by Anne Holt
Joachim did not bat an eyelid.
‘But how do you know all this?’ Henrik dared to ask from his sentry post at the door.
‘Sit down, Henrik. Joachim’s not going anywhere. Isn’t that right, Joachim?’
Still no reaction.
Hesitantly, Henrik went back to his seat.
‘When I came to this house sometime after three o’clock on Friday the twenty-second of July,’ Johanne began, ‘the front door was open. The doorbell wasn’t working, as you probably recollect. Isn’t working. Still. When nobody answered, I went in. Called out, but didn’t hear any reply except for your sobs, Ellen, and something Jon said that I didn’t catch. I went upstairs. Sander was dead and lying on Ellen’s lap. What is interesting, however, is a tiny detail that I noticed before I even went upstairs. There’s a desk in the hallway.’
‘A secretaire,’ Helga corrected her stiffly.
‘And one of the bottom cabinet doors is a bit warped. It was open when I arrived. Ever so slightly.’
Johanne measured four or five centimetres with her thumb and index finger.
‘The cabinet was empty. At least there was nothing to be seen through the tiny crack. I saw it as I leaned my umbrella against the desk. When I was leaving, later that evening, I stopped in front of the desk to pick up my umbrella again. The cabinet door was still open, but now there was something inside the cabinet. A laptop. The light from the windows above the door was reflected on the dull metal. I remember it clearly, because I pushed the door to. It stuck, and I had to push it hard. I even noticed the Apple logo before I closed the door. The fact that I forgot the incident until today, I ascribe to two things. First, that I was speaking to Kalle Hovet when I left, and all my concentration was directed at him. Second, we’re all agreed that...’
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
‘...it was a terrible, fucking awful day.’
No one said a word. Jon sat with his mouth open, his lips wet. From time to time he gave a violent shiver, as if he had a fever. Ellen had the glass with the gin mixture in her hand, but was not drinking from it. Joachim had changed position and was now leaning back in his chair, with his legs splayed and his arms folded on his chest.
‘It was not until Jon told me, when we were in the garage, about the laptop that belongs in the desk that the memory clicked into place.’
Henrik poured her more tea.
‘Five people came to this house after my arrival,’ Johanne continued. ‘Five people could have put the machine back. Two men from the undertaker’s, the Police Prosecutor, Henrik Holme and Joachim.’
She looked at the policeman with a mock-quizzical expression.
‘It wasn’t Henrik?’
He shook his head vigorously.
‘Not Kalle Hovet, either,’ Johanne said, tugging at the damp cotton sweater that was sticking to her body. ‘And nor was it the pair from the undertaker’s.’
‘You can’t be sure of that,’ Joachim said.
‘Yes, I can. They hadn’t been here earlier that day, you see. The machine belongs here in this house, in the first place. It had to be removed before it could be put back. Logical, don’t you think?’
‘Joachim was here,’ Jon said, raising his voice. ‘You were here that morning, you said you were going to the gym and to get—’
‘That’s rubbish,’ Joachim said with a snort. ‘Fucking hogwash!’
‘Maybe you sat in the garage and downloaded all that crap,’ Johanne said, paying no attention to his flare-up. ‘The coverage on the house network reaches as far as that anyway. Or in the garden, perhaps. For all I know, you have the right password on your own computer, so you didn’t even need to take the chance of “borrowing” Jon’s MacBook.’
After drawing slow air-quotes, she leaned on her elbows as she lowered her eyes.
‘You can never prove that,’ Joachim said. ‘Never!’
‘I don’t need to, either,’ Johanne said, disheartened. ‘I’m finished with this case. The police will get to hear what I know and believe. They can take it from there. If only you hadn’t...’
All of a sudden she looked up and gazed at Joachim with a mixture of astonishment and contempt.
‘If you hadn’t been such a decent guy at the outset,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘...then you’d probably have got away with this. You possibly regretted the whole business. When Sander died, and you started to feel suspicious that things hadn’t been as they should in this house, you came upon a completely new and far better crime to use to bring Jon down. Anybody else with a suspicion like yours would either have been a coward, like most of us, and kept his mouth shut, or gone to the police. At present you’re terrified of them. Instead you tried to hook me with that...’
She screwed up her eyes again and stroked her temples. Removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes and got up stiffly from her chair.
‘...that ridiculous text message,’ she rounded off.
Her back was sore. Despite the underfloor heating, her feet were ice-cold.
‘And when we met at the Åpent Bakeri café...’
She smiled wanly, put both hands on the small of her back and stretched.
‘You didn’t even conceal the fact that you had something to hide. Your whole body reeked of guilty conscience. You as good as admitted you’d done something wrong. As I said, you’re actually quite a decent young man, Joachim. Deep down. I liked you. However, I really don’t like the idea that you’ve attempted to obtain money by illegal means, and that you tried to push the blame on to Jon.’
The kitchen was so spacious that the five people around the table had no need to move when she pushed in her chair and crossed to the kitchen counter on the opposite side of the room. She turned the tap on full. When the water was hot enough, she let it stream over her hands, over her wrists; she pulled up her damp sleeves with wet fingers and let the water run until her skin turned red.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jon stretch out towards Ellen’s glass and push it beyond her reach.
‘I’m keeping an eye on things,’ he murmured.
‘But who...who killed Sander?’ Henrik Holme asked in a staccato, rather too-loud voice.
‘Jon,’ Johanne said without turning round. ‘Jon killed Sander. I think Jon battered Sander to death, in the brutal way he has behaved towards his son for many years. But the police can take care of that. I want to go home. It’s no longer my business. Actually, it never has been.’
‘No,’ Helga interjected. ‘That’s not how it was.’
‘Mother,’ Jon said.
‘You didn’t kill Sander,’ the old woman said, her voice taking on a rasping note, as if one of her vocal cords had snapped.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t kill Sander. It was an accident.’
‘I’m not going to sit here and—’ Helga began.
‘Mother!’ Jon interrupted her, harsher now, more like his old self.
‘I’m going now,’ Joachim said. ‘I can’t be fucking bothered with all this any more.’
Johanne heard two sets of chair legs scrape across the floor. The hot water was still running over her hands; she turned up her lower arms and leaned her forehead on the high kitchen cabinet.
‘Let him go, Henrik. He’s not going to disappear from the surface of the earth. Tie Jack up beside the garage, Joachim. Under the shelter, preferably. I’ll come shortly. Just go.’
A racket behind her. Furious footsteps across the floor behind her back. Doors slamming: first the kitchen door, then the more muffled sound of the heavy front door. The sound of Henrik sitting reluctantly down again. Johanne shut her eyes and felt her thoughts drift. She could not remember ever being so exhausted. The pain in her back would not abate, and an unpleasant, acid pressure in her diaphragm forced her to turn the water to cold and open the cupboard door to find a glass.
A sudden thought made her freeze in mid-movement.
For far too long she had refused to accept that Jon could have mistreated his
son. Despite all her abilities and knowledge, despite her education, experience and insight, she had done the same as everyone else. Refused to see. Refused to believe. As we all do, she thought, with her hand stiff on a glass on a shelf in the kitchen cupboard. As she was about to do again, it finally dawned on her, and she blushed in shame.
‘What did you say, Jon?’
‘What?’
She did not look at him. Her right hand was still curled around the glass. The water ran in a nerve-racking, steady rush.
‘What did you say when you moved Ellen’s glass?’
‘He’s keeping an eye on things,’ Ellen said in a reedy voice. ‘And he didn’t kill Sander.’
Jon is keeping an eye on things.
At last Johanne managed to pick up the glass. She filled it to the brim with ice-cold water and walked as calmly as she could across to the door.
She turned round and looked at them.
There they sat, the three people who comprised the last Mohr family.
Helga, grey and strict and terribly old. Ellen, with her moist eyes and delicate, restless hands; they had nothing to fiddle with, now that the glass had been taken from her. Beside her sat Jon, a shadow of what he had once been at that time when, at his peak, still not thirty, he had achieved both the career and trophy wife everyone coveted.
Just no children.
Jon is keeping an eye on things. He wasn’t keeping an eye on things.
That was how her complaints had been formulated, that time exactly a fortnight ago almost to the hour. Ellen was blaming Jon for not keeping an eye on things. Jon hated himself for the same reason. Johanne heard their voices, as if it had all been recorded on tape inside her head and could be switched to replay, over and over again.
He wasn’t keeping an eye on things, Ellen lamented. I wasn’t keeping an eye on things, Jon wept.
They had not been talking about keeping an eye on Sander, as she had thought the whole time. It was Ellen that Jon had not been keeping an eye on; Ellen was the one he continually assured that he was assuming responsibility, as now when he had pushed the glass away from her with exactly the same phrase: I’m keeping an eye on things.
But he had not been keeping an eye on things when Ellen killed her son.
Jon hadn’t accompanied Sander to the doctor’s because he wanted to protect himself. He went with Sander to protect Ellen from the consequences of what she had done. Sander hadn’t come to school the day after a concussion, accompanied by his father, because the father was uncaring. Jon was trying to protect Sander. That was why he preferred to stay at home in the afternoons and evenings, even when he had to work, even when Joachim had to accompany him.
For all these years Jon Mohr had tried to protect Sander from his mother, and Ellen from being unmasked. Jon had kept a tight hold on his little family, a family built on a lie that had steadily grown arms and legs until the falsehoods became so numerous and so enormous that both Ellen and Jon had lost their way in them.
‘You were the one who killed Sander,’ Johanne said, as unruffled as possible, once she finally caught Ellen’s eye.
Jon stood up abruptly.
‘It was an accident,’ he yelled and began to splutter. ‘I was the one who...’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Ellen sobbed. ‘How can you... Johanne! It was Jon, he wasn’t keeping an eye on things. And it was an accident and he wasn’t keeping an eye on things!’
‘No!’ Helga’s voice shrieked through Jon and Ellen’s sobs. Henrik had got to his feet. He hammered his fist on the table.
‘Shut up,’ he thundered. ‘Keep your mouths shut, all of you!’
Silence fell as if someone had cut the soundtrack with scissors.
Johanne inclined her head. That day’s copy of Aftenposten was lying on a high shelf beside her. She caught sight of the front-page photo. A funeral. Yet another in the endless series. Yet another teenager. Yet another father carrying a coffin that no father should have to bear.
She recognized him.
The father carrying his daughter to her grave was Kalle Hovet, the Police Prosecutor who had come to her aid when Sander was dead and she had no idea what to do.
Johanne began to cry. She put her glass down on the worktop, took a deep breath and pressed on: ‘Why did you want me to prove Jon’s innocence?’
Her voice was barely audible.
‘I wanted—’
Ellen gasped when Johanne raised her hand as if to deliver a blow, even though she was standing three metres away and could not possibly hit either of them.
‘I didn’t ask you,’ Johanne hissed indignantly. ‘I was asking Helga!’
The old woman was no longer pale. She was ashen.
‘If the police were to reach the wrong conclusion,’ she said hoarsely, ‘then I wanted you to know better. Best of all, I wanted the case to be dropped. Disappear. Nothing could bring Sander back to life. For Jon to be able to live with what his wife...that his child... To live with having protected her for all these years, held his hand over someone who... It wasn’t something that you could live with. The family would... I hoped that the case would be dropped. If not, then I wanted somebody to know. That it wasn’t Jon. That it was Ellen.’
She looked down for the first time. It was the very first time that Johanne saw Helga Mohr with her head bowed.
‘You tried to hire me as some kind of... precautionary measure? Why didn’t you tell me what you knew? Or guessed? Or assumed, or whatever it was you did? Because that fucking... façade is more important than anything else? Because child abuse doesn’t happen among the smart set, or at least not in the Mohr family? What? Answer me!’
‘It was me, Mother!’ Jon wept. ‘I’m the one who wasn’t keeping an eye on things when Sander—’
‘No. I saw you, Jon. I went to find my book, the novel I’d left behind. I took the route through the terrace and saw that Sander was about to draw on the ceiling. I saw Ellen. I saw Sander being pulled down from the stepladder, saw the torch, the blows, the shattering blows, I saw...’
She covered her eyes with her hand and sobbed.
‘I saw you come. Running.’
Silence.
‘I just wanted to protect you, my boy. Shield the family. No reason for a tragedy to become greater than it already was. When all is said and done, you’re the one who’s my responsibility. You.’
Jon was no longer crying. Incredulous, he struggled to catch his breath. Ellen had leaned over the table for the glass. She seemed in a daze as she raised it to her mouth and drank.
‘Why?’ Johanne asked; she had forgotten everything she was capable of, everything she knew, she wanted to go home, right now, but she had to know: ‘How could you take it upon yourself to mistreat your own child?’
Ellen looked up. First at Johanne, then at the ceiling above the door, as if searching for divine assistance. Her shoulders, previously so narrow, almost disappeared as she cowered, curled up over the empty gin glass, and whispered: ‘Because it helped.’
‘What?’ Henrik said.
‘It started because it was the only thing that helped.’
Again that silence – unbearable silence.
‘He was so impossible,’ Ellen whispered, almost mute. ‘The only thing that could get him to...stop. There was so much noise, so much... A little slap, that was all, and then he stopped. Little slaps. Just little slaps, and they helped. Slap.’
Her mouth was so close to the empty glass that her voice was faintly distorted.
‘I had decorated it all so beautifully. I was looking forward to the party. He was sitting at the top of the stepladder and was going to spoil it all with those coloured pens of his. He spoiled everything, far too often. A little slap, that was all, it helped.’
‘Because it helped. Because it helped?’
Johanne wheeled round. She wrenched the door open. In the hallway – that far too enormous, un-Norwegian hallway – she grabbed her rain jacket and shoved her feet into her boots and then struggled with t
he front door, which refused to open; she tore it open, dashed out and let the rain pummel her face. She nearly fell over on the slippery slate steps, regained her balance and sprinted on, up the steps where she saw Jack tied to the garage gutter with the grubby scrap of blanket by his side. Suddenly she was blinded by car headlights; it was Joachim, she thought. Joachim was still sitting in his car. She wanted to stop, but her body had lurched forward when, on the top step, her foot crashed into a toy car, a red fire engine partly hidden by rhododendron leaves, a car that resembled Kristiane’s Sulamit to a T, and she slipped.
There was something about the angle of the fall.
Something about feeling her lower body continue to sail forward, with the fire engine like a roller-skate under her right foot, while the rest of her body headed in a different direction. It was a bad fall, she just had time to realize that as her head flew first upwards, then backwards and down to where there were steps and a steep incline and jagged stones.
When she heard the sound of her own skull crack, it was not Kristiane’s cautious farewell smile that she saw in her mind’s eye. It was not Ragnhild’s wet goodbye kiss on her cheek that she felt. She was never going to see Tarjei, he would never be born, but in the lightning bolt of time and sunlight from the moment the sharp slate edge of the second-to-bottom step struck the back of her head until she was no longer conscious, she did not think about her own children.
We let Sander happen, Johanne thought, and died.
PRAISE FOR
ANNE HOLT
‘Anne Holt reveals how truly dark it gets in Scandinavia’
Val McDermid
‘Anne Holt is a thriller writer of the highest order’
Liza Marklund
‘Lively, unusual and persuasive. Holt writes with the command we have come to expect from the top Scandinavian writers’
The Times
‘It is easy to see why Anne Holt, the former minister of justice in Norway and its bestselling female crime writer, is rapturously received in the rest of Europe’
Guardian
‘Step aside, Stieg Larsson, Holt is the queen of Scandinavian crime thrillers’
Red
