Thomas Enger - Burned

The Juul family. Not exactly a happy one. But it’s the only one he has.

He looks at the piano. It stands up against the wall. He used to love playing it, but he doesn’t know if he still can. It has nothing to do with his hands. His fingers work fine, despite the scars.

He recalls the night Nora told him she was pregnant. It was shortly after their wedding and it was a planned pregnancy, but they had heard about many couples who had tried for years without success. Henning and Nora, however, fell pregnant at their first attempt. Bull’s-eye.

He was working on a story when Nora came into his study. He could tell from her face that something had happened. She was nervous, but excited. Brimming with fear and awe of what they had started, the responsibility they were taking on.

I’m pregnant, Henning.

He recalls her voice. Cautious, trembling. The smile, which soon spread across her face before giving way to an uncertainty he couldn’t help but love. He got up, embraced her, kissed her.

Christ, how he had kissed her.

Nora was just over seven weeks pregnant that evening. He remembers her going to bed early because she felt nauseous. He sat alone for a long time, thinking, listening to the silence in the flat. Then he sat down at the piano. At the time, he was working very hard and he hadn’t played for ages. But it is always the same when he sits down at the keyboard after a long break. Everything he plays sounds fine.

That evening, he composed possibly the finest song he has ever written. He woke Nora up and dragged her out of bed to play it to her. Nauseous and magnificent, she stood behind him as his fingers caressed the black and white keys. The tune was soft and melancholic.

Nora rested her hands on his shoulders, bent down and hugged him from behind. Henning called the song ‘Little Friend’. Once Jonas was born, he often played it to him. Jonas liked to hear it in the evening, before going to bed. Henning wrote the lyrics too, but he is bad at writing lyrics, so he tended to hum along, mostly.

He should have played ‘Little Friend’ at the funeral, but he was in a wheelchair, encased in plaster and bandages. A friend could have played it, obviously, but it wouldn’t have been the same. It should have been him.

Henning hummed while the vicar spoke. He hasn’t hummed since.

*

Something has been bugging him all day. All good crime reporters have sources. Henning has a great one. Or he used to. This source came into Henning’s life when he was surfing for child porn for a story one evening. He wanted to discover how easy it was to find child porn on the Internet, how many clicks it would take, and he soon reached a flagged page. Fortunately, the police already knew about it. But because Henning had visited it, they knew about him, too. He had been aware that this might happen, but that was also a part of his story. Establish how well informed the police were, how far he could go before he was stopped. He couldn’t quite recall how he got the idea, but he thought it had come to him after learning he was going to be a dad. Perhaps it had been an attempt to meet trouble halfway?

After visiting several different child porn sites, he was befriended on-line by a woman calling herself Chicketita. She promised to give him some child porn DVDs if he met her in Vaterlands Park at 11 p.m. that night. He never went.

The day after, he was brought in for questioning, his laptop was seized and sent to Forensics to check if he had surfed for child porn before. Which he obviously hadn’t. He was quickly released, once he had explained his actions to officers from the Sexual Crimes Unit. Chicketita, who turned out to be a female police officer called Elisa, was sympathetic. He was given permission to carry on with his project. She was in favour of the press highlighting the issue.

Some days later, he was contacted by 6tiermes7. At first, he thought it was another police officer hunting paedophiles, but he eventually decided that it couldn’t be. 6tiermes7 had a completely different agenda.

He didn’t know if 6tiermes7 knew about his child porn story, but he suspected that he or she had followed his work for a while or, at least, checked him out to know that he was sound. At that time, he often worked undercover; he had exposed several scandals, which led to the police starting new investigations or solving cold cases. He got results. 6tiermes7 was willing to help him on the non-negotiable premise that he never revealed his source.

Via an e-mail account, which couldn’t be traced to 6tiermes7 ’s real name, Henning was sent a file containing a program called FireCracker 2.0 which he was told to install. Henning later searched the Internet for the program, but never found anything which suggested it might be for sale anywhere. He assumed that 6tiermes7 had written it, but he never asked. The program, once opened, connected to a server so they could chat safely. Or, in relative safety.

They used an encryption algorithm that made any keystrokes they sent to each other incomprehensible to outsiders — unless they had the key. This security feature obviously depended on their keystrokes not being recorded before they were encrypted. After all, it is possible to monitor a keyboard. 6tiermes7 could be risking his/her own life, but Henning had no wish to question the morals and ethical dilemmas faced by his source.

6tiermes7 soon turned out to be the best source he had ever had. Everything in journalism is about contacts. Having a reliable source, who brings the stories to you, not the other way round, someone who will regularly feed you information that helps you in interviews, insider knowledge that may not be useful at the time, but which turns out to be worth knowing, nonetheless. As leverage, for example. Or new developments in an investigation, what the police have discovered, which leads they are pursuing, names of people brought in for questioning — that kind of information.

6tiermes7 gave him all of that. He or she was Deep Throat, the deepest of them all. In the three years before That Which He Doesn’t Think About, Henning had published several stories as a result of his partnership with 6tiermes7. 6tiermes7 helped him, he in turn helped the police by breaking stories that threw fresh light on their investigations, new and old, and together they got results. Quid pro quo, as Hannibal Lecter would have put it.

But 6tiermes7 has never told him why or how. And Henning has never tried to uncover the identity of 6tiermes7. Nor has he any plans to do so. Some things are best left alone.

Before he went back to work, he hadn’t thought about 6tiermes7 for almost two years. He has no idea whether 6tiermes7 is still available to him as a source, if he or she has started working with other people, or if 6tiermes7 has simply vanished from cyberspace.

But he is about to find out.

The steam rises and condenses under the roof. A high pressure hose is systematically swept across a dark red Audi A8 with shiny 19-inch chrome rims. Encrusted bird pooh, grit, gravel and pebbles are quickly washed off the paintwork. The car is drenched in seconds.

Yasser Shah puts down the high pressure hose and gestures to two men to get to work. A third man opens the doors and starts hoovering the interior. Soapy sponges squeak against the luxury car. The quartet works fast and efficiently. Mats are removed and hosed down. The boot is cleared of bark, grass and rubbish. Strips are wiped and soon the interior, steering wheel, dashboard, gears, sound system and windows all gleam. It takes them less than ten minutes.

And all for 150 kroner.

The car’s owner, a man in a grey suit with a matching tie, waits outside. At regular intervals, he peers inside to check on progress. Zaheerullah Hassan Mintroza sits in his glass booth, aware of the owner’s scepticism. It’s probably because we’re Pakistanis, he thinks. But we’re cheap, so the guy’s prepared to take a chance.