Black Seconds

by Karin Fossum

  Sejer considered the offer while staring out of the window into the distance. He thought, one whiskey won't hurt. I can leave the car till the morning. I can walk home. Just this one time.

  "No, I don't smoke Prince," he replied as Skarre held out his packet of cigarettes. "But I would like a whiskey."

  Skarre leapt up immediately. He was glad that his boss had said yes for once. As a rule Sejer tended not to be very sociable. Skarre was pleased that they could sit together in the darkness, thinking. His admiration for Sejer knew no bounds. There were even times he felt downright chosen to be working with him. The inspector had simply taken him under his wing. Encouraged him and given him responsibilities. It was a gesture he took great care to be worthy of.

  "What is it with girls?" Sejer said. "They correspond for a whole year and everything's about animals? They've barely mentioned any people. Just rabbits, horses, and dogs."

  "She writes about a reptile, too," Skarre said, walking across the room to get two glasses. "An iguana named Iggy Pop. That's quite witty, I think."

  "Is it because they think so little of people?" Sejer raised his voice because Skarre was further away.

  "It's a girl thing," Skarre said. "Girls like fussing. They like caring for someone and feeling useful. Boys are into other things. Boys like stuff they can control. Like cars. Planning the design, constructing it, assembling it, influencing it and manipulating it. Girls have different values; they invest in caring for someone. And they're less afraid of failure."

  He fetched the whiskey bottle from the cabinet. It was three-quarters full.

  "Since when do you drink whiskey?" Sejer asked.

  "Since I met you."

  Sejer took his whiskey. He raised the glass to his nose. Skarre took out a Prince cigarette from the packet and lit up. Sejer reached for the box on the windowsill to replace the letters. By chance he happened to glance at the bottom of it. There was something there, something soft and light.

  "A feather," he said, holding it up in wonder. "A red feather."

  Skarre stared at the feather that Sejer was holding in his hand. A beautiful feather, ten centimeters long. "That doesn't belong to a budgie," he stated. "Something bigger. A parrot. Macaws are red. Perhaps it's from a macaw?"

  "She hasn't shown it to Helga," Sejer said, wondering. "Why not?"

  Skarre met his eyes across the coffee table. "I would have done so when I was nine. If I'd had a feather like that. I would have even shown off a crow's feather," he declared.

  "So would I," Sejer said. "I'll check with Helga just to be sure. But this feather seems to be a secret."

  Skarre gave Sejer an envelope. Carefully he put the feather in it and placed it in his inside pocket. Later on he walked briskly through the streets, exhilarated by this new discovery. Then he had to smile once again. A red feather. Something so minor. Kids collect all sorts of stuff. They're closer to the ground, he thought, and they notice much more than we do. He saw his own shadow beneath the street light; it grew to the size of a monster, then shrank to the size of a dwarf. Over and over, from lamppost to lamppost. Tomorrow it'll be ten days, he thought. Tomorrow Helga Joner's nightmare will have lasted two hundred and forty hours. She lies in bed, waiting. She stares out of the window, waiting. The telephone sits on the coffee table, an ardent hope one moment, a black and hostile object the next.

  ***

  Ida was not waiting for anything. Her tiny body was wrapped in a white duvet. Just as Sejer opened the door to his apartment on the thirteenth floor, a car stopped a few kilometers out of town and the driver placed a bundle by the roadside. It was very noticeable against the dry, withering grass. It was just waiting for the dawn.

  CHAPTER 14

  It was 7:00 A.M. Sejer was standing by the window in his living room, looking down at the car park. He had just knotted his tie and was pushing the knot upward toward his collar. Suddenly his telephone rang.

  "We've found her," he heard. It was Skarre's voice. Professional and firm. "She's wrapped in a duvet."

  "Where?" Sejer said. At that moment something inside him wilted. He had been preparing for this, but he must have been secretly hoping after all, because now he felt a great sadness.

  "By Lysejordet. Drive out to the Spinning Mill. Follow the road inward some four to five hundred meters. That's where we are."

  ***

  Despite the huge gathering of people, the crime scene was very quiet. Everyone moved around noiselessly, everything was measured and focused. Everyone's voice was subdued.

  Sejer closed his car door. Softly he walked the last few meters.

  "Who called us?" he asked, looking at Jacob Skarre.

  "A truck driver. He was passing. Then he stopped and reversed. He says himself he's got no clue as to what made him do that." He pointed across the road. "He's over there, having a cigarette."

  Sejer stopped at the tiny bundle. Everyone made way for him. He thought, this is what we have been waiting for. Now it is here. He knelt in the grass. The small white parcel had been carefully opened at one end. Ida's face was visible in the opening. Her eyes were closed. The skin on her cheeks was very pale. At first glance he saw no sign of injuries or cuts. No red bruises, no cranial fractures, no blood anywhere, no evidence of damage. But something was wrong. He felt perplexed. This child has not been dead for ten days, he thought. A day, perhaps, or two. A technician found a craft knife in his bag and cut through the brown tape that secured the bundle. Then he unwrapped the duvet. Sejer shook his head in disbelief. Her clothes, he thought, looking around, where are the clothes she was wearing? Her sweatsuit and her sneakers. Ida lay there on the duvet wearing a white nightie. She was barefoot. He got up again. A strange sensation came over him. I've never seen anything like this, he thought. Never in all my life. He looked around Lysejordet. It was an isolated spot. Not a single house as far as the eye could see. No one would have seen anything. Whoever had brought her here had done so under the cover of darkness. She had been placed, not thrown, it struck him; she was lying flat on her back. He was deeply moved by the sight of the little girl in her nightie. The whole scene was like something out of a fairy tale. He thought of Helga Joner and was relieved that it would be possible for her to see her dead daughter. She was almost as lovely now as she had always been. So far they had no idea about what her body might reveal. He knelt down again. She had a tiny little mouth. It was drained of color now, but on the photos it was dark red, like a cherry. Her eyelids had swelled up over the sunken eyeballs. There were no marks on her face, but the blood had started to form minute red dots on her hands. Her hair, which was thick and curly in the photos, was lank and lifeless. But apart from that ... almost like a doll, marblelike and delicate.

  "The body has been frozen," said Snorrason, the pathologist. He had got up to stretch his back. "In fact, she is only partly thawed."

  Sejer raised his eyebrows.

  "In other words, she could have been dead for ten days. She just doesn't look like it."

  "Why would he freeze her?" Sejer wondered, looking at Jacob Skarre. This was exactly what he had suggested, that the killer might not have been in a hurry, but could have kept her somewhere in his house.

  "To gain time, possibly. Perhaps he lost his nerve. I don't know," Snorrason said.

  "Gain time. For what? He hasn't attempted to hide her. She was lying right by the side of the road. He wanted us to find her."

  Sejer noticed something in the grass and bent down to pick it up. It was tiny and white as snow. "Down?" he speculated and looked at Skarre. "From the duvet?"

  Skarre frowned. He rubbed a corner of the duvet between his fingers. "Possibly," he said reluctantly. "However, I don't think this duvet is filled with down. It's a cheap synthetic one from IKEA, the kind you can machine wash and tumble dry." He had located the washing instructions and was pointing to them.

  Sejer searched the grass. He found several tiny white feathers. They were mostly sticking to the duvet, but some had attached themselves to the
nightie. When he tried to catch them they flew off like dandelion seeds.

  He called out to the photographer. "Photograph her nightie," he said. "Make sure you get the neck opening with the red edging and the lace on the sleeves. Take pictures of the duvet. Get a close-up of the pattern. Look out for more down." He gestured with his hand. "Be careful with the duvet. Do not shake it or disturb it in any way. Any particles found on it could be important."

  Then he pulled Skarre aside and walked a few meters across the damp grass. He kept the white duvet in the far corner of his eye. He surveyed the horizon, taking in every ridge and treetop. A low, earnest murmur could be heard from the large crowd of people working on the crime scene.

  Then more cars arrived. The press was descending.

  "When does it start getting dark in the evening these days?" Sejer asked. "Around eight-thirty?"

  "Thereabouts," Skarre said. "It gets light at seven. So between eight-thirty last night and seven o'clock this morning, a car drove along this road. It would have taken only a few seconds to move her from the car to the roadside."

  "Everything is so neat," Sejer said. "The nightie. The duvet. The way she's lying. Why did he do that?"

  "Don't know," Skarre said.

  "Perhaps he's read too many crime novels," Sejer said. "All we need now is to find a poem under her nightie."

  "You're saying we can eliminate young men from the investigation?" Skarre asked.

  "I would think so. This is the work of a more mature person. A teenage boy wouldn't have arranged her like this."

  "There's something feminine about it."

  "I agree," Sejer said. "I hate IKEA," he added. "They make everything in such vast quantities, we'll never be able to trace it."

  "We have to pin our hopes on the nightie. It looks expensive."

  "How can you tell?" Sejer was impressed.

  "It's old-fashioned," Skarre declared. "Girls today wear nighties with Winnie-the-Pooh or something like that. This looks like it came from another era."

  "Who buys nighties from another era?" Sejer was thinking out loud.

  "People from another era, perhaps? Old people," Skarre said. "Old?"

  Sejer frowned. They looked at the crowd once more. "I hope he's made a mistake," he said. "Nobody gets everything right." "This doesn't look rushed," Skarre said.

  "I agree," Sejer said. "We'll have to wait for forensics."

  He went back to Snorrason. The pathologist was working quietly and methodically. His face was inscrutable.

  "What do you think about the down?" Sejer asked.

  "It's strange," the pathologist said. "The feathers stick to the duvet and yet they float away once they're loosened. Some stuck to her hair, too."

  "You found anything else?"

  Snorrason lifted up Ida's nightie carefully. "I don't like to speculate," he said. "And you know it."

  Sejer looked at him urgently. Snorrason began rolling the white nightie up Ida's body. You could tell he had done this several times before. He had his own technique, a special gentleness about his hands. Sejer saw her thin thighs emerge. He saw the bare stomach. She was not wearing any underwear. A sudden nervousness gripped him as her torso was revealed. And there it was. Her chest. It was oddly caved in and slightly discolored. Snorrason placed two fingers on her lower ribs. As he pressed, her entire ribcage gave way.

  "She's been subjected to a blow," he said. "Or a kick. But it looks like it was a forceful blow."

  Sejer looked at Ida's chest. Fragile like a bird's nest. He was silent.

  "Several ribs have been broken. I know even saying it sounds bad, but I wish her skin had broken or that we'd found some external injuries," Snorrason confessed. "Then we would have had a better chance of determining what caused them."

  Sejer needed to process this information. The damaged chest was too much for him.

  "Whatever hit her did so with great force," Snorrason said. "Something big and heavy. No sharp edges."

  Sejer looked at Ida once more. He outlined the damaged area with his eyes and tried to imagine what could have caused this massive blow.

  "A very big stone?" he suggested. Snorrason did not reply. "A stick? A boot?"

  "Not a stick," the pathologist said. "Something bigger. And not a boot either. That would have left a heel print. Guessing will get you nowhere, Konrad. I need to open her up."

  Sejer was silent. Snorrason looked at him. "What are you thinking?" he asked.

  "I'm thinking about Helga Joner," Sejer confessed. "About what I'm going to tell her. She will have so many questions."

  "Tell it like it is," Snorrason said. "We don't know what happened."

  "I'd rather she didn't see Ida's chest," Sejer said.

  "You have to let her if she asks," Snorrason said. "And don't forget: she's prepared. I don't mean to sound insensitive, but it could have been worse. It could have been much worse."

  Sejer knew the pathologist was right. He merely nodded in reply. He did not know what Helga had imagined in her own mind, but perhaps it was worse than the body lying at his feet. She looked like a sleeping doll. And the nightie, which did not belong to her, was poignant and beautiful in its simplicity. What had happened? Where had she been? He had to go to Helga's house now. Perhaps she was sitting in her chair by the window. Perhaps her eyes were fixed on the telephone. He thought about how scared she was. He thought: She is prepared. But she still lives in uncertainty. A few more minutes, he thought, in screaming uncertainty.

  ***

  The crime scene was carefully secured. They worked on Ida and the area surrounding her body for several hours. Later Sejer and Skarre met up at the office. Finally they had something to work with. Concrete physical evidence, which could be examined and might lead them somewhere. In the midst of everything they felt a kind of relief. They had been waiting for this moment; now they had got past it and they could move on.

  "The nightie is made by Calida," Skarre said. "In Switzerland. This country imports large quantities of nightwear and underwear from there. It's available in most shops."

  Sejer nodded. "Good work," he said. "Any news from Hamburg?"

  "Some." Skarre perched on the desk. "Christine's mother's name is Rita Seidler. She found Ida's last letter and faxed it to us. I've translated it. And made a few corrections so it's easier to understand. Nine-year-olds these days know a lot of English. I didn't know they would be this good," he said.

  "Read it to me," Sejer asked him.

  "Dear Christine," Skarre read. "Thank you for your letter. Today is Monday and I always watch a program on TV called Pet Rescue. There is a team that goes out and saves animals. Today it was about a fat dog. It almost could not walk."

  Sejer thought of Kollberg, who almost could not walk, either. He held his breath as he listened because Skarre read so tenderly, and he found the words so charming.

  "The people from Pet Rescue came to get the dog and the owner got really angry. He said that he could feed it as much as he liked because it was his dog. Then they told him that the dog could die from a heart attack unless it lost weight. So they gave him three weeks. But when they came back, the dog had died."

  Skarre paused. Then he continued.

  "I know a parrot that can talk. I am trying to teach it new words, but it takes a long time. Mom does not know about it. The parrot is called Henry. It is very irritable and bad-tempered, but it does not bite me. I am going to ask Mom if I can have my own bird. I will pester her forever. In the end she will say yes. Tell me more about your rabbit."

  Skarre looked briefly up at Sejer and then returned to the letter. "I am going to be ten years old soon. September tenth. Love, Ida."

  He folded the letter. "It's her birthday today," he said solemnly. "Today, September tenth." "Yes, I know," Sejer said.

  Skarre put the letter down on the desk. "And Helga?" he said softly. "How did she take it? What did she say?" "Nothing," Sejer said. "She just fainted."

  CHAPTER 15

  Elsa Marie did not kno
ck. She used her own key to let herself in and stomped into the kitchen. Emil had done his best to mend the door. He was standing by the counter fumbling with a cloth. The crumbs refused to stick to it, he was just moving them around the surface. Finally he swept them away with his bare hands.

  "Go for a ride on your bike," his mother ordered him. "This is going to take time."

  He no longer protested, exactly as she had predicted. Emil heard the trembling undertone in his mother's voice and it made him nervous. He left the kitchen and grabbed an old coat from a peg in the hallway. He pulled his leather cap over his head. His mother watched him. She looked at the ridiculous leather cap. Her body was very tense and every movement caused her pain. She reminded herself that she was facing an important task. She would become a cleaning machine. She would work her way through his rooms and leave behind a strong smell of Ajax and bleach. It was the whole house this time. The curtains were going to be taken down; the bed linen was going to be washed. Her jaw was clenched. Emil slunk out to the drive and got on his three-wheeler. It would not start. He made some irritable grunting noises and noticed his mother's face in the window. He tried to get angry but did not succeed. It took a lot for Emil to get angry. Finally the engine started coughing. He revved it, a little more than was strictly necessary, and his mother's pale face vanished. He saw the curtain settle back into place.

  Emil always kept to a steady speed of forty kilometers an hour. He had nowhere to go, no one to visit. No money in his pocket either. But he had half a tank of gas. He could drive a long way on half a tank, all the way into town and back and perhaps even up to Solberg. The waterfall appealed to him. He decided to drive out to it. He wanted to sit on his three-wheeler and feel the spray from the waterfall on his face. He often did that. It was not a cold day and his coat was warm. Buttoned all the way up. He was wearing brown gloves and thick boots.

  Five minutes later he passed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He was able to read a few short words, but he did not always understand what they meant. Emil was tired. His mother had been screaming at him for days. "I want you to talk to me!" she demanded. "I don't understand!" And he wanted to. He knew that the words lay somewhere at the back of his head. He could arrange them and line them up in those rows people called sentences. But he was afraid to let them out. He worried that they would come out the wrong way and make everything worse. Things had never looked as bad for him as they did now. The racetrack was on his left. He was constantly being overtaken. He was used to it, used to irate drivers tailing him, beeping at him. He was faster than bicycles, but slower than motorcycles and he took up more space. Everyone was in a hurry these days. Emil never was. He wondered what it was they all had to do. Once he had witnessed a car crash just as it happened. A deafening bang, the sharp sound of metal and steel bending and snapping, glass splintering and raining down on the asphalt. He remembered the silence that followed, and the smell of gas. Through the windshield he had seen a head resting on the steering wheel and blood pouring out onto knees in gray trousers. He drove off when he heard the sirens.