‘Look out for anyone Vietnamese,’ Reilly shouted.
‘But they’re all foreign,’ Jon replied. ‘There’s not a single one with a Norwegian name. Shall I run up and read the names by the doorbells?’
‘Stay here,’ Axel thundered. ‘We need to stick together.’
‘He’s not breathing,’ Reilly whispered. ‘Look at his lips. They’ve gone blue.’
‘That’s because it’s so cold,’ Axel declared. He started walking. He stopped after a few metres, turned abruptly and came back.
‘Help me!’ he said. ‘We need to talk.’
Together they managed to lift Kim into the boot. Axel slammed it shut. He ordered them back inside the car. A few minutes later he started driving.
‘We can’t stay here,’ he explained. ‘People can see us. We need time.’
Jon stared out of the rear window. He watched the letterboxes vanish in the darkness.
‘But where are we going?’ he asked. ‘What are we going to do?’
Axel did not have a plan. He drove aimlessly. As long as they kept on moving, a solution would appear, he thought, or the person in the boot would come back to life and start banging on the metal. Time itself would come to their rescue. Nature was playing a nasty trick on them, that was all, so he carried on driving. They passed no one. A Shell petrol station tempted them with hot food and drinks behind lit-up windows. Jon begged Axel to stop.
‘People will see us and remember us,’ he argued. ‘We’re not stopping anywhere, not yet.’
‘Then when will we be stopping?’ Jon persevered. ‘Are we going to drive until morning?’
‘You’re low on petrol,’ Reilly remarked. He pointed to the petrol gauge.
Axel Frimann sat hunched over the wheel as though he was steering a ship through a storm. They were moving, but they were not going home. They were in no man’s land.
‘We might have been mistaken,’ Reilly tried. ‘Shouldn’t we stop to see how he is? If he’s come round?’
Axel pulled over at a bus stop.
He opened the door and got out. Reilly staggered after him.
‘He’s starting to grow cold,’ Reilly said. ‘It’s not necessarily our fault. Perhaps he had a bad heart.’
‘Do you know something?’ Axel said. ‘That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.’
They continued to drive through the darkness. At first in huge circles around the town, later along the main road. It was still snowing.
‘We need to call,’ Jon stuttered.
‘It’s too late,’ Reilly said. ‘He’s dead.’
‘But how?’ Jon asked.
‘Perhaps he threw up,’ Reilly said.
‘People don’t die from that,’ Axel argued.
‘Yes. He threw up and inhaled his own vomit. You can drown that way, it does happen.’
Jon curled up on the back seat. He listened to the two men in the front. A few words reached him through the darkness of the car, such as ‘it’s no good, we can’t drive back and leave him at the side of the road, you know that.’
‘But he’s in the boot now and it’s not like he’s going to go away.’
‘We need to find another solution.’
‘It’s not our fault.’
‘Yes,’ Reilly said. ‘It is our fault. You and your seats.’
‘So it’s my fault now, is it? Is that what you’re saying? That he drank too much and decided to die in my car? Is that my fault?’
Axel’s strong, argumentative voice. Reilly’s weak protests.
‘It’ll only get worse,’ Reilly said.
‘It can’t get any worse,’ Axel said.
Twenty minutes later Axel parked the car by the shore of Glitter Lake.
‘Why are we stopping?’ Jon asked.
‘The petrol light has come on,’ Axel replied.
The headlights formed two pale blue cones across the ice. After some time they got out of the car and wandered up and down along the shore.
‘We can’t drive back,’ Axel said. ‘And we can’t take him home with us. This much I assume we do agree on.’
He looked across the ice. To the right of the beach lay a hill with some bushes growing around it.
‘There,’ Axel said. ‘Under the bushes. We’ll hide him there, and when the ice melts he’ll go through.’
‘You’re not serious?’ Reilly said.
Axel opened the boot.
Jon protested. ‘We don’t need to say that we put him in the boot,’ he wailed. ‘Can’t we just keep quiet about that bit?’
‘They’ll find out eventually,’ Axel said. ‘We’ll be convicted of manslaughter. We’ll go to prison for several years.’
Jon carried on crying.
‘You need to think of those closest to you now,’ Axel said. ‘Not strangers from a foreign country who decide to die on your doorstep. What do you think your mum will say if you go to jail?’
‘But we won’t go to jail, will we?’ Jon whispered.
‘Yes, we will, and I’m not going to let that happen to me. We need to agree a story.’
Jon was still sobbing. He started kicking the tyres of the car. ‘Reilly,’ he howled. ‘Say something!’
Reilly took a few steps through the snow, still keeping his back to him.
Axel pulled out his mobile from his pocket.
‘Here you are, Jon, go on, make the call. After all, you’re so much better than us. Do the right thing and ruin the rest of your life.’
CHAPTER 36
Ingerid Moreno spotted the taxi from her window.
She pulled on her boots and had just got outside when Yoo Van Chau’s foot appeared below the door of the taxi. Yoo was carrying a big shoulder bag. It was heavy, and it upset her balance. The street had been gritted, but there were still icy patches on the flagstone path leading up to the house.
‘Let me help you,’ Ingerid said.
Yoo hooked her arm through Ingerid’s and together they staggered up the slippery flagstones like two old ladies. They could not help but laugh at themselves, and their laughter reminded them of the old life they had lost.
‘Please sit down,’ Ingerid said, once they got inside.
She had cleaned the house. She had bought flowers and lit candles. She had cooked dinner and set the table, and she had opened a bottle of wine.
Yoo sat on the sofa and Ingerid let herself fall into a chair. There were things that needed saying. They both summoned their courage.
‘I’m not making excuses for Jon,’ Ingerid began. ‘He should have held his ground even though Axel and Reilly were older and stronger than him. But I was young myself once. We went to parties every Saturday and we used to get quite drunk. Some mornings I would wake up unable to recall the night before. It would just be a blur.’
Yoo listened with the shoulder bag on her lap.
‘There’s so much we don’t know about ourselves,’ Ingerid said. ‘Perhaps we ought to thank fate for the trials we never have to face.’
‘Kim shouldn’t have drunk as much as he did,’ Yoo said. ‘He wasn’t used to it. I feel sorry for both of them. And I feel sorry for us.’
She looked at the flowers on the table. She recognised them as caramel roses. Ingerid had food in the oven too. She could hear hot fat spitting.
‘Every day I light a candle on his grave,’ she said. ‘I go there whatever the weather, come rain or come shine. Afterwards, I wait for the bus, in the freezing cold. I’m so tired of it. Then I make up my mind not to go the next day, but I think I can hear him calling out for me, so I have to go anyway even though it’s cold. I have to, otherwise I can’t sleep.’
‘He’s controlling you,’ Ingerid said. ‘Did he control you when he was alive as well?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So why do you allow him to do so now?’ She went to the window and looked outside. ‘The snow will come soon,’ she said. ‘Think about that.’
Yoo thought about the snow. It would cover the graves like a duvet.
Ingerid went to the bookcase, pulled out a photo album with a black cover and placed it on the table. ‘You first,’ she said.
Yoo opened her shoulder bag. Her photo album was pale blue and bore the following title: My little baby.