of yellow spring flowers.
“Tonnes Selbu is a good father.
Sigmund Berli stared in disbelief at the photograph of the nine-year-old.
“I would want to know. Shit, if Sture and Snorre are not mine, then…”
“Then what? Then you wouldn’t want them?”
Berli snapped his mouth shut, audibly. The snap made Adam laugh, a dry laugh.
“Forget it, Sigmund. What’s important is to find out whether the information is relevant to us. For the investigation.”
“And why should it be?” he asked, unfocused.
Snorre was dark like Sigmund Berli. Square. Like peas in a pod, people used to say. And even though he wasn’t usually much good at things like that, even he could see clear similarities between his son now and pictures of himself as a five-year-old.
“Obviously, I’ve got no idea! Get a grip.”
Adam snapped his fingers in front of Sigmund’s face.
“The first thing we should find out is if the same applies to any of the others.”
“You mean whether the other children are in fact their fathers’ children? And we should check that just before the funeral, knock on the door and say excuse me, kind sir, but we have reason to believe that you are not the father of the child you just lost, so please can we have a blood sample? Well?
“What’s wrong with you?”
Adam’s voice was quiet and calm. Sigmund Berli normally envied him that, his older colleague’s ability to control himself, to think clearly at all times, to talk precisely. But now Berli was furious.
“Damn it, Adam! Have you thought of putting the last nail in the coffin for these men or what?”
“No. I thought we would do it discreetly.
Sigmund Berli drew a deep breath. Then he put his fingertips together and twiddled his thumbs.
“Any ideas?”
“No. That’s your problem.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sure,” Adam started, in a conciliatory tone, like a father holding out his hand to an unreasonable son. “No, let’s put it another way: There are two things we have to find out as soon as possible. One is whether the children are their fathers’ children. The other is…”
Sigmund Berli stood up.
“I’m not finished,” said Adam.
“Well, hurry up and finish then, because I’ve got plenty to do.”
“We have to find out how Kim and Sarah died.”
“The doctors say they don’t know.”
“Well, then they will have to look more closely. Run new tests. I don’t know. But we have to know what the children died from and we have to know if they have an unknown father out there.”
“Unknown father?”
Sigmund Berli was calmer now. He had unclenched his fists and was breathing more freely.
“You mean that these children might be… half brothers and sisters?”
“I don’t mean anything,” said Adam Stubo. “You’ll have to find some way of getting the tests run. Good luck.”
Sigmund Berli said something under his breath. Adam Stubo was sensible enough not to ask what it was. Sigmund sometimes said things he didn’t mean. That is, once they had been said. And Adam knew very well what his colleague was thinking. Sigmund Berli’s oldest son was a fair and slight boy. His mother through and through, he used to say to himself with barely disguised pride.
When the door shut behind Sigmund, Adam Stubo dialled Johanne’s number at work. There was no reply. He let it ring for a long time, to no avail. Then he tried her at home. She wasn’t there either, and he discovered that he was annoyed that he didn’t know where she was.
THIRTY-NINE
The building was obviously from the postwar period. The fifties perhaps. A square building with four apartments, no doubt with two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and bathroom. The area was relatively big; lack of space was not a problem for small towns in Norway after World War II. The building had recently been renovated. The walls were painted with thick yellow paint and the roof tiles looked new. Johanne parked on the road, right outside the gate. The fence was also newly painted; the green paint so shiny that she wondered if it was still wet.
It smelled of small town.
The sound of a car, a jumble of voices from a kindergarten behind a high fence, hammering from a construction site across the road, the carpenters slinging obscenities at one another, a sudden peal of female laughter from an open window. The sounds of a small town. The smell of someone baking bread. The feeling that she was being watched as she walked up to the porch by the front door, without knowing who was watching, what they were thinking or whether they were thinking anything other than “Here comes a stranger, someone who doesn’t belong here.”
Johanne had been born and raised in Oslo. She knew very little about small towns and admitted it freely. All the same, there was something about places like this that appealed to her. They were manageable. Transparent. The feeling of being part of something that is not too big and unpredictable. She had often thought recently that with modern technology, she didn’t need to live in Oslo anymore. She could move away, move to the country, to a small village with five shops and a garage, a dilapidated cafe and a bus station, cheap housing and a school for Kristiane with only fifteen pupils in each class. But of course she couldn’t, not with Isak and her parents in town, not with Kristiane, who needed people around her all the time. But it had crossed her mind. She could feel the eyes trained on her from the first floor of the yellow building, from the bay window in the villa across the road, eyes that watched from behind the blinds and curtains; she had been noticed and was being watched, and the thought made her feel bizarrely safe.
“Lillestrom. Jesus. Here I am romanticizing about Lillestrom.”
The housing cooperative’s maintenance fund had obviously run dry when they got to the doorbells. They were hanging from the wall, speckled with yellow paint. Johanne tried to press one of the bells. She had to hold the plate with one hand and press with the other. She heard a horrible ringing sound somewhere in the distance. No one reacted, so she pushed the next one. The lady on the first floor, who had been watching her from the kitchen window, unaware that she was visible from the driveway, stuck her head out.
“Hello?”
“Hi. My name’s Johanne Vik. I wanted to…”
“Wait a moment!”
The woman padded down the stairs. She smiled expectantly at Johanne as she opened the door a crack.
“What can I do for you?”
“My name is Johanne Vik. I work at Oslo University and I’m looking for someone who might know what happened to a lady who lived here before. Many years ago, to be honest.”
“Oh?”
The woman was well over sixty. Her hair was covered with a chiffon scarf. Johanne could see big blue and green hair rollers under the bluish green semitransparent material.
