by Thomas Enger
Frode, Mari’s father, sat next to his wife throughout the funeral. I noticed how they looked at each other from time to time, how she leaned her head against his shoulder. In the graveyard he pulled her closer, too. When Mari was finally lowered into the ground, and we all gathered around the family to pay our respects, he gave me a hug and squeezed me tightly. He didn’t say anything, but I could see all I needed to in his eyes. He was sorry. For a lot of things.
Afterwards Cecilie asked if I wanted to join the wake at their home, but I respectfully refused. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially people I didn’t know who were only going to ask me questions about Imo or what actually happened in the pig shed that day. I was done with all that. At least, that’s what I thought.
As I walked away from the graveyard, Ole Hoff came over to me.
‘Even,’ he said. ‘Can I talk to you for a minute?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He took me a few steps away from the rest of the mourners. We stopped by his car.
‘What is it?’ I asked – I could see that something was bothering him.
‘It…’ He waved to a man in a suit. I didn’t recognise him at first, then I realised it was Tic-Tac. I’d never seen him in a suit before.
Ole turned back to me and said: ‘Something’s not right here.’
I looked at him and said, with a slight tremor in my voice, ‘What do you mean?’
‘How much do you really know about what actually happened that night?’
‘Which night?’
‘The night Mari was killed.’
I thought about it for a second. ‘I only know what Imo told me. That he put his hands around Mari’s throat, and before he knew it, he’d strangled her.’
‘He didn’t say that he’d hit her first?’
‘Hit her? No,’ I said, getting anxious. ‘He didn’t say anything about that.’
He nodded. ‘Apparently Mari was hit before she was strangled. Before someone tried to resuscitate her. I read the autopsy report.’
I tried to think.
‘You knew your uncle best,’ he said. ‘Is he the sort of man who would punch a girl that young in the face?’
I thought about my encounter with Ida Hammer that night in her bathroom. What Imo told me afterwards about how a real man should treat women.
There are three things you must never do to a girl, Even. One, you don’t spread false rumours about her. That’s mean. Two, you stick to one girl at a time. And three… you don’t hit them. Not under any circumstance. A guy picks a fight with you, sure, you stand your ground. Not with a girl. Not ever.
Ole looked at me. ‘So, what are you saying?’ I asked, my voice shaking.
‘What I’m saying,’ Ole said, ‘is that I don’t think your uncle killed her.’
84
There are things in life that suddenly turn everything upside down. A comma in the wrong place, a plus or a minus that changes the whole equation.
A lot of the evidence pointed to Imo being the killer. The fact that he had confessed was one piece. The fact that Johannes’ microphone case was found in his home was another. The story he’d told me about sitting down with Mari and talking about my dad and her own mother – he knew all the details.
So what was it that didn’t fit?
I could tell that Ole had discovered something, that he was struggling with how to present it to me. ‘Did you know that Imo was ill?’ he asked.
I cocked my head. ‘Ill? What do you mean?’
‘He had Parkinson’s,’ Ole said. ‘Still early-stage though. You know what Parkinson’s is, don’t you?’
I knew that it was a disease that made it difficult to control your limbs. Which explained Imo’s shaking hands and all the medicine in his bathroom cabinet. I had just assumed they were pills he needed for his back problems.
‘Parkinson’s is a terrible disease to live with,’ Ole said. ‘Basically, it’s just a very slow death.’
‘So you think … that he … that Imo took the blame for what happened, because he wasn’t going to live for a long time anyway?’
I was cold after standing in the churchyard, but that was not why I was now shaking.
‘It’s a possibility, yes,’ Ole said. ‘And while I don’t think your uncle killed Mari, I am pretty sure he killed Johannes Eklund and Børre Halvorsen.’
I felt my eyes growing wider and wider. I had no idea what he was talking about, and he didn’t explain, either.
But then the penny dropped and I found the mistake in my own equation – the plus that should have been a minus.
I understood what Ole meant.
I buried my face in my hands. ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘God no.’
85
NOW
‘What did you do then?’
‘First I had to pull myself together a bit – I was in shock. Then I called Victor Ramsfjell. Børre Halvorsen’s best friend.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘I … needed to ask him about something. A detail that would confirm Ole’s suspicions.’
‘And which detail was that?’
I take another look at my Mum. She is crying. Uncontrollably.
86
THEN
After he buried Åse, Yngve had wondered what it would be like to set his foot inside a church again. He wondered how he would respond to seeing other people grieving for their lost ones, how he’d react to the sombre mood that always seemed to reside inside God’s house. The hushed conversations. The slow, melancholic music. People wearing dark clothes. Men and women taking careful steps between tombstones afterwards, as though afraid of disturbing the dead.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be – not even at the first funeral. Yes, she’d been on his mind the whole time. He’d even seen her, right next to the altar, paying her respects to Johannes Eklund’s family, but he hadn’t spoken to her. Not even when he stopped by her grave after the ceremony. He didn’t need to. Didn’t need her to say anything, either. He was fine.
After Mari Lindgren had been put to rest, Yngve was sitting in his office, looking through some interview records, when the receptionist notified him that Ole Hoff and Even Tollefsen needed to see him.
‘Send them in,’ Yngve said and put the paperwork away inside a manilla folder. He met them at the front door to the main office. Yngve could see that something had happened.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Ole looked around to see if anyone was listening. Therese Kyrkjebø was sitting at her workstation, looking up, her face slightly ashen, but clearly intrigued by their sudden presence. Yngve also caught Vibeke Hanstveit’s inquisitive eyes looking out from behind the glass wall of her office.
Soon all five of them were standing inside her office. Even and Ole presented their story, what they had discovered. And Yngve had to admit, what they said did sound plausible, however shocking it was. The question was, how were they going to prove it?
‘I think I know how to get a confession,’ Even said.
‘Really?’ Hanstveit was sceptical.
‘Yes, really.’
Yngve looked at the boy’s clenched fists. The muscles in his chin, tight as a knot.
‘We need an admissible one,’ Hanstveit protested.
‘I’m sure you can get that afterwards,’ Even said. ‘When you know.’
Then he explained his plan.
Yngve had to admit it was a good one. And Even seemed to be full of courage and determination – desperation maybe. There was also a generous helping of anger in there too. It was like he needed to do this, for his own sake. His father had been dead for ten years. Imo was gone now as well, having shocked the whole of Norway. Mari, Even’s ex-girlfriend and half-sister, had also been murdered. And less than a week ago, Tobias, Even’s brother, had tried to commit suicide.
‘I’m not very comfortable about sending you in there like this,’ Yngve said, before looking at Even. ‘It might be dangerous.’
‘
I can handle it.’
Yngve could tell that Hanstveit didn’t like this either, but she didn’t voice any further concerns.
‘Alright, then,’ Yngve concluded. ‘Let’s do it.’
‘One thing,’ Even said.
‘What is it?’
‘Can I have dinner with them first?’
87
The dinner in our house that day consisted of Swedish meatballs, pasta and a tomato sauce with a heavy taste of basil. Knut was there, too. As usual he didn’t say much.
Afterwards I asked Tobias if he wanted to play Call of Duty with me. It was ages since we’d done anything like that together. The psychiatrist at the hospital had concluded that my brother no longer was suicidal, but that he needed steady routines – no sudden surprises, no upset, only harmony. He’d seemed a lot happier the last few days. Lighter somehow, as though he’d managed to put the past behind him.
‘I spoke to Victor Ramsfjell a little while ago,’ I said somewhere in the middle of the first game.
‘Hm?’ My brother’s hands didn’t stop moving. He seemed to be focusing on what he was doing.
‘Victor,’ I said. ‘Børre Halvorsen’s mate. The one with the red hair, you know? He’s the same age as you.’
Tobias didn’t say anything at first. Then: ‘Why did you talk to him?’
‘I wanted to check something.’
Tobias carried on playing, but I could tell that he’d lost a bit of concentration.
‘Victor wasn’t at the school the night Mari and Johannes were killed. But Børre was his best friend, and they talked all the time. One of the things they talked about was when Børre saw you in the window of the school newspaper room that night.’
Tobias’s hands slowed down.
‘You told me you waited for Mari outside the school, Tobias, but that’s not true. Børre saw you in that window after the show was over. A good while after it was over, too.’
Tobias stopped playing, but he didn’t look at me.
I thought about my brother’s suicide attempt. At first I had believed he was tired of his life somehow, which may have played a part in it, but mostly, I think he was just afraid of getting caught. That when Yngve Mork got him into an interrogation room, he would break down.
‘Was that why Børre had to die?’ I asked him. ‘So he wouldn’t tell the police when he’d seen you?’
My brother didn’t answer.
‘That would have branded you a liar,’ I continued. ‘Børre could have got you arrested. And then you might tell on Imo. And Imo couldn’t take that risk.’
I thought about Ole Hoff and what Imo had tried to make me do. If we had gone through with it – if we’d killed Ole – Imo had said we would never talk about it again. Neither of us would have wanted to. We would have been intent on forgetting. If any alarm bells had rung in my head, I would have ignored them – as it would only have caused me problems. And with everything pointing in Imo’s direction, there was no reason to doubt his confession or any of the evidence that seemed to support it. So there was no reason to ask Tobias any more questions.
But I had never understood why Børre had to die in the first place. He knew nothing about Dad and Cecilie and the fact that Mari was their child.
My brother’s avatar died on the screen in front of us. He blinked. It looked like his eyelids were moving in slow motion. He inhaled deeply and looked at the ceiling for a few seconds. Leaned back in his chair.
‘I just wanted to talk to her,’ he said with a quiet voice. ‘After Imo had. I wanted to talk to her, because … I didn’t understand … she contacted me first, and she was all nice and friendly on the phone. Grateful when I gave her the stupid pictures of you and Dad and told her what stupid blood type he had.’ Tobias picked at a loose thread in his jeans. ‘And then she split up with you, and I thought … I thought that maybe … maybe…’
He ground to a halt for a moment.
‘I didn’t think she’d be like the other girls,’ he finally said. ‘I didn’t think she’d be like that Amalie bitch in Solstad.’
After the funeral, Ole had told me that, before Imo attacked him, he’d driven to Solstad. He’d spoken to Ruben’s father – the idiot who’d come to Fredheim to get Tobias in the middle of the night. I wasn’t aware of just how serious the incident with Amalie, the girl who was in love with me, had been, but according to Ruben’s father, Tobias had flown into a rage that day and put his hands around her neck. Thankfully someone had managed to stop him before it was too late. Amalie had been petrified.
Ole had tried to call me from Solstad. He had wanted to know what I knew about the incident. When I didn’t answer, he turned to Imo. Ole went to his house, because he wanted to ask Imo some questions about Jimmy and Cecilie as well, having discovered the truth about his wife earlier in the day. And that’s when he discovered Johannes’ microphone case. Imo realised that Ole could put both Tobias and him in a lot of trouble, so he decided to put Oskar’s father completely out of the equation. And by bringing me into the frame as well, he thought he’d covered all his bases. That it would all go away.
‘I thought she liked me,’ Tobias said with a soft sob. ‘For real. But she didn’t answer my texts and she didn’t want to talk to me after the show, either, when I went to see her in that room. She was like a wall. Didn’t even want to look me in the eye. That’s when I realised she’d only been acting nice to get what she wanted. She was just like all the others.’
Tobias turned towards me with an angry, sad look on his face. I wondered if I should tell him about Mari’s phone, that she hadn’t answered his texts because it was broken, not necessarily because she didn’t want to.
‘And then I got so angry that I…’
‘…hit her.’ I finished the sentence for him. ‘You hit her first, and then you strangled her.’
Tobias looked away. Then he nodded and took a sharp breath. ‘It all happened so fast I … didn’t realise that…’ His head sank down. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘It was just something that happened.’
I couldn’t move. Not a single muscle.
‘Then Imo came back in and saw what had happened.’ Tobias took another jagged breath. ‘At first he was…’ Tobias shook his head. ‘He tried to bring her back. Did everything he could. He pumped and pumped at her heart and blew into her mouth like a madman. And then Johannes came and…’ Tobias stopped.
For a while I’d thought that Mari had been murdered because she’d discovered something about Dad’s accident, proof that Mum’s version wasn’t true. Perhaps it wasn’t. I still needed to question my Mum about that. But I had realised that what Mari really wanted was to find out as much as possible about her biological father. She may have just wanted to know how he’d died.
‘So what happened after that? After you had both become killers.’
‘Imo … he paced around for a while, thinking. We had to get out of there, but we couldn’t leave through the doors on the first floor. I told him about the newspaper room being open. We went in there and … climbed up onto the roof through the window.’
‘You both did?’
‘Yes. We had no other choice. Imo had his car on the other side. He dropped me off not far from our house and told me to go home. Lay low. Go to school the next day and act as if nothing had happened. Wait for instructions.’
I thought about Børre’s Facebook post that day, the one about me lying. That he’d seen me. I had shown it to Imo before we went to his house to eat and drink. If I hadn’t done that, then maybe Børre would still have been alive.
‘So what happened on the way back to Fredheim,’ I asked. ‘When Imo came to get you from Solstad?’
‘He told me what I had to say to the police,’ Tobias said. ‘In order to save us both. Told me to tell them that I just wanted to get the pictures back so Mum wouldn’t go all crazy on us. It was the only thing he could think of that would make any sense.’
I had been surprised that Tobias cared enough about Mum’s fee
lings that he had sought Mari out on opening night to get the pictures back. It just hadn’t seemed like something he would do. It was easy, though, to imagine the journey back from Solstad to Fredheim. Imo going over the details with my brother, how they should proceed in order not to get caught. I could understand why Tobias had finally snapped and tried to end his own life. To put himself out of his misery.
I thought about my tequila evening with Imo. My uncle had been texting Tobias. Just checking that everything is alright. In other words: checking that Tobias was sticking to their plan and that he hadn’t said anything about what they’d done. Perhaps that had been Imo’s plan all along – to make sure that Tobias was alone and that I was so drunk that I passed out. So he could go out and kill Børre.
‘How well did you know Børre?’ I asked Tobias.
‘Not very well, but I knew he used to hang out under the bridge from time to time.’
‘And you told Imo?’
Tobias nodded.
And Imo had acted on my brother’s information. He had found Børre and ended his life against the bridge wall that night.
‘The other day, you told me that Knut went into the school that night. Why did you do that? You knew he hadn’t done anything.’
Tobias paused for a moment, then said: ‘You were on to me. You’d told Imo about your suspicions, about our fight. I was scared you might say something to the cops as well, so they would put even more pressure on me. I wanted you to focus on someone else.’
‘So I wouldn’t suspect you?’
My brother nodded.
‘You thought of that? Not Imo?’
‘It was my idea, yes.’
And it worked. For a while, at least.
I had thought I would be angrier with Tobias, but a small part of me actually felt sorry for him. He’d always had a difficult relationship with girls, and he’d struggled to find his place both in Solstad and in Fredheim. And he’d never had a lot of friends. Certainly not good ones. He didn’t have football, like I did.
