The woman sitting next to her had finished reading VG. She handed it to Liss, even though Liss hadn’t asked for it.
She flipped through without reading. A few pages in, she stopped and just stared at the headline above a big story: Missing woman (29) due to appear on Taboo. It was about Mailin. Her partner had mentioned this TV programme. VG called it ‘a scandal show’. A talk show hosted by Berger, she read, a name she associated with obsolete rock music. Now he was attracting huge audiences with this series on the subject of taboos. Yesterday’s show was apparently about sexuality. It had caught fire when Berger defended the idea that child sex might be okay. Liss struggled to put this into context. What could Mailin, always so careful about the views she sponsored, be doing on a TV show with someone like that? The 29-year-old psychologist never turned up at Channel Six’s studio in Nydalen. She had not been heard from since earlier that evening. Several times in the course of the show Berger claimed that she must have got cold feet. He now refuses to make any further comment.
The woman beside her sat with eyes closed and held on tightly to the armrests. Liss wedged the paper down into her seat pocket, pressed her head against the window. The layer of cloud beneath them was thinning out. She could just see the fjord below and the fortress at the top of it. Leaving four years earlier, she had thought she would never be back.
What’s to become of you, Liss?
She had told the taxi driver Ekeberg Way, but not the number. As they got close, she asked him to stop. Paid with her credit card and got out.
Up here on the hilltop above Oslo, it was biting cold. Liss was dressed for a mild day in Amsterdam; she’d fled to the airport without even thinking about going home and packing some clothes. The temperature on the dashboard read minus twelve. She buttoned the thin leather jacket all the way up to the neck, not that it helped, tried to stuff her hands down into the tiny pockets.
She found the number, a large, bright yellow functionalist villa. The name on the letter box was right. The driveway was paved in red flagstones, so slippery that she had to tiptoe up with tiny steps, like an old woman. She rang the doorbell. Rang again, a bit too quickly because already she could hear sounds inside. A woman put her head out. Dark hair, bunched at the neck, nicely made up. She might be in her mid-thirties, some ten years older than Liss.
– Judith van Ravens?
The woman gave a little smile in response, as if she’d been sitting in the house waiting for a floral delivery. Liss noticed that she had a bundle in her arm, something wrapped in a crocheted blanket.
– I must talk to you, she continued in Dutch, pointing to the hallway.
A hostile look showed in the woman’s eyes. – What’s this about?
Liss struggled to control herself. She was freezing from her toes and up through her back to the roots of her hair. She hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. She had killed someone. All she could hold on to were the two thoughts: Mailin is missing. I must find Mailin.
– Let me come inside for a moment and I’ll explain.
The woman shook her head firmly and tucked at the bundle she was holding next to her body. She was on the point of closing the door. Liss put her foot across the threshold. She pulled the photo of her sister from her bag and held it up in front of the woman’s face. The woman blinked in confusion and released her hold on the door. Liss shoved it open and pushed her way past her and inside.
The large room seemed almost empty. A suite of chairs that might have come from IKEA, a dining table in one corner, a large, pallid painting on the biggest wall.
– We’re only living here temporarily, the woman excused herself. – My husband is working for Statoil. He spends most of the time in Stavanger, but I couldn’t live there.
Her uncertainty evidently made her talkative. Unless this information about Statoil was offered up as a way of showing the intruder the powers that stood behind her. She held the bundle up to her shoulder. There was a pushchair bag on the sofa; perhaps she didn’t dare lay the sleeping child down.
Liss remained standing in the middle of the room. The woman didn’t offer her a seat.
– What is this about the photo?
– You took it, Liss stated, as calmly as she could.
– Did I?
– It was sent from your phone to a recipient in Amsterdam.
The woman drew a breath, and Liss readied herself. At any moment some great brute of a husband might turn up and throw her out. Maybe they’d call the police. But she was determined to stay put until she found out why these pictures of Mailin had been taken. A sudden vision of grabbing that bundled baby, threatening to beat its dark little head against the wall unless the woman told her what she knew.
It was as though this threat from some dark and closed place deep down inside her materialised itself, moved through the room and touched something in Judith van Ravens. She picked up the pushchair bag and headed for the door.
– Just going to put her down. Be right back.
Liss imagined her ringing her husband, if he wasn’t at home, or the neighbours, or the emergency number. It didn’t bother her at all. She knew she had come to the right house.
A few moments later, Judith van Ravens was back again.
– You’re right, she blurted out before Liss had a chance to say anything. – I did take that picture, but I don’t see why that gives you any reason at all to come barging in here. My daughter needs changing and feeding very soon, I’ve got hundreds of things to do, I’m expecting guests…
– The woman you took that picture of has gone missing.
Judith van Ravens stared at her. – What do you mean?
Liss took out the VG she had pocketed on the way out of the plane, opened it to the page and spread it on the table. Judith van Ravens read, looked at her, read again.
– How do you know that…?
– My sister, Liss answered dully. – It’s my sister that’s gone missing. And before I leave here, you’re going to tell me everything about these pictures. After that I’m going to the police.
– The police? Is that necessary?
– That’s for me to decide, Liss said firmly.
Judith van Ravens stood over by the window. – I haven’t done anything wrong, she said, suddenly sounding like a child who’s been dragged in to see the headmaster. – It’s just that I don’t want my husband to know anything about this.
She glanced across at Liss. – It’s true. I sent some pictures of that woman to Amsterdam, to someone I know.
– Zako.
– You know who he is?
Liss shrugged her shoulders. – Why did you do it?
Judith van Ravens rubbed her hands along her cheeks, pulling her entire face backwards.
– I’ve… known Zako some years. We’re friends.
Liss almost interrupted, but stopped herself. Zako doesn’t have women friends, she was going to say, and at the same instant saw him in her mind’s eye, lying on the sofa with vomit round his mouth. She could hear the voice of the policeman named Wouters, the one who was waiting for her to come and tell him what had happened that night.
– Sometimes we speak on the phone, Judith van Ravens continued, – and sometimes when I’m in Amsterdam we meet.
She was slender, a little below medium height, round hips and breasts not too big, even though she was probably breastfeeding. Not a typical Zako woman, Liss thought.
– And your husband’s not supposed to know about this, she noted with a touch of contempt.