‘For good reason, it seems.’
She nodded sombrely. ‘She was carrying around this dreadful knowledge – this awful secret – for all those years. And I was living with both of them and had no idea.’ A stifled sob burst from her throat. ‘How could he! How could he!’
I watched her. I didn’t know her well enough, didn’t know how much strength she might be hiding, what intense emotions she might reveal if you could peel back her skin and look inside. ‘If it was you who did this, Anita, you have no choice. Go to the police and tell them everything. If not, Ruth might suffer for what you failed to do, a second time.’
She stood up with such force that she sent the chair beneath her flying. ‘But I didn’t, Veum. I didn’t do it.’
I stood up too. Then I nodded. ‘Right, I believe you. But I don’t think Ruth did it, either.’
She stared at me with new hope in her eyes. ‘No?’
‘No.’
But as I left I knew that this hope would die too, and she would sink into a darkness that was deeper and more impenetrable than she could have ever imagined in her wildest dreams.
On the way out I met her cat again. It was halfway down the stairs squinting at me with its green eyes, like a landlord on his way to evict an unruly tenant.
Outside, the snow crystals on the ground glistened. There they lay, like falling stars that had been plucked down, stars that had completed their orbits.
On the other side of the fjord lay Bergen, unendingly alluring in its frozen beauty, like an unapproachable princess atop a glass mountain. Unless it was an angel.
49
The front door wasn’t locked. I went inside without kicking the snow from my shoes. It lay like footprints on the floor behind me.
I had heard the loud voice from outside. Now I stood by the vestry door listening, as though I had turned to ice, or salt, or whatever you turned to in circles such as these.
I hardly recognised Berge Brevik. His voice was louder and shriller than I had ever heard before and it was only his Møre ‘r’s that gave him away.
‘Oh, Lorrd!’ it shrieked through the grey door with an oval, porcelain sign saying VESTRY. ‘Descend from on high and give this Your sinful daughter the succour and support she has requested from You. See her lying here, full of remorse, begging for forgiveness. Drive the evil spirits out of her, You who have all the power, on earth as in heaven, You who drive the rebellious angels back to the fire where they belong, You who command the evil spirits to go whence they came. You have helped me before. Let Your power flow through my hands and down into this unhappy person. Let evil thoughts and cruel acts be driven out of her and take her – when her time is ripe – into Your arms and let her rest in Your embrace – in the light of Your forgiveness, in the sound of Your choir, in…’
Then I heard another voice, hers, whimpering and incomprehensible, like a confused babble, unclear tongues, motherless whelps.
I placed my hand on the handle and pushed at the door.
This one was unlocked too.
It opened and I stepped into the room.
The office was in twilight, illuminated only by the flickering glow of three candelabra holding three candles each, placed on the standard desk behind them.
Sissel was kneeling on the floor with her hands folded in front of her. Berge Brevik was on his knees opposite her clasping her head between his hands as he stared upwards to the ceiling. The veins on his hands stood out clearly and the sinews in his neck had swollen. Blood was pounding rhythmically in his temples and his skin was ruddy with an inner glow.
As I stepped in he turned blindly towards me. His voice went up another tone. ‘Oh, Lord, Almighty God – in Your name and the name of Your Son, the crucified Jesus Christ – and with the power of the Holy Spirit – I beg You to drive out the demons from this young woman. Drive out the evil spirits. Drive them out.’
A trembling seemed to go through him and all of a sudden it was as though the whole room was being ripped apart. It was Sissel screaming, so shrilly, so piercingly and so unbearably alone. I had never heard anyone scream like that.
Tremors shook her and she clung to the priest.
Then she broke down into convulsive sobbing on his chest.
A boundless, peaceful expression appeared on Brevik’s face.
Within ten seconds I had become drenched in sweat.
Brevik focused on my eyes and said: ‘She’s free. The Lord has liberated her. Praised be the Lord. Amen, amen, amen.’
Then there was silence.
We didn’t move; we were frozen where we were. Brevik on his knees, Sissel in his arms like an empty sack, me spellbound by the door.
Then I broke the spell by turning round, grabbing the handle and closing the door.
Brevik freed himself from Sissel, who slumped onto the floor, her face in her hands, as her sobs slowly dissipated.
Brevik went to the switch beside the door and put on the lights.
The vestry around us became normal, as clear as a drawing.
He walked over to the three candelabra and blew out the candles, one by one, like a ritual act.
Then he turned to me as though I had come to seek advice about a problem I had.
I looked down at Sissel, her slender neck, her young-girl’s jumper, her heart-shaped bottom in tight jeans, crouched over, abandoned to forces beyond her endurance as she had already been, to some extent, for many years.
The face between the bars of the bed. The four-year-old who had seen something that was so immense and black and incomprehensible that it created an inevitable psychosis in her, a thinking she was unable to understand or do anything about until she had become old enough. And that was what happened in 1985. Sissel became old enough. To send letters containing angels. And to call on the people to whom she sent letters.
Brevik read my gaze and coughed. ‘You know everything?’
I nodded. ‘Ruth’s been arrested. She’s confessed to it all.’
Sissel raised her head. Her hands fell from her face. Her neck was hidden behind her hair.
‘I understood it in the end,’ I continued. ‘There’s only one person in the world Ruth loved so much that she would take the blame for her.’
Sissel turned her head and looked at me. Hers was a face that was both child-like and old, a face that had experienced too much for too long, but had never quite grown out of that October night eleven years before.
‘You told Ruth everything, didn’t you?’
She nodded.
‘And when she read in the paper about Jan Petter Olsen, she visited you and tried to stop you.’
She nodded again.
‘But by then it was already too late?’
She didn’t nod anymore, just stared into the distance.
‘Shall we go down and tell them what really happened?’
She got up and nodded, once again. Then she went to the chair where her puffer jacket was, bent down and picked it up.
Brevik followed what she did. ‘Don’t forget you’re free now, Sissel. The Lord will hold His hand over you. Wherever you go He will always be with you.’
She zipped up her jacket, tied her green scarf tightly around her neck and waited passively for further instructions.
Brevik looked at me. ‘That’s true for you too, Veum.’
‘What’s true for me?’
‘If you ever need a light in the darkness, then … come to me.’
I gently shook my head. ‘I don’t think…’
He came close to me, with his back to Sissel, and said in a low voice, as though he didn’t want her to hear: ‘You’re standing with your back to me as well, Veum.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have a vision in my mind. Of Jesus returning.’
‘Really?’
‘Everyone expects Him to come from the east, in the light of dawn. They will turn their faces in that direction, to Mount Ulriken, in expectation. But He’ll come from the west, where no one can see Him. I
see him arriving in cloud, in the sky above Askøy while everyone’s standing with their backs to Him … like a thief in the night. As it is written in the scriptures.’
‘I’d better go home and check the burglar alarm then.’
‘You do that, Veum. Now. Tomorrow it may be too late.’
I nodded to him, as a kind of acknowledgement. Then I took a step to the side, fixed my gaze on Sissel, passed her my hand and said: ‘Let’s go, shall we?’
She nodded automatically.
She led the way out of the vestry.
Brevik opened his palms and said: ‘I’ll be here for you, with two empty hands.’
‘And I’m going, with mine much too full.’
50
When I finally returned to my office, I opened a bottle of Gammel Reserve aquavit I had been thinking of saving for Christmas Eve, and it wasn’t the last I opened that winter. It was a long winter. As a social worker I had observed a lot of tragic destinies, but never one as shocking as this. It really hurt me to contemplate it, and in a very personal way, because of my long relationship with Jakob. There was only one way to escape: on the inside of a bottle.
They found the knife in her room. But the murder of Johnny Solheim was the only one they could pin on her. The others would forever remain in obscurity. She confessed to no more than sending the letters containing the angel stickers.
She never appeared in court. She had entered a long, heavy darkness.
But these December days did something to me too.
After spending Christmas with Thomas I came face to face with a serried rank of bottles that followed me like loyal reserve soldiers far into the New Year.
I whiled away time at the office, put days and nights in my pockets, never to take them out again, wrote my notes on the back of wallpaper, on the clouds that blew past, and in other useful places.
A couple of times I invited Karin Bjørge out to dinner, without ever inviting her home. A couple of times I dropped in on Laila Mongstad at her office and wondered what it would be like to make love to her, without doing anything about it. I saw nothing of Rebecca and Jakob. Jakob was safe from any prosecution – 1975 was too long ago now for the police to legally investigate him.
A few clients came, jobs came and went.
But the greatest part of the time I spent alone and the only soulmates I woke up with were empty bottles.
Winter passed and in the end it was spring. A light like phosphorus flooded over a fresh, clean town, but when I went out it hurt. The spring sun was like a spear in your heart and spring is the cruellest of all seasons: the time when nature renews itself while all you have done is become a year older.
And all this time I thought about Sissel. There wasn’t a day that passed when she wasn’t on my mind. She was another refugee in involuntary exile. Another person who had definitively passed the invisible border between being a child and becoming an adult. Another fallen angel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
One of the fathers of Nordic Noir, Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1947. He made his debut at the age of twenty-two with Seasons of Innocence and in 1977 he published the first book in the Varg Veum series. He is the author of over twenty titles, which have been published in twenty-four countries and sold over four million copies. Twelve film adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, starring the popular Norwegian actor Trond Espen Seim. Staalesen has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of Honour). Where Roses Never Die won the 2017 Petrona Award for Nordic Crime Fiction, and Big Sister was shortlisted for the award in 2019. He lives with his wife in Bergen.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Don Bartlett completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2000 and has since worked with a wide variety of Danish and Norwegian authors, including Jo Nesbo and Karl Ove Knausgaard. He has previously translated The Consorts of Death, Cold Hearts, We Shall Inherit the Wind, Where Roses Never Die, Wolves in the Dark, Big Sister and Wolves at the Door in the Varg Veum series.
COPYRIGHT
Orenda Books
16 Carson Road
West Dulwich
London SE21 8HU
www.orendabooks.co.uk
First published in Norwegian as Falne engler by Gyldendal, 1989
First published in English by Orenda Books, 2020
Copyright © Gunnar Staalesen 1989
English translation copyright © Don Bartlett 2020
Map copyright © Augon Johnsen
Photograph of Varg Veum statue supplied courtesy of Augon Johnsen
Gunnar Staalesen has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–913193–06–5
eISBN 978–1–913193–07–2
The publication of this translation has been made possible through the financial support of NORLA, Norwegian Literature Abroad.
Typeset in Arno by typesetter.org.uk
Fallen Angels Page 33
