didn’t manage to keep hold of him in death either. We lost him to the earth, plain and simple. It says something about us.’
‘What does it say?’ Sejer asked.
‘That we’re all to blame.’
She fell silent. She waited for Sejer to move the conversation forward.
‘When Jon was growing up, were you ever worried about him?’ Sejer asked.
She smiled bleakly.
‘Of course I was. He was my child. Is there anything we do but worry about them? There’s so much they have to cope with,’ she said. ‘They have to find a space for themselves among their siblings, and in the classroom, and they have to survive in the playground. They have to find a peer group to belong to and a couple of close friends.
