‘Park here and then we will swap cars.’
Thorleif manoeuvres into the bay and turns off the engine. A heavy silence fills the car. In the distance a door slams with a bang before an engine starts. They get out. He is met by a smell that reminds him of a ferry deck. There is a constant humming above him. The man goes over to the passenger side of the BMW, opens the doors and tosses the keys to Thorleif. Caught off guard, Thorleif only just manages to catch them.
‘You want me to drive?’
‘Let’s find out what you’re made of,’ the man says, and his voice echoes against the walls. He grins. ‘In you get.’
Chapter 36
They have left Stavern behind and have driven past horse paddocks, onion fields and a Free Church when Thorleif is told to stop in a bus lay-by opposite a maize field. The crop reaches waist height. Beyond them, far away on the horizon, the Strait of Skagerrak opens wide towards Denmark. White horses on the surface of the water chase boats, big and small. Above them white and dark-grey clouds drift along without bumping into one another.
‘Do you want me to turn off the engine?’ Thorleif says. The sun is roasting him through the window. The man next to him looks at an old garage with rusty doors and a black sheet-metal roof. He turns his whole body towards Thorleif.
‘Earlier today I asked you which way you wanted to go. Remember?’
‘Y-yes.’
The man points ahead where the road bends left in a long, soft curve.
‘A few hundred metres further ahead there is another junction. Technically you can’t turn right there, you’ll have to go straight across it, but I’ll ask you all the same. Right or left?’
‘W-what?’
‘Right or left?’
‘But-’
‘Right or left?’
‘I don’t know! Which way do you want me to go?’
‘You remember how it was earlier today. I’m asking you one last time: right or left? Left: your girlfriend dies. Right: you can still eat tacos-’
‘Right,’ Thorleif replies quickly. ‘I’ll turn right, okay?! Why don’t you just tell me which way you want me to go? I’ll do anything to save my girlfriend!’
‘Good, Toffe, I want you to hold that thought: you’ll do anything to save your girlfriend. Great. Now start driving. Stick to route 301.’
‘What are we going to do when we get there?’
The man doesn’t reply. Thorleif sighs and puts the car in ‘D’. He pulls out into the road again, calmly increases his speed to 60 kilometres per hour and follows the long curve to the left, towards the sign for the 301. He brakes in the bend before continuing straight ahead and accelerating up a small hill. The narrow road continues to wind its way through dense forest interspaced with onion and potato fields on both sides whenever the landscape opens up. No cars come in the opposite direction. Thorleif clutches the steering wheel. Tiny side roads turn off to the right, towards farms and cottages he can’t see.
‘Pull up over there.’
The man points to a faded brown fence enclosing a plot which doesn’t appear to be named, but where gravestones stick up from the well-tended grass. Thorleif parks in between two birches whose branches offer them shade.
‘What do we do now?’ Thorleif asks.
‘We wait. You can turn off the engine now.’
They sit in silence for several minutes. They hear the sound of a car approaching. A black cat runs along the edge of the road before it shoots off in between the rowan bushes. The car appears, zooms past them before it falls silent once more. Soon afterwards a tractor comes along. Then two cyclists. Thorleif notices that the man follows them with his eyes with considerable interest.
Suddenly he leans forwards and says, ‘Perfect.’
‘What is?’
‘Check your wing mirror.’
Behind them a man wearing a headset, dark-blue running trousers and a blue jacket comes jogging. His pace is leisurely.
‘Wait until he has passed us.’
Thorleif waits. He watches the jogger in his mirror, sees him overtake the car. The jogger pays no attention to them, he just disappears around the next bend. The minutes pass.
‘Okay, start the engine.’
‘What are we doing?’
‘Just do as you are told.’
The engine growls menacingly.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Drive. Faster.’
Thorleif pushes down the accelerator a little more. The car gains speed. The jogger appears around the next bend. He has reached the foot of a long sloping hill that twists like a snake.
‘Faster!’ The man leans forwards.
‘Why?’
‘Because I want you to hit him.’
‘I can’t drive into him. I’ll kill him!’
‘Faster!’
Thorleif obeys, gripping the steering wheel. His thoughts bounce up and down like a roller-coaster. What does he do now? Surely he can’t run over someone deliberately?
They pass a house and a sign advertising a sculpture exhibition.
‘There are people living here,’ Thorleif yells.
‘So what?’
‘What if they see us? What if there are other cars behind us or coming towards us?’
‘Think about your girlfriend. Think about what we’re going to do to her if you don’t run him over.’
‘I can’t do it!’ he screams.
‘Of course you can!’
The tears well up in his eyes and make it difficult for him to see clearly. Thorleif closes them and tries to blink away the wetness, but the tears keep flowing. He struggles to breathe. The engine emits another roar as they gain on the jogger. The fields open up on both sides of the road and there is a smell of onions, of bloody onions, while Thorleif’s heart feels as if it is about to jump out of his chest. His hears himself cry out as his hands twist the steering wheel in the direction of the jogger. I’m going to hit you, Thorleif thinks, I’m going to hit you now.
He closes his eyes and waits for the car to react to the collision with a human being and the loud crash that will follow as Thorleif takes the life of an innocent man. But the crash never comes. The wheels of the car never stray across the edge of the tarmac where the gravel starts, where thousands of onions are neatly lined up. Thorleif opens his eyes again. Only a few metres ahead of them the road goes into a double bend, and they are about to plough into a field where the red-tinted flowers of the potatoes still display the remains of summer. Thorleif tries frantically to regain control of the car, to get it back on the road. He hears a quartet of tyres scream as the car hurls itself to the left just as they come into the bend and Thorleif clings to the steering wheel while he pants and tries to straighten up, gasping and frantically turning the wheel. Behind them the jogger has stopped. He waves his clenched fists at them.
You failed, Thorleif mutters to himself. You failed the test.
He stares at the man who has already pressed a number on his mobile which he is pressing against his ear.
‘Hi, it’s me,’ he says and sends Thorleif an icy stare. ‘He screwed up. Kill his girlfriend.’
Chapter 37
A bunch of keys that editor-in-chief Ida Caroline Ovesen has lent to Henning is jingling in his hands. One of the keys fits the lock of a basement storeroom where all superfluous office equipment was dumped during the refurbishment until someone found a suitable home for it. ‘It’ll probably stay there for ever,’ Ida remarked.
She had no idea where his cassette tapes might be. The refurbishment had been chaotic, and many staff had helped clear out the offices. This impression of chaos is reinforced when Henning enters a room filled to the rafters with chairs, desks, old computers, boxes of wires and cables, mice and mouse mats, ring binders and bookcases, workstations and monitors.