Pierced (17 page)

‘Park here and then we will swap cars.’

Thorleif manoeuvres into the bay and turns off the engine. A heavy silence fills the car. In the distance a door slams with a bang before an engine starts. They get out. He is met by a smell that reminds him of a ferry deck. There is a constant humming above him. The man goes over to the passenger side of the BMW, opens the doors and tosses the keys to Thorleif. Caught off guard, Thorleif only just manages to catch them.

‘You want
me
to drive?’

‘Let’s find out what you’re made of,’ the man says, and his voice echoes against the walls. He grins. ‘In you get.’

They have left Stavern behind and have driven past horse paddocks, onion fields and a Free Church when Thorleif is told to stop in a bus lay-by opposite a maize field. The crop reaches waist height. Beyond them, far away on the horizon, the Strait of Skagerrak opens wide towards Denmark. White horses on the surface of the water chase boats, big and small. Above them white and dark-grey clouds drift along without bumping into one another.

‘Do you want me to turn off the engine?’ Thorleif says. The sun is roasting him through the window. The man next to him looks at an old garage with rusty doors and a black sheet-metal roof. He turns his whole body towards Thorleif.

‘Earlier today I asked you which way you wanted to go. Remember?’

‘Y-yes.’

The man points ahead where the road bends left in a long, soft curve.

‘A few hundred metres further ahead there is another junction. Technically you can’t turn right there, you’ll have to go straight across it, but I’ll ask you all the same. Right or left?’

‘W-what?’

‘Right or left?’

‘But—’

‘Right or left?’

‘I don’t know! Which way do you want me to go?’

‘You remember how it was earlier today. I’m asking you one last time: right or left? Left: your girlfriend dies. Right: you can still eat tacos—’

‘Right,’ Thorleif replies quickly. ‘I’ll turn right, okay?! Why don’t you just tell me which way you want me to go? I’ll do anything to save my girlfriend!’

‘Good, Toffe, I want you to hold that thought: you’ll do anything to save your girlfriend. Great. Now start driving. Stick to route 301.’

‘What are we going to do when we get there?’

The man doesn’t reply. Thorleif sighs and puts the car in ‘D’. He pulls out into the road again, calmly increases his speed to 60 kilometres per hour and follows the long curve to the left, towards the sign for the 301. He brakes in the bend before continuing straight ahead and accelerating up a small hill. The narrow road continues to wind its way through dense forest interspaced with onion and potato fields on both sides whenever the landscape opens up. No cars come in the opposite direction. Thorleif clutches the steering wheel. Tiny side roads turn off to the right, towards farms and cottages he can’t see.

‘Pull up over there.’

The man points to a faded brown fence enclosing a plot which doesn’t appear to be named, but where gravestones stick up from the well-tended grass. Thorleif parks in between two birches whose branches offer them shade.

‘What do we do now?’ Thorleif asks.

‘We wait. You can turn off the engine now.’

They sit in silence for several minutes. They hear the sound of a car approaching. A black cat runs along the edge of the road before it shoots off in between the rowan bushes. The car appears, zooms past them before it falls silent once more. Soon afterwards a tractor comes along. Then two cyclists. Thorleif notices that the man follows them with his eyes with considerable interest.

Suddenly he leans forwards and says, ‘Perfect.’

‘What is?’

‘Check your wing mirror.’

Behind them a man wearing a headset, dark-blue running trousers and a blue jacket comes jogging. His pace is leisurely.

‘Wait until he has passed us.’

Thorleif waits. He watches the jogger in his mirror, sees him overtake the car. The jogger pays no attention to them, he just disappears around the next bend. The minutes pass.

‘Okay, start the engine.’

‘What are we doing?’

‘Just do as you are told.’

The engine growls menacingly.

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Drive. Faster.’

Thorleif pushes down the accelerator a little more. The car gains speed. The jogger appears around the next bend. He has reached the foot of a long sloping hill that twists like a snake.

‘Faster!’ The man leans forwards.

‘Why?’

‘Because I want you to hit him.’

‘I can’t drive into him. I’ll kill him!’

‘Faster!’

Thorleif obeys, gripping the steering wheel. His thoughts bounce up and down like a roller-coaster. What does he do now? Surely he can’t run over someone deliberately?

They pass a house and a sign advertising a sculpture exhibition.

‘There are people living here,’ Thorleif yells.

‘So what?’

‘What if they see us? What if there are other cars behind us or coming towards us?’

‘Think about your girlfriend. Think about what we’re going to do to her if you don’t run him over.’

‘I can’t do it!’ he screams.

‘Of course you can!’

The tears well up in his eyes and make it difficult for him to see clearly. Thorleif closes them and tries to blink away the wetness, but the tears keep flowing. He struggles to breathe. The engine emits another roar as they gain on the jogger. The fields open up on both sides of the road and there is a smell of onions, of bloody onions, while Thorleif’s heart feels as if it is about to jump out of his chest. His hears himself cry out as his hands twist the steering wheel in the direction of the jogger.
I’m going to hit you
, Thorleif thinks,
I’m going to hit you now
.

He closes his eyes and waits for the car to react to the collision with a human being and the loud crash that will follow as Thorleif takes the life of an innocent man. But the crash never comes. The wheels of the car never stray across the edge of the tarmac where the gravel starts, where thousands of onions are neatly lined up. Thorleif opens his eyes again. Only a few metres ahead of them the road goes into a double bend, and they are about to plough into a field where the red-tinted flowers of the potatoes still display the remains of summer. Thorleif tries frantically to regain control of the car, to get it back on the road. He hears a quartet of tyres scream as the car hurls itself to the left just as they come into the bend and Thorleif clings to the steering wheel while he pants and tries to straighten up, gasping and frantically turning the wheel. Behind them the jogger has stopped. He waves his clenched fists at them.

You failed
, Thorleif mutters to himself.
You failed the test
.

He stares at the man who has already pressed a number on his mobile which he is pressing against his ear.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ he says and sends Thorleif an icy stare. ‘He screwed up. Kill his girlfriend.’

A bunch of keys that editor-in-chief Ida Caroline Ovesen has lent to Henning is jingling in his hands. One of the keys fits the lock of a basement storeroom where all superfluous office equipment was dumped during the refurbishment until someone found a suitable home for it. ‘It’ll probably stay there for ever,’ Ida remarked.

She had no idea where his cassette tapes might be. The refurbishment had been chaotic, and many staff had helped clear out the offices. This impression of chaos is reinforced when Henning enters a room filled to the rafters with chairs, desks, old computers, boxes of wires and cables, mice and mouse mats, ring binders and bookcases, workstations and monitors.

Henning moves a chair, clambers to the first desk and opens its drawers one by one, but they are all empty. The desks are identical, and none of them has his or any of his colleagues’ names on them so he has no other choice but to go through all of them and keep his fingers crossed that he might have some luck for once. He clears a path, taking one drawer at a time and slamming it shut as soon as he has looked inside. Soon he has built up a rhythm, but it produces no result.

Perhaps the drawers were emptied first, he speculates. He closes his eyes and imagines being the person who cleared out and removed the tapes from his desk. Could they have been put in a separate box? Bundled together with sticky tape even? Henning opens his eyes and locates the packing crates but soon realises that the filing system used was the one known as chucking stuff in any old box. Ten minutes later he has rummaged through all of them without finding a single audio cassette.

He looks around again. At the rear, behind the storage crates, he can see an unvarnished pine shelving unit filled with old stationery, headed paper with
123news
’s old logo, envelopes, pens – even umbrellas and white T-shirts. Henning works his way across to it, stepping over a dusty computer monitor in the process, and starts scanning the shelf in front of him at eye level. Nothing of interest. He stands on tiptoe and takes down a box from the top shelf. As he does so its bottom falls out and the contents cascade around his feet. He bends down and feels twinges in his back and hip, pain that sometimes returns as a reminder – as if he could ever forget the slippery railing and the fatal flagstones two floors below, but he grits his teeth and searches through the rubbish which someone decided was worth keeping. Conference papers for the Norwegian Foundation for Investigative Journalism. Union agreements. A computer mouse. Three pens that are unlikely to work. He removes two half-empty boxes of drawing pins that have fallen out – and spots a pile of cassettes held together with yellow tape. The initials HJ have been written on the side followed by a question mark.

Henning smiles. So someone did pack them, he thinks, delighted, as he counts eight cassettes, each containing four hours of recording time. He realises immediately that he will be unable to concentrate on anything else until he has listened to all of them. Perhaps he could ask Heidi Kjus for a few days’ leave.

His thoughts are interrupted by his mobile ringing. The caller is unknown, but Henning replies.

‘It’s Tore Pulli. Olsvik said you wanted me to call you.’

Henning stands up and feels his back ache. ‘Yes. Eh, great.’

He tries to organise his thoughts but ends up asking the first question that comes into his head. ‘How do we know each other?’

The seconds pass without Pulli replying.

‘The first time we spoke, you asked me if I remembered you. That’s not a question you ask someone you’ve never met or spoken to before. But I have no memory of us meeting. I remember nothing from the weeks or days before my son died. So, I was wondering, did we have any contact around the time of the fire at my flat? Did we know each other?’

The seconds tick away while Henning grows increasingly agitated.

‘I read somewhere that you weren’t in the habit of giving interviews, Pulli. Was I trying to arrange an interview with you? Was that the reason?’

Pulli doesn’t reply.

‘Was I working on a story where you were one of the players?’

Still silence.

‘Why were you outside my flat that night? And I mean, really?’

Pulli sighs. ‘I can’t tell you anything about that, Juul.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t. The telephone in here is being monitored.’

‘I don’t give a damn about that.’

‘No, but I do.’

‘If you want my help, you have to not care about that.’

Pulli sighs. As does Henning when Pulli takes a long time to consider his response.

‘I can’t tell you on the telephone,’ he says eventually.

‘Then tell me this,’ Henning counters aggressively. ‘How did you know that I was back at work?’

Another silence.

‘Great,’ Henning snorts. ‘I can’t be bothered with this. Good luck with your appeal.’

‘No! Don’t do it, don’t do it, please, don’t do it!’ Thorleif grabs the man’s left shoulder and pulls him.

‘Watch the road!’

The car has swerved out on the gravel at the edge of the tarmac. Thorleif lets go of the man and forces the car back on the road. The moment he is in control of the car, he pleads with the man again. ‘Don’t do it! I’ll do whatever you want, please, give me another chance, please, don’t hurt her, don’t kill her!’

‘It’s too late, Toffe. You had your chance.’

‘No, it can’t be too late! I’ll do what you want me to. Whatever it is. Please.’

Thorleif is crying. The man ignores him.

‘Please,’ he begs him as he bangs the steering wheel. They reach the end of the road. Thorleif stops the car, rests his head on the steering wheel and sobs.

‘Turn right,’ the man says softly and looks at Thorleif. ‘There is a car behind us. Turn right,’ he repeats, his voice firmer this time.

Slowly, Thorleif straightens up. A swirling mist is dancing in front of his eyes. He doesn’t see where the car is heading; he merely registers that it is accelerating.
I’ve killed her
, Thorleif thinks in despair.
It’s my fault. Soon she’ll be leaving work for the last time. She’ll never see the children again.

The children
, he thinks.
My God
. ‘Please,’ he repeats, weakly. ‘I’ll do anything. Anything. I promise, I’ll get it right next time.’

But the man doesn’t respond.

Thorleif drives quietly. The road is narrow, with grass on both sides right up to the tarmac. The colours around him merge, churn and spin inside his brain. Again his head slumps forwards against the steering wheel as he weeps. The car almost comes to a halt. The man reaches over and takes the wheel, making sure that they stay on the road. Then he looks at Thorleif.

‘Okay,’ he says, calmly. ‘I’ll give you a second chance.’

Thorleif lifts his head quickly and stares at the man; he never would have thought that he would experience such a genuine and profound sense of gratitude towards someone who only a few minutes ago had tried to make him kill another human being.