Death By Water (33 page)

Can you hear someone rowing out there, Mailin?

Mailin gets out of bed, crosses to the open window. The night is pale grey.

I hear it. He’s rowing in the night. He’s getting nearer.

Liss hides her head under the pillow. Mailin gets into her bed, puts her arms around her.

If he comes, he can take me. I’ll never let him lay a finger on you, Liss.

Fare, end, she.
In the car, she continued to think about the words.
Feren
, she suddenly said out loud. The lake they often skied across. Instead of
she
, could Mailin have been saying
ski
? All the ski trips they had taken across the lakes. Feren was one of the biggest, halfway to Flateby. And back through the woods after dark. This whole swathe of forest was theirs. Has Mailin given me a message about a skiing trip we once made? Then it might have something to do with a specific winter holiday. Or an Easter holiday. Up until Mailin finished at secondary school and went to university, they’d spent most of their holidays out there, just the two of them. Mailin had boyfriends, but never took any of them there. Not until she met Pål Øvreby. The first who was allowed to visit the cabin. She’d been a student for six months. Liss didn’t like Pål. Straight away he acted as though he owned the place. Bossed them around: who was to fetch the water, who fetch the wood. Before, these things had just taken care of themselves. Liss liked to keep things moving, get up first and make sure there was water in the buckets and wood in the fireplace. Now there were objections, arguments. And Pål Øvreby tried to persuade them that he owned Mailin, too.

That winter holiday was Liss’s last year at middle school. There were only the three of them there. She went out to the shed one morning. Sat on the toilet. Hadn’t bothered to hook the door closed. Heard footsteps outside. It wasn’t Mailin. She dried herself and stood up to pull on her trousers. The door opened wide. Pål didn’t say sorry; just stood there, staring at her. She couldn’t get the tight trousers up. He didn’t retreat, he stepped inside. Stood right up close to her. Put his hand between her legs.
You’re so fucking gorgeous.
She was freezing cold and couldn’t move. She felt his finger inside her.
Liss
, he murmured, bending down to kiss her. His mouth smelled of tobacco and mouldy cheese, or was the smell coming from the toilet? That was what freed her feet; she whirled round and threw herself against the door.

Why had she never told her sister? If she found out what Pål was like, Mailin would be hurt. That it might hurt her even more if she carried on seeing him was something Liss couldn’t even bear to think about. Not long afterwards Mailin finished with him anyway, so there was no longer any need to tell her.

Someone’s been here. The thought struck her as she climbed over the hilltop and slid down towards the panel fence. Stood there a few moments thinking about it. The curtain, she decided. She had drawn the living-room curtain on this side wall too, always did that before leaving the cabin. Now it was open. She stalked around the corner, to the veranda, unhooked the key from under the gutter, let herself in. No sign of a break-in. Everything looked untouched. Apart from that curtain. Could she be wrong about that? Or had Tage been here? Viljam? Her mother? That was out of the question – her mother hadn’t left the house since Christmas Eve.

Liss inspected all the rooms, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Took another circuit of the cabin and out to the toilet. Poked her head into that smell of stale dung. Mostly the family’s dung, collected and broken down over the decades. The reek of something like chlorine when she raised the toilet seat. Dead flies in the window. Maybe some of them not quite dead. Lying there all through the winter waiting for it to be warm enough outside for them to return to life. If Mailin wasn’t dead either … if she were deep-frozen and could be thawed out. Slowly moving her lips, opening her eyes. They were destroyed. She would never be able to see with them. Who is out there who doesn’t want Mailin to see any more?

She got up, tossed the lid back over the opening, suddenly furious, the same fury that had frozen her to the floor that time ten years ago. Now she swung the door open and howled up into the trees and at the hill behind the cabin.

It was almost dark when she took the water buckets and made her way down to the rock. The ice was probably safer now than when she was there before Christmas; the open channel as always followed the line of the current from the stream and on outwards, Morr Water’s black winter eye staring up at her. She bent forward, switched on the torch and shone it on to the gap. The light broke through the clear cold water and disappeared in the depths.

Sand
and
oar
. She cleared her way to the boathouse door. The boat lay there, belly upwards. It needed tarring. She smelled it. Water and rot. Hanging up under the roof, fishing rods and the obsolete remains of the old wooden skis people once used, long before she was born. Both oars were up there. She lifted them down, turned them over, shone the torch beam along the length of them, studied every centimetre of the wood, every cut, every crack. Nothing different from the way she remembered it.
Feren
and
ski.

She lay on the sofa. The smell of fir and winter dust. Silence. No sound but the sound of her thoughts. Mailin’s voice:
Shall I wax your skis for you, Liss?
Easter weekend, a couple of months after the winter holidays when Pål came out. Mother’s comment:
She always waxes her own skis.
But on this morning Liss was lying on the sofa. A few minutes earlier she’d been bent double behind the toilet shed, because no one must see her vomiting, no one must know she felt nauseous the whole time. Mailin was the only one she told. Not that Mother would have condemned her; she never condemned people. But she would have wanted to know how it had happened, why Liss hadn’t taken precautions, and who was responsible. Her skis were waxed and ready. Mailin stood waiting for her. She didn’t get up to the cabin much any more. Went up into the Nordmarka forest with student friends, or studied for her exams. Maybe it would be the last holiday they had there together, Liss had thought. She felt nauseous. Afraid. She feared this thing inside her body; it would grow, emerge, turn her into something else. And Mailin couldn’t be told either who she’d been with. She couldn’t understand why Liss wouldn’t say, but in the end gave up trying to find out.

It was dark outside. Liss took out the notebook.

Mailin: We’ll take the track across Feren today. Shall I wax your skis, Liss?

What if you’d found out what had happened before that Easter, Mailin? You would have hated me.

She hunched up, felt that she would soon fall asleep. Out here she always felt dog tired in the evenings. Slept deeply and soundly, as though her restlessness spread on the wind and was sucked up by the trees, until all that remained in her body was a faint murmuring. She reached out a hand, turned down the paraffin lamp on the table; the two logs in the fireplace could just burn up. She abandoned the thought of washing and brushing her teeth and getting into bed. Sank down into sleep. Could sleep here all winter, was the last thought she was aware of, not emerge until spring. Stand down on the beach and see Mailin come rowing to shore. Her back to the land. Rowing and rowing.
Turn round, Mailin, so I can see that it’s you.
She turns. It isn’t Mailin. It’s Grandma, her father’s mother. Wearing a black dress, her red hair like a veil flowing down her back …

Liss starts restlessly as she lies there. Someone has entered the room. She tries to wake up. What’s happened to my eyes? I can’t see properly. The old woman doesn’t move, stands in front of the fireplace staring at her. She’s wearing a sort of uniform, with a long green coat over it. A towel tied around her forehead, drenched in blood.

What do you want? Where is Mailin?

Her own shout awoke her. She saw the outlines of a face outside the living-room window. – You are not afraid, Liss, she murmured. – You’re never afraid any more. She got to her feet. The shape outside disappeared. She stumbled out into the kitchen. Had to pee. Put her hands into the bucket and rubbed her face hard with the icy water. Took the lamp out into the darkness. It was still snowing, harder now. On the veranda outside the living-room window she saw footprints. She shone the lamp on them. Boots, bigger than hers, from the door and over to the window, from there to the corner. She went back inside, put on the head lamp, threw on the enormous all-weather jacket she still hadn’t returned to its owner. From the corner she tracked the footprints over towards the outside toilet, where they disappeared into the trees beyond.

It snowed for the rest of the night. She didn’t sleep. Locked the door. Lay with her eyes open in the dark. Placed an empty wine bottle next to the sofa. Didn’t know what she intended to do with it. Smash it, use it to stab with maybe. – I am not afraid, she repeated. – I am not afraid any more. Everything that’s happened to Mailin, I could stand it too.

In the end she must have dropped off, because suddenly the grey light of dawn was outside. She got up, went outside to pee. No footprints on the veranda now. Snowed over. Should have taken a photo of them, she thought. But who would she show it to? Wouldn’t be talking to the police any more, she had decided.

She made fires in the woodstove and the open fireplace. Boiled water, sprinkled in the coffee powder. Wrapped a blanket around herself, lit a cigarette, sat by the window and watched the day arrive. Nowhere she had to be. At the same time, a feeling that there was something she had to do before it was too late. She took out the notebook.

Footprints in the snow. Winter boots. Several sizes bigger than mine.

Dream: Mailin rowing towards land, turns, it isn’t Mailin. Grandma standing in the room. Wants to tell me something.

She sucked the last drags from the cigarette, felt the burning deep down in her chest. Needed to eat. Eat and puke. Nothing suitable for that to eat here. Needed to inhale something that would make her strong, invincible, furious, if only for a half-hour. Didn’t have that here either.

I’ll never leave here again.

You can’t stay here, Liss.

I don’t have anywhere else.

You can’t hide yourself away. The world is wherever you are.

She glanced over at the sofa where she’d spent the night. One of the cushions had fallen on to the floor. She picked it up, noticed as she did so that the zip fastener on the cover was half open. Inside was a sheet of paper. Scrunched up into a ball. She smoothed it out. A story from
VG
’s online edition dated 21 November 2003, but the printout was from 10 December 2008, the day before Mailin’s disappearance.

Missing girl (19) found dead outside Bergen
was the headline.

I
T WAS NOWHERE
near crowded at Klimt that evening, but a couple of regulars were nursing beers at the bar, and at one table New Year was still being celebrated. Roar Horvath swapped a few pleasantries with the lads behind the bar; one of them he hadn’t seen since they played in the back four together for LSK juniors, but he’d gathered that Roar was working on the murder of the woman who was supposed to be on
Taboo
. Roar could only respond with his most ironic
No comment
, and in return got a pat on the shoulder and a
Cheers
anyway. Almost before he knew what was going on, the first beer had come and gone. Going out in Lillestrøm was a homecoming after all.

Dan-Levi appeared in the doorway that led down to the toilets. At first Roar thought he’d had his dark hair cut, but then realised his old friend had tied it in a ponytail that hung down his back. Not exactly the latest style for men, but then Dan-Levi would never abandon his long tresses; he called them his freak flag, after one of his favourite songs.

They sat in a corner where they could talk undisturbed. As usual Dan-Levi wanted to hear about Roar’s bachelor life. Roar admitted he had something going and hoped that would be enough to satisfy his friend’s curiosity. No such luck, as it turned out. Dan-Levi looked as though he’d hooked an enormous trout on the end of his fishing rod and started to reel it in.

– Not a policewoman, is it? Then the outlook isn’t good.

It was hardly a scientifically based conclusion, but it was smart and aimed at eliciting further hard facts.

– Both yes and no, Roar conceded. – In a sense.

He didn’t want to break with the joking way they’d always had with each other, and the openness it allowed them. This openness had been good for them both. Around the time of the divorce, Dan-Levi had always been there for him, inviting him out for an evening in town, or to go fishing up in the Østmarka forest. As well as something they both referred to as their annual hunting trip, though it was a few years now since the last time. Dan-Levi wasn’t completely hopeless with a fishing rod, but he would never make any kind of hunter. The best he’d managed that autumn when Roar got divorced was a couple of hares that turned out to be, on closer inspection, pet rabbits that some idiot of a farmer up in Nes had allowed to run about freely. It was a story Roar never tired of reminding his friend about. After a while he contented himself with just holding two slightly bent fingers up in the air to make his point. The gesture seemed to have no effect at all on Dan-Levi’s masculine pride. He’d even written a little sidebar about the episode for
Romerikes Blad
, in which he exaggerated his own clumsiness and claimed to have nearly hit one of the farmer’s cows into the bargain – but a big one, with horns almost the size of a moose.

– In a sense what? he went on now with a journalist’s persistence. – She surely can’t both be a policewoman and
not
be a policewoman?