Thomas Enger - Pierced

‘Why the Norse theme?’ Henning asks and turns to Nylund again.

‘It was Vidar’s idea.’

‘Vidar Fjell?’

‘Yes. Some years ago, when I talked about opening this place, we spent an evening discussing how we could make the club stand out. Vidar talked about Freya and the Vikings and all that, and I was fascinated by the Norse concept of sex. I think we all were. We decided it would be a good look for us, and that’s how Asgard was born.’

‘So Vidar was into Norse mythology?’

‘Yes. In a big way.’

Interesting, Henning thinks, as he remembers that Fjell’s father is a professor of Nordic Studies. This must be where his interest sprang from. Henning realises he is excited by this discovery though he doesn’t quite know why.

He sits for a while looking at the real-time clock at the bottom of the right-hand corner of one of the monitors. It makes him think about the nineteen minutes that left Tore Pulli shaking his head. If he really was innocent and he continued to insist that he had arrived on time, how could time pass so quickly?

The answer is obvious, Henning thinks, and it irritates him that the thought hasn’t occurred to him earlier: time doesn’t run fast unless someone makes sure that it does.

Someone must have tampered with the clock on Pulli’s mobile. Someone with easy access to it.

Mia is working today as well. Thorleif smiles to her as he enters the hotel lobby.

‘Hi,’ he says.

‘Hello, you.’

‘I was wondering if I could borrow your laptop for a little while. Just for a couple of minutes,’ he says, apologetically.

‘Of course you can.’

‘Thank you so much. There was just something I wanted to check.’

‘Take as long as you like. It’s fine.’

Mia smiles and lifts the bag with the laptop over the counter. He takes it.

‘Thank you. How is the book coming along?’

‘Not too bad. I’m working on an escape scene at the moment. It takes place in a hotel,’ she says with her most conspiratorial smile.

‘Oh, good,’ Thorleif says. He realises he would genuinely like to hear more about Mia’s other experiences as a budding writer but suppresses the urge. He can’t allow himself to get to know her or anyone else here. Instead, he sits down in the same seat as yesterday and throws his denim jacket on the adjacent chair. The hotel’s home page glows at him as he opens the screen. Thorleif straightens his cap, opens his newly created email account and waits with bated breath as it downloads. There is no reply from Iver Gundersen.

Thorleif slumps a little in the chair but decides he might as well check the newspapers as he is already online. He finds an article that informs him that the preliminary autopsy report on Tore Pulli provided no answers as to his cause of death. Apart from that, there are no interesting stories about Pulli.

Most newspapers have produced their own, near identical stories about Thorleif’s disappearance, but none of them is accompanied by a picture. This is one of the advantages of being behind the camera, he thinks. You’re practically invisible to the public.

‘Mia?’ he calls out.

‘Yes.’

‘Where is the gents, please?’

She leans over the counter and points to the right. ‘Go past the piano and you’ll find the lavatories on the other side.’

‘Okay. Thank you. Is it all right if I leave your laptop here while I’m gone?’

‘Yes, as there is no one else around-’

Mia smiles again. Thorleif gets up and walks past the fireplace. He passes a lobster tank by the entrance to the restaurant and turns the corner by the dark brown piano. After the smell of the old earth closet in Einar’s cabin, it is a treat to enter a fragrant room. There are grey tiles on the floor. The walls are white.

Thorleif relieves himself and spends a long time washing his hands in one of the two square sinks in front of the mirror before he dries them with a paper towel which instantly disintegrates and sticks to his fingers. He is about to return to the lobby‚ but stops at the sight of a man at the reception with his back to him. The man is wearing a black leather jacket. And he has a ponytail.

Orjan Mjones looks around as he gets off the train. A petrol station, a hotel, a shop and a kiosk. Is that all this place has to offer? he wonders. In that case it will be a brief visit. If I was Thorleif, he thinks, and I had got off the train here, where would I have gone? What would I have needed?

Mjones tries the shop by the petrol station first, but finds it closed. The kiosk, however, is open, but the woman behind the counter has never heard of Brenden. Mjones walks down the steps and out into the evening heat. The sky above him is turning as dark and gloomy as he feels.

The hotel, red and built in the eighties, looms large in the landscape. I might as well stay here for the night, he thinks. The last train back to Oslo left long ago.

He enters the lobby and smiles to a friendly girl behind the counter. He takes out the folded photo of Brenden and introduces himself as Detective Inspector Stian Henriksen. ‘I’m looking for this man,’ he says. ‘Have you seen him?’

Thorleif stands rooted to the spot. His breath has stopped somewhere at the back of his throat. He can’t move. Mustn’t move.

How the hell did the man with the ponytail get here?

Thorleif looks around, panicking. He can’t risk running into the restaurant from where soft music and muffled conversation drift out towards the lobby. It’s too near the reception. Nor can he go back inside the lavatory because there is no way out from there. He turns around and sees a door right behind him. And above the door there is a green exit sign.

His only chance.

He backs towards the door as calmly and quietly as he can. He sees the man lean across the counter, but it is impossible to hear what he is saying to Mia. Thorleif holds his breath as he takes tiny steps backwards. When he can no longer see the man, he turns around and narrows his eyes as if that will prevent the door from making a sound. As noiselessly as he can, he pulls the door open and enters a bright room with art on the walls. He closes the door carefully behind him. Without looking back he starts to walk, softly to begin with, then faster, until he finally starts to run.

He passes a grey staircase which splits into a right and left branch and continues towards the Plenary Hall but decides to follow the green exit sign past a bench, two chairs and a table in pale pine that have been placed in front of a window. He reaches a corridor with no windows, but there is a door at the end of it. He tears it open and steps out into the evening as he gasps for air.

To his right is a covered wooden walkway with red doorframes and green doors leading to the new holiday apartments. It gets darker and darker further down the corridor. Don’t go that way, Thorleif tells himself, you don’t know if there is a door at the other end. Instead, he steps out on to the gravel, sees hundreds of cabins up to his left and a mountain that has shed its misty veil. He runs past first one cabin, then another before he reaches the road which leads either to the petrol station or further up the hillside, past Presttun. I can’t go back to the village, he thinks. The man could come out of the hotel at any moment, and he would have no trouble spotting me out here in the open. But does he know that I’m here? Or is he just trying his luck?

Then he remembers it. The denim jacket. The laptop. And Mia would have recognised me, Thorleif thinks, if the man gave her a description or showed her a picture. But perhaps she has guessed the man is a villain — after all, she is obsessed with studying faces. What are the chances that the man would then give up, try the next village and never come back?