Dregs (2011)

by Jorn Lier Horst

  ‘Do you sell them, or do you fish yourself?’ Line asked.

  ‘I fish myself,’ Age Reinholdt explained, beginning on a new pot. ‘I’m up and pulling them at four o’clock every morning. The first pan is on the boil at half past seven. When the shop down at Sondersrod opens, I’ve got between 100 and 150 crabs for them.’

  ‘As many as that?’

  ‘It varies, of course, but the secret lies in the bait.’

  ‘What do you use?’

  ‘That’s what the secret is.’ He put his work down and smiled at her with a row of teeth that spoke well of the dentistry service in Norwegian prisons. ‘Crabs can smell underneath the water,’ he claimed.

  Line returned his smile and remembered how she had fished for shore crabs when she was little. It never took many minutes from the time she had fastened a mussel onto the line and cast it out until the first crabs appeared. She had never thought about it, but it had almost been as though they could smell the bait.

  ‘They smell with their antennae,’ he explained, wiggling with his fingers on his forehead. ‘They can smell a tasty morsel up to a kilometre away.’

  ‘What kind of tasty morsels do you lure them with?’

  The man facing her had taken on a different energy now, a kind of involvement.

  ‘I get out of date meat products down in the shop,’ he said, ‘packets of sandwich toppings, chops, tenderloin, and juicy steaks. The more perished and bloody, the better.’

  ‘Do you make a living from it?’

  Age Reinholdt shook his head.

  ‘I’ve received disability benefit from the day I was released. The money from the crabs is more like holiday money.’ He leaned back, staring straight ahead. ‘That was the life I dreamed about. My grandfather fished with pots, and that was the way I always thought my life would be. It took a few wrong turnings, but now I’m here.’

  ‘Where did you go wrong?’ Line asked, feeling her way with words so as not to cross him in any way. ‘What was it that led to the wrong turning?’

  Age Reinholdt remained sitting, not uttering a word.

  ‘My mother died when I was eight,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve never understood what she died of. It was as though she just withered away. One Sunday morning she didn’t get up. In the evening they came and carried her away.’

  Age Reinholdt took hold of the tobacco pouch that lay on the deal table in front of them. Line nodded, as an encouragement for him to continue.

  ‘Afterwards I sometimes thought that it might have been best that way. She escaped.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He hit her,’ he said by way of explanation, dividing the tobacco in the paper. ‘Hurt and tormented her. I don’t remember much of it, just that I crawled onto Mum’s lap when his eyes darkened. I thought that he wouldn’t strike out while I was sitting with her. I remember the smell of her and the fast heartbeats before she lifted me down and told me to go into the living room and turn on the radio.’

  He put the rolled cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a lighter. Then he took a deep breath, took out the cigarette and spat.

  ‘That’s a part of the story, but I don’t know if it has anything to do with what happened later. With what I did.’

  Line held on to the eye contact she had with him and cocked her head to the side.

  ‘We lived in a flat in Sagene. Dad worked in different workshops along the Akerselva river. In the evenings he and his pals sat at our house drinking. Maybe I was unmanageable. He did everything to make me pay attention, hit me, burned me with cigarette butts, shut me in or threw me out. It was all the same. I began to drink to escape.’

  The dry tobacco crackled when he inhaled.

  ‘I’ve had plenty of time to think about these things,’ he continued. ‘Talked to people who are experts. Psychologists and that. They think I’m transferring and repeating the violence on to others, but I don’t believe that keeping me locked up has made me less violent.’

  Line leaned forwards. The conversation was going in the right direction.

  ‘Yes? What effect has prison had on you?’ she asked.

  Age Reinholdt leaned across the table, pulled an overflowing ashtray towards him and tapped the ash off his cigarette.

  ‘It’s made me mad,’ he said, spitting once more. ‘You need to go mad when you are left to your own devices and to your thoughts, confined in a space of six square metres for most of the hours of the day. I remember the anxiety that got hold of me when I had scratched five lines on the edge of the table and realised that this was the way I was going to spend the next ten years. It sat like a lump in my belly. Do you know how many lines there’s room for along the edge of a table that measures one and a half metres?’

  Line shook her head.

  ‘757. Two years and 27 days. I continued on the ends, and turned the table round a year later. Then I still had another 2000 lines to go, but there was no room for any more. It didn’t matter anyway. By then I had lost any overview a long time before. The days and weeks ran into each other. The only way I could register that a week had gone past, was that the food was served at different times at the weekends. It was something you looked forward to. That dinner was at three o’clock instead of five.’

  ‘All the same you ended up in jail again,’ Line said cautiously. ‘Ten years after you had been released.’

  ‘Madness,’ Age Reinholdt asserted with a nod. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘What did you do for all these days? All those hours?’

  ‘When I served the first sentence, in the seventies, there was no TV in the cells, so the solution for me was books. The prison had a good library, and I tried to escape reality by immersing myself in books. I didn’t read a single other book after I was released.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette and let his hand rest around an empty coffee cup.

  ‘The second sentence was actually worse, although there was cable TV in the cells and various leisure options. In the course of the first six months I realised that I might as well not exist at all. I meant nothing to anyone. I had no one to use my phone time on, and no visitors. I was just there, exactly like a potted plant. I became depressed and self-destructive and began to slash myself with knives, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I really existed.’

  Line scrutinised his arms and saw the scars she hadn’t noticed before. Some of them ran lengthwise and were deeper than what would be called slashes. She wanted to take photos of them, but considered that it would be inappropriate to lift her camera while the man in front of her was still talking. Instead she jotted down some keywords: depression, psychological difficulties, suicide attempts. Age Reinholdt shed light on aspects of imprisonment that other interview subjects had not opened up on.

  ‘I still have the same thoughts,’ Age Reinholdt went on. ‘Being deprived of contact with other people has serious consequences. The only people I talked to were prison staff, overworked leaders of leisure activities, health personnel and other inmates, other madmen. I accept that I must be punished for what I did, but isolating someone because they have done something crazy, that’s inhuman. It does irreparable harm, and is not the best thing for anyone.’

  He got up, threw away a splash of cold coffee, and stared out to sea.

  ‘That’s why I live here,’ he said. ‘Some people might think that this is also living in isolation, but I’ve got freedom. Everything is open in front of me, as far as the eye can see.’

  Line turned to look. Thickets on every side enclosed the overgrown agricultural landscape, but facing them was the sea. It was so blue that the sky seemed paler. The coast was steep, but without an edge of foam. Against the grey-blue silhouette she saw the lighthouse at Tvistein, and behind that a cargo ship bound for Langesundsbukta.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked Age Reinholdt suddenly.

  Line glanced at the stained cup he was holding.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she responded, mainly to be polite.

  She
got up while Age Reinholdt disappeared into the old main house, and picked out another lens from her bag. She took a few photographs of the view before walking several metres from the house, and hunkered down to focus on a rusty harrow that was lying dug into the earth, slowly becoming choked with nettles and dandelions. It was an image that contrasted strikingly with the blue background.

  ‘I had to heat the kettle up,’ said Age Reinholdt behind her. ‘It’ll be ready in a minute. I’m not used to visitors.’

  During her preparations for this interview, Line had decided to ask Age Reinholdt if he had met a new woman. As far as she knew, he had only had two girlfriends in his life, and he had murdered them both.

  ‘You haven’t found anybody that you want to share the rest of your life with, then?’ she asked, just as she had planned.

  He smiled, and it looked as if he was wondering how to answer, before he ended up with a short, ‘No.’

  ‘Do you miss that?’

  ‘We humans are not created to live alone,’ he admitted. ‘But I think it’s too soon. Or else it’s already too late.’

  He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his baggy work trousers, seemingly bothered by the topic.

  ‘It’s not so easy for someone like me,’ he continued. ‘The years in jail have made me antisocial. I keep myself to myself. The only place I go is Furubakken, for interviews with my psychiatrist, and then into the shop with my crabs. They’re not exactly pick-up places.’

  He kicked a tuft of grass, grabbing at the tobacco pouch in his breast pocket.

  ‘It was actually easier when I was inside,’ he elaborated. ‘I thought it was me who was mad, but letters with proposals of marriage turned up all the time from women I had never met or had any idea about. Can you imagine it? I had killed the girlfriend I was living with, and then I get letters from women who want me?’

  ‘Have you met any of them?’

  ‘One of them drove 300 kilometres to visit me every Sunday.’

  ‘Have you any contact with her now?’

  A different expression came over Age Reinholdt’s face and he shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said, turning and walking towards the house. ‘I think the coffee will be hot now.’

  He stopped in the doorway, put the newly rolled cigarette into his mouth, lit it and turned to face her.

  ‘You’d better not write about any of that,’ he said, and disappeared into the house.

  CHAPTER 33

  The sun was setting over a flat calm sea, with the cry of seagulls in the air. The air had turned slightly cooler.

  Wisting had eaten his fill of the seafood that Line had brought from the fishmonger’s shop by the steamship harbour and served with herb bread and garlic mayonnaise.

  They were sitting across from each other at the table on the verandah. Sounds from the town rose and sank like breakers in the air, mixed with the buzzing of wasps and bumblebees working amongst the rosebushes that were growing wild beside the wall of the house.

  ‘That was good,’ Wisting thanked her, ‘a nice surprise. I had actually thought I would heat myself some frozen food.’

  Line smiled back at him.

  ‘Did you know that crabs can smell?’ she enquired, holding up a crab shell.

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘Especially if they’re left lying for a while.’

  She laughed.

  ‘They use their sense of smell to find food on the bottom of the sea,’ she explained.

  ‘I’d prefer not to think about what crabs or other sea creatures eat before they become delicacies for us,’ Wisting remarked, bending over the table to study the shell. ‘Where’s its nose?’

  She laughed, throwing the shell into a bowl of scraps before she got up to clear the table.

  ‘Were you not supposed to be with Suzanne tonight?’ she asked. ‘We could have invited her.’

  ‘I’m not good company,’ Wisting said dismissively. He got up and gathered the plates and cutlery. ‘I need to do some work. Reading reports,’ he went on by way of explanation, but understanding that he would miss having her near. ‘What about you?’ he asked, following behind her into the kitchen. ‘Shouldn’t you have been with Tommy?’

  ‘I’ve got to work as well,’ she explained, nodding towards the kitchen table.

  Wisting rinsed the plates before placing them in the dishwasher. He glanced at the space his daughter had turned into a work area - her computer was switched on and a series of summer images changed on the screen, operating as a screen saver. An abandoned agricultural implement in a meadow filled with flowers. A beautiful summer bird on a yellow flower growing through a rusty iron pipe. Brilliant colours and striking contrasts. She was a competent photographer. Suddenly the face of a stocky man appeared. His eyes were searching, a little to the side and past the photographer.

  The photograph gave him a sense of deja-vu. The same experience he had when Daniel Meyer appeared at the door of his grandfather’s house in Kongsberg earlier that day, before he managed to place him as one of the crowd of spectators out at Blokkebukta cove.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, nodding towards the screen as the picture changed to one of the man pressing a cigarette tightly between his lips and lighting up.

  Line turned round, peering over at the screen.

  ‘That’s Age Reinholdt,’ she explained. ‘The double murderer I told you about. I interviewed him earlier today.’

  Pieces of a jigsaw picture in his memory fell into place for Wisting.

  ‘That was strange,’ he commented. ‘I saw him yesterday. At a psychiatrist’s at Furubakken.’

  ‘It’s not so strange,’ Line smiled. ‘He’s gone mad, he says. Goes to the psychiatrist’s three times a week.’

  Wisting smiled back.

  ‘It’s strange all the same,’ he thought, ‘that I saw him yesterday, and then you speak to him today. Neither of us has ever met him before.’

  ‘Synchronicity,’ Line explained.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Coincidence without connection. If you think about it, it happens quite a lot. For example, when a car drives out from a full parking place so that you get an empty spot just as you drive in.’

  ‘That never happens to me.’

  ‘Or if you think about a person,’ Line went on. ‘Then that person suddenly calls you on the phone. Two chance occurrences.’

  Wisting understood what she meant.

  ‘It’s exactly like the fact that I interviewed Ken Ronny Hauge yesterday.’

  ‘The police murderer?’

  Line nodded, continuing: ‘And today there’s an interview with his brother in the Ostlands-Posten newspaper.’

  ‘Is there?’

  Line went over to the box of discarded newspapers behind the door and took out the paper.

  ‘It’s on the Saturday pages,’ she elaborated, leafing back through the pages before laying the newspaper on the worktop in front of him.

  Sharp Sales was the inventive title on an article describing the success story of a local company that supplied automatic cutting and grinding tools to the stone industry. Made gold out of granite, the text proclaimed beneath a photograph of the founder, Rune E. Hauge. Large new contracts had been entered into with a slate quarry in Oppdal, a new granite quarry in Gudbrandsdal and three big stone quarries in Finland. The success lay in the development of a unique laser-based cutting technology.

  ‘That’s his little brother,’ Line explained. ‘A chance coincidence.’

  In his work, Wisting had seen how coincidences could play against each other. He had often thought of how coincidences became decisive, but also understood that what might be regarded as a chance coincidence, might just as well be seen as an unavoidable interaction of events.

  ‘It could at any rate seem like a coincidence,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How many events does a person actually experience in the course of a day, do you think?’

  He went on before she had an opportuni
ty to reply: ‘What is an event, actually? Blinking is an event, going to the toilet is an event, sitting in a cafe is an event, thinking a thought is an event too. All the things we do and all the things that happen, are events.’

  Line nodded, but looked as if she did not fully comprehend.

  ‘So how many events do you experience in the course of a day?’

  ‘A thousand?’ she suggested.

  ‘That doesn’t sound unreasonable. Probably there are more. It depends on how detailed you want to be. Eating dinner can be considered as one event, but the actual dinner consists again of many minor events, such as, for example, putting the fork into the food or lifting a glass. Chewing, swallowing and belching. I think that, in the course of a week, you have taken part in 50,000 small and large events.’

  He glanced over to see if she agreed. She nodded.

  ‘Is it probable then that, in the course of a week, during one of these events, a situation crops up that can appear to be a coincidence decreed by fate?’

  She understood where he was going now, and simply smiled in response.

  ‘Statistically speaking, it’s almost remarkable if an event like that doesn’t take place,’ he concluded.

  ‘So coincidences are not coincidental?’ she asked teasingly.

  ‘Well yes, that’s exactly what they are,’ he expanded further. ‘Nothing else, but I think that we humans have a particular ability to suppress and forget the neutral and meaningless things. We remember the time we thought about someone just before they phoned us, but we forget about the times we thought of the same person after which they didn’t phone.’

  Line folded up the newspaper.

  ‘Some things in life are random all the same,’ she felt. ‘Eighteen years ago, Rune Hauge started as an apprentice in the stone quarry at Tvedalen, at the same time as his brother was sentenced for murder. The little brother has become a millionaire several times over. The big brother has nothing. No one could see that in them at that time, that life would work out so differently for them.’ She turned to the computer, on which one of the photographs of Age Reinholdt remained on the screen. ‘In the case of Age Reinholdt, you can in a way understand what turned him into a man of violence. He was thrashed and punched from when he was a little child, but Ken Ronny Hauge had no such external influences. He ended up behind the walls of a prison while his brother became a great success.’