Thomas Enger - Scarred

‘She’s going to kill me if she finds out that the two of us have been talking,’ Osmundsen then says.

Henning tilts his head.

‘Why?’

‘Well, you’re not exactly the best of friends.’

Henning lowers his gaze, stares into a past that rises from the table like a multi-coloured fog. And in the midst of it – a sad and lonely truth.

‘No, we’re not,’ he admits. ‘I don’t really know why, but—’

‘Is it true?’

Henning nods.

Images of Trine that have started to surface recently come back to him like uninvited guests. He hears her voice, small and fragile. He sees her gaze, dull and distant. And he wishes he knew, that he understood when and why they grew apart.

‘Has she ever talked about it to you?’ he asks.

Osmundsen shakes his head.

‘I’ve asked her several times, but every time she just gives me a hard stare and that’s the end of that conversation.’

Henning nods slowly.

Osmundsen takes out his mobile and puts it on the table with the screen facing up.

‘In case Trine calls,’ Osmundsen says by way of explanation.

‘Have you heard from her?’

‘She sent me a text message yesterday saying she wasn’t coming home. She wouldn’t tell me where she was because she needed to be alone, she said.’

‘So she hasn’t gone missing as some papers are speculating?’

Osmundsen hesitates.

‘That rather depends how you look at it.’

Osmundsen lowers his gaze again. A dark shadow falls across his coarse, weather-beaten face. Even though he is tall and big, he looks small as he sits there. As if the strength in his upper body, the strength that kept him upright, has gone.

‘It’s happened before,’ he says eventually. ‘Her disappearing, I mean. It happened one Sunday a few years ago, I think it was, and I didn’t find her until late in the evening, far away in Nordmarka Woods. She sat under a tree and was completely out of it. She came to when I touched her, but she couldn’t remember anything of what had happened.’

‘What did her bodyguards say?’

‘Trine didn’t have bodyguards in those days.’

‘But—’

The words stop in Henning’s mouth.

‘There’s a name for it,’ Osmundsen continues. ‘For what happened. Dissociative fugue,’ he pronounces it clearly. ‘A person will leave their home or their job, apparently with a sense of purpose, but afterwards they remember nothing.’

The waiter brings Osmundsen’s coffee cup in one hand and a pot in the other. Henning covers his cup with his palm.

‘So what causes it?’ he asks when the waiter has left.

Osmundsen puts his head on one side.

‘No one really seems to know, but it’s usually trauma of some kind that the body is trying to protect itself against. Trine denies that she has ever experienced something that could trigger a reaction like that, so I guess we’ve agreed that it must have been due to work pressure. I could tell from looking at her in the days and weeks leading up to it. She was exhausted. And something was weighing her down.’

‘And still she carried on as Justice Secretary?’

‘Yes, anything else would have been unthinkable.’

‘And the media never got wind of it?’

‘No, they called it depression. The media write whatever you want them to write. Or they do some of the time.’

Henning tries to digest the information he has just been given.

‘Do you think that’s what has happened now?’

Osmundsen raises the coffee cup to his lips, takes a sip and puts it down with a clatter. Then he throws up his hands.

‘Trine has always been a tough girl. I would have thought this kind of challenge would only have made her stronger. But who knows. And I don’t like the fact that I can’t get hold of her.’

‘She has probably just switched off her mobile.’

Osmundsen nods helplessly and lowers his gaze again. Another silence descends on the table.

‘So what do you make of all this?’ Henning says. ‘Did Trine do what they say she did?’

Again Osmundsen flings out his hands.

‘She told me yesterday morning that the story isn’t true. That the accusations against her are false.’

‘But if that’s the case,’ Henning says, ‘why doesn’t she defend herself? Why has she run away?’

‘I don’t know,’ Osmundsen replies and lowers his gaze again. ‘It’s not like her. I’ve no idea what’s going on.’

The next moment the mobile on the table between them starts to vibrate. Henning sees hope and fear rise in Osmundsen, who quickly picks it up. Only to put it down and let it ring out.

‘Journalists?’ Henning asks.

Osmundsen nods.

‘I think I must have got two hundred calls in the last twenty-four hours. They just refuse to give up.’

Henning feels the need to say something, but the words won’t come out.

‘Do you have any idea where Trine might be?’ he asks instead. ‘Is there somewhere the two of you go when you want to be alone?’

Osmundsen thinks about it again, but Henning can see that he has given up. Shortly afterwards Osmundsen makes his excuses, explains that he has to get back to work where he is taking part in an important video conference. Henning shakes his hand and says that he’ll pay, obviously. And the tall man disappears outside, out into a miasma of uncertainty.

Henning doesn’t know why, but the sight of Pål Fredrik reminds him of his own father. In a rare TV profile he found about Trine last night, she talked about how hard her father’s death had been for her, how it shaped her as a person. And he wonders how Pål Fredrik will cope if Trine doesn’t recover.

This line of thinking leads him straight to his mother. He wonders if the caretaker in the block where she lives has managed to do him that favour he asked him.

Henning decides to find out.

Pernille Thorbjørnsen and Ole Christian Sund are sitting down when Bjarne Brogeland and Ella Sandland enter the staff room. Their chairs are close together and they are leaning in towards each other, but both jump back when the officers greet them.

‘Hello,’ Sund says with a stiff smile. He looks across to Thorbjørnsen who immediately lowers her gaze and folds her hands in her lap. They don’t stay there for long; she fiddles with her hair, tries to sit upright and glances quickly at the officers who have yet to ask them any questions.

Bjarne bides his time because he has a hunch about the two care workers, prompted by the first conversation he had with Thorbjørnsen after Erna Pedersen had been found dead. It started when she told him that Sund had called her after the murder.

Now it might just have been a conversation about a traumatic incident at the place where they both work. But given the looks they exchange and the closeness of the chairs, Bjarne suspects that their relationship is more intimate. Not only do they share a staff room, they also share a bed.

The room is so small that the police officers remain standing.

‘Who would have thought we’d find you both here at the same time,’ Bjarne says and looks at Thorbjørnsen. Her defences were intact the first time he met her. Now he can practically see the cracks. Her face has lost some of its colour.

‘Have you finished arguing?’ Bjarne says.

Thorbjørnsen’s gaze shoots up at him, then shifts to Sund who starts picking at a callus.

‘There’s nothing wrong with having a quarrel, all couples do from time to time. I’m more interested in why you argued here, in Ward 4, on the afternoon Erna Pedersen was killed.’

Bjarne sees the beginning of the protest form in Sund’s face.

‘And why we found your fingerprints on Erna Pedersen’s knitting needles,’ Sandland interjects and points at Thorbjørnsen.