Don't Look Back

by Karin Fossum

  "It looks as if Sølvi is managing all right," he said, to change the subject.

  "Sølvi is strong," she said, suddenly sounding confident.

  Strong, he thought. Yes, maybe that is the proper term. Perhaps Annie was the weak one. Things began whirling through his mind in a disquieting way. Mrs Holland went out to get cream and sugar. Sølvi came in.

  "Where's Papa?"

  "He'll be right back!" Mrs Holland called from the kitchen in a firm voice, perhaps in the hope that Eddie would hear her and reappear. It's bad enough that Annie is dead and gone, Sejer thought. But now her family is falling apart, the welded seams are failing, there are big holes in the hull, and the water is gushing in, and she's stuffing old phrases and commands into the cracks to keep the ship afloat.

  She poured the coffee. Sejer's fingers were too big for the handle and he had to hold the cup in both hands.

  "You keep talking about why," she said wearily, "as if he must have had a good reason for doing it."

  "Not a good reason. But the killer had a reason, which at that moment seemed to him to be the only choice."

  "So evidently you understand them – these people that you lock up for murder and other appalling crimes."

  "I couldn't stay in the job otherwise." He drank some more coffee and thought about Halvor.

  "But surely there must be some exceptions."

  "They're rare."

  She sighed and glanced at her daughter. "What do you think, Sølvi?" she said. Softly, using a different tone than he'd heard her use before, as if for once she wanted to penetrate that carefree blonde head of her daughter's and find an answer, maybe even one that would make sense of it all. As if the only daughter she had left might be a different person than she had initially thought, maybe more like Annie than she knew.

  "Me?" Sølvi stared at her mother in surprise. "For my part I've never liked Fritzner across the street. I've heard that he sits in his dinghy in his living room and reads all night long, with the rowlocks full of beer."

  CHAPTER 13

  Skarre had turned off most of the lights in his office. Only the desk lamp was on, 60 watts in a white spotlight on his papers. A gentle, steady hum came from the printer as it spewed out page after page, covered with perfect text, set in Palatino, the typeface he liked best. In the background, as if from far away, he heard a door open and someone come in. He was about to look up to see who it was but just at that moment the pages tumbled off the printer. He bent down to get them, straightened up, and discovered that something was sliding into his field of vision, across an empty page. A bronze bird sitting on a perch.

  "Where?!" he said at once.

  Sejer sat down. "At Annie's house. Sølvi has inherited her sister's things, and this was among them, wrapped in newspaper. I went out to the cemetery. It fits like a glove." He looked at Skarre. "Someone could have given it to her."

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. But if she went there and took it herself, really went there, under cover of darkness, and used some kind of tool to break it off the headstone, then that's quite an unscrupulous thing to do."

  "But Annie wasn't unscrupulous, was she?"

  "I'm not entirely sure. I'm not sure about anything any more."

  Skarre turned the lamp away from the desk so that it made a perfect half-moon on the wall. They sat and stared at it. On impulse, Skarre picked up the bird, gripping it by its perch, and held it up to the lamp with a swaying motion. The shadow it made in the white moon was like a giant drunken duck on its way home from a party.

  "Jensvoll has resigned from his job as coach of the girls' team," Skarre said.

  "What did you say?"

  "The rumours are starting to circulate. The rape conviction has come out, and it's hovering over the waters. The girls stopped showing up."

  "I thought that would happen. One thing leads to another."

  "And Fritzner was right. Things are going to be tough for a lot of people now, until the murderer is caught. But that will happen soon, because by now you've worked it all out, haven't you?"

  Sejer shook his head. "It has something to do with Annie and Johnas. Something happened between the two of them."

  "Maybe she just wanted a keepsake to remind her of Eskil."

  "If that was it, she could have knocked on the door and asked for a teddy-bear or something."

  "Do you think he did something to her?"

  "Either to her or maybe to someone else she had a relationship with. Someone she loved."

  "Now I don't follow you – do you mean Halvor?"

  "I mean his son, Eskil. He died because Johnas was in the bathroom shaving."

  "But she couldn't very well blame him because of that."

  "Not unless there's something unresolved about the way Eskil died."

  Skarre whistled. "No one else was there to see what happened. All we have to go on is what Johnas said."

  Sejer picked up the bird again and gently poked at its sharp beak. "So what do you think, Jacob? What really happened on that November morning."

  Memories flooded over him as he opened the double glass doors and took a few steps inside. The hospital smell, a mixture of antiseptic and soap, combined with the sweet scent of chocolate from the gift shop and the spicy fragrance of carnations from the flower stand.

  Instead of thinking about his wife's death, Sejer tried to think about his daughter Ingrid on the day she was born. This enormous building held memories of both the greatest sorrow and the greatest joy of his life. Back then he had stepped through these same doors and noticed the same smells. Involuntarily he had compared his own new-born daughter to the other infants. He thought they were redder and fatter and had more wrinkles, and that their hair was more rumpled. Or they were born prematurely and looked like undernourished miniature old men. Only Ingrid was utterly perfect. The recollection helped him to relax at last.

  He was not arriving unannounced. It had taken him exactly eight minutes on the phone to locate the pathologist who had overseen the autopsy of Eskil Johnas. He made it clear in advance what he was interested in, so they could find the files and reports and get them out for him. One of the things he liked about the bureaucracy, that unwieldy, cumbersome, difficult system that governed all departments, was the principle that everything had to be recorded and archived. Dates, times, names, diagnoses, routines, irregularities, everything had to be on the file. Every facet of a case could be taken out and re-examined, by other people with different motives, with fresh eyes.

  That's what he was thinking as he got out of the lift. He noticed the hospital smell grow stronger as he walked along the corridor of the eighth floor. The pathologist, who had sounded staid and middle-aged on the phone, turned out to be a young man. A stout fellow with thick glasses and soft, plump hands. On his desk stood a card file, a phone, a stack of papers, and a big red book with Chinese characters on it.

  "I have to confess that I took a quick glance at the case file," the doctor said. His glasses made him look as if he were in a constant state of fear. "I was curious. You're a chief inspector, isn't that what you said?"

  Sejer nodded.

  "So I'm assuming that there must be something unusual about this death?"

  "I have no opinion about that."

  "But isn't that why you're here?"

  Sejer looked at him and blinked twice, and that was all the answer he gave. When he remained silent, the doctor started talking again – a phenomenon that never ceased to amaze Sejer, one that had produced numerous confessions over the years.

  "A tragic case," the pathologist said, looking down at the papers. "A two-year-old boy. An accident at home. Left without supervision for a few minutes. Dead on arrival. We opened him up and found a total obstruction of his windpipe, in the form of food."

  "What type of food?"

  "Waffles. We were actually able to unfold them, they were practically whole. Two whole, heart-shaped dessert waffles, folded together into one lump. That's an awful lot of food for such a s
mall mouth, even though he was a sturdy boy. It turned out that he was quite a greedy little fellow, and hyperactive too."

  Sejer tried to picture the waffle-iron that Elise used to have, with five heart shapes in a circle. Ingrid's iron was a more modern kind with only four hearts that weren't properly round.

  "I remember the autopsy clearly. You always remember the very sad cases; they stay in your mind. Most of the people we see, after all, are between 80 and 90 years old. And I remember the waffle hearts lying in the bowl. Children and dessert waffles go together. It seemed especially tragic that they should have caused his death. He was sitting there having such a good time."

  "You said 'we'. Were there others working with you?"

  "Arnesen, the head pathologist, was with me. I had just been hired back then, and he liked to keep an eye on the new people. He's retired now. The new departmental head is a woman." The thought made him glance down at his hands.

  "Two whole waffles shaped like hearts. Had he chewed them?"

  "No, apparently not. They were both nearly whole."

  "Do you have children?"

  "I have four," he said happily.

  "Did you think about them when you were doing the autopsy?"

  The doctor gave Sejer a look of uncertainty, as if he didn't quite understand the question.

  "Well, yes, I suppose I did. Or I might have been thinking more about children in general, and how they behave."

  "Yes?"

  "At that time my son had just turned three," the doctor went on. "And he loves dessert waffles. I'm forever scolding him, the way parents do, about stuffing too much food into his mouth at one time."

  "But in this case no one was there to scold the boy," Sejer said.

  "No. Because then, of course, it wouldn't have happened."

  Sejer didn't reply. Then he said, "Can you picture your own son when he was about the same age with a plate of waffles in front of him? Do you think he would have picked up two of them, folded them in half, and stuffed both into his mouth at the same time?"

  Now there was a long silence.

  "Well... this was a special kind of child."

  "Where exactly did you get that information from? I mean, the fact that he was special?"

  "From his father. He was here at the hospital all day. The mother arrived later, together with his half-brother. By the way, all of this is included in the file. I've made copies for you, as requested."

  He tapped the pile in front of him and pushed the Chinese book aside. Sejer recognised the first character on the cover, the symbol for "man".

  "From what I've been told, the father was in the bathroom when the accident occurred, is that right?"

  "That's right. He was shaving. The boy was strapped to his chair; that's why he couldn't get loose and run for help. When the father came back to the kitchen the boy was lying across the table. He had knocked his plate to the floor so it broke. The worst thing was that the father actually heard the plate fall."

  "Why didn't he come running?"

  "Apparently the boy broke things all the time."

  "Who else was home when it happened?"

  "Only the mother, from what I understood. The older son had just left to catch a school bus or something, and the mother was asleep upstairs."

  "And didn't hear anything?"

  "I suppose there was nothing to hear. He didn't manage to scream."

  "Not with two heart-shaped waffles in his mouth. But she was awakened eventually – by her husband, of course?"

  "It's possible that he shouted or screamed for her. People react very differently in those kinds of situations. Some can't stop screaming, while others are completely paralysed."

  "But she didn't come with the ambulance?"

  "She arrived later. First she went to get the older brother from school."

  "How much later did they arrive?"

  "Let's see ... about half an hour, according to what it says here."

  "Can you tell me a little about how the father acted?"

  Now the doctor fell silent, closing his eyes as if he were conjuring up that morning, exactly the way it was.

  "He was in shock. He didn't say much."

  "That's understandable. But the little he did say – can you remember what it was? Can you remember any specific words?"

  The doctor gave him an inquisitive look and shook his head. "It was a long time ago. Almost eight months."

  "Give it a try."

  "I think it was something like: 'Oh God, no! Oh God, no!'"

  "Was it the father who called the ambulance?"

  "Yes, that's what it says here."

  "Does it really take 20 minutes from here to Lundeby?"

  "Yes, unfortunately, it does. And 20 minutes back. They didn't have personnel with them who could perform a tracheotomy. If they had, he might have been saved."

  "What are you talking about now?"

  "About going in between two cartilages and opening up the windpipe from the outside."

  "You mean cutting open his throat?"

  "Yes. It's actually quite simple. And it might have saved his life, although we don't know how long he sat in that chair before his father found him."

  "About as long as it takes to shave?"

  "Well, yes, I suppose so." The doctor leafed through the papers and shoved his glasses up. "Do you suspect something ... criminal?"

  He had been holding back this question for a long time. Now he felt that he finally had the right to ask it.

  "I can't imagine what that might be. What do you mean?"

  "How could I have any opinion about that?"

  "But you opened up the boy afterwards and examined him. Did you find anything unnatural about his death?"

  "Unnatural? That's the way children are. They stuff things in their mouth."

  "But if he had a plate full of waffles in front of him and was sitting there alone and didn't need to worry that anyone was going to come and take them away from him – why would he stuff two pieces in his mouth at once?"

  "Tell me something: where are you going with these questions?"

  "I have no idea."

  The doctor sat there, lost in thought; he was thinking back again, to the morning when little Eskil lay naked on the porcelain table, sliced open from his throat down. To the moment when he caught sight of the lump in his windpipe and realised that it was two waffles. Two whole hearts. One big sticky lump of egg and flour and butter and milk.

  "I remember the autopsy," he said. "I remember it in great detail. Maybe by that I mean that I was actually surprised. No, I can't really say that. But," he added suddenly, "how did you come up with the idea that there might be something irregular about his death?"

  Irregular. A vague word that could cover so many different possibilities.