Fear Not

A woman stared out of a window, not knowing if she would ever sleep again. Perhaps she was already sleeping. Everything was strange and unreal, like a dream. She had been born in this house, in this room, she had always lived here and looked out of this leaded window, a cross dividing the view into four different parts of the world, as her father had told her when she was little and believed every word he said. Now everything was twisted and distorted. She was used to the rain against the window pane. It often rained, almost all the time. It was raining in Bergen and she wept and didn’t know what she was seeing. Life had been chopped into pieces. The view from the little house was no longer hers.

She had waited for twenty-four hours – a long night and an even longer day – in a state of not knowing which she could do nothing about. Just as her life had followed a course that had been determined by circumstances beyond her control, so these endless hours of waiting had been something she just had to suffer. There had been no way out, not until the woman on TV had told her what she had, in fact, already known when she woke up in the armchair in front of the screen exactly twenty-four hours earlier, with a fear that grasped her by the throat and made her hands shake.

Because she had waited before.

She had waited all her life, and she had got used to it.

This time everything was different. She had felt a confirmation of something that couldn’t be true – shouldn’t be true – and yet she still knew, because she had lived like this for such a long time, utterly, utterly alone.

The doorbell rang, so late and so unexpectedly that the woman gave a little scream.

She opened the door and recognized him. It was an eternity since they had last met, but the eyes were the same. He was weeping, like her, and asked if he could come in. She didn’t want him to. He wasn’t the one she wanted to see. She didn’t want to see anyone.

When she let him in and closed the door behind him, she asked God to let her wake up.

Please, please God. Please be kind to me.

Let me wake up now.

***

‘Surely nobody’s awake at this time of night?’

Beate Krohn looked at the news editor with a resigned expression. It was almost midnight. They were alone in the news office among silent, flickering monitors and the quiet hum of computers and the ventilation system. Here and there someone had hung up the odd Christmas decoration: a strand of red tinsel, a garland of little Norwegian flags. In one corner stood a sparse Christmas tree with a crooked star on top. Most of the chocolates and biscuits that had been provided as a consolation for those who had to work over Christmas had been eaten. Sheets of paper and old newspapers were strewn all over the place.

‘What about your parents?’

He just wouldn’t give up. He had lit a cigarette – such a blatant breach of the rules that she was quite impressed in spite of herself.

‘They’ll be asleep, too,’ she said. ‘Besides which, I’d frighten the life out of them if I rang this late. We have rules about that kind of thing in our family. Not before seven thirty in the morning, and not after ten at night. Unless somebody’s died.’

‘But somebody has died!’

‘Not like that. I mean-’

He interrupted her with a deep drag on his cigarette and an impatient wave of his hand.

‘Let me show you how it’s done,’ he grinned, the cigarette clamped between his teeth. ‘Watch and learn.’

His fingers flew over his mobile before he put it to his ear.

‘Hello Jonas, it’s Solve.’

Silence for three seconds.

‘Solve Borre. At NRK. Where are you?’

Beate Krohn had once read that the most common opening remark in the entire world when it came to mobile phone conversations was ‘Where are you?’ After that she had sworn never to ask the question herself.

‘Listen, Jonas. Bishop Lysgaard died last night, as you’ve no doubt heard. The thing is-’

He had obviously been interrupted, and took the opportunity to have another deep drag on his cigarette.

‘Sure. Sure. But the thing is, I just wanted to check what she died of. Just to satisfy my curiosity. I’ve got one of those feelings, you know…’

Pause.

‘But can’t you give one of them a ring? There must be somebody there who owes you a favour. Can’t you-?’

Once again he was interrupted. By now the cloud of smoke surrounding him was so dense Beate was afraid it would set off the alarm. She took a step back to avoid getting the smell in her clothes.

‘Nice one, Jonas! Nice one. Give me a ring later. Doesn’t matter what time it is!’ He ended the call. ‘There you go,’ he said, his fingers moving over the keys. ‘Come here and I’ll teach you something. Look at these messages.’

Beate leaned hesitantly over his shoulder and read the message saying that Bishop Lysgaard was dead. It hadn’t changed since she last saw it.

‘Notice anything odd?’ asked the editor.

‘No.’

She coughed discreetly and turned away.

‘I don’t know how many messages like that I’ve read in my life,’ he said, completely unmoved. ‘But it has to be a lot. By and large, they’re all exactly the same. The tone is slightly formal, and they don’t really say much. But they almost always say more than the fact that the person concerned is dead. “So-and-so passed away unexpectedly at home.” “So-and-so passed away after a short illness.” “So-and-so died in a car accident in Drammen last night.” That kind of thing.’

His fingers drew so many quotation marks in the air that ash went all over the keyboard. It was already so worn that the letters were barely visible.

‘But this one,’ he said, pointing at the display. ‘This one just says “Bishop Eva Karin Lysgaard died yesterday evening. She was sixty-two years old…” And so on and so on, blah blah blah.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ she said firmly.

‘Oh no,’ said the news editor, still smiling broadly. ‘Probably not. But it needs checking. How do you think a guy like me became a journalist at NRK before I was twenty-one, with no training?’

He pointed meaningfully at his nose.

‘I’ve got it, that’s how.’

The telephone rang. Beate Krohn stared at it in surprise, as if the editor had just shown her a conjuring trick.

‘Solve Borre,’ he yapped, dropping his cigarette stub into a mineral water bottle. ‘Right. Exactly.’

He sat in silence for a few seconds. The mischievous expression disappeared. His eyes narrowed. He reached for a pen and made a few illegible notes in the margin of a newspaper.

‘Thanks,’ he said eventually. ‘Thank you, Jonas. I owe you big time, OK?’

He sat staring at his phone for a moment. Suddenly he looked up, completely transformed.

‘Bishop Lysgaard was murdered,’ he said slowly. ‘She was fucking murdered on Christmas Eve.’

‘How…?’ Beate Krohn began, sinking down on to a chair. ‘How do you know…? Who was that you were talking to?’

The chief news editor leaned back in his chair and looked her straight in the eye.

‘I hope you’ve learned something tonight,’ he said quietly. ‘And the most important thing of all is this: you’re nothing as a journalist without good sources. Work long and hard to cultivate them, and never, ever give them away. Never.’

Beate Krohn struggled in vain to control her blushes.

‘And now,’ said the editor with a disarming smile as he lit yet another cigarette, ‘now we’re really going to hit the phones. Time to start waking people up!’