Thomas Enger - Scarred

He doesn’t come here often. But now that Henning has unlocked the door to the attic room and looked inside, he wishes he hadn’t come at all. There are so many memories stored up there, in everything he sees. Boxes of clothing, toys, shoes that would have been too small for Jonas today. An old scooter, a pair of skates. He can’t bear to let them go. It’s as if Jonas will be even further away from him if he were to throw out his things. Just thinking about it feels like a violation.

Even so he enters the attic room and finds the box he is looking for; he carries it down to his flat and wipes off the dust before he opens the lid. He stares at the piles of photos and photo albums. He deliberately avoids looking at pictures of Jonas. What he is interested in right now are photographs of Trine and him, the identical collages their mother made for them the Christmas when they were ten and twelve years old respectively.

The idea came to him when he saw an old photograph of Jonas, Nora and himself on the mantelpiece in his mother’s flat. It made him realise there is so much about Trine he has forgotten. He blows hard into the box and the dust whirls back in his face. He instinctively recoils before he starts rifling through the photographs. It doesn’t take long before he finds the album he is looking for.

He opens it so that the light and the air can reach it. The first page is blank. Then – a photo of Trine and him as babies, eighteen months apart. They are lying on the same blanket, with the same open gaze aimed at the camera. Henning can see how much they looked like each other as babies.

He turns the page and sees more baby pictures of them together on the floor. Henning’s back is ramrod straight and his hand reaches out to Trine, who is lying on her back with her legs in the air. They play. They smile. There are pictures of them in their cots, pictures of them lying under a duvet on the sofa with dull eyes and feverish foreheads. Pictures of them growing bigger. Pictures from birthday parties, Christmases, from the pebble beach near their cabin in Stavern of them trying to skim stones. Two ‘1’ candles on a birthday cake the year Trine turned eleven. Trine puffing up her cheeks ready to blow out the candles.

I wonder what I did , Henning thinks to himself. What did I do that made Mum hate me and worship Trine?

Henning looks at the photo album again, the pebble beach, the rocks, the ships in the Skagerrak. He can’t remember when he last visited the cabin, but it must be many years ago. He remembers how the small community and the holiday resort seemed to die every year in mid-August. Their sun-loving cabin neighbours would disappear before the schools started again. When Henning’s family came back in September to shut down the cabin for the winter, their neighbours would already have left. The sea could carry on gambolling without an audience. And it occurs to him that if Trine has gone somewhere to be alone right now, then that has to be the place.

It has started to rain again when Bjarne comes back outside, a cold shower with big, heavy drops. But neither the wet nor the cool autumn air has any effect on him. An uneasy gut feeling has brought on a fever that is spreading to the rest of his body.

Two crime scenes in the space of just a few days presenting with very similar evidence. Is that a coincidence ? he asks himself, and answers his own question immediately. Photographs can easily get broken in the heat of a struggle. Murder by strangulation is not uncommon. And only Erna Pedersen was mutilated after her death.

But even so.

Shortly afterwards Bjarne sees Emil Hagen outside the entrance to the apartment block. Because of the heavy rain they get into one of the patrol cars, but don’t start the engine. The raindrops batter the windscreen. Big curtains of water are blown across the bodywork.

‘I checked with the emergency services,’ Bjarne says. ‘There were no calls to them from the victim’s mobile.’

Hagen runs a hand over his wet face and wipes it on his trousers.

‘I’ve spoken to those neighbours who were at home,’ he says. ‘Nobody heard anything.’

Bjarne tries looking out through the windscreen. It’s starting to mist up. Outside two police officers walk past, chatting to each other, but their words can’t be heard inside the car.

‘But there was one interesting thing,’ Hagen says. ‘The victim reported a break-in two weeks ago.’

Bjarne turns his head to his colleague whose jaw looks even more tightly clenched than usual.

‘Nothing was taken, but she said – if I’ve understood this correctly – that someone had been bleeding in her flat.’

‘Bleeding?’

‘Yes. She found a blood stain right next to the cat basket, I believe. And someone had smashed a photo on the wall.’

Bjarne looks at him.

‘Two weeks ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘The same picture hanging there now or a different one?’

‘I’m not sure, but I think it was the same one. It’s possible she hadn’t replaced the frame. Or the glass yet.’

‘And left broken glass on the floor?’

Bjarne shakes his head.

‘I highly doubt that.’

Hagen doesn’t reply. A smell of wet leather rises from his jacket.

How bizarre , Bjarne thinks. Someone broke a picture in the victim’s home two weeks ago and the same thing happens again today?

This is definitely not a coincidence. And it bears witness to a deep-seated rage.

‘Who handled the investigation?’ Bjarne asks.

Hagen looks at him.

‘It was low priority. Nothing was stolen. And nobody got hurt.’

‘Except, possibly, the man who broke in.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘But what about the blood? Can that help us?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hagen says. ‘I guess it’s at the back of the queue at the lab, like everything else.’

Bjarne shakes his head and sighs.

‘What kind of blood was it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Are we talking drops, blood spurts – what was it?’

‘A smear. Like if you have a cut, but you don’t know it and then you accidentally touch—’

‘I know what a smear is, Emil.’

The investigators sit in pensive silence for a few seconds while the rain lashes the windscreen. Bjarne puts his hand on the door handle.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I guess we’ll have to do what we always do.’

‘I guess so.’

Henning loves autumn. In the summer only the copper beeches and the bright yellow rapeseed fields stand out from all the lush shades of green. But in the autumn nearly every tree and bush changes colour. It’s as if the year has matured. And yes, the colour palette warns of darker times, and yes, there is something sad about the dying plants and withering leaves. But even so Henning has always welcomed it.

Nora could never understand why halfway through Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Henning would sit there with tears in his eyes and yet expect her to believe that the saltwater was a sign that he was enjoying himself.

Now autumn rushes past outside the car window. The fields lie shorn and dormant, like a memorial to bright, warm summer evenings.

Henning remembers that the drive to Stavern used to take two and a half hours, but that was going from Kløfta. It was also in a different car, in another age. They would pack the small, blue VW Beetle to the rafters and, had they been spotted today, the police would have pulled them over for careless driving. Just being back on the same road – or almost the same road because motorways have been built since – reminds Henning how he used to be squashed on the backseat, barely able to reach out to undo the small latch that opened a window to get rid of the cigarette smoke in the car.