Eva Magnus sat shivering in a thin nightie. She wanted to go to bed, but couldn’t seem to leave her chair. It was getting harder and harder to do the things she needed to, as if she felt the whole time that it was a wasted effort. She jumped when the phone rang. The clock told her it must be her father, nobody else phoned this late.
“Yes?” She got into a more comfortable position. She had to treasure the talks with her father, and they could be lengthy.
“Eva Marie Magnus?”
“Yes?”
An unknown voice. She’d never heard it before, at least she didn’t think so. Who would ring so late in the evening, if they didn’t even know her?
There was a small click. He’d hung up. Suddenly she began to tremble violently, she looked fearfully out of the windows and listened. All was quiet.
13
Ingrid had given him a tube of tar ointment. He sniffed it tentatively, wrinkled his nose, and put the tube in the drawer. Then he stared at the pictures on the desk in front of him, of the beautiful Maja Durban and the somewhat more prosaic Einarsson, who was as bereft of force and manliness as she was bereft of innocence. He couldn’t imagine them knowing each other, moving in the same circles. Or even that they’d had acquaintances in common. But Eva Magnus was a link. She’d found Einarsson in the river, and for some reason she’d said nothing about it. She’d been friends with Durban and was one of the last people to see her alive. Only days separated their killings, and both frequented the south side, although that meant nothing, it was a small town.
Two unsolved murders didn’t disturb his equilibrium, and he wasn’t capable of becoming stressed. Rather, he became dogged, even more attentive, as he organized and reorganized his thoughts in logical sequences, tried various juxtapositions and played the resulting possibilities to himself like short film clips. He made deeper inroads into what was really his leisure time, although he had enough of that for his own needs anyway. His whole intuition told him there was a connection between the two victims, although he lacked most of the hard facts. Could Einarsson have had an affair, even though the idea made his wife smile? Certainly, wives didn’t know everything. Apart from Elise, he thought, and realized all at once that he was blushing at the thought. He should have hauled Eva Magnus in and really piled on the pressure, but he couldn’t do that without reasonable grounds. She should have been in here on the other side of his desk, off balance and insecure, not as she was in her own home, but alone and anxious within this great edifice, this gray giant of a building which could break anybody. Easy enough to stick to a story at home. My home is my castle. He should have had one of those old-fashioned mangles, and put her through it to see what got squeezed out. Probably black and white paint, he thought. Yet he had no grounds for bringing her in, that was the problem. She had done absolutely nothing illegal, she’d made a statement after Durban’s murder, and he’d believed her. She lived as most people did, took her daughter to playschool, painted, shopped for food, didn’t keep company of any sort, not even that of other artists. And it wasn’t a crime to pay your bills before they fell due. He cursed the fact that she’d been given such an easy ride from the start. He had believed her, that she knew absolutely nothing at all. And perhaps it was true that she’d met Durban quite accidentally. The fact that someone killed her the following evening must have been a shock. It might explain her strained manner when he’d visited her the first time. An almost quivering nervousness. But who, he thought again, finds a body in the river, shrugs their shoulders, and goes for a meal at McDonald’s? And also, she had more money than she had before. Where had she got it from?
He sat there sifting for a while, continually gazing out of the window, but seeing nothing except roofs and the tops of the tallest trees. It was a paltry view, but at least there was a bit of sky, and that was the most important thing. That was what the prisoners looked at, he thought, sitting in their cells. That was what they missed. The various colors, the changing light. The constant motion of the clouds. Sejer grunted, opened his desk drawer, and took out a bag of Fisherman’s Friends. The phone rang just as he’d stuck two fingers in the bag. It was Mrs. Brenningen down below in reception, she said she had a small boy with her who absolutely had to speak to him.
“You’ll have to be quick,” she said, “he wants a pee!”
“A small boy?”
“A skinny little lad. Jan Henry.”
Sejer leapt to his feet and sprinted to the elevator. It descended through the building almost noiselessly. He didn’t like the way it made so little sound, it would have made a more solid impression if it had been more raucous. It wasn’t that elevators made him nervous or anything, it was just a thought.
Jan Henry stood quietly in the wide space watching out for him. Sejer was moved when he saw the thin little figure; here in this large lobby he seemed even more lost. He took him by the hand and led him over to the toilets. He waited outside until he’d finished. Afterward he looked very relieved.
“Mom’s at the hairdresser,” he explained.
“Is she? So she knows you’re here?”
“No, not that I’m here exactly, but she said I could go for a walk. It takes such a long time. She’s going to have curls.”
“A perm? Yes, that’s no joke, takes about two hours,” Sejer said knowledgeably. “Come up to the office with me and I’ll show you where I work.”
He took the boy’s hand again and shepherded him into the elevator, while Mrs. Brenningen sent him a long, appreciative look. She’d witnessed the power play and got through most of her book’s intrigues. Now only the lust remained.
“You probably don’t like Farris mineral water, Jan Henry,” he said, looking around the office for something to offer him. Farris and Fisherman’s Friends were hardly the things to offer a small boy with all his taste buds unsullied and intact.
“Yes, I like Farris. Dad used to give me some,” he said contentedly.
“That’s lucky then.” He tugged a plastic cup loose from the stack above the sink, filled it, and placed it on the desk in front of him. The boy took a long drink and burped gently. “How have you been keeping?” Sejer asked amicably and noticed that the boy’s freckles had multiplied.
“Not too bad,” he mumbled. And then added, as if in explanation for why he’d come: “Mom’s got a boyfriend.”
“Oh, my goodness,” he exclaimed, “so that’s the reason for the curls.”
“I don’t know. But he’s got a motorbike.”
“Has he? A Japanese one?”
“BMW.”
“No! Been on it?”
“Only backwards and forwards between the clothes lines.”
“That’s not too bad, perhaps the trips will gradually get longer. You wear a helmet, don’t you?”
“Oh yes.”
“And your mom, does she go on it?”
“No, she’d rather die. But he’s trying to change her mind.”
Sejer drank from the bottle and smiled. “It was nice of you to come, I don’t often get visits at work.”
“Don’t you?”
“No, I mean, not visits like this one. Which are just nice. Which haven’t got anything to do with work, if you see what I mean.”