Don't Look Back

by Karin Fossum

  The factory building was quiet and empty, no longer in operation, used only as a warehouse. Crates, boxes and sacks were piled up from floor to ceiling; the place smelled of cardboard and dust and mouldy wood. Bjørk didn't turn on the lights. Hanging from his belt was a torch, which he switched on as they walked through the dark hall. His boots rang hollowly on the stone floor. Each step echoed, unique, in his mind. His own footsteps, one after another, alone in the silence. He didn't believe in God, the dog was the only one who heard them. Achilles walked along on a slack leash, taking measured steps, meticulously trained. The dog anticipated calm, not danger, and he loved his master.

  They approached the machinery, a huge rolling machine. Bjørk squeezed himself in behind the iron and metal, pulling the dog with him. He fastened the leash to a steel lever and gave the command to sit. The dog sat down but stayed alert. A smell was starting to spread through the room. A smell that was no longer unfamiliar, that was becoming a bigger and bigger part of their daily life. But there was something else too. The rank smell of fear. Bjørk slid down to the floor; a rustling noise from his nylon coveralls and the panting of the dog the only audible sounds. He took a bottle out of his hip pocket, unscrewed the top, and began drinking.

  The dog waited, his eyes shining, his ears alert. He knew he wouldn't be getting any biscuits just then, but he sat there all the same, waiting and listening. Bjørk stared into the dog's eyes, not a word passed his lips. The tension in the dark hall grew. He could feel the dog watching him, as he watched the dog. In his pocket he had a revolver.

  Halvor grunted with displeasure. Not a living soul is going to get into this file, he thought despondently. The hum of the monitor had started to annoy him. It was no longer a gentle sighing but an endless din, as if coming from some vast machine far away. It stayed with him all day long; he felt almost naked each time he shut off the computer and silence took over for a few seconds, until the sound reappeared inside his own head. Spit it out, Annie, he thought. Talk to me!

  The movie theatre was showing a travelogue. She bought Smarties and lemon drops at the kiosk while he waited at the entrance with the tickets in his hand. "Do you want anything to drink?" she asked. He shook his head, too preoccupied with looking at her, comparing her to all the others crowded together in front of the theatre. The attendant appeared in the doorway, dressed in a black uniform and holding a punch in his hand, and as he clipped everyone's tickets, he studied the faces before him. Most of the kids kept their eyes lowered because they were under the age restriction for this movie. A Bond film. The very first one they had seen together, their first date, practically like a real couple. He swelled with pride. And the movie was a good one, at least according to Annie. He hadn't actually followed much of it; he was much too preoccupied with staring at her out of the corner of his eye and listening to the sounds she made in the dark. But he did remember the title: For Your Eyes Only.

  He typed the title into the field and waited for a moment, but nothing happened. Got up impatiently, took a couple of steps, and tore the lid off a jar standing on the windowsill where he kept a packet of King of Denmark tobacco. This was hopeless. He shoved any trace of guilt to the far corner of his mind. It was a secret part of his mind, and it contained something from his past. There was no stopping Halvor now; he walked through the kitchen to the living room and over to the bookshelf where the phone was. He looked up the listing for computer equipment, found the number he wanted, and punched it in.

  "Ra Data. Solveig speaking."

  "Hi. I'm calling about a locked file," he stammered. His courage disintegrated; he felt small, like a thief or a voyeur. But it was too late for that now.

  "You can't get in?"

  "Er, no. I can't remember the password."

  "I'm afraid the technician has left for the day. But wait just a minute and I'll ask somebody."

  He was pressing the receiver to his head so hard that his ear went numb. On the other end of the line he could hear the hum of voices and telephones. He glanced over at his grandmother, who was reading the paper with a magnifying glass, and he thought, "Annie should have known you could do this."

  "Are you still there?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you live far away?"

  "On Lundebysvingen."

  "You're in luck. He can drop by on his way home. What's your address?"

  He sat in his room and waited, his heart pounding in his throat and the curtains open so he could see the car when it pulled into the courtyard. It took exactly 30 minutes before the technician appeared in a white Kadett Combi with the Ra Data logo on the door. A surprisingly young man got out of the car and glanced uncertainly at the house.

  Halvor ran to open the door. The systems specialist turned out to be a nice guy, plump as a dumpling, with deep dimples. Halvor thanked him for taking the trouble. Together they went to his room.

  The technician opened his briefcase and took out a stack of charts. "Is it a numerical or alphabet password?" he asked.

  Halvor turned bright red.

  "Can't you even remember that much?" he asked in surprise.

  "I've used so many different ones," Halvor muttered. "I change them regularly."

  "Which file is it?"

  "That one."

  "'Annie'?"

  He didn't ask any more questions. A certain etiquette went with the job, after all, and he had big ambitions. Halvor went over to the window and stood there, his cheeks burning with a mixture of shame and nervousness, and his heart was hammering so hard that it might have been a drumroll. Behind him he heard the keys clacking rapidly, like distant castanets. Otherwise there wasn't a sound, just the drumroll and the castanets. After what seemed like an eternity, the technician got up from the chair.

  "OK, man, there it is!"

  Halvor slowly turned around and stared at the screen. He took the invoice that was handed to him for signature.

  "What? 750 kroner?" he gasped.

  "Per hour and any fraction thereof," said the young man with a smile.

  His hands trembling, Halvor signed the dotted line at the bottom of the page and asked to have the bill posted to him.

  "It was a numeric password," said the expert, smiling again. "One seven one one nine four. Date and year, right?"

  His dimples got even deeper. "But obviously not your birth-date. In that case you wouldn't be more than eight months old!"

  Halvor escorted him out and thanked him, then ran back and sat down in front of the monitor. A new command had appeared on the screen: "Please proceed".

  He had to press his hand to his heart because it was beating so hard. The words scrolled into view and he started reading. He had to lean on the desk and blink several times as he scrolled through the document. Something had happened, Annie had written it down, and finally he had found it. He read with his eyes wide, and a terrible suspicion slowly began to develop.

  Bjørk had worked up a high blood-alcohol content.

  The dog was still sitting with his tongue hanging out, panting and impatient, his eyes shifting anxiously. After a while, Bjørk got laboriously to his feet, set the bottle on the ice-cold floor, hiccuped a few times, and straightened up. He immediately fell against the wall, his legs splayed out. The dog got up too, staring at him with yellow eyes. He wagged his tail tentatively two or three times. Bjørk fumbled for the revolver, which was stuck tight in his pocket. He got it out and cocked it, staring at the dog the whole time, as he listened to the sound of his own molars grinding against each other. He swayed, his hand shaking, but fought off the dizziness, raised his arm, and pulled. The violent explosion ricocheted off the walls. The skull split open, and the contents splashed across the walls, and some struck the dog on the snout. The shot continued to reverberate. Gradually it faded to what sounded like distant thunder. The dog lunged to break free, but the leash held. After repeated attempts, the animal was exhausted. He gave up and stood there, whimpering.

  The gallery was located on a quiet street, not far from th
e Catholic church. Outside stood a Citroen, an older model, the kind with slanted headlights. Rather like Chinese eyes, Sejer thought. The car was covered with dust. Skarre went over and looked at it. The roof was cleaner than the rest of the car, as if something had been on top, protecting the surface. It was blue-green.

  "No ski-box," Sejer said.

  "No, it's been removed. There are marks from the fastenings."

  They opened the gallery door and went in. It smelled quite similar to Mrs Johnas's shop, of wool and starch, with a faint hint of tar from the beams in the ceiling. A camera was aimed at them from a corner. Sejer stopped and peered into the lens. Everywhere lay great piles of carpets. A broad stone staircase led up to the floors above. Several carpets were spread out on the floor and some hung from poles on the walls. Johnas was coming down the stairs, dressed in flannel and velvet, red and green and pink and black. With his dark curls he seemed to fit his passion for carpets perfectly. There was something soft and gentle about him. His fierce temper, if it existed, was well concealed. His eyes were dark, almost black, and his whole manner was unmistakably that of a salesman. Friendly, slick, accommodating.

  "Well, hello!" he said. "Come on in. So you want to buy a carpet, is that right?"

  He gave a wave of his arm, as if they were close friends he hadn't seen for a long time, or perhaps potential customers with a weakness for this particular kind of handwork. The knots. The colours. The patterns with the religious symbols. Birth and life and death, pain, victories, pride. To put under the dining-room table or in front of the TV. Indestructible, unique.

  "You have a lot of space here," Sejer said, looking around.

  "Two whole floors, plus an attic. Believe me, this has been a big investment. I've practically skinned myself alive on this place, and it didn't look like this when I took over. Mouldy and grey. But I gave it a proper cleaning and whitewashed the walls, and that's really all it needed. Originally it was an old villa. Follow me, please."

  He pointed up the stairs and led them to what he called his office, but it was actually a spacious kitchen, with a stainless steel counter and stove, a coffee maker, and a small refrigerator. There were tiles above the counter with lovely, chastely attired Dutch girls, windmills, and thick waving grass. Old copper kettles with decorative dents hung from a beam in the ceiling. The kitchen table had brass edges and corners, as though it was from an old ship.

  They sat down around the table, and without asking them Johnas went over to the refrigerator and poured grape juice into wine glasses.

  "How did it go with the puppies?" Skarre asked him.

  "Hera will get to keep one of them, and the other two are already spoken for. So it's too late for you to change your mind. Now what can I do for you?" He smiled and took a sip.

  Sejer knew that his friendliness would quickly evaporate.

  "Just a few questions about Annie. I'm afraid we need to go over the same ground again and again." He wiped his mouth discreetly. "You picked her up at the roundabout - is that right?"

  Sejer's choice of words, his intonation, and the tiniest hint of doubt about his previous statement sharpened Johnas's attention.

  "That's what I said before, and that's exactly what I did."

  "But she actually preferred to walk, didn't she?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "It took a little persuasion for you to get her into the car, is that correct?"

  Johnas's eyes narrowed but he remained silent.

  "She preferred to walk," Sejer said. "She declined your offer of a ride. Am I right?"

  Johnas nodded suddenly and smiled. "She always did that; she was so unassuming. But I thought it was too far to walk to Horgen's Shop. It's quite a way."

  "So you persuaded her?"

  "No, no ..." He shook his head hard and shifted position in his chair. "I coaxed her a little. Some people have a tiresome habit of needing to be coaxed all the time."

  "So it wasn't that she didn't want to get into your car?"

  Johnas heard quite clearly the extra stress on the words "your car".

  "That's the way Annie was. A little aloof, maybe. Who have you been talking to?"

  "Several hundred people," Sejer said. "And one of them saw her get into your car after a long discussion. You're actually the last person to see her alive, and we've got to focus on that, don't you agree?"

  Johnas smiled back, a conspiratorial smile, as if they were playing a game and he was more than willing to participate.

  "I wasn't the last person," he said. "Whoever killed her was the last person."

  "It's proving rather difficult to get hold of him," Sejer said with deliberate irony. "And we have nothing to corroborate that the man on the motorcycle was waiting for Annie. The only thing we have is you."

  "I'm sorry? What are you getting at?"

  "Well," Sejer said, throwing out his hands, "I'm trying to get to the bottom of this case. It's the nature of my job to doubt what people say."

  "Are you accusing me of lying?"

  "I'm afraid that's what I have to think," Sejer said. "I hope you'll forgive me. Why didn't she want to get in?"

  Johnas was visibly uneasy. "Of course she wanted to get in!" He had shown the first sign of anger, and now controlled himself. "She got in and I drove her to Horgen's."

  "No further than that?"

  "No, as I told you, she got out at the shop. I thought she was going there to buy something. I didn't even drive up to the door; I stopped on the road, and let her out. And after that," he stood up to get a pack of cigarettes from the counter, "I never saw her again."

  Sejer steered his interrogation on to a new track.

  "You lost a child, Johnas. You know what it feels like. Have you talked to Eddie Holland about it?"

  For a moment Johnas looked surprised. "No, no, he's such a private person, I didn't want to bother him. Besides, it's not an easy thing for me to talk about either."

  "How long ago was it?"

  "You've talked to Astrid, haven't you? Almost eight months. But it's not the sort of thing you forget or get over."

  He slipped a cigarette out of the pack. Lit up and smoked in an almost feminine way. Merits, filtertipped.

  "People often try to imagine what it's like." He stared at Sejer with weary eyes. "They do it with the best of intentions. Try to picture the empty bed and imagine themselves standing there and staring at it. And I did do that often. But the empty bed is only part of it. I got up every morning and went out to the bathroom, and there was his toothbrush under the mirror. The kind that changes colours when it gets warm. The rubber duck on the edge of the bath. His slippers under the bed. I caught myself setting too many places at the table for dinner, I did it for days. There were stuffed animals that he had left in the car. Months later I found a Band-Aid under the sofa."

  Johnas was speaking through clenched teeth, as if with great reluctance he was revealing things to them that they had no right to know.

  "I threw things out, a little at a time, and it felt as if I was committing a crime. It was painful to look at his things day after day, it was horrible to pack them away. It haunted me every second of the day, and it haunts me still. Do you know how long a person's smell stays in a pair of cotton pyjamas?"