‘Martha and I have decided on a winter wedding,’ he said. ‘Because we know that our love can melt all ice, that our friends’ hearts can warm any function room and that your – our family’s – care, wisdom and guidance will be all the light we need on our dark winter path. And, of course, there is another reason . . .’ Anders grabbed the wine glass and turned to Martha, who only just managed to tear herself away from the evening sky and return his smile. ‘We simply can’t wait until summer!’
Happy laughter and applause filled the room.
Anders seized her hand with his free one. He squeezed it hard, smiled, his fine eyes sparkling like the sea, and she knew he was aware of the impression he’d made. Then he bent down as if overcome by the occasion and kissed her quickly on the lips. The table erupted. He raised his glass.
‘To us!’
Then he sat down. He caught her eye and flashed her an almost private smile. The smile which told the twelve dinner guests that he and Martha shared something special, something that belonged only to them. But just because Anders was playing to the gallery didn’t meant it wasn’t true. They
did
have something that belonged only to them. Something solid. They had been a couple for so long that it was easy to forget all the good days and the nice things they had done together. And they had worked through the bad times and come out stronger for it. She cared about Anders, she really did. Of course she did, otherwise why would she have agreed to marry him?
His smile stiffened slightly. It was telling her that she could try to show a little more enthusiasm, work with him here now that they had gathered their families to tell them their wedding plans. Her future mother-in-law had asked to make the announcement and Martha hadn’t had the energy to protest. And now she got up and tapped her glass. It was as if someone had flicked a switch marked ‘silence’. Not just because the guests were eagerly awaiting what she had to say, but because no one wanted to be skewered by the mother of the groom’s withering stare.
‘And we’re so very thrilled that Martha has decided that the wedding ceremony will take place in St Paul’s Church.’
Martha barely managed to stop herself from spluttering.
She
had decided?
‘As you’re aware, we’re a Catholic family. And even though the average level of education and income is higher among Protestants than Catholics in many other countries, that isn’t the case in Norway. In Norway we Catholics make up the elite. So, Martha, welcome to the A-team.’
Martha acknowledged the joke which she knew perfectly well wasn’t a joke at all. She heard her future mother-in-law’s voice continue, but she drifted off again. Because she had to get away. Escape to that other place.
‘What are you thinking about, Martha?’
She felt Anders’s lips against her hair and earlobe. She managed a smile because she was close to laughing. Laughing as she imagined getting up and telling him and the other guests that what she was thinking about was lying in the arms of a killer in the sun on a rock while a thunderstorm headed across the fjord towards them. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t love Anders. She had said yes. She had said yes because she loved him.
35
‘
DO YOU REMEMBER
the first time we met?’ Simon asked as he stroked Else’s hand on the duvet. The two other patients in the ward were asleep behind their curtains.
‘No,’ she smiled and he imagined those strangely shiny, pure blue eyes of hers sparkle under the bandage. ‘But you do. Go on then, tell me again.’
Instead of just smiling back, Simon chuckled quietly so that she could hear it.
‘You were working in a florist’s in Grønland. And I came in to buy flowers.’
‘A wreath,’ she said. ‘You came to buy a wreath.’
‘You were so beautiful that I made sure we chatted for much longer than was necessary. Even though you were far too young for me. But as we spoke, I grew young myself. And the next day I stopped by to buy roses.’
‘You bought lilies.’
‘Yes, of course. I wanted you to think they were for a friend. But the third time I bought roses.’
‘And the fourth.’
‘My flat was so full of flowers, I could barely breathe.’
‘They were all for you.’
‘They were all for
you
. I was merely looking after them for you. Then I asked you out. I’ve never been so scared in all my life.’
‘You looked so nervous that I couldn’t bear to say no.’
‘That trick works every time.’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘You were nervous. But I was attracted by your sad eyes. A life lived. The melancholy of insight. That’s irresistible to a young woman, you know.’
‘You’ve always said it was my athletic body and that I’m a good listener.’
‘No, I haven’t!’ Else laughed even louder and Simon laughed with her. Relieved that she couldn’t see him now.
‘You bought a wreath the first time,’ she said quietly. ‘You wrote a card and you looked at it for a while, then you threw it in the bin and wrote another one. After you’d gone, I picked the card out of the bin and read it. And it said “To the love of my life”. That was what got my attention.’
‘Oh? Wouldn’t you rather have a man who thought he had yet to meet the love of his life?’
‘I wanted a man who was capable of loving,
really
loving.’
He nodded. Over the years they had repeated this story to each other so often that the lines were rehearsed, as were their reactions and the apparent spontaneity. They had once sworn to tell each other everything, absolutely everything, and after they had done that, after they had tested how much truth the other could tolerate, their stories had become the walls and the roof that held their home together.
She squeezed his hand. ‘And you were, Simon. You knew how to love.’
‘Because you fixed me.’
‘You fixed yourself.
You
decided to quit gambling, not me.’
‘You were the medicine, Else. Without you . . .’ Simon took a deep breath and hoped she couldn’t hear the trembling in his voice because he didn’t have the energy to go there now, not tonight. Didn’t want to repeat the story about his gambling addiction and debts which he ultimately dragged her into. He had done the unforgivable, mortgaged their house behind her back. And lost. And she had forgiven him. She hadn’t been angry or moved out or let him suffer the consequences or given him any kind of ultimatum. All she had done was to stroke his cheek and say that she forgave him. And he had cried like a child and at that moment his shame had extinguished the craving after the pulsating life in the intersection between hope and fear, where everything is at stake and can be won or lost in an instant, where thoughts of the catastrophic, final defeat are almost – almost – as tantalising as the thought of victory. It was true, he had quit that day. And he had never gambled since, hadn’t bet as much as a beer, and it had been his salvation. It had been their salvation. That and their promise to tell each other absolutely everything. To know that he had the capacity for self-control and the courage to be totally honest with another person had done something to him, had restored him as a man and a human being, yes, even caused him to grow more than if he had never been at the mercy of his vices. Perhaps that explained why in his later years as a police officer he had gone from seeing every criminal as notorious and incorrigible to being willing to give everyone a second chance – in stark contrast to what his wide experience told him.
‘We’re like Charlie Chaplin and the flower girl,’ Else said. ‘If you play the movie backwards.’
Simon swallowed. The blind flower girl who thinks the tramp is a rich gentleman. Simon couldn’t remember how, only that the tramp helps her get her sight back, but that afterwards he never reveals his identity because he is convinced that she wouldn’t want him if she saw who he really was. And then, when she finds out, she loves him all the same.
‘I’ll go and stretch my legs,’ he said, getting up.
There was no one else in the corridor. For a while he looked at the sign on the wall depicting a mobile with a red line across it. Then he took out his mobile and found the phone number. Some people think that if you send an email from a mobile via a Hotmail address on the Internet, the police won’t be able to trace the phone number it was sent from. Wrong. It had been easy to find. It felt as if his heart was in his throat, as if it was beating behind his collarbone. There was no reason why he would pick up the phone.
‘Yes?’
His voice. Alien, but yet so strangely familiar, like an echo from a distant, no, a near past. The Son. Simon had to cough twice before his vocal cords would make a sound.
‘I have to meet you, Sonny.’
‘That would have been nice . . .’
There wasn’t a hint of irony in his voice.
‘. . . but I’m not planning on being around for very long.’
Here? In Oslo, in Norway? Or here on Earth?
‘What are you going to do?’ Simon asked.
‘I think you know what.’
‘You’re going to find and punish all the people responsible. The people you served time for. The people who killed your father. And then you want to find the mole.’
‘I don’t have very much time.’
‘But I can help you.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Simon, but the best thing you can do to help me is carry on doing what you’ve been doing so far.’
‘Oh? And what is that?’
‘Not try to stop me.’
A pause followed. Simon listened out for any background noises that might reveal where the boy was. He heard a low, rhythmic pounding and sporadic shouting and screaming.
‘I think we want the same thing, Simon.’
Simon gulped. ‘Do you remember me?’
‘I have to go now.’
‘Your father and I . . .’
But the line had already gone dead.
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘Don’t mention it, mate,’ Pelle said, glancing up at the boy in the rear-view mirror. ‘A taxi driver’s meter runs less than thirty per cent of his working day so it’s nice, both for me and my business, that you called. Where are you off to tonight, mister?’
‘Ullern.’
The boy had asked him for his card the last time Pelle drove him. Passengers tended to do that from time to time if they were satisfied, but they never called. It was too easy to get a cab by flagging one down in the street. So Pelle had no idea why the boy specifically wanted him to drive all the way from Gamlebyen to Kvadraturen to pick him up outside the dubious Bismarck Hotel.
The boy was wearing a smart suit and Pelle hadn’t recognised him at first. Something was different. He carried the same red sports bag plus a briefcase. A sharp jangle of metal had come from the bag as the boy dumped it on the back seat.
‘You look happy in that photograph,’ the boy said. ‘You and your wife?’
‘Oh, that one,’ Pelle said and felt himself blushing. No one had ever commented on the picture before. He had stuck it low down on the left-hand side of the steering wheel, so that customers wouldn’t be able to see it. But he was touched that the boy could see from the picture that they were happy. That
she
was happy. He hadn’t selected the best picture of them, but the one where she looked happiest.
‘I think she’s cooking rissoles tonight,’ he said. ‘Later we might go for a walk in Kampen Park. The breeze up there will be very welcome on a hot day like this.’
‘That sounds nice,’ the boy said. ‘You’re lucky to have found a woman to share your life with.’
‘Indeed I am,’ Pelle said and looked up in the rear-view mirror. ‘You couldn’t be more right.’
Pelle usually made sure the customer did the talking. He liked it, getting a snippet of someone’s life for the brief duration of a cab ride. Children and marriage. Jobs and mortgages. Sneak a peek at the trials and tribulations of family life for a short while. Not having to bring up the topics he knew so many taxi drivers enjoyed discussing. But a strange intimacy had grown between them; in fact, he quite simply enjoyed talking to this young man.
‘How about you?’ Pelle asked. ‘Found yourself a girlfriend yet?’
The boy smiled as he shook his head.
‘No? No one who revs up the old engine?’
The boy nodded.
‘Yeah? Good for you, mate. And her.’
The boy’s head movements changed direction.
‘No? Don’t tell me she doesn’t fancy you? I admit you didn’t look like much of a catch when you were throwing up against the wall, but today, in that suit and everything . . .’
‘Thanks,’ the boy said. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t have her.’
‘Why not? Have you told her you love her?’
‘No. Should you do that?’
‘All the time, several times a day. Think of it as oxygen, you never stop needing it. I love you, I love you. Try it, then you’ll see what I mean.’
There was silence in the back for a while. Then he heard a cough.
‘How . . . how do you know if someone loves you, Pelle?’
‘You just know. It’s the sum total of all the little things you can never really put your finger on. Love surrounds you like steam in the shower. You can’t see the individual drops, but you get warm. And wet. And clean.’ Pelle laughed, embarrassed and almost a little proud at his own words.
‘And you continue to bathe in her love and tell her that you love her every day?’
Pelle got the feeling that the boy’s questions weren’t spontaneous, that it was a subject he had intended to ask Pelle about because of the picture of him and his wife, that the boy must have spotted it on one of the other two rides they had taken.
‘Absolutely,’ Pelle said and felt as if something was stuck in his throat, a crumb or something. He coughed hard and turned on the radio.
The drive to Ullern took fifteen minutes. The boy gave Pelle an address in one of the roads which swung up towards Ullernåsen between gigantic wooden structures that looked more like fortifications than family homes. The tarmac had already dried after the rainfall earlier that day.
‘Pull over here for a moment, would you, please?’
‘But the gate is over there.’
‘This is fine.’
Pelle pulled up along the kerb. The property was surrounded by a tall white wall with broken glass on the top. The vast, two-storey brick house lay at the top of a large garden. Music was coming from the terrace in front of the house and the light was on in every window. Floodlights in the garden. Two massive, broad-shouldered men in black suits were standing in front of the gate, one with a big white dog on a leash.