Thomas Enger - Scarred

It is an old person’s voice. Henning stuffs a finger in his ear to shut out the noise from the street.

‘You are.’

‘I’m sitting here with your business card,’ says the woman down the other end.

‘Oh, right,’ Henning says, now remembering Erna Pedersen’s old neighbour in Brinken. Borgny Ramstad, that was her name, wasn’t it?

‘I’ve been visiting my daughter in Bergen for a couple of days and I’ve only just got back. I caught the night train. And the first thing I saw when I came home was your card stuck in my front door. I hope you’re not going to try to sell me something?’

‘No, not at all,’ Henning assures her. ‘I wanted to talk to you because you knew Erna Pedersen.’

‘Indeed I did. We were neighbours for twenty-four years.’

Henning looks across to Bjarne and sees him take out his notebook and check something.

‘Mrs Ramstad, I want to ask you about something that happened quite a few years ago. It’s to do with Erna Pedersen.’

Henning tells her that Erna Pedersen has been murdered.

‘Oh, how dreadful,’ Borgny Ramstad says. ‘I haven’t been following the news recently. My grandchild has colic, you see.’

‘I understand,’ Henning says. ‘What I’m particularly interested in is the vandalism done to Erna Pedersen’s house while she was still working as a teacher. Did she ever talk to you about it?’

‘She certainly did. Erna was in such a state about it.’

‘I know she had her suspicions about who was behind it. Did she ever tell you?’

There is silence for a moment. Henning watches Bjarne press the phone to his ear again.

‘I don’t really—’

‘As far as I understand there were several culprits. But do you know if Erna was scared of any of them?’

There is another silence.

‘Well, in that case, it must have been the boy who—’

Silence again.

‘Oh, I can’t remember his name.’

‘Please try—’

‘Oh, now I remember!’ she exclaims. ‘It was the brother of the boy who died in that snow cave accident, wasn’t it?’

Bjarne remembers what Markus Gjerløw said to him on the telephone.

‘I only know Remi.’

Bjarne pulls out the list of names that Emil Hagen gave him. Sees that there is a Remi highlighted in bold.

Remi Gulliksen.

Bjarne takes out his mobile and calls Fredrik Stang.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ Bjarne says. ‘Can you check if a boy called Remi Gulliksen went to school with Markus Gjerløw?’

‘Okay, hold on.’

It has to be Remi Gulliksen, Bjarne thinks while he listens to Stang flicking through documents down the other end of the phone. Of the people who were at Grünerhjemmet on the day that Erna Pedersen was killed, Gulliksen was the only person Markus Gjerløw knew. As a friend of Gjerløw’s, Gulliksen would have been able to gain access to Gjerløw’s flat, force him to swallow the morphine capsules and then write a cryptic apology on Facebook that would make everyone think that Gjerløw was apologising for the lives he had taken.

‘No, I can’t find a Remi Gulliksen,’ Fredrik Stang says. ‘But there is another Remi in his class. A Remi Winsnes.’

Bjarne tastes the name a little. It rings no bells.

‘Okay, can you look up both Winsnes and Gulliksen for me? Try including Jessheim in your search as well and see if you get any hits.’

He hears clicking and keyboard sounds in the background. The seconds pass.

‘I’ve found a Nils Jørgen Winsnes and a Susanne Marie Gulliksen. They live in Jessheim at the same address.’

‘They must be Remi’s parents.’

‘Looks like it. He must have changed his surname as an adult.’

It has to be him, Bjarne thinks.

‘And it says here that they lost a child,’ Stang says. ‘In a snow cave accident in Jessheim in the eighties.’

Bjarne makes no reply; all he can think about is that he couldn’t get hold of Emilie Blomvik a few minutes ago. He is still very unhappy that Romerike Police decided to call off the protection Bjarne had requested for Blomvik and her family once Markus Gjerløw was found dead.

‘Call Romerike Police and ask them to go to the home of Emilie Blomvik,’ Bjarne says to Stang. ‘And tell them to hurry up.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Just get them to check that everything is okay with her and her family.’

‘Okay.’

They end their calls. Henning comes up behind him.

‘I think I might know the name of the man you’re looking for,’ he says.

Bjarne spins around.

‘Do you now?’

‘It wouldn’t happen to be Remi, would it?’

Remi can still remember it. Her birthday.

Eighteen years. The portal to adulthood. Old enough to drive and finally able to get into most bars without fake ID. Not that Emilie ever needed to. She got in everywhere, even though the doormen knew that she wasn’t old enough.

He gave her a very special present on that momentous day. A picture of two footprints, partly covering each other, on a beach. To let her know what he thought about the two of them and their future. He also gave her eighteen long-stemmed red roses, though the man in the florist told him that even numbers and flowers didn’t go all that well together.

Memories.

Memories are crap.

He wishes he had never opened the local newspaper that day when the past suddenly became the present. The years had left their marks in her cheeks, time had done something to her chin and her eyes, but he could see that she was the same girl. Just as lovely. She still had that special light in her eyes, which beamed into him and turned everything it found upside down. And it was as if the smile she sent the readers of Eidsvoll Ullensaker Blad was aimed at him. He wanted the ground to open and swallow him up.

They used to talk about what they would call their children if they ever had children together. Emilie had said Sebastian if it was a boy, and Johanne if it was a girl. Remi didn’t really mind, he just wanted Emilie to be happy. And suddenly, there she was, in the newspaper with a child on her lap. A little boy called Sebastian. He could no longer remember what the article had been about, only that the picture had been taken at the boy’s nursery.

And hey presto, they came back.

The memories.

Not only had they come back, he could physically feel them in his body, he started reliving the past, he felt the butterflies in his stomach when he walked past the places where it had happened, the place where – according to Emilie – absolutely nothing had happened. But he knew that it was all a lie.

They did it in the grove between the junction and the school playground where houses have since been built. Markus and Emilie hadn’t even been able to wait until they got home, but they were seen – at least so the rumour went. And this at a time when she was supposed to be his girlfriend, when life was meant to be good, but it became a living nightmare.

Some people are just like that; they covet what others have. If Markus saw someone with a cool jumper or jacket at school, he had to have the same – or preferably something better and more expensive. He had to have the latest thing. For some reason he had always been popular with the girls. And, to top it all, he was Erna Pedersen’s teacher’s pet.

So when Remi started going out with Emilie, Markus obviously couldn’t help himself. He had to have her, too, couldn’t bear that someone else had something so wonderful. And as for Emilie, she was out of control and just wanted to party all the time.

Emilie had pleaded innocence, of course, and blamed it all on common gossip in Jessheim. She managed to sow just enough doubt in Remi for them to get back together. And that was when it happened with the worst possible timing; she missed her period. And he remembered what it had been like, when he hoped it could have marked a fresh start for them, that everything would be different. We’ll erase the past and start over. We’ll be a family, build a life together. And we’ll call our child Sebastian.