I should have tried harder to cover myself up, he thinks. I should have thought about it for one more second, just one, then perhaps the flames would have burned me in a different place. It might have made all the difference. My eyes wouldn’t have glued themselves together and I would have been able to see properly before I got ready to jump off the railing and not slip just as I was about to escape. Everything could have been different. And Jonas would still have been alive.
Henning strangles a sob while he looks at the picture. You should be on the wall, he says to his son. You should have been on my wall all this time. But I can’t bear to have you there. I’m so sorry, my darling boy, but I just can’t bear it.
A rumble outside his window makes him take a step to one side. He looks for something familiar, something to fix his eyes on as the storm draws near. The sweat trickles down between his shoulder blades and he imagines tasting saltwater as he breaks through the surface of a shimmering, dark pink sea. Sinking like a sounding lead. He turns into a shadow and a dry noise is forced out of him. But the only part of him that gets wet is his eyes.
Chapter 56
His legs feel strangely jelly-like as he walks down the road, which he can barely see in the darkness. The headlights of an oncoming car sweep towards him and he steps on to the verge and bows his head as the car passes him. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he has been back home.
Home.
Where is his real home now? He is about to be evicted from his flat. And given what he has just done to his father, he can never go home to his mother again.
How strange, he thinks, that you can do something and not see it. It wasn’t until the display cabinet got knocked over that his sight returned and he realised what he had done.
Smoke is coming from a chimney on one of the houses he passes. The smell drifts down towards him, even though the smoke itself is rising. He is reminded of something he learned at school. After a forest fire everything regenerates. New plants and flowers will grow from under the ash as if the flames have pressed a reset button that makes everything default to the start position.
And, as he stands on the platform at Nordby Station, he wonders if anything will rise from his ashes when the time comes. If he has a reset button.
Fortunately there is no one around so he takes a step closer to the edge of the platform and looks at the thick, rough-hewn stones between the railway sleepers and the tracks. It is very quiet. He closes his eyes and recognises the buzz he used to get as a child though no trains are approaching. And he doesn’t know how long he has been standing there, how long it takes before the rail tracks start humming, charging him up and preparing him for what comes next. The alarm bells start to ring, the lights on the plate change from white to red, and the barriers hesitate for a second before they begin to lower. The ringing that was steady to begin with ends up out of time, just like when he was little and it takes maybe thirty seconds before the barriers at the level crossing have come down and the ringing stops.
But it doesn’t stop inside him; he can feel it in his head. And then a light appears; a glow deep inside the forest as if the trees are the walls of a tunnel that gradually comes alive. And standing here now, so many years later, it feels even better; he can see the rail tracks glisten in the darkness. They look like shiny, white ski tracks.
Then the eyes appear, fierce and beckoning, huge like the eyes of a troll. And the train doesn’t slow down, the tracks become even more alive, they hiss, they snarl, they make themselves look sinister and dangerous, and he takes another step forward, feels his foot touch the edge of the concrete. The train is coming and the driver sounds his horn, perhaps he has seen him. But it doesn’t stop him from sticking out his foot. He lets it dangle over the edge; the gleaming rail tracks are just one metre below him as is the light in the lovely, big eyes that will devour him.
Henning shakes off his distressing thoughts and finds the paper towel with the sketch he drew in the car. He copies out the map on an A4 sheet, paying more attention to the details this time and before long a clearer image emerges in front of him.
He has seen this map before.
He goes to the kitchen, opens his laptop and starts a search engine. Types in the name of the city and clicks on the first map that comes up. And as he sees the characteristic canals, bridges and parks, he realises that his memory was correct.
It’s a map of Copenhagen.
Henning thinks about Trine’s watch that told her how far she had walked along the coastal path. He has heard of fitness fanatics who log their exercise efforts, who wear pulse and distance counters and God knows what. The fat line that looked like a worm on her laptop was the route she had run and walked. In Copenhagen. At 20.17. The same evening she was supposed to be at a party conference in Kristiansand sexually assaulting a young man. The same evening no one remembers seeing her during dinner.
Bloody hell.
The young politician’s statement is false. And Henning starts to get an inkling of what is going on. The reason why the politician doesn’t want to be named, but chose to write an unconvincing account of a ‘sexual assault’ and sent it anonymously by fax.
It’s because it never happened.
It’s because that person doesn’t exist.
And since the media appear to have accepted that they will never be able to interview him, they have turned their attention to all the other stories being written about Trine instead. The sex scandal was the perfect detonator. The character assassination destroying her reputation was only the beginning.
This is the work of someone who is an expert in media manipulation, who knows which buttons to press to trigger an avalanche of negative publicity about a Minister who has made too many enemies along the way.
But there is one thing Henning can’t understand. Why doesn’t Trine speak up? And since she was studying her running profile on her laptop, she would appear to be aware of the evidence that would clear her name. So why doesn’t she defend herself? Why doesn’t she fight?
There must be more to this than meets the eye, Henning thinks. And the only thing that makes any sense to him is that Trine is protecting someone or something. Herself, possibly, from anything else that the media might uncover. That could also explain the nature of the attack. Her enemy knows that she knows. He knows her secret, knows that she can’t defend herself because then the truth of what she was really doing that day will come to light.
So the question is: who else knows? And what on earth was Trine doing in Denmark?
Wednesday
Chapter 57
Henning falls asleep around three o’clock in the morning, slumped over the kitchen table, but he wakes again three and a half hours later. The first thing he does is make himself a cup of coffee. Then he sits down with the printout of the map of Copenhagen.
If the fat lines he saw on Trine’s laptop match the lines he has just drawn on the printout, it would mean that Trine’s run on the evening of 9 October started in Nørre Søgade, a long, wide street that runs parallel with Peblinge Lake.
Henning opens his own laptop, retrieves the map and zooms in on the area. More details appear. Bridges, parks, buildings. What was Trine doing there? he wonders again. Apart from going for an evening run?