‘I suppose we ought to check with Inspector Muus first. To make sure it’s alright that we’re taking him, I mean.’
‘Of course.’
She disappeared.
I looked at Jan. Six years old. I had a boy of two and a half, Thomas, living with his mother now, after things had gone wrong for Beate and me six months ago. For the moment we were separated, but the outcome of the waiting period was a foregone conclusion. I had tried to change her mind, but she had given me a look of despair and said: ‘I don’t think you understand what’s behind this, Varg. I don’t think you understand anything.’ And she was right. I didn’t understand at all.
I gazed at the vacant, apathetic look on his face and tried to summon up the photograph of the tiny boy on the Rothaugen estate from three or four years ago. But my first impression had been too hazy. I remembered the awkward atmosphere in the small flat, the loudmouth who had burst in, the mother’s despairing eyes; and I remembered the tiny boy in his cot. But his face… it still had not taken shape; had hardly done that now.
I crouched down beside the sofa where they were sitting, to be on the same level as him. I put one hand on his knee and said: ‘Would you like to come in my car, Johnny boy?’
For the first time a glint appeared in his eyes. But he said nothing.
‘Then we can go have a chat with a nice lady.’
He didn’t answer.
I took his hand. It was limp, lifeless, and he didn’t respond. ‘Come on!’
Cecilie rose to her feet, carefully took him under the arms and warily lifted him onto the floor. He stood upright, and as I led him to the door he offered no resistance. He tentatively placed his feet in front of him as if he were setting out across a frozen pond, unsure it would bear his weight.
Then we were brought to a halt, all of us. Inspector Muus filled the doorway. Behind him I glimpsed Tora Persen. The tall policeman stared down at the boy in a surly manner. ‘Has he started talking?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well,’ he growled. ‘And where had you been thinking of taking him?’
‘First of all to a psychologist we use, then to an emergency shelter organisation in Asane.’
He nodded. ‘Just let us know its whereabouts. I suppose it’s not impossible that some of us might have to interview him.’
‘Interview!’ exclaimed Cecilie.
‘He’s the only witness,’ Muus said, sending her a measured glare.
‘I’ll keep you posted,’ I said. ‘But now we have to think about Jan. Could we pass?’
‘Less haste, young man. What name did you say?’
‘Veum. But I didn’t say.’
‘Veum. I’ll make a note of it,’ he said with a faint smile from the corner of his mouth. ‘We could have an amusing time together, we two could.’
‘But not today. Can we go now?’
He nodded and stepped aside. Cecilie and I led Jan into the hallway and headed briskly for the door. From the corner of my eye I saw Muus turn quickly and return to the cellar staircase while Tora Persen remained in the hallway, looking as abandoned as a passing headlight on an ice-bound road.
Outside on the steps I took Jan in my arms and carried him the last part of the way. He didn’t object; I might just as well have been carrying a sack of potatoes. By the car I said to Cecilie: ‘I think you’ll have to sit at the back with him.’
She nodded. I sat Jan down and pushed the right-hand seat forward so that they could get in. Cecilie clambered in and eased herself into the seat behind the driver. I lifted Jan up and she held out her hands to take him. Suddenly he turned his head round and looked me straight in the eye for the first time. ‘Mummy did it,’ he said.
4
Dr Marianne Storetvedt was a somewhat old-fashioned-looking beauty, around forty years old. Her hair fell in loose cascades over her shoulders. She had an attractive, narrow face with high cheekbones. Her sharp eyes were softened by the adjacent laughter lines. She was dressed simply, a bright twin set and a brown skirt with a pearl necklace.
Her office was at the far end of Strandkaien and looked over the docks, Rosenkrantz Tower and Haakon’s Hall or towards Skansen and Mount Floien, if she cast her gaze in that direction. I would not have minded an office there myself, had anyone offered me one.
The Asane-bound line of traffic in Bryggen had come to a standstill, as usual at this time of the day, and on the archaeological dig site after the 1955 fire, the new museum building on the slope down from St Mary’s Church was beginning to take shape.
Marianne Storetvedt was in the waiting room to greet us. She had immediate eye contact with Jan, who, after the statement he made while being lifted into the car, had been as silent as a trapeze artist. ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling at him, then laying a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘We’re going to be good friends, you and I.’
He looked at her without saying a word, without any visible reaction.
She turned to Cecilie and me. ‘I think I’d prefer to speak with him on my own, but… do you have anything to tell me first?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If we could have a few words undisturbed.’
‘I’ll look after Jan in the meantime,’ Cecilie said. ‘We’ll find ourselves a magazine to look at, won’t we.’
She sat down with him on one of the upholstered benches in the waiting room and took a weekly from the shelf under the coffee table. I followed Marianne Storetvedt into her office.
The room was as simply kitted out as she was herself: a desk with a chair, a very comfortable leather armchair on the other side of the desk and a leather couch along one wall for those of her clients who preferred to be lying down during the consultation. On the walls hung a handful of beautiful, unpretentious landscapes — sea, mountain and forest — broken only by one of Nikolai Astrup’s pictures of Jolster, the well-known spring evening motif, where a man and a woman were on their knees working in a meadow, the apple tree in blossom and the moon reflecting off the lake beneath them.
We stood, and she looked at me with a little smile. ‘Well?’
‘Well, we don’t know much. He’d been at home with his father who was found dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs. He was standing in the hall crying when his mother returned home. He didn’t say a word to us until…’
‘Until?’
‘Well… when we were getting in the car to drive here he said…’
‘Yes? Come on!’
‘“Mummy did it.”’
‘“Mummy did it?”’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you tell the police?’
‘No, we haven’t yet. She’s still at the hospital and… I suppose it’ll all come out at some point. Anyway…’
‘Is there anything else I should know about?’
‘I’ll have to get it checked out first, but I was wondering whether Jan could be… whether he might’ve been their foster child, and I’ve met him before.’ Briefly I told her what I could remember of the flat on the Rothaugen estate that July day three and a half years ago.
‘What’s the background of the foster parents? Do you know anything?’
‘No. We haven’t been told anything as yet. They’re called Skarnes. Svein and Vibecke. That’s all I’ve been told. But they live in a detached house in Wergelandsasen, so we’re not talking about a low-income family here.’
‘No one else? No brothers or sisters, I mean?’
‘No, not as far as I’ve been informed.’
‘OK, so let’s get cracking. I’ll see if I can get him to loosen up. But I don’t want to push him too much. If you and Cecilie wouldn’t mind waiting out there, then…’
We walked into the waiting room together. Outside the windows it was getting dark. The street lighting had come on and the car headlights in Bryggen resembled a torn necklace, the pearls falling off one by one as they headed for Asane. After a further, unsuccessful, attempt to establish contact with Jan, Marianne guided him into her office and closed the door behind her.
Cecilie and I sat outside. She was flicking through the same weekly magazine. It was hardly her taste. I had known her since the summer of 1970, and a periodical like Sirene would have been more up her street, workaday feminist that she was.