I sighed. ‘Not if I could help it.’
‘Who the devil can help it, then? Our Father who art in Heaven?’
‘That’s two you’ve mentioned already.’
Åsa and her mother came down the stairs, Åsa looking like a sulky child, her mother en route to eternal martyrdom.
‘Hello, Åsa,’ I said in yet another attempt to keep the tone light. It wasn’t easy.
She simply pulled a face but said nothing.
Randi Furebø glanced at her husband. ‘Shall I put on some coffee?’
Furebø shook his head sternly. ‘He can have a beer if he likes.’
‘He’s driving, so he’d prefer a Clausthaler,’ I said.
Randi Furebø nodded and went out into the kitchen.
‘Veum says he has a few questions to ask you, Åsa,’ said Furebø.
She glanced in my direction but without actually looking me in the face. She was wearing light blue jeans and a white, full-length blouse. She looked as if she’d just washed her hair, as the ends were still wet. The only thing that jarred was the closed stony expression on her face.
‘I’d like to talk a bit again about the day Torild disappeared – and the day after,’ I began cautiously.
‘The day after?’
‘The Friday.’
She looked at her father. ‘I was grounded from that Friday onwards.’
Randi Furebø returned from the kitchen with a glass and an open bottle of Clausthaler on a white tray. ‘Well, not grounded,’ she said. ‘It was because we were anxious about you, Åsa!’ She glanced at me while putting the tray down on the table beside me. ‘We’d no idea what might have happened!’
‘No… thank you,’ I said, pouring myself a glass of alcohol-free beer. ‘And from when were you grounded?’
‘After I got home from town. There was no school that day.’
‘It wasn’t till the afternoon that we heard Torild hadn’t come home,’ her mother added.
Trond Furebø cleared his throat. ‘Listen, Veum, what’s the point of this, anyway?’
I kept my eyes fixed on Åsa. ‘The day before, you and Torild were at Jimmy’s when she received a phone call, weren’t you?’
She twisted about on her chair.
‘Weren’t you?’ I said again.
‘Yes.’
‘You knew where she was going, didn’t you?’
‘Didn’t you, didn’t you? How could I know?’
‘You’d received phone calls like that yourself a few times, hadn’t you?’
‘Veum!’ Now it was her mother’s turn to react. ‘What are you insinuating? This goes far beyond -’
‘Just look at her! She’s blushing with -’ I stopped myself just in time and turned to speak to Åsa in a much gentler tone. ‘You could make money out of it, couldn’t you? Far more than you could expect to get at home, however much you badgered them to raise your allowance.’
Furebø slammed down his glass. ‘Are you trying to…? How dare you come here and…’
‘It was Torild and Astrid who… I just went with them,’ said Åsa faintly. ‘I’m not like that.’
‘But they were?’
She nodded.
‘They were on drugs, weren’t they?’
‘No. Just – tried them.’
‘Tablets?’
‘Helge had got hold of some stuff from England, some pills that were supposed to give, to make you, even when you…’ She looked shiftily back and forth from her mother to her father.
‘Even when you…’ I repeated.
‘Even when you did it on your own!’ she burst out.
I glanced quickly at Furebø. ‘Ecstasy.’
‘What’s that?’ barked his wife crossly.
‘Tablets that are supposed to increase libido, or so it’s claimed. Especially popular at so-called House parties. There hasn’t been much of it in Bergen yet, but in Oslo it’s been around for a number of years now.’ Bitterly I added, ‘But it doesn’t increase the sex drive, Åsa! It just does your head in, makes you a nervous wreck and so out of it that… Abroad there’ve been a number of murders under the influence of stuff like this. So it probably won’t be long before we have the first one here. If we haven’t already.’
‘Maybe this was what that Satanist had taken?’ said Randi Furebø weakly, as if to change the subject.
I looked at her askance with a crooked smile, so as not to give her too much hope.
‘The day after, the Friday, you were at Jimmy’s again. But then neither Astrid nor Torild was there. Was that why you said that you would do it?’
‘I’m not like that! I couldn’t know!’
‘But they tempted you with the promise of good money, eh?’
She looked down then sideways, up at the ceiling, everywhere but at her parents.
‘Don’t tell me it was your first time!’
‘No, course not! I’d done it before! But I wasn’t like that! I didn’t do it all the time! I tried to stay out of it!’ At last she glanced at her parents: ‘Do you understand?’
Randi Furebø just sat there, staring at her, as pale and lifeless as a wax doll. Trond Furebø was ashen-faced. His silver hair no longer became him. His boyishness had vanished. In the last five minutes he seemed to have aged ten years.
‘Understand?’ he murmured. ‘How can you “understand” something like that? Your own daughter.’
‘Åsa!’ her mother whimpered as though she was in pain and the pain had been inflicted by her daughter.
‘It was you who was with Judge Brandt when he died, wasn’t it?’
She nodded. She was still struggling to hold on to her mask.
‘They found a bottle of tablets in the bathroom. Did you take them – to make it easier to go through with it?’
The dam burst. And she broke down, weeping uncontrollably. Tears poured from her eyes and nostrils as she sobbed: ‘He… he was repulsive! The old pig! He was wearing – women’s underwear – and he wanted, I had to take my clothes off and put on something he’d brought with him, in leather and jackboots and, and a sort of whip, and he made me, he crawled round on the floor, and I had to kick and whip him, and in the end he wanted, he lay on his back with his legs in the air like a little baby, and, there was an opening in – I was supposed to sit on top of him and pee on him!’
Her mother let out a loud gasp. Her father clamped his jaw shut so hard that it cracked.
‘But I couldn’t do it!’
‘That’s something at least!’ exclaimed her mother as though even the smallest chink of light was worth seizing upon.
‘And as if that wasn’t enough he, he had a bad turn, a sort of attack, and that was it!’
‘He died, you mean.’
‘Yes! I didn’t know it at the time, but I…’
‘And what did you do? Did you call for help?’
‘I…’ She shook her head. ‘I pulled off those horrible clothes, put my own back on and just ran off…’
‘Where to?’
‘Back to Jimmy’s and told them…’
‘Told who?’
‘Kalle and Helge! They… they took me into the room at the back and said I wasn’t to worry, said I should just forget about it and that they’d take care of everything, then they phoned somebody, and I… I came home.’
‘You came home,’ I said lamely. ‘And were grounded?’
She nodded.
‘Without saying a word about it?’
‘You don’t think I’d say anything…’ She looked away again. ‘About that?’
‘But you were grounded, all the same.’
Randi Furebø opened her mouth – and closed it again.
I looked at her. ‘Why?’
She gestured vaguely and glanced at her husband. ‘Well… we didn’t know what had happened to Torild…’
‘Yes, that’s true. But, all the same, didn’t the two of your trust her?’
‘Trust Åsa? Do you think there was any reason to after what you’ve heard today?’ She looked at her husband again as though waiting for him to say something.