“… after so many years,” she sighed. “Astor was… convinced. The way things transpired, the way I… No, I’m confusing things now.”
Her smile was shy, nearly perplexed.
“Listen,” said Johanne, leaning toward Unni Kongsbakken. “I really think this should wait. We can meet again later. Next week.”
“No,” said Unni Kongsbakken with surprising force. “I’m old. I’m not helpless. Let me continue. Astor was sitting in his study. He always spent a lot of time on the pleadings. Never wrote them out. Key words only, a sort of arrangement on cards. Lots of people thought he made his arguments spontaneously…”
She gave a dry laugh.
“Astor did nothing spontaneously. It was no fun having to disturb him when he was working. But I had been down in the cellar, in the laundry room. Right at the back, behind some pipes, I found Asbjørn’s clothes. A sweater I’d knitted myself-that was before I… I hadn’t established myself as a tapestry weaver yet. The sweater was bloody. It was covered in blood. I got angry. Angry! Of course I thought he had gone over the top with one of his protests again, killed an animal. Well, I stomped upstairs to his room. I don’t know what made me…”
It was as if she was looking for the words, as if she had rehearsed this for a long time, but still couldn’t find the words to say what she wanted to say.
“It was a feeling, that’s all. As I went up the stairs, I thought about the evening when little Hedvig disappeared. Or rather, I thought about the following day. At some point early in the morning, well… of course, we didn’t know about Hedvig then. It was only announced a day or two after the little girl had disappeared.”
She pressed her fingers to her temple, as if she had a headache.
“I had woken up about five in the morning. I often do. I’ve been like that all my life. But that morning in particular, which would later prove to be the day after Hedvig was killed, I thought I heard something. I was frightened, of course. Asbjørn was in his most manic period and did things that were well beyond what I had imagined a teenager could do. I heard footsteps. My first instinct was to get up and find out what had happened. But then I just couldn’t be bothered. I felt absolutely exhausted. Something held me back; I don’t know what. Later, at the breakfast table, Asbjørn was sullen and silent. He wasn’t normally like that. He normally talked incessantly. Even when he was writing, he talked. Chatted away and gesticulated. Always. He had opinions about everything. He had too many opinions, he…”
Again, a shy smile slipped over her face.
“But enough of that,” she interrupted herself. “Anyway, he was silent. Geir, on the other hand, was lively and chipper. I…”
She half-closed her eyes and held her breath. It was as if she was trying to recreate it all-to visualize the breakfast table that morning in a small town just outside Oslo, long ago, in 1956.
“I realized that something must have happened,” said Unni Kongsbakken slowly. “Geir was the quiet one. He normally said nothing in the mornings. Just sat there, helplessly… He was always in Asbjørn’s shadow. Always. And his father’s. Even though Asbjørn was an unusually rebellious teenager and didn’t even want to carry his father’s name, it was as if Astor… admired him, you could say. He saw something of himself in the boy, I think. His own strength. Stubbornness. Self-assertion. It was always like that. Geir was somehow… superfluous. Always. But that morning he was chatty and bright and I knew that something was wrong. Of course, I didn’t think of Hedvig. As I said, we knew nothing about the little girl’s fate until later. But there was something about the boys’ behavior that made me so frightened that I didn’t dare to ask. And then when I later, weeks later, the evening before Astor was going to argue that Aksel Seier was guilty of killing Hedvig Gåsøy… when I went upstairs with Asbjørn’s bloody sweater in my arms, angry as sin, suddenly…”
She folded her hands again. Locks of hair fell down heavy and gray on one shoulder. Tears flowed from the red eye. Johanne was not sure whether the old lady was crying or whether her eye was infected.
“It struck me, like a kind of vision,” said Unni Kongsbakken, tensely. “I went into Asbjørn’s room. He was sitting writing, as usual. I threw the sweater at him. He shrugged his shoulders and carried on writing without saying anything. ‘Hedvig,’ I said. ‘Is this Hedvig’s blood?’ Again he shrugged and kept on writing at a furious pace. I thought I was going to die there and then. Everything went black and I literally had to lean against the wall to stop myself from falling. The boy had given me endless sleepless nights. He always made me anxious. But I had never, never…”
Her hand hit the white tablecloth; Johanne jumped. The glass and cutlery chimed and the waiter came running over.
“… never thought that he had it in him to do anything like that,” Unni Kongsbakken concluded.
“No thank you,” Johanne said to the waiter, who withdrew with some hesitation. “What… what did he say then?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“But… did he admit…”
“He had nothing to admit.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t quite…”
“I just stood there, leaning against the wall. Asbjørn wrote and wrote. To this day I don’t know how long we stayed there on our own. It could well have been half an hour. It was like… like losing everything. It’s possible I asked him again, but he didn’t answer. Just wrote and wrote, as if I wasn’t there. As if…”
Now she was really crying. Her tears fell from both eyes and she fished around in her sleeve for a tissue.
“Then Geir came in. I didn’t hear him. Suddenly he was just there, beside me, staring at the sweater that had fallen on the floor. He started to cry. ‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.’ Those were precisely the words he used. He was eighteen years old and he was crying like a baby. Asbjørn jumped up and threw himself at his brother. ‘Shut up!’ he screamed, again and again.”
“Geir? Geir said that he didn’t mean to, that he…?”
“Yes,” said Unni Kongsbakken, and straightened her back. She pressed her tissue gently to her eyes before tucking it back up her sleeve. “He wasn’t able to say much more. Asbjørn literally knocked him out.”
“But, does that mean… I’m not sure what…”
“Asbjørn was the kindest person you could imagine,” said Unni Kongsbakken, calmer now and breathing freely; she was no longer crying. “Asbjørn was an affectionate boy. Everything he wrote later, all that awful, offensive… blasphemy. The attacks. It was only words. He just wrote, Asbjørn. In reality he was a very kind man. And he was very fond of his brother.”
Johanne tried to swallow, but something was blocking her throat, just below the larynx. It was difficult. She had to say something, anything. She had no idea what.
“It was Geir who killed little Hedvig,” said Unni Kongsbakken. “I am almost certain of it.”
It took the emergency services over forty-five minutes to get the man out of the wreckage of the blue Opel. His leg had been ripped off at the thigh. His left eyeball had been crushed; a bloody clump had fallen out of the eye socket and dangled helplessly on his cheek. The steering wheel lay a hundred yards away at the foot of a pine tree; the wheel shaft had plunged deep into the man’s stomach.
“He’s alive,” panted one of the rescue men. “Holy shit! The man’s alive!”
Barely an hour later, the driver of the blue Opel was on the operating table. Things didn’t look hopeful, but there was still life in him.
Laffen Sørnes, on the other hand, was still staring blankly at the sky with his body twisted halfway out the side window of a stolen Mazda 323. An inexperienced policeman was bending over a stream, crying openly. Three helicopters still hovered above the accident. Only one of them belonged to the police.