Without even locking the outside door she grabbed her daughter’s hand and ran down the steps and across the gravel to the car, which fortunately was parked just in front of the building.
‘You’re hurting me,’ Ragnhild protested. ‘Mummy, you’re squeezing my hand too hard!’
Johanne felt dizzy. She recognized the fear from the very first time she held Kristiane in her arms. Perfect, said the midwife. Healthy and beautiful, said Isak. But Johanne knew better. She looked down at her daughter, just thirty minutes old, so silent and with something in her that was blowing her to pieces.
‘Jump in,’ she said just a little too sharply, opening the back door. ‘I’ll fasten your belt.’
Her mobile rang. At first she couldn’t remember where she had put it, and started patting her jacket pockets.
‘Your bottom’s ringing,’ said Ragnhild, clambering into the car.
‘Yes, yes,’ Johanne said breathlessly into her phone when she had managed to get it out of her back pocket.
‘I’ve found her,’ Isak said from a long way off. ‘She was in the teddy bear shop, just as you thought, and she’s absolutely fine. A man was looking after her, and they were actually standing chatting to each other when I got there.’
Johanne leaned against the car, trying to slow her breathing. An immense feeling of relief that Kristiane was safe was overshadowed all too quickly by what Isak had said.
‘What man?’
‘What man? I ring up to tell you that Kristiane is perfectly safe, just as I thought, and you start going on about-’
‘Are you aware that shopping centres are an absolute El Dorado for paedophiles?’
Her words turned to grey clouds of vapour in the ice-cold air.
‘Mummy, aren’t you going to fasten my belt?’
‘Just a minute, sweetheart. What kind of-?’
‘No, Johanne, that’s enough! I’m not having this!’
Isak Aanonsen rarely became angry.
Even when Johanne got up from the sofa late one night an eternity ago and explained that she didn’t think their marriage could be saved, and that she’d already obtained the necessary forms to draw a line under it, Isak had tried to be positive. He just sat there for a while, alone in the living room, as Johanne went to bed in tears. An hour later he had knocked on the bedroom door, having already accepted the fact that they were no longer each other’s most intimate confidant. Kristiane was the most important person in all this, he said. Kristiane would always be the most important thing for both of them, and he really wanted them to agree on the practical arrangements regarding their daughter before they tried to sleep. By the time dawn broke they had come to an agreement. Since then he had loyally adhered to it. And she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times over the years he had shown even the slightest hint of irritation.
But now he was furious.
‘This is just hysteria! The man who was talking to Kristiane was a perfectly ordinary guy who had obviously noticed what kind of… what kind of child she is. He was very kind, and Kristiane smiled and waved to him as we left. She’s standing here now and…’
Johanne could hear Kristiane’s usual dam-di-rum-ram in the background. She started to cry. Silently, so that she wouldn’t upset Ragnhild any more than she already had.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘I’m sorry, Isak. I mean it. I was just really, really scared.’
‘I think we both were,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation, his voice back to normal. ‘But everything’s worked out fine. I assume you’d prefer it if I brought her straight home today? What do you think?’
‘Thank you. Thank you so much, Isak. It would be wonderful to have her back home.’
‘I’ll make up my time with her another weekend or something.’
‘Perhaps you could stay as well,’ Johanne heard herself saying.
‘Stay over with you? Great!’
In her mind’s eye she could see a glint in those dark blue eyes that narrowed to slits in his always unshaven face when he smiled that crooked, sweet smile that she had once been so in love with.
‘I’ll be there in half an hour,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to pick up any shopping while we’re here?’
‘No thanks. Just bring yourselves. Just come.’
She ended the call, overwhelmed by an immense weariness. She rested her arms on the roof of the car. The metal was so cold that her skin contracted. Perhaps she could tell Isak about the man in the garden on Christmas Day. If she explained that her fear hadn’t come from nowhere, that she had a good reason to be anxious, that the man had known Kristiane’s name although neither of the children knew him, if she…
No.
Slowly she straightened up and dried her tears with the back of her hand.
‘Out you come,’ she said, bending down to Ragnhild with a smile. ‘We’re not going to Sandvika after all. Isak and Kristiane are coming here instead.’
‘But we were going to watch a film and pretend we were at the cinema!’ Ragnhild complained loudly. ‘Just you and me!’
‘Well, we can do that with the others. It’ll be brilliant. Come on, out you get.’
Raghnild slid reluctantly from her child seat and climbed out of the car. As they walked back across the gravel, she suddenly stopped and put her hands on her hips.
‘Mummy,’ she said severely. ‘First of all we were in a big hurry to get to Storvika Sandsenter. Now we’re going back inside. We were going to pretend we were at the cinema, just you and me, and now suddenly Isak and Kristiane are coming. Daddy’s quite right.’
‘About what?’ said Johanne with a smile, stroking her youngest daughter’s hair.
‘Sometimes you just can’t make up your mind. But you’re still the best mummy in the world. The very best supermummy in the whole wide world, with bells on.’
Detective Inspector Silje Sorensen of the violent crime division in Oslo had drunk two cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream and was feeling sick.
The photographs in front of her didn’t help.
This year Christmas Eve had fallen on a weekday, which was perfect for those who wanted to have the longest possible time off work. The twenty-third of December, when some people also held celebrations, was on a Tuesday, so most people had also taken the Monday off, even though it was a normal working day, and stayed away on Tuesday. Christmas Day and Boxing Day were bank holidays anyway, and today, the day after Boxing Day, it was Saturday, and therefore a working day for those within the public sector, but for the less conscientious Christmas 2008 was an opportunity to take two weeks off work, since there was no point in going in when New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day fell in the middle of the following week.
Norway was working at a quarter speed, but not Silje Sorensen.
The sight of her full in-tray had put her in a foul mood. In the end it was easy to convince the family it would be best for all of them if she put in an extra day at work.
Or perhaps it was the thought of Hawre Ghani that distracted her, whatever she tried to do.
She flicked quickly through the photographs of the body, took out the picture of the boy when he was alive, plus a new document, and closed the file.
On the afternoon of Christmas Day she had phoned DCI Harald Bull, as he had requested. He wasn’t all that interested in discussing work in the middle of the holiday. When he wrote ‘as soon as possible’, he meant 5 January. Despite the fact that the overtime budget had been blown long ago, they agreed to give DC Knut Bork the job of checking the Kurdish asylum seeker’s background. Bork was young, single and ambitious, and Silje Sorensen was impressed by the report he had completed that morning and left in her office.
She glanced through the pages.
Hawre Ghani had come to Norway eighteen months ago, allegedly at the age of fifteen. No parents. Since he had no ID papers, the Norwegian authorities quickly became suspicious of his age.
Despite doubts about the boy’s date of birth, he was placed in an asylum centre in Ringebu. There were
