Thomas Enger: Scarred

‘Hi, Ulrik,’ Sund says and stops. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

Ulrik makes no reply; he just carries on rocking. Sund bends down and strokes his hair. For a brief moment he wonders if one of the residents might have hurt him, but dismisses the thought instantly. At times they act up and lose their temper, but they would never take it out on a young boy. They all adore him.

‘Hello, son,’ Sund continues. ‘What is it?’

No response.

Sund looks up and reads the name plate outside the room. Sees that the door is ajar.

‘Have you been visiting Erna again?’ he asks.

The boy just carries on rocking.

He has seen something, Sund thinks. Or heard something.

His knees are shaking as he gets up. He walks past the wheelchair and pushes open the door to the resident’s room. Erna Pedersen is sitting in her chair, straight up and down as she always does. But that’s not why Sund pulls up short and takes a long step backwards. It’s her face, usually white and cold. Now it’s discoloured. Dark, rust-coloured trails run from her eyes down her wrinkled face like a river delta. He just has time to realise what her smeared glasses are hiding before the stench of death comes rolling towards him.

Henning Juul leans forwards on the cold, rough seating planks below Dælenenga Club House. Above him the clouds have dressed the sky in layers of grey that move across the city as if they have somewhere special to go. The wind, which earlier that day whipped up dust and rubbish in the streets of Oslo, has started to settle, but still contains a hint of anger.

Henning comes here as often as he can whatever the weather. He finds the place conducive to thinking, though it hurts him to see children, young and old, do the things Jonas would have been doing if he’d still been alive.

A football bounces towards a boy of eight or nine years. It rolls right past his football boots. Another boy with hair so blond it’s practically white takes possession of the ball, runs towards the goal and scores.

‘For Christ’s sake, Adil. What do you think you’re doing?’

The coach, dressed in a black tracksuit, screams till he is red in the face.

‘You were supposed to stop the ball!’

The boy who has scored the goal runs past Adil and sends him a look of triumph.

‘Good work, Jostein. Well spotted.’

The coach blows his whistle. The game resumes. Henning follows Adil’s movements. There is something resigned about them, a sense of hopelessness. As though he’d really rather not be there.

Henning has seen Adil before. Usually he is alone. No one ever picks him up after football practice. Sometimes he is with one of the other boys from the team, but his friend isn’t there now. Henning imagines he probably has better things to do on a Sunday evening.

And, strictly speaking, so do you , Henning says to himself, only he had been desperate for a change of scenery, something to distract him. But no matter how hard he tries to clear his head, the questions keep returning. What did former enforcer Tore Pulli know about the fire that killed Jonas? And was that the reason why Pulli himself had to die?

Henning’s mobile goes off in his inside pocket. He takes it out and groans. The name on the display tells him something has happened and that the rest of his evening is most probably ruined.

Even so he answers it.

‘Hi, Henning, it’s me. Have you heard the news?’

Henning holds the mobile away from his ear. Kåre Hjeltland’s voice is so loud he doesn’t need a telephone. He is the most fanatical news editor Henning has ever met, he operates exclusively at a super-octane level and it doesn’t help his somewhat comical appearance that he has been saddled with an aggressive form of Tourette’s. Tonight his random swearing has temporarily eased off, but Henning knows that his boss’s head makes sudden jerks while he talks. Hjeltland continues before Henning has time to say anything.

‘An old woman has been killed in a care home right around the corner from where you live. Do you think you could go over there? I’m a bit short of people tonight.’

You’re always short of people , Henning thinks, but doesn’t say it and checks his watch at the same time. He had planned to go home and try to sleep for more than two hours in a row for once. But he also knows that Hjeltland doesn’t have many journalists who can cover a murder right now. Iver Gundersen is still on sick leave after being beaten up in Josefinesgate a couple of weeks ago, and the Sunday evening shift at the offices of 123news.no comprises just two staff: a duty editor who has to keep on top of everything happening in the whole world with just a keyboard and only ten fingers, and a sports journalist reporting the latest football results.

Henning takes a deep breath and looks up at the gathering clouds. Another killing , he thinks, with everything that that entails: more time at work and less time to look for whoever torched his flat.

And yet he sighs and says: ‘All right, then.’

Inspector Bjarne Brogeland parks near the entrance to the care home and steps out into the autumn evening. He slams the car door shut and takes a look around.

A narrow one-way street winds its way through towering buildings with dark windows that reach for the sky above Grünerløkka. The streetlights reflect on the wet tarmac. The road has been closed off to traffic, but curious onlookers walk slowly past on the pavement.

It’s the same everywhere. People like to rubberneck, catch a glimpse of death, a hint of tomorrow’s headlines so they can boast that they were there, that they saw it. Death in a body bag. Death in the eyes of a crime scene investigator dressed in white coveralls.

Bjarne has never understood the fascination with gore and wrecked cars, the desire to deliberately inflict trauma on yourself. People don’t know that the image of a broken body or the smell of a crushed skull doesn’t just disappear while you get on with your life, go to the cinema, to the café or drink yourself senseless. Such memories can return without warning. And once they’re in your head, they’ll stay there for a long time.

Bjarne’s father, who was an engineer, once told him that his team killed a female polar bear when he was working on a research project near ESRO, the European Space Research Organisation, in Ny-Ålesund in the sixties. They enticed the polar bear with food and as she stuck her head inside the wooden box where the bait was lying, she triggered a mechanism that fired the fatal shot from a sawn-off 12 bore shotgun. The polar bear had two small cubs, which were running helplessly around their mother when the team came to pick her up, Bjarne’s father said. He never forgot their screams. ‘They sounded just like human children, Bjarne. It might as well have been you screaming.’

It’s a little over half an hour since Bjarne got the call. He had just put his five-year-old daughter Alisha to bed and sat down on the sofa with his wife. The message made him shudder and the feeling returns as he approaches the care home. There’s something about the murder of old women.

Bjarne glances at the clouds and pulls his collar up tighter around his neck. Darker and colder times are coming.

A sign to the left of the main entrance warns potential intruders that the area has CCTV. Good , Bjarne thinks. Perhaps the killer was caught on camera. He turns around and looks up at the buildings opposite. Closed curtains in the flats. Closed shops and a hairdresser at street level. A café called Sound of Mu also appears to be empty though a dim light seeps out from inside. Sunday is the big day for café visits and walks in Grünerløkka so several people might have seen the killer as he left – if he left through the main entrance.