Anne Holt - 1222

Strictly speaking, I think it’s perfectly OK to have mobility problems. I want to be immobile, that’s the way I’ve chosen to live. The chair doesn’t really hamper me significantly in my everyday life. It can be weeks between the occasions on which I leave my apartment. The problems arise when I am forced to go out. People are just desperate to help me all the time. Lifting, pushing, carrying.

That’s why I chose the train. Flying is a complete nightmare, I have to say. The train is simpler. Less touching. Fewer strange hands. The train offers at least some degree of independence.

Except when it’s derailed and crashes.

And I really don’t like those looks, up and down, from those who are healthy and mobile. That’s why I didn’t meet his gaze. Instead I closed my eyes and pretended I was settling down for a sleep.

‘I don’t think you’ve really grasped the situation,’ said Geir Rugholmen.

‘We’re snowed in on the mountain.’

‘You could put it that way. We certainly are snowed in. At the moment a full storm is raging out there, with gusts of hurricane force. A hurricane on Finse! It’s not exactly an everyday occurrence. We’re in the lee of -’

‘I’m really only interested in one thing: when can we expect someone to come and get us?’

There was complete silence. But I knew he was still there. The smell of wood smoke and old wool was equally strong.

‘I asked you a question,’ I said quietly, keeping my eyes closed. ‘If you can’t answer, that’s fine, of course. Personally I was thinking of having a little nap.’

‘You’re like an ostrich.’

‘What?’

‘You think nobody can see you if you shut your eyes.’

‘The ostrich buries its head in the sand, as far as I know. And in any case, that’s supposed to be a myth.’

I gave an enormous yawn, still with my eyes closed.

‘Nobody can say I haven’t tried,’ said Geir Rugholmen sourly. ‘If you’re just going to sit here being awkward, well… Sod you.’

His ski boots clumped across the floor and disappeared.

I’m good at that sort of thing.

I might even have dozed off for a little while.

The Crown Princess had been on the train, according to what people were saying.

Nobody knew where she had gone.

When I insisted on having my wheelchair fetched from the train, it wasn’t only because I felt helpless without it. As far as my mobility went, it didn’t really make that much difference. I had to stay in the lobby anyway. The toilets were on the same floor right next to the main staircase, which made it possible for me to empty my bags with comparatively little embarrassment, thank God, but apart from that there was nowhere I could get to without help.

The most important thing about the wheelchair is that it creates distance.

Not physically, of course; as I said I am constantly stared at and bombarded with offers of help. I strive more for a kind of mental distance. The chair makes me different. It defines me as something completely different from all the rest, and it is not uncommon for people to assume that I am stupid. Or deaf. People talk over my head, quite literally, and if I simply lean back and close my eyes, it’s as if I don’t exist.

You learn a great deal in this way. My relationship to other people is – how shall I put it – more academic in its nature. I would prefer not to have anything to do with them at all, something that can easily be interpreted as a lack of interest. This is incorrect. People do interest me. That’s why I watch a great deal of television. I read books. I have a DVD collection that would be the envy of many. In my day I was a good investigator. One of the best, I would like to think. That would be impossible without a certain curiosity when it comes to other people’s stories, other people’s lives.

It’s having people close to me that I find difficult.

I am interested in people, but I don’t want people to be interested in me. A very taxing situation. At least it is if you surround yourself with friends and colleagues, and if you have to work in a team – as you do in the police. When I got shot and almost died, I ran out of strength.

I was perfectly happy sitting there, all by myself.

People were staring, I could feel it, but it was still as if I didn’t exist. They were talking openly about everything. Despite the fact that many had disappeared for a while when the rooms were allocated, it was still too early to wind down for the night. Most of them came back before long. A few were standing chatting in the reception area. The shock of the accident had begun to subside, edging towards laughter. The situation was no longer threatening, in spite of the fact that the storm outside the old hotel was more violent than anything any of us had experienced before. It was more the fact that the shabby, melancholy air of the hotel was having a calming effect on us. Its crooked brown architectural patchwork had withstood both wind and storms for almost a hundred years, and it was not going to let anybody down tonight either. The doctors had worked their way through the queue of those needing help. A few of the teenagers were playing poker. I had positioned my chair at just the right distance from the long wooden table, and I could hear both the youngsters and the stream of people coming back from their rooms to find out the latest news, to compare their injuries and to stare at the huge windows as the storm tried in vain to batter its way through to us at Finse 1222.

I was listening to what people were saying. They thought I was asleep.

And now that everyone had been taken care of and fed, when there wasn’t much more to say about where exactly they had been on the train when the crash happened, and glasses of red wine and beer had started to appear, most people were more interested in where on earth Mette-Marit had got to.

The rumour had already been circulating on the train. Two middle-aged women just behind me had talked about virtually nothing else. There was an extra carriage, they whispered. The last carriage looked different from the rest of the train, and this wasn’t the way the normal morning train to Bergen looked at all. What’s more, the far end of the platform had been cordoned off. It had to be the Royal Carriage. True, it didn’t look particularly royal, but there was no way of knowing how it was equipped inside, and besides it was widely known that Mette-Marit was scared of flying. It could be Sonja, of course, she adores the mountains, I mean everybody knows that, but on the other hand she wouldn’t be leaving home right now, just before the King’s seventieth birthday.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the two ladies got off at Hønefoss.

I rejoiced too soon.

The gossip had caught on, and was well on the way to becoming the truth. Strangers were chatting to each other. The train became less and less Norwegian as it climbed towards the high mountains. People were sharing their sandwiches and fetching coffee for each other. One person thought they knew something they had heard from someone they knew, and a girl of about twenty-five had definitely heard that somebody she went to school with who now worked in the royal protection team was actually going to Bergen this week.

When we left Oslo, there was quite simply an extra carriage on the train.

By the time we were approaching Finse, the carriage had turned into the Royal Carriage and everybody knew that Mette-Marit and her bodyguards were on board, along with little Prince Sverre, no doubt. He was still so small, after all. He needed his mummy, the little darling. An eager, elderly man thought he had seen a little girl through a window before he was brusquely turned away by the police, so Ingrid Alexandra was there too.