‘You knew Jon,’ Axel said calmly. ‘You know what kind of conscience he had. He fretted about the slightest thing. Jon was a sensitive boy, his nerves forever fraying. I simply cannot imagine what could have tormented him to such an extent that he could not go on. There is nothing between us that can explain what happened. Perhaps he’s referring to some trivial incident, something Reilly and I have long since forgotten, but which Jon brooded over. Perhaps it grew in magnitude and overwhelmed him. I’m so very sorry, Ingerid, but I don’t understand a word of this.’
Ingerid Moreno was close to tears. She looked at Axel’s face like a beggar. She had been so sure he had the answer.
‘Please remember one thing,’ Axel continued. ‘Some people have a tendency to blow their sins and faults completely out of proportion. Tiny errors of judgement turn into monsters which consume them. That’s probably what Jon did. It’s called paranoia.’
Ingerid fought her tears. Axel’s composure was beginning to make her have doubts.
‘But there’s something there,’ she stuttered. ‘Page after page about remorse. Page after page of self-loathing. I was so sure you would be able to help me. I’ll go to Reilly now, I’ll ask him.’
Axel gave her a compassionate look. ‘I think you should. Do what you have to, but I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Jon didn’t do much wrong, I can assure you of that. Jon was sensitive and decent and upright. And though I know how hard it must be, you may have to accept that he could have been delusional.’
Ingerid got up and went to the door. ‘Jon was nothing of the sort,’ she said, ‘I would have known about it. His doctor would have known. I’ll unravel this somehow and if you’re hiding something, I’ll never forgive you!’
She started screaming again. She lost control, not that it was worth anything without Jon.
‘I’ve known you since you were a little boy,’ she shouted, ‘and I know your mother. I’ve put plasters on your knees, made you toast and orange squash. You’ve come to my house for years and I’ve always thought well of you. You were a brat, but you were Jon’s friend. And don’t you dare deceive me now, I won’t tolerate it!’
She slammed the door as she left. Axel grabbed his mobile and phoned Reilly.
‘Are you awake?’ he asked. ‘Are you lucid? Ingerid Moreno will be with you in ten minutes.’
CHAPTER 22
Yoo Van Chau was a small woman with round childlike cheeks. When she saw Sejer, she spun around and buried her face in her hands. Some coats hung on one wall and she disappeared between a jacket and an overcoat. Sejer noticed two things. She had black silky hair and wore tiny embroidered slippers on her feet.
Having hidden behind the clothes for a while, she reappeared with an apologetic smile. He followed her into the living room and spotted a photo of Kim Van Chau straight away. It stood on a tall chest of drawers. A candle burned next to it. Kim was a handsome boy and he could not stop himself from thinking of the body they had dragged out of the water. It was not handsome, but Yoo Van Chau did not know that.
She gestured towards a sofa. It was red with golden trim. She sunk into a chair. Sejer could not take his eyes off the embroidered slippers. He thought he could make out a motif of fire-breathing dragons.
‘I can make tea,’ Yoo Van Chau said.
‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ Sejer said.
Her hands settled in her lap and a stream of words poured out of her. She spoke good Norwegian with a charming accent, and her voice was that of a little girl.
‘They told me he was found close to the shore,’ she said. ‘That he’s been lying there a long time. It’s nine months now since he went missing. So I’m happy in a way. Because I had given up. I thought that all was lost and that my hands would be empty for ever.’
‘Do you have any other children?’ Sejer asked, hoping she would say yes. That any second now a teenage daughter would appear from one of the rooms and put her arms around her mother’s neck. Or a small child might crawl up into her lap. She seemed young.
‘Kim’s my only one,’ she explained. ‘We never had any more children, my husband died when he was only thirty-two. I couldn’t support us on my own. Kim was only eight years old when we moved to Norway. We come from Yen Bai. We decided on Norway because we have family here and they said it was a fine country.’
‘And what do you think?’ Sejer asked. ‘Is Norway a fine country?’
‘You want for nothing,’ she said simply.
Sejer did not reply.
‘Kim didn’t have many friends,’ she went on. ‘And whenever he found someone to spend time with, they wanted to go out drinking. That’s what he said to me: if I want to hang out with them, I have to go drinking.’
She stopped her flow of words.
Sejer had listened in silence. To come all this way, he thought, from beautiful Vietnam, to the dark Norwegian winter with ice and snow and lose everything you have. And yet sit there calmly talking with your hands in your lap. Tiny porcelain hands. And fire-breathing dragons on your feet.
‘Isn’t it odd that some people end up without friends?’ she said. ‘After all, he wanted for nothing. He did well at school and you can see from the photo that he was good-looking, so it’s hard for me to understand. It’s very hard indeed.’
‘Tell me about the night he went missing,’ Sejer asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I will tell you. It was 19 December last year, in the early evening. He wanted to go into town. He wasn’t meeting anyone in particular, he just wanted to watch the world go by, he said, and I told him to dress up warm because it was freezing cold that day. And a seventeen-year-old boy should have some independence, I do know that, so I was happy that he wanted to go out and meet people even though I didn’t know who they were. He called out to me from the hall. That was the last time I heard his voice, I can still hear his very last words. I went to bed at midnight, but I didn’t go to sleep. I lay waiting for his key in the lock because it makes quite a loud noise, you can’t mistake it. I listened out for his voice and his footsteps, and I waited for the pipes in the bathroom to gurgle. The night has never been so full of sounds. I kept hearing things, and every time I sat up with a start. Kim’s coming, that’s definitely Kim. Wasn’t that the sound of a car starting in the road? They must have given him a lift home, after all he’s gone out with nice people. Because he’s a nice boy. That’s what I thought as I lay in my bed. After several hours dawn broke and then I was sure that something must have happened. I stood in the doorway and looked at his empty bed. I could hardly believe it. Then there was the business of trying to find out what had happened. When he was reported missing in the newspaper, the police received some calls. It turned out he had met some young people and gone to a party with them, and they’d all been questioned, but none of them had any idea what might have happened to him. Kim had done what they had done. He had been drinking and he wasn’t used to that. They made no bones about it. Kim was drunk. And I don’t know what happened, but he shouldn’t have been drinking because he can’t handle it.’
‘What do you think might have happened?’ Sejer asked.
‘For a long time I thought he might have fallen asleep in a ditch on his way home and frozen to death, but then I heard that he had been given a lift as far as the letterboxes and that’s when I started to have doubts. But the days passed and no one found him, and I knew that this was something completely different, something incomprehensible. I don’t understand why they found him in the water, perhaps he fell through the ice. But it was so cold last winter. The ice must have been thick, and what would he have been doing up at Glitter Lake?’
She wiped tears from her cheek. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some tea?’ she asked again.