But Furebø just stared at his daughter as though she was a total stranger who had forced herself upon his attention and demanded to be taken seriously.
‘That episode with the leather jacket…’
Furebø looked at me and snapped: ‘Yes? What about it?’
‘I don’t quite see the connection.’
‘There wasn’t any connection! This… My daughter, who stands here before you, I almost said, stole it. I insisted she should take it back, and -’
‘But the manageress was sure it had been bought and paid for.’
‘Sure? She was a complete dope! It was several weeks since it had happened; how could she be so sure?’
‘Several weeks? It was just last Wednesday that I went there for the first time, and on that occasion -’
‘So what?’
I turned back to Åsa. ‘What’s your version of the story?’
‘About the leather jacket?’
‘Yes.’
‘It…’ She shot a quick look at her father again. ‘What he says is true. I’d stolen it.’
I looked at her gently. ‘Listen… everything else is on the table now, Åsa.’
‘They know how you – earned a bit extra. Can’t you just as well admit that you bought it, as the lady said, with money you’d earned – doing that?’
‘Yes, but… it was just that Dad hadn’t seen the jacket before – the day you…’
I looked at Furebø again. ‘Was that when you understood – or at least suspected, what Åsa was mixed up in?’
‘Yes, I…’
His wife gave him a hurt look. ‘You didn’t say anything to me about it!’
‘No, I didn’t want you to…’
‘But all the same she’d been grounded from the Friday, five days before.’
‘Yes?’
Both of them looked at me for an answer. Even Åsa turned her attention to something other than her own dark conscience.
I hadn’t taken my eyes off Furebø. ‘No, not because Torild had disappeared but because you knew why she had disappeared, and perhaps even what had happened to her?’
‘What?!’
Randi Furebø looked at her husband uncomprehendingly. ‘Trond? What is he talking about?’
I leaned forward and stared at him. ‘Where were you on Thursday evening, Furebø?’
‘At work, as always!’
‘We can check up on that. It’s not completely impossible that you too went into town on a little errand, isn’t that so?’
‘Out on… Trond!’
‘The police are with Holger Skagestøl at this very moment. They’ve identified the car from a photograph. He’s been caught in flagrante as a client in the area.’
‘Which car?’
‘Holger!’ Randi Furebø looked from her husband to me. ‘Now I think I’ve taken leave of my senses. I just can’t imagine Holger would go to a – prostitute.’
‘Can’t you? What about your husband, then?’
‘Veum! That’s completely unwarranted!’ Furebø cut in.
‘Is it?’ I turned my attention back to him. ‘Oh yes. Holger Skagestøl told me, as an example of what good friends the two of you were, that you often swapped cars, if the other one’s car was in for repairs. Was that the case one January evening when you picked a girl up in his car? – This is what Laila Mongstad had got wind of. Actually, she perhaps still thought it was Holger. Did she ring you to ask you what you thought? Did you realise that if Holger were faced with these charges, he’d send the ball back to you?’
‘She… But what about… You’re forgetting the break-in – from outside.’
‘It’s the easiest diversion to create for someone already in the building. One set of footprints in one direction, one in another. But there was no one who said the footprints could go out and then back in, and not as we were supposed to think: in and then out again.’
‘These are just loose accusations.’
‘The police will get them to stick.’
‘So I’m supposed to have…?’
‘You knew what Åsa and Torild and their friends were up to, because as a client you’d had Torild the same evening she was killed, and that was why you were so insistent that Åsa should be grounded from the following day. But you couldn’t prevent her from going into town that morning, because there was still nobody who had the faintest inkling of what had happened to Torild. But from Monday onwards you collected her from school, didn’t you?’
Now the expressions on the two women’s faces were quite different. Åsa looked at her father with the same sort of naivety he had looked at her with a few minutes before. As for Randi Furebø, tears ran silently down her cheeks.
‘Trond… Yes, it’s true… everything he says fits… You weren’t home at all that evening. There was something restless about you at breakfast the next morning. Don’t you remember me asking you if something was bothering you at work? You were furious when you heard that Åsa’d been in town that day, and from Monday onwards… Everything fits!’
I leaned back in my chair a little, sipped my beer and looked expectantly at Trond Furebø.
He sat there, almost apathetic, ashen-faced, his lips strangely crooked, almost like a stroke victim. Finally, he turned to look at his two women and said hoarsely: ‘Can’t the two of you leave us for a bit? Can you go downstairs? I have to talk to him about this alone.’
Fifty-two
THE TWO WOMEN walked towards the stairs leading down to the ground floor. Randi Furebø attempted to put her arm round her daughter’s shoulder, but Åsa shook her off with an irritable sideways glance as though it was all her mother’s fault.
Trond Furebø’s eyes lingered on them, and he did not look back at me until he heard the door downstairs close behind them.
The look he gave me was strangely distant, as if he stood at the end of a long dark corridor and could only just make me out at the other end.
When at last he spoke, it was so softly that I had to lean forward to catch everything, yet there was no doubting the intensity of his voice. ‘Oh my God, Veum, what a high price a man has to pay!’
‘For what?’ I said calmly.
‘For this whole accursed life! For trying to elbow a bit of breathing space in his life, to have butter on his bread for once.’
‘Has it been that hard for you?’
‘Hard? You don’t have the faintest bloody clue! But sit in judgement over others, you can do that all right!’
I shook my head slowly. ‘I’ve never – at least, hardly ever – sat in judgement over anyone. I can even accept prostitution as a phenomenon, provided they’re responsible grown-up girls. But I have no time at all for the pimps who make a packet out of – ha ha! – “protecting” them, and I’ve just as little time for people who buy young girls barely over the minimum age of consent and get them to do unspeakable things with them!’
‘I didn’t get them to – all I bought was pure clean sex, to make up for what I no longer got even the faintest whiff of here at home!’
‘Pure clean sex, as you call it. Can’t buy me love, is that it?’
‘Love!’ he said with contempt. ‘It’s something young girls read about in their magazines, see at the cinema or hear about on records. The reality’s quite different.’
‘The reality is your best friend’s father who pays to go to bed with you – is that how it’s supposed to be, according to you?’
He looked away. ‘You’ve misunderstood me there, Veum!’
‘Have I? Let’s get down to brass tacks, then, shall we? It was at the Pastel Hotel, wasn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘I – didn’t have much time, two hours at the most, but I’d reserved a room as I…’
‘Usually did?’
‘Not as I usually did! But like a few times before. She… Reception rang to say she was on her way up. When there was a knock at the door… it was just as much of a shock for both of us, but obviously, in a small city like this, it’s not all that unlikely that one day you’ll run into somebody you know in this game, is it? I mean do you know who’s behind all the contact notices you see in the papers? Eh?’