Norwegian by Night (6 page)

With his elbow, he pushes the rug aside and sees the door behind.

‘Right, that's it. We're going. Now.'

The banging has changed from a firm knock to a frontal assault on the door. The monster is attempting to get in. He is kicking it with his boot. Hammering at the spot where the thin deadbolt holds the fifty-year-old dry-wood door to the opposing wall.

It is only a matter of time.

The problem is that the door in front of Sheldon is also locked, and he can't manage to get it undone while holding the boy.

‘Come here, you fruitcake. Open this. Open it! Goddamn it!'

But she does not open it. She has crouched down under his bed.

Is she hiding there? That would be madness. Why hide when escape is possible?

There is no option. Sheldon has to put down the boy to struggle with the lock. And when he does, the boy rushes to his mother.

Just then the front door is kicked in.

It slams into the wall. Though he can't see the front door from his angle, he hears the wood splinter and something metallic clank on the ground.

What Sheldon does next is focus.

‘Panic is the enemy,' said staff sergeant O'Callihan in 1950. ‘Panic is not the same as being scared. Everyone gets scared. It is a survival mechanism. It tells you that something is wrong and requires your attention. Panic is when scared takes over your brain, rendering you utterly fucking useless. If you panic in the water, you will drown. If you panic on the battlefield, you will get shot. If you panic as a sniper, you will reveal your location, miss your mark, and fail your mission. Your father will hate you, your mother will ignore you, and women across this planet will be able to smell the stench of failure oozing from your very pores. So, Private Horowitz! What is the lesson here?'

‘Hold on a second. It's on the tip of my tongue.'

Sheldon focuses on the lock. There is a chain lock that he slides off. There is a deadbolt that he twists. There is a door latch that he presses downward as he also lowers his weight onto it in the hopes the hinges will not squeak.

The steps down into Sheldon's flat are not immediately visible from the kitchen. There are two other bedrooms off the living room for the monster to search first before reaching the stairs.

It is just a matter of seconds now.

Sheldon grabs the boy by the shoulders just as the mother emerges from under the bed. There is a moment when all three are standing silently. Looking at each other. Pausing before the final assault.

A stillness happens.

Vera is framed by the doorway leading upstairs. The Norwegian summer light floods around her, and in that blessed moment she looks like a saint from a Renaissance painting. Eternal and beloved.

And then there are heavy footfalls.

Vera hears them. She opens her eyes wide, then — slowly, quietly — pushes her boy towards Sheldon, mouths something to him Sheldon doesn't understand, and then turns. Before the legs of the monster can descend the three steps, Vera, determined, rushes up the stairs and launches her whole body at him.

The boy takes a tentative step forward, but Sheldon grabs him. With his free hand, he tries the back door one more time. It still won't open. They are trapped.

Releasing the rug and letting it fall back into position, Sheldon opens the closet door and leads the boy in. He raises his finger to his lips to signal silence. His eyes are so stern, and the boy so terrified, that not a sound passes between them.

There is screaming, heavy-body heaving and crashing, and cruelty upstairs.

He should go. He should grab the poker from by the fireplace and swing with all the force of mighty justice, and lodge the spike into the monster's brainstem, standing tall as his lifeless body collapses full force to the floor.

But he doesn't.

With his fingers under the door's edge, he pulls it closed as far as it will go.

As he hears the sound of choking, the smell of urine fills the closet. He pulls the boy to his chest, presses his lips against his head, and places his hands around the boy's ears.

‘I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. This is the best I can do. I'm so sorry.'

Chapter 3

Sigrid Ødegård has been a police officer with the Oslo Politidistrikt for just over eighteen years. She joined after completing her advanced studies in criminology at the University of Oslo. Her father convinced her to go there, rather than study farther north, because — in his view — ‘there will be more eligible men in the big city.'

As so often happens in both police work and life, her father's theory proved both true and irrelevant.

‘The question, Papa, is the ratio of available men to those who are interested in me. Not just the number of available men.' Sigrid made this point to her widowed father in 1989, before going to Oslo.

Her father was a farmer from the countryside. Though not a formally educated man, he did understand numbers, as they came in handy for organising life on the farm. He was also a reader of history. He did not call himself a student, as he had no tutor, but he found reading pleasurable, took an interest in the worlds that have passed before this one, and he had a good memory. All this served him, Sigrid, and the animals rather well. He also had a fine mind for reason, and he and Sigrid found comfort there when emotions were too tender.

‘If your argument holds,' he had responded over a quiet dinner of salmon, boiled potatoes, and a bottle of beer, ‘then it is not a matter of ratios at all, but a statistic of likelihoods. What is the likelihood of there being a man sufficiently observant as to note your desirability and availability? And again, I stand by the claim that such a young man is more likely to be found in the big city.'

‘It's not such a big city,' Sigrid said.

Her father slid each section of pink meat off the subsequent section of pink meat to see how well prepared it was. They slid easily, and he said nothing.

‘It is the biggest one available,' he offered.

‘Yes, well …' she muttered, reaching for the butter.

Sigrid's older brother had moved to America on being offered a position selling agricultural machinery. It was a good offer, and their father had insisted he take it. Though he stayed in touch, Sigrid's brother almost never came home. This was family now. This and the animals.

‘I'll grant you the point about the city, but there are still two problems,' she said.

‘Oh?' Her father raised his voice just enough to suggest a question.

‘The first is that I'm not pretty. I'm plain. The second is that it is near impossible to know if a Norwegian man is interested.'

She had learned this by way of empirical observation and comparison.

To wit, she had once met a British man named Miles. Miles was so forthcoming with his advances that the alcohol merely affected his aim rather than his behaviour.

She had also met a German boy who was sweet and affectionate and clever, and whose only flaw was being German — which was unfair, and she knew it, and she felt bad about it, but Sigrid still didn't want to spend every other Christmas in Hanover. To his credit, though, neither did he.

Norwegian men, in contrast to the others, were problematic — even for Norwegian women, who presumably had the greatest motive to crack the code of their behaviour, if only for reasons of proximity.

She explained. ‘They are polite. Occasionally witty. They dress like teenagers, no matter what their age, and will never say anything romantic unless it's during a drunken confessional.'

‘So get them drunk.'

‘I don't think that's the first step in a lasting relationship, Papa.'

‘Things can't last unless they begin. Worry about duration after commencement.'

Sigrid pouted, and her father's shoulders dropped.

‘Daughter, it's not hard at all. You look for the man staring with the greatest intensity at his own shoes while in your presence. The kind of man who is too tongue-tied to even try talking to you. This is the one you're looking for. And take it from me, you'll have his love and you'll win more arguments. In the long run, this is the key to longevity, which is apparently your goal.'

Sigrid smiled. ‘You know, Papa, they tend to be more loquacious in Oslo.'

‘Yes, well,' he said, ‘the world is a tricky place.'

Her father finished his second beer and sat back with a heavy wooden pipe that he lit with an experienced hand and a long match.

‘So,' he asked, ‘what will you do after university?'

Sigrid now smiled broadly.

‘I'm going to fight crime,' she said.

Sigrid Ødegård's father nodded approvingly. ‘That's the spirit.'

Sigrid's interests had led her to specialise in organised crime. Traditionally, this meant drug, weapons, and human trafficking, and a smattering of economic and corporate crime — though Oslo's police department was woefully understaffed to deal with white-collar problems. Back when she started, organised criminals were more opportunistic and disorganised than today; they were generally not linked with matters of global criminal networks and terrorism. Only in recent years, as Europe's borders grew soft, and wars raged on in the Balkans and the Middle East and Afghanistan, did organised crime come to resemble the sorts of American TV shows she often watched alone in the early evenings after returning from work.

Sigrid, just over forty, had recently been promoted to the rank of Politiførstebetjent, or Police Chief Inspector, in her district, after dutifully working her way up from constable, to sergeant, to inspector, and now this. Not politically minded, she had little interest in this post, but it did provide an opportunity to survey the wider range of crime in the city and to see the movement of the times from a greater height and wider angle. She confidently believed this job was her final destination, and she was grateful that she had reached her potential without undue strain or frustration.

From now on,
Sigrid thought,
I will work, witness, and assist when possible.

Being a professional witness, she was aided by a corps of able, respectful men in her unit who understood that she took pleasure in odd events. They each made a concerted effort to bring the most noteworthy matters to her attention, and no one was more eager to do so than Petter Hansen. Petter, thirty-six and still not needing to shave, was able to spot oddities with the careful eye of an antique collector.

His job had become easier over the past few years because Oslo was no longer the silent, uneventful city it once was. There were now rapes, thefts, armed hold-ups, violent domestic problems, and a growing tide of younger people who did not respect the police. New immigration from Africa and Eastern Europe — and Muslim countries farther east — created a new social tension in the city that still lacked the political maturity to address it. The liberals expounded limitless tolerance, the conservatives were racist or xenophobic, and everyone debated from philosophical positions but never from ones grounded in evidence, and so no sober consideration was being given to the very real question now haunting all of Western civilisation — namely,
How tolerant should we be of intolerance?

Sigrid sets her sandwich — now half molested — onto the brown paper bag that had sheltered it for the night and looks up as Petter walks to her desk with a smile, which can only mean he's uncovered another buried treasure.

‘Hi,' she says.

‘Hi,' he says.

‘Have something?'

‘Yes,' he says.

‘Good for you.'

Petter says, ‘Something awful.'

‘OK.'

‘But different.'

‘Start with the awful.'

‘There's been a murder. A woman in her thirties in Tøyen. She was strangled, then stabbed. We've already secured the location. We're starting the process now.'

‘When did this happen?'

‘I got the call twenty minutes ago. We've been there for five. A person in the building heard a fight and called us.'

‘I see. And what's different?'

‘This,' says Petter, handing Sigrid a note. It is written in English. A sort of English, at any rate. She reads it carefully. And she reads it again.

‘Do you know what this means?'

‘No. But it has spelling mistakes.'

‘Yes.'

‘We've called the owner of the apartment. The woman who was killed didn't live there. She lived upstairs with her son. The son is missing. The owner is Lars Bjørnsson.'

‘Do we know him?'

‘He makes video games. He's really good.'

‘You're thirty-six, Petter.'

‘They're very sophisticated video games.'

‘I see.'

‘He's here in room four. They came right away. Lars's wife says her grandfather is missing from the apartment.'