Frank Frølich regarded himself in the mirror in front of his bed. He reconstructed the sequence of events in his head:
I had discovered someone was in my flat. Elisabeth had let herself in before I arrived. She had taken a shower. She sat cross-legged in the living room. She was sitting in front of the hi-fi listening to music, dressed only in underwear.
He stood up and went into the living room. Stared at the stereo. In the TV screen a reflection of himself and the furniture he had bought for the room.
He went to the doorway and stared at his hi-fi equipment again.
She was sitting with her back to me as I came in and said she had let herself in with the key from the key dish
. He saw her back in front of him as she stalked over to her clothes on the chair. He remembered the brush of her lips against his. He saw the sway of her hips as she walked across the floor. The clink of the key as it dropped into the bowl in the kitchen. He went to the kitchen door. Stood staring at the bowl of keys, small coins, various steel screws, drawing pins, the odd krone coin and other bits and bobs.
No house key
.
So she hadn’t put the key back
.
Why not? But he
had
heard the clink of the key in the bowl. If she hadn’t put the house key back, what had she put in it instead? He took hold of the bowl with trembling hands. It was a piece of hollowed-out birch, a so-called wooden nipple with delicate carvings on, a dish he had bought at an art-and-crafts fair when he went fishing on Lake Osen in Trysil. He tipped the contents of the bowl onto the kitchen worktop: coins, some screws, a safety pin, a dud 5-amp fuse, an anti-nuclear-weapons badge, another badge against joining the EU. One of the coins rolled off onto the floor – a euro. A green marble rolled after it. He caught it.
Yes, there was a key
. He took the key.
It’s not mine!
It wasn’t a house key. And he had never seen it before. It was a long, narrow key with a strange cut, a key to a special kind of lock.
What is going on here?
Why had she put back a completely different kind of key? And why had she
not
put back his house key? Why had she lied to his face? What would this key fit?
A key. But what was it hiding? Where is the lock?
Frank Frølich walked stiffly back into the living room and dropped into a chair.
She hadn’t put back the key
. In a flash he saw bones glowing in the ashes.
The key has been burned
.
No, stick to the facts! The house key is irrelevant. What is relevant is the key she left in the bowl.
Once again he saw the contours of her body moving away from him – across the floor. The clink in the bowl. Everything had been a bluff, a red herring. Either the bluff was because she wanted to hang onto the house key – or perhaps it was because she wanted to put the other, strange key in his bowl. Third option: she wanted both, to deposit this key and keep his key so that she could collect it later.
That was the answer. He was sure. She had intentionally hidden this key in his flat so that she could pick it up later.
But she hadn’t managed to accomplish her plan. She had been killed, burned to death in the chalet where she was hiding.
The phrasing in Reidun Vestli’s suicide letter bit into his consciousness:
Fear of pain. I couldn’t hold out.
Was this the key these
terrible people
were after? If so,
who was looking for the key? And why?
He gave a start as the telephone rang. It was Gunnarstranda. Without any preamble, he said: ‘Positive DNA.’
‘Where?’
‘The fire – Reidun Vestli’s chalet. It
was
Elisabeth Faremo who was burned. My condolences, Frølich. You’ll be getting another visit from Kripos soon.’
‘Hang on,’ Frølich said.
‘Relax,’ Gunnarstranda said. ‘Take more time off or apply for a week’s holiday so you can ride the storm.’
‘I have to talk to you.’
‘What about?’
‘A key I’ve found.’
‘Is it very important?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come over this evening – after eleven.’
Perhaps he just wanted to kill time. Or something else in him had triggered the initiative. But he went back to Merethe Sandmo’s exworkplace. It was almost eleven o’clock. The place was filling up. The gathering was a motley group of individuals, several of them belonging to a stag party. One man – presumably the bridegroom-to-be – was dressed in a bunny outfit. He was in such a drunken state he needed three chairs to sit on. Two young whippersnappers wearing dinner suits were giggling and trying to dip his hand in a bowl filled with water. An older guest with a waxed moustache and a chimpanzee jaw cast furtive glances while rolling a schnapps glass between his hands.
On the stage a buxom woman with chocolate-brown skin was rotating her breasts to the sound of Tom Jones’s ‘She’s a Lady’ booming out of the loudspeakers. Frølich went to the bar and ordered a large beer from a pimply youth in a dinner suit. Frølich took his beer, reflecting that he had always considered dinner suits ridiculous.
Item in his favour: I have never worn a dinner suit. Item no longer in his favour: I have never seen a striptease
. The woman with the rotating breasts had finished. Eyes followed her as she ran off the stage and the lights were lowered. Frølich manoeuvred his way to a table right in front of the stage.
He scanned the audience. Stag party or not, these men were serious. Welcome to men’s country, he thought, and looked up at the ceiling where he discovered a flashing disco ball the like of which he had not seen outside seventies John Travolta films. He looked at the faces in the room. Yes, he was in the arena of shadows, the hour of the rats, the wedding procession of the cockroaches: in this light, all the faces were lent the same blue and yellow hue. This was a place where it didn’t matter whether you were sick, healthy, Aryan, Indian, Chinese or just uncomfortable. This was the place where there was no room for reflection or appraisal, where lonely souls would reap pangs of guilt, bitterness or self-contempt the following day — or another time, later anyway — for everyone here can deceive themselves for a few seconds that welfare is a fruit that grows out of your own wallet. The password of the void here was: ‘Another drink, please.’
And here I am sitting in the front row!
he thought, raising his tankard and drinking while the next number was being announced. The glass at his mouth, he met the gaze of the woman making her entrance on the stage. She had covered her face with a mask moulded into the shape of a face. Nevertheless, he recognized the hourglass figure and the dreadlocks. She danced to Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’. The lady knew her audience. Even the hecklers in the stag party quietened down. She was wearing long tight gloves over her arms, but the most striking effect was the contrast between the cold, lifeless porcelain of the mask and the living skin, of which she was gradually revealing more and more. After a while she let go of the firemen’s pole and glided off the stage. With her eyes behind the mask fixed on his, she released her top. A couple of the guys in the room couldn’t stand the pressure and roared rutting cries. A young man sporting a grey suit and a formidable fringe threw a hundred-kroner note folded into a paper aeroplane. The note hit her in the stomach. She took no notice; but in one gliding movement she was back on the stage. The eyes behind the mask were still fixed on him. She held eye contact even while she was taking off her gloves. Not until she had spun round and run off stage did she relinquish his eyes. The music was drowned by whistles and applause. Only the bridegroom in the bunny outfit had missed the finale. He was on all fours under a table throwing up.
Frølich was fascinated by the fact that she hadn’t taken off the mask.
He went to the bar.
He had almost finished his next beer when she was beside him, dressed, without a mask, and transformed into a completely different woman from the one who had left the stage without a stitch. He asked what she wanted to drink.
‘Just water,’ she shouted through the din.
‘Well, I must say,’ he said, aware that he had no idea how to compliment in situations like these, ‘you’re good.’
She said: ‘I’ve been keeping an eye open for you for a few evenings now.’
‘I didn’t think the invitation was still valid.’
‘And
I
didn’t know who you were.’
‘But you do now?’
She nodded.
‘Do you know Elisabeth?’
She nodded. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Give me your hand.’
He shook her hand. ‘That’s my phone number,’ she said and let go. ‘I mustn’t be seen with you.’
He put the slip of paper in his pocket and asked: ‘Who are you frightened of?’ She was drinking water and could not answer. When she had put down the glass, she slid off the barstool.
‘When they ask you what I said,’ Frølich yelled, ‘tell them I have a message. I have the key.’
She wanted to go.
He held her back.
She sent him a wounded look. ‘I have to go, I mean it.’
‘I have the key,’ Frølich repeated.
She squeezed his wrist lightly and was gone, the heavily made-up, fake-tanned babe from the working classes who stripped to earn money in this grotty place.
What am I doing?
He was dismayed to meet an echo of his earlier thoughts, and put down the glass with trembling hands. He walked away from the bar, up the stairs and out. Outside, he stood breathing in the air, which was cold and refreshing. He jumped into the first taxi. It was just gone eleven.
It was an odd feeling to be trudging up these particular stairs, noticing the smell, passing door after door with peepholes, in a stairwell that he felt such an affiliation with, but had never entered. He stopped and studied the battered door, the brass nameplate, the aluminium newspaper flap. He lifted his finger to the white doorbell and pressed it. The bell rang like a sixties telephone. The echo hung in the quiet stairwell until he could hear his boss coughing on the inside shortly before the door was opened.
Gunnarstranda stared coolly up at him without any expression.
‘Now it’s my turn,’ Frølich said, embarrassed.
Gunnarstranda held open the door. ‘Would you like a whisky?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Which brand do you prefer?’
‘What have you got?’
‘All of them.’
Frank Frølich raised his eyebrows.
‘At any rate, the ones you know.’
‘An Islay,’ Frank Frølich said, watching Gunnarstranda going off to a worn old trunk on which it was still possible to read the faded label of MS
Stavangerfjord.
He opened the lid; the brown bottles were tightly packed in.
‘Bowmore?’
‘OK.’
Frølich had a look around. Almost every square centimetre of wall space in the living room was covered with books. Specialist literature, encyclopaedias, ballistics, botany. He read the titles:
Alpine Flowers in the North, Flowers of the Alps, Flowers in Iceland, Flowers of the Faroese Islands.
The only break in the rows of books was a glass bowl in which a red fringetail was belching water. He stood up and looked at the fish through the glass.
‘Here you are,’ Gunnarstranda said, passing him the glass.
Frølich took it.
‘They cost thirty-five kroner,’ Gunnarstranda said.
‘Hm?’
‘Fish like that one. Cheap, isn’t it?’
‘Looks a bit listless.’
Gunnarstranda didn’t answer.
‘You don’t have a lot of fiction,’ Frølich noticed.
‘Fiction?’
‘Yes, novels, poems …’
‘Arts?’ Gunnarstranda shook his head and smiled. ‘I don’t like the arts.’ He raised his glass.
‘Skal.’
They sipped their whisky.
Frølich swallowed his with relish.
‘That doesn’t tally with your ability to quote literature.’
Gunnarstranda shrugged, put down his glass and said: ‘Have you got the key?’
Frølich buried his hand in his pocket and then passed it to him.
They were sitting in two deep chairs which must have dated from at least the first EU referendum in 1972.
Gunnarstranda studied the key. ‘A bank safety-deposit box,’ he said.
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Because it’s exactly the same as the key for my own safety-deposit box.’ Gunnarstranda passed him back the key. Frølich sat pondering it in his hand. ‘No name of bank, no number of box.’