That was the answer. He was sure. She had intentionally hidden this key in his flat so that she could pick it up later.
But she hadn’t managed to accomplish her plan. She had been killed, burned to death in the chalet where she was hiding.
The phrasing in Reidun Vestli’s suicide letter bit into his consciousness: Fear of pain. I couldn’t hold out.
Was this the key these terrible people were after? If so, who was looking for the key? And why?
He gave a start as the telephone rang. It was Gunnarstranda. Without any preamble, he said: ‘Positive DNA.’
‘Where?’
‘The fire – Reidun Vestli’s chalet. It was Elisabeth Faremo who was burned. My condolences, Frølich. You’ll be getting another visit from Kripos soon.’
‘Hang on,’ Frølich said.
‘Relax,’ Gunnarstranda said. ‘Take more time off or apply for a week’s holiday so you can ride the storm.’
‘I have to talk to you.’
‘What about?’
‘A key I’ve found.’
‘Is it very important?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come over this evening – after eleven.’
Perhaps he just wanted to kill time. Or something else in him had triggered the initiative. But he went back to Merethe Sandmo’s exworkplace. It was almost eleven o’clock. The place was filling up. The gathering was a motley group of individuals, several of them belonging to a stag party. One man – presumably the bridegroom-to-be – was dressed in a bunny outfit. He was in such a drunken state he needed three chairs to sit on. Two young whippersnappers wearing dinner suits were giggling and trying to dip his hand in a bowl filled with water. An older guest with a waxed moustache and a chimpanzee jaw cast furtive glances while rolling a schnapps glass between his hands.
On the stage a buxom woman with chocolate-brown skin was rotating her breasts to the sound of Tom Jones’s ‘She’s a Lady’ booming out of the loudspeakers. Frølich went to the bar and ordered a large beer from a pimply youth in a dinner suit. Frølich took his beer, reflecting that he had always considered dinner suits ridiculous. Item in his favour: I have never worn a dinner suit. Item no longer in his favour: I have never seen a striptease. The woman with the rotating breasts had finished. Eyes followed her as she ran off the stage and the lights were lowered. Frølich manoeuvred his way to a table right in front of the stage.
He scanned the audience. Stag party or not, these men were serious. Welcome to men’s country, he thought, and looked up at the ceiling where he discovered a flashing disco ball the like of which he had not seen outside seventies John Travolta films. He looked at the faces in the room. Yes, he was in the arena of shadows, the hour of the rats, the wedding procession of the cockroaches: in this light, all the faces were lent the same blue and yellow hue. This was a place where it didn’t matter whether you were sick, healthy, Aryan, Indian, Chinese or just uncomfortable. This was the place where there was no room for reflection or appraisal, where lonely souls would reap pangs of guilt, bitterness or self-contempt the following day – or another time, later anyway – for everyone here can deceive themselves for a few seconds that welfare is a fruit that grows out of your own wallet. The password of the void here was: ‘Another drink, please.’
And here I am sitting in the front row! he thought, raising his tankard and drinking while the next number was being announced. The glass at his mouth, he met the gaze of the woman making her entrance on the stage. She had covered her face with a mask moulded into the shape of a face. Nevertheless, he recognized the hourglass figure and the dreadlocks. She danced to Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’. The lady knew her audience. Even the hecklers in the stag party quietened down. She was wearing long tight gloves over her arms, but the most striking effect was the contrast between the cold, lifeless porcelain of the mask and the living skin, of which she was gradually revealing more and more. After a while she let go of the firemen’s pole and glided off the stage. With her eyes behind the mask fixed on his, she released her top. A couple of the guys in the room couldn’t stand the pressure and roared rutting cries. A young man sporting a grey suit and a formidable fringe threw a hundred-kroner note folded into a paper aeroplane. The note hit her in the stomach. She took no notice; but in one gliding movement she was back on the stage. The eyes behind the mask were still fixed on him. She held eye contact even while she was taking off her gloves. Not until she had spun round and run off stage did she relinquish his eyes. The music was drowned by whistles and applause. Only the bridegroom in the bunny outfit had missed the finale. He was on all fours under a table throwing up.
Frølich was fascinated by the fact that she hadn’t taken off the mask.
He went to the bar.
He had almost finished his next beer when she was beside him, dressed, without a mask, and transformed into a completely different woman from the one who had left the stage without a stitch. He asked what she wanted to drink.
‘Just water,’ she shouted through the din.
‘Well, I must say,’ he said, aware that he had no idea how to compliment in situations like these, ‘you’re good.’
She said: ‘I’ve been keeping an eye open for you for a few evenings now.’
‘I didn’t think the invitation was still valid.’
‘And I didn’t know who you were.’
‘But you do now?’
She nodded.
‘Do you know Elisabeth?’
She nodded. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Give me your hand.’
He shook her hand. ‘That’s my phone number,’ she said and let go. ‘I mustn’t be seen with you.’
He put the slip of paper in his pocket and asked: ‘Who are you frightened of?’ She was drinking water and could not answer. When she had put down the glass, she slid off the barstool.
‘When they ask you what I said,’ Frølich yelled, ‘tell them I have a message. I have the key.’
She wanted to go.
He held her back.
She sent him a wounded look. ‘I have to go, I mean it.’
‘I have the key,’ Frølich repeated.
She squeezed his wrist lightly and was gone, the heavily made-up, fake-tanned babe from the working classes who stripped to earn money in this grotty place. What am I doing? He was dismayed to meet an echo of his earlier thoughts, and put down the glass with trembling hands. He walked away from the bar, up the stairs and out. Outside, he stood breathing in the air, which was cold and refreshing. He jumped into the first taxi. It was just gone eleven.
It was an odd feeling to be trudging up these particular stairs, noticing the smell, passing door after door with peepholes, in a stairwell that he felt such an affiliation with, but had never entered. He stopped and studied the battered door, the brass nameplate, the aluminium newspaper flap. He lifted his finger to the white doorbell and pressed it. The bell rang like a sixties telephone. The echo hung in the quiet stairwell until he could hear his boss coughing on the inside shortly before the door was opened.
Gunnarstranda stared coolly up at him without any expression.
‘Now it’s my turn,’ Frølich said, embarrassed.
Gunnarstranda held open the door. ‘Would you like a whisky?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Which brand do you prefer?’
‘What have you got?’
‘All of them.’
Frank Frølich raised his eyebrows.