Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (34 page)
Read Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel Online
Authors: Anne Holt
His head vanished from my field of vision.
“It’s sticking out about twenty centimetres on the other side,” he called out. “You’ve bled a bit. Well, quite a lot, actually. Are you cold? I mean, are you colder than . . . It looks as if the pole is slightly bent, so . . .”
“We can’t pull it out,” said the man with the yellow goggles around his neck, so quietly that I only just heard him. “She’d bleed to death. Who’s been stupid enough to put a pair of poles in here?”
He looked around accusingly.
“We need to get her out of here right now, Johan. But what the hell are we going to do with the pole?”
I don’t really remember anything else.
And so of the 269 people on board train number 601 from Oslo to Bergen on Wednesday 14 February 2007, only one person lost his life in the crash. He was driving the train, and can hardly have grasped what was happening before he died. Incidentally, we didn’t crash into the mountain itself. At the foot of Finsenut, a concrete pipe has been sunk into the rock, as if someone thought that the ten-kilometre tunnel wasn’t long enough as it was, and therefore needed to be supplemented with several metres of ugly concrete in the otherwise beautiful landscape around the lake known as Finsevann. Subsequent investigations would show that the actual derailment occurred exactly ten metres from the opening. The cause was the fact that the rails had acquired a comprehensive covering
of ice. Many people have tried to explain to me how such a thing could happen. Two goods trains had passed in the opposite direction during the course of an hour before the accident happened. As I understand it, they had pushed the warmer air in the tunnel out into the increasingly colder air outside. Just like in a bicycle pump, somebody told me. Since it is more difficult for cold air to retain moisture than it is for warm air, the condensation from inside turns to droplets, which fall to the ground and turn into ice. And more ice. So much ice that not even the weight of a train can crush it in time. Since then I have thought that although I couldn’t see the point of the concrete pipe at the time, it was probably put there to create a gradual cooling of the air inside the tunnel. So far, nobody has been able to tell me if I am right.
It lies far beyond my comprehension that a weather phenomenon which must have been known since time immemorial can derail a train on a railway that has been in use since 1909. I live in a country with countless tunnels. We Norwegians should have a good knowledge of snow and ice and storms in the mountains. But in this hi-tech century with planes and nuclear submarines and the ability to place a vehicle on Mars, with the ability to clone animals and to carry out laser surgery which is accurate to the nearest nanometre, something as simple and natural as the air from a tunnel coming into contact with a snowstorm can derail a train and smash it against a huge concrete pipe.
I don’t understand it.
Afterwards, the accident was referred to as the Finse disaster. Since it wasn’t in fact a disaster but rather a major accident, I have come to the conclusion that the designation has been coloured by everything else that happened in and around the railway station 1222 metres above sea level in the hours and days following the collision, as the storm increased to the worst in over one hundred years.
© JO MICHAEL
ANNE HOLT
has worked as a journalist and news anchor spent two years working for the Oslo Police Department before founding her own law firm and serving as Norway’s minister of justice 1996 and 1997. She is the author of
Blind Goddess
and 1222. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Oslo with her family.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by J. W. Cappelens Forlag
English language translation copyright © 2013 by Anne Bruce Originally published as
Demonens Død
in 1995 in Norway by J. W. Cappelens Forlag.
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ISBN 978-1-4516-3480-8
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