Other officers are busy searching the care home for a stone troll with a dent. There is a remote possibility that the troll might still have fingerprints or contain other forensic evidence that justifies expending resources on it. Meanwhile, they continue interviewing everyone who was at the care home at the time when Erna Pedersen was killed. Bjarne is responsible for interviewing the five people from the Volunteer Service.
Bjarne can’t imagine that he could ever do what they do and visit people who are lonely but complete strangers. Accompany them to the doctor or the hairdresser. He wouldn’t know what to say to them. What little time he has outside of work is spent on family and exercise. Quite simply, there isn’t room for anything else.
He reads the first name on the list, Markus Gjerløw, and runs it through the criminal records register. No hits. So he rings Gjerløw’s number and waits for a reply. The ring tone is interrupted by a bright voice saying ‘hello’.
Bjarne introduces himself and explains the reason for his call.
‘Yes, I wondered when you would get to me,’ Gjerløw responds with a voice laden with haughty contempt. Bjarne suppresses a sudden rage and coughs into the palm of his hand instead.
‘I’m trying to find out what happened at the care home on Sunday afternoon. Do you remember when the volunteers arrived and when they left?’
‘I don’t know when the others arrived, but I got there between three and three thirty, I think. And I guess I was there until around five o’clock. I didn’t check what time it was when we left.’
Bjarne makes a note of the times.
‘You said when we left. Did you all leave the care home at the same time?’
‘Yes, I think so. I wouldn’t know if anyone stayed behind as we didn’t share the lift down. It isn’t big enough for all five of us.’
Bjarne nods and gets a flashback to Sandland and him in the narrow space, a little too close for her comfort zone, too far apart for his. The silence that follows gives way to an impatience that prompts him to ask: ‘Have you been to these singalongs before?’
‘Yes, certainly.’
‘Did anything last Sunday strike you as a little unusual?’
Gjerløw falls silent.
‘Well, I’m not really—’
‘Did anyone behave differently, a patient, a staff member or… or anyone else?’
‘Not that I recall.’
Bjarne lifts his pen from the paper while he thinks.
‘How well do you know the other volunteers?’
Gjerløw sighs again.
‘I only know Remi. I don’t know what it’s like with the rest, if they know each other.’
Bjarne nods to himself and looks down at his notepad. Depressingly few notes.
‘What made you volunteer in the first place?’ he asks.
Gjerløw doesn’t reply immediately.
‘Helping others is a good thing to do,’ he says eventually. ‘Making a positive difference to someone’s day. You ought to try it sometime.’
The words smart like an unexpected slap to the face. Bjarne is lost for an answer.
‘Was there anything else?’ Gjerløw asks. ‘I’m about to go out.’
‘No,’ Bjarne says. ‘Thanks for your help.’
Bjarne spends the next hour calling the other four names on the list from the Volunteer Service, but none of them can add a single new detail. All of them confirm that they left the care home around the same time as they normally do.
Bjarne shakes his head while he tries to sum up the case for himself. First Erna Pedersen is strangled in her own room, then her eyes are pierced with her own knitting needles; the killer proceeds to smash a picture of her son’s family, which was on the wall, and takes with him a school photo from the crime scene without anyone seeing or hearing anything.
The only thing he can think of that could have distracted an entire floor in a care home is the Volunteer Service’s singalong that afternoon. Someone could have stolen away from the entertainment, gone to Erna Pedersen’s room, killed her and then returned to the singalong. It need not have taken more than a couple of minutes and no one would have noticed. Pedersen wouldn’t have been capable of making very much noise and her room was quite a distance from the TV lounge where the singalong was taking place. And it’s fairly easy to hide a framed school photo. All you need is a bag or jacket with big pockets.
But what was the point of mutilating her eyes? And what about the missing picture? Was Pedersen meant to look at it before she was killed?
His train of thought is interrupted by Ella Sandland knocking on his door and popping her head round.
‘I’ve just had a call from Forensics,’ she says, sounding agitated. ‘They’ve found a fingerprint on the knitting needles that doesn’t belong to Erna Pedersen.’
Bjarne looks up at her.
‘Okay? So who does it belong to?’
Chapter 38
A layer of grey clouds hangs across Jessheim and refuses to let in the sun, but Emilie Blomvik doesn’t even notice it when she drops off Sebastian at nursery, just in time for him to join in the trip to the Raknehaugen burial mound. Inside his Lightning McQueen bag are two packed lunches, a clear blue plastic bottle of tap water and a green apple. She sends him inside with whispered instructions to have lots of fun today because that’s exactly what she intends.
As expected the morning started slowly after she came home late from work last night and found Mattis asleep on the sofa under a blanket. On the table stood a bottle of red wine that he had clearly consumed single-handedly because his dry cracked lips were stained blue. Next to the bottle was a note saying ‘Wake me when you get home…’ followed by three x’s – as if the first hint could be misunderstood.
But she didn’t have the energy. A long night shift at the airport had worn her out. The luggage belt had broken down – again – which meant it took longer to check in passengers, whose bad mood increased in line with Emilie’s. When she finally got home, well past midnight, she had only one thought in her head and that was to go to bed. So that was what she did. She fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.
Mattis was woken up by his mobile, which on weekdays makes an infernal noise at quarter to six in the morning. She heard him get in the shower, but when he returned to the bedroom to get dressed, she pretended to be asleep. She didn’t really know why she did that. He came over to her just before he left, but by then she had buried her head under the duvet and curled up in a ball.
As usual Sebastian woke up around seven o’clock and Emilie plonked him in front of the television for an hour, expertly ignoring all the voices in her head that called out: you’re a bad mother, you’re a bad mother, and went back to bed. She set the alarm for eight o’clock and woke up with a panicky feeling of being late for something. Fortunately she found Sebastian right where she had left him with his Lightning McQueen car in his hands and the remote control right beside him.
Television.
The world’s best invention, surpassed only by a baby’s dummy and the dishwasher.
But the mood of the day changed completely when she remembered that she was going to Oslo to have lunch with Johanne.
Emilie thinks about her friend’s gentle face as she leaves the nursery and walks out into a day that is waiting just for her. She is so looking forward to seeing Johanne again, hearing the latest news in her life since they last saw each other, what she did last summer, if she has met a new man, what’s going on with her.
Emilie drives towards the motorway while she wonders about Mattis. If anyone can make sense of the thoughts and feelings that have started to appear about the man she thought she loved, then it has to be Johanne. She has always given her such good advice.