‘Thank you,’ he said after a while.
‘You’ll do exactly as I say, understand?’ Jens Horder said, holding the knife perilously close to one of Roald’s wrists.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I need your help. The two of us will carry a bathtub up to the first floor of the main house.’
‘A bathtub?’ It was pretty much the last thing Roald had expected to hear.
‘Yes, my wife needs a bath. Come on, get up.’
Roald was herded along a specific route across the farmyard to the bathtub, the one that Liv had tried to hide behind. It was the free-standing sort. With feet.
Only it wasn’t the kind of bathtub you would want to take a bath in. Yellow blotches and tidemarks of dark grime had settled on the enamel sides and on the bottom. A woodland snail was floating around a dried lake of spruce needles and hose clamps. Jens Horder used his shabby cap to empty the tub with a couple of sweeping movements. Afterwards, he put the cap back on.
The bathtub was as heavy as sin. Roald was ordered to walk in front, and even before he reached the steps leading up to the front door he was dripping with sweat. He understood why Jens Horder had taken off his coat and chucked it over a barrel somewhere.
The archer followed them like a shadow. There was no doubt that she understood her role. She never once took her eyes off him. Roald felt conflicted at being threatened by a scruffy little kid, but the threat seemed real enough. Besides, he had already seen what her arrows could do. They were not toys.
Liv opened the door for them and was told to wait outside in the farmyard. With her bow at the ready.
Roald had already concluded that they couldn’t possibly get the bathtub through the hall and up to the first floor. Although it might be the most direct route through the house, it was piled high with stuff. However, when he entered the darkness and the stench he realized what it was that had caused Horder to sweat earlier. Things had been pushed aside and rearranged to create a slightly wider passageway. It might actually be possible to get the bathtub up to the first floor now.
It was completely absurd. She was dying up there. The woman didn’t need a bath. She needed help.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy in any sense of the word. Roald had never carried anything so heavy, but his body had apparently accepted that there was no escape and found strength in his fear.
The trickiest part was to angle the bathtub correctly so that they could get it into the bedroom, but Jens Horder had worked out exactly how it should be done. Then again, with all the things he had dragged into the house, he had by now accumulated a lot of experience in negotiating doorways.
He had made room along the bed, or at least there wasn’t as much junk as before. The bucket had gone, thank God, but the smell was still intolerable.
Roald glanced at the huge woman still lying buried by her own body and the stuff on the bed. The candle flickered on the bedside table, and he didn’t have time to catch her eye. However, he did notice that the duvet had been rearranged. It looked almost as if she had been lovingly tucked in, like when you tuck in a child.
An unemotional Jens Horder instructed him how to navigate the bathtub in. It had to be closely aligned with the bed. Why? So they could roll her into it? Roald feared that the poor woman was so big she might easily get stuck in the tub. How on earth would they ever get her out of there? He was, however, quite certain that now was not the time to voice his concerns.
Especially when he sneaked a peek at Maria’s face and saw that she was dead.
She had to be dead. You didn’t lie like that with staring eyes and your mouth half open unless you were dead.
She seemed to be smiling faintly.
He quickly looked away and caught a glimpse of a large glass of pills which looked far too empty. Had she swallowed them by choice? Or…?
‘One of the feet is caught by something in your corner. You need to move it,’ came the order from the other end of the bathtub.
Roald obediently squatted down next to the headboard to free the bathtub foot. He moved a book that was lying on the floor, along with a small, empty notebook with frayed bits of paper in the spiral binding, and then tried to pick up a woollen blanket which had half fallen off the bed and was also in the way. He had to tug hard to get the blanket out from underneath the swaddled human being, and the movement caused Maria’s left hand to suddenly appear from under the duvet. Roald froze at the sight of her open palm. A ballpoint pen was trapped in a deep fold of skin.
He glanced furtively at Jens Horder, who was standing with his back to him over by the door, then placed two fingers on Maria’s wrist. No, there was no pulse. Roald gently pushed her hand back under the duvet.
And that was when he noticed it. Something was tucked in between the mattress and the bedframe, right where the woollen blanket had been. It was a slim green file. He glanced towards the door again. Jens Horder was busy moving a big cardboard box that perched precariously on top of some other boxes and which Roald had accidentally bumped into with the bathtub.
Roald carefully pulled out the file. ‘To Liv’, it said in cursive writing on the cover. He opened it, only for a moment, but long enough to see that it contained both handwritten letters and several smaller notes, some apparently stuffed randomly into the file. A single scrap of paper from a notebook seemed to have escaped and was still trapped between the mattress and the bedframe. He could barely make out what it said because it was written with clumsy capitals on top of one another.
He didn’t have time to think about why he did it. Quick as lightning, he stuffed the loose scrap into the file with the other notes, then slipped the file under his shirt. He could feel his heart pounding furiously.
He continued to squat behind the bathtub for a few more seconds while he tried to calm his nerves. Then he got up and pushed the tub close to the bed, just like he had been told to. Jens Horder was still facing away from him. The knife was tucked into his belt at the back.
If only he could slip past him, but how? He looked at the woman in the bed for a moment and then he said:
‘I think your wife is trying to say something.’
Jens Horder spun around and stared at Maria. Seconds later, he was back by the headboard.
Roald stepped aside to make way for him.
‘She was trying to say something just now,’ he lied again.
Horder stroked the dead woman’s hand and moved his face close to her.
‘My darling,’ he whispered. ‘Are you still awake?’
And that was when Roald ran. He jumped past the bathtub on his way to the door. The box which Horder had struggled with was still close to the edge of the pile it was resting on, and with his newly acquired strength Roald managed to pull it down behind him. It hit the floor with a crash and something shattered. Out in the passage, he knocked down everything he could in order to block Jens Horder’s path. Some big clip frames landed cooperatively across the floor of the corridor. A standard lamp keeled over, dragging rolls of fabric with it. A flower-pot stand was knocked over and bumped down the stairs, along with engine parts and tinned food, petrol cans and toys. Something hit a crumbling sack, which responded by spewing its foul-smelling contents over the landing.
Roald made it down the stairs and out through the hall. He didn’t look back. He tore open the heavy front door, just as he had done earlier but experiencing a different fear this time. The fear of death was chasing him, as were the smell, the noises and the darkness. As soon as he was outside he slammed the door shut behind him.
The light was overwhelming, but not blinding. The sun threw itself into the farmyard from the south-west. It was on his side. And a sunbeam revealed a kneeling archer who was aiming her bow at him.