‘This is Frank Frølich. I would like to talk to you.’
Silence.
‘It’s about Elisabeth Faremo.’
The conversation was broken off.
He stared down at the display. This was a conversation he had dreaded, but for Reidun Vestli it must have been worse. The panic-stricken refusal to speak made him ring again, instantly. The number rang and rang. Then the answer service took over.
He was fed up. Pissed off. Right now the situation seemed totally ridiculous. He could hear Gunnarstranda’s voice in his head as he drove home. A set-up! Of course it is, Frølich!
He had opted to take a whole load of accumulated time off because… why had he, actually? Because Elisabeth Faremo was covering up for her brother? Or was he doing it to hide, to bury his head in shame?
A young man had been killed. But Elisabeth could have been telling the truth. Why couldn’t what she said have been true? Elisabeth had always sneaked out of his flat at night. What might have happened was this: Elisabeth had gone home. She had sat up for a few hours with her brother and then all of a sudden the police ring at her door. Except for the tip-off. The problem was that he knew nothing about the tip-off. Who had tipped off the police and what was their motive?
He automatically steered a course homewards. It was a dark winter afternoon and rush hour. He had taken time off. Nothing to do. What does a Norwegian man do when he has nothing to do? He has a drink – or five. Frank Frølich headed for the shopping centre in Manglerud.
10
He set out on his pub crawl. Had a couple of lagers at a bar registered under the name of Olympen Restaurant and known locally as the Lompa, the Rose of Grønland. The place was half full. Most of the customers were of the jaded variety, who lived nearby and went to the Lompa to have profound conversations with their beer glasses. Frank Frølich sat alone at a table watching the people around him. Lean men, most so rigid from years of hard drinking that they looked as if they were balancing on stilts when they walked into the toilet. When he moved on, it was to find a bar to prop himself up on. He went to Oslo main station, to platform two in the old Østbanehalle. The place was packed. Travellers. Commuters on their way home waiting for the next train. Men and women from Moss and Ski with their suitcases, warming up with a beer before catching the ferry to Denmark. The loudspeakers were playing the Hollies’ ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ and a group of women dressed in track suits were singing along. Frølich studied himself in the mirror and felt like a Martian on Pluto. He drank his third and fourth beers while witnessing two old acquaintances of the police selling dope to some teenage girls. Frølich raised his glass. He was off duty for fuck’s sake. None of his business. But old acquaintances are as alert as wild mink. They immediately sensed Frølich’s passive state and were ready to misinterpret it. Frølich drank his beer and moved on, up Karl Johans gate. He paused at the intersection with Dronningensgate and the row of obscure bars. But then another old acquaintance limped out of the shadows by Kirkeristen: ‘Frankie, fancy a beer?’
Frølich shook his head and walked back towards Jernbanetorget. Is it possible to sink any lower than being bought a beer by someone you have arrested countless times? He thought: the safest place to go on a bender seems to be further west. He caught the first tram, hung onto the strap as the tram swayed up Prinsens gate, got off at the lower end of Kontraskjæret, crossed to Fridtjof Nansens plass and decided to start on the corner and work his way along all the watering holes around the City Hall. It was a strenuous job. But he didn’t feel drunk; he just needed to keep emptying his bladder. A couple of hours later he wobbled into the lounge of the Hotel Continental. This was the place where original Munch paintings used to hang on the wall, where the male guests are the type of men who look forward to the weekend to try out their new golfing trousers and where the wallflowers are cultivated women with a nose for port wine. This was where an unshaven, furloughed cop could walk around incognito too, he thought, and fell over a sofa in the middle of the room. He ordered a whisky. After drinking another, knocking over a glass of beer and attempting to wipe up the mess with the table cloth from the neighbouring table, he was politely asked to leave. Things are improving, he thought. If I play my cards right now I will be taken to the drunk cells before the night is out. ‘I’m not drunk,’ he said to the girl who had been given the unenviable task. ‘I’m just suffering from a few synchronization problems.’ He stood up, impressed that he had managed to pronounce such a long, tricky word.
He tottered out and almost collided with Emil Yttergjerde. Yttergjerde must have been in the middle of his own pub crawl because there was a red, almost purple, glow to his face and he had to hold onto the lamppost as they stood contemplating each other. Together, they staggered around the corner and into Universitetsgata. Several bars there. And he still had some money left.
It was evening, maybe night, at any rate many hours later, when he and Yttergjerde were sitting at a table in Café Fiasco. No, he concluded, it had to be night. He was drinking his beer and struggling not to slide off his stool while concentrating on Yttergjerde’s mouth. The music was hammering away and he was shouting to be heard through the din.
‘She was from Argentina,’ Yttergjerde bellowed.
Frølich put his half-litre down on the table, wishing Yttergjerde would shut up and stop his awful shouting.
‘But I didn’t find that out until later,’ Yttergjerde shouted.
‘What was that?’ Frølich shouted back.
‘The woman from Argentina. She was broke, you see, and I kept her going with cigarettes and some food. I was arseholed when I got into this bus, it was four in the morning and I was going to Milan. Anyway, I sat down in the bus and then she came and sat down beside me. She’d spent all her money on rented cars and expensive hotels in Paris and Rome. She needed somewhere to live because there were still two weeks to go before her return flight left from Paris to cross the Atlantic.’
Yttergjerde paused for breath and took a drink from his glass of beer.
‘What are you talking about?’ Frølich asked.
‘My holiday,’ Yttergjerde said. ‘Keep up, will you?’
Frølich raised his head. It was impossible to hear yourself think. There was a break in the music. But not for long. Someone put on some Springsteen. One chord, one riff: ‘Born in the USA’.
Frølich was about to say something. Just to prove that he wasn’t going to collapse. Instead he had to battle not to fall off his stool. He clung to his beer glass and said: ‘I guess I’ll have to be off now.’
Yttergjerde didn’t hear. He put down his glass, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and roared through the music: ‘I couldn’t talk to her about Swedes, you see. This woman had been with a Swede and he’d been knocking her about for a long time. And she was whingeing and nagging me – that was probably why it finished – always asking me if I was all right and telling me in the morning I looked extremely aggressive. I have no idea what I look like in the morning actually, but I was sick of the nagging, really sick of it. I mean, I’ve never heard that I look aggressive before. Anyway, in the end, I lost my temper and told her in my Oxford English I wasn’t angry. But, I said, if you don’t stop asking me if I’m angry, I’ll lose my temper. Perhaps I was a bit rough. I mean, it’s not so easy to catch the nuances using Oxford English. Anyway, she legged it and that was the last I saw of her. Just as well maybe. I mean, it was a hopeless business. I was on holiday. I put the woman up and kept her in cigarettes for four days – while she was doing the best she could to pay in kind. That’s no healthy basis for a lasting relationship.’