He was startled by the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand.
‘Do you sometimes think that the earth looks blue?’ she whispered. ‘Seen from afar?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Everything that has happened between you and me depends on where you’re standing, Frank. I know you’re bitter because I didn’t say anything to you that night, but I’d been told Jonny was going to be arrested for killing a man he hadn’t even touched. You were a policeman. I kept you out of it and I did what I thought was right.’
He looked down at her hand. It was the first thing he had noticed: her hands. Her black gloved fingers putting packs of cigarettes into her rucksack. The same fingers which were stroking him now closed around his hand. The warmth from her hand shot up his forearm. He closed his eyes for a second, feeling her touch. Then he put his hand in his pocket and said: ‘Did you do what you thought was right when you went back to your flat and cleaned it thoroughly? When you planted Merethe’s hairbrush on your bed for the police to find? So that they would use Merethe’s DNA profile to identify the bones in Reidun Vestli’s chalet? When you made Merethe spread rumours about her having a job in Athens? When you made her buy a plane ticket?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Was it right to kill her?’
‘If anyone killed Merethe it must have been Vidar Ballo. I don’t know anything about Merethe or what happened to her.’
‘Jim Rognstad may have killed the guard in Loenga. Your brother may have slipped into the river by accident. Reidun Vestli did take her own life. But Vidar Ballo cannot have killed Merethe. He was dead from an overdose when the chalet burned down.’
Frølich put his hand in his inside pocket and passed her a sheet of paper. ‘Another copy.’
She read the copy of Reidun Vestli’s suicide note and began to tear up this letter into small pieces too.
‘I read through the letter again on the plane coming here,’ Frølich said. ‘And I wondered for the umpteenth time what it was that Reidun was asking forgiveness for. Were you supposed to forgive her for leading some nasty brutes to your bolthole? Who were these brutes? When her chalet was on fire, Jim Rognstad was with a woman in Oslo and Vidar Ballo was dead, so if those two didn’t set fire to the chalet, who beat up Reidun Vestli? And why was she only beaten up after the fire? The answer to that was difficult to unearth, precisely because no one beat her up. She faked the attack. She wanted the police to believe that someone beat the information out of her to track you down. If necessary she would claim the assault was carried out by Rognstad and Ballo. She would be believed because she was a respected academic. But while she was simulating the attack she must have known about parts of your plan. She must have sacrificed the chalet. But if there weren’t any attackers, the one single, large, in fact the real, issue remains unresolved: Why is she asking for forgiveness?’
‘A few minutes ago you said this was about us, Frank. Why did you say that?’
‘If you won’t answer, let me do it for you. Reidun is asking for forgiveness because she’s dropping out. She couldn’t stand being part of your blood-stained steeplechase. She didn’t have your motivation. All she had was love for you. But that only went as far as an appeal for forgiveness. You were the one who planned the fake attack. You wanted the police to believe someone had beaten her up and she’d betrayed where you were hiding. To suggest that someone wanted to find you and take your life. In this way you would be able to divert the blame for the fire and your murder. But Reidun Vestli didn’t want to be an accessory to murder. She therefore opted out of your insanity – and begs your forgiveness.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s the craziest story I’ve ever heard.’
He smiled; his lips were dry. ‘It’s not over yet. You were enraged by Merethe, I know that. And perhaps you blamed her for Jonny’s death. Wherever you stand on this, whatever fantasies you have, the fact is that you overlooked a couple of tiny details when you planned your revenge. You forgot, for example, that you should have worn a hairnet when you slept in my bed. You left one long hair on my pillow the night you left me. The DNA profile did not tally with the hair on Merethe Sandmo’s hairbrush and it did not tally with the bones in the ashes of the chalet. Your story, Elisabeth, hung on a hair. I have an irritating terrier of a boss and when I brought in your hair and forensics found there was a mismatch, he had to go to Merethe Sandmo’s flat and get further samples there. Guess what? The samples matched.’
She stood still, looking at the hotel. The wind was still ruffling her dress.
‘Merethe Sandmo was on a plane to Athens. Although, according to the evidence, she was dead,’ he said. ‘The same woman who called herself Merethe Sandmo got off the plane and hired a car which she drove to Patras where the car and the keys were handed over to the Hertz agent. And this is where Merethe Sandmo vanishes. Into thin air. At the ferry quay, though, in the same town another woman turns up: Elisabeth Faremo. She buys a ferry ticket to Bari, on the Italian side of the Adriatic Sea. Elisabeth Faremo disappears here, but a woman by the name of Merethe Sandmo turns up two days later in Ancona on the coast. She buys a ticket to Zadar in Croatia. The woman who bought the hotel there is unknown. It was a long detour, but your problem is that the woman who owns the hotel paid her bills with Norwegian currency, the numbers of which are recorded with Eco-Crime. Elisabeth, there is a whole team of policemen who know that Narvesen’s money is financing your stay here.’
‘Have you come all the way here, have you tracked me down, just to tell me these things?’
He stood looking at her. Suddenly the situation seemed unimportant. He thought about the collection of poems he had found. The conversation in bed when she had told him the name of this island.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she continued. ‘But I wanted you to be driven here by longing, not negative emotions.’ She placed her hand on his arm, stretched up on her toes and brushed his cheek with her lips. He remembered her touch.
‘I knew,’ she whispered, ‘that you would come here and find me.’
He tore himself free. ‘It’s too late.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing is too late.’
‘Why did you do it?’ he whispered, despising his own wretchedness. ‘At least you can give me this. You can tell me what the sense of it all was.’
‘I have nothing without Jonny.’
He thought about what she said. ‘Do you mean that nothing would have happened, that life would have been normal if Jonny
‘Now I have only you,’ she interrupted.
‘That’s not true, Elisabeth. You left me behind.’
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she repeated.
‘But we can never belong to each other.’
A minor eternity passed. Only the sound of waves murmuring. Two metres between them. When they finally looked into each other’s eyes, he could read that something had happened. She was in a different place.
‘You’ve forgotten one thing,’ she said roughly.
‘Remind me.’
‘Inge Narvesen will keep his mouth shut. He will never say anything in public about having a stolen painting in his possession. You have nothing on me. Without the painting your story is so much thin air. Without the painting, there would have been nothing to collect from the bank vault. Without the painting, there was nothing to sell to Inge. You were quite right, I used Merethe’s name and ticket to get away, but I had to, I feared for my life. Someone had killed my brother and then Merethe.’
‘The painting?’ Frank Frølich asked in surprise. ‘What sort of painting are you talking about?’