Thomas Enger: Burned

He looks for sounds of acquiescence or admission, but finds neither. Even so he can’t stop now.

‘You planned the killing well. And to implicate Marhoni even more deeply, you e-mail Henriette the very day you intend to kill her. You e-mail a photo. Henriette with her arms around an older man. I’m willing to bet that the man in the photo was Yngve.’

‘I never sent Henriette a picture of Yngve,’ Anette snorts.

‘No. You didn’t press the ‘ send ’ button. You got someone else to do that.’

He points to her backpack.

‘Inhambane.’

She turns her head, but realises she can’t see which sticker Henning is pointing to. It says Inhambane in black print against a white background surrounded by a red heart.

‘Inhambane is a town in southern Mozambique, on the Inhambane Bay. Great beaches. The day Henriette was killed, she received an e-mail from an Internet cafe in Inhambane. A text message was also sent to her from a free e-mail account from the same cafe shortly afterwards, telling her to check her e-mail. This happened while she was with Mahmoud Marhoni.’

‘And then?’

‘And then? You’re telling me it’s pure coincidence that you happen to have a Inhambane sticker on your backpack? You’ve been there, Anette. You’ve probably got friends there. Inhambane isn’t exactly one of Star Tours’ top-ten travel destinations.’

Anette doesn’t reply.

‘The trouble with being partners in crime’, he carries on, ‘is that you can never be sure that the other one will keep his mouth shut. That’s why you were scared, the first time I met you. You were afraid that Stefan would give himself away, give you away, that he wouldn’t be able to live with what the two of you had done. And you were right. So you tricked him into taking his own life.’

Anette’s face dissolves into an enigmatic smile, but she quickly recovers.

‘Let me tell you something about Henriette,’ she says. ‘Henriette wasn’t that clever. Since her death, everyone has been at pains to say how talented she was, how brilliant.’

Her voice darkens.

‘The truth was that she was mediocre. I read the script she sold. It wasn’t that good. Control+Alt+Delete? — what kind of a title is that? The clever twists in that script were my ideas. But do you think she was going to give me any credit for that?’

She snorts.

‘That’s why you promised to carry on her work, as you wrote on the card. You felt you had certain rights to the script, to the clever twists. Have you been in contact with Truls Leirvag yet?’

Anette laughs briefly and then she nods.

‘We should make a film together, you and I. You’ve got a great imagination. But you, too, have forgotten something,’ she says. She walks right up to him and whispers:

‘The two people who can prove everything you’ve just described — ’ she begins and holds a dramatic pause. The coldness in her eyes hits him like an icy slap across his cheeks.

‘They’re both dead.’

She takes a step back. Then she smiles again. A small, cunning smile.

‘So what if they find sweets in Stefan’s room?’ she continues. ‘What does that prove? That he had a visitor who liked sweets? And what if he rang me that afternoon? I was going to direct his film. We were still in contact. None of that proves that I killed Henriette or Stefan. None of it.’

‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘The police can only prove that you tried to point the finger at Mahmoud Marhoni, but — ’

‘What kind of proof do you have?’ she interrupts him. ‘A sticker on my backpack?’

‘It doesn’t prove a whole lot, but if you line up enough matches and strike them all, you get a fairly decent flame. When I hand over everything I’ve discovered to Detective Inspector Brogeland, he and his colleagues will go over everything you have said and done in the last few years. They will turn your life upside down and inside out, every e-mail, text message, receipt and bill will be scrutinised in an effort to link you to a murder and a suspicious death. And when the toxicology report is ready and the police learn that Stefan’s body contained Orfiril, the circumstantial evidence will be so overwhelming that it will take a great deal to prevent you from going to prison. One sweet, as you rightly point out, doesn’t constitute proof, but remember the Orderud trial. Four people went to prison because of a sock.’

Anette doesn’t reply. He looks at her and tries to mirror her frosty smile.

‘What’s the point of being a genius if nobody knows?’ he says, mimicking her voice. She looks up at him. ‘Everyone, at some level, wants recognition for what they’ve done. We want applause. Human beings are like that. That’s why you gave me the script. You wanted me to understand. And I do. I understand that you planned it all, and I’m terribly impressed. But you’re not going to get a round of applause. Not from me, not from anyone.’

Anette stares at him. He turns around and sees the funeral procession leave the church.

‘Like you said, Anette, the hysteria is about to begin.’

She laughs at his remark.

‘Wow,’ she says, alternately shaking and nodding her head. She comes up to him again. She takes the sweet from his hand and pops it into her mouth.

‘Do you know who taught me that they taste best when you eat them all at once?’

She sucks the pastille demonstratively.

‘Given how clever you are, I’m sure you can find out,’ she says, without waiting for him to reply. She looks at him for a long time. Then she smiles again and walks past him in the direction of the funeral procession. He follows her with his eyes, as she strolls across the grass, past the mourners; she glances at them, nods to some acquaintances, but she doesn’t join them. Instead she strolls on, taking her time. As if she doesn’t have a care in the world.

And she might well be right, Henning thinks, when Anette disappears from view and the cemetery fills with mourners in black clothes. It may be impossible to prove that she plotted and executed plans that resulted in the deaths of two people. Because she has never admitted to anything, not today or in the tent at Ekeberg Common, and the evidence is, at best, circumstantial.

Jarle Hogseth used to say: Crimes are rarely delivered gift-wrapped to the police. Sometimes it is straightforward: the evidence speaks an unequivocal language, the perpetrator confesses, either spontaneously or due to evidence presented during interrogations; or in the subsequent trial, the prosecution’s version stands in sharp contrast to the explanations given by the defendant. That’s the way it is and always will be.

But the truth will never be lost to him. He saw it in Anette’s frozen eyes. And plenty can happen during an investigation. New evidence might appear. Witnesses could come forward with testimony that sheds fresh light on Anette’s actions. She will have a lot of questions to answer and it is difficult to give consistent replies, time after time after time, to complex questions, no matter how clever you are.

*

He remains in the churchyard during the interment. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t listen to what is being said; he only listens when they sing: Help me, God, to hum this song so my heart will carry on just one day, one moment at a time until I reach your good country.

He grits his teeth and swallows the memories and the pain, even though he sees Jonas all the time. He feels that he can finally say goodbye. He hasn’t been ready until now. He couldn’t manage it back then, because he couldn’t, didn’t want to accept that Jonas would never again wake him in the morning, at the crack of dawn, would never again snuggle up to him and cuddle, cuddle, cuddle until children’s TV began.