‘Do you have some disinfectant upstairs?’ Goma asks him.
‘I think so.’
‘Okay, you can’t stay here. Take my hand.’
Henning looks up at him.
‘Take my hand,’ Goma repeats.
Henning finds Goma’s face and eyes, discovers a determination and a gravity he hasn’t seen there before. He never would have thought that he would need helping up the stairs by a seventy-six-year-old bypass patient naked from the waist up. Nevertheless, he holds out his hand and staggers to his feet. He moves like a drunk. They take the stairs one step at a time. Goma wheezes. His old hand feels rough and full of cartilage. Working hands, Henning thinks. All the time he can hear someone sawing, hammering or hitting something in the courtyard.
They reach his flat. Henning fishes out his keys and opens the door, allows himself be led into the hallway. He stops, looks at the folding steps and the smoke detector, then he looks at Goma.
No, Henning tells himself. This is a job you need to do on your own.
He thanks his neighbour for his help.
‘Don’t mention it,’ Goma says.
Henning looks down. ‘Sorry, I don’t really know what… what happened-’
Goma holds up his hands. ‘Don’t worry about it. We all have our senior moments. I once came round just as I was about to go into Kondomeriet. I don’t know how I ended up in front of a sex shop.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes. But once I was there, I obviously had to go in and-’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Henning interrupts him and holds up his hand. A long moment passes in silence. They look at each other.
‘Can I offer you a cup of coffee or something?’ Henning asks.
‘No, thank you, I’m off to Sultan’s to buy tomatoes.’
‘Some other time perhaps?’
‘Yes, I would like that.’ Goma looks at him for a long time. ‘Right. Got to go. You take it easy now.’
‘You too.’
Chapter 52
It has just gone five o’clock when Thorleif gets off at Ustaoset Station on wobbly legs. He stops and surveys the area, looks at what must be Hallingskarvet mountain range up to his right. The peaks are covered by velvety circles of mist. Dotted randomly around the landscape below are cabins, big and small, in a range of colours. In front of him the mountain hotel, with its brown and red cladding, takes up a fair amount of space. There are several apartment blocks close to the hotel. Route 7 winds its way towards Haugastol and Bergen in parallel with the railway tracks. Across the tracks there is a little lake that sparkles in the late afternoon sunshine.
Thorleif starts to walk. It is hot. He gets even hotter when he realises it’s too late to call Elisabeth. She is bound to be home by now, probably busy feeding their starving children and irritated that he isn’t back yet or answering his mobile.
Normally she would have gone to the gym on a Thursday night, but now she will have to stay at home. Otherwise he could have tried calling her there. But she won’t be going tonight even if she could find a babysitter at short notice. Isn’t there anyone else he can call? Someone he can get to visit Elisabeth or who could bring her to a neutral place?
Calling her sister, his in-laws or his parents would set any number of alarm bells ringing. And if he had been the one hunting someone, apparently with access to unlimited funds, the first thing he would have done would be to check with their next of kin or friends to see if there had been any sort of contact. One of the football mums, perhaps. But Thorleif barely knows who they are or what their names are. Nor does he have their numbers. Besides, it occurs to him, it would be stupid to get even more innocent people mixed up with this. You’ll just have to wait, Thorleif concludes, until Elisabeth is back at work. This means she faces an unbearable evening and night.
As the train continues on towards Bergen, Thorleif follows a man and a woman who also have business in Ustaoset on a Thursday afternoon. They walk separately. Thorleif takes care to lag behind them while simultaneously looking as if he knows his way around. As if it was quite natural for him to get off the train right there, right now.
He leaves the platform, crosses route 7 and walks down towards the petrol station. Ustaoset’s only supermarket greets him with the words lebensmittel and groceries displayed above one other on a white wall. Thorleif tries to visualise the road to Einar’s cabin, but all he can recall is that they passed the shop, the petrol station and the kiosk before taking a right. So that’s what he does now though he has yet to recognise anything. It doesn’t help that the darkness and the snow back then have been replaced by bright afternoon sunshine and dry late summer colours. He walks past a block of flats with five garages under a large brown building with a red roof. Otherwise it is all cabins. Everywhere. And an enormous car park with rows of blue posts lined up with space for one car between them.
Thorleif follows the gravel road until he reaches a crossroads. There is a sign saying Prestholt to the right, via a road called Nystolvegen. Next to it are more signs on top of each other, all signposting cross-country ski routes such as Embretstolen, Geilo via Prestholt or Prestholt via Eimeheii. No, Thorleif thinks. It doesn’t ring any bells.
So he decides to continue straight ahead as a car comes towards him on the gravel road. Thorleif pulls down the baseball cap and stares at the ground. He steps aside until the car has passed him and carries on until he reaches a grey building with a sign saying Presttun.
Presttun, Thorleif thinks. That sounds vaguely familiar.
Spurred on by this he walks on, following the red sticks along the roadside — put there in case the snowfall is so deep that the snowplough drivers can’t see the road. He remembers Einar and himself struggling up that same hill, expelling clouds of beery breath as they went. He hears rhythmic hammering coming from a building site, but he doesn’t see anyone.
One hundred metres later he stops and looks across the slope to the right. Cabin after cabin and occasional young birch trees rise from the ground. Does he recognise the black cabin halfway up the slope? Red roof and windowsills. A small outhouse nearby. Yes, that’s it, Thorleif says to himself and speeds up.
He soon reaches it. It’s not a big cabin, but now when Thorleif sees it again he remembers what it looked like on the inside. Pine walls and pine furniture everywhere. A small galley kitchen. A sofa with red cushions. Oilcloth on the table. Square windows with red and white curtains.
It probably hasn’t changed on the inside, either, he thinks and takes another look around. The cabin looks deserted. The surrounding cabins look empty too. He walks up to it, stops and peers inside through a gap in the kitchen curtains. Thorleif has never burgled anyone’s house, he has barely done anything illegal in his entire life, and he feels uneasy knowing he is about to do so now, especially to someone he knows. He tries to persuade himself that Einar and his family would understand.
Thorleif walks around to the back of the cabin, remembering how Einar told him they forgot their key one Easter. They had to call out a local locksmith, who, in return for a substantial fee, made sure their holiday wasn’t completely ruined. Einar’s father, who was tight-fisted, promised himself that this would never happen again so he devised an alternative way into the cabin to be used in an emergency. As a result, the door of the woodshed was always left unlocked. At the end of the woodshed a new door was fitted that led to the tool shed and larder from which you could enter the kitchen through a hatch with a padlock. And Thorleif remembers Einar telling him that the key to that padlock was hidden in a small rusty tin can.
Thorleif pushes down the handle of the door to the woodshed, but he has to lean heavily on it before it opens. He looks around one last time before he enters and walks to the next door. The shelves and benches in the tool shed are packed with old skis, ski poles with snow guards, snowshoes, spades, tins of paint and various tools. Then he sees the tin can. Rusty but intact. He picks it up and shakes it.