She looked up and saw that they were at Carl Berners Place and just managed to get out before the carriage doors closed. Jogged up the steps, into the daylight. Her boots were dry again, both of them with an uneven grey rim round the outside of the ankle. A few days ago she would have hated to have them looking like that. In the life she lived, every imperfection acquired a significance. But not now. Not here in this misty winter city.
She was on her way to meet Mailin’s partner. Passed a post office. Wouters, she thought when she saw it. Saw in her mind’s eye the name of the detective inspector on an office door. She’s standing outside it with a letter in her hand. She’s written down exactly what happened that night in Zako’s flat. How she tricked him into taking all that Rohypnol and sat there watching as he became more and more helpless. How she left him there to collapse and drown in his own vomit. Mailin is missing, she protested. I can’t do anything for her if I write that letter.
She carried on down towards Rodeløkka. There had always been something about Mailin’s boyfriends. When she was younger, Liss had been obsessed with the need to find out about them. As if there was a code to them, something that told her what she should be looking out for herself. Once, perhaps in an attempt to crack this code, she’d allowed herself to be carried away. After that, she wanted to know as little as possible about her sister’s love life.
The house was away down at the end of Lang Street. She rang, waited, rang again. The front door wasn’t locked. She opened it and looked in. Light in the hallway and a staircase on the right.
– Hello?
She heard a door opening upstairs. He appeared at the top of the stairs. Then began descending towards her.
– Sorry, I was in the bathroom.
He stopped before he was all the way down. The eyes were quite large, the cheekbones high. His dark hair was longish and combed back. He gave a quick smile, came all the way down and held out his hand.
– Viljam.
He was quite a bit taller than her, but not particularly well built. She was surprised; she had imagined he would be like the person in the picture on Zako’s phone. But this wasn’t the man on his way out through the gate with Mailin.
He squeezed her hand, not hard, released it at once. He was unshaven, but his sideburns curved in a delicate bow towards the angles of his jaw and were symmetrically trimmed. It struck her that he was better looking than any of Mailin’s former boyfriends. He seemed calm, and was perhaps deliberately striving to maintain that calm. She never trusted her first impression of people she met. It was always accompanied by uncertainty, and often deceptive. She picked up a host of signals, full of contradictions and hidden significances. Being prepared was no help, she thought as Viljam walked in front of her down the hall. Most of what she picked up on she couldn’t think about until the encounter was over, and often not even then.
Liss looked round at the room. The ceiling was high, the room going halfway up into the next floor. The painting on the wall appeared to be of a winter landscape, snow through dark trees beneath a grey sky. Muted but full of light.
– Do you and Mailin own this house? she asked, though she knew the circumstances of how they came to be living there.
– Rent it cheaply, Viljam told her. – A friend of Linne’s working in the US on an open-ended contract. Not even certain he’ll come back. If he doesn’t, then it’s possible we’ll buy it.
He called her Linne. Liss had done the same when she was younger.
He took her upstairs and showed her around. The bedroom was in bright colours, with a solid double bed made of oak. There was a spare bed in an office. Liss tried to work out what was Mailin in the house. The bed and the dark brown leather furniture, the orchids on the windowsill in the living room, the painting, the piano.
Afterwards they sat in the kitchen, at a surface that stuck out from the wall and divided the room in two.
Viljam poured coffee from a cafetière.
– Keep expecting every moment that she’ll come in the front door, he said. – Kick the snow off on the threshold.
He sipped at his cup, looked away. Liss studied his hands. The fingers were long and thin. She glanced up at his profiled face against the afternoon light from the window. Thought of what Tage had said about Ragnhild’s reaction; that there was something about Viljam that gave her mother a funny feeling… These funny feelings of hers always filled the room with something floating and invisible; back home they used to swim in them all the time. Liss recalled why it was she had left, and would never come back.
– Mailin says you’re studying law. And that you also work.
He nodded. – The Justice Bus. Free legal aid for people who can’t afford to pay.
Was he trying to hide something? According to Tage, Viljam had been at work with some other students when Mailin disappeared. And the rest of that evening and night and the following day at the house in Lørenskog.
She swallowed some coffee. It was black and strong, just the way she liked it. – On the phone that day, you said that Mailin was going to call me.
Even in the light from the window his eyes were dark blue. She still didn’t know what she thought of him. Other than that he was good looking in an almost feminine way. As was usually the case with Mailin’s men.
– She said there was something she wanted to talk to you about. Don’t know what it was. Then she went out to the cabin.
– Just for one day? Liss could hear the scepticism in her own voice.
– She’s been spending a lot of time there recently. Working on a very demanding project. Part of her PhD. Says she thinks better out there. Nothing to disturb her. And on Thursday of course she was supposed to take part in Taboo.
Lisa could see her, sitting by the large French windows in the room at the cabin. View of a stretch of Morr Water between the trees.
– So that old rock-preacher Berger has turned himself into a talk show host, she remarked.
– You’ve never seen Taboo? Everybody’s talking about it.
– It’s years since I saw a Norwegian TV programme. I gather I’m missing something.
Viljam drained his coffee cup, poured them both refills.
– Read about it in a newspaper on the plane, she added. – Every week he discusses a new taboo which he claims we should get rid of. Smart guy.
Viljam took the bait. – Berger is an unscrupulous bastard who has discovered how much attention he can get just by digging in the dirt.
Liss wasn’t sure whether he sounded irritated or not.
– In the beginning he was untouchable, ostracised. Now he’s cool. Everyone who’s famous for being famous turns up on his show and yaps away with him.
– You mean Mailin?
He shook his head. – I was extremely surprised when she accepted the invitation. Then I realised it was for a reason. She wrote a piece for the newspapers about his show.
He pulled down a cutting from the cork noticeboard, Berger – a hero for our times. From Aftenposten, 1 December. – She discusses his project and shows what a narrow-minded idiot he really is.