The Fifth Element

by Jorgen Brekke

  “In Trondheim?” Eirik had said. “I just ran into her on the street today, and she said she was in town for a little while, and that she came in on the Fast Boat. But she’s staying on Hitra. Borrowed her sister’s house over there. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah. She’s supposed to be on Hitra this week,” he’d replied. “But next week, when I’m there, we’ll be staying in Trondheim.”

  As he’d hoped, his wife hadn’t said anything about them to Eirik, who invited both of them over for a dinner of bacalao.

  He’d accepted.

  That’s how simple it had been.

  * * *

  They had stayed in her sister’s house once before. It was late summer, a year ago. They went diving and fished for crab, which they ate out on the veranda, which was on the wrong side of the house, the only side without a view of the sea. His sister-in-law had two houses—the one on Olderøya, an island northwest of Hitra, where she had her workshop; and the house on the main island, right near Kvenvær. It was a ramshackle old place. Once upon a time she’d planned to fix it up and turn it into a shop so she could sell the pots and cups that she made. But the place had ended up being a dilapidated vacation cabin for friends and family. She had a lot of friends, so it was always occupied. He guessed that was where his wife would go. How could she be so predictable?

  On the early morning news on the radio, Fagerhus heard that the Hitra tunnel was closed due to an accident, but by the time he got there, it had been cleared. Out here on the coast the snow hadn’t settled on the roads, and the storm, which had raged over large parts of Norway, had begun to move off. It didn’t take him long to reach the small gravel road that led up to his sister-in-law’s house by the shore. He thought about parking the car and walking the last part of the way, but the house was hidden from the road by two huge glacial boulders, so he could drive quite close without arousing suspicion. If she happened to look out the window just as he pulled into the front yard, she wouldn’t recognize the car, so she wouldn’t try to run or send Tina away before he was standing at their front door. Not that there was anywhere to go. He just wanted his daughter. That was all. Everything would go nice and smoothly. No more mistakes. No more surprises. It would all go according to plan.

  As he drove around the boulders, he noticed at once that the door to the house was open. It had blown open and shut twice in the brisk breeze by the time he got out of the car and took the duffel bag with the gear from the backseat. He caught a glimpse of the sea beyond the veranda stairs. There were whitecaps, as if the water were still shaking from the storm. Then he entered the cabin. The floor creaked, just as it always had. The only difference was that the place looked even more decrepit. There were black patches on the ceiling. In the hallway the wallpaper was peeling. He noticed a moldy smell as he went into the living room.

  Why would she want to stay here? he thought. Why would she rather live here than back home in their apartment in Homansbyen, where everything was nice and clean? Where they had a new ventilation system and probably the best heating system in town. What did it say about her that she’d rather hide out in this place? What did it say about him? Had he really been so impossible? Was it that difficult to put up with him? One thing was clear: This was no place for his daughter.

  He stopped in the middle of the room and looked out the windows at the view. The water, the whitecaps, the birds. They’d had a good time here that summer. Was it the year before Tina was born? He’d fucked her here on the table after pulling off her wet swimsuit. A bucket of crabs stood next to the table, and they’d heard them rattling around. What a body she’d had back then. Drops of water glittering on her skin; invisible, downy hair on her stomach; eyes that promised to liberate him, promised him life—if only he would feel something in return.

  He had tried. All these years he’d tried but never got any closer than on this table. He’d almost felt it, the way he thought it should feel. Almost intimacy, almost love.

  Back in those days, down at the dock there’d been a boat that guests could use to go out and visit her sister in the archipelago. He saw the boat was still there, moored, with the canopy down, as if it’d been used recently. There were also two other boats. But he noticed that the boat belonging to the old man they’d met last time was gone. The man used to live in Trondheim and would come out here on weekends to fish. He’d seemed ancient back then and must be dead by now.

  “Where have the two of you gone?” he murmured.

  From where Fagerhus was standing, he could look into the kitchen. Other than the toilet out in the hall, there were no other rooms on the ground floor. He wondered if they were hiding in the bedrooms upstairs, but decided that his daughter would never hide from him, no matter what her mother said. That was when he noticed the piece of paper on the dining table. He reached out to pick it up. As his fingers touched the note, he noticed a tiny red laser dot dance over his hand. Instinctively he turned around and caught sight of a gray box attached to the wall above the sofa at the end of the room.

  He grabbed the note and read what it said:

  Look under the table!

  Quickly he leaned down to look. Between the table legs he saw a wooden crate. It was filled with sticks of dynamite, and attached to them was a blasting cap with a digital timer. The numbers on the display were red. It said:

  04.

  It must have started counting down from ten when his hand interrupted the laser beam. That set off the remote control on the wall, which sent a radio signal to the unit under the table, which began the countdown. Quite a sophisticated setup, designed to start the second he picked up the note. Not before, and not after.

  03.

  He tried counting the dynamite sticks, realizing there was enough to blow up the entire ground floor. Who the hell used dynamite these days?

  02.

  He straightened up, looking for a way out. He didn’t need to look at his heart monitor. His pulse was racing faster than the timer under the table; he could feel it pounding. He took two swift steps back and stared out the window at the sea.

  01.

  I should have realized it was way too easy to find you, he thought. Who the hell helped you with this? Who do you know?

  00.

  The table was lifted off the floor when the explosion came.

  4

  Two weeks after it happened …

  “You’re a cliché, Odd Singsaker.” Felicia Stone looked at him and laughed.

  What did she mean by that?

  “I’m old,” he said.

  She sat on the kitchen counter and tossed her hair back.

  “Old?”

  “I’m a policeman.”

  “You’re a cliché.”

  “I am who I am. A man of habit. An aging policeman. I don’t want to be anything else.”

  “Come on, let’s do something crazy.”

  “You don’t like doing crazy things either.”

  “I’ve never tried it.”

  “Yes, you have. You left me. You ran off to Oslo. I thought you’d gone home to Richmond. For a while I thought you were dead.”

  “Maybe I was.” She jumped down from the counter and went over to him to put her arms around his neck. “Maybe I was dead.”

  * * *

  Odd Singsaker woke up. The bed was empty except for him. He felt his back. No sweat on his shirt or on the sheet. Again he had dreamed about talking to Felicia. They had long discussions about who they were and what they wanted. He didn’t understand these dreams.

  Then he got up. Went straight to the kitchen wearing his shirt and underwear. He looked for his pants, but he couldn’t remember where he’d tossed them. There was no time to take a shower.

  “I put them in the washing machine. Time for a change, Odd.” She was standing next to the kitchen counter. The same place as in his dream.

  It took him a few moments to realize that she was really there. He’d been through so much. It hadn’t helped his memory any.

  “I
t’s going to be a long day,” he said tersely.

  “A tough day,” she said.

  “A day. Just a day that I have to get through. But it’ll be a long one.”

  “When’s your doctor’s appointment?”

  “In twenty minutes.”

  He got out a bottle of Red Aalborg aquavit from the kitchen cupboard and filled a glass half full. He downed it in one gulp.

  “No herring today?”

  “I don’t feel like eating anything,” he said.

  “You have to eat,” she said. “Not eating isn’t going to make anything better.”

  “It’s just a doctor’s appointment and an interview,” he said.

  “Oh, sure. An interview with Internal Affairs. And you’re the one being questioned.”

  “I know that. I’ll grab a roll at the station.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  He went into the bedroom and put on clean clothes. On his way out, she handed him coffee in a paper cup.

  “Drink this on your way. At least you’ll be awake.”

  * * *

  The sun was shining for the first time in weeks, or so he imagined. They’d had one snowstorm after another this winter. And it had been bitterly cold for a long time. Today he was almost too warm in his wool coat as he headed down the road. Or maybe it was because he was walking so fast. He was in a hurry, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He felt even hotter because of the heavy leather shoulder bag he was carrying, which was filled with documents.

  Well, there’s really no rush, he thought, mostly to calm himself down.

  At the medical center, they were always running half an hour behind schedule, even in the morning. So an eight o’clock appointment meant in reality eight thirty. These delays were so consistent that, in Singsaker’s opinion, they could just factor them in when they made their schedules. It would save the patients a lot of unnecessary time spent in the waiting room. And it would spare him from feeling like he was late, when he probably wasn’t. But then it might not be such a bad thing to feel a little stressed. Maybe it was a good sign that he cared about such trivial matters. That he was able to think about something other than what had happened after Felicia disappeared when he was working on the music-box homicide case, and then what happened later on Hitra, when he saw her again.

  Odd Singsaker had been through a lot in life, many tough murder cases, a divorce, and surgery for a brain tumor. But he had no idea how he was ever going to get over what happened on Hitra on that windy winter day two weeks ago. It would haunt him to his grave, like some incurable growth on the anatomy of his psyche, a second brain tumor, one that never grew any bigger, never shrunk, and could never be cut out by a surgeon. Not lethal, and yet not something he could live with.

  At the 7-Eleven nearby he tossed out the coffee even though the cup was still half-full. Then he headed for Vollabakken at a relatively calm pace.

  * * *

  “You’re not well.”

  Dr. Barth was Odd Singsaker’s primary care physician. A patient man around fifty with permanently rosy cheeks, the doctor was fond of repeating himself.

  “And you know it. I’ve explained it all to you before. The tumor we found in 2009, an astrocytoma, as we call it, was malignant. The operation was successful, but we couldn’t remove all of it. That’s not possible with that sort of tumor. Sooner or later, it’s going to start growing again.”

  Singsaker listened without fully taking in what the doctor was saying. He’d heard it all before. The first time, he’d made a vow not to let this news affect his life. His estimated life expectancy was about ten more years, give or take. He knew that, but he didn’t think it was all that bad. Not really much shorter a life span than any man of his age and in his profession could expect.

  “The good news is that you’re shamelessly healthy for a man who’s sick. All the test results are good. I’ve sent the latest images over to St. Olav’s. The tumor is still in stage two. That’s what it should be, and it may stay that way for a long time. Physically it shouldn’t give you any problems, unless the attacks start up again.”

  Dr. Barth was referring to the hallucinations and other ill effects that had occurred when the tumor was discovered. A couple of years back, Singsaker had suddenly collapsed at the police Christmas party.

  “I feel fine,” he said.

  He wasn’t lying. His head felt heavy, but that was not due to any pathological cause.

  “I think you’re doing as well as you possibly could,” said Barth. “And I see that the cognitive test you took for Dr. Nordraak is okay too.”

  Singsaker nodded. He had to take these memory tests at regular intervals for as long as he stayed on the job. Lately the problem was that he wasn’t on the job. Officially he was on sick leave. He’d been taken off active duty ever since he’d suffered an ax blow to his leg during the last homicide case. That was one of the reasons he was in trouble now. He was still on sick leave when he’d joined the action out on Hitra.

  “So let’s take a look at your leg,” said Barth.

  Singsaker pulled up the leg of his pants and his long underwear to bare his calf. The stitches had come out a week ago.

  Barth lifted Singsaker’s heel and did a halfhearted examination of the dark red stripe that was in the process of becoming a permanent but not too disfiguring scar.

  “Good,” he said. “Looks like both your physical and invisible injuries are healing nicely.”

  Singsaker nodded silently.

  “But something is bothering you,” said Barth. “Want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Is it about what I’ve been reading in the papers?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Is it true what they’re saying? That your wife…”

  “It’ll pass,” said Singsaker. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  * * *

  He walked down the street and continued on to the restaurant Baklandet Skydsstation. The ocher-colored building presented a cheerful façade to the street, as always. Icicles hanging from the eaves glittered in the sunshine. He went inside and claimed his usual table closest to the door. He went over to the counter to order his food, then sat back down at the table and stared at the door. He liked to look at the people as they came and went. He could study them without seeming too intrusive. He found it relaxing. It let his mind wander.

  His food arrived. He ate the herring, drinking coffee and a glass of water. The one shot of aquavit he’d had earlier that morning would have to do. He had a long day with a difficult interview ahead of him. Singsaker glanced at his watch. It was almost nine thirty. They’d agreed to start late today, not until noon.

  He leaned down and took a stack of documents out of his bag. He placed them on the table next to the platter of herring. These were the transcripts from yesterday’s interview, forty single-spaced pages with everything that had been said during the first interview regarding the Hitra affair.

  He thought back to his meeting yesterday with the chief investigator for Internal Affairs. He and Kurt Melhus were old acquaintances. In his younger days, Singsaker had spent a year working in Horten. It was his first full-time job on the Trondheim police force. In Horten he and Melhus had been colleagues. He remembered that they’d gotten on well together. Melhus had studied logic at the same time as he attended the police academy. That was enough for the younger police officers in Horten to give him the nickname “the Philosopher.” He didn’t make it any easier for himself by quoting words of wisdom from classical philosophers. Singsaker had liked that about him. Melhus had a genuine depth of character. He often came up with surprising ideas.

  These days, it seemed like an eternity between occasions when they saw each other. Melhus was a special investigator, not someone any active police officer wanted to encounter. Their first meeting yesterday outside the interview room had been unsettling because of the unusual situation in which they found themselves. Melhus had wasted n
o time addressing the difficult matter, and Singsaker couldn’t tell whether that was a sign of friendship or simply a good interviewing technique.

  In his mind, Singsaker again heard Melhus saying:

  “Life consists partly of what you yourself do, and partly of what others do to you. That’s what my aunt used to say. I think she got it from Aristotle. Plus illnesses, she used to add, and those were her own words. She knew what she was talking about. She lost both of her parents to cancer. As did her sister, who was my mother. She died when I was five. Have I ever told you this?”

  Singsaker shook his head.

  “I was really upset when I heard that you were sick. I should have sent you a card,” said Melhus.

  “That’s okay. I’m doing better now,” said Singsaker.

  “No, you’re not. At least not after what you’ve just been through. But let’s put that aside for the moment. We have a lot of ground to cover. We’re not such close friends that this should be a problem from a legal standpoint. We had dinner together a few times when we lived in Horten. But that was a long time ago. Now we have a job to do. Let’s stick to that.”

  * * *

  And with that, the tone for the interview had been set. It was the only appropriate course. This was a serious matter, and Melhus might have to make a difficult choice. He couldn’t allow personal considerations to come into play.

  As an investigator, Singsaker usually prepared himself between interview sessions by reading through the transcripts and carefully studying everything that had already been said. Sometimes a close read could lead to unexpected breakthroughs. But now that he wasn’t the one conducting the interviews and was, in fact, the one being questioned, he just wanted to forget everything that had been said on the previous day. Repress all of it. Pretend that it’d never taken place. Yet the policeman in him knew how important it was to be prepared.