A Grave for Two

by Anne Holt

  ‘Who knew about the first drugs test?’ he asked as he stood up. ‘The negative one?’

  ‘The top brass in the Federation, at any rate. Me. And now you. Are you going home to catch some sleep?’

  ‘After learning of this? No. I need to get back to work.’

  He was so tall that Selma inevitably had to lean back when she looked up at him. A certain reluctance had come over his whole demeanour. His jacket was still halfway on, hanging over one shoulder with the collar partly turned.

  ‘See you again,’ Selma said cheerfully.

  His phone gave a short, shrill ring. He pulled it out of his pocket, glanced at it and held it up to Selma.

  ‘There it is,’ he said, not entirely able to conceal how elated he was. ‘DG Sport’s third headline story of the day.’

  Selma read it.

  ‘Good God,’ she said slowly. ‘Norway’s at risk of being excluded from the Winter Olympics.’

  ‘Yep. Both Sweden and Finland are rattling their sabres. If the Germans jump in, things could turn nasty. The IOC are to deal with the case before the end of the week.’

  ‘About us … possibly not being permitted to participate at all?’

  Lars spread out his arms.

  ‘It’s too early to say. The IOC has just decided that clean Russians will be allowed to take part, if such a thing actually exists. But not under their own flag or with their own colours. There’s been far too systematic a doping regime in that camp. How things will end in Norway’s case, it’s too early to tell. But as I said, it doesn’t look good.’

  The shrieking babies had wakened the sleeping one over by the window. Lars flashed a look at the mothers who sat in a circle around the table in a strange, swinging dance, each with a howling baby at the breast. He was still slightly hesitant about leaving. He finally took his leave by putting a finger to his forehead and saying, ‘See you soon, just give me a call,’ before taking a few steps towards the exit. Stopped, turned and came back. He leaned down towards Selma from behind. His mouth was only five centimetres from her ear when he whispered: ‘You need to take better care, Selma. A better disguise, at least.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A wig and sunglasses, Selma? Seriously?’

  She froze.

  ‘I was out to expose a well-known footballer in the national team. Illegal poker’s not a good idea for that sort of guy. It wasn’t difficult to recognize you, Selma.’

  He held out his phone, only thirty centimetres from her eyes.

  ‘The Poker Turk,’ he said. ‘This is you on your way into the Poker Turk’s place. Four weeks ago. Blonde and with a cap, but unmistakably you all the same.’

  His mouth was so close to her ear that it tickled when he spoke. The photo had been taken in darkness: it was grainy and slightly out of focus.

  She could deny it. She could pretend not to have a clue about what he was alleging. She could stand up and give a discouraged smile. Indulgent. Or get angry. Burst out laughing.

  Selma did nothing.

  She concentrated on breathing. Lars continued to whisper: ‘If you’d still been a high-profile lawyer, I’d have given this photo to my wife. She works in the news section. But you’re no longer a lawyer. As far as I understand, you’re nothing. So I’ll let the story lie. DG has no interest in hanging out people who’re nothing. I’ll give you a good piece of advice all the same, since you think we’re on the way to becoming friends: give it up. Or find yourself a new, improved disguise. You’re far too well known, Selma, to have a skeleton like that in your cupboard. See you later.’

  He pulled back his arm, straightened up, pulled the strap of his shoulder bag over his head and left the café. One of the mothers had started to sing the ‘Lucia’ song to her infant. That helped. The other mothers joined in quietly. The elderly woman still sat silently, keeping company with her novel.

  Only Selma was all alone.

  She was, as Lars Winther had said, nothing.

  That was exactly how she felt too.

  Like a nothing, and she had never felt like that before.

  THE DOUGH

  The wall had moved closer.

  For the second time in the course of what he reckoned to only a couple of hours, the motor out there had started to thrum. As before, the hatch was first opened, and something edible thrown inside. He hadn’t even begun his earlier meal yet, and now unwrapped potato crisps started to drop through. The flakes lay like dead leaves just inside the door before the machine was set in motion.

  He could no longer bear this.

  Battering his head against the wall did not work.

  He couldn’t manage to do it hard enough to die. The result of his many attempts was merely a perpetual headache and bloody tangles in his hair.

  In a TV series, he could not remember which one, a life prisoner in the same situation as he was had gnawed through to the main artery of the wrist. She, for it had been a woman, imprisoned without charge or trial in a system beyond the system, condemned to eternal darkness without any hope of ever being set free, had overcome her most basic instincts by biting herself in order to die. He had been disgusted when he had watched the episode. Thought that such a suicide was completely lacking in credibility. Admittedly, he knew that an animal caught in a trap could chew off its own leg in order to free itself, but that the wolf fought for its life. A fox wanted to live and was willing to sacrifice everything to avoid death. The woman in the underground dungeon had spent ages inflicting more and more pain on herself, not in order to survive, but to bleed to death.

  Now he understood why.

  He was going out of his mind. He no longer slept. Neither was he ever completely awake: his condition had become a state of angst-filled apathy. A steady, dull fear. Literally scared stiff, he could barely bend his legs any longer. It was impossible to fully flex his fingers: he wanted to smash them on the wall until they bled the last time it moved closer, but couldn’t clench his fists. When he first ended up in here and understood how the mechanism functioned, he had alternated between panic and frenetic mental activity. Terrified of the wall, but fairly clear and alert during the many hours he had spent struggling to find a way out. A solution.

  A life.

  Now it was over.

  The cell was only three times four paces in size now. He realized that the room would never disappear entirely. The narrow bed along one of the short walls was moulded concrete, and he doubted whether the motorized wall would be powerful enough to crush it. At least he had doubted that when he was still capable of rational thought.

  By the time it came so far, he would be without both water and food. The door would disappear first, then the water pipe. In the end he would be left sitting on the concrete bed, enclosed by walls on all sides, with the ceiling above him. Like in a coffin.

  In the end the room would become a coffin.

  He could not wait so long.

  He would never manage to gnaw his way out of life.

  There must be another way.

  In a flash of clarity, forced out by a desperation he had never believed possible, he understood what he had to do. For a while he sat on the edge of the bed, quietly, his breathing regular and his eyes closed. He envisaged what he would have to do. How it would have to be done. Bit by bit he went through his plan. Correcting it a little, thinking again. Understood what would be the critical phases, and what would come easily to him. Finally he stood up on his stiff legs and stretched his arms up as high as he could manage. His fingers nearly reached the ceiling. He raised his legs one by one to let air circulate around his balls – one of them was so painful that he was almost unable to walk.

  All the same he dragged himself the couple of paces across to the plaster he had torn off the movable wall. Grabbing two pieces, he sat down again on the bunk and began to crush them. Once he had a pile consisting of a mixture of tiny fragments and plaster dust, he picked up the potato crisps from just beside the door. He pulverized them too, and placed them in the pile
of plaster. Then it was the turn of the bread roll he’d received from the man out there. He picked at it to make crumbs, and then ripped the cheese to pieces and mixed it into the by now fairly large heap of powder and scraps. To finish off he stirred in some of the filthy straw.

  Holding the pulp under the water pipe proved tricky. He needed to make a bulky dough, but his hands were too small and the water trickled out so slowly. Instead he put the mixture on the floor in front of the pipe in the wall, collected the water in his cupped hands and poured it over what had now begun to resemble dough. He had fashioned a hollow at the top of the little mound, as if he were making pasta.

  It took time. Drop by drop his plan was implemented.

  And he was ready.

  The sticky mass began to dry out almost immediately in the overheated room. He made it extra wet, as syrupy as possible. He brought the dough with him and sat down on the bunk bed.

  His nose must be closed first. That was easy. He stuffed the plaster mixture as far up each nostril as he could manage while breathing through his mouth. He retched a couple of times; the dough was pushed so far up his nose that he began to taste it, but that didn’t matter. In the end, when his nose was so full on both sides that it ached, he plugged the holes again with two whole fragments of plaster he had measured for that specific purpose before he embarked on making the dough. An intense pain spread through his face, his entire head, and he began to bleed. Not only inside his nose, but so far back that he could feel a distinct, warm taste of iron on his tongue.

  Gingerly, he tried to blow out through his nose.

  The block held firm.

  He took a deep breath through his mouth, closed it, and forced the air even harder against the doughy obstruction. It had to withstand a lot; he would fight against death, he knew that – nearly three million years of evolution would make him struggle for survival. Before he began to stuff the rest of the repulsive pulp down his throat, he had to be sure that his nose would not let him down. Not let him breathe.

  It held.

  But not the third time. The plugs shattered when he took a really deep breath.

  Snotters and blood, plaster and crumbs all gushed out. A reflex made him take a sudden breath, and the rest of the dough went the wrong way down his throat. He coughed and spluttered. Crying and screaming, he took hold of the heap of dough with both hands, crammed it into his mouth, pushed in the pile of plaster, furiously, using all his fingers, up into his nostrils and down into his throat, gasping for breath and getting even more dough in his lungs, sobbing and weeping and swallowing and stopping up all the possible breathing routes.

  But he went on breathing.

  He coughed, spat and breathed.

  Life refused to let go of him.

  A sudden, lightning flash of pain shot through his left neck and shoulder. He froze. Touched his upper arm. His jaw. His heart, which was about to stop. He knew it, it was as if the very air in this appalling room had become heavy as lead, it was pressing him down, he turned over on his side with both hands clutching his chest, he wept, in delight now, that it would all soon be over.

  He saw colours. Red and blue. Yellow and a beautiful green. Indigo. A rainbow, the most exquisite one he had ever seen; he lay quite still on the bed with his eyes open, ever so quiet, and did not blink.

  It was no longer necessary to take a breath.

  THE MACBOOK

  ‘I‘m really sorry for your sake.’

  Bottolf Odda looked as if he meant it. He stood in the doorway and had just put a huge cardboard box down on the floor beneath the row of coat pegs. His complexion was ashen, and his chin far from being as outward thrusting as usual. The bags under his eyes were growing bigger day by day.

  He had no desire to enter. Elise, Haakon’s grieving partner, had made an apathetic and rather grudging offer of coffee. Fortunately he had turned it down. She wanted to be alone. Didn’t even want to see William, who had been handed over to her sister for a few days. At least until the funeral.

  ‘You could have warned me,’ she said softly.

  ‘I did. I told Selma Falck about the drugs test on Monday, and she promised to let the relatives know. I had no idea about this business with the car until I read it this morning.’

  Monday, Elise thought dully. Meaning that Selma could have told her about the positive drugs test yesterday. Which she definitely hadn’t done. For some reason or other.

  Elise couldn’t care less. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. It didn’t matter at all. Her existence was going up in smoke, regardless. When her father had turned up unexpectedly at half past seven that same morning to let her know about the latest news, she had scarcely had the strength to listen. The police had contacted him at six a.m. This was of no interest to her, Elise realized. Neither the doping charges nor the possibility that a car had been involved in Haakon’s accident.

  He was dead and gone, and nothing could change that.

  At length Elise had sent her father away and taken an Imovane tablet. It had knocked her out for nearly six hours, totally exhausted as she was after far too many sleepless nights. She had still felt groggy when she dragged herself out of the coma when the doorbell rang a few minutes ago.

  She sighed almost inaudibly and used her small, pale hand to push her hair back from her face. Peering down at the box, she gave Bottolf a quizzical look.

  ‘Haakon’s belongings,’ he said. ‘He’d been up at the Federation before he went out training. Obviously planned to come back again before he went home, because he had changed clothes there. His car … your car was, as you know, found at Tåsen – the police assume he had set off from there on his training session. I’ve emptied his locker.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, opening the box.

  The red all-weather jacket with the Olympiatoppen Sportshotel logo lay on top. She lifted it up and held it to her face. It smelled a bit off, a hint of sweat, and not at all of Haakon.

  ‘Are there only clothes in here?’ she asked, hanging the jacket on a peg.

  ‘More or less. Most of them are dirty. I thought …’

  His hand made a helpless gesture.

  ‘Fine,’ Elise said.

  ‘Two pairs of trainers. Four pairs of ski boots. And then there are three pictures in there. Of you and William. Laminated. He had them on the inside of his locker.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Then I hope you’ll be as well as can be expected. See you on Friday.’

  Elise forced a smile and moved to close the door behind him.

  ‘By the way,’ she said, changing her mind: he was already making his way down the stairs. ‘Was his laptop there? Or his mobile?’

  Bottolf Odda turned around, plainly disconcerted.

  ‘No. Didn’t he have his phone with him in Maridalen? While training?’

  ‘No. He had a fitness watch with all kinds of doodahs, but rarely wanted to have his phone with him. Especially not in rainy weather. Usually he used …’

  She put a thumb and forefinger on her eye sockets and pressed hard. It felt as if her head was full of treacle.

  ‘Haakon had an old iPhone 4, which didn’t matter too much. It was in his car, I think the police have it now. That was the one he used most. But he had just got himself a ten.’

  ‘A ten?’

  ‘An iPhone X. Two or three weeks ago. It’s not here, so I thought …’

  ‘Maybe at the Olympiatoppen? Have you asked them?’

  ‘Yes, Dad was in touch with them. They had nothing there belonging to Haakon. Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, no laptop, no phone. Just clothes, footwear and photos.’ As if to emphasize how certain he was, he came back and lifted the things in the box.

  ‘This is all that was there. Nothing else. Is it … does it mean anything?’

  ‘Probably not. It’s not so important. Forget it.’

  He hesitated for a moment, but then obviously made up his mind to drop it.

  ‘Look after yourself, then.’

  ‘Th
anks. You too.’

  She closed the door behind him. Tried to think. It was difficult through the grey fog of sleeping medication and she went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee.

  Two phones. Two laptops.

  A couple of weeks ago, he suddenly had two of each.

  If Haakon couldn’t be called stingy, he was at least thrifty. Good with money was how he put it himself, every time Elise became ever so slightly annoyed that he had bought the cheap make of mackerel in tomato sauce, First Price, instead of the proprietary brand, Stabburet. While his mates were obsessed with the very latest in mobile phones, games consoles, flat screens and hifi, Haakon searched items on sale only when the old ones were so worn out that they could no longer be repaired. Only with sports equipment did he know no limits, but usually he received those free of charge. Either from the NCCSF, the manufacturer, sponsors or quite simply from shops that generally foisted a new pair of trainers on him if he dropped by.

  Elise filled the kettle and pressed the button on the coffee grinder.

  The grating noise irritated her, and she stopped the machine before it was completely finished. Enough for half a cafetiere, she thought, as she poured the ground coffee into the jug and placed it on the kitchen table to wait until the kettle boiled.

  It was so beautiful outside, she noticed as her gaze strayed out of the window. The view faced west. The sky was collapsing into bright colours, orange and pink, pale-blue and almost lilac. In the little grove of birch trees on the other side of the lawn, the bare branches stretched out in a coal-black pattern towards the horizon. It had grown cold, according to the thermometer at the window. Minus six degrees Celsius.

  She hadn’t thought too closely about either the phone or the extra MacBook. Mainly because Haakon had grown so distant recently. And maybe because she had simply assumed he had received them as gifts. There were strict rules about what he was permitted to accept, not to mention use. The sponsorship agreements were almost as much a straitjacket as an important source of revenue. Nevertheless Haakon continually arrived home with various things, small and large, that he didn’t think mattered too much. The point was that they mustn’t be competitors’ merchandise, as he had explained to her a couple of years ago. No products that competed with those of the sponsors, belonging to neither the Federation nor himself.