Anne Holt: Punishment aka What Is Mine

Isak Aanonsen brushed his face with a slim hand.

“I am. How can you say that? I’ve listened to the whole story so far and I am very interested in hearing the rest. What’s the matter with you?”

Kristiane had managed to get the dog to lie down. And now she was sitting astride its back, burying her hands in its fur. The astonished owner stood beside them, looking at Isak and Johanne with undisguised concern.

“It’s okay,” called Isak, and sprinted over to the dog and the child. “She’s got a way with animals.”

“You can say that again,” said the man.

Isak lifted his daughter off the animal and the dog stood up. The owner put on its leash and headed off northwards at a brisk pace, looking back over his shoulder every now and then, as if frightened that the scary child might follow.

“So go on,” said Isak.

“Dam-di-rum-ram,” sang Kristiane.

“Her boss refused her request,” said Johanne brusquely. “He said that she should leave the case alone and do her job. When she confronted him and said that she’d had all the documents sent over and had read them carefully, he became visibly agitated. And when she then said she was convinced that Seier was innocent, he was furious. But the really-the most frightening thing about the whole story is what happened next.”

Kristiane suddenly took her by the hand.

“Mamma,” she said happily. “My mommy and me.”

“One day when Alvhild Sofienberg came into the office, all the papers had disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Gone?”

“Yep. A pile of documents over a yard high. Vanished without a trace.”

“Go for a walk,” said Kristiane. “My mommy and me.”

“And Daddy,” said Johanne.

“And then what happened?”

Isak’s brows were knitted. The likeness between him and his daughter was even more obvious; the narrow face, the knitted eyebrows.

“Alvhild Sofienberg was quite… frightened. In any case, she didn’t dare to nag her boss anymore when she heard that the files had been collected ‘by the police.’”

She made quote marks with her fingers.

“And then completely confidentially, very hush-hush, she was told that Aksel Seier had been released.”

“What?”

“A long time before he should have been. Released. Just like that. Discreetly and without any fuss.”

They had reached the big parking lot by the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences. There were hardly any cars there. The ground was crisscrossed with deep tire ruts and puddles. Johanne’s old Opel Kadett stood parked under three large weeping birches, beside Isak’s Audi TT.

“Let me just get this straight,” said Isak, holding up his hand as if he was about to take an oath. “We’re talking about 1965. Not the nineteenth century. Not the war. But 1965, the year that you and I were born, when Norway had been built up again after the war and bureaucracy was well established and due process was a recognized concept. Right? And he was just released without further ado? I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with releasing an obviously innocent man, but…”

“Exactly, there’s a huge but.”

“Daddycar,” said Kristiane and stroked the silver-gray sports car. “Billycar. Automobillycar.”

The adults laughed.

“You’re a right one, you are,” said Johanne, tying Kristiane’s hat more securely under her chin.

“Where the hell does she get it from?”

“Don’t swear,” warned Johanne. “She’ll pick it up. At least…”

She straightened her back. Kristiane sat down in a puddle and hummed.

“Alvhild’s source, the prison chaplain, told her that an old woman from Lillestrøm had contacted Romerike Police. She’d been nursing a painful secret for a long time. Her son, a mildly retarded man who still lived with her, had come home in the early hours on the night that little Hedvig disappeared. His clothes were covered in blood and he was very agitated. The woman immediately suspected him when Hedvig’s story became known shortly after. But she didn’t want to say anything. Perhaps not so difficult to…”

She looked over at her daughter.

“In any case… her son had died. The case was hushed up by the police and prosecuting authorities. The woman was more or less dismissed as hysterical. But whatever happened, our friend Aksel Seier was released only a few weeks later. Discreetly. Nothing was written in the papers. Alvhild never heard any more about it.”

The mist was clearing; some low clouds drifted slowly over the treetops to the east. But now it had started to rain in ernest. A soaking-wet English setter circled around Kristiane, barking and running to fetch the stones she threw with delighted screams.

“But why is this Alvhild Sofienberg telling you?”

“Hmm?”

“Why is she telling you about this now? Thirty… thirty-five years later?”

“Because something strange happened last year. The case has been bothering her for years. And now that she’s retired, she decided to study the case in detail again. She contacted the regional state archives and the National Archives to get ahold of the documents. And they no longer exist.”

“What?”

“They’ve vanished. They are not in the National Archives. Not in the regional state archives. Oslo Police Force can’t find them, nor can Romerike Police. More than a yard of case documents has simply disappeared.”

Kristiane had got up from her puddle. She puttered toward them, wet and filthy from head to toe.

“I’m glad you are not getting into my car,” said Isak, and squatted down in front of her. “But I’ll see you on the seventeenth of May, okay?”

“Aren’t you going to give Daddy a hug before we go?” asked Johanne.

Kristiane reluctantly allowed herself to be hugged; her eyes were miles away.

“Do you think you’ll manage, Isak?”

His eyes were firmly fixed on Kristiane.

“Of course I will. I’m a wizard, don’t you know. If Aksel Seier is still alive, I’ll find out where he lives in less than a week. Guaranteed.”

“There are no guarantees in life,” retorted Johanne. “But thank you for trying. If anyone was going to manage it, it would be you.”

“Sure thing,” said Isak and slipped into his TT. “See you on Wednesday.”

She stared after him until the car disappeared over the brow of the hill down toward Kringsjå.

Isak would never be anything other than a big boy. She had just not realized it soon enough. Before, before Kristiane, she had envied him his quickness, his enthusiasm, his optimism; the childish belief that everything could be fixed. He had built an entire future on boundless self-confidence; Isak started a dot-com company before most people even knew what they were and had had the sense to sell it in time. Now he enjoyed playing around with a computer for a few hours every day, he sailed in regattas half the year, and helped the Salvation Army to look for missing persons in his spare time.

Johanne had fallen in love with the way he embraced the world with laughter, the shrug of his shoulders when things got a bit complicated that made him so different and attractive to her.

And then along came Kristiane. The first years were swallowed up by three heart operations, sleepless nights, and anxiety. When they finally woke up from their first night of uninterrupted sleep, it was too late. They limped on together for another year in some semblance of marriage. A two-week family stay at the National Center for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in a futile attempt to find a diagnosis for Kristiane had resulted in them separating, if not exactly as friends, at least with a relatively intact mutual respect.

They never found a diagnosis. Kristiane wandered around in her own little world and the doctors shook their heads. Autistic, perhaps, they said, then frowned at the child’s obvious ability to develop emotional attachments and her great need for physical contact. Does it matter? Isak asked. The child is fine and the child is ours and I don’t give a shit what’s wrong with her. He didn’t understand how much it mattered to find a diagnosis. To make arrangements for her. To make it possible for Kristiane to achieve her full potential.