Jo Nesbo - The Son

‘Today is a lovely day,’ he said.

She stopped the recording and played it back to him.

‘Is that my voice?’ he asked, surprised and clearly embarrassed.

She pressed stop and played it again. The voice sounded constricted and tinny through the loudspeakers: ‘Is that my voice?’

And she laughed when she saw the expression on his face. She laughed even harder when he snatched the phone from her, found the record button and said that now it was her turn, now she had to say something, no, she had to sing.

‘No!’ she protested. ‘I’d rather you took my picture.’

He shook his head. ‘Voices are better.’

‘Why?’

He made a motion as if to tuck his hair behind his ear. The habitual gesture of someone who has had long hair for so long that he has forgotten it’s been cut off, she thought.

‘People can change the way they look. But voices stay the same.’

He looked across the sea and she followed his gaze. Saw nothing but the shimmering surface, some seagulls, rocks and sails in the distance.

‘Some voices do,’ she said. She was thinking of the baby. The whimpering on the walkie-talkie. That never changed.

‘You like singing,’ he said. ‘But not in front of others.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because you like music. But when I asked you to sing, you looked just as petrified as that girl in the cafe when you gave her the key.’

She jumped. Had he read her mind?

‘What was she scared of?’

‘Nothing,’ Martha said. ‘She and the other girl are supposed to shred and reorganise the files in the attic. Nobody likes going up there. So the staff take turns whenever a job needs doing.’

‘What’s wrong with the attic?’

Martha followed a seagull which hung suspended in the air, high above the sea, shifting only slightly from one side to the other. The wind up there must be much stronger than it was down here.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she said quietly.

‘No.’

‘Me neither.’ She leaned back on her elbows so that she couldn’t see him without turning. ‘The Ila Centre looks as if it’s nineteenth century doesn’t it? But it was actually built in the 1920s. To begin with it was just an ordinary boarding house-’

‘The cast-iron letters on the front.’

‘That’s right, that’s from back then. But during the war the Germans turned it into a home for unmarried mothers and their children. There are so many tragic stories from those years and they left their mark in the walls. One of the women who came to stay there had a baby boy and claimed it was a virgin birth — something girls would occasionally say when they found themselves in trouble in those days. The man everyone suspected was married and, of course, denied being the father. There were two rumours about him. The first that he was a member of the Resistance. The second that he was a German spy who had infiltrated the Resistance and that was why the Germans had given the woman a place at the home and not arrested the man. Anyway, one morning the suspected father was shot dead on a crowded tram in the centre of Oslo. The killer was never identified. The Resistance claimed they had liquidated a traitor, the Germans that they had caught a member of the Resistance. In order to convince anyone who had doubts, the Germans suspended the body from the top of Kavringen Lighthouse.’

She pointed across the sea.

‘Sailors passing the lighthouse in the daytime could see the withered corpse which the seagulls had pecked at and those who passed at night could see the vast shadow it cast across the water. Until suddenly one day the body was gone. Some said that the Resistance had removed it. But from that day the woman started to lose her mind and claimed that the dead man was haunting her. That he came to her room at night, that he leaned over their baby’s cot, and that when she screamed for him to get out, turned to her with black holes where his eyes used to be.’

Stig raised an eyebrow.

‘This is how the story was told to me by Grete, the manager at the Ila Centre,’ Martha said. ‘Anyway, legend has it that the baby wouldn’t stop crying, but whenever the women in the other rooms complained and told the woman to comfort her child, she replied that the child cried for both of them and would do so forever.’ Martha paused. Her favourite part of the story was coming up. ‘Rumour had it that the woman didn’t know which side her child’s father worked for, but to pay him back for denying paternity she had reported him as a member of the Resistance to the Germans and told the Resistance he was a spy.’

A sudden, cold gust of wind made Martha shudder and she sat up and hugged her knees.

‘One morning the woman didn’t come down for breakfast. They found her in the attic. She had hanged herself from the big cross-beam in the roof. You can see a pale stripe in the wood where she supposedly tied the rope.’

‘And now she haunts the attic?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that it’s a difficult place to be. I don’t believe in ghosts, but no one seems able to spend much time in that attic. It’s as if you can sense evil. People get headaches, they feel pushed out of the room. And often they’ll be new members of staff or contractors hired to do maintenance work, people who don’t know the story. And, no, there isn’t asbestos in the insulation or anything like that.’

She studied him, but he didn’t display the sceptical expression or the small smile she had half expected. He just listened.

‘But that’s not all,’ she went on. ‘The baby.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Yes? Have you guessed it?’

‘It was gone.’

She looked at him in amazement. ‘How did you know?’

He shrugged. ‘You told me to guess.’

‘Some people think that the mother gave it to the Resistance the same night she hanged herself. Others that she killed the child and buried it in the back garden so that no one would take it from her. Anyway. .’ Martha took a deep breath. ‘It was never found. And the strange thing is every now and then we hear a noise on our walkie-talkies, but we can’t work out where it comes from. But we think it’s. .’

She thought he looked as if he had guessed that as well.

‘A baby crying,’ she said.

‘A baby crying,’ he repeated.

‘Many people, especially new staff, get freaked out when they hear it, but Grete tells them that the walkie-talkies sometimes pick up signals from baby monitors in the neighbourhood.’

‘But you don’t think so?’

Martha hesitated. ‘She might be right.’

‘But?’

Another gust of wind. Dark clouds had appeared in the west. Martha was regretting not bringing a coat.

‘I’ve been working at the Ila Centre for seven years. And when you said that voices never change. .’

‘Yes?’

‘I swear it’s the same baby.’

Stig nodded. He said nothing, didn’t try to offer an explanation or a comment. He just nodded. She liked that.

‘Do you know what those clouds mean?’ he asked at last and got up.

‘That it’s going to rain and it’s time we went home?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That we need to go swimming right now, so we’ll have time to dry in the sun.’

‘ Compassion fatigue ,’ Martha said. She was lying on her back, looking up at the sky; she still had the taste of salt water in her mouth and she could feel the warm rock against her skin and through her wet underwear. ‘It means that I’ve lost the ability to care. It’s so unthinkable in the Norwegian care sector that we don’t even have a Norwegian word for it.’

He made no reply. And that was fine, she wasn’t really talking to him, he was just an excuse to think out loud.