by Anne Holt
Copyright © 2001 by Anne Holt
English translation copyright © 2006 by Kari Dickson
All rights reserved.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
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The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: July 2006
ISBN: 978-0-7595-6772-6
Contents
COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT
The ceiling was blue. The man in the shop claimed that the dark color would make the room seem smaller. He was wrong. Instead the ceiling was lifted; it nearly disappeared. That’s what I wanted myself, when I was little: a dark night sky with stars and a small crescent moon over the window. But Granny chose for me then. Granny and Mom, a boy’s room in yellow and white.
Happiness is something I can barely remember, like a light touch in a group of strangers, gone before you’ve had a chance to turn around. When the room was finished and it was only two days until he was going to come, I was satisfied. Happiness is a childish thing and I am, after all, thirty-four. But naturally I was happy. I was looking forward to it.
The room was ready. There was a little boy sitting on the moon. With blond hair, a fishing rod made from bamboo with string and a float and hook at the end: a star. A drop of gold had dribbled down toward the window, as if the heavens were melting.
My son was finally going to come.
ONE
She was walking home from school. It was nearly National Day. It would be the first 17th of May without Mommy. Her national costume was too short. Mommy had already let the hem down twice.
Last night, Emilie had been woken by a bad dream. Daddy was fast asleep; she could hear him snoring gently through the wall as she held her national costume up against her body. The red border had crept up to her knees. She was growing too fast. Daddy often said, “You’re growing as fast as a weed, honey.” Emilie stroked the woollen material with her hand and tried to shrink at the knees and neck. Grandma was in the habit of saying, “It’s not surprising the child is shooting up; Grete was always a beanpole.”
Emilie’s shoulders and thighs ached from being hunched the whole time. It was Mommy’s fault she was so tall. The red hem wouldn’t reach farther than her knees.
Maybe she could ask for a new dress.
Her schoolbag was heavy. She’d picked a bunch of coltsfoot. It was so big that Daddy would have to find a vase. The stalks were long, too, not like when she was little and only picked the flowers, which then had to bob around in an eggcup.
She didn’t like walking alone. But Marte and Silje had been collected by Marte’s mom. They didn’t say where they were going. They just waved at her through the rear window of the car.
The flowers needed water. Some had already started to wilt over her fingers. Emilie tried not to clutch the bunch too hard. A flower fell to the ground and she bent down to pick it up.
“Is your name Emilie?”
The man smiled. Emilie looked at him. There was no one else to be seen here on the small path between two busy roads, a track that cut ten minutes off the walk home. She mumbled incoherently and backed away.
“Emilie Selbu? That’s your name, isn’t it?”
Never talk to strangers. Never go with anyone you don’t know. Be polite to grown-ups.
“Yes,” she whispered, and tried to slip past.
Her shoe, her new sneaker with the pink stripes, sank into the mud and dead leaves. Emilie nearly lost her balance. The man caught her by the arm. Then he put something over her face.
An hour and a half later, Emilie Selbu was reported missing to the police.
TWO
I’ve never managed to let go of this case. Perhaps it’s my bad conscience. But then again. I was a newly qualified lawyer at a time when young mothers were expected to stay at home. There wasn’t much I could do or say.”
Her smile gave the impression that she wanted to be left alone. They’d been talking for nearly two hours. The woman in the bed gasped for breath and was obviously bothered by the strong sunlight. Her fingers clutched at the duvet cover.
“I’m only seventy,” she wheezed, “but I feel like an old woman. Please forgive me.”
Johanne Vik stood up and closed the curtains. She hesitated, not turning around.
“Better?” she asked after a while.
The old woman closed her eyes.
“I wrote everything down,” she said. “Three years ago. When I retired and thought I would have . . .”
She fluttered a thin hand.
“. . . plenty of time.”
Johanne Vik stared at the folder lying on the bedside table beside a pile of books. The old woman nodded weakly.
“Take it. There’s not much I can do now. I don’t even know if the man is still alive. If he is, he’d be . . . sixty-five. Or something like that.”
She closed her eyes again. Her head slipped slowly to one side. Her mouth opened a fraction and as Johanne bent down to pick up the red folder, she caught the smell of sick breath. She put the papers in her bag quietly and tiptoed toward the door.
“One last thing.”
She jumped and turned back toward the old woman.
“People ask how I can be so sure. Some think it’s just an idée fixe of an old woman who’s of no use to anyone anymore. I’ve done nothing about it for so many years . . . When you�
�ve read through it all, I would be grateful to know . . .”
She coughed weakly. Her eyes slid shut. There was silence.
“Know what?”
Johanne whispered, not sure if the old lady had fallen asleep.
“I know he was innocent. It would be good to know whether you agree.”
“But that’s not what I’m . . .”
The old woman slapped the edge of the bed lightly with her hand.
“I know what you do. You are not interested in whether he was guilty or innocent. But I am. In this particular case, I am. And I hope you will be too. When you have read everything. Promise me that? That you’ll come back?”
Johanne smiled lightly. It was actually nothing more than a noncommittal grimace.
THREE
Emilie had gone missing before. Never for long, though once—it must have been just after Grete died—he hadn’t found her for three hours. He looked everywhere. First he’d made some irritated phone calls to friends, to Grete’s sister who only lived ten minutes away and was Emilie’s favorite aunt, to her grandparents who hadn’t seen the child for days. He punched in new numbers as concern turned to fear; his fingers hit the wrong keys. Then he rushed around the neighborhood, in ever-increasing circles, his fear growing into panic, and he started to cry.
She was sitting in a tree writing a letter to Mommy, a letter with pictures that she was going to send to Heaven as a paper airplane. He plucked her carefully from the branch and sent the plane flying in an arc over a steep slope. It glided from side to side and then disappeared over the top of two birch trees that thereafter were known as the Road to Paradise. He did not let her out of his sight for two weeks. Not until the end of the holidays, when school forced him to let her go.
It was different this time.
He had never called the police before; her shorter and longer disappearing acts were no more than was to be expected. This was different. Panic hit him suddenly, like a wave. He didn’t know why, but when Emilie failed to come home when she should have, he ran toward the school, not even noticing that he lost a slipper halfway. Her schoolbag and a big bunch of coltsfoot were lying on the path between the two main roads, a shortcut that she never dared take on her own.
Grete had bought the bag for Emilie a month before she died. Emilie would never just leave it like that. Her father picked it up, reluctantly. He could be wrong—it could be someone else’s schoolbag, a more careless child’s, perhaps. The schoolbag was almost identical, but he couldn’t be sure until he opened it, holding his breath, and saw the initials. ES. Big square letters in Emilie’s writing. It was Emilie’s schoolbag and she would never have just left it like that.
FOUR
The man referred to in Alvhild Sofienberg’s papers was named Aksel Seier and he was born in 1935. When he was fifteen years old, he’d started an apprenticeship as a carpenter. The papers said very little about Aksel’s childhood, except that he moved to Oslo from Trondheim when he was ten. His father got a job at the Aker shipyard after the war. The boy had three offenses on his criminal record before he even reached adulthood, but nothing particularly serious.
“Not compared with today, at least,” Johanne mumbled to herself and read on. The paper was dry and yellow with age. The court transcripts mentioned two kiosk break-ins and an old Ford that was stolen and then left stranded on Mosseveien when it ran out of gas. When Aksel was twenty-one, he was arrested for rape and murder.
The girl was named Hedvig and was only eight years old when she died. A customs officer found her, naked and mutilated, in a sack by a warehouse on the Oslo docks. After two weeks’ intense investigation, Aksel Seier was arrested. It was true that there was no technical evidence. No traces of blood, no fingerprints. No footprints or marks of any kind to link the person to the crime. But he had been seen there by two reliable witnesses, out on honest business late that night.
At first the young man denied it vigorously. But eventually he admitted that he had been in the area between Pipervika and Vippetangen on the night that Hedvig was killed. Just doing some bootlegging, but he refused to give the customer’s name.
Only a few hours after his arrest, the police had managed to dig up an old charge for flashing. Aksel was only eighteen when the incident took place, and according to his own statement he was simply urinating when drunk at Ingierstrand one summer evening. Three girls had passed him. He just wanted to tease them, he said. Drunken horseplay and high spirits. He wasn’t like that. He hadn’t flashed them, but was just joking around with three hysterical girls.
The charge was later dropped, but never quite disappeared. Now it was resurrected from oblivion like an indignant finger pointing at him, a stigma that he thought had been forgotten.
When his name was published in the newspapers, in big headlines that led Aksel’s mother to commit suicide on the night before Christmas, 1956, three more incidents were reported to the police. One was discreetly dropped when the prosecuting authorities discovered that the middle-age woman in question was in the habit of reporting a rape every six months. The other two were used for all they were worth.
Margrete Solli had dated Aksel for three months. She had strong principles, which didn’t suit Aksel, she claimed, blushing with downcast eyes. On more than one occasion he had forced her to do what should only be done in marriage.
Aksel himself told another version. He recalled delightful nights by Sognsvann, when she giggled and said no and slapped his hands playfully as they crept over her naked skin. He remembered passionate good-bye kisses and his own half-baked promises of marriage when he had finished his apprenticeship. He told the police and the judge that he’d had to persuade the young girl, but no more than was normal. That’s just the way women are before they get a ring on their finger, is it not?
The third charge was made by a woman Aksel Seier claimed he had never met. The alleged rape had taken place many years before, when the girl was only fourteen. Aksel denied it repeatedly. He had never seen her before in his life. He stubbornly stuck to this throughout his nine-week custody and the long and devastating trial. He had never seen the woman. He had never even heard of her.
But then he was known to be a liar.
When he was charged with murder, Aksel finally gave the name of the customer who could give him an alibi. The man was named Arne Frigaard and had bought twenty bottles of good moonshine for twenty-five kroner. When the police went to check this story, they met an astonished Colonel Frigaard at his home in Frogner. He rolled his eyes when he heard the gross accusations and showed the two officers his bar. Honest drinks, every one. His wife said very little, it was noted, but nodded when her pompous husband insisted that he had been at home nursing a migraine on the night in question. He had gone to bed early.
Johanne stroked her nose and took a sip of cold tea.
There was nothing to indicate that anyone had investigated the colonel’s story any further. All the same, she could sense the irony, or perhaps even sarcastic objectivity, in the judge’s dry, factual rendition of the policeman’s testimony. The colonel himself had not been called as a witness in court. He suffered from migraines, his doctor claimed, thereby sparing his patient of many years the embarrassment of being confronted with allegations of buying cheap spirits.
Johanne jumped when she heard noises from the bedroom. Even after all this time, even when things had been so much better for the past five years—the child was healthy now, and usually slept soundly from sunset to sunrise and probably just had a bit of a cold—she felt a chill run down her spine whenever she heard the slightest sleepy cough. All was quiet again.
One witness in particular stood out. Evander Jakobsen was seventeen years old and was in prison himself. However, he had been free when little Hedvig was murdered and claimed that he’d been paid by Aksel Seier to carry a sack for him from an address in the old part of town, down to the harbor. In his first statements, he said that Seier walked through the night streets with him but didn’t want to carry the s
ack himself as “that would draw too much attention.” He later changed his story. It was not Seier who had asked him to carry the sack, but another—unidentified—man. In the new version, Seier met him at the harbor and took the sack from him without saying much. The sack supposedly contained old pigs’ heads and feet. Evander Jakobsen couldn’t be certain, as he never checked. But it stank, that’s for sure, and it could have weighed roughly the same as an eight-year-old.
This obviously phoney story had sowed seeds of doubt in the mind of Dagbladet’s crime reporter. He described Evander Jakobsen’s explanation as “highly implausible” and had found support for this in Morgenbladet, in which the reporter unashamedly mocked the young jailbird’s conflicting stories told from the witness stand.
But the journalists’ doubts and reservations were of little help.
Aksel Seier was sentenced for the rape of little Hedvig Gåsøy, age eight. He was also found guilty of killing her with the intent to destroy any evidence of the first crime.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Johanne placed all the papers carefully one on top of the other. The small pile contained transcripts of the judgement and a large number of newspaper articles. No police documents. No records of questioning. No expert reports, though it was clear that several of these had existed.
The newspapers stopped writing about the case soon after the verdict was given.
For Johanne, Aksel Seier’s sentence was just one of many similar cases. It was the end of the story, however, that made it different and that made it hard to sleep. It was half past twelve and she wasn’t in the slightest bit sleepy.
She read through the papers again. Under the verdicts, attached to the newspaper cuttings with a paper clip, was the old lady’s alarming account.
Eventually Johanne stood up. It was starting to get light outside. She would have to be up in a few hours. When she nudged the child over to the other side of the bed, the little girl grunted sleepily. She could just stay where she was. Sleep was a long way off anyway.
