‘Just separated,’ he muttered.
It was as though it only now dawned on her that I was there too and, looking at me, she said: ‘You can drive me, Veum!’
‘Me! But I… Don’t think you should…?’ I looked at her husband. ‘She ought to lie down.’
He made as if to take her arm gently, but she pulled away from him dramatically. ‘I said no! No, no, no! I’ll scream.’
‘It might perhaps be best…’ Holger Skagestøl said softly. ‘It might do her good, and I’ll have a chance to talk to the children alone – first.’
She looked at me with the same agitated expression, as though she hadn’t heard what he had said at all. ‘Well? Yes or no?’
I threw up my arms. ‘All right, then. Of course I’ll drive you up there, if you think…’ I lowered my voice. ‘But I’m not at all sure the police are going to like it.’
‘The police? What have they got to do with it?’
‘Well, in any case it’s become a police matter now, hasn’t it?’
‘But she’s our… she’s my daughter, isn’t she?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, of course she is.’
‘Shall we go, then?’
Without waiting for an answer, she turned to the door and set off. I trotted after her as obediently as a little dog, with an apologetic backward glance at the hapless trainer who was staying behind to wait for the children. The other children.
Fifteen
I HELD THE CAR DOOR OPEN for her. She got in and had dutifully put on her seatbelt before I’d walked round to the other side and sat behind the wheel.
As I turned on the ignition, she asked: ‘Do you know where it is?’
‘More or less.’
Then she said nothing further until we sat waiting for the light to turn green at Paradiskrysset. ‘You’d have thought a crisis like this ought to repair a broken relationship.’
I shot a sidelong glance at her. ‘Often it does.’
‘Hm,’ she said pensively to herself rather than anyone else.
I turned right at Hopskiftet and took the motorway to Rådalen. The white snowflakes gave the landscape a grey tint like in an old copper engraving.
She sat quiet as a mouse beside me: her breathing calm and regular. She seemed to have left the pent-up hysteria behind at the house in Furudalen. Now we were more like a couple approaching middle age, with nothing more to say to one another, on the way to some shopping centre or other.
In Rådalen, the stench from the landfill site suggested it wouldn’t be long before the refuse dump, now almost thirty years old, would be so full that the contents would start spilling out over the sides. Then we were out on the open farmland between Stend and Fanafjell, where the wind from the sea drove the snowflakes obliquely in across the landscape like dramatic flourishes in the copper plate. Fana Church, with its medieval-looking grey stonework, stood there like a reminder of life and death at the foot of Fanafjell, and I changed down so the car would smoothly take the first sharp bends on the way uphill.
As we neared the highest point on the road, she suddenly placed her hand on my arm and pointed left. ‘Can you drive into the parking place there, Veum?’
I did as she said.
She took hold of the door handle. ‘I think I could do with some fresh air before…’
I nodded and turned off the engine.
There were no other cars parked there. It was so utterly out of season that the café at Fanaseter was closed, and even if they still had any animals in the enclosures there, there were no kindergarten or other kids visiting them at this time of the year.
Sidsel Skagestøl walked ahead of me towards the old vantage point, where the base of a panoramic telescope still stood, the view long since obscured by the fast-growing conifers. She walked on over the rocky outcrops facing north until she finally felt she was high enough and paused, her gaze sweeping round in an arc, the wind tugging at her blonde hair, so that she had to gather her dark green coat tight round her to keep out the cold.
I climbed up and stood beside her, following her gaze. To the south-west Korsfjord cut its way through between Austevoll and Sotra, where the Lia Tower rose up to a height of 1120 feet above sea level. In the north-west, on the other side of Nordåsvannet, lay the collection of houses at Bønes like a scar in the landscape along the narrow elongated western side of Løvstakken, and beyond that Lyderhorn’s highest point at 1300 feet. Behind the mountains the horizon could just be made out: a barely perceptible line between grey and white somewhere far out in the maw of the open sea.
‘Life is something you lose,’ she said in an undertone. ‘Bit by bit.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Childhood – a distant memory. You’re young and frisky, full of expectations of life, and then – then suddenly that phase is over. You find love, or you don’t find it, in all its various guises. And before you know where you are, that’s gone too. The children you bring into the world…’ She swallowed and blinked back the tears as though the wind had become too biting for her. ‘Suddenly they’ve gone too.’
‘But life does go on, Sidsel.’
She seemed not to hear me. ‘There are those who would say life is something we build stone by stone until by the day we die we have a complete edifice.’
‘Mm.’
‘I’d put it differently. The edifice is what is given to you when you’re born: a beautiful edifice into which you are invited. But it’s not long before they start to tear your fine edifice down, bit by bit, until at last there you sit, quite alone, on the empty plot. And some houses,’ she added with sudden vehemence, ‘are not even torn right down! They stand there for ever, like incomplete… lives.’
She turned abruptly and looked east, where the broad channel on the far side of the Hardangerijord lay like a diminutive duvet between the mountains at Fusa. ‘And there – lies Folgefonna glacier, just as it has for thousands of years. It will never die.’
‘Hm, glaciers are like people. They come and go too. They just take a bit longer, that’s all.’
She started to walk back down. ‘Shall we – carry on, now?’
‘It’s up to you.’
We got back into the car again.
The valley on the eastern side of Fanafjell is covered in conifers right to the top of Lyshorn, and the road descends in a succession of narrow bends down towards Nordvik and Lysefjord. On a bend a mile or so from the top, two cars were drawn up at the side of the road: a patrol car and a private vehicle. A uniformed policeman stood midway between the cars almost as though he was parked there too.
He followed us with his eyes until I pulled in to the side and parked behind the other two cars. At which point he immediately set off in our direction. As we got out of the car, he said: ‘I’m sorry, but this is a restricted area for police only.’
‘This is the deceased’s mother,’ I said with a small gesture of the hand in the direction of Sidsel Skagestøl.
The young constable blushed. ‘Oh, I see… I’m really sorry, but I still can’t let you through… Of course, you can look…’ He cleared his throat. ‘I mean… Obviously you understand… we’re still carrying out technical investigations down there. To make sure we have all the evidence,’ he said, addressing Sidsel Skagestøl directly.
She nodded but looked at neither of us. Her gaze was directed towards the steep slope on the far side of the concrete kerb. With the look of someone afraid of heights she moved gingerly towards the edge of the road, leaning slightly back as though afraid of being sucked in by the downward air currents.
I followed at a discreet distance, conscious of the constable’s eyes on the back of my neck. He said nothing but would certainly let us know if we made any attempt to step over the red-and-white tape cordoning off the police’s preserve around the scene of the crime.