Black Seconds (16 page)

‘The body has been frozen,’ said Snorrason, the pathologist. He had got up to stretch his back. ‘In fact, she is only partly defrosted.’

Sejer raised his eyebrows.

‘In other words, she could have been dead for ten days. She just doesn’t look like it.’

‘Why would he freeze her?’ Sejer wondered, looking at Jacob Skarre. This was exactly what he had suggested, that the killer might not have been in a hurry, but could have kept her somewhere in his house.

‘To gain time, possibly. Perhaps he lost his nerve. I don’t know,’ Snorrason said.

‘Gain time. For what? He hasn’t attempted to hide her. She was lying right by the side of the road. He wanted us to find her.’

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Sejer noticed something in the grass and bent down to pick it up. It was tiny and white as snow.

‘Down?’ he speculated and looked at Skarre. ‘From the duvet?’

Skarre frowned. He rubbed a corner of the duvet between his fingers. ‘Possibly,’ he said reluctantly.

‘However, I don’t think this duvet is made from down. It’s a cheap synthetic one from IKEA, the kind you can machine wash and tumble dry.’ He had located the washing instructions and was pointing to them. Sejer searched the grass. He found several tiny white feathers. They were mostly sticking to the duvet, but some had attached themselves to the nightie. When he tried to catch them they flew off like dandelion seeds.

He called out to the photographer. ‘Photograph her nightie,’ he said. ‘Make sure you get the neck opening with the red edging and the lace on the sleeves. Take pictures of the duvet. Get a close-up of the pattern. Look out for more down.’ He gestured with his hand. ‘Be careful with the duvet. Do not shake it or disturb it in any way. Any particles found on it could be important.’

Then he pulled Skarre aside and walked a few metres in the damp grass. He kept the white duvet in the far corner of his eye. He surveyed the horizon, taking in every ridge and treetop. A low, earnest murmur could be heard from the large crowd of people working on the crime scene.

At that moment more cars arrived. The press was descending.

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‘When does it start getting dark in the evening these days?’ Sejer asked. ‘Around eight thirty?’

‘Thereabouts,’ Skarre said. ‘It gets light at seven. So between eight thirty last night and seven o’clock this morning, a car drove along this road. It would only have taken a few seconds to move her from the car to the roadside.’

‘Everything is so neat,’ Sejer said. ‘The nightie. The duvet. The way she’s lying. Why did he do that?’

‘Don’t know,’ Skarre said.

‘Perhaps he’s read too many crime novels,’ Sejer said. ‘All we need now is to find a poem under her nightie.’

‘You’re saying we can eliminate young men from the investi gation?’ Skarre asked.

‘I would have thought so. This is the work of a more mature person. A teenage boy wouldn’t have arranged her like this.’

‘There’s something feminine about it.’

‘I agree,’ Sejer said. ‘I hate IKEA,’ he added. ‘They make every thing in such vast quantities, we’ll never be able to trace it.’

‘We have to pin our hopes on the nightie. It looks expensive.’

‘How can you tell?’ Sejer was impressed.

‘It’s old-fashioned,’ Skarre declared. ‘Girls today wear nighties with Winnie-the-Pooh or something like that. This looks like it came from another era.’

‘Who buys nighties from another era?’ Sejer was thinking out loud.

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‘People from another era, perhaps? Old people,’

Skarre said.

‘Old?’

Sejer frowned. They looked at the crowd once more. ‘I hope he’s made a mistake,’ he said.

‘Nobody gets everything right.’

‘This doesn’t look rushed,’ Skarre said.

‘I agree,’ Sejer said. ‘We’ll have to wait for forensics.’

He went back to Snorrason. The pathologist was working quietly and methodically. His face was inscrutable.

‘What do you think about the down?’ Sejer asked.

‘It’s strange,’ the pathologist said. ‘The feathers stick to the duvet and yet they float away once they’re loosened. There are some stuck to her hair, too.’

‘You found anything else?’

Snorrason lifted up Ida’s nightie carefully. ‘I don’t like to speculate,’ he said. ‘And you know it.’

Sejer looked at him urgently. Snorrason began rolling the white nightie up Ida’s body. You could tell he had done this several times before. He had his own technique, a special gentleness about his hands. Sejer saw her thin thighs emerge. He saw the bare stomach. She was not wearing any knickers. A sudden nervousness gripped him as her torso was revealed. And there it was. Her chest. It was oddly caved in and slightly discoloured. Snorrason placed two fingers on her lower ribs. As he pressed, her entire ribcage gave way.

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‘She’s been subjected to a blow,’ he said. ‘Or a kick. But it looks like it was a forceful blow.’

Sejer looked at Ida’s chest. Fragile like a bird’s nest. He was silent.

‘Several ribs have been broken. I know even saying it sounds bad, but I wish her skin had broken or that we’d found some external injuries,’ Snorrason confessed. ‘Then we would have had a better chance of determining what caused them.’

Sejer needed to process this information. The damaged chest was too much for him.

‘Whatever hit her did so with great force,’

Snorrason said. ‘Something big and heavy. No sharp edges.’

Sejer looked at Ida once more. He outlined the damaged area with his eyes and tried to imagine what could have caused this massive blow.

‘A very big stone?’ he suggested.

Snorrason did not reply.

‘A stick? A boot?’

‘Not a stick,’ the pathologist said. ‘Something bigger. And not a boot either. That would have left a heel print. Guessing will get you nowhere, Konrad. I need to open her up.’

Sejer was silent. Snorrason looked at him. ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

‘I’m thinking about Helga Joner,’ Sejer confessed.

‘About what I’m going to tell her. She will have so many questions.’

‘Tell it like it is,’ Snorrason said. ‘We don’t know what happened.’

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‘I’d rather she didn’t see Ida’s chest,’ Sejer said.

‘You have to let her if she asks,’ Snorrason said.

‘And don’t forget: she’s prepared. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it could have been worse. It could have been much worse.’

Sejer knew the pathologist was right. He merely nodded in reply. He did not know what Helga had imagined in her own mind, but perhaps it was worse than the body lying at his feet. She looked like a sleeping doll. And the nightie, which did not belong to her, was poignant and beautiful in its simplicity. What had happened? Where had she been? He had to go to Helga’s house now. Perhaps she was sitting in her chair by the window. Perhaps her eyes were fixed on the telephone. He thought about how scared she was. He thought: she is prepared. But she still lives in uncertainty. A few more minutes, he thought, in screaming uncertainty.

The crime scene was carefully secured. They worked on Ida and the area surrounding her body for several hours. Later Sejer and Skarre met up at the office. Finally they had something to work with. Concrete physical evidence, which could be examined and might lead them somewhere. In the midst of every thing they felt a kind of relief. They had been waiting for this moment; now they had got past it and they could move on.

‘The nightie is made by Calida,’ Skarre said. ‘In Switzerland. This country imports large quantities 166

of nightwear and underwear from there. It’s available in most shops.’

Sejer nodded. ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Any news from Hamburg?’

‘Some.’ Skarre perched on the desk. ‘Christine’s mother is called Rita Seidler. She found Ida’s last letter and faxed it to us. I’ve translated it. And made a few corrections so it’s easier to understand. Nineyear-olds these days know a lot of English. I didn’t know they would be this good,’ he said.

‘Read it to me,’ Sejer asked him.

‘Dear Christine,’ Skarre read. ‘Thank you for your letter. Today is Monday and I always watch a programme on TV called
Pet Rescue
. There is a team that goes out and saves animals. Today it was about a fat dog. It almost could not walk.’

Sejer thought of Kollberg, who almost could not walk either. He held his breath as he listened because Skarre read so tenderly, and he found the words so charming.

‘The people from
Pet Rescue
came to get the dog and the owner got really angry. He said that he could feed it as much as he liked because it was his dog. Then they told him that the dog could die from a heart attack unless it lost weight. So they gave him three weeks. But when they came back, the dog had died.’

Skarre paused. Then he continued.

‘I know a parrot that can talk. I am trying to teach it new words, but it takes a long time. Mum does not know about it. The parrot is called Henry. It is 167

very irritable and bad-tempered, but it does not bite me. I am going to ask Mum if I can have my own bird. I will pester her for ever. In the end she will say yes. Tell me more about your rabbit.’

Skarre looked briefly up at Sejer and then returned to the letter. ‘I am going to be ten years old soon. September tenth. Love, Ida.’

He folded the letter. ‘It’s her birthday today,’ he said solemnly. Today, September tenth.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Sejer said.

Skarre put the letter down on the desk. ‘And Helga?’ he said softly. ‘How did she take it? What did she say?’

‘Nothing,’ Sejer said. ‘She just fainted.’

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Elsa Marie did not knock. She used her own key to let herself in and stomped into the kitchen. Emil had done his best to mend the door. He was standing by the worktop fumbling with a cloth. The crumbs refused to stick to it, he was just moving them around the surface. Finally he swept them away with his bare hands.

‘Go for a ride on your bike,’ his mother ordered him. ‘This is going to take time.’

He no longer protested, exactly as she had predicted. Emil heard the trembling undertone in his mother’s voice and it made him nervous. He left the kitchen and grabbed an old coat from a peg in the hallway. He pulled his leather cap over his head. His mother watched him. She looked at the ridicu lous leather cap. Her body was very tense and every movement caused her pain. She reminded herself that she was facing an important task. She would become a cleaning machine. She would work her way through his rooms and leave behind a strong smell of Ajax and bleach. It was the whole house this time. The curtains were going to be taken 169

down; the bed linen was going to be washed. Her jaw was clenched. Emil slunk out on to the drive and got on his three-wheeler. It would not start. He made some irritable grunting noises and noticed his mother’s face in the window. He tried to get angry but did not succeed. It took a lot for Emil to get angry. Finally the engine started coughing. He revved it, a little more than was strictly necessary, and his mother’s pale face vanished. He saw the curtain settle back into place.

Emil always kept to a steady speed of forty kilo metres an hour. He had nowhere to go, no one to visit. No money in his pocket either. But he had half a tank of petrol. He could drive a long way on half a tank, all the way into town and back and perhaps even up to Solberg. The waterfall appealed to him. He decided to drive out to it. He wanted to sit on his three-wheeler and feel the spray from the waterfall on his face. He often did that. It was not a cold day and his coat was warm. Buttoned all the way up. He was wearing brown gloves and thick boots. Five minutes later he passed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He was able to read a few short words, but he did not always understand what they meant. Emil was tired. His mother had been screaming at him for days. ‘I want you to talk to me!’ she demanded. ‘I don’t understand!’ And he wanted to. He knew that the words lay somewhere at the back of his head. He could arrange them and line them up in those rows people called sentences. But he was afraid to let them out. He worried that 170

they would come out the wrong way and make everything worse. Things had never looked as bad for him as they did now. The racecourse was on his left. He was constantly being overtaken. He was used to it, used to irate drivers tailing him, beeping at him. He was faster than bicycles, but slower than motorbikes and he took up more space. Everyone was in a hurry these days. Emil never was. He wondered what it was they all had to do. Once he had witnessed a car crash just as it happened. A deafening bang, the sharp sound of metal and steel, bending and snapping, glass splintering and raining down on the tarmac. He remembered the silence that followed, and the smell of petrol. Through the windscreen he had seen a head resting on the steering wheel and blood pouring out on to knees in grey trousers. He drove off when he heard the sirens.

Ahead of him now he could see the exit to Solberg. He began indicating in plenty of time and managed the turn expertly. Further up he needed to turn right again and soon he could see the waterfall. He changed down into second gear and parked in a lay-by. Got off the three-wheeler and walked over to the railings. Leaned forward. He liked the deep roar of the water, liked hanging over the railings.

‘No,’ he said, out into the air. He felt the vibrations in his chest. He tried to form an ‘o’ with his mouth. A noise that sounded like an owl hooting emerged through the drone of the waterfall. He bent his head and stared into the eddy. He could say anything 171

inside his own head. He could say: ‘Have you no shame, have you gone completely mad?’ Or: ‘What on earth am I going to do with you?’ He heard the words inside his head and the voice was agreeable to listen to, a pleasant male voice. Not his own gruff

‘no’. He thought of his mother busy rushing around turning drawers and cupboards upside down and inside out. She always asked him endless questions about everything. But his silence protected him. He was made of granite. For fifty years his mother had tried to make contact with him using every possible means, in an attempt to chip away at the granite. She had tried being kind, she had tried ignoring him, and she had tried provoking him with sharp words. But he was silent. He would always be silent. While Emil Johannes was staring into the roaring waters, Ruth and Sverre Rix sat waiting for Tomme. They had tried reaching him on his mobile, but there was no reply. Ruth had called both Helge and Bjørn, but he was not with them. Marion was leafing through a photo album displaying pictures of her and Ida. The cat featured in several of the pictures. It had been run over by the school bus and they had found it in a snowdrift. It was flattened, with its own intestines smeared all over it. Now Ida was gone too. There’s just me left, Marion thought. She put her finger over the cat and Ida and saw her own face shine white and lonely in the picture. Finally they heard the Opel on the drive. Ruth and Sverre looked at each other.