Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Karin Fossum
Dedication
Epigraph
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Copyright
The Inspector Sejer series
Don’t Look Back
He Who Fears the Wolf
When the Devil Holds the Candle
Calling Out For You
Black Seconds
The Water’s Edge
Bad Intentions
The Caller
In the Darkness
Standalone crime fiction
Broken
To Kari
I hate people for the simple reason that they exist
and envy them intensely when I see them moving
around in their own country.
Inside my block of ice I sit, the lunatic,
taking meticulous notes on all the hostile deeds
that people direct specifically at me.
And from inside the dark space of revenge
emerges a master of the world.
– Elgard Jonsson
A DAZZLING RAY of light slanted in through the trees.
The shock brought him up short. He wasn’t ready. He had got out of bed, made his way one foot in front of the other through the dark house, still half-asleep, and come out on to the front steps. And there he encountered the sun.
It struck his eyes like an awl. He raised his hands to his eyes, but the light kept coming, penetrating cartilage and bone, all the way into the dark of his skull. Everything turned blindingly white inside. His thoughts fled in all directions, shattered into atoms. He wanted to scream, but he never screamed because to do so was beneath his dignity. Instead he clenched his teeth and stood as still as he could on the steps. Something was happening. The skin on his head began to tighten; a tingling sensation that was getting stronger. Trembling, he stood with his hands on his face. He felt his eyes being pulled apart as his nostrils flared, growing as big as keyholes. He whimpered faintly and tried to resist, but he couldn’t stop the violent force. Bit by bit his features were erased. All that remained was a naked skull covered with translucent, white skin.
He struggled, frantic, moaning as he tried to feel his face, to be sure it was still there. His nose had turned soft and disgusting. He took his hand away – he had ruined what little was left, could feel it sliding off, losing its shape like a rotten plum.
And then it released him. Anxiously he took a breath, and felt his face slip back into place. He blinked several times, and opened and shut his mouth. But as he was about to move forwards he felt a deep pain in his chest, the sharp claws of an invisible monster. He doubled over, wrapping his arms around his torso to restrain the force that was yanking the skin of his breast tighter and tighter. His nipples vanished into his armpits. The skin on his bare chest grew thinner, the veins stood out like knotty cables, pulsing with black blood. He was bent nearly double, and knew that he was no longer able to resist it.
Suddenly he split open like a troll in the sunlight. His guts and intestines poured out. He tried to keep everything in by seizing hold of the edges of the wound and pulling them together, but it seeped out and ran through his fingers, collecting at his feet like the entrails of a slaughtered animal. His heart was still beating, trapped behind his ribs, terrified, pounding. He stood like that for a long time, bent double and gasping. He opened one eye and cast an anxious glance down his body. His abdominal cavity was empty. The outpour had stopped. He began clumsily to gather up what had come out, stuffing it back in any old how with one hand while he held on to his skin with the other, to prevent it from sliding out again. Nothing was in the right place; there were strange bulges everywhere, but if he could get the wound closed, no-one would know. He wasn’t made like other people, though this wasn’t plain to see. He held on to the skin with his left hand, continuing to shove with his right. At last he got most of it inside again. Only a small spattering of blood was left on the steps. He pressed hard on the wound and felt it starting to close up, breathing cautiously so it would not open again. The sun was still shining through the trees, its white beams as sharp as swords. But he was whole again. Everything had happened too fast. He shouldn’t have gone straight from bed out into the sunlight. He had always moved in a different space, seeing the world through a murky veil that took the sting out of the light and the sounds coming from outside. He held the veil in place by concentrating hard. A moment ago he had slipped up, had run out into the new day without taking stock, like a child.
His punishment seemed unreasonably harsh. Because as he slept on the dark bed, he had dreamed about something that made him sit bolt upright and then rush outside without thinking. He closed his eyes and recalled some images. He was looking at his mother at the bottom of the stairs. Out of her mouth gushed warm red blood. Fat and round, wearing a white apron with big flowers, she reminded him of a toppled jug, emptying red gravy. He remembered her voice, always accompanied by a dark velvety tone.
Then he went back inside the house.
*
This is a story about Errki.
It began like this: at 3 a.m. he left the asylum. We don’t refer to it as the asylum, Errki, and even though you surely have the right to call it whatever you like in private, you ought to take other people into consideration and give it a different name. It’s a matter of courtesy. Or tact, if you will. Have you ever heard of that?
She was so eloquent, God help her, that her words seemed to seep out of her like oil. After the words came her sound, a shrill electric organ.
“It’s called the Beacon,” he said, and gave an acid smile. “Those of us here in the Beacon are all one big family. The telephone rings, may I speak to the Beacon please? Could someone get the mail for the Beacon?”
“Precisely. It’s all a matter of habit. Everyone has to show a little consideration.”
“Not me,” he replied in a sullen voice. “I was committed against my will, per paragraph five. Dangerous to myself and possibly to others.”
He leaned forward and whispered in her ear.
“Thanks to me you can swan around on pay grade 27.”
The night nurse shivered. This was the time of day when she felt most vulnerable. This no-man’s-land between night and morning, a grey void when the birds stopped singing and you couldn’t be sure that they’d ever sing again. When anything might have happened and she didn’t yet know about it. She slumped a little, feeling faint. She didn’t have the strength to see his pain, to remember who he was, that he was her charge. She just found him repulsive, self-absorbed and nasty.
“I realise that,” she snapped. “But you’ve been here for four months now, and as far as I can tell, you seem to like it well enough.”
As she said this her lips pursed like the beak of a hen. The organ struck a strident chord.
And so he left. It wasn’t hard. The night was warm, and the window was ajar with a gap of 15 centimetres. It was locked with a steel bar, but he managed to remove the whole bar, using his belt buckle. The building was more than a hundred years old, and the screws came smoothly out of the rotting wood. His room was on the first floor. He jumped from the window as light as a bird and landed on the lawn.
He didn’t cross the car park, but instead headed through the woods towards the small lake, which they called the Well. It didn’t matter which route he took. The point was that he didn’t want to stay in the Beacon any more.
The lake was beautiful. It didn’t put on airs, just lay there without a ripple, resting in the landscape, open and still. Didn’t push him away, didn’t lure him forward. Didn’t touch him. Was simply there. The asylum was only a stone’s throw away, but invisible because of the trees. Nestor asked him to stop for a moment, and he did. He stared down into the black Well, and thought of Tormod, who was found floating face down in the water, wearing rubber gloves, as always, with his blond hair waving in the greenish-black water. He didn’t look very good, but then he never had. He was fat and sluggish with colourless eyes, and besides he was stupid. A disgusting, pudding-like fellow who went around asking people to excuse him, afraid of infecting them or of being in the way, afraid that someone would notice his contaminated breath. Now the poor man was with God. Maybe he was sloshing around on a cloud, freed at last from his clammy gloves. Maybe he’d met Errki’s mother up there, maybe she was floating on the cloud next to his. Errki loved his mother. The thought of Tormod’s fluttering eyes with the blond eyelashes made him swallow hard. He gave a couple of irritated shrugs of his thin shoulders and kept walking.
His dark figure was quite visible against all that light-green foliage, but no-one saw him. The others were asleep. After his suicide Tormod was reduced to a practical phenomenon for which they had need: an empty bed. An astonishing transformation. Tormod was no longer Tormod, he was an empty bed. And he too would become an empty bed, with the sheets tucked in tight. He listened to the voice and gave a brisk nod. Then he walked on, sauntering through the dense woods. By the time the night nurse arrived to peek into his room, he had been walking for more than two hours. She didn’t dare repeat their conversation. “No, I didn’t notice anything unusual, he was as he always is.” The sun had come up and shone in her face through the window of the staffroom where they held their morning meetings. The words burned her throat like acid.
He passed the riding centre. Heard the big dark animals restlessly scraping their hooves. One of them saw him and gave a loud snort. He looked at them out of the corner of his eye and felt a deep longing to stay with them, to be like them. No-one would go up to a horse and ask: who are you? A horse had to bear whatever burden it was given, and afterwards it was allowed to rest. And the horse that was incapable of doing anything got a bullet in its forehead. One day at a time. Walk around the enclosure with a child on its back. Take a drink from the old bathtub. Sleep standing up with its head drooping. Shake off a few insects. Until the end of its days.
Now he was walking on the road. People would soon be crawling out from under sheets and quilts. Tumbling out of holes and anthills. He could feel it approaching, like a vibration in the air. Before long the traffic would be on the move. Errki picked up his pace. It would be better to go back into the woods. Occasionally he raised his head. He liked the quivering trees, the light shimmering through the leaves, and the smell of grass in his nostrils. The sound of twigs and heather crunching under his feet. Trees, grey and dry, that stood there, anchored in the earth. He snatched at a fern and pulled it up, roots and all, held it to his eyes and muttered, “Root, stem and leaf. Root, stem and leaf.”
In time he grew tired. In the distance he saw a crag and beneath it a dark shadow. When he reached it he curled up in the grass, listening all the while to the voice. It hummed inside him, steady and peaceful, like a power station. In his pocket he had a little pill box with a screw-on lid. Sleep is Death’s brother, he thought, and closed his eyes.
*
He was at the edge of a plain.
Only Errki could walk like that, his tread heavy, limping like a crow with clipped wings, but moving fast. Everything hung from him, his long hair, his open jacket, and the baggy trousers that he hadn’t taken off in a long time – old polyester trousers with a rank smell of sweat and urine. His head was tilted, as if a tendon were pulling his neck. He seldom looked up; instead he kept his gaze mostly fixed on the ground, so that what he chiefly saw was his feet trudging along. They moved by themselves. He didn’t need a destination, he could keep going for hours without getting tired. He walked as tenaciously as a wind-up toy with a key in its back.
He was a man of 24 with narrow shoulders but surprisingly wide hips. He had inherited bad hip joints, and had to swing his hips in a special way to make his legs cooperate. An annoying swing, as if he had something hideous on his back that he wanted to shake off. It made people think that he walked like a woman. His neck was also thinner and longer than usual for a man, almost too thin to bear the weight of his head. Not that his head was particularly large, but the contents were much heavier than was common.
He weighed only 60 kilos and ate little. It was hard to decide what he wanted to eat. Bread or cornflakes? Sausage or a hamburger? An apple or a banana? How did people actually go about making all the choices that life required? How did they know if they’d made the right choice?
In his pocket was his pill box with a screw-on top which contained all he needed to arrange his thoughts in acceptable order, and to make his legs obey him, up and down the corridors of the Beacon, on the bus, on the train, or wandering along the road.
When he wasn’t on the move he would lie still and rest. His hair was long and black and wiry. It hung over his face like a filthy tassel. His skin was scarred with acne. The pimples had appeared in his thirteenth year, fermenting like tiny volcanoes. He stopped washing. They looked much worse if he rubbed them with soap and water. They weren’t quite so noticeable with dirt and grease caked on his skin in a thick layer. Beneath the wiry hair a long, narrow face could be glimpsed, with sharp cheekbones and narrow black brows. His eyes were deep-set and strange, most often downcast, avoiding anyone’s glance. But if someone did make contact, they shone with a pale light. Because of his long hair and all the clothes he wore, his skin was white even in the summer. His trousers rode low on his hips, held in place by a leather belt. The buckle was a brass eagle with outspread wings and a crooked beak. It had tiny enamel eyes that stared down at an invisible prey, perhaps at Errki’s modest genitals within the filthy trousers. His penis was small for a man his age, and it had never been inside a woman. No-one knew this, and even he ignored the fact, focusing on more important matters. Besides, the eagle was impressive enough as it swayed in time with the rotation of Errki’s hips. Maybe it fooled people into thinking that the equipment below might actually be a beast of prey.
It was quiet and hot along the road, and there were yellow fields on both sides for as far as the eye could see. A girl with a pram was approaching. She saw the dark, lumbering figure from far off and realised that she would have to pass him. He looked odd, and as he got closer she could feel her body tense, and her steps grew stiffer. The figure was jolting and twisting along; there was something both timid and aggressive about him, and it occurred to her that she should not look into his eyes, but move quickly past, with an indifferent and superior look on her face. She must not show that she was afraid because she had the feeling that if he smelled her fear, he would attack, just like an untrustworthy dog.
The girl was as fair and pretty as Errki was dark and ugly. Even through the veil her approach was like a sharp light. She was clutching the handle of the pram, pushing it brusquely ahead of her like a shield, as if she were willing to sacrifice whatever it contained to save her own skin. Or so Errki thought. He had been walking for a long time, lost in thought. Now he was aware of the figure mincing towards him on the periphery of his vision. It looked insignificant, like a piece of fluttering white paper. He did not raise his head. He had long ago registered the contours that were approaching. Of all the things in Errki’s world of perceptions, a girl with a pram was the most pitiful. That producing a child should give a woman that stupid expression of bliss was something he couldn’t understand. In spite of the billions of wailing inhabitants on earth, having a child changed their whole view of life. It was beyond his comprehension. Yet he did cast a glance at her and asked the question: evil intentions or none at all? He had no experience of good intentions. But he never let himself be fooled. It was impossible to recognise an enemy by outward superficial appearances. Under the baby blanket she might have hidden a knife. He imagined something with a barbed point and jagged edge. One never knew.
They passed each other. At that instant Errki heard the brittle sound of tinkling glass. The girl tightened her grip on the handle of the pram. For a brief moment she looked up. To her horror she saw the strange light in his eyes and inside his open jacket she read the words on his T-shirt:
KILL THE OTHERS
It was something she wouldn’t forget. And so she became one of many who would later report to the police that she had seen the man they were looking for on that day at that particular spot.
The others were always after him. Not just his ravaged body with its organs all jumbled together, or his hard-as-stone heart that trembled behind the grating of bones. They wanted to get inside him. Into the secret space with the dazzling lamps. They wrapped their evil intentions in fine words, nagged him about the blessing of reality and the exciting challenge of community. He couldn’t bear it.
What if he didn’t want to?
He shook his head in confusion. His thoughts had wandered out of control, disturbing his sense of time. He tottered back into the room and sank down on the filthy mattress. He was glad that he had run away from the suffocating asylum, glad that he had found the abandoned cabin. He curled up on his side with his knees bent, his hands between his legs, his cheek pressed against the mouldy mattress. He was staring deep inside himself, down into the dark, dusty cellar where a narrow hole in the ceiling opened, letting in a ray of pale light. It formed a circular patch on the stone floor. There sat Nestor. Beside him a ragged coat. The coat looked quite innocent, like something discarded, but Errki knew better. He lay still for a long time, waiting, and then fell asleep again. The wound needed time to grow together. While it grew he dreamed. After the punishment he was always given comfort, and he accepted it. It was part of the agreement. It was 6.03 a.m. on July 4th, and a fierce heat was already seeping in.
*
The cabin had come as a surprise, hidden in a dense grove of trees. It was an old place where no-one had lived for decades, yet it was in good repair, although most of the furnishings had been ruined long ago by drifters. Over the years quite a few such people had made themselves at home for a brief period, setting their mark on the worn rooms, leaving empty bottles behind.
He had stood in the grove for a while and stared. It was a wooden house, and in front was a little yard with a lush lawn. He put his hand tentatively on the door and pushed it open, then stood for a moment, sniffing the air. Inside he found a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms. On one of the beds lay an old striped mattress. He tiptoed from room to room, looking around, breathing in the smell of old timber. In this house Errki was closer to his ancestors than he knew. It was an old summer cabin, constructed on the ancient site of one of the many Finnish dwellings built in the 1600s. As he walked around he listened to the mute walls. It looked as if something had happened. A rage had settled in the walls. Many of the thick beams had splinters sticking out of deep gashes, as if someone had attacked them with an axe. Not a single window pane was intact; only a few shards of glass remained in the shattered frames. He thought of three or four things at once. It was impossible to get here by car, and as far as he knew no-one had seen him when he had turned off the road and began clambering through the undergrowth. He didn’t have a watch, but he knew he had walked for about 30 minutes after leaving the roadway. The fact that he had no food or extra clothes didn’t bother him, but he was thirsty. He ground his jaws together to create some saliva and began chewing on his tongue.
He went into the room that had been the kitchen and started opening the drawers. The knobs were gone, so he had to prise them open with his long fingernails. He found a fork with missing prongs and a box of candles. Crumbs and cobwebs. Bottle caps. An empty matchbox. Under the broken kitchen window lay the remnants of a net curtain, but when he picked it up, the fabric dissolved in his fingers. He went back to the living room. The room had one window facing out the front and one on the opposite wall, looking out at a pond. Against one wall stood an old sofa with rough green upholstery. Across from it stood a large wardrobe. He opened it and peered inside. It was empty. The wooden floor was stained and rough under his feet. He let himself sink onto the sofa. The springs screeched and a cloud of dust rose up from the threadbare fabric. He changed his mind and went into the bedroom with the bed and mattress. He pulled off his jacket and T-shirt and lay down. He was gone for an eternity. When he woke up he had forgotten where he was, and besides, he had been dreaming. That was why he made the big mistake, stepping straight out into the sunshine without stopping to think. It was humiliating to scrape up his own guts from the step, listening to Nestor’s spiteful laughter, as his intestines slid through his fingers like baby snakes.
He woke for a second time, sat up very slowly and stared around the room, running his hand over his chest to make sure it was whole. Only a jagged red scar remained. It ran from between his nipples all the way down to his navel. He got up from the bed. The sun was higher now. The room was empty except for a rough bedside table that was really no more than a crate. Slowly he straightened his back and walked over to the table and pulled out the drawer. While he stood there staring down at the drawer, he rubbed absentmindedly at a tender spot on his hip. He had been lying on something hard. He went back to the bed and looked down at the mattress, and felt around with his fingers. Something narrow and hard was there. He lifted the mattress with difficulty and rolled it back. Underneath was a big hole in the striped cover where some of the foam had been removed. He stuck his hand inside and dug around, until he felt something cold. He pulled it out and stared in amazement, not believing his eyes. Of all the things to find in this dilapidated place, inside a mouldy old mattress: a pistol. He held it gingerly in both hands and looked down the barrel. In Errki’s hands it was a foreign object, but when he gripped it in his right hand with a finger on the trigger, it felt good. What power it had. All the power of heaven and earth. Breeze, gale and storm. Out of curiosity he turned a lever and opened it. There was one bullet in the chamber. Eagerly he pulled it out and examined it. It was long and shiny and surprisingly round at the tip. He pressed the round back into the chamber, pleased at how well it fitted. The discovery made him look around. Someone had spent the night here and left the pistol behind. That was odd. Maybe the person had been caught by surprise and didn’t have time to take it with him. Maybe he was waiting somewhere until he could come back and get it. It was a fine gun. Errki didn’t know much about firearms, but he thought it was a large-calibre revolver of an expensive kind. He read the tiny letters on the stock: Colt.
“What do you think, Nestor?” he murmured softly as he turned the weapon this way and that. Then he stopped abruptly and tossed it away. The pistol crashed onto the floor. He ran out to the kitchen and stood there for a moment, clinging to the bench. He should have thought of that. Nestor would come up with some disgusting suggestion. He could hear them down there in the dark cellar, laughing so the dust flew. He went back and stood looking at the gun for a long time. After a time he put it back inside the mattress. He didn’t need it; he had other weapons. He wandered around the house, from the kitchen to the living room and back again, keeping his eyes on the stained floorboards. They creaked and carried on, the pitch varying. Soon he had created a whole melody from his route from room to room. His black hair and his jacket and trousers shook frenetically. His arms stuck out woodenly from his body, and he moved his fingers in rhythm, in time with the creaking boards. He was sucked into the rhythm; he walked and walked, unable to stop, not wanting to. In the repetition he found peace. He had no other aim than to walk, back and forth, taking even steps, his fingers splayed. Creak, creak, Errki goes, to and fro, over and over, from room to room, bumpety-bump.
He didn’t know how long he had been walking, but eventually he gathered his courage and went to stand in the doorway. He hesitated and then opened the door. Bright sunlight flooded the clearing. He lowered his eyes and took a cautious step out onto the stone steps, then made his way through the deep grass. He stopped and sniffed up at the pine cones and down at the thicket of ferns and bracken. Root, stem and leaf. At last he was in motion again, though he didn’t know where he was going or what he would do. Nestor was guiding his steps through the undergrowth towards civilisation.
It was still early morning. Only the early-risers had got out of bed. They had opened their curtains and looked out at the radiant day. Hot. Bright. Shimmering green. They made optimistic plans for the day, wanting to take advantage of the beautiful weather of the all-too brief summer. One of them was Halldis Horn. She lived alone on a little farm not far from the old Finnish cabin. As Errki took his first steps through the grass, she was pulling her nightgown over her head.
BOTH THE FIRST and the second bloom of youth had long since passed, and she was much too heavy, but for a few unprejudiced souls she was definitely still a looker. Tall and plump and full-breasted, with a grey braid that hung like a thick iron rope down her back. She had a round face with good colouring, cheeks like red roses, and her eyes had retained their flashing brightness even though she was old.
She went through her living room and kitchen and opened the door to the courtyard. She lifted her face to the sun, squinting, and stood on the steps for a moment, in her checked apron and wooden clogs. She wore brown, knee-high stockings, not because it was cold but because she thought women of her age shouldn’t show too much flesh, and even though no-one ever came to her house except for the grocer once a week, there was always Our Lord and His eternally present gaze. For better or worse, to put it bluntly, because although she was a believer, she did send Him angry thoughts sometimes, and she never asked for His forgiveness. It was the invasion of dandelions that she was looking at now. The whole yard was full of them. They seemed to spread like a rash, polluting the entire garden, which she tended so carefully. Twice each summer she would root out the weeds with a hoe, hacking at one plant after the other with furious blows. She liked to work, but once in a while she would complain, just to remind her blessed husband what kind of mess he had left her in by falling dead at the wheel of his tractor, the result of a clot the size of a grain of rice in an artery. That her tough and solid husband, a mountain of muscles, could be felled in such a way was beyond her understanding, even though the doctor had tried to explain it. She found it as impossible to believe as the fact that a plane could fly, or that she could ring her sister Helga in Hammerfest way up north and hear her plaintive voice so clearly.
She had better start before it got too hot. She found the hoe and carried it out to the yard. Shaded her eyes with her hand and scanned the area to plan her route. Decided to start near the steps and work her way in a fan formation past the well and over to the shed. In the hall she found a bucket and rake. She established a swift rhythm, hacking steadily at the weeds until she was tired, giving each plant two or three chops, then slowing the tempo, filling the bucket and emptying it on the compost heap behind the house. Ashes to ashes, she thought, giving the bottom of the bucket a hard thump. Then she went back to hacking. Her wide behind pointed towards the sky and swayed in time with the rhythm of her hoe. The red and green checks of her apron fluttered gently in the sun. Her brow was damp with sweat, and her braid kept swinging forward over her shoulder. She usually wore it pinned up, coiled around like a shiny snake, but not until after morning chores.
She liked the sound she made, hacking through the grass. The hoe was as sharp as an axe; she had sharpened it herself. Now and then she hit a stone, and winced at the thought of the shiny blade with its razor-thin edge. The weeds lay like fallen soldiers on a battlefield as she worked her way forward. She didn’t sing or hum. She had enough to do just carrying out her task, and besides, the Creator might end up thinking that life was going too well, and for Halldis that would be an exaggeration. In her mind she set the table. Home-baked bread and her own brown whey cheese made from goat’s milk.
She straightened up. Several birds shrieked high above the trees, and she thought she heard a swishing sound and then something falling through the leaves. Then silence. She paused for a while and stared, stealing a few moments of rest and letting her eyes glide over the woods, where she knew every single tree. In the familiar pattern of black trunks she thought she saw something dark. Something that had not been there before. An irregularity.
She narrowed her eyes and stared intently, but since it didn’t move, she dismissed it as illusion. Her eyes stopped on the well. The grass around the pump was tall and untidy; maybe she should cut it later. She bent to the work again, this time with her back to her front door. The sun was getting hot, even though it was early. Her wide backside was baking in the sun, and the sweat tickled as it ran down the inside of her thighs. This was Halldis Horn’s life. Solving one problem, then another, as they appeared, without grumbling. She was the type of person who never questioned the Creation or the meaning of life. That wasn’t proper. And besides, she was afraid of what the answer might be. She kept on hacking, making her bottom shake. Up the slope, hiding behind a tree, watching, stood Errki.
*
The woman fascinated him. Like heavy spruce trees, she grew out of the earth. Behind her he could hear her sound, a lonely, majestic trombone. For a long time he stood and devoured her with his eyes: her round shoulders, the fluttering dress. He had seen her before. This was someone who lived alone, he knew that. Someone who seldom spoke and listened only to the wind, or the screeching of the magpies. He took a couple of steps, making a few twigs crack. The sound of the hoe grew sharper. He fixed his eyes on her hands, thick fingers and wrists. The force of the blade as it sliced through the grass was fearsome and had nothing feminine about it. As he moved, without a sound now, he could tell that the woman gradually became aware of something alive approaching her. People who live alone develop an acute awareness of their surroundings. Her rhythm changed, becoming first slower, then faster, as if to deny that something was about to happen. She stopped and straightened up. Suddenly she caught sight of him. Her body stiffened. She stood as taut as a bow, her chest heaving. A cord of fear trembled between them. Her hands wrapped tighter around the hoe. Her eyes immediately widened, then turned narrow and hard. There was not much she was afraid of in the world, but just at that instant she felt uneasy.
He came to an abrupt halt, wanting her to keep on working. The only thing he wanted was to watch her as she carried out the simple task, to observe her rhythm and her wriggling backside. But Halldis was alarmed. Errki recognised all the sharp signals she was sending out and stopped short, his fists clenched, incapable of moving. Her gaze struck him like a rain of arrows.
*
The sun continued to climb, relentlessly blazing down on man and beast and the crackling dry forest. Community police officer Robert Gurvin sat alone, lost in thought. He opened a button on his shirt and blew at his chest. Sweat trickled down his neck. He tried to push back a lock of hair from his forehead, but it refused to stay put. He gave up and tried instead to slow his heart rate by focusing his thoughts. He had heard that old Indians could do this, but all the concentrating just made him sweat more.
Someone was shuffling outside. The door opened and a fat boy of about twelve entered hesitantly in. He stopped in the middle of the room, panting hard. In one hand he held a grey container that resembled a suitcase, though it had rather an odd shape. Maybe it contained a musical instrument, like a lyre. Although the boy didn’t look much like a lyre player, Gurvin thought. He studied him closely. The boy was astonishingly fat. His arms and legs stuck out from his body as if someone had pumped him full of helium and he was about to take off. His hair was brown, thin and greasy, plastered to his skull in thin strips. He was barefoot and dressed in pale cut-off jeans and a dirty T-shirt. His mouth was agape with excitement.
“Yes?”
Officer Gurvin shoved his papers aside. He didn’t have much to do that day, and he enjoyed having visitors. Right now he couldn’t get enough of the incredible sight standing before him.
“Can I help you, son?”
The boy took a step forward. He was still panting; it was clear that he had something he needed to get off his chest in a hurry. It was presumably something along the lines of a stolen bicycle. His eyes were glittering, and he was shaking so much that Gurvin couldn’t help but think of a warm soufflé in the oven, just before it caves in.
“Halldis Horn is dead!”
His voice teetered somewhere between the bright sounds of a child and the darker tones of the man he would become. He started low but when he came to the word “dead” his voice rose to a falsetto.
Gurvin was no longer smiling. He looked at the creature in front of him in amazement, not sure that he had heard him correctly. He blinked and pressed a hand to the back of his neck.
“What did you say?”
“Halldis is dead. She’s lying on her front steps!”
He looked like a brave soldier who had come back to camp alone to report on the terrible loss of his whole platoon. Shaken to his soul, but with a sort of acquired dignity all the same. Standing before his commander, he had completed his mission.
“Sit down, young man!” said Gurvin with authority, nodding towards a chair. The boy stayed where he was.
“You mean the woman who has the small farm up in Finnemarka?”
“Yes.”
“Have you come straight from there?”
“I was walking past. She’s lying on the steps.”
“Are you sure that she’s dead?”
“Yes.”
Gurvin frowned. This heat could have an effect on anyone.
“Did you examine her?”
The boy looked at him in disbelief, as if the mere thought made him feel like fainting. He shook his head. The movement caused his heavy body to ripple.
“You didn’t touch her at all?”
“No.”
“How can you be so sure that she’s dead?”
“I’m sure,” he panted.
Gurvin took a pen out of his shirt pocket and made a note.
“Could I have your name?”
“Snellingen. Kannick Snellingen.”
The officer blinked. The name was just as peculiar as the boy, but it suited him. He wrote it down on a pad, not letting his face show what he thought of the parents’ choice of name.
“So you were baptised Kannick? It’s not a nickname? Short for Karl Henrik, for example?”
“No, it’s Kannick. Spelled with a ‘c-k’.”
Gurvin wrote the name down with a flourish.
“You’ll have to forgive me for my surprise,” he said politely. “It’s an unusual name. Age?”
“Twelve.”
“So you say that Halldis Horn is dead?”
The boy nodded, still breathing hard and shifting his bare feet unhappily. He had set his container on the floor beside him. It was covered with stickers. Gurvin noticed a heart and an apple and a couple of names.
“You’re not trying to pull my leg, are you?”
“No!”
“In any case, I think I’ll give her a call, just to see if she answers,” Gurvin said.
“Go ahead and call. Nobody’s going to answer!”
“Sit down in the meantime,” Gurvin said. For the second time he nodded at the chair, but the boy remained standing. It struck Gurvin that he might not be able to stand up again if he set his rump down. He found the number in the phone book under the name Thorvald Horn. It rang and rang. Halldis was an old woman but still quite quick on her feet. Just to be sure he waited for a long time. The weather was magnificent. Maybe she was out in the garden. The boy kept his eyes fixed on him, licking his lips. Gurvin could see that the boy’s forehead was whiter than his cheeks because his wispy shock of hair shaded it from the sun. His T-shirt was a little too short and some of his huge belly bulged over his shorts.
“Now that I’ve told you,” he said, out of breath, “can I go?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” said the officer as he put down the phone. “No-one is answering. I need to know what time you were at her farm. I’ll have to write up a report. This could be important.”
“Important? But she’s dead!”
“I need an approximate time,” Gurvin said gently.
“I don’t have a watch. And I don’t know how long it takes to get here from her farm.”
“Would you say about 30 minutes?”
“I ran almost all the way.”
“Then we’ll say 25.”
Officer Gurvin looked at his watch and made another note on his pad. He couldn’t imagine that so fat a boy could move at any great speed, especially carrying something. He picked up the receiver and tried Halldis’s number again. He let it ring for a long time before he put down the phone. He was pleased. This was a break in his routine, and he needed it.
“Can I go home now?”
“Let me write down your home number.”
The boy began to squeak in a shrill voice. His double chin quivered on his plump face, and his lower lip trembled. The officer began to feel sorry for him. It began to look as if something had happened.
“Shall I call your mother?” he asked gently. “Can she come and pick you up?”
Kannick sniffled. “I live at Guttebakken.”
This piece of information made the officer look at him with new interest. A film seemed to slide over his eyes, and Kannick instantly saw how the adult had put him into a new file labelled “unreliable”.
“Is that so?”
Gurvin took his time cracking the knuckles of each finger, one by one.
“Should I call them and ask someone to come and get you?”
“They don’t have enough staff. Margunn is the only one on duty.”
The boy shifted his feet again and kept on sniffling.
The officer softened his tone. “Halldis Horn was old,” he said. “Old people die. That’s how life is. You’ve never seen a dead person before, have you?”
“I just saw one!”
Gurvin smiled. “Usually they pass away in their sleep, sitting in a rocking chair, for instance. There’s nothing to be afraid of. No reason for you to lie awake at night thinking about it. Promise me that?”
“There was someone up there,” the boy blurted out.
“Up at the farm?”
“Errki Johrma.”
He whispered the name like a swear word.
Gurvin looked at him in surprise.
“He was standing behind a tree, by the shed, but I saw him clearly. And then he took off into the woods.”
“Errki Johrma? That can’t be right.” Gurvin shook his head. “He’s in the asylum – has been for months.”
“In that case, he’s escaped.”
“I can easily check on that,” said the officer calmly, but he bit his lip. “Did you talk to him?”
“Are you crazy!”
“I’ll look into it. But first I have to check on Halldis.”
He let the news of Errki sink in. He wasn’t superstitious, but he began to understand why some people were. Errki Johrma sneaking around in the woods nearby, and Halldis dead. Or at least unconscious. He felt as though he’d heard this before. A story that was repeating itself.
Something occurred to him. “Why are you dragging that case around with you? You don’t have orchestra practice in the middle of the woods, do you?”
“No,” the boy replied, planting one foot on either side of the case, as if he were afraid it would be confiscated. “It’s just a few things that I always take with me. I like to walk in the woods.”
The officer gave him a penetrating look. The boy was apparently defiant, but underneath lay fear, as if someone had frightened him to the bone. Gurvin called Guttebakken – the home for boys with behavioural problems – and talked to the superintendent. Succinctly he explained the situation.
“Halldis Horn? Dead on her front steps?”
The voice grew strident with doubt and concern. “It’s impossible for me to say whether he’s lying,” the woman said. “They all lie when it suits them, but in between there might be a scrap of truth. At any rate, he’s already deceived me once today, since he obviously took the bow with him, knowing perfectly well he’s only supposed to use it with adult supervision.”
“The bow?”
Gurvin didn’t understand.
“Doesn’t he have a case with him?”
The officer cast a glance at the boy and at what lay between his feet.
“Yes, he does.”
Kannick understood what they were discussing, and pressed his fat legs closer together.
“It’s a fibreglass bow with nine arrows. He roams in the woods, shooting crows.”
She didn’t sound angry, more worried. Gurvin made another call, this time to the psychiatric ward where Errki Johrma was committed. Or should have been, since it turned out that he had in fact escaped. He tried to play down the episode. The rumours about Errki were already bad enough. He didn’t mention Halldis.
Kannick was growing more and more uneasy. He glanced at the door. What had really happened? Gurvin wondered. He hadn’t hit her with one of those arrows had he, for God’s sake?
“Well, at least Halldis died on a beautiful day,” he said, giving the boy an encouraging look. “And she was old, after all. That’s the way we all dream of dying. Those of us who are no longer spring chickens.”
Kannick Snellingen didn’t reply. He shook his head and stood there motionless with the case between his legs. Grown-ups always thought they knew everything. But Officer Gurvin would soon think otherwise.
HE DROVE STEADILY up to the farm. It was a long time since he had last been there, maybe a year. In his chest a jagged stone was frantically spinning. Now that he was alone in the car, he felt a churning inside. What had the boy seen?
Kannick had insisted on walking the two kilometres home to Guttebakken. Margunn had promised to come out to meet him. If Gurvin knew the superintendent, there would be juice and sweet rolls and a brisk scolding, followed by a tender caress of his hair. Never mind what the others might say. Margunn was smart enough to know what he needed. The boy had calmed down a bit and wore a brave expression as he set off.
The Subaru moved up the wooded slope with the eagerness of a terrier. Everyone around here had a four-wheel drive, and it was needed in winter because of the snow and in the spring, because of the mud. The slopes were steep, and driving was difficult enough even on this dry paved road. As he drove he thought about Errki Johrma. At the