It’s no help, either, that the dreaded thesis is lying in wait for her like a troll under a bridge. And her useless supervisor who is always busy and never interested in hearing what she thinks or believes. He is the expert, not her. She is just a student, one of many who have filed through his office over the years. Fresh perspectives, hah!
She has no idea how she will find the strength to get through the last few terms. She recognises the feeling from her time at sixth form when she came to hate everything to do with school. She just wanted to finish the course as quickly as possible. It showed in the grades she got, something that prompted her to try to improve her academic results when she reached her early thirties. And to begin with, going back to school was fine. The partying from her teenage years came back, with all that entailed. And perhaps that’s the only thing that has kept her going.
Her thumb glides up and down her mobile as she walks. She is on Facebook and she feels a warm glow when she reads Emilie’s last status update. Johanne presses ‘Like’ and writes a comment. Only occasionally does she look up to see where she is going.
Luckily the college she attends in Oslo is not far from her flat and it feels good to get home and see that everything is still the same, that Baltazar lies in his basket just as he did when she left him. Black, white and happy.
Johanne Klingenberg throws down her keys, takes out her mobile and goes back on Facebook to update her status.
Home.
Safe at last.
Chapter 28
Henning looks at the clock. The working day has come and gone without Erna Pedersen’s son returning his call. Henning has sent him a text message as well, but has had no reply. Nor does Bjarne Brogeland appear to have had the time to return his calls. Things are moving slowly.
Henning files a story about how Erna Pedersen was strangled, a story he illustrates with a photograph of her that the police have issued to the media. The story reads well even though it is far less sensational than the stories being written about Trine.
The online version of VG, VG Nett, has managed to track down an old boyfriend of his sister’s when she was a law student who can tell the newspaper’s readers that ‘Trine Juul, as she then was, was known for her excessive partying. It certainly wouldn’t surprise him if she is guilty of the accusations being made against her.’ None of the newspapers has a single new picture to publish. The most recent ones they have are from this morning when she hurried inside the Ministry of Justice and didn’t make eye contact with any of the cameras. A headline repeated by several papers is TRINE HIDES.
Henning would have expected that the identity of the young Labour Party politician would have become known during the day, but even though online speculation is rife, no one has yet come forward, nor has any particular name taken more hold in the public imagination than others. As far as Henning can work out, most members of the Labour Party’s youth branch who took part in last year’s conference must have been interviewed by now. All of them are denying that they went to Trine’s hotel room.
The picture the media are creating of her now is very far removed from the little girl he grew up with. He remembers how every Christmas Eve they would sit in front of the television with bags of sweets and watch Christmas movies. They also used to have some bean bags; Trine’s was pink, while Henning’s was mint green. Some evenings he would go to her room just to give her a goodnight hug, and he would stay there and chat for a long time until there would be a knock on the wall from his parents’ bedroom because their talking was keeping them awake.
They also used to play and exercise together down in the basement passage on the grey, knobbly carpet. Often there would be an acrid smell of urine because local cats favoured the foundations of their house. Trine and Henning had a foam ball and switched between playing handball and football; the door to the lavatory and the door to the larder served as goals. One Christmas they were given Adidas shorts, which they wore when they played and their game appeared to improve because they felt they looked so much smarter.
He wonders if Trine ever thinks about those days.
Perhaps they started drifting apart as teenagers when they developed different interests. Once he had finished sixth form and joined the army to do his national service, he barely spoke to her. Whenever he called home, it was always his mother who answered the telephone. Trine never called. Never gave him a welcome-home hug when he visited; instead she would usually go out straight after dinner and come back late.
Despite the lack of contact between them, there is something about her plight that moves him. He doesn’t like to see her bleed. But no matter how tempting it is to get involved, he can’t report on a story about his own sister. Besides, he would meet with closed doors everywhere. He doesn’t have any contacts in the world of politics. And what could he really do? So far her young accuser hasn’t even been named.
Leave it alone, Henning tells himself. It’s not your story.
Chapter 29
Bjarne Brogeland doesn’t know when he will be able to leave the office and anyway the weather doesn’t encourage him to go outside, so he texts Anita to apologise for missing dinner yet again and tells her to eat without him. There is no reply.
The investigation team is about to hold another meeting when Bjarne receives a call from the unit that has spent the last two hours watching Daniel Nielsen’s flat.
‘Yes?’ Bjarne replies.
‘You wanted to know if the subject moved,’ says the voice down the other end.
‘Yes,’ Bjarne replies again.
‘He came outside a little while ago and was picked up by a red BMW with a massive hole in the silencer.’
‘Go on?’
‘They drove up to Holmenkollen via Majorstua and Smedstadkrysset, but we lost him at a red light. And we can’t hear the noisy silencer any more.’
‘Holmenkollen?’
‘Yes.’
Bjarne wonders what Nielsen’s car could be doing there.
‘We’ve checked the registration number. The car belongs to a Pernille Thorbjørnsen. Do you know her?’
Bjarne thinks about it.
‘Yes,’ he replies.
‘But she wasn’t driving the car. The driver was a man with blond, shoulder-length hair.’
A man with blond, shoulder-length hair, Bjarne thinks, and tries to recall all the people he has spoken to recently. It doesn’t take long before he gets a hit.
Could the man have been Ole Christian Sund, the care worker who found Erna Pedersen dead?
The bodyguards offered to carry Trine’s bags of food and clothing, but she declined. The pain burning in her arms and spreading up to her shoulders is something she has to endure if only because it makes her feel vaguely alive. She hasn’t felt that for the last couple of hours. She has merely existed, almost in a state of weightlessness, without being able to sense the ground beneath her feet.
Pål Fredrik doesn’t like the sea, he prefers the mountains. His objection is that nothing ever happens by the sea. No, precisely. That’s exactly why she loves it, because nothing ever happens. It’s about being at one with the wind, the breeze and the sea. Because they never look at her with accusing eyes.
She finds the key where she left it the last time she was here – God knows how many years ago – under the bench by the door to the log cabin. The smell that comes towards her as she enters floods her with memories. Everything is as she remembers it from her childhood. The white, open fireplace in the corner, still in one piece. The crumbling old log basket beside it. The small, dusty portable television, the white display cabinet with glasses and bottles. The sofa bed up against the wall. The table in the middle, which can be extended to almost twice its size if she can be bothered to attach the flaps. Old, worn chairs with blue seat cushions.