In the Darkness (6 page)

He jumped down from the bench, which was quite high, and he had to take a couple of steps to regain his balance.

‘Is it a Volvo?’

‘No, it’s a Ford.’

Jan Henry ran ahead and Sejer looked at his legs, at how pale and almost abnormally thin they were. He was nearly swallowed up by the front seat, and it was difficult to fasten the seat belt in a secure fashion, but it would have to do. He could barely see out over the dashboard, even if he craned his neck. Then Sejer started up and swung on to the road. There was silence for a while, just
the
even hum of the engine and the occasional swish of cars passing in the left-hand lane. The boy had stuffed his fingers between his thighs as if he was frightened of touching anything inadvertently.

‘D’you miss your dad, Jan Henry?’ Sejer asked quietly.

The boy stared back in surprise, as if it were the first time anyone had thought to ask him such a question. His answer was clear.

‘Very much,’ he said simply.

They fell silent again. Sejer headed down towards the textile mill, indicated right and drove towards the rapids.

‘It’s so quiet in the garage,’ the boy said suddenly.

‘Yes. A pity Mum can’t do car repairs.’

‘Mmm. Dad was always in there doing things. In his spare time.’

‘And all those nice smells,’ Sejer grinned, ‘oil and petrol and suchlike.’

‘He promised me a boiler suit,’ he went on, ‘just like his one. But he didn’t have time before he disappeared. The boiler suit had fourteen pockets in it. I was going to wear it when I was working on my bike. It’s called a mechanic’s suit.’

‘Yup, a mechanic’s suit, that’s right. I’ve got one myself, but mine’s blue, and it’s got FINA on the back. I’m not sure it’s got fourteen pockets. Eight or ten perhaps.’

‘The blue ones are nice, too. Do they have them in children’s sizes?’ he asked precociously.

‘I’m not sure about that, but I’ll definitely look into it.’

He made a little mental note, indicated right again and drew up. They could see down to NRK’s local broadcasting centre in its idyllic setting down by the river. He pointed to the windows glinting in the sun.

‘Shall we wind them up a bit? With the sirens?’

Jan Henry nodded.

‘Press here,’ he said pointing, ‘then we’ll see just how hungry they are for news down there. Perhaps they’ll come rushing out with all their microphones.’

The siren started and wailed loudly in the silence, rebounded off the hillside opposite and came howling back again. Inside the car it didn’t sound so piercing, but when its hundred decibels had been going for a few seconds, the first face appeared at one of the shiny windows. Then another. Then one of them opened a door and walked out on to the balcony at the end of the building. They could see him raise a hand and shade his eyes from the sun.

‘They think it’s at least a murder!’ the boy exclaimed.

Sejer chuckled and studied the winter-wan faces that continued to emerge from the building.

‘We’d better pipe down. See if you can switch it off, now.’

He could. His eyes were shining with delight and his cheeks were flecked with red.

‘How does it work?’ he asked with childish confidence in Sejer’s abilities.

‘Well,’ said Sejer digging deep into his memory, ‘it’s like this, first they make an oscillating circuit electronically, which in turn creates a square pulse, which is amplified by an amplifier and fed into a loudspeaker.’

Jan Henry nodded.

‘And then they vary it from eight hundred to sixteen hundred cycles. In other words, they alter its strength, to make it easier to hear.’

‘At the siren factory?’

‘Yup. At the siren factory. In America, or Spain. But now we’ll go and get an ice cream, Jan Henry.’

‘Yes. We deserve one, even though we haven’t caught any baddies.’

They pulled out on to the main road again and turned left towards the town. When they got to the trotting course, he stopped, parked and steered the boy over to the kiosk. Once he’d got it, he needed a bit of help with the paper. They sat on a bench in the sun sucking and licking. Jan Henry had chosen an ice lolly, red and yellow and tipped with chocolate, while Sejer ate a strawberry ice cream, which had been his favourite ever since boyhood. He’d never seen any reason to change.

‘Are you going back to work afterwards?’ Jan Henry was wiping juice from his chin with his free hand.

‘Yes, but I’ve got to visit a man first. In Erik Børresensgate.’

‘Is he a baddie?’

‘No, no,’ Sejer smiled. ‘Probably not.’

‘But you’re not completely certain? He
could
be?’

Sejer had to capitulate and chuckled a little.

‘Well, yes, possibly. That’s why I’m going to see him. But it’s mainly to make sure that he
isn’t
. Because then I can cross him off the list. That’s the way we do it, you see, until there’s only one person left.’

‘I bet he’ll be scared when you come in that car.’

‘Yes, I’m sure he will. Everyone is. People are funny like that. You see, nearly everyone’s got something in their past they feel guilty about. And when I suddenly turn up at their door, I can almost see them searching their memories to work out what I’ve discovered. I shouldn’t laugh, but sometimes it’s impossible not to.’

The boy nodded, and basked in the company of this wise policeman. They finished their ice creams and returned to the car. Sejer got a serviette from the kiosk, and wiped the boy’s mouth and helped him with his seat belt.

‘Mum and me are going to town to hire videos. One for each of us.’

Sejer put the car in gear and checked the mirror.

‘And what are you going to get? A film about baddies?’

‘Yes.
Home Alone 2
. I’ve seen the first one twice.’

‘You’ll have to take the bus out and back. If you haven’t got a car.’

‘Yes. It takes rather a long time, but it doesn’t matter, ’cause we’ve got lots of time, really. Before, when Dad – when we had a car, it only took a minute to drive there and back.’ He poked a finger up his nose and picked it a bit. ‘Dad wanted a BMW. He’d been to see it. It was white. If that woman had bought the Manta.’

Sejer almost drove off the road. His heart gave a great leap, then he controlled himself.

‘What was that you were saying, Jan Henry – I wasn’t quite paying attention.’

‘A woman. Wanted to buy our car.’

‘Did Dad talk about it?’

‘Yes. In the garage. It was that day – the last day he was at home.’

‘A woman?’ Sejer felt a shiver run down his spine. ‘Did he say what she was called?’ He glanced in the mirror, changed lanes and held his breath.

‘Yes, because he had her name on a bit of paper.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘But I can’t remember it now, it’s such a long time ago.’

‘On a piece of paper? Did you see it?’

‘Yes, he had it in the pocket of his boiler suit. He was lying on his back under the car, and I was sitting on the bench as usual. Well, it wasn’t a piece of paper exactly, more a bit of paper. Sort of half of a sheet of paper.’

‘But you say you saw it – did he take it out of his pocket?’

‘Yes, from his chest pocket. He read the name, and then …’

‘He put it back in his pocket?’

‘No.’

‘Did he throw it away?’

‘I can’t remember what he did with it,’ he said wistfully.

‘If you were to think very hard, do you think you could remember what he did with it?’

‘Don’t know.’ The boy looked earnestly at the policeman, he was beginning to realise that it was important. ‘But if I remember about it I’ll say,’ he whispered.

‘Jan Henry,’ Sejer said softly, ‘this is very, very important.’

They’d arrived at the green house.

‘I know it is.’

‘So if you should remember anything about this woman, anything at all, you must let Mum know, so that she can phone me.’

‘All right then. If I remember. But it is a long time ago.’

‘It certainly is. But it is possible, if you try very hard and think about something for a long time, day after day, to remember something you thought you’d forgotten.’

‘Bye.’

‘See you,’ Sejer said.

He turned the car and watched him in the mirror as he ran to the house.

‘I ought to have realised,’ he said to himself, ‘that the boy would know something. He was always hanging round the garage with his father. Will I never learn?’

Chapter 7

A WOMAN
.

He thought about it as he parked at the courthouse and walked the few metres to Mikkelsen’s address. There could have been two of them. The woman might have been there to entice him out, while the man lurked in the background and did the dirty work. But why?

Erik Børresensgate 6 was a shop that sold bathroom fittings, so he entered the lobby of number 5 and saw there was a J. Mikkelsen on the first floor. He was unemployed and therefore at home, a man in his mid-twenties with both knees sticking out of his denim jeans.

‘Do you know Egil Einarsson?’ Sejer asked, studying the man’s reaction. They were seated on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Mikkelsen pushed a pile of lottery tickets, the salt and pepper cellars and the latest edition of
Esquire
out of the way.

‘Einarsson? Well, it’s got a familiar ring, but I don’t know why. Einarsson. Sounds like someone from Iceland.’

He didn’t seem to be hiding anything. In that case it was clearly a waste of time sitting here leaning on this checked oilcloth, in the middle of the day, investigating a blind alley.

‘He’s dead. He was found in the river a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Aaah, yes!’ He nodded energetically and massaged the thin gold ring he wore in his ear. ‘I saw it in the paper. Killed with a knife and stuff. Yes, now I’m with you, Einarsson, yes. Soon it’ll be like America here, it’s all these drugs if you ask me.’

He didn’t ask him. He kept quiet and waited, inquisitively watching the young face under the perfectly straight hairline which made his ponytail suit him so well. Some people were lucky enough to look good wearing one, Sejer thought. But there weren’t many of them.

‘Well, I didn’t know him.’

‘So you don’t know what sort of car he had?’

‘Car? Well no, why should I know that?’

‘He had an Opel Manta. Eighty-eight model. Exceptionally well maintained. He bought it from you, two years ago.’

‘Oh Christ, was that him?’

Mikkelsen nodded to himself. ‘Of course, that was why he seemed familiar. Bloody hell.’ He reached for a packet of nicotine gum on the table, stood it on end, gave it a little flick, and stood it up again. ‘How d’you find that out?’

‘Well, the two of you wrote out a purchase agreement, just like people do. Did you advertise in the paper?’

‘No, I drove around with a card in the window. Saved the money. It took a couple of days, and then he rang. He was a funny bloke. He’d been saving up since the year dot, and paid cash.’

‘Why did you want to sell it?’

‘I didn’t want to. I lost my job and couldn’t afford to keep it any longer.’

‘So now you haven’t got a car?’

‘Yes I have. I’ve got an Escort which I bought at a car auction, an old one. But it just sits there most of the time, I haven’t got the money for petrol while I’m on social security.’

‘Well, that’s fine.’ Sejer rose.

‘No, it’s not at all fine, if you ask me!’

They both chuckled.

‘Do they work?’ Sejer asked, pointing at the packet of chewing gum.

The younger man thought a bit: ‘Yeah, they do, but you get totally hooked on them. They’re expensive as well. And they taste disgusting, like chewing a fag.’

Sejer left, crossed Mikkelsen from the top of the list and put him at the bottom instead. He cut across the street and felt the sun warming him gently through the leather of his jacket. This was the best time, when the anticipation of summer still lay some way in the future, a dream of the cabin on Sandøya, of sun and sea and salt water, the essence of all previous summers, the good holidays. Occasionally he felt a slight uneasiness, the bitter experience of summers that had been rainy and windy, there had been a number of those, too. But during sunny summers he found peace, he didn’t itch so much then.

He jogged up the shallow steps and pushed open the door, nodded briefly to Mrs Brenningen in reception. She really was a good-looking woman, Mrs Brenningen, cheerful and friendly. Not that he chased women, perhaps he ought to, but that would have to wait. For the moment he contented himself with just looking at them.

‘Is it exciting?’ he enquired, nodding at the book she was reading in between busy periods.

‘Not too bad,’ she smiled. ‘Power, lust and intrigue.’

‘Sounds just like the police.’

He chose the stairs, closed the door and sank down in the chair from Kinnarps, which he’d paid for out of his own pocket. Then he got up again, pulled Maja Durban’s folder from the file and sat reading. He gazed at the pictures of her, first the one taken while she was alive, a pretty, slightly rounded woman with a chubby face and black eyebrows. Small eyes. Rather close-cropped hair. It suited her well. An attractive woman favoured by fortune, the way she was smiling said a lot about who she was, a mischievous, teasing smile that brought small wrinkles to her cheeks. In the other photograph she was stretched out on a bed staring at the ceiling with eyes wide open. The face expressed neither fear nor astonishment. It expressed nothing whatsoever, it resembled a colourless mask.

The folder also contained a number of photos of the flat. Its rooms were neat, pretty spaces full of beautiful things, feminine, but without frills or pastels, the furniture and carpets were in vivid colours, reds, greens, yellows, colours a strong woman would choose, he thought. Nothing bore any mark of what had happened, nothing had been broken or upset, it was as if everything had happened silently and unobtrusively. And totally unexpectedly. She had known him. Opened the door to him and removed her clothes herself. First they’d made love, and nothing indicated that it had occurred against her will. Then something had happened. A breakdown, a short-circuit. And a strong man could squeeze the life out of a small woman in mere seconds, he knew that, just a few kicks and it would be over. No one can hear your screams if you’ve got a muffler of duck down over your mouth, he thought.