normally said nothing in the mornings. Just sat there, helplessly… He was always in Asbjorn’s shadow. Always. And his father’s. Even though Asbjorn was an unusually rebellious teenager and didn’t even want to carry his father’s name, it was as if Astor… admired him, you could say. He saw something of himself in the boy, I think. His own strength. Stubbornness. Self-assertion. It was always like that. Geir was somehow… superfluous. Always. But that morning he was chatty and bright and I knew that something was wrong. Of course, I didn’t think of Hedvig. As I said, we knew nothing about the little girl’s fate until later. But there was something about the boys’ behavior that made me so frightened that I didn’t dare to ask. And then when I later, weeks later, the evening before Astor was going to argue that Aksel Seier was guilty of killing Hedvig Gasoy… when I went upstairs with Asbjorn’s bloody sweater in my arms, angry as sin, suddenly…”
She folded her hands again. Locks of hair fell down heavy and gray on one shoulder. Tears flowed from the red eye. Johanne was not sure whether the old lady was crying or whether her eye was infected.
“It struck me, like a kind of vision,” said Unni Kongsbakken, tensely. “I went into Asbjorn’s room. He was sitting writing, as usual. I threw the sweater at him. He shrugged his shoulders and carried on writing without saying anything. ‘Hedvig,’ I said. ‘Is this Hedvig’s blood?’ Again he shrugged and kept on writing at a furious pace. I thought I was going to die there and then. Everything went black and I literally had to lean against the wall to stop myself from falling. The boy had given me endless sleepless nights. He always made me anxious. But I had never,
Her hand hit the white tablecloth; Johanne jumped. The glass and cutlery chimed and the waiter came running over.
“… never thought that he had it in him to do anything like that,” Unni Kongsbakken concluded.
“No thank you,” Johanne said to the waiter, who withdrew with some hesitation. “What… what did he say then?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“But… did he admit…”
“He had nothing to admit.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t quite…”
“I just stood there, leaning against the wall. Asbjorn wrote and wrote. To this day I don’t know how long we stayed there on our own. It could well have been half an hour. It was like… like losing everything. It’s possible I asked him again, but he didn’t answer. Just wrote and wrote, as if I wasn’t there. As if…”
Now she was really crying. Her tears fell from both eyes and she fished around in her sleeve for a tissue.
“Then Geir came in. I didn’t hear him. Suddenly he was just there, beside me, staring at the sweater that had fallen on the floor. He started to cry.
“Geir?
“Yes,” said Unni Kongsbakken, and straightened her back. She pressed her tissue gently to her eyes before tucking it back up her sleeve. “He wasn’t able to say much more. Asbjorn literally knocked him out.”
“But, does that mean… I’m not sure what…”
“Asbjorn was the kindest person you could imagine,” said Unni Kongsbakken, calmer now and breathing freely; she was no longer crying. “Asbjorn was an affectionate boy. Everything he wrote later, all that awful, offensive… blasphemy. The attacks. It was only words. He just wrote, Asbjorn. In reality he was a very kind man. And he was very fond of his brother.”
Johanne tried to swallow, but something was blocking her throat, just below the larynx. It was difficult. She had to say something, anything. She had no idea what.
“It was Geir who killed little Hedvig,” said Unni Kongsbakken. “I am almost certain of it.”
It took the emergency services over forty-five minutes to get the man out of the wreckage of the blue Opel. His leg had been ripped off at the thigh. His left eyeball had been crushed; a bloody clump had fallen out of the eye socket and dangled helplessly on his cheek. The steering wheel lay a hundred yards away at the foot of a pine tree; the wheel shaft had plunged deep into the man’s stomach.
“He’s alive,” panted one of the rescue men. “Holy shit! The man’s alive!”
Barely an hour later, the driver of the blue Opel was on the operating table. Things didn’t look hopeful, but there was still life in him.
Laffen Sornes, on the other hand, was still staring blankly at the sky with his body twisted halfway out the side window of a stolen Mazda 323. An inexperienced policeman was bending over a stream, crying openly. Three helicopters still hovered above the accident. Only one of them belonged to the police.
TV2 was about to break the record for afternoon viewers.
People passed outside the big windows of the Grand Cafe. Some were in a hurry. Others ambled down the street, aimlessly; they had all the time in the world and Johanne’s gaze followed them. She was trying to gather her thoughts. Unni Kongsbakken had apologized, got up, and left the table, without saying where she was going. She left behind her bag, a big, brown leather bag with metal details. Presumably she had just gone to the bathroom.
Johanne felt exhausted.
She tried to picture Geir Kongsbakken. His face kept slipping away; even though it was no more than a day since she met him, she couldn’t recall what he looked like, other than that he looked boring. Compact and heavy, like both his parents. She remembered the smell of furniture wax and brown wood. She remembered his neutral suit. The lawyer’s face was just an unclear blur in her mind.
Unni Kongsbakken came back. She sat down again without a word.
“What do you mean by ‘I am almost certain’?” asked Johanne.
“Pardon?”
“You said… you said you were almost certain that… that Geir killed Hedvig. Why just almost certain?”
“I can’t know for certain,” said Unni Kongsbakken drily. “Not in a legal sense, at least. He has never admitted to anything.”
“But…”
“Let me continue.”
She lifted her cup. It was empty. Johanne waved to the waiter for a refill. The waiter was getting annoyed; Unni Kongsbakken had to ask twice for more milk before he brought some.
“Geir was unconscious,” she said in the end. “And Asbjorn was like a clam. It only took a minute or two before Geir came to. And then he was as silent as his brother. I went to get Astor. As I said, he was sitting in his study and it was quite late.”
Again she got that faraway look in her eyes, as if she was trying to turn back time.
“Astor was furious. First because I had disturbed him, of course, and then because of what I had to say. It was ludicrous, he shouted. Garbage. Bullshit, he shouted at me. He commanded the boys down to the sofa and bombarded them with questions. Neither of them said a word. They… they simply didn’t answer anything. For me, that was as good an answer as any. Even though Asbjorn was a rebel, he always had a kind of respect for his father. I had never seen him like that before. The boy looked his father defiantly in the eye and did not answer. Geir stared down into his lap. He was silent, too, even when Astor slapped him hard. In the end, Astor gave up. He sent them to bed. It was well past midnight. He was shaking when he got into bed beside me. I told him what I thought. That Geir had killed Hedvig and that he’d called Asbjorn to help him get rid of… the body. We only had one phone in the house and it was right outside Asbjorn’s room. Geir could have called him in the night without us hearing it. That’s what I said. Astor said nothing; he just cried silently. I had never seen my husband cry. Finally he said that I was wrong. That it wasn’t possible. Aksel Seier had killed Hedvig, and that was that. He turned his back to me and said no more. I didn’t give in. I went through everything again. The bloody sweater. The boys’ peculiar behavior. The evening that Hedvig disappeared, Geir had been at a Young Socialists’ meeting in Oslo. Asbjorn was at home. In the early hours I heard… sorry, I’ve already told you that. I’m repeating myself. But Astor wouldn’t listen. When the day finally dawned, he got up. He took a shower, got dressed, and went to work. From what I read in the papers, he gave an impassioned speech. Then he came home and we ate dinner in silence. All four of us.”
