Tobias cleared his throat. The girl carried on weeding without noticing him. Tobias glanced around and spotted a couple of old pine cones on the ground. Carefully, he threw one of them in her direction, but it didn’t get very far, didn’t even reach the fence. He half rose, threw the second cone harder, and this time he succeeded. He hit the middle section of the fence, which rang out – the sound was far too loud, and he regretted it immediately – threw himself on the heather and lay as still as he could.
When he looked up again, the girl was standing near the fence. She had heard the sound. She was looking at him. He could see her eyes. She was looking straight at him. Tobias placed his finger in front of his lips. Shhh. The girl was very surprised but, even so, she obeyed his instruction and said nothing. She looked around. First to one side, then to the other. Then she nodded cautiously. Tobias looked around, too, and moved closer to the fence. He opened his rucksack, took out the water bottle, slipped it under the fence and quickly retreated to his hiding place. The girl in the grey dress glanced around again. There was no one about. She quickly got up, ran to the water bottle, snatched it, hid it in the folds of her dress and raced back to the patch she had been weeding. Tobias saw her unscrew the cap and drink practically the whole bottle. She must be very thirsty. The girl with the white bonnet kept looking around. She seemed nervous. Frightened that someone might come. Tobias’s courage grew and he walked all the way up to the fence. The girl also came closer, quietly, but she kept looking over her shoulder. He could see her face more clearly now. She had blue eyes and many freckles. Her strange bonnet and heavy dress almost made her look like an old lady, but she wasn’t. If she had been wearing ordinary clothes, she would have looked just like the other girls in his class. The girl held up the bottle to him as if to ask him if he wanted it back. Tobias shook his head. The girl knelt down and took out something from the pocket of her dress. It was a notepad and a small pencil. She wrote something on a piece of paper and folded it carefully. Then she got up, half ran to the fence and stuck the paper through it. She glanced around nervously and ran just as quickly back to her original position and carried on pulling up weeds. Tobias elbowed his way to the fence to take the paper. He crawled back and opened it. ‘Thank you,’ it said. He looked at the girl and smiled. He tried to work out how to signal ‘You’re welcome’ without speaking, but it was far from easy. The girl glanced over her shoulder and wrote something else. She ran to the fence again but, this time, she didn’t fold the piece of paper, she left the whole notepad and the pencil by the fence. Tobias quickly crouched down and made his way back to the fence, took the notepad and the pencil and returned to his hiding place. My name is Rakel, it said on the notepad. ‘I am not allowed to talk. What is your name?’ Tobias looked towards the girl. Not allowed to talk? What kind of rules were those? And why had she been so thirsty? And why was she out here all alone? Tobias thought about it and wrote a reply: ‘My name is Tobias. Do you live here? Why can’t you talk?’ He crept back to the fence with the notepad and resumed his position. Writing ‘Do you live here?’ might have been a bit stupid because she obviously did, it was plain to see, but he hadn’t known what else to write. The girl smiled slightly when she saw the notepad and wrote a quick reply. She was still very wary. She glanced over her shoulder several times before she risked passing the new message through the fence. ‘I live here. Lux Domus. Can’t tell you why (not talking).’ She tried to signal something with her hands when he had read the note, as if she wanted to add something, but did not know how. Tobias smiled at her and wrote a reply back. ‘I live at the edge of this forest. We are neighbours.’ He added a smiley. Then he wrote, ‘What does Lux Domus mean?’ The girl got the notepad back. Again, she smiled faintly. After a fresh check to make sure that no one was watching her, she wrote her reply, and raced to the fence to leave the notepad there before running back to the vegetable bed. ‘Lux Domus = house of light. It’s very kind of you to help me. Thank you.’ Tobias frowned at the second half of her message. He didn’t think he had done that much to help her. All he had done was give her some water. He wondered what to write back. Words seemed really important now that he wasn’t allowed to say them out loud. He had to think very carefully. He chewed the pencil for a while before he realized what he wanted to write. ‘Do you need any more help?’ he wrote, and slipped the notepad through the fence.
Suddenly, something happened up by the main house. The girl glanced nervously over her shoulder and wrote a quick reply. She tore off the paper this time and folded it like she had done with her first message. People were coming now; several were emerging from the house, quite a few. It looked as if they had just finished something inside the church. The girl got up quickly and pushed the note through the fence. Now Tobias could hear voices as well. They were calling her name.
‘Rakel!’
The girl slowly got up, dusting down her dress. He could no longer see her eyes; she had bowed her head now. She picked up the hoe and walked quietly towards the voices calling her. Tobias lay completely still, too scared to move before the crowd had dispersed. The girl had now joined them, and everyone went inside one of the greenhouses. Once more, the farm was silent. Tobias emerged from his hiding place to pick up the final note. He stuffed it in his pocket, and he didn’t take it out until he had found a better hiding place, deeper inside the forest. His fingers were trembling as he unfolded the paper. He had a shock when he saw what she had written.
‘Yes. Help me. Please.’
Slowly, he crept back towards the fence. There was still total silence on the other side. Tobias did not know exactly what to do. He had planned to go on a secret mission, but that had just been a silly idea in his head.
This was different.
This was real.
The girl in the grey dress existed. The girl who was thirsty, but not allowed to talk. And, now, she had asked him for help.
Tobias put on his rucksack and walked calmly to the mound, from where he would have a clearer view.
Chapter 28
Mia Krüger woke up with a feeling that there was someone in her hotel room. She was unable to open her eyes properly; she was enveloped in a fog, half asleep, half awake. She forced open her eyelids enough to establish that she was alone. There was no one there, just her. A depressing thought. Her life was reduced to this? A hotel room and a murder case. Not that it really mattered. This was only temporary.
Come to me, Mia, come.
She would be gone soon. Why fret about it? Why think? Why this? Why that?
For some inexplicable reason, Mia had a headache. After her consumption of various drugs in the last six months, she thought she had become immune to low-level pain like this. Her evening with Susanne had gone on longer than planned – well, planned was an exaggeration, it had been a chance meeting – but the bottom line was that she had had too much to drink. She closed her eyes and tried to get back to her dream. She had been dreaming about Roger Bakken. He had been standing naked on the roof of the hostel. The eagle tattoo was no longer confined to his neck; it covered almost all of him now. He was trying to tell her something, shouting it down to her, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying; the traffic was too noisy and someone insisted on talking right into her ear. She had turned to see who it was whispering strange sentences she didn’t understand, but there was no one there. Roger Bakken kept waving his arms about, wanting her to understand, but she couldn’t hear him. ‘Come here,’ she had called out. ‘Come down.’ And then Roger Bakken had jumped. Fallen slowly through the air towards her. His tattoo had kept on spreading; it covered all of his body and the air around him now. His arms had turned into wings. His legs into talons. His head had grown a beak. Right before he was about to hit her, Roger Bakken had spread his wings and flown away. She didn’t hear what he said. An image from the cemetery. Sigrid’s gravestone. Someone whispered in her ear again, an invisible voice. Church bells rang out in the distance. On an island. The church bells were tolling on Hitra. Metallic sounds from eternity metamorphosed into the mobile in the pocket of her trousers which lay next to her bed. Sleepily, she reached out in the direction of the sound, pressed the screen and started to talk, before she was fully conscious.